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I loathe BNBR for its vagueness and subjectivity. I appreciate BNBR for its encouraging a culture of civility.

BNBR can be used to prosecute nerd rage (as OP explains it: aggressive snarkiness), since such snark is Not Nice. After all, BNBR is used to prosecute banter, which is meta-Nice, because moderators think it will discourage civility.

OTOH, there are plenty of snarksters here, particularly high-profile users castigating vices; and I don’t see snark being systematically nipped in the bud here before it escalates into outright BNBR violations. (I’m not sure I would either.)

You pose an interesting question: is BNBR the only thing that averts feral snark? No. The culture of the site ultimately is what averts misbehaviour. And since OP was curious about practice in other fora: if the fora are small enough to have an organic culture, that culture can self-moderate pretty well. In bigger fora like Quora, you need to build the culture by policing it. BNBR has done that here, but BNBR would be nowhere unless a critical mass of users bought into it, and policed it themselves, through reporting and downvoting.

That’s misbehaviour in general; trolling, for example, is here but is much less prominent than elsewhere. But feral snark? Much more borderline, much harder to extirpate, and much harder to get community buy-in that it must be stamped out than for trolling. And I just don’t see it is being prosecuted as aggressively. (And I’d rather it not be, precisely because it’s much harder to.)

Michael Kiprovski

Account deactivation by Michael Kiprovski on Profile and football updates

Michael Masiello’s answer to If a healthy person suddenly starts preparing for their funeral, does that mean they’re subconsciously aware of impending death?

I suppose if someone were to make these arrangements while on Ambien, in a remarkably focused somnambular state, one might say the person was unconsciously aware of impending death. But “subconsciously” just doesn’t seem intelligible here.

Definition of SOMNAMBULAR

of, relating to, or characterized by somnambulism

Hien?

Definition of SOMNAMBULISM

1. an abnormal condition of sleep in which motor acts (as walking) are performed
2. actions characteristic of somnambulism

Oh, so you mean…

somnambular (Collins)

(Medicine) relating to sleep-walking

Gotcha.

And of course:

somnambulism – Wiktionary

From Latin somnus (“sleep”) + ambulo (“to walk”) + -ism.

The word I was actually unfamiliar with in the Magister’s passage was Ambien:

Zolpidem – Wikipedia

Zolpidem (originally marketed as Ambien and available worldwide under many brand names) is a sedative primarily used for the treatment of insomnia. It works quickly, usually within 15 minutes, and has a short half-life of two to three hours. Zolpidem has not adequately demonstrated effectiveness in maintaining sleep, unless delivered in a controlled-release (CR) form. However, it is effective in initiating sleep. Its hypnotic effects are similar to those of the benzodiazepine class of drugs.

I’m still extremely liberal about comments. If you engage at all, I’ll upvote. If you’re not adding value (and I have a low threshold for that), I’ll ignore you. If you attack me, I’ll still ignore you. If you’re being abusive or stupid, I’ll downvote you. I think the times I’ve reported or deleted comments on my answers in the 1.5 years I’ve been here, can be counted on a hand or two.

But I do avoid controversies (that don’t involve Quora itself). I’ve gotten away with liberality in comments, because I’ve been avoiding conflict in general; I’ve gotten just two BNBR warnings in my time here.

I will cc comments a lot to people who should know of them, through @-mention. Unfortunately, @-mention has been only sporadically functional for months. (The lightbox ads aren’t though!)

My experience to Duke Skibbington’s is so utterly different, I’m all… “are you sure you’re Greek?” But of course, he’s 3rd generation, and I’m 1.5th generation. (2nd generation, but spent childhood in Greece.)

It is of course to do with assimilation, which is to do with the timespan your family has been in Australia, and with intermarriage out of the ethnic group.

• Aboriginal Australians who were part of the Stolen Generations underwent forced assimilation; they don’t know any of their indigenous language, to their distress. Aboriginal Australians still living a traditional lifestyle in the country’s north are likelier to have held on to their language.
• There have been Asians in Australia since the Gold Rush; those Asian Australians are unlikely to have retained their language across 6 generations. The Asian Australians I went to high school with and am still in contact with are 2nd generation; they don’t look like passing their language on.
• Second generation Greeks were known in the 90s to be outliers in how much stronger their retention of Greek was than for other ethnic groups (even though their Greek, as I experienced, was not so much conversational as a secrecy language). But now that we’re in the 3rd generation, their Greek is gone, as Duke reports (and I know other such Greek-Australians).

To the extent that the major wave of Asian migration into Australia was in the 70s–90s, and the major wave of (non-British) European migration into Australia was in the 50s–70s, European–Australians are on aggregate one generation ahead in assimilation. That’s the most one can say.

This was pointed out to me by a correspondent who wishes not to draw undue attention to themselves as an Insurgent. That’s my job, apparently.

Lightboxes. A feature I’ve yet to see anyone like.

Except….

… for advertisers.

Lightboxes are a feature alright, not a bug.

Question now is: were they a feature motivated primary by helping Quora users pay more focussed attention to a “story”?

… Or to the ad underneath the “story”?

In Greece, it’s not particularly difficult to find all the works of Kazantzakis in any middling bookstore; and bless you for mentioning the Terza Rimas, that I have a lot of affection for.

In the Anglosphere, a university with a Modern Greek teaching program will have them. A university that used to have a Modern Greek teaching program, like the University of Melbourne, will have banished them to storage.

From Nikos Kazantzakis – Wikipedia, I see a lot of translations of the more obscure works have appeared in very obscure places—literary journals in the 1970s, limited edition runs of 140. Neither Julian nor the Terza Rimas have been translated, although the Terza Rima I use as one of my email .sigs has been:

• Christ (poetry), translated by Kimon Friar, “Journal of Hellenic Diaspora” (JHD) 10, No. 4 (Winter 1983), pp. 47–51 (60).

You can download that issue at: Issues 1-2, 3, 4

The time frame for appeals, we are told, is two weeks. See e.g.

• Sierra Spaulding’s answer to How long does it take for Quora to un-collapse an answer?
• McKayla Kennedy’s answer to How long do Quora moderators take to respond to appeals and reported issues?
• Laura Hale’s answer to How long does Quora take to respond to an appeal to anonymity suspension?
• Laura Hale’s answer to How long should I expect to wait for a response from Quora moderation?

Any unbans I have seen have been within that timeframe.

Brooke was banned two weeks ago.

I doubt it.

The Magister’s comment to Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do you find Thucydides hard to read in Greek?

https://www.quora.com/Do-you-fin…

I feel your pain. I am sorry to report that’s just Thucydides talkin’, too. Try reading Pericles’ famous speech if you want to develop trichotillomania.

I understood the word, and now, you will too:

Trichotillomania – Wikipedia:

Trichotillomania (TTM), also known as hair pulling disorder, is an impulse control disorder characterised by a long term urge that results in the pulling out of one’s hair. This occurs to such a degree that hair loss can be seen. Efforts to stop pulling hair typically fail. Hair removal may occur anywhere; however, the head and around the eyes are most common. The hair pulling is to such a degree that it results in distress.

The disorder may run in families. It occurs more commonly in those with obsessive compulsive disorder. Episodes of pulling may be triggered by anxiety. People usually acknowledge that they pull their hair. On examination broken hairs may be seen. Other conditions that may present similarly include body dysmorphic disorder, however in that condition people remove hair to try to improve what they see as a problem in how they look.

Treatment is typically with cognitive behavioral therapy. The medication clomipramine may also be helpful. It is estimated to affect one to four percent of people. Trichotillomania most commonly begins in childhood. Women are more commonly affected than men. The name was created by François Henri Hallopeau in 1889, from the Greek θρίξ/τριχ- thrix meaning “hair”, τίλλειν tíllein meaning “to pull”, and μανία mania meaning “madness”.

I find the fact that medicos abbreviate it as TTM adorable.

I plan on retaining my full hair of head for a while longer…

Pericles’ Funeral Oration – Wikipedia

No, don’t you dare.

Thucydides’ Greek is notoriously difficult, but the language of Pericles Funeral Oration is considered by many to be the most difficult and virtuosic passage in the History of the Peloponnesian War.

I mean it!

Οἱ μὲν πολλοὶ τῶν ἐνθάδε ἤδη εἰρηκότων ἐπαινοῦσι τὸν προσθέντα τῷ νόμῳ τὸν λόγον τόνδε, ὡς καλὸν ἐπὶ τοῖς ἐκ τῶν πολέμων θαπτομένοις ἀγορεύεσθαι αὐτόν. ἐμοὶ δὲ ἀρκοῦν ἂν ἐδόκει εἶναι ἀνδρῶν ἀγαθῶν ἔργῳ γενομένων ἔργῳ καὶ δηλοῦσθαι τὰς τιμάς, οἷα καὶ νῦν περὶ τὸν τάφον τόνδε δημοσίᾳ παρασκευασθέντα ὁρᾶτε, καὶ μὴ ἐν ἑνὶ ἀνδρὶ πολλῶν ἀρετὰς κινδυνεύεσθαι εὖ τε καὶ χεῖρον εἰπόντι πιστευθῆναι.

AAAAARGH!!!

(Actual shots of TTM are actually pretty disturbing…)

First up, my vanity is well gratified!

Well, there’s the question, and then there’s the details.

Can I understand someone speaking modern Tsakonian, or read ancient Arcadian and understand it, sight unseen?

Mate, I struggled to understand the Cypriot of my cousin’s husband Fotis; and I have no idea what Homer is on about. Homer!

I’m a really bad example, because I’ve approached Greek as a linguist rather than a classicist, so I’ve learned only the bits I’ve needed. I know that when I was studying my thesis on Modern Greek dialect, I was familiar enough with Pontic that I could read it without a problem, and I probably could hold a conversation in Tsakonian. It’s patchier 20 years on. And I would still struggle with Cypriot basilect, or Samothracian.

Ditto Ancient Greek, and that’s exacerbated by my imposter syndrome. I can kinda understand Attic, but I will sneak peeks at the dictionary when I don’t think you’re looking, and I ain’t touching no Thucydides. I know the Doric shibboleths, so I can probably deal with the Doric in Aristophanes and Archimedes; maybe not Alcman and Theocritus. I did intensive work with Alcaeus and Sappho, so I’m better than the usual classicist on Aeolic. But, because the TLG lemmatiser already dealt with Homer and Herodotus, when I first obtained it as Morpheus from Perseus, I never needed to brush up on my Epic/Ionic.

And non-literary dialects? I’ve read the handbooks of Ancient Greek dialect, such as Thumb and Buck and Bechtel, so I’ve *seen* North-West Greek and Arcadian and Cretan. Understand them? I’d be struggling. I’d pick out a few words more than the average classicist, perhaps, but that wouldn’t be enough for me to do a translation viva.

Edward Conway brings up Linear B in comments, and I’m just going to pretend I didn’t hear him. 🙂

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Now, to go to your details: can you triangulate dialects (let alone intermediate stages of the language) from Attic Classical Greek + Standard Modern Greek?

Intermediate stages: Usually. Dialects: Less so.

We don’t have as much Greek attested between Attic and Early Modern Greek as you might think, because most people tried to write Attic. (A very artificial Attic.) Koine is not really challenging if you know Attic; you’ll be relieved at the simplifications, and the occasional Doric-looking words won’t throw you. The papyri are as much Greek as a Foreign Language as they are Koine, but they won’t really throw you either. In between the papyri and Early Modern Greek, we have bits and pieces: snatches of songs, inscriptions written by Greek POWs under the Bulgars. Again, no problem.

Actual Early Modern Greek starts 1100, more or less. There are going to be some archaic words and grammatical usages that will throw you a bit more, if you’ve got just Attic and SMG, and you want to be on the alert for false friends. You’ll understand the gist of things, but you may miss the fine print.

When I co-translated a poem written in 1364 (An Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds), we looked up every single word in the Early Modern Greek Dictionary, because there were a lot of words that changed in strange ways. The modern word for “pew” for example, στασίδι, was just the mediaeval word for “a spot”: the Rat went back to his spot in the assembly, not to a church pew. The future tense looked very different from Modern Greek, with the modern form originating only in the 1400s, and not really settling down until the 1700s; so you could be missing some nuance there. Prepositions also worked slightly differently.

But honestly, most of the difficulty you’ll find in Early Modern Greek will be dialectal, rather than chronological. If you’re going to read Early Modern Greek, you’re going to find a lot of Cretan material in particular. Dialects are often archaic in some ways, but just knowing Ancient Greek isn’t going to be enough to work them out.

As a little sampler: here’s one of the very few private unlettered letters we have preserved in Early Modern Greek, from 1420 Crete.

Manuel Chantakites, Away from Crete, 1420

Chantakites: Linguistic analysis

I’m curious how easy Greek Quorans—particularly those unfamiliar with Cretan dialect—find it to read.