My Third BNBR

I know that this blog is the People’s Blog, and not my personal blog. But when I get a BNBR, it goes here.

Especially when it’s a ludicrous BNBR, meted out for paying people compliments. As they all have been.


Hello,

Yeah, whatevs, Quora Moderation.

We recently found some of your content (Your comment on What do very popular non-Top Writers think they’d need to change in order to become Top Writers?) that violates Quora’s Be Nice, Be Respectful policy (See What is Quora’s “Be Nice, Be Respectful” policy?).

Uhuh.

Please keep this policy in mind when interacting with other people on Quora. If you continue posting content that violates this policy, you may be banned from using Quora. For more information, see: How do I appeal a Quora Moderation decision?.

And believe me, I will be appealing.

If you think this is an error on our part, please submit a moderation appeal at https://www.quora.com/contact with a link to your content.

Thank you,
Quora Moderation

Full text of comment:

Oh this is gonna be good.

The context was:

Dimitris Almyrantis’ answer to What do very popular non-Top Writers think they’d need to change in order to become Top Writers?

In response to https://www.quora.com/What-do-ve…

I said:

“I really think you should be a TW.”

… No, actually. Given the mixed record of TWs, their indebtedness to Quora, and the crimps that it would put on Dimitris [ Dimitris Almyrantis ], the *last* thing I would want is for him to be a TW.

Λάμπε τρελό διαμάντι. 🙂

The Greek, btw, is: “Shine on you crazy diamond.”

So responding to an answer by Dimitris about why he isn’t getting the Quill, and agreeing with him that he shouldn’t compromise how he writes to get the Quill, IS INSULTING HIM?!!

It’s not Dimitris that I seek to insult. Believe me.

One appeal, coming up.

Is it true that Klingon is a living language, and that people who don’t speak the same earth languages can communicate with it?

I have had conversations in Klingon, including with the guy who was trying to teach his kid to speak in Klingon. (The kid lost interest in it, and I have found a photo of the kid, 15 years later, jumping into a mosh pit. He’s turned out fine. 🙂

The vocabulary admittedly can be a little restricted in some domains. But it can be done, and I have done it.

You aren’t really going to be able to hold a conversation in Klingon, unless you’ve studied The Klingon Dictionary. The book is available in Italian and (I think) German, so in theory it is possible for two people with no common natural language to converse in Klingon. In practice, if any Klingon speaker does not understand English, I would be exceedingly surprised.

Answered 2017-06-14 · Upvoted by

Steve Rapaport, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK. and

Logan R. Kearsley, MA in Linguistics from BYU, 8 years working in research for language pedagogy.

Does βαμπίρ have female and plural forms in modern Greek?

Being a foreign word ending in a non-Greek ending, there is no plural. In Modern Greek, if a noun ends in something other than a vowel or sigma, it can’t be declined. (Nu is archaic; rho xi psi even more so.) So το βαμπίρ, τα βαμπίρ.

I see that at least one person online has named themselves Vampirissa “vampiress”, forming a feminine of the form. But that would be considered informal usage: formal usage would just put a feminine article in front of βαμπίρ.

There is a reason unassimilated loanwords suck.

Does Quora care about paid trolls? Is there a way to report accounts suspected of being such?

As any search for “Quora” on Upwork will show, plenty of people are being paid to write answers on Quora, without being state agents. Quora has strictures against spam; it does not have strictures that I know of against propaganda.

From my outside perspective, I keep thinking Quora is one bad news story away from being in a world of hurt. But the bad news story hasn’t happened since 2014. And at least this year they’ve hired a lawyer.

Spam is not the right category for suspected professional propaganda or astroturf, but it’s close enough to serve for reporting, and it’s better than mere “factually inaccurate”. Do give an argument for your suspicion if you make a report, though.

How are the clusters “μψ” and “γξ” pronounced in Modern Greek?

Modern Greek has nasal Sandhi. That means that following a word ending in /n/, any voiceless stop is voiced. (And in the case of /ks/ and /ps/, so is the following /s/.) The /n/ in turn assimilates in place of articulation to what follows.

So:

  • patera “father”, san patera [sam batera] “like a father”
  • keo “I burn”, ðen keo [ðeŋ ɡeo] “I don’t burn”
  • psixi “soul”, stin psixi [stim bziçi] “to the soul”
  • kseno “stranger”, ton kseno [toŋ ɡzeno] “the stranger”

How did Plato address Socrates? Teacher? Master?

Originally Answered:

How does Plato call Socrates?

Of course, we don’t have transcripts by Plato of chats with Socrates, we have dialogues he made up. But Socrates is constantly addressed in Plato’s dialogues as “O Socrates” (ὦ Σώκρατες), with monotonous regularity—over 1200 times in the works of Plato. Socrates in turn addresses his trollees (er, interlocutors) as “O partner” or “o good man” (ὦ ἑταῖρε, ὠγαθέ).