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You may be surprised to hear me say this, given the debate I’ve just had on a related question, but not quite.

Kids have to learn how to speak Job Interview.

Linguistics, as a science, dispassionately observes the fact that there is such a variant of the language as Job Interview. Linguistics knows that native speakers of Job Interview are not innately smarter, more virtuous, or more sexy than native speakers of Da Langwij Of Da Streetz. But linguistics also has no business preventing school from equipping kids with learning how to speak Job Interview. We don’t live in Chomskyland, we live in the real world.

Linguistics, however, would appreciate it if, when teachers do teach their kids how to speak Job Interview, they don’t also say that people who speak Job Interview are innately smarter, more virtuous, or more sexy. It’s just another language, appropriate in another context. And FWIW, at least some English curricula do attempt to do that.

Without knowing anything whatsoever of your circumstances, OP, I’ll guess you’ve picked up some supraregional dialect koine somehow.

Like, I dunno, RP, or whatever has replaced RP in England these days.

It’ll have a lot to do with your upbringing and your socialisation, as others have said. This kind of accent mixup is very commonplace in children of military personnel, who move around a country frequently; hence the term “army brat”. And of course prestige variants of a language are produced all over a language community, unified by ideology or class rather than regional identification—even if their origin is often regional.

Patsas (Tripe soup) is a Greek hangover cure specialty. It occupies the same niche in Greece that a late night kebab occupies in Britain.

Or Australia.

The answer is, not really; Stalactites would be the obvious place to do it (one of the few remnants of the original Greektown in the CBD, which is open 24/7); but I don’t see it on their menu.

One of the places in the current Greektown, Oakleigh, does offer it: Yefsi. But Yefsi closes at 10 pm.

Well has Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s answer put it:

Is the glass half-full or half-empty?

Here’s some ways in which Koine is closer to Modern Greek:

• Phonetics: there’s lots of disagreement about precise dates, but in lower-class Koine, potentially as few as two sounds were left to change over between Koine and Modern Greek, ɛ > i (η) and y > i (υ, οι). Accent was already likely stress- and not pitch-based, and vowel length was lost.
• Morphology: No dual, moribund optative. No Attic declension.
• Syntax: At the very start of hína replacing infinitive
• Lexicon: Substantial move forwards in both meanings of words, and Latin loans. Some of it straightforwardly legible by Modern Greek speakers.

Here’s some ways in which Koine is closer to Classical Greek:

• Phonology: Gemination was still present.
• Morphology: Still has dative, perfect, future, infinitive, third declension, athematic conjugation
• Syntax: Still has clause-chaining strategies using participles
• Lexicon: Still basically legible for someone reading ancient Greek

Phonetically, it’s almost Modern Greek. Morphologically, it’s identifiably Ancient, though there has already been some simplification. Syntax and lexicon are in between.

This short version of the answer is:

• The pre-Ottoman Emirates that ruled Asia Minor encouraged missionary activity.
• Once Constantinople was conquered, the Millet system was put in place, granting confessional communities autonomy. So long as the Christians provided taxes and troops, the Ottoman Empire was not particularly interested in converting them.
• Albania and Bosnia were an exception, and Islamisation was pursued there to quash ongoing rebellions.

Several answers on related questions provide further detail.

The stanza OP is querying, from Dryden’s imitation of the Second Epode of Horace (The Hymn of Gentry Contentment) is:

How happy in his low degree,
How rich in humble poverty, is he,
Who leads a quiet country life;
Discharg’d of business, void of strife,

This almost scans as iambic tetrameter: 8–9 syllables, not 10–11 syllables (which the rest of the poem does, outside its final stanza), and it scans better than OP thought it did:

1. In modern times, qui.et is two syllables, not one, although past spellings reveal that it used to be both. From OED 3rd edition:

ME quit, ME quyeet, ME quyte, ME qwiet, ME qwiete, ME qwyete, ME–15 quiete, ME–15 quyete, ME–16 quyet, ME– quiet, 15 quiate, 15–16 quiett, 15–16 quyett, 16 queat, 16 queit, 18– quate (south-west midl. and Irish English (lnorth.)), 18– quite (Lancs.), 19– quait (Irish English (north.)), 19– quayit (Eng. regional (Devon)), 19– quient (U.S. regional); Sc. pre-17 quayt, pre-17 queat, pre-17 queet, pre-17 queyt, pre-17 queytt, pre-17 quiatt, pre-17 quiete, pre-17 quiett, pre-17 quiette, pre-17 quiit, pre-17 quit, pre-17 quoyet, pre-17 quoyit, pre-17 quyat, pre-17 quyatt, pre-17 quyet, pre-17 quyete, pre-17 quyett, pre-17 quyiat, pre-17 quyiet, pre-17 quyit, pre-17 quyt, pre-17 qwiet, pre-17 qwiette, pre-17 qwyet, pre-17 qwyete, pre-17 qwyett, pre-17 qwyette, pre-17 qyett, pre-17 17– quait, pre-17 17– quiet, pre-17 19– queyet, 18 quaete, 18 quaiet, 18 quayet, 18– quaite, 18– quate, 19– quaeit, 19– quaet, 19– quaiat, 19– quet, 19– queyit, 19– qui’t, 19– quite.

2. In modern times, business is two syllables (bɪznəs). To quote OED again:

Disyllabic pronunciation, reflecting syncope of the unstressed second syllable of trisyllabic forms, is indicated by spellings without a medial vowel from the 16th cent. and is noted by orthoepists from the early 17th cent. (see further E. J. Dobson Eng. Pronunc. 1500–1700 (ed. 2, 1968) II. §306).

3. However, poverty is a problem. For this to scan, it would have to be one of:

• pov’rty’s he (with pov’rty two syllables, and not <r> acting as its own syllable). But that’s unpronouncable, unless the <v> was actually a /w/. OED provides a pre-17th century spelling powerte, powertie, and pow’rty’s he is slightly more pronounceable; but that was supposed to have been ancient history by Dryden’s time.
• povert’s he, with the final -y not pronounced; OED indicated that that did actually occur in places in Middle English and Modern dialect—Middle English has spellings like “ME pouerd, ME pouerert (transmission error), ME pouerte, ME pouertt, ME pouertte, ME povert, ME poverte, ME powaret, ME–15 pouert; Sc. pre-17 powert.” Again, that was supposed to have been ancient history by Dryden’s time.

… There is of course a simpler explanation: that Dryden is allowing himself one initial pentameter, before ploughing on in tetrameters; just as he puts a couple of trimeters at the very end of the poem—

This Morecraft said within himself,
Resolved to leave the wicked town,
And live retired upon his own.
He called his money in;
But the prevailing love of pelf
Soon split him on the former shelf,
And put it out again.

I don’t know enough about English verse to know whether such licence was commonplace at the start of long poems.

This is an incendiary and attention-seeking claim, with an eensy-weensy tiny kernel of truth to it.

The refugees from Turkey after 1922 (and that’s not just Pontic Greeks, but Western Asia Minor Greeks and Cappadocian Greeks too) were dispossessed and impoverished. They gravitated to the left and the Communist Party.

As a lot of dispossessed and impoverished people tend to do.

If some of them adopted communism so fervently as to become spies for the KGB, that would be plausible—but for the fact that the KGB was not called the KGB until 1954, by which time the Greek Communist Party leadership had been exiled to Tashkent, and the Communist Party driven underground. Would the Greek Communist Party of the 30s have loyally provided some intelligence to the OGPU, KGB’s predecessor of the time? I guess. And would some of them have been Pontic Greeks? I guess. *shrug*

Which is as polite as I can be about this question.

The Quora Credentials bot is very inflexible, and it’s been difficult to work out how to get it to shut up.

And the credential is being rejected because the Credentials bot doesn’t think it’s helpful; not because it necessarily isn’t helpful.

In the absence of Quora publishing a Guide to getting the Credentials bot to shut the hell up consisting of useful credentials templates (because that would require Quora Inc to actually care about its users), I suggest offering an academic-looking credential. OP has tried the following phrases:

Student, Aspiring Psychologist, Aspiring scientist, Psychologist student

I’d suggest something like

BSc (Psychology), So-And-So University (year of graduation)

Or, at a minimum, a phrase longer than two words, such as

Studying developmental psychology, aiming to practice in clinical psychology

or in fact your existing other bio, OP,

Polymath, Reads a lot, science fan, student

And whatever you do, don’t use the phrase

Question Details

Empirical research by Zeibura S. Kathau and myself confirms that phrase gets deprecated. 🙂

I knew linguists that had worked with long-rangers (those who propose wide-ranging linguistic affiliations); I have in fact met the late Sergei Starostin, proofread contributions by John Bengtson, and read issues of Mother Tongue (journal). I even have a quote from Mother Tongue as one of my .sigs, though not approvingly:

“Assuming, for whatever reasons, that neither scholar presented the evidence properly, then there remains a body of evidence you have not yet destroyed because it has never been presented.” — Harold Fleming

Spot the logical fallacy. The quote actually was trying to defend a link between Basque and Caucasian languages, which is part of the Dené–Caucasian hypothesis.

Dené–Caucasian languages – Wikipedia

Dené–Caucasian is a proposed broad language family that includes the Sino-Tibetan, Northeastern Caucasian, Na-Dené, Yeniseian, Vasconic (including Basque) and Burushaski language families. A connection specifically between Na-Dené and Yeniseian (Dené–Yeniseian languages hypothesis) was proposed by Edward Vajda in 2008, and has met with some acceptance.

The validity of the rest of the family, however, is controversial or viewed as doubtful by most historical linguists.

Dené–Yeniseian languages is new to me (of course, since I was reading long-range reconstructions in the 1990s), and I’ll come back to it.

The majority opinion in historical linguistics is to mistrust long-range linguistic families, because the number of correspondences those families are based on is increasingly tenuous, and the amount of noise introduced by the great chronological distance overwhelms the signal of possible links.

When long-range reconstruction tries to use the traditional methodology that gave us Indo-European, as with Nostratic languages (trying to find commonality between Indo-European and its neighbours), the majority opinion is sometimes polite, but almost always unconvinced. Particularly when those families are instead based on eyeballing, the majority opinion simply does not want to know.

Long-range advocates defend eyeballing by the fact that Joseph Greenberg used eyeballing to work out the linguistic history of Africa. But his proposals only can get confirmed by detailed comparative work (just as the periodic table needed to wait on subatomic particles for its workings to be understood); and unsurprisingly the linguists who are sceptical about long-range comparison in general, such as Lyle Campbell, are sceptical about his work on Africa too.

When it comes to American Indian languages, we have poor historical records, and congenitally cautious historical linguists (such as Campbell) combining to refuse to reduce the number of American Indian language families below 150. Now, obviously, there weren’t 150 different waves of migration across the Bering Strait: those language families are quite likely all related. Greenberg thought they are almost all related as Amerind, again by eyeballing. But most Amerindianists don’t see enough convincing data there to call Amerind a family.

There are two indigenous language families in the Americas that Greenberg did not think could be lumped in as Amerind: Eskimo–Aleut languages, and Na-Dené languages. The best known languages of Na-Dene are Apache and Navajo; but the bulk of the Na-Dené languages are spoken in Western Canada and Alaska:

And Na-Dené may (may) reflect a distinct wave of migration into America: Settlement of the Americas – Wikipedia says “The interior route is consistent with the spread of the Na Dene language group and Subhaplogroup X2a into the Americas after the earliest paleoamerican migration.”

And if the Na-Dené are a distinct, later wave of migration, then we might (might) be able to find related languages on the other side of the Bering Strait.

The linguists behind Dené-Caucasian are Russians of the Nostratic school, not Americans of the eyeballing school. But it’s a big family: it includes North-Eastern Caucasian (of which Chechen is the language you’re likeliest to have heard of), Sino-Tibetan (which includes Chinese), Burushaski (an isolate in Pakistan which lots of linguists would like to connect to something), Yeniseian (a language family in central Siberia), and, alas, Basque, which everyone wants to try to connect to something.

There’s extensive discussion of the pros and cons to Dené-Caucasian over at Wikipedia. The proposal, like Nostratic, does try to do things by the book, which is laudable. But it relies on comparing proto-languages, which are themselves reconstructions; and that is risky business, given how uncertain the reconstructions are; if you switch reconstructions (e.g. the reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan or North Caucasian), it falls apart. And given the ginormous number of consonants in Caucasian, any reconstruction of North-Eastern Caucasian is going to be fragile.

The news to me was that the more recent proposal of Dené-Yeniseian, lining Na-Dene to the Yeniseian languages in central Siberia, has not been shouted down:

It helps rhetorically that its proponent Edward Vajda has dismissed an earlier eyeballing-based proposal of Dené-Yeniseian as based on coincidence. I hate to say it, but it may also have helped that he’s American and not Russian. But a lot of Western linguists have lined up since to say that his proposal sounds plausible—a lot more than have ever said anything nice about Nostratic. (Lyle Campbell of course has continued to do his Lyle Campbell thing and be sceptical.)

And if you’re going to link Na-Dené with a group of languages the other side of the Bering Strait, Yeniseian looks somehow… safer than Yeniseian + Sino-Tibetan + Northeastern Caucasian + Burushaski + Basque.

Because she no longer wishes to be on Quora.

Yes, I know this from her. Several Quora users are in touch with her on Facebook.

No, I am not going to elaborate.

InB4 some shmuck reports this question and it gets deleted…