Category: Uncategorized

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.

Greeks don’t know the song. Most Greeks barely know about Chameria. And nationalist Greeks who know how the song has become a rallying point for Çam identity may well react with hostility. God knows I read a couple of shitfights on YouTube.

But given the translation and someone who’s not nationalist (e.g. Dimitris Almyrantis: Dimitris Almyrantis’ answer to What do Greeks think of the song of Çelo Mezanit?), you’ll get the recognition of something culturally familiar.

To answer the question, I’m going to YouTube, ignoring the typical “Fuck you Greek pederast” “Fuck you Albanian cur” stuff, and translate the comments made in Greek to a different recording:

• Epirot and Albanian, it’s almost the one music.
• We cry and celebrate with the same songs. Whatever they may say, our blood is so mixed together, whether we like it or not.
• Finally a YouTube user with serious and truthful attitudes! Good health to you and your family, sir! Good luck!
• [I didn’t translate Prentas Dimtris’ comments, because I actually didn’t understand them; Greek as Foreign Language, I surmise]

I’m not trying to whitewash anything by quoting those. Just point out that if Greeks aren’t given the political context that the song has acquired, and just listen and read the lyrics, they’ll actually like it.

I did too, although I think I’ve heard ballads that got to the point more directly.

Some celebrity nicknames are funny, and ingenious, and a sign that you have made it big, if you have an instantly recognizable nickname.

On the other hand, some celebrity nicknames show familiar contempt for celebrities, and I like those too. Australian bent in these.

• Madge for Madonna
• This. So delightfully pulling her down a peg.
• Jacko or Wacko Jacko for Michael Jackson
• The Silver Budgie for Bob Hawke
• Silver-haired, short
• The Singing Budgie for Kylie Minogue
• Sings, short
• The Mad Monk for Tony Abbott
• Former seminarian, volatile, social conservative
• Dipper for Robert DiPierdomenico
• Farnsey and Barnsey for John Farnham and Jimmy Barnes
• The rhyme was used as a commentary on the uniformity of Australian rock radio being monopolised by them

I don’t have the wherewithal to judge where we don’t have good coverage, and I haven’t thought “I cannot get an answer about this topic on Quora”. Then again, I tend not to ask questions on Quora!

But to back up Joseph Heavner’s point and generalise it:

• More humanities and social sciences academics.

I have the utmost of contempt for Quora’s credentialism—what Silicon Valley thinks scholarship is about (to quote myself). But if you go diving into linguistics or sociology, you notice that there’s not a lot of regular users who are academics giving specialist advice. Lots of excellent linguists here, for example, not least of whom IS ME. But people whose day job is as a linguistic academic? Thomas Wier, and he doesn’t write often enough.

I have the distant impression that we’ve got plenty of Hard Science and Computer Science academics here, but I could be wrong.

Mycenaean Greece was a Greek culture, and it was literate at that, though we know none of its literature. The Homeric epics preserve bits and pieces of that culture orally.

But Greek civilisation as we understand it is based on written records, and those written records start with the invention of the alphabet: 8th century BC. Let’s make it 7th century BC for actual literature that wasn’t orally transmitted.

What was India doing in the 7th century BC?

History of India – Wikipedia

From a cursory glance at Wikipedia, India was moving on from Vedic culture to new religions (Śramaṇa) and new systematisations of the old religion (Upanishads), new political structures (Mahajanapada) and new settlements (Iron-Age: Brief Notes on the Second Urbanization in India). The modern tradition of writing in India seems to date from the 4th century BC, but the oral texts of the Vedas, Upanishads, and Epics seem to have been much more extensive than the Greek Epics.

I already substantially answered this on Nick Nicholas’ answer to How long did it take you to become popular on Quora?

As I’ve reported in that and other answers, it was a combination of two things:

• No longer paying attention to new followers.
• Having lots of chat with users outside my areas of core expertise.

The topic about me didn’t make as much of an impression on me as it seems to have to some. The attention the “Discord Teens” seem to be paying me has, admittedly, taken me aback.