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tis eudaimōn? ho to men sōma hygiēs, tēn de psychēn euporos, tēn de physin eupaideutos.

Word for word:

Who good-daemoned? The: the on-the-one-hand body healthy, the on-the-other-hand soul good-resourced, the on-the-other-hand nature good-educated.

I’ll start by giving the passage on this change from Elementary Middle English grammar : James Wright, as a change specific to French loans.

§231. Initial e– disappeared before s + tenuis as Spaine, spȳen, staat beside estaat, stüdien, scāpen beside escāpen, squirel (O.Fr. escurel). Initial vowels also often disappeared before other consonants, as menden beside amenden, prentȳs beside aprentȳs, pistīl beside epistīl. Initial prefixes often disappeared, as steinen beside desteinen ‘to stain’, sport beside disport, saumple beside ensaumple.

Now, as OP points out, Latin > French and Latin > Italian went the other way.

The insertion of an initial e- before a cluster makes a word easier to pronounce; Latin statūs > Old French estat (Modern état) > English estate (state). Lots of languages do this; Turkish is another good example; French station > Turkish istasyon.

So why would English go the other way?

Notice that this change happened to French loans; it isn’t something that happened generically in the language, to Old English words. And ease of pronunciation is not an absolute in a language; after all, plenty of languages do have words starting with st-. Like Latin.

Or Old English.

If a change systematically happens to French words, it might not be motivated by making them easier to pronounce. It might be motivated by making them look more familiar—which can mean making them better aligned to the native phonotactics of the language.

So: did Old English have lots of words starting with an unaccented esc-, esp-, est-? From what I’m seeing at An Anglo-Saxon dictionary : based on the manuscript collections of the late Joseph Bosworth , no: just a couple of words starting with accented est-. As opposed to lots and lots of words starting with sc-, sp-, st-. And of course native stress was on the first syllable: an unstressed initial esc-, esp-, est– would have sounded doubly alien to Old English.

The rule was not regular and overwhelming: we’ve gone back to escape from scape, and we’ve kept apprentice. But—without knowing this for a fact—I think that’s what’s happened.

Yes. BNBR is not an obvious notion to people who have commented to any significant extent on the Internet, and the requirement for BNBR is something users stumble on, not something they’re particularly alerted to. Quora’s particular notion of BNBR is far less intuitive than many are assuming it is: the tone policing, the expectation of deference towards public figures, the intolerance of several forms of humour.

Answerers are getting sidetracked into mechanisms of how the onboarding should be done, or how difficult it would be to ensure that people pay attention to onboarding. I would still retort that some onboarding is better than no onboarding, and no onboarding has been Quora’s MO for years now.

I’ve been here close to 2 years, and others have been 7. So using a year count would be self defeating.

Such a year count would only be relevant to topics about Quora. I’m quite happy with my somewhat adversarial, somewhat self parodying Quora credential as a Welchite. At any rate, I don’t think there is much to be learned about how Quora works, that you haven’t worked out within the first six months of being an engaged poster. (Well, that plus doing some research on the site.)

Being here for 2 years does mean I’m not an expert in being an “Old Planter” TW. And that’s ok by me.

Pahawh Hmong – Wikipedia

Pahawh is written left to right. Each syllable is written with two letters, an onset (la, an initial consonant or consonant cluster) and a rime (yu, a vowel, diphthong, or vowel plus final consonant). However, the order of these elements is rime-initial, the opposite of their spoken order. (That is, each syllable would seem to be written right to left, if it were transcribed literally into the Roman alphabet.) This is an indication that Shong conceived of the rimes as primary; Pahawh Hmong might therefore be thought of as a vowel-centered abugida. Tones and many onsets are distinguished by diacritics.

As OP clarified elsewhere, the prevalent account for the name Hades is that it originally had a digamma in it, and meant Unseen: Hades – Wikipedia. Ἀϝίδης A-wídēs > Ἀΐδης Ā-ï´dēs > ᾌδης Ā´idēs. The archaic wid– stem for ‘see’ is the same as the stem vid– in Latin, and wit in English. (The terms for know and see were interchangable in Indo-European; in fact the Ancient Greek for ‘know’ is the perfect tense of the verb for ‘see’.)

It is also true that the Digamma ϝ, which represented the letter /w/ in Archaic Greek, eventually came to look like a ϛ in the Middle Ages, when it was only used to represent the number 6.

That’s all there is to OP’s claim. The rest… no:

• The digamma only started looking anything like a sickle in cursive writing in late antiquity—certainly after Christ.
• Even if Bean-Man (Cyamites) was Hades, and not just a local hero, his worship in Athens would have long predated the digamma looking like a sickle; he is mentioned in Pausanias.
• The digamma looked like an F from the time it was taken from Phoenecian, up until the time it was abandoned as a letter in the various dialects. (The numerical form had moved into a different glyph, that looked like a square C; that’s where the sickle shape comes from.) Bean-Man was celebrated in Athens, and Athens lost its /w/ before writing in Attic is attested.

So not only is it implausible that Bean-Man is somehow an allusion to the missing sickle-letter in Hades’ name; the time frames for Bean-Man, the sickle letter, and the pronunciation of /w/ in Hades are off by centuries.

In my experience in Australia, we slotted readily into the stereotype of Arts students in general. (Well, I didn’t: I was a refugee from Engineering.) Leftie do-gooders, dressed down, partial to cheap wine, mostly laid back.

I’d forgotten about this:

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why did the Ancient Greeks refer to Ancient Blacks (the Ethiopians) as ‘blameless’ and ‘favored by the gods’? Also, what does it mean?

(Oh, God, not Afrocentric history, anything but that.)

Afrocentric pages online say Diodorus Siculus said:

“The Aethiopians (Ethiopians) are high favored with the gods, they were the first of all men created by the gods and were the founders of the Egyptian Civilization.”

Diodorus Siculus actually says this:

…

Comment:

I’m trying to understand your answer. A few thoughts:

1. Are you being a bigot? You seem to suggest in your writing the Ancient Greeks were all one type of people instead of mix of people with various identities.

You can read the exchange in situ; we were clearly talking past each other. You can accuse me of hastily accusing the OP of Afrocentrism (though I don’t think that was an unreasonable assumption) or of dismissing Afrocentrism (I was certainly dismissing the stuff I’d found written about the quote on Google). Bigotry seems a little far-fetched to me, especially as my answer was saying Greeks were being benign-racist towards Africans (“noble savage”). But… I think that’s as direct an accusation as I’ve had.

Achilleas Vortselas did speculate about the psychology of Quora critics in a comment (?) to me once, and spoke of “fellow-travellers”. But fellow-travellers is a hallowed company to keep, and I certainly thought the speculation was fair game!

This question previously had question details. You can find them in the question comments.

What kind of people follow him? Those who are drawn in by his sartorial splendour, his wry anecdotes, and his way of looking at the world askance.

What kind of people keep following him? Those who find his brand of elegant nihilism bracing rather than off putting. Those who take it to heart when he excoriates us for staying stuck in The Matrix.

As well as those who never cull their list of followers.

🙂

In the cartoons gathered up in Gallery of Awesomery, I have frequently had recourse to symbols, as shorthands of the Quora users I’m depicting. Many of them are taken from their profile pics, but not all. Here’s the symbols that haven’t.

• Michael Masiello: a beret, as befits an intellectual. A very very floppy beret.
• Lyonel Perabo: skis and a camera. He’s become so Nordic, skis are growing out of his feet.
• Sophia de Tricht: a sailor cap. She was formerly a sailor, and still swears like one.
• Scott Welch: a dart, and optionally a dartboard. The dartboard being Quora.
• Richard White: a stage mike. The guy’s a jazz singer.
• Sierra Spaulding: a bandana, and an inconspicuous doobie. Sierra’s a bit of a self-proclaimed hippie, even if she hasn’t quite used that wording.
• Mohammed Khateeb Kamran: the severed head of Han Solo. Khateeb accidentally a spoiler on the Star Wars movie cycle.
• Jeremy Markeith Thompson: a tux. Man’s a class act, and somehow the Nation Of Islam uniform seemed appropriate, even if he’s nothing to do with NOI.
• Habib Fanny: not socks! A stethoscope. And a laugh: my original nickname for him was not just Habib le toubib, but Habib le toubib qui rit: Habib the Laughing Medico.
• Mary C. Gignilliat: a pitchfork, doubling as a gardening hoe. She has the devil in her eyes, don’t ya know.
• Josephine Stefani: a bottle of Ararat brandy. We have bonded over having Armenian partners.
• Gigi J Wolf: a vintage air hostess hat. A nod to her professional background.
• Sam Murray: a packer and a clipboard. A packer, as Sam is bigender; a clipboard, through the anecdote she shared about arranging dates with a celebrity via an assistant.
• Michaelis Maus: a cigarette holder. A representation of the aesthete, whether sported by Audrey Hepburn or him.
• John Gragson: a British barrister’s wig. Even though he’s neither British nor a barrister.
• Victoria Weaver: an Ushanka. It befits her Stalinist persona, at least.
• Jennifer Edeburn: the scales of justice. Because her responses are so measured.
• Victor Goodwin: the claw of a lion. A very peeved lion. From his bio motto: tanquam ex ungue leonem.
• Peter Hawkins: a dumbbell. When he’s not explaining all there is to know about British politics, he does strength training.
• Vicky Prest: a treadmill. As a stand-in for all that cardiovascular exercise she’s been missing out on.
• Nikki Primrose: a Viking helmet. Because Danish.
• Desmond James: a rat. Which used to feature in his profile picture.