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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.

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’]

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.

Been on Quora for close to two years. Have had two benburrs (h/t Gigi J Wolf), both resulting from quoting someone else (and both of which I reject as intractable tone policing):

• My first BNBR warning by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency (January 2017)
• Shoot the messenger by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency (April 2017)

I’m pretty conflict averse, I’d like to think, which may explain it. I also don’t seem to have been as much of a target as, say, Habib. (Yet…)

Two ways of solving this: via Greek and via Latin.

Greek first. I don’t care if the Aeneid is in Latin.

• Iliad: Nominative Iliás, Genitive Iliádos, so the stem is Iliad-. (The nominative in proto-Greek would be *Iliad-s.) Hence, Iliad-ic.
• Odyssey: Nominative Odússeia, Genitive Odusseías, so the stem is Odussei-. First declension, –ikos didn’t attach to those, Latin does its own thing, mumble mumble stuff I don’t actually know, which leads to Odysse(i)-an.
• In Greek, the Aeneid is Aineiás, by analogy with Iliás. So if Aeneid were an originally Greek word, its adjective would be Aene(i)ad-ic.
• In Latin, for whatever reason, the Aeneid is Nominative Aenei-s, Genitive Aenei-dis (treating the word as Latin) or Aenei-dos (treating the word as Greek. So the stem is Aeneid-, not Aenead– in Latin (therefore Aeneid in English), and if we treat Aeneid as a Latin word, the adjective is Aeneid-ic.

Google: 239 hits for Aeneidic, 146 for Aeneadic, both of which look to be used by reputable sources.

The artificial language Lojban was not expressly designed to be used by machines; it (or rather its antecedent Loglan) was designed as a test of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, its overt basis in predicate logic being sufficiently alien that its inventor thought it would serve the purpose.

Lojban is something of a kitchen sink language in its design, but its design has several aspects which are appealing to at least some AI enthusiasts:

• It has spoken syntactic brackets, and it can be parsed syntactically by an LALR parser (defined in Yacc); so its syntax as formally specified is unambiguous.
• It is also morphologically unambiguous, at the cost of some restrictive phonotactics. (I’m seeing that loanword phonotactics are less restrictive than they were in my day.) So a stream of phonemes can be broken up into morphemes only one way.
• It was a well-elaborated list of 1300-odd basic predicates, with their arguments fully specified. It has prepositions supporting a full case grammar, and (unofficially) conventions for deriving compound predicate arguments from their components. (I was involved in the latter.) This does not quite make its semantics as unambiguous as they’d like, but it certainly puts it on a very formal footing.

Syntactic and morphological ambiguity are not the big challenge of natural language processing; stats tends to take care of that. Semantics is always sloppier, but I’m not sure that the new generation stats-mongerers are that fussed about formal semantics either. But yes, Lojban has been attractive to several AI people for that reason. Ben Goertzel, who is on here, has been vocal about this; see e.g. Aspects of Artificial General Intelligence.