Category: Uncategorized

They proclaim it and they are taught it, and yes, they feel it.

But they feel it at a superficial level, as either ancestor-worship, or a totem to beat up Westerners with. Nick Nicholas’ answer to If your country had a slogan what it would be?: “When we Greeks were building Parthenons, you barbarians were still eating acorns.”

If you dig deeper in getting how the Ancient Greeks ticked, you’ll see some superficial similarities, which Modern Greeks seize on—the fractiousness, the love of the good life, the politics. And you’ll see a lot more difference in how they viewed the world, and realise that there’s a reason why Etonians felt Demosthenes was their forebear rather than the Modern Greeks’.

But then, as I said in Nick Nicholas’ answer to Greeks, which do you identify most with: Ancient Greece or the Byzantine Empire?,

the marble looks like some highly advanced spacemen dropped this stuff off and left. It doesn’t gel with the Modern Greek landscape; it’s something Alien.

In fact, that’s how Modern Greek folklore accounted for all this marble. Built by the pagan giants of yore, before they collapsed under their own weight. And the Franks are the giants’ kinfolk; that’s why they come from their countries and genuflect before those ruins.

The theocracy of Byzantium really is more familiar, as Joachim Pense’s answer points out: “The continuity the modern Greeks feel mostly though, is that to the Byzantine tradition – of which the western Europeans don’t care much.”

In Nick Nicholas’ answer to Are there any dialects of Greek that Nick Nicholas can’t understand?, I just exclaimed:

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.

So. Let’s touch some random Thucydides. 6.30.

μετὰ δὲ ταῦτα θέρους μεσοῦντος ἤδη ἡ ἀναγωγὴ ἐγίγνετο ἐς τὴν Σικελίαν. τῶν μὲν οὖν ξυμμάχων τοῖς πλείστοις καὶ ταῖς σιταγωγοῖς ὁλκάσι καὶ τοῖς πλοίοις καὶ ὅση ἄλλη παρασκευὴ ξυνείπετο πρότερον εἴρητο ἐς Κέρκυραν ξυλλέγεσθαι ὡς ἐκεῖθεν ἁθρόοις ἐπὶ ἄκραν Ἰαπυγίαν τὸν Ἰόνιον διαβαλοῦσιν: αὐτοὶ δ᾽ Ἀθηναῖοι καὶ εἴ τινες τῶν ξυμμάχων παρῆσαν, ἐς τὸν Πειραιᾶ καταβάντες ἐν ἡμέρᾳ ῥητῇ ἅμα ἕῳ ἐπλήρουν τὰς ναῦς ὡς ἀναξόμενοι.

“And after that, it already being the middle of summer, the going up took place in Sicily.”

Well, that wasn’t too bad.

Ah. The next sentence is 55 words long. I see what they warned me about now.

OK:

“So, of the allies, to the most and the wheat-loaded boats and the ships, and whatever other preparation followed together, beforehand it was said to gather in Corcyra so that they would go across, to the massed ones, onto furthest Iapygia, across the Ionian Sea: but the Athenians themselves, and any of the allies that might have been present, descending to Peiraeus in a strict day together with the dawn filled the ships as loading up.”

I mean, there’s enough bits of meaning that I know what’s going on: most of the allies and the supply ships were to head off en masse to Iapygia, while the Athenians and any allies already there would fill up the ships in Peiraeus by dawn. But what those datives are doing in the start of the sentence, I have no idea (“with regard to?”): there must be a subtle way in which the sentence is hanging together, but I can barely see it, and I can’t read it: I can only gather the bits together, dump them, and guess at the context.

So, how did I do?

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War

After this the departure for Sicily took place, it being now about midsummer. Most of the allies, with the corn transports and the smaller craft and the rest of the expedition, had already received orders to muster at Corcyra, to cross the Ionian sea from thence in a body to the Iapygian promontory. But the Athenians themselves, and such of their allies as happened to be with them, went down to Piraeus upon a day appointed at daybreak, and began to man the ships for putting out to sea.

Oh! So the “of the allies” depended on “to the most”: “to most of the allies”. Didn’t see that one. And the datives are the indirect object of “it was said”: “it was said beforehand to most of the allies”, i.e. “most of the allies had been commanded”. OK, missed that completely. And I got taken in by “spoken (day)”, which I thought had already picked up its modern metaphorical meaning of “strict” (from “explicitly spoken”): no, it was “spoken” as in “prearranged, nominated”.

I can see how that meaning arises from Thucydides’ passage; I might pick up meanings like that with practice. But I have no practice. And that was likely not even a particularly complicated sentence.

In my “I Love Youse All” series of blog posts about favourite Quorans (and I’m due to add to them), I sometimes use nicknames as well as in-jokes, and I explain them in the Clavis Quoristarum Praeclarorum series:

• Clavis Quoristarum praeclarorum #1 by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile
• Clavis Quoristarum praeclarorum #2 by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile
• Clavis Quoristarum praeclararum #3 by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile
• Clavis Quoristarum praeclarorum #4 by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile

There aren’t that many nicknames, but the nicknames I use, stick.

• Michael Masiello is The Magister (“the teacher, the Master”).
• Habib Fanny is Habib le toubib (“Habib the medico”).
• Mohammed Khateeb Kamran is Hansolophontes (“Hans Solo Slayer”—he spoiled a plot point about Hans Solo here once).
• Gigi J Wolf is La Gigi. (Die Kat tells me that she came up with La Gigi first.)
• Tracey Bryan is Trace.
• Pegah Esmaili (banned) is canım (“My soul”—term of endearment at odds with her demeanour).
• Kelley Spartiatis is (very occasionally) Madonna (her actual Greek name means Maiden-Voiced; so she sounds Like A Virgin).
• Josephine Stefani is my Spirit Sister (because we both have Armenian partners. Which one toasts using spirits. Ararat Brandy, to be exact.)
• Victoria Weaver is Comrade Victoria or Grazhdanka Viktoria (depending on how commie I’m feeling; “Grazhdanka” is Russian for “Citizen”).

I’ve pointed a typo in Stephanopoulos’ name to Irene Colthurst in her bio, and she did not immediately excoriate me. 🙂 Yes, it’s a confrontational tactic, but not everyone will take offence.

A less risky strategy is private message, if the user has them enabled.

A really roundabout way if they don’t, as you point out, is to find a mutual friend—someone they follow who you can message, and get them to let them know.

But I gotta say, I would not consider answer commenting to point out a typo rude, as long as your comment is appropriately deferential…

Yes. It was never written unaccented, because it was never treated as a clitic. On the other hand, the unstressed variant κι was indeed never accented.

There are several online dictionaries of emoji meanings.

The intended meaning of [math]unicode{x1f60B}[/math] is “Face Savouring Delicious Food”, which is the Unicode name of the emoji.

U0001f60b Face Savouring Delicious Food Emoji (Emojipedia) offers “Used to indicate a silly happiness; goofy; hungry.”

U0001f60b (Urban Dictionary) offers “thirsty; desperate”

Face Savouring Delicious Food Emoji (Emojibase) notes that :yum: is used in some phones as an abbreviation.

A Google perusal suggests that the “food” association is prevalent.

I’m not the starstruck type normally, and I’ve grown both more confident and more jaded the longer I’m on here. I did PM “Thank you for following me!… But why?” to a few people in my time: Kate Scott, Jeremy Markeith Thompson, Sabrina Deep, Buster Smith.

Early on, I was proud to get a comment from Dan Holliday, but my answer was as courteous to him as if he’d had two followers. I may very occasionally still say I appreciate the attention, in my response to a famous Quoran, but I think the more jaded I get, the less it registers; I tend to appreciate reactions equally by people I don’t know, and more by people I do. 🙂

I will not be confused with an ethologist. But I do know that whenever I try to dance with my honey, and our dog is anywhere near, Jenny gets excited, wags her tail, and jumps on us to join in.

Fricking dog.

My understanding with what little I know of ethology is, Jenny does so because she understands dancing as equivalent to dogs’ play-fighting. That, she understands; that’s why she wants to join in. So I’d assume that’s the shortcircuit in her brain, rather than understanding dance on its own terms.

Dogs are also hypersensitive to changes in people’s gait. Jenny gets very agitated when she sees me on a swing; but that’s something I gathered from reading, rather than from Jenny. I think the freakout of dogs seeing the changed gait of dancers would overrule any recognition of controlled gait as communication.

Latin script in Unicode – Wikipedia

As of version 9.0 of the Unicode Standard, 1,350 characters in the following blocks are classified as belonging to the Latin script

Let’s remove the uppercase letters; and that leaves us with your answer. From eyeballing:

26+30+128+104+14*8+12+12+67+26 = 517

That leaves 833.

If I’m wrong, I’m not wrong by much.

EDIT: Derek Zech’s answer to How many letters does Unicode currently include in the Latin script, no matter the language, but ignoring upper vs. lower case differences? leaves out more letters than I do, is more thorough, and he sounds more correct. Go upvote him: Vote #1 Derek Zech.

None of the answers satisfy me, though Logan R. Kearsley’s is by far the closest to satisfying me.

EDIT: Uri Granta’s answer satisfies me more than mine. Go read that.

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There is a colloquial register in English, in which the first person subject is omitted routinely. It predates social media; see, for example the Beatles’ A Day in the Life. The bits Lennon wrote use the pronoun; the middle section McCartney wrote skips it:

Woke up, fell out of bed,
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup,
And looking up I noticed I was late.
Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke,
Somebody spoke and I went into a dream

But contra Logan, I don’t think this is just spoken English. I think this is a particular narrative register of spoken English—it’s a conventionalised way of telling stories, in a punchy way. I don’t think you’ll find it in different kinds of speech, such as say persuasive speech or instructional speech.