Category: Uncategorized

Guidelines for this blog by Nick Nicholas on Necrologue

I solicit personal messages from users, to let me know who’s been banned or blocked: How does Nick Nicholas keep track of all those Quora users who are banned, edit blocked, deactivated, etc?

• This blog will publish notifications as they come to the editor’s attention.
• This information must be independently verifiable (big red banner on their profile; posting by the user indicating that they are leaving Quora; notice of edit blocking in user log).
• Posts on this blog will only name the users in question. Speculation about why people have been banned or blocked will not be entertained. If I find what could be construed as speculation or BNBR violations, I will invite commenters to delete their comments.
• No value judgement about why people have been banned will be entertained. Some people may well have deserved it. Maybe even most. Some may not. But the purpose of this blog is to raise visibility of moderator actions; not to protest it.
• BNBR applies in comments.

See also Category definitions by Nick Nicholas on Necrologue for the kinds of user status tracked. As of April,

• Deactivation notices will not be published by default to Necrologue. The community is invited to submit such notices to Argologue instead.

Guidelines for this blog by Nick Nicholas on Necrologue

• The user named must have reached a reasonable level of notability: at least 100 followers. No exceptions, though I have been tempted.

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.

The canonical counterpoint duets are surely Bach’s Two Part Inventions:

It doesn’t get better. God bless Gerubach on YouTube.

“So that others may live.”

Which is why medical professionals do what they do.

• User
• Kate Liotta

Γένεσις /ɡénesis/ “Genesis, origin” consists of the verb root gen- “to originate”, and the ending -esis.

The -εσις ending of Greek genesis has two components. The –sis component is a nominalisation, indicating the result of a verb. Cf. ly-sis ‘solution’ < lyō ‘solve’; gennē-sis ‘birth’ < gennaō ‘give birth’; pep-sis ‘digestion’ < peptō ‘digest’; theōsis ‘becoming God’ < theoō ‘make a God’.

The vowel before the –sis, if any, depends on the conjugation of the verb.

• A normal thematic verb (with a thematic vowel connecting inflections to the verb stem) does not use a vowel: ly-sis; pep-sis < *pept-sis.
• A contracted thematic verb (verb stem already ends in a vowel) often lengthens the vowel: the-ō-sis < the-o-ō; genn-ē-sis, Doric genn-ā-sis < genn-a-ō.
• A contracted thematic verb in –eō may or may not lengthen the e; this usually correlates with whether the e is lengthened in the aorist passive. blasteō ‘to sprout’, aor.pass. eblastē-thēn, blastē-sis ‘sprouting’; haireō ‘to choose’, aor.pass. haire-thēn, haire-sis ‘choice’.
• An athematic verb (with no thematic vowel: an archaic class of verbs) has a short vowel before the ending. hi-stē-mi ‘stand’, Doric hi-stā-mi > sta-sis. di-dō-mi ‘give’ > do-sis. ti-thē-mi ‘put’ > thesis.

And here I get stuck, I’m afraid. I can’t work out why the vowel in genesis is an epsilon instead of a zero, *gen-sis > *gessis, or an a which corresponded to the Indo-European schwa, cf. teinō ‘stretch’ > tn-sis > ta-sis ‘tension’. I think somehow this is a pattern with second aorists, e-gen-omēn ‘I became’ > gene-sis ~ e-sch-omēn ‘I was had’ > sche-sis ‘relation’.

But in any case: the vowel is not part of the suffix, but a connector.

EDIT: the actual answer is Neeraj Mathur’s answer to The Greek word genesis (γένεσις) has the root gen, but where does the suffix -esis come from? I’m leaving this up because it takes you halfway there, and Neeraj resolves the -e- issue where I got stuck; and this is good information to know for less archaic verbs anyway.

I’ve just written an answer about Pāṇini. I know what a macron is, and I know what a retroflex nasal is. I also know that the Sanskrit grammarian is not to be confused with an Italian sandwich.

Nevertheless, in my answer I referred to him as Panini. And I do not feel guilty for doing so.

Diacritics for other languages are appropriate in scholarly writing, and when you are writing for a bilingual audience, which will wince to see them missing. In a more casual context, on the other hand, it does come across in English as pretentious.

There is also a long standing convention that we are not as fastidious about diacritics on proper names. Proper names are embedded in otherwise purely English text. There is a strong driver to nativise them orthographically, since they are effectively used as part of English. The same goes for loan words. I pronounce jalapeno with a velar fricative and palatal nasal, because I’m pretentious like that, but I would still hesitate to use a tilde.

Language is full of contradictory pressures, and this is yet another instance: assimilation versus fidelity, nativisation vs exoticisation. The pendulum swings, as a matter of fashion, but the drivers behind each are legitimate. Dropping the tilde in a loanword is not disrespect to Spanish: it demonstrates how thorough the influence of Spanish has been in English, to have produced a nativised loanword.