Category: Uncategorized

Just happened to me as well today.

It’s happened periodically before.

Assume bug.

For now.

The Wikimedia Language committee clamped down on “dead” languages and artificial languages quite ferociously, after an initial laissez-faire period. Because initially you could set up a Wikipedia in any language you liked, Latin, Old English, Gothic, and Old Church Slavonic got in. Because the Wikimedia Language Committee clamped down, Ancient Greek got rejected even though the proposal for it was far advanced.

Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Ancient Greek

This discussion was created before the implementation of the Language proposal policy, and it is incompatible with the policy. Please open a new proposal in the format this page has been converted to (see the instructions). Do not copy discussion wholesale, although you are free to link to it or summarise it (feel free to copy your own comments over). — {admin} Pathoschild 20:12, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Same goes for Ido and Volapük and Lojban, which got in before (Esperanto would be hard to argue against), and Toki Pona or Klingon, which didn’t make it. Klingon being a pop culture conlang, it attracted disproporionate negative attention, including Wales personally wielding the axe against it:

History of the Klingon Wikipedia

In August 2005, Jimbo Wales made a decision to lock the Klingon Wiki permanently. While Jimbo has never publicly stated his exact rationale for closing the wiki, the maturation of Wikipedia and its sister projects as a whole into a vital worldwide resource meant that there was little incentive to keep a niche language that was not intended to be seriously used. Other constructed languages such as the Toki Pona language were closed at about the same time (although the Toki Pona Wikipedia, like the Klingon Wikipedia, was ultimately hosted at Wikia due to the presence of a strong community).

In fact, the Klingon letter r was removed from the Wikipedia logo in 2010, replaced by a Ge’ez character.

Old logo; Klingon <r> top right.

New logo

Mills Baker’s answer to Why should designers work at Quora?

Product Design Manager at Quora (2016-present)

If you’re working on an unsolved problem that depends heavily on design, you’ll structure your organization and roles to empower design. This is as true at Quora today as it’s been historically at Apple, with some key distinctions relating to the types of products we make. For us, empowerment means a few things specifically:

• Design reports to the CEO, not to a non-design product executive
• Design is deeply involved in both company and product / team strategy
• Design at Quora is optimized for speed and autonomy, so we can learn extremely rapidly and can’t be blocked by the necessity for endless consensus building; thus designers at Quora code
• Functional groups at Quora take one another seriously: designers aren’t handed “product ideas” and told to draw UIs for them
• We work to make design ever-faster and easier, building new abstractions that simplify work in the product (on both native and mobile)

Designers at Quora can conceive of ideas, build them in the product, test them in our Analysis Framework on millions of users live, and can ship to production at their speed.

Designers Will Code by David Cole on Emesis

Director of Design at Quora

The fact that these components all stay current with live data automates a lot the engineering work. If a designer is making a form that submits an answer to a question, the existing list of answers will show the submission as soon as it’s posted, without anyone writing new code telling it to update. This means that changes on the interaction or visual level usually require no engineering support whatsoever. And because we run constant deployment, and designers can push to production, a Quora designer can make changes and see them live on the site in minutes.

I am happy for one reason only:

I called it. Two months ago:

Nick Nicholas’ answer to What’s the next useful and perfectly good feature that Quora is going to do away with?

Wild speculation:

*touch wood* Blogs.

[…]

The current trend though, is away from social media functionality, and has been deemphasising your followers. So:

Less Wild speculation:

In the display of your followers, or the mouseover display of a user: the followers you have in common.

It’s the last piece of the puzzle: MVW badges and TW quills have already been taken away from the former.

EDIT: Yes, Quora has put the mutual followers field back.

For now.

See links in Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why does Quora permit foul language?

It used to, five years ago: What is the guideline on the use of profanity on Quora?

See Marc Bodnick’s answer to What is the guideline on the use of profanity on Quora? [Originally Answered: Is profanity a violation of the Be Nice rule?] (2011, incorporated into Answer Wiki)

Users should avoid unnecessary profanity.

Tracey Bryan’s answer to Why aren’t rules guiding the use of profanity enforced more on Quora? (2012)

Quora has a policy against profanity: What is the guideline on the use of profanity on Quora?

The reviewers and admins will thus edit questions, or collapse answers, which are in contravention to this policy, but they can’t be everywhere.

Quora appears not to any more. As witnessed by all the Top Writers since 2013 answering questions like this with variations of “FUCK no, ahahahahahaha!!!!11!!!11”. Starting with:

Dan Holliday’s answer to What is the guideline on the use of profanity on Quora? [Originally Answered: Is it appropriate to use curse words in your answers in Quora?] (2013)

If not, then I’m in big fucking trouble.

---

Here’s an answer from seven years ago, on why using the Q&A format to publish Quora policy guarantees this kind of confusion when policy changes—or indeed policy at all:

Xianhang Zhang’s answer to What are some of the basic “Community Management 101” mistakes that Quora has made? (2010)

Dogfooding is all well and good but Quora deciding to put its charter documents in the same Q&A system as everything else means that they’re fragmented and may as well not exist for new users.

Do read the rest of that answer and weep, btw.

So you seek to translate:

Ich möchte aus meinem Herzen hinaus
Unter den großen Himmel treten.

“I would like to step out of my heart,
And go walking beneath the enormous sky.”

I’ll start by putting in the missing accent marks 🙂

ἐκ τῆς καρδίας βούλομαι ἐκβαίνειν
ὑπὸ τῷ μεγάλῳ οὐρανῷ βαδίζειν

I am so, so not going to have anything to say about metre: never got the hang of it.

The Greek matches the English, but not the German. Notice that the Greek repeats ek– : “step out, out of my heart”; the German repeats the aus: “out of my heart, away”, but the verb isn’t there at all: it’s literally “I would out of my heart, away, beneath the great heaven to tread”. So I’d get rid of ἐκβαίνειν: the Greek should be as taut as the German.

The other problem is that ἐκ τῆς καρδίας sounds like “from my heart” (which in German would be von Herzen); in fact Aristophanes uses it in that meaning in Clouds 86 ἀλλ’ εἴπερ ἐκ τῆς καρδίας μ’ ὄντως φιλεῖς “but if you truly love me from your heart”.

Homeric/Poetic Greek is not something I’m in any way comfortable, but maybe ἑκάς ‘far away from’?

And for the ‘great heaven’, I’m thinking ‘broad’—cf. the Orthodox icon caption of the Virgin Mary as πλατυτέρα τῶν οὐρανῶν.

τῆς καρδίας ἑκάς βούλομαι
ὑπὸ τῷ πλατεῖ οὐρανῷ ἐκβαδίζειν

“away from the heart I wish
under the broad heaven to step out”

Someone else do the metre.

Ptolemy, at least, expressed them somewhat clumsily, by adding reciprocals. There were dedicated symbols for half: [math]unicode{x10175}, unicode{x10176}[/math], two thirds: [math]unicode{x10177}[/math], and three quarters: [math]unicode{x10178}.[/math] Outside of those, fractions were expressed by using double prime for reciprocals, ″.

So Ptolemy used ιβ″ = 1/12 a lot for geographical coordinates; and he would also use expressions like γ″ιβ″ = 1/3 + 1/12 = 5/12 or [math]unicode{x10175}[/math]ιβ″ = 1/2+1/12 = 7/12.

---

EDIT: For those without font support for Ancient Greek Numerals:

A Q&A site like Quora, with more “facts”, and even fewer “non-facts” (e.g. less sociability)?

Stack Exchange. Quite Savage in its culture of Just The Facts, but overall very reputable, aggressively moderated by its users, and its programming forum Stack Overflow is the canonical place for programmers to go for advice.

“So if you hate Quora so much, why don’t you go there?”

Because it’s Quite Savage in its culture of Just The Facts. I stay here because, the best efforts of Quora’s UX team notwithstanding, it is still possible to socialise here.

Anvil Chorus (Verdi: Il Trovatore, chorus from act 2, scene 1). 1:02 in the attached video.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=WEMMVHAINFM

May John Clarke (satirist) rest in peace.

Complimentary, but not deep.

The interwebs widely quote Chomsky saying in Kolkata, in a 10-minute speech in 2001, “The first generative grammar in the modern sense was Panini’s grammar”: An event in Kolkata. Chomsky in fact already said that in the preface of Aspects in 1965: “a generative grammar, in essentially the contemporary sense of this term” . And the final line of The Sound Pattern of English is an allusion to the final sutra of Panini, “ā → ā”.

But as Kiparsky and Staal noted in 1969, Panini’s model of generativity has very different constructs between the two levels: they are derivations, not rewritings. An anecdote on Chomsky’s linguistic theory suggests that Chomsky ended up going back to an approach more like Panini’s with Minimalism in 1991—and might have saved himself 26 years if he’d read Panini more closely when he was citing him in Aspects.

But of course, Chomsky wasn’t learning from Panini, or honing his craft against the Indian master. Chomsky came up with transformations on his own, and merely found it convenient occasionally to allude to Panini as an antecedent. Panini and Chomsky were not undertaking the same research programme, after all.