Category: Uncategorized

Quora for the most part relies on users to write questions (hence their frequent absurdity). On occasion, they have hired freelancers to write questions in areas they think are underrepresented. See Nick Nicholas’ answer to Has Quora ever hired people to ask questions on a particular topic?

As Albanians here know, I am intrigued by Albania, to the extent of filling a few Albanian Quorans’ feeds. That was triggered in the main by an interest in Balkan linguistics, plus Albanian being the local isolate branch of Indo-European.

I didn’t have a particularly negative impression of Albanians before I came to Quora. Unfortunately, what little contact I had with Albanians was in the context of the influx of Albanians as workers in Greece in the 90s: they were somewhat guarded, quite busy trying to make ends meet, and treated with contempt by Greeks. (The grudging respect came later, and it needed the next wave of migration to come through. Just as has happened with Greeks in Australia, in fact.) And of course Albania had just come out of the dead years of Hoxha, chaotically.

I knew from reading that there were intellectuals in Albania, that they were proud, and that I’d have a lot in common with them culturally. I just didn’t really get the opportunity to explore it that much until now.

I have had a very positive experience of Albanians in my two years of Quora, just as I have had of most Turks, and of most Iranians; I just regret I haven’t had the chance to interact with as many Bulgarians or Macedonians. I don’t think my perception has changed, but it has certainly filled out somewhat.

My maternal grandparents (Crete) had five (1940–1953). John, Helen, Maria, Georgia, George.

My paternal grandparents (Cyprus) had nine (1926–1947), of which one was still-born (Angelica) and one died of smallpox as a toddler (Kostas). George,† Helen, Chris, Stavros, Dora,† Andrew, Savvas. As Savvas once said to me, “the machine kept going, until it stopped.” The first child migrated when the last was six months old; I think they all were in the same room only once after that, when Dora was dying of cancer in ’81.

Every once in a while, I take offence at the possibility that any Unicode script might not be rendered on my Mac—even if I never use the script, will never see the script, and will have no idea what the script even is. And I go hunting for free fonts.

There are five cuneiform blocks in Unicode: Ugaritic (Unicode block), Old Persian (Unicode block), and three blocks for Sumero-Akkadian: Cuneiform (Unicode block) , Cuneiform Numbers and Punctuation, and Early Dynastic Cuneiform.

These are the fonts sitting on my computer, and the blocks they contain. Fonts containing Sumero-Akkadian are in boldface.

• Aegean: U OP
• Alphabetum Unicode: U OP
• Akkadian: C CNP EDC
• Andagii: U
• Code2001: U OP
• Everson Mono: U
• MPH 2B Damase: U OP
• Noto Sans Ugaritic: U
• Noto Sans Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform: C CNP
• Universalia: U OP C CNP

The Akkadian and Aegean fonts are by George Douros, and the world owes him gratitude for his Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts, including his typographically meticulous fonts for Greek.

This phrase is a false friend.

In Modern Greek, it sounds like “eternal hell”. In Modern Greek it would in fact be αιώνια κόλαση: the word order is slightly more fixed, adjectives before feminine nouns must have an -a and not an -o ending, and the third declension has been merged into the first.

In Ancient Greek, it is not eternal hell. It is eternal punishment, eternal chastisement. That particular word for punishment was used a lot in the New Testament and Christianity for what happens to sinners after death; so it was transferred across to the place where that punishment happens. Lampe’s dictionary mentions that meaning in a couple of passages in the 4th century AD, but they still look like meaning just “punishment” to me. The earliest examples Kriaras’ dictionary of Early Modern Greek has meaning “hell” are from 16th century Crete.

A semantic dictionary of late mediaeval Greek remains a desideratum; Trapp’s Lexikon is wonderful, but as Trapp himself admitted to me, it simply doesn’t do semantics. (In fact, it skips words that existed already, because it’s about new words; there is no entry in Trapp for kolasis.)

In my experience, Perth by far. Enough that the South African presence in Perth is very visible: it’s one of the largest ethnic subgroups there. (Perth has not had the same level of Mediterranean or Asian migration as Sydney or Melbourne.) South African restaurants are common there, and very uncommon in Melbourne (though I’ve still found a couple of places that had biltong.)

It helps that Perth is so much closer to South Africa, of course.

As all the other answers have said, there is just too broad a spectrum of views within the American Democrat party for us to speak of an average Democrat. Unless, of course, that is code for “moderate Democrat” or even “blue dog Democrat”.

Australia too has two big tent major parties.

1. Labour has a left wing, but not much of a left-wing policy anymore, and the Labour Right has been dominant for a while. The Labour Right has a socially conservative constituency, which is part of the reason why Australia still has not legalised gay marriage.
2. The Liberals have a moderate and a conservative wing. Formerly, the split was about economic policy. In the past decade, the split has mostly been about social conservatism, with the moderates more libertarian and the conservatives more authoritarian. That split is the current big story in Australian politics.
3. The Nationals have been in lock-step Coalition with the Liberals for the past four generations, and their brand of agrarian populism does not appear to have had much impact on government policy when they have been in government.

As with much of the West, the two major parties’ fervour has hollowed out, and they have bled votes to populists:

1. Left wing populists (formerly the Australian Democrats, nowadays the Greens, who have locked up the inner city intelligentsia),
2. Right wing populists (of which One Nation is only the most notorious),
3. And even Centrist populists (the original Australian Democrats, back when Labour was still a left wing party; nowadays the Nick Xenophon Team).

So the landscape is just as messy as America, and the two major parties are fractious coalitions just as in America. But third parties are slightly better established, and of course the social consensus is to the left of America, both socially and economically.

A social conservative Republican might make their home grudgingly in the Conservative wing of the Liberals, and the newly bellicose Conservative Liberals have certainly been borrowing rhetoric from America. But they would be bothered by the abundance of RINO equivalents, and may eventually flee to a more principled party. One Nation, possibly, if they’re anxious about culture and race; Family First or Rise Up Australia if they are Christianist.

A libertarian Republican might make their home grudgingly in the Moderate wing of the Liberals, and the newly supine Moderate Liberals have certainly been borrowing rhetoric from America. But they would be bothered by the abundance of big government statists even in the Moderate flank, and may eventually flee to a more principled party. The only real alternative is the Liberal Democrats—which by Australian standards is horridly right wing (Why Ridiculously Stupid White Man David Leyonhjelm Will Lose His 18c Racial Discrimination Case – New Matilda)—simply because Australians are really not used to libertarian rhetoric. (Yes, New Matilda is left wing.)

In terms of sentiment, a Sandersnista would gravitate to the Greens, who are the only somewhat mainstream voice against refugee demonisation and for gay marriage. (Labor has been riven on both, because of its big tent.) A Clintonista would gravitate to Labor, and Labor functionaries do apprenticeships in Democrat campaigns.

In terms of actual economic or social policy, a Sandersnista would probably find themselves somewhere in the Labor party (more to the left socially, more to the right economically). A Clintonista would find themselves freaking out at the overt power of Unions in the Labor party, and hopping between Labor Right and Moderate Liberals.

Just as outsiders can see American politics more clearly than those caught up in its culture wars, so too I trust that an American Clintonista can actually make out some sunlight between Labor Right and Moderate Liberals…

Google translation does not work by rules and grammars. Machine translation gave up on that decades ago. Pity, because I spent well over a decade coding morphological rules for Greek, and it was a lot of fun.

Machine translation works on statistics. To gather the statistics, you need a large amount of bilingual texts.

Now, there is an order of magnitude more ancient Greek than ancient Latin texts, much of it translated. And there are a substantial number of mediaeval Greek texts as well.

But even if the interest was there in ancient Greek machine translation, the material would not be.

• Optical character recognition for the squiggles of polytonic Greek is not great, and would degrade the quality of any bilingual corpus substantially, unless someone had typed the text in. (Both Perseus and the TLG have; Google did talk to the TLG once while I was working there, but it was about teaching materials, not machine translation.)
• The classical corpus is probably not big enough to be useful for statistical machine translation; and there is a lot more bilingual text for mediaeval Latin available than for mediaeval Greek.
• Unlike Latin, the classical Greek corpus is multidialectal, which would compromise any statistics even more.

So machine translating ancient Greek would be a lot more hassle than for Latin. And because of the cultural history of Western Europe, there is much less demand for it than there would be for Latin.

Compare the number of translation requests for tattoos on this site, in Latin and in ancient Greek.

None. From memory, that didn’t happen before Berlioz.

Bit of a big question there, and nihilism is a big concept—that often gets used quite loosely, to mean “relativistic” or “cynical”.

We are in a time in the West, of course, when a lot of longstanding moral absolutes have been increasingly questioned or scrutinised, and the outcome has been called nihilistic by both proponents and adversaries. (Adversaries more than proponents: the term is something of a cudgel.)

Nihilism – Wikipedia

Nihilism has also been described as conspicuous in or constitutive of certain historical periods: for example, Jean Baudrillardand others have called postmodernity a nihilistic epoch; and some religious theologians and figures of religious authority have asserted that postmodernity and many aspects of modernity represent a rejection of theism, and that such rejection of theistic doctrine entails nihilism.

So one primary point of relevance is that it is a shorthand for the modern-day questioning of absolute values, which is prevalent, and which you need to be aware of to work out how the modern West ticks. Or fails to tick.

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The second primary point of relevance is not as time-bound. Nihilism, like solipsism, is a useful intellectual exercise. It is a useful phase to go through, if you like. The teen or undergrad who stumbles across solipsism in their intellectual development is something of a cliche: “Woah, man, like what if I told you everything was, like, an illusion!”

But it is useful because, when you come out the other end, you acknowledge better the contingency and fragility of your construction of the world: you know to be on the lookout for misconstrual and bias better.

Same with nihilism. It’s good to have values. It’s better if you’ve scrutinised those values, and worked out why they are a good thing, rather than to just passively accept what you have been handed down. And a phase of questioning everything, of early nihilism, is useful to help you build them back up again—and convince yourself that there are things really worth holding on to, after all.