Category: Uncategorized

The Quora Memorial

“Remembering” is prefixed to the profiles of prominent Quora users who have passed on, e.g. John Burgess.

I answered a related question, and so did Dimitra Triantafyllidou: Do Greek villages near Albania use Albanian words, just like those in Albania use Greek loanwords? The Greek blog article Πενήντα ελληνικές λέξεις αλβανικής προέλευσης lists 50 common Albanian words in Greek; Dimitra being in Northern Greece, she knew most of them, whereas I being from Crete knew half of them:

• alita-buras ‘thug’ < αλήτης ‘vagabond’ + burrë ‘man’
• vlamis ‘blood brother’ < vëllam
• gionis ‘Scops owl’ < gjon
• kalamboki ‘corn’ < kalambok
• kokoretsi ‘grilled entrails’ < kokoreç
• kopela, kopeli ‘girl, kid’ < kopil ‘servant’
• luluði ‘flower’ < lulë
• mangas ‘tough guy’ < mangë < Turkish manga ‘small troop’
• marmanga ‘bogeyman’ < merimangë ‘spider’
• babesis ‘dishonourable’ < pabëse
• besa ‘honour’ < besë
• buluki ‘troop’ < buluk < Turkish bölük ‘troop of irregulars’
• busulao ‘to crawl’ < bishulla ‘on all fours’ or Aromanian buşuledzŭ ‘crawl’
• pipiza ‘recorder’ < pipëza
• pliatsiko ‘loot’ < plaçkë ‘thing (of war)’
• sverkos ‘back of neck’ < zverk
• triliza ‘tic tac toe’ < Albanian (dialectal trilizë ?) < Italian triglia
• tsiftis ‘debonair’ < qift ‘hawk’
• tsupra ‘girl’ < çuprë
• fara ‘clan’ < farë
• floɣera ‘flute’ < flojerë

A category of words that has attracted particular attention in Balkan linguistics are the so-called lexical Balkanisms: words whose etymology is uncertain, and which turn up in multiple Balkan languages. They have attracted attention, because of the suspicion that they may represent a substrate language.

The main (if not the only) class of such words are words common to Romanian and Albanian; there has been controversy around them, but they do exist. From http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/availabl… p. 49:

Regardless of the position to which one subscribes, some of the shared words are: Romanian abure, Albanian avull ‘steam’; mînz, mës ‘colt’; scrum, shkrump ‘ash’; vatră, vatrë ‘hearth’; pîrâu, përrua ‘brook’; copil, kopil ‘child (Rom.), bastard (Alb.)’; ghiuj, gjysh ‘old timer (Rom.), grandfather (Alb.)’, etc.

Notice kopil, which also shows up in Greek: kopil is in fact the posterboy of Balkanisms, showing up in Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, and Ukrainian (copil – Wiktionary). Unless Wiktionary is right about it being a Slavonic word for ‘digger’.

Nick Nicholas’ answer to How much writing from ancient Greece is preserved? Is it a finite amount that someone could potentially read?, 20 Aug 2015.

A topic I am a world expert on, since I was still working then at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (which had digitised all that writing), and I’d written a post about it on my inactive Greek linguistics blog, six years previously.

I’ve got enough arrogance in me that all my posts since have been as confident as that one—though it took me a month to answer another question, and I didn’t become prolific until 2016.

My first answer outside of my core competencies (Byzantium, music, language, Greece, Australia) was Nick Nicholas’ answer to What culture first created books as they exist today, with spines and bound into covers?, 24 Nov 2015.

I’ll answer this question for English, rather than cross-linguistically; I’ve A2A’d users who are more across the right typological databases.

Markedness (the linguistic notion of what is the default value between two alternatives) is a confluence of several factors, and in all of them, voiceless wins.

Refer Is there a rule for pronouncing “th” at the beginning of a word? and Pronunciation of English ⟨th⟩ – Wikipedia.

• In frequency within the lexicon (frequency of types), θ is by far more frequent. ð is very frequent in tokens, because of its prevalence at the start of very common function words; but if you pick a random word of English with a <th>, it will almost always be voiceless.
• If you look at the synchronic rules for how <th> is pronounced, in both the Stack Exchange and Wikipedia links, the “else” rule is the voiceless. That makes the voiceless the default value in speakers’ internalised rule system.
• For what it’s worth, θ diachronically was also the unmarked value: ð was restricted to occurring between vowels.
• This means that in peoples’ intuitions of English, θ is the unmarked reading of <th>. If they are confronted with a new random word with <th> in it, θ is how they will pronounce it by default.
• In collaboration of that, look at how Modern Greek δ is transliterated into English. You will occasionally see the spelling dolmathes for ντολμάδες, but you almost always see the spelling dolmades instead. And there is a straightforward reason for that: because ð is so marked in English, no one would assume it is the pronunciation of a novel loanword with a <th> in it.

In Melbourne:

“Pure” Armenian? There was an Armenian Cafe restaurant before I got together with my wife, but that’s long closed.

There’s Sezar | Modern Armenian Restaurant, which is Nouveau Armenian (Nouveau, as most upmarket ethnic restaurants in Melbourne are). We’ve been once, and it wasn’t strikingly “pure”. Pleasant, though rather heavy.

It’s next door to Armenia, and the cuisine is quite different, but I have much affection for the Georgian cuisine of the Umbrella Lounge Bar.

A non-trivial one. The meaning needs to be captured, and the meaning is that “it is no more than what it already is; we are stuck with it.” Which means I’d rather render the second is as ‘become’, ‘end up’.

Est sicut factum est “it is as it has become” is a start.

Ut fit sic sit “as it becomes, so let it be” is catchier, though perhaps it goes in a different direction (“if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”).

Est id, quidquid fit “Whatever it is becoming, it’s that” is maybe a bit closer.

There’s no shortage of Chinese speakers here, and they’ll give better informed answers than me. But:

Mandarin Chinese is not Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese was a bit of a scholarly game, and writers relished the ambiguity of the homophones and the overall oracularity of it all. People in real life don’t, and Mandarin has dealt with homophony the way many languages do, by adding disambiguating words. Though people still have fun with Homophonic puns in Mandarin Chinese.

So the word for bat, fú 蝠, is homophonous with the word for good fortune, fú 福, and as a result bats commonly feature in Chinese art. But people who actually speak the language don’t call bats fú. They call them 蝙蝠 biānfú, combining two words for bat.

For another instance of ambiguity, look at Megan Cox’s answer to What are some homophones in Mandarin Chinese?. As Megan points out, there is homophony between bīng 冰 ‘ice’ and bìng 病 ‘illness, esp. mental illness’.

That’s not as homophonous as it gets; bīng 兵 (soldier) is a true homophone, and Wikipedia’s article on homophonic puns reports that in 1882, when there was fear of rebellions around Beijing, the sale of ice was banned as a result.

But even with that near homophony of bīng and bìng, Megan as a learner of Chinese may have been confused, yelling 你有病吗？ “Have you got a mental illness?” at the convenience store when she thought she was asking for ice. But the shop owner worked out what was going on, and he wouldn’t have been confused if she was fluent in Chinese. Ice as a noun is not bīng 冰 , but bīngkuài 冰块 ‘ice piece, ice cube’. So it would never be ambiguous with the noun bìng 病 ‘illness’.

Spam detectives

Steven de Guzman, who was the main poster to the blog and spam detective, got banned three times. The third ban has stuck.

Quora does not like this blog, and in fact thinks that it is getting in the way of them doing their own job. See the arguments between Timothy Wingerter (Quora employee at the time) and Guzman in comments; e.g. https://spamdetectives.quora.com…, https://spamdetectives.quora.com…, and especially https://spamdetectives.quora.com….

(Do read that last comment, even if it is quite long. It’s very rare that we hear anything from Quora employees about what they’re doing, and Wingerter does make a cogent argument for why they don’t want their spam process usurped by users.)

Not to mention Is Spam Detectives at risk of being deleted? by Steven de Guzman on Spam detectives, and Incorrectly banned on @Quora for allegedly having sock puppet accounts (Part 2) —Steve’s second ban was rescinded on the condition that he did not continue to report spam, which he did not adhere to. (His return prompted Wingerter’s comment that he’d rather the blog did not exist.)

Read the blog and comments, talk to other posters there, and make your own assessment; but anecdotally, if you link to or repost too much spam, the bots and/or mods will mistake you for a spammer, or find that your efforts are getting in the way of their efforts, and take action against you.

For what is a schwa, I refer you to What is the schwa in linguistics?, and Schwa – Wikipedia. It is the “neutral”, mid central vowel.

You’ll find the schwa in lots and lots of languages, including English (uh…. ; about; and in fact most unstressed vowels of English). You won’t find it in Ancient Greek.

Schwa used to be reconstructed in Proto-Indo-European though, as the phoneme behind the correspondence of i in Indic to a in Greek. For example, pitár ~ patēr was reconstructed as *pəter-. The distribution of the “schwa indogermanicum” was somewhat problematic, and it is now more economically reconstructed as a syllabic laryngeal (*p-h̥₂ter-); it’s plausible that in late Indo-European, the earlier syllabic laryngeal would have been pronounced as a schwa.

Ooh. That’s a tough one, and I’m going to want backup on this.

• The nationalist writers of the 1890s: Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson. Culturally defining figures.
• At the same time, the Heidelberg School of painters (back when Heidelberg was on the outskirts of Melbourne, instead of suburbia); just as strongly defining of Australia’s self-perception, and the mythologising of the bush.
• I’m not a visual arts guy, but Sidney Nolan in the 1940s was another mythic figure.
• The Whitlam prime ministership. Seismic shift in Australian self-perception, and seismic shift in funding of the arts.
• Australian film in the 1970s and 1980s, from Picnic in Hanging Rock through to Mad Max.