What is the term for a word that has been lent, and then taken back?

Rückwanderer:

Less commonly, a native word may be borrowed into a foreign language, then reborrowed back into the original language, existing alongside the original term. An English example is animation and anime “Japanese animation”, which was reborrowed from Japanese アニメ anime. Such a word is sometimes called a Rückwanderer (German for “one who wanders back”). (Doublet (linguistics) – Wikipedia)

What made Greeks invent Asia and Europe concept?

Nick Nicholas’ answer to What was the reason people created the Europe Idea while it is not separate from Asia?

What people created the notion of Europe? Ancient Greeks.

Where did the Ancient Greeks live? On the border between Asia and Europe.

The Ancient Greeks had not circumnavigated the Arctic (and they didn’t believe a word Pytheas said). The Ancient Greeks did not know anything about the Urals. The Ancient Greeks did not even know what a continent was.

All they knew was, there was stuff to the East of them, stuff to the South of them, and stuff to the Northwest of them. They called each a different name. And to them, the Aegean Sea (and I guess the Black Sea) were as big a divider of landmass as the Mediterranean is. Remember: they did not know about the Urals. And they wouldn’t really have cared.

What’s the difference between Res extensa and Res corporea?

Not a philosopher by any stretch, but if I can decipher my Googlings of Heidegger’s interpretations of Descartes correctly:

The res corporea “the bodily substance” is defined in opposition to the res cogitans “the thinking substance”. Applied to people, it is the human body as opposed to the mind. The defining attribute of the res corporea is its extensio: the fact that it has physical dimensions, and thus, physical existence—something it shares with all physically existing things, but not with the mind, the soul, or God.

So the res corporea “human bodies” are a subset of all res extensa “things that have physical dimensions”. Descartes uses res corporea and res extensa interchangeably, since he is defining mind vs body. Heidegger uses res extensa separately from res corporea, as he’s defining not just mind vs body, but the physical world (which consists of more than just human bodies).

Could Malayalam be made into Latin script?

Malayalam has been written in Arabic script (Arabi Malayalam) and Syriac script (Suriyani Malayalam), with significant extensions to both to deal with the large number of phonemes. The large number of phonemes means any Romanisation is going to involve either diacritics or digraphs; but there’s no intrinsic reason why Malayalam, or any other language, cannot be romanised; and Romanization of Malayalam – Wikipedia lists two ASCII and two scholarly romanisations.

Do you think it is reasonable and useful to social justice for a white cis man to refrain from expressing his perspectives too often or too forcibly?

This is contentious, and ideological.

I’ll just give my answer, as a middle-aged white cis het male.

I have judgement. I have opinions. I am not disenfranchised from having opinions or judgement, simply by accident of what privilege I have inherited. I am entitled to discuss those opinions, and so long as I do so openly and receptively and respectfully, that is a good thing.

That said: I am privileged, which means that I have a hegemonic* perspective. The kinds of perspectives that I naturally align to get heard a lot, and are familiar to me and to my interlocutors. The kinds of perspectives that my less privileged interlocutors may have are not necessarily as familiar to me.

Which means that while my judgement and opinion is as valid as any other’s, I readily concede that I have more to learn from the less-privileged than they from me, about the realities they confront. And being open to learning means that, a lot of the time, I withhold judgement, and I don’t interrupt, and I just listen. And because my privilege is the kind of privilege that drowns out others’ voices, I don’t pipe up with my opinion and judgement until it’s appropriate to: it’s not all about me.

Is the reflex cry of mansplaining and whitesplaining good citizenship and good alliance-building? No, because reflex cries are not discourse, they are turf-guarding. But if the less-privileged have carved out a space to speak to their lack of privilege, then the more-privileged are in that space as guests; and it is courteous to act like it. Offer your opinion, but offer it courteously, and with a bit of deference.

If they keep shouting you down, and you are honestly speaking in good faith with them—why then, there’s no discussion to be had; shake the dust off your shoes, and move on. But do make sure you’ve been listening, and trying to learn.


*If Sam Morningstar’s Tourette’s syndrome involves saying “neo-Marxism”, mine is saying “hegemony”.

How many types of dictionaries are there?

Dictionary Typology

This presentation offers the following typology of dictionaries:

  • Bilingual/Multilingual (translating one language into another)
  • Monolingual
    • Synchronic (contemporary usage)
      • Limited (a particular field, e.g. medical; a particular register, e.g. slang)
      • General: Comprehensive (all of the language, multi-volume) or Standard (single volume, mostly for paedagogical use)
    • Diachronic
      • Historical (the historical paths that words have taken in their usage and forms)
      • Etymological (the origins of words)

Dictionaries often combine several categories. The Oxford English Dictionary is all of Historical, Etymological, and Comprehensive. There are dictionaries that are purely etymological, though historical dictionaries almost always are also etymological. You can also have bilingual dictionaries that are not just translations, but etymological or historical (the big dictionaries of Classical languages fall in that category), or synchronic and limited (e.g. Greek–English medical dictionary).

Is Greece a multicultural multiethnic country?

To expand on Fey Lepoura’s answer to Is Greece a multicultural multiethnic country?

Historically, Greece contained a large number of ethnicities, and a large number of distinct cultures to go with those ethnicities:

  • Greek
    • Orthodox
    • Catholic
    • Muslim
  • Turkish
  • Arvanite
  • Albanian (in the Northwest, mostly Muslim, but also Christian)
  • Aromanian
  • Megleno-Romanian
  • Macedonian (Slavonic)
  • Bulgarian
    • Christian
    • Muslim (Pomak)
  • Roma
  • Armenian
  • Jewish
    • Romaniote
    • Sephardic
    • Italkian

Of those ethnicities and cultures, the Muslims left most of Greece in 1923, the Jews were mostly extirpated through the Holocaust, and the Christians were mostly assimilated to the Greek culture.

I think you can still legitimately claim that Greece is multiethnic, and that Arvanites, Aromanians, Slavophones, Pomaks, Turks, Roma, and Sephardic Jews are distinct ethnicities that are still identifiable in Greece. (That’s not to mention the substantial number of immigrants to Greece since the 1990s.)

But multicultural has come to mean something more. Multicultural has come to mean that, even if there is a dominant culture in the country, the state will not pressure its population to assimilate to that culture, and will accept the coexistence of different cultures in the country as an asset.

For better or worse, the Greek state has never been multicultural in that way.

Were Trojans Greek?

Troy – Wikipedia

After the 1995 find of a Luwian biconvex seal at Troy VII, there has been a heated discussion over the language that was spoken in Homeric Troy. Frank Starke of the University of Tübingen recently demonstrated that the name of Priam, king of Troy at the time of the Trojan War, is connected to the Luwian compound Priimuua, which means “exceptionally courageous”. “The certainty is growing that Wilusa/Troy belonged to the greater Luwian-speaking community,” although it is not entirely clear whether Luwian was primarily the official language or in daily colloquial use. (Latacz, Joachim (2004). Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 116)

See also Trojan language – Wikipedia

Greek legend gives further indications on the subject of language at Troy. For one thing, the allies of Troy, listed at length in the Trojan Battle Order which closes book 2 of the Iliad, are depicted as speaking various languages and thus needing to have orders translated to them by their commanders (2.802-6). Elsewhere in the poem (4.433–38) they are compared to sheep and lambs bleating in a field as they talk together in their different languages. The inference is that, from the Greek point of view, the languages of Trojans and their allied neighbors were not as unified as those of the Achaeans.

What are Quora’s rules about naming specific Quora users in a Quora blog?

As is so often the case, Quora’s policy is vague enough to need interpretation, and this is a question that I welcome Christopher VanLang’s feedback to.

The chapter and verse is:

Quora’s answer to Does Quora enforce its moderation policies on blog content and comments?

Blogs on Quora are generally unmoderated. Most policies that apply to question-and-answer pages do not apply to blogs.

The catch is,

1. Blogs whose primary purpose is to attack, insult, and/or derogatorily label people are not allowed.

That appears to me to be a higher bar than BNBR: there is, I would think, some breathing room between “nice” and “attack”, and there is some room between “blog whose primary purpose is to attack” and “occasional post which attacks”. But I don’t know what the test cases have been.

2. Blogs which aren’t aimed at attacking people but still have a purpose of attacking content will no longer generate notifications or repost trackbacks.

Which means that attacking bad content is allowed, it’s just not particularly facilitated.