Category: Uncategorized

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.

A2A by Emlyn Shen.

Now, I am cis. Emlyn is trans.

Inspired by this tweet,

pic.twitter.com/A47L9UBDtn

— jordan (@redazarath) May 2, 2017

—I asked a trans friend of mine. I would have asked Emlyn herself, but she A2A’d me, so that hardly seems fair.

Nick:

You’ve reflected on femininity; you’d have a much better informed answer than me. Who do you think the most feminine woman out there is?

Janna:

well in all honesty I don’t think there’s an answer. femininty not being simple, I guess there are many different ways to possess it

so I could name some feminine ppl, but ~most feminine for me doesnt have a meaning

Now, you see the pic of Aristotle on the left? I’m that guy when it comes to music; which is why “What’s your favourite piece of music” is a question I find meaningless.

See that pic of the ginger two–year-old on the right? I’m that guy when it comes to gender. Which is why I asked Janna “Who do you think the most feminine woman out there is?”

Janna, OTOH, is that Aristotle guy when it comes to gender. (Only she’s a chick.) Which is why she handled the question the way I’d handle a similar question about music.

So, as a ginger two–year-old when it comes to gender, I could pick, oh, I dunno, some archetype like Marilyn Monroe or Ophelia or Jessica Rabbit. But given what femininity is actually about—a performed identity, an identity learned and that can be reflected on, I’m picking Janna.

After all, how many cis women do you know that wear stockings?

John L. Miller’s answer:

If I give you a computer because I like giving people computers, that makes me happy. If I give you a computer because you’re paying me $50, I no longer have the joy of giving AND it is worth more to me than $50 (even if no one else will pay anything for it), so I’m losing money and unhappy.

• Per John L. Miller’s answer: If I wanted to get paid a humiliatingly low amount for my intellectual output, I’d be spending even more time on Upwork. In fact, I’d spend time on Fiverr; I’d likely make more money there than the 20c I’d get out of Quora.
• Nah. I’d write another monograph. Even that’d give me more money than Quora is likely to.
• If you thought the fissures in the Quora community are bad now, you should see what’d happen if people started getting paid. The strikes. The complaints about no pay. The conspiracy theories. The accusations of collusion with Quora management. It would destroy what community and good faith there is here. People would go postal.
• And I would join the Bottom Writers, and throw all the sabots I could until I got banned.
• Re Jon Davis’ answer: Quality? Monetisation would drive up quality?! It would drive up the pablum populist crap we already get on the Digest and the Facebook feed. (Why yes, I have had some answers go to the Digest. I didn’t get any answers as good as mine fed to me, while I was subscribed to the Digest.) And Wikipedia did not need monetary incentives to get where it is.
• And quality on YouTube as a paradigm for the quality monetisation would bring to Quora? I’d like to think my content on Quora aspires to be more like a Wikipedia post (or at least a science blog) than like a YouTube how-to video.
• I write here because it’s fun. If money were to come into it, it would no longer be fun. It would be a job, and it would make me much more overtly beholden to the bumbling behemoths of Mountain View. My employer already owns my soul; some of us still want a venue where our souls can be unfettered.

Will they? Doubt it: it’d be a logistical and community nightmare. Answers from three years ago, when monetisation was but a twinkle in D’Angelo’s eye, thought it unlikely in the foreseeable future, and pointed out that noone was asking for it anyway. I’m not convinced that many more people are asking for it now.

Should they? It doesn’t advance Quora’s agenda. It undermines my agenda. I come back to John Miller’s answer: it’d take the fun out, and whatever we got in recompense would be insulting—like a $50 computer.

I come back to the question details:

Quora doesn’t currently have any revenue, but when it does start making money, will/should some of that revenue be shared with the writers who create the content (or even with just a few of the best writers, whose answers bring in lots of views)?

I am already uneasy with the notion of Top Writers, and even more with the air of entitlement of too many Old Planter Top Writers, and the fact that Quora staff give the appearance of only talking to them. If, on top of that, Quora were to arbitrarily pick the most popular hundred writers, pay them, and not pay anyone else… my God. Those writers had better disable their comments if that happened: their life on Quora would not be worth living.

Those of you who don’t think there is community to Quora might like that proposal. I want no part of it on any Quora I’m on. It’d be the ἀρχέκακος ὄφις: the serpent at the root of all evil. 1 Timothy 6:10.

I’ve been A2A’d this question, which strikes me as odd. I am pretty urban, and as a friend once said, I’m ok with fauna as long as it stays the hell the other side of the car window.

So the following recommendation is made more on character and writing, than on my capacity to judge his expertise.

Rory Young

Rory writes less than he used to, and never was voluminous. But Rory is a Mensch fighting the good fight, and is well worth your time.

Longer than 10 years; I’ve certainly seen forms like that, but they were routinely used in the 19th century. From the following, it wasn’t just one authority that made a single decision; it’s been incremental and exception-ridden, although (from footnotes) the big authorities like Fowler and Hart were influential in advocating against 19th century forms like Brahms’ and James’:

Apostrophe – Wikipedia

Many respected authorities recommend that practically all singular nouns, including those ending with a sibilant sound, have possessive forms with an extra s after the apostrophe so that the spelling reflects the underlying pronunciation. Examples include Oxford University Press, the Modern Language Association, the BBC and The Economist. Such authorities demand possessive singulars like these: Senator Jones’s umbrella; Tony Adams’s friend. Rules that modify or extend the standard principle have included the following:

• If the singular possessive is difficult or awkward to pronounce with an added sibilant, do not add an extra s; these exceptions are supported by The Guardian, Yahoo! Style Guide, and The American Heritage Book of English Usage. Such sources permit possessive singulars like these: Socrates’ later suggestion; or Achilles’ heel if that is how the pronunciation is intended.
• Classical, biblical, and similar names ending in a sibilant, especially if they are polysyllabic, do not take an added s in the possessive; among sources giving exceptions of this kind are The Times and The Elements of Style, which make general stipulations, and Vanderbilt University, which mentions only Moses and Jesus. As a particular case, Jesus’ is very commonly written instead of Jesus’s – even by people who would otherwise add ’s in, for example, James’s or Chris’s. Jesus’ is referred to as “an accepted liturgical archaism” in Hart’s Rules.

Although less common, some contemporary writers still follow the older practice of omitting the extra s in all cases ending with a sibilant, but usually not when written -x or -xe. Some contemporary authorities such as the Associated Press Stylebook recommend or allow the practice of omitting the extra “s” in all words ending with an “s”, but not in words ending with other sibilants (“z” and “x”). The 15th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style [2003] recommended the traditional practice, which included providing for several exceptions to accommodate spoken usage such as the omission of the extra s after a polysyllabic word ending in a sibilant, but the 16th edition [2010] no longer recommends omitting the extra “s”.

From Is Jesus’ or Jesus’s the Possessive Jesus?, Jesus’s has been advocated in non-liturgical use at least as far back as the original Hart’s Rules in 1904.

Because to the Greeks, the people who spoke about him the most, and whose historical accounts influenced the West’s understanding of Alexander the most, saying he was Greek wouldn’t mean anything: they were Greek themselves, after all. But saying he was from Macedon meant a lot to Greeks: Macedon had a marginal presence in Classical antiquity, then all of a sudden conquered the world. (That’s not taking a side on how Greek the Ancient Macedonians were, btw.) And Macedon was the state he was the king of, not Greece.

If you want some parallels, try George W Bush: to Americans, and indeed to the Anglosphere, the fact that he was (or rather, proclaimed himself to be) Texan was noteworthy; the fact that he was American was taken as given. And Franz-Joseph was the emperor of Austria–Hungary; we don’t refer to him as Austrian.

I was hoping to find instances of the people he conquered calling him Alexander the Greek, but it doesn’t look like it. Hebrew per Wikipedia (אלכסנדר הגדול – ויקיפדיה) uses Alexander the Great אלכסנדר הגדול or Alexander of Macedon אלכסנדר מוקדון. Ditto Arabic per Wikipedia (الإسكندر الأكبر – ويكيبيديا، الموسوعة الحرة): Alexander the Great (الإسكندر الأكبر، والإسكندر الكبير) or Alexander of Macedon (الإسكندر المقدوني), or Alexander the Two-Horned (الإسكندر ذو القرنين)—though per Alexander the Great in the Quran – Wikipedia, the earliest identification of the Two-Horned One of the Quran with Alexander, in the 9th century, referred to him as Greek:

Dhu al-Qarnain is Alexander the Greek, the king of Persia and Greece, or the king of the east and the west, for because of this he was called Dhul-Qarnayn [meaning, ‘the two-horned one’]

Recall Scott Welch: When do you think Quora is going to end?: Scott Welch’s speculation that Google Traffic is what will keep Quora in money forever—and the existing userbase is an expendable loss-leader.

I was intrigued to read this speculation, from the time Cheever was ousted, that Cheever was pro cultivating the existing userbase, and D’Angelo was pro encouraging Google Traffic. Maybe the poster really was on to something….

One suspects there’s a lot less going on than what everyone would like to think…. (comment on: The Sudden, Mysterious Exit Of A Quora Cofounder Has Silicon Valley Baffled)

One suspects there’s a lot less going on than what everyone would like to think. (Thanks, ChuckMcM, for the nice post about money and stock.)

Mr Cheever is “something of a product design genius, and lots of people give him credit for Facebook’s best features;” even the now-removed-from-Quora post says “to him the user came first and growth features would sacrifice that.” That puts him in complete opposition to the guy (Mr D’Angelo, who to his credit is putting his money where his mouth is) who is paying the bills.

The problem is that almost every Q&A type site has the same issue as Quora: only a small percentage of its membership is actively engaged. The number cited by the article is eight per cent, and in my experience, that’s about par for the course. Since revenues (and therefore stock performance) are directly tied to use, there are two ways to increase revenues, with implications regarding the user experience for both:

1. Increase traffic, AKA “make the pie bigger”. This means doing the kinds of things Mr D’Angelo probably championed — the SEO Solution, playing nice with Google, low barriers to entry (i.e. Free). This is the tactic taken by most startups, since they’re generally looking at Mountain View and saying “Gee, if we could just get our hands wet in THAT revenue stream, we’d be rich.”

2. Keep your existing userbase more engaged, AKA “get your customers to eat more pie”. This means doing the kinds of things Mr Cheever championed — making the experience better, providing more services to them, concentrating on getting lifelong customers rather than more customers for less time. Most startups aren’t in it for the long haul; they’re in it for the big payday.

The NYTimes obit of Arthur Sulzberger pointed out the difference. His family has always wanted to be in the business of disseminating the news; their competitors are in the business of selling advertising. Mr Cheever wanted to take care of users; Mr D’Angelo wants to see a return on his investment. If there was ever a startup in the position to do the former, it’s Quora; I know my colleagues would dearly love to have enough money to where they wouldn’t have to worry for a while how to keep the lights on.

But as William F. Buckley noted a long time ago, “Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive,” and that’s when someone like Mr Cheever moves on to his next venture.

Quora?

The site which has socially hacked its editor so that almost all users are convinced they can’t use emojis at all ([math]unicode{x1F61D}[/math]), and almost all of those users are patting themselves on the back at how wonderful it is that no emoji shall sully their path? ([math]unicode{x1F644}[/math])

That Quora?

Quora does not have emojis that it has advocated for the creation of in Unicode, no. But are there any emojis proper to Quora, and characteristic of it—that we might term, Quora’s own emojis?

Well, to research this question, I perused Quora’s Instagram account: Quora (@quora) • Instagram photos and videos, which seems to be using all the emojis saved up from Quora itself. The most common emoji there was the globe, which accompanies all mentions of internationalisation. ([math]unicode{x1F30E}[/math])

And yes, that’s the version of the globe emoji showing the Americas. Never forget that Quora is in Mountain View, CA; they certainly don’t.

I tried to repeat the experiment on Quora’s Twitter feed, Quora (@Quora) | Twitter; but I was quickly overwhelmed by the Shutterstock photos, and the overrepresentation of answers by Quora employees.

*shudder*

So. If Quora were to claim an emoji as its own, what emoji would it be?

I give you: the Thinking Face emoji!

[math]huge{unicode{x1F914}}[/math]

It is an emoji which can convey multiple perspectives simultaneously.

• The thought-provoking knowledge to be found on Quora!
• The cogitational acrobatics of Quora’s Artificial Intelligence engines!
• The head-scratching UX decisions! (OK, make that chin-scratching.)
• The difficulty of working out whether this question was for real!
• The decision processes of Quora Policy leads on whether to explicitly ban emojis from answers, and how it should be worded! (h/t User)

I’m not going to speak to the details of the question, but to the general question: how to help instill your ethnic identity abroad, in a child whose identity you have some say in. (If you don’t have a direct say in it, Andrew Crawford’s answer applies: be a good role model.)

• Acknowledge that the child will have the identity of the country they are brought up in, and that identity will ultimately prevail. You can cocoon the child a fair bit before they go to school, and to some extent even after. But if you get too defensive about your ethnic identity, that will end up backfiring in the child’s teens, and your cherished ethnic identity will be something they rebel against, reject, flee from, and ultimately resent. You don’t want that.
• Immerse the child in the culture of your ethnic identity at home. That means TV and books and talking the language at home and little songs and games, and trips back to the mother country. Try not to convey resentment or superiority over the host culture: that will backfire too.
• Immerse the child in the culture of your ethnic identity outside of the home. That means hanging out in the local ethnic community, and building a store of fond memories and associations. It means the culture will be real and lived for the child, not a mere abstraction or playacting at home.

The way to instill your ethnic identity is to build fond associations of family and rootedness and affect in the child with that identity. And even so, being Greek in Melbourne in the 1980s was not the same as being Greek in Athens in the 1980s. Being Greek in Melbourne in the 2010s, even less so. It’s a losing battle. But by being positive and warm about it, you can make the loss more gradual, and more reluctant.