Category: Uncategorized

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.

For the past blessed week, I have not seen featured comments.

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”.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Did Quora just get rid of featured comments? has been up for a week, and the three users who have answered it to date haven’t had featured/recommended comments for a week. To their relief.

So… which is the bug, and which the feature? That I don’t have featured comments? Or that John Gragson still does? (Quora’s ML comment ‘featuring’ system is not cool.)

Note also that there’s three iterations of the feature (or bug): Original Comments, Featured/Other, and Recommended/All. If Susan Bertolino and John have just been moved from Featured/Other to Recommended/All, then I shouldn’t be optimistic…

Survey question, and I’m looking forward to someone bringing up the Amharic sarcasm mark.

Greek punctuation functionally corresponds to English punctuation—mostly.

• Upper dot <·> corresponds to semicolon.
• In Ancient Greek typography, the upper dot is usually also used in the function of the English colon. Modern Greek typography uses the colon.
• Ancient punctuation had a middle dot as well as an upper dot, for different length pauses. Modern typography does not differentiate a middle dot from the upper dot.
• The Greek interrogative is identical to the Latin semicolon <;>.
• Quotation marks in Modern Greek typography have traditionally been the French guillemets <« »>. Through English influence, you will now see more English double quotes.
• Like French, Greek uses the quotation dash <―>.
• There is a native counterpart to the ampersand, the kai ligature <ϗ>, but it is no longer in wide use.
• Abbreviations are occasionally marked with double prime <″>, although that is quite old fashioned. The only instance anyone living is likely to have seen is Χ″ as an abbreviation of the surname prefix Χατζη- “Hatzi-”; e.g. Χ″μάρκου “Hatzimarkou”. Much more common now is the solidus </>; e.g. παν/μειο = πανεπιστήμειο “university”, Κων/πολη = Κωνσταντινούπολη “Constantinople”.

There is not one community. Something anticipated as far back as 2010: Seb Paquet’s answer to Does Quora actually need a community? There are clear splits in the community, enabled by the fact that different Quora users see very different feeds, determined by the topics and people they follow.

quora numbers by the departed Laura Hale demonstrated this with what statistics she could glean, and it is corroborated in all your experience. American Quora users notoriously know very little of what happens in the Indian Quora, and their demographics and interests are vastly different. Most Quora users have no idea who the Discord teens are, or who the Insurgents are. I certainly know very little of the Venture Capital old core of Quora.