Category: Uncategorized

At a first stab (so to speak):

Plutarch • Life of Caesar

After this speech to Metellus, Caesar walked towards the door of the treasury, and when the keys were not to be found, he sent for smiths and ordered them to break in the door. Metellus once more opposed him, and was commended by some for so doing; but Caesar, raising his voice, threatened to kill him if he did not cease his troublesome interference. “And thou surely knowest, young man,” said he, “that it is more unpleasant for me to say this than to do it.”

ταῦτα πρὸς τὸν Μέτελλον εἰπών, ἐβάδιζε πρὸς τὰς θύρας τοῦ ταμιείου. μὴ φαινομένων δὲ τῶν κλειδῶν, χαλκεῖς μεταπεμψάμενος ἐκκόπτειν ἐκέλευεν. αὖθις δ’ ἐνισταμένου τοῦ Μετέλλου καί τινων ἐπαινούντων, διατεινάμενος ἠπείλησεν ἀποκτενεῖν αὐτόν, εἰ μὴ παύσαιτο παρενοχλῶν· „καὶ τοῦτ’“ ἔφη „μειράκιον οὐκ ἀγνοεῖς ὅτι μοι δυσκολώτερον ἦν εἰπεῖν ἢ πρᾶξαι“.

The Greek literally says: “and little boy, you are not unaware that it would be harder for me to say it than to do it.”

The quote is attributed to an “official at the Roman Treasury” (I could kill you faster than I could threaten to kill you.) Plutarch says: “When the tribune Metellus tried to prevent Caesar’s taking money from the reserve funds of the state, and cited certain laws, Caesar said that arms and laws had not the same season.” I guess that makes Metellus an official at the Roman Treasury.

Can I say? Apparently Carlin is a podcaster who tries to make historical figures sound sexy and badass, but I don’t think he’s improved on the original.

Humphry Smith’s answer is right, but let me spell it out a bit more.

We come up with stem suffixes in proto-Greek, to explain the diversity of case endings of classes of nouns—a diversity between dialects of Greek, as well as trying to make intuitive sense of where they came from. The nouns in your details, neuter teîch-os, masculine triē´r-ēs, proper name Themistokl-ēˆs, are all explained by proto-Greek stems ending in –es-.

Why do we do that? Because if you look at the cases other than the nominative, they’re pretty similar. We account for that by saying they’re actually underlyingly the same.

A few things to keep in mind whenever we’re reconstructing proto-Greek:

• First: Attic contracts vowels (mooshes them together); Epic Greek tends not to contract them, and proto-Greek is more obvious if we move back from Homer rather than Attic. So (interleaving the masculine noun triērēs where it’s different):

Attic:

teîch-os
triē´r-ēs
teích-ous
teích-ei
teích-ē
triē´r-eis
teich-ōˆn
teích-esi

Epic:

teîch-os
triē´r-ēs
teích-e-os
teích-e-ï
teích-e-a
triē´r-e-es
teich-é-ōn
teích-e-ssi

See that -e- in the Epic? You can’t see it as clearly in the Attic. That’s part of the reason why it’s an -es- noun.

Oh, and Themistocles? The uncontracted form is Themistoklé-ēs. The only difference between Themistoklé-ēs and triē´r-ēs is that Attic contracts the last two vowels.

• Second: Proto-Greek -s- between vowels is deleted. (In Latin, its equivalent turns into -r-.)

So our Epic paradigm now becomes:

teîch-os, triē´r-ēs
teích-es-os
teích-es-ï
teích-es-a
triē´r-es-es
teich-és-ōn
teích-es-ssi

And that’s where the -es- stem comes from.

The catch is that horrid nominative singular, teîch-os, triē´r-ēs.

• Third: When you’re reconstructing nominals, always leave the nominative singular till last. They tend to be… different.

The masculine nom. sg can be understood by compensatory lengthening. As you’ll know from other third declension nouns, the nom. sg. masc ending here should be -s. The stem is -es. So Proto-Greek nom. sg ‘trireme’ would have been triē´r-es-s. When the first s drops out, the vowel before it lengthens to compensate: triē´r-es-s > triē´r-ē-s.

That leaves the neuter singular -os. In fact, cracking open my copy of Sihler: New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin §296, the nominative singular is as old as Proto-Indo-European: it’s –os all the way back.

Now, whenever you see o in Proto-Indo-European, you immediately think of the ablaut alternation of ø/e/o. Sihler notes (§297) that “Scholars have long maintained that the nom./acc. form -os, albeit of securely PIE date, is secondary; presumably the zero grade nom./acc. of the the type krewH̥2-s [Greek krea-s] is a relic of a more original state of affairs.” What he’s saying is that the -o-s looks suspicious, and it may be a ø/e/o alternation; the word for ‘meat’, which has nothing rather than e or o in front of the -s, was the original way of doing those neuters.

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.