Category: Uncategorized

The Jew’s harp is very widely used; in fact, according to History of the Jew’s Harp, the two continents where it was not indigenous were Africa and Australia. There is a long history of the Jew’s harp being used in the British Isles (The Jews-Harp in Britain and Ireland (SOAS Musicology Series): Michael Wright: 9781472414137: Amazon.com: Books); and inasmuch as Australian folk music is based on Anglo–Celtic music, that’s enough to explain its presence there.

There have been a few proposals for symbolic universal language, most of them taking their inspiration from Chinese ideographic systems.

• Pasigraphy was at the start of the universal language movement: they were akin to universal thesauruses in symbolic form. Rather naive in retrospect.
• Blissymbols was probably the most thorough recent effort, and it has found some unexpected usage since for teaching communication to language-disabled children.
• iConji seems to be some sort of mix of Emoji and dingbats.
• And of course there’s Emoji themselves, which are increasingly being used in communication, though of either a more rebus-like or a less syntactic nature.

There are pros and cons to symbols as a universal language. Some symbols are arguably more iconic or indexical as signs than words, and less arbitrary, so they should be easier to learn. In theory. In practice, the minute you move away from concrete nouns, the signs symbolic languages use look pretty arbitrary; and even if they are conceived of as indexical, the metaphors may not be all that obvious. I’m not convinced the gains in iconicity would really be worth it.

Interesting set of answers to date, which surface a bunch of different attitudes:

• The Old Planter: “I’d get on the phone and ask what the hell are you doing to me.” It would not even occur to the peasantry to get on the phone. The peasantry are not convinced that moderators are human beings that breathe the same air they do. It helps, I presume, to have met Quora staff face to face.
• The Loyalist: “Quora does not do bad things for no reason, and I trust I will be vindicated.” There’s a bunch of users who don’t have that level of trust. It helps, I presume, to have met Quora staff face to face.
• The Wronged: “That’s all too likely, given what I’ve experienced here. I’d accept it, and I wouldn’t be that surprised.”
• The Take-It-Or-Leave-It: “Meh, a distraction that’s had its time, there’s a world beyond. More fools they.”
• The Content-Proud: “For God’s sake, at least let me back on so I can archive my writings.” (Good news: they do.)

Two consistent themes emerge though:

• I would not come back under a new identity. In fact, I would not come back at all. (As an exception, Dan, I see, would ask for reinstatement after 6 months or a year. I wonder if anyone’s ever been unbanned after that long. And I wonder if anyone who has not met Quora staff face to face would expect as much.)
• Quora will have violated an implicit contract with me, and would have lost my good will. (Assuming they had it.) Which is a large part of the reason why I wouldn’t come back.

I’ll note that there are people I know who have been banished, fairly or no, and who have come back under false identities. So the first theme is not universally held. I’d say that the second is universally held though: in the instances I know of in regard to returnees, they certainly don’t sing Quora’s praises behind its back.

(And no, I am not going to report them. As I’ve said already: Quora is entitled to demand my compliance to their regulations, but not to demand my enforcement of them on others.)

For my part?

• I would feel even more betrayed. Incandescently betrayed.
• I would republish my content (which I still own) elsewhere, taking a leaf out of Clarissa Lohr’s answer to What would happen if comments feature in Quora was removed and all existing comments simply vanished into thin air?.
• At that elsewhere (presumably my own blog), I would violate BNBR loudly and often. And proudly.
• My sense of betrayal would certainly outweigh my sense of community: I would not make up an identity and come back. Not out of respect for Quora’s Terms Of Service, but out of my own self-respect. Which ultimately should count for more.

The way I did it, which may not work everywhere, is:

• Take as many breadth subjects in linguistics as you can, while doing your degree in another faculty.
• Demonstrate through charm and wit and intellect that you would be an asset to the linguistics department.
• If at all possible, do a cross disciplinary postgraduate degree that somehow bridges the gap between the two faculties. In my case, it was a masters in cognitive science.
• Of course, back in my day, interdisciplinary degrees were fashionable; not sure they are still.
• Failing that, see if you can work out an accelerated or diploma course to bridge the gap.
• The more brilliant you show yourself to be, and the more slack your University administration is, the less hoops you will have to jump through to bridge the gap.
• Again: university administrations are not as slack as they used to be .
• All this presupposes that money is no object. If you’re in the States, my best advice would be to get a membership to a university library… 😐

… but Greek Language – A Stack Exchange Proposal has certainly piqued my interest.

Expect plenty of cross-polination between my posts here and there if it gets up. (Unless that’s verboten over there; Stack Exchange I gather is pretty rigid.)

There’s not much to read, apart from the Greeks’ accounts. The peoples to the north were not literate; the Carthaginians did not do history, and their accounts would have been wiped anyway. The main other source of external accounts I could think of would be Persians; and nothing from the Sassanids survives, though some Persian accounts were based on their accounts. (Roman–Persian Wars – Wikipedia)

As others have mentioned, kath– is a variant of kata as a prepositional prefix to verbs and verbal nouns. The meaning of kata– as a preposition in compounds is captured in Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges:

Down from above (καταπίπτειν fall down), back (καταλείπειν leave behind), against, adversely (καταγιγνώσκειν condemn, decide against, καταφρονεῖν despise), completely (καταπετροῦν stone to death, κατεσθίειν eat up), often with an intensive force that cannot be translated. An intransitive verb when compounded with κατά may become transitive.

Great answer from Roman Huczok: see Roman Huczok’s answer.

Getting an undeciphered text with no Rosetta stone is, as Roman said, hard work, though not impossible. The question is after the peculiarities of Lojban which would make the decipherment harder—particularly given the whole exoticism that Lojban claims to, of encoding predicate logic as something quite alien to human language.

I’ll retort that the way actual humans use it, the predicate logic component is not that big a deal: you can still clearly see human verbs behind it. (The way Lojban predicates avoid raising by default is somewhat more odd.)

I’ll suggest the following as things that would trip up a would-be decipherer:

• The compounding morphology of Lojban—which is both its derivational morphology and its compounding proper—is eccentric: lots of three-letter reduced forms, which only occasionally remind you of their original five-letter predicates. The decipherer will easily tell that they are a distinct word class because of their phonotactics, but working out that they are compounds will take longer.
• The terminators—the spoken bracketing of Lojban—are not a human language thing, and the conditions of ambiguity which make them optional aren’t human either. A decipherer might work out that they coocurr with certain syntactic structures, but would be likelier to construe them as attitudinals (modal particles).
• Because of Lojban’s stick-them-in-a-blender approach to the core predicates, the tools of historical linguistics or inspection will be pretty useless in deciphering them. In fact, apart from le, la, lo, na, mi, I don’t think inspection would yield up anything.
• The use of numbered predicate places instead of prepositions—the tritransitive and quadritransitive predicates, the strategies for rearranging arguments, the relative paucity of actual prepositions—would throw a decipherer as well.

Recall the old, old answer by the then head of Reddit: Yishan Wong’s answer to Why are my questions not answered on Quora?

The fact that it’s a Q&A format is just a hook to make it easier for people to start writing.

Quora is a great place to write answers and to read answers, but it is not a good place to get your own questions answered.

It is true that disregarding the intent of a questioner is, under normal circumstances, assholery. Yes, so are troll questions; but troll questions are not a get-out-of-jail card for this rather idiosyncratic attitude. The attitude is best motivated by this:

Anil Mitra’s answer to Questions on Quora don’t “belong” to the person who asked them, but shouldn’t it matter that the original asker gets a satisfactory answer?

If a sincere questioner wants Quorans to respond to their intent, they should state their intent directly. This does not always happen. But if, in stating their intent directly, they limit the scope of their question they are limiting the usefulness of the site.

The premise of Quora is not answering questions, it’s treating questions as springboards for formulating knowledge. Questions people actually need narrow and usable answers to, with a time limit no less, are not the kinds of question that will get much joy here. They’re not what Quora is looking for, and they haven’t cultivated the kind of community that would answer in those terms.

But still. That’s no excuse for not trying to work out what the OP’s intent was in good faith, and dismissing their intent; Quora policy in fact dictates this. Phrases such as “this is obviously a troll question” are in fact reportable under BNBR. (How widely is that known?)

The satisfaction of the person matters; if they follow up and say, “what I was actually after was…”, I will engage with them. But the way Quora is set up, it’s not mandatory; I have in fact sometimes said that I would ignore the specifics of a question’s details to give a more general answer.

Australians desperately hang on to the small lexical differences between States, as you’ll see here, because otherwise Australian English is ludicrously homogeneous geographically. Variation in Australian English – Wikipedia

The names for different sizes of beer glasses (Australian English vocabulary – Wikipedia) is kind of the counterpart to the renowned Eskimo words for snow. (Yes, the jokes do write themselves.) And there is bizarre State-based variation, just as there was beer parochialism in the days before craft beer.

There used to be a similar diversity of words for uncouth and unsophisticated people (yes, again the jokes do write themselves); but they have all been replaced now by Bogan, which has now also come to be reclaimed as a positive.

Where Australia specialises words about beer glasses, Greece specialises words about souvlaki. A döner kebab is a gyros in the South; in the north it’s a sanduits.

The other shibboleth of Northern vs Southern Greek vocabulary is the word for ‘on the ground’. Northern Greek uses the word kato ‘down’ for ‘on the ground’ as well; Southern Greek has retained khamo, khamu for the latter—earning them the moniker khamudzides ‘Down-On-The-Grounders’ from northerners.

See this post on a recent book about the slang differences between the two, written by Haralambos Metaxas, who is also a contributor to the Greek equivalent of Urban Dictionary, slang.gr