Category: Uncategorized

Translation to Federation Standard follows:

yItamchoH jay’ ’ej HuchwIj yItlhap! nuqDaq jIqI’?

mach tlhIngan Hol mu’ghom, ’ej tlhIngan Hol Quora tu’lu’chugh, pIj DIvI’ Hol mu’mey lo’lu’ net pIH. jIHvaD qay’be’.

cha’ Seng vIpIHlaH:

• tlhIngan Hol Quora lo’laHwI’ law’ law’, wa’maH law’ puS; ’a wa’vatlh law’ law’. Quoravetlh leHmeH yapbe’.
• meqna’mo’ tlhIngan Hol Wikipedia bot Jimbo Wales. vuDvetlh jeS D’Angelo ’e’ vIHar. Dogh Quora DIvI’ ’e’ luQub Huch nobwI’, ’e’ Hajba’.

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Shut up and take my money! Where do I sign up?

The Klingon vocabulary is small, and if a Klingon Quora were used, people would often end up borrowing English vocabulary. That’s not a problem for me.

I anticipate two problems:

• There’s more than 10 people that could use a Klingon Quora, but less than 100. Not enough to maintain such a Quora.
• Jimbo Wales blocked Klingon Wikipedia for a clear reason. I’d think D’Angelo would be of the same mind. He’d clearly fear funders thinking Quora Inc is being silly.

Of the four non-English​ Quoras to date:

• I don’t have an account on the Italian yet, and I’ve never formally learned the language. Informally, I have faked the language through reconstruction from music scores and Latin, but I would be reluctant to commit my improvisation to writing.
• Taxi cabs are another matter.

• I spent some time watching Univision while living in Southern California, but I have not studied Spanish either, and Speedy Gonzales cartoons are no substitute for musical scores, when it comes to reconstructing a language. The four Quora languages are in fact the four European languages taught at Melbourne Uni, when I was hanging out there in IT; but Spanish was a late addition, and I didn’t get on with the lecturer. So less incentive there.
• The languages I have had formal training in are French and German. My command of the two is equally bad, but I’m clearly gravitating towards the German.
• I already know two users well on the German site, Clarissa and Joachim. (Can’t tempt you to join, Kat?) I’ve been doing good banter with both. On the French site, I only know Habib well, and I didn’t get the impression he was a frequent poster.
• I have aesthetic reasons to prefer German to French. Although that aesthetics is as much to do with their music as their language.
• I have had my one French answer corrected 4 times. The first time by Sihem herself. The first two times, it’s flattering. By the fourth time, you start suspecting that maybe they’re trying to tell you something. My German answers have been corrected too, but only once (so far). And my German interlocutors tell me they find my German adorably eccentric.
• … They should be careful what they wish for…

Why yes, I do have footage of me speaking German in a cab, too:

See? They should be careful what they wish for…

I’m having a lot of difficulty understanding your question, but what I think you’re asking is: can a word be both onomatopoeic (or otherwise iconic in some way), and borrowed?

The lazy answer, which is in fact the default answer from what I can tell, is no: if a name is an onomatopoeia, then its form is non-arbitrary, and you don’t need to go to the country next door to make sense of it. Dogs in English go “woof woof”, and you don’t need to look at German or Russian to know that; you just need to listen to a dog. Same for “splash” or “bang” or “bleep”.

Except that this is not true. An onomatopoeic form is not completely arbitrary, but it is still somewhat arbitrary; that’s why dogs in Greek go ɣav ɣav and dogs in Korean go meong meong and dogs in English go arf arf and yip yip and bark bark. Add to that that onomatopoeic forms can often end up inflected, and the inflections are certainly arbitrary and rooted to a place.

And the partially-arbitrary form one language picks for its onomatopoeia can travel to another.

I had my own epiphany about this just this year. The Greek onomatopoeia for sneezing is apsu (cf. English a-tishoo).

The Turkish onomatopoeia, I learned on Quora, is hapşuu.

If you pronounce hapşuu in a language with no /h/ and no /ʃ/, you get apsu. That is not a coincidence. The Greek word is an onomatopoeia, but it is still borrowed from Turkish.

Latin: yes.

• Nick Nicholas’ answer to During antiquity, did anyone in Greece or Rome recognize similarities between Greek and Latin languages and hypothesized relationships between them?

Persian: probably not.

• Were ancient Greeks and Persians aware of their Indo-European roots?
• History: During Alexander’s invasions, would his soldiers have found Old Persian or Indic to be somewhat familiar sounding given their closeness to Greek?

I seem to answer a question like this every few months. This is this trimester’s iteration:

• No transparency
• Low clarity
• The policies are often as vague as any article of the US constitution
• Low visibility
• No visibility of updates
• Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is Quora’s policy on adding images and videos to answers?
• No equity (consideration of circumstances)
• No accountability
• Worse still, if you aren’t aware of Tatiana’s email address or role as a user: random accountability. There are any number of moderation decisions that Tatiana has publicly repealed and apologised for, but only when they were pointed out to her in public. Most users don’t know who Tatiana is; and less do now than did 6 months ago. Whatever is happening with appeal, the normal avenues are clearly not always working or getting escalated up to her.
• Infantilising tone-policing, as part of BNBR
• Enforcement by robots
• Robotic enforcement (even if they aren’t robots)
• Culminating in Bodnick’s Bodnickism that moderation does not consider content when judging infractions. Not context. Content.
• Low community confidence in enforcement
• Widespread suspicion of selective enforcement
• I think we can all name the TWs who seem to repeatedly get away with murder. I’ve blocked most of them already.
• Breathtaking arrogance on the part of their defenders
• No, just because Quora is a private company does not mean it is morally neutral.
• No, just because Quora is a private company does not mean I should joyfully accept their constraints on my speech or others’.
• No, just because you follow the letter and not the spirit of BNBR does not make you a better person, argumentative and arrogant TW from my home town that I have already chosen to block, and who has expressed shock that people don’t do BNBR in real life. Thank God they don’t do BNBR the way you choose to, anyway.
• Breathtaking radio silence on the part of their implementers
• Although it’s not much better when they aren’t silent

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… How would I fix it?

Going back to 2013 would be a start. There are things Achilleas Vortselas or Christopher VanLang or Tracey Bryan or Marcus Geduld have written here over the years as community moderators, that I’ve disagreed with. But when Marcus says that community mods used to agonise over decisions to ban people, I believed him, because I trust people who’ll show their face in public, and take accountability for what they do.

Trust in-sourced Quora Moderation, on the other hand? Whatever unholy mix of bots, contractors, and employees behind the curtain it may be? With so many visible errors and so little effort to restore trust in its processes? And with even former leads quite happy to throw them under the bus, as has happened on the pages of Cordially Resistant?

I’d fix Quora Moderation by having Quora be the kind of organisation that feels it is important to rebuild trust from its users. In fact, by having Quora be the kind of organisation that pays any attention to its users at all. Over and above giving a few of them a jacket and snacks, circulating the occasional SurveyMonkey form, or measuring their clicks when Quora makes the notifications menu piss-coloured.

Latin confirmed with a check in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Latin was clearly on the wane from the 7th century, but it seems not completely lost:

Lawyers preserved some knowledge of Latin, often superficial, from the 8th to 11th C., and Constantine IX’s novel establishing a law school in Constantinople prescribes the teaching of Latin. From the 11th C. onward, closer, if sometimes hostile, contact with the West led to increasing knowledge of Latin in leading Byz. circles; Romanos III spoke Latin and Psellos claimed some knowledge of it. Still, cultural arrogance usually marked Byz. attitudes to the West and its language.

Knowledge of Latin was even greater after the Fourth Crusade, and Maximus Planudes and the Cydones brothers even translated Latin works into Greek in the 14th century.

Nonetheless, Mehmed II’s diplomatic correspondence with the West was in fact in Modern Greek.

Panos Skoulidas‘ answer is right. To elaborate:

• Κομψός means “elegant, clean cut”. It has ancient lineage. It does not explicitly mean that someone is fashionable; it can correspond to “classic”, and it can certainly be used approvingly by an 80 year old.
• Σικ, from French chic, explicitly refers to being up to date with fashion.
• Both posh and preppy are negative evaluations, posh more so. The closest of the three is κυριλέ, which is derisive slang about someone with upper class affectation in how they present themselves (so posh, but without the British connotations, and more about parvenues). It is derived from κύριος, (in this context) “gentleman”, plus the French fashion style suffix -é.
• The /l/ is a random consonant, inserted so the word wouldn’t end up ambiguous with κύριε “sir!”

I’m going to answer a different interpretation of this question. If all languages have access to the same, finite repertoire of segments (phonemes), then why do they sound as different as they do?

There are several answers to this.

• The repertoire of phonemes may be finite, but the realisation can be phonetically different. A Dutch /x/ is much more fortis than a Greek /x/.
• Different languages employ quite different subsets of the available phonemic inventory.
• Languages differ in sound, not only at the level of individual segments, but also in how they arrange those segments, their phonotactics. People are very attuned to phonotactic differences, because that’s what they are listening for when they are trying to make sense of strings of segments as words.
• Languages, dialects, and for that matter idiolects differ hugely in their suprasegmental phenomena, the aspects of speech that range beyond the individual segments. That includes intonation, loudness, and timbre.

As I expect you know, Collapse Bot hates Non-Roman scripts.

I’ve had several bouts with the bot over the question Which conjugation is Gnōthi ‘know’, as in Gnōthi sauton ‘know thyself’?

The Greek used to be in Greek characters, and without glosses. Shifting to transliteration and italics, and adding glosses, sometimes works; this time it hasn’t.

Some of you will have put non-English in questions. How do you get the bot to shut up?

No. Gemination is preserved, but only in the South-Eastern group of dialects (the most prominent member of which is Cypriot). And the gemination of those dialects does not always coincide with the orthographic gemination preserved from Ancient Greek. In all other dialects, and in Standard Greek, double consonants are for spelling only. (Just like in Modern English.)