Category: Uncategorized

For much of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, Greek identity was a tug of war between a Romaic and a Hellenic construct, between an identification with Ancient Greece via Western Europe (or vice versa), and the folk culture informed by the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires.

The Hellenes have won, but that victory is fairly recent. I don’t believe it truly predates the European Union. And that victory has certainly not been as thorough-going as people like to think.

Turks have been the Other for Greeks too long for them to identify with the Turks. Especially when Greeks have so much invested in identifying as European.

All I can say is, there is a joy of recognition when I talk to Turks, that I don’t feel talking to Germans. That’s not just because of the commonalities in low rather than high culture. It’s also because those commonalities have been deprecated in official discourse. They have not been ignored, but they have been cast as something to be embarrassed about. So when I do encounter those commonalities, they are all the more resonant for me.

Anything for you, Jeremy.

The traditional way of doing that is to use a Greek numeral; you could use them indiscriminately for ordinals, cardinals, and in antiquity even multiplicatives. So World War II, Henry VIII: Βʹ Παγκόσμιος Πόλεμος, Ερρίκος ο Ηʹ, which are in fact read out loud as Δεύτερος Παγκόσμιος Πόλεμος, Ερρίκος ο Όγδοος, with ordinals and not cardinals. (It is “Second World War”, never “World War Two”.) This is done for names and titles.

The ordinal numbers can have a superscript inflection ending, as is done in Romance languages. That does not happen with titles, but it is optional with non-titles: you can say α[math]^{ος}[/math], β[math]^{ος}[/math], γ[math]^{ος}[/math] πρωταθλητής for 1st, 2nd, 3rd champion. Alternatively, the suffix can be hyphenated: α-ος.

These days, you will also see Arabic rather than Greek numerals, always with the inflection, and the inflection can appear with no hyphen or superscript: 1[math]^{ος}[/math], 1ος. This is newer, and if Google is any indication, that’s the most common mechanism now. In the 80s, my primary school, Sitia Second, was named Βʹ Δημοτικό Σητείας (primary schools and high schools are numbered in each town); its blog now names it 2o ΔΗΜΟΤΙΚΟ ΣΧΟΛΕΙΟ ΣΗΤΕΙΑΣ. Patras Third High School, which is old and venerable, is listed on Wikipedia as Γ’ Γυμνάσιο Πατρών; but its Facebook page names it as 3ο ΓΥΜΝΑΣΙΟ ΠΑΤΡΩΝ.

We truly are spoiled for choice in this town, Miguel Paraz.

I did take my future wife for Valentine’s Day to Grossi Florentino our first year of dating. It truly is a high temple of dining. It would have to be, at $200 a person.

But the place that pops into my head is Scugnizzo. Tucked away in a laneway of the more downmarket side of the CBD, in a lovely old brick warehouse, with a courtyard. Featuring an expansive mad genius Italian chef with creativity to spare, and good ingredients. It’s a place that makes you smile just to walk in. And I think it is well suited to canoodling…

Like Michael Masiello said, no real obstacles: things are simpler. There will be fewer Attic futures and Attic second declensions. In fact, they were historically called Attic not because they were alien to Doric (Doric loved the “Attic” future), but because they were alien to Koine. So λαός, σκανδαλίσω, not λεώς, σκανδαλιῶ. Some Latin loan words, but you will recognise them from English anyway: κουστωδία, κεντυρίων. Some particles are moving towards Modern Greek, so their usage may surprise you: ἵνα for example is closer to a subjunctive marker then just a purposive.

I’d just jump in. If you find it too easy, I’ll point you in the direction of Nonnus’ Homeric paraphrase of the Gospel of John. 🙂

I’m going to do some backgrounding on this for people not blessed enough to have delved in the waters of Greek.

English makes a distinction between active and passive voices of a verb.

Homeric Greek made a distinction between active and middle voices of a verb. It distinguished between you actively doing something to the world, and you just sitting there. If you were having things done to you (passive), you’re just sitting there. If you are doing things to yourself (reflexive), you’re just sitting there. If you two are doing things to each other (reciprocal), you’re just sitting there. And if you are doing things for yourself, you are still just sitting there: in all these instances, you are not actively doing something to the world, outside of yourself.

The distinction puts some instances that in English would be active into the middle voice. The verb for sleep is in the middle voice. So is the verb for work.

So, in that division of the world, the middle voice of ‘love’ can mean all of the above: “I love for myself”, “I love myself”, and “I am loved”.

In Homeric Greek, you occasionally have a verb form in the aorist that looks somewhat different from the middle. This ended up extended to the future tense in Attic (in a very morphologically awkward way), and it was supposed to be the emergence of a distinct passive voice in those tenses, whereas the future and aorist middles kept their middle meaning (“just sitting there”, including reflexives, reciprocals, and self-benefit).

That’s the theory. In practice, you will still find aorist passive forms with middle meaning, and aorist middle forms with passive meaning: they were easily confused, and Greek writers really did confuse them. The legacy is that in Modern Greek, we only have active and passive forms in the aorist…

… and the passive forms have the same range of meanings as the Homeric middle: the forms have switched, the underlying meaning hasn’t. Remember: the middle/passive distinction only ever happened in the aorist and future, and even there it was garbled. In the present, imperfect, perfect and pluperfect, Greek continued to use the one voice for both middle and passive, throughout. Greek simply got rid of the outliers in the aorist: it kept the semantics the same.

So, if I may introspect on the modern verb αγαπιέμαι: in the plural, it would be interpreted as “we love each other” (αγαπιόμαστε), and in the singular, it would be interpreted as “I am loved”. That’s not about preference of one meaning over the other, that’s about context and plausibility. Other words have different default interpretations. An inanimate subject of κλέβομαι “be stolen” is passive; a human subject will be interpreted as reciprocal (we stole each other = we eloped).

And there is the possibility of confusion between middle and passive still. I once used the middle of self-benefit with reference to shopping: I announced to my cousin that ψωνιστήκαμε “we went shopping (for things for ourselves)”. My cousin told me to shut up, because the idiomatic interpretation of the verb “to shop” in the middle/passive voice was not self-benefit, but passive: “we were shopped for, someone went shopping to buy us”. Which applies to street prostitutes.

Well, you need to know What’s Bendigo, Australia like to live in?

You need to know that Bendigo is a two hour train ride from Melbourne, and a smidgeon longer as a car ride.

You need to know that there are good foodie options to be had in Bendigo, that real estate is affordable, that the town has a visible history (it was its Victorian architecture that made me fall in love with it), and that it is large enough for life to be pleasant with all the expected modcons.

You need to also know that it is still a country town (population 100k), and that there are things you can get or experience in Melbourne that you can’t in Bendigo. But again, Melbourne is two hours away. Not six, like Mildura is.

You probably need to know that Bendigo was a flashpoint recently of conflict about whether a mosque should be built there. There were Bendigonians who were passionately against; there were also Bendigonians who were passionately for. Country Australia is relatively whitebread compared to the cities; but Bendigo does have a significant presence of overseas born residents, including refugees: a large number of Karen refugees, for example.

My thanks to Konstantinos Konstantinides for doing the back research.

The word is real, and it’s not mangled much: it should be –melisi– It’s another coinage by Aristophanes, from Wasps 220: ἀρχαιομελισιδωνοφρυνιχήρατα. Aristophanes, Wasps, line 183

ὡς ἀπὸ μέσων νυκτῶν γε παρακαλοῦσ’ ἀεί,
λύχνους ἔχοντες καὶ μινυρίζοντες μέλη
ἀρχαιομελισιδωνοφρυνιχήρατα,
οἷς ἐκκαλοῦνται τοῦτον.

They arrive here, carrying lanterns in their hands and singing the charming old verses of Phrynichus’ Sidonian Women; it’s their way of calling him.

The breakdown is:

• archaio– ‘old’
• meli– ‘honey’
• Sidōno– ‘Sidonian’
• Phrynicho– ‘Phrynichus’
• eratos ‘lovely’

Erica Friedman’s answer to What was the 2017 New York Top Writer’s meetup like?

I was able to get there a little early and meet some of the Quora Staff and speak with them. It’s very easy when one is removed from the gears of a community to imagine that nothing is being done when, in fact, a great deal is being done, just not all of it working the way we want. I came away from those talks excited and energized about the direction Quora is taking.

About as little as it is doing to stop it on Upwork, of which Quora is an enterprise client (they’re still recruiting question writers there):

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Is Quora just a site where shills ask questions anonymously so they can answer them and promote themselves and/or their companies?

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Has Quora ever hired people to ask questions on a particular topic?

And it looks like 50c an answer is the rate there too:

I’m looking for someone to search for questions about how to play/train on Baseball/Basketball/Golf/Swimming on Quora and to post answers related to the questions by referring to what a company’s online solutions can offer. A Quora account and sample of answers shall be provided. Pay Rate: 20 answers for $10. NOTE: You should be familiar with the sports as in how to play/train or coach a sport, not the spectator part of it (news, teams, views, etc). We’re looking for those that know the following sports.

50c?! Cf. John L. Miller’s answer to Will (and should) Quora ever pay its content creators?

If I give you a computer because I like giving people computers, that makes me happy. If I give you a computer because you’re paying me $50, I no longer have the joy of giving AND it is worth more to me than $50 (even if no one else will pay anything for it), so I’m losing money and unhappy.

50c… is not going to motivate me to do the kind of answer I do for free. FFS.

I read with some… puzzlement the following answer:

It’s a win win (x2) for all the parties involved.

A freelance writer gets money.

A company gets exposure.

Quora establishes itself as the go-to place for quality content.

Users get their answers from a professional and get to discover companies related to their interests. Maybe they can even get their problems solved.

Does that 50c an answer question sound like it’ll be quality content? Does it sound like anything but spam?

One would think, at any rate, that spam prevention would be better than spam cure. Then again, one would think that Quora would take a dimmer perspective on Do My Homework questions too.

Upwork is awash with people paying freelancers to do their homework, btw. Behold: the programmers of the future. And weep for the species…