Category: Uncategorized

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why are there so many languages in the world?

Firstly, because we are not even sure that there was monogenesis of language. That is, we are not sure whether language originated in a single contiguous community of humans, or multiple communities.

Myself, I suspect there was monogenesis, but that’s a hunch; and the serious work on the origins of language is subsequent to my training as a linguist, so I’m not across it.

But even if there were a single origin of language, any trace of it is long since effaced, under the waves of language change after language change, millennium after millennium. In our mental and scholarly modelling of how languages have come to be, the single mother language doesn’t make any difference: there could have been one, there could have been a hundred, we’ll never know. So it doesn’t matter to me.

I have answered this question with regard to one of the Anglo-Celtic Australians pictured: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do you think Australian singer Delta Goodrem is pretty? My answer is no different for the other three Anglo-Celtic Australians.

What can we do to stop situations like this from happening?

Be aware of the policies. Quora certainly won’t bother telling you in advance (Quora does not do onboarding), so find out about them, and find out about how they are policed. Do your own digging. Don’t just take me or my blogs’ word for it. And don’t just read the letter of Quora’s policies either; they are vague and generic. Look at specific moderation calls. Talk to former community mods about how they think the policies work.

Being aware of the policies is not to acquiesce to them and absolve Quora of any blame. We know Quora is fallible. We know that Quora can be tricked. And whether the sockpuppetting rules are justified or not is a topic worthy of discussion. Information is a good thing to have. Critical opinion about rules is a good thing to have.

But they are still their rules, not yours, and their processes of appeal, not yours.

How can we get her back?

Matt Zhang is unbanned not only because Quora recognised that they had been tricked (if what User says is true), but also because I gave him Tatiana’s email address for him to appeal his ban. I also gave those who wanted to appeal Brooke’s ban Tatiana’s email. (Tatiana’s email, and her availability as an avenue of appeal, is not secret information, so I don’t feel compunction about doing so. If that avenue is closed off, I’m sure I will hear of it.)

You can use that avenue of appeal alongside the normal, fill-out-a-form-and-Rory-the-Quora-intern-will-take-your-form-and-file-it process. I don’t know for a fact that this avenue is discouraged or encouraged. If that avenue fails, though, you are out of luck. No industrial action or protest will change it. And I can only assume by now that this is the case with Brooke Taylor.

Btw, because I have been getting a few emails lately about this from banees: I have no special access to the Corridors Of Power here on Quora. Quite the opposite in fact: I’ve had all of one (1) exchange with Tatiana, about my blog posts being throttled. I don’t know if Top Writers can advocate successfully for or against banees, as I’ve seen alleged here; I can only assure you that I’m not such a Top Writer, and I wouldn’t want to be.

I’m not contradicting Warren M Tang (see Warren M Tang’s answer to How we can differentiate functionalists, cognitivists, and structuralists?), but let me try a different formulation.

• A functionalist explains language structures by appealing to the communicative function of those structures. (They do linguistics by metaphors.)
• A cognitivist explains language structures by appealing to general psychological processes of cognition. (They do linguistics by diagrams.)
• A structuralist explains language structures as a coherent system of signs. (They do linguistics by tables.)

These approaches are not mutually exclusive in principle—though they tend to be in execution.

Where’s Chomsky fit in all of this? He wishes he was a cognitivist; he’s actually a structuralist.

Because lots of Westerners know Latin (or at least know about Latin), relatively few Westerners know Ancient Greek, and Latin is the language Westerners associate with the Roman Empire. Having Greek spoken in a movie would really just confuse people, who’d expect the Romans in Palestine to be speaking Latin.

That, and the logistics of getting actors to speak Greek (and which Greek?), precisely because relatively few Westerners know Ancient Greek. Even the Passion of the Christ ended up going with Church Latin instead of Classical Latin…

Heidi Cool is right, the answer is no, although back when there were unofficial APIs, you could see something.

At best, there are visualisation tools based on scraping a user’s profile page for stats, and they are quite fragile because Quora tinkers with the UI. See Welcome to my Quora stuff!

Until the March 2017 changes to anonymity, this was a bug. After the March 2017 changes to anonymity, this has become a feature.

Should Quora honour the commitments it has made publicly and eponymously?

(Improvements to Anonymity on Quora by Riley Patterson on The Quora Blog. Remember that name.)

Yes.

In Riley’s sentence:

All anonymous content will be reviewed for spam and harassment before receiving distribution,

(remember, he put his name to that statement),

should “fairly dimwitted bot, of the caliber we can expect of Quora bots in the year 2017” be understood to be the subject of the weaselly passive, and a satisfactory level of review?

No.

I’m sure Quora thinks Yes. Because they want this done on the cheap. The answer is still No.

Should Quora commit to vetting questions to decide if anonymity is appropriate or just trolling?

How well is the “new anonymity” policy on Quora working at filtering out bad content, as of March 20, 2017?

If this is the level of their vetting, better not to have made that undertaking at all.

Bridegrooms, Bonfires, and Woodchucks: Folk Etymologies in English. From that link:

• The textbook examples for English are sparrowgrass for asparagus, and bridegroom, which should have been bridegoom. (The word gome for “man” became extinct, so people grabbed the nearest similar word. Now that the noun groom for “horse attendant” has also become extinct, people use groom to mean bridegroom.)
• Apparently cockroach is a folk etymology mangling of cucaracha, and Algonquin otchek became woodchuck.
• A bonfire was originally bonefire; people assumed the bon- is French.
• The change of femelle to female in English was a folk etymology linking it to male.

An example I discovered just this year, because of Quora, is the Greek for toyboy or twink, teknó. It looks like a mis-stressed version of the Ancient Greek téknon “child”, the word with which priests address their parishioners. (Insert your own joke here.)

In fact, it’s from the Romany tiknó, “small (child)”. Kaliarda, the cant of Greek street queens in the 60s, used Romany for its base vocabulary, just as its counterpart Polari for English used Italian. Someone along the line noticed the similarity of tiknó to téknon, and switched the vowel accordingly. (Amusingly, someone also noticed it in 1800: Etymologicon magnum, or Universal etymological dictionary, on a new plan [By W. Whiter].)

… Unless Romany tiknó is derived from téknon itself, of course. But I’m reasonably sure it isn’t: Scandoromani derives it from Sanskrit tīkṣṇa “sharp”.

• The sooner you pronounce the city name the way the locals do, the better. Not MELbin, but MALbin: Salary–celery Merger, a proudly Victorian peculiarity. (Whaddaya mean, New Zuhluhnduhrs do it too?) And never, ever pronounce that <r> in Melbourne. What do you think this is, Melbourne, Florida?
• Never say anything good about Sydney. It’s against the law.
• As others have said, learn to coffee snob. See for example Guide to America | Chaser Guides. The print version has the gem “Every day, Starbucks sells 4 million cups of coffee. And not one of them is any good.”
• Go for weekend drives, down the Mornington Peninsula, up to the hills (towards Mt Dandenong), or down to North Hipsterville Daylesford. Thank me later.
• Maybe get me a latte or something. Strong, no sugar.
• There are divides in Melbourne:
• There is a North Of The River/South Of The River divide. It’s not social, it’s about travel convenience. It’s easy to be in a rut and never venture across the River. Don’t fall for it unless you haven’t bothered to get a car. There’s good things to be experienced both sides of the river.
• I once gave an American linguist a tour of the inner south. It was all new to him: all the Melbourne Uni academics who had hosted him had never taken him further south than St Kilda. ST KILDA!
• There is a West Of The River/East Of The River divide. That one is social, and it’s to do with lack of infrastructure in the West. Which means the West has been historically working-class and aggrieved. Demographic pressure though means that gentrification is happening even in the West; Williamstown is already shmick, and Footscray is now only selectively grotty. (Why yes, I do live East Of The River, why do you ask?)
• There is a Hipster/Burbs divide. That one is real. Do not succumb to it on either side. The inner city is wonderful and vibrant. It’s also smug. And the middle range burbs are no longer a wasteland; there’s nice greenery and good social enclaves and a booming café culture. (The outer burbs… well, yeah. They’re dormitory suburbs. Particularly estates. Berwick’s nice though.)