Category: Uncategorized

I received this in email today and am passing it on, anonymously.

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I am a moderator of that subreddit r/indianpeoplequora.

With reference to your blog post: How Reddit trolls have infiltrated Quora:

I have removed all those posts where the users show they have asked troll questions on Quora. I have even updated the rules of the subreddit to not allow such things in the future.

https://www.reddit.com/r/indianp…

I’ve created that subreddit a long time ago just for posting funny Quora question/answers written by Indians. Here’s an example of one of the earlier posts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/indianp…

I didn’t know all this would have happened.

Regarding trolls, I’ve seen a few on Quora before the subreddit even existed. I’ve seen one vandalize content and ask harassing/creepy questions. I’ve reported them to the Quora admins and had them banned.

The ones you have pointed out:

• Hardick Chopra seems to have been banned by Quora moderation. https://www.quora.com/profile/Ha…
• Raden Smith has apologized for trolling and said he will never do it again. https://www.quora.com/Where-can-…

Regarding the Reddit accounts,

The Reddit account of Raden Smith has deleted his 1-yr old account, and the other has been banned from r/indianpeoplequora.

I am not that active on either Reddit or Quora these days, so I have added more moderators to keep things under control.

Cheers!

As Joe Devney said, depends on the study, but I have a fair guess.

That would be gender, presumably, as in grammatical gender, in those languages that have them. The wording would then presumably be something more like how does assignment of entities to particular genders vary from one dialect to another within the same language.

Dialects are linguistics’ natural laboratory: you have a common starting point for the dialects that’s quite well understood, even by laypeople—they can work out how the dialects relate to each other and to the common core of the language without much trouble. So the variation in how different dialects treat the same phenomenon can be mapped out straightforwardly. Because the dialects have diverged recently enough, those changes can usually be made sense of easily, compared to changes between different languages.

So the variation in gender assignment within a language, between different dialects, will have a common starting point—in Modern Greek dialect, say, Ancient Greek; and you can make sense of the variation between dialects, because there’s much less variation to trace than, say, the variation between French and Russian.

The purposes of such a research study would be the same as the purposes for any research study on how entities are assigned to gender; the results would just be much more tractable.

I received this a week ago from Sophie Dockx, and am passing it on. The bug report Sophie mentions is a security hole I am electing not to publicise; Quora has been notified of it.

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I saw your graphs on the necro. Such over 45° upward slopes are indicative of a lot more than management or policy changes within Quora. This is the signature of a management being flooded with complaints until past saturation point, and that is now collapsing under the work pressure.

Q-mod and Q-admin are not responsible for the bans. They have been flooded and overworked. That is why they don’t check each report properly anymore, because they can’t. They have (almost literally) opened the emergency pressure valve in the hope the report bombings stop. They have banned the targets, not the targeters. They don’t realise that this only makes it worse for them. Incomprehensible bans lead to voluntary quits, as by my friend Prof. Walter Lewin. That is why the Quora community needs to know.

People are leaving Quora for the wrong reasons. They are not a bunch of incompetents or of totalitarians. They have been under attack from an organised mob, but don’t seem to realise that they have. Discuss this with your friends, please, Nick. Don’t take my word for it. Quora has been criticised wrongly by most of its critics. It is not Quora, it is a group of users doing this.

Send my bug report to your friends. Call me conspiracy nutter if you have to. Mock me, have a laugh on my expense I don’t care. What is happening to Quora at the moment is the work of conspiracy nutters. They can’t make such shit work in the real world, but they can on the web.

Sites have been switching to Real Name policy without taking into account why it had been abandoned in the nineties. Real names add credibility to the content, but at the same time warrant a much tighter vetting and background checking procedure. Like the one applied by LinkedIn. Quora has been overambitious. They are slow at detecting fake names, because they rely on reporting by the community for that. That explains also why many people have been banned for using their real names that have been flagged by numerous users as fake names. It happened to me in October.

To me, it sounds like a less mumbly Turkish, and certainly much more like Turkish than, for example, Azeri sounds to me. Having read the other answers, there are moments where I hear something reminiscent of Russian palatalisation, but they are very infrequent.

That’s of course proves that I shouldn’t be reading the other answers before answering questions like this.

Like Turkish (and just as mumbly as Turkish), with what sound like added uvulars. Which make it sound slightly Arabic.

I have seen another such question about Central Asian Turkic, where an answer commented that it sounded Korean. I can see why: the combination of high back vowels and rapid syllables.

Habib, so many good answers here with allusion to the US Constitution, and I couldn’t hope to exceed them or even reach them.

And then, I remembered a different country’s constitution. Not even its current version.

In the 60s, Greek leftist youth protested the assassination of Grigoris Lambrakis and the subsequent upheaval in the country, by chanting “114!”

Article 114, the final article of the 1952 Constitution of Greece. It’s article 120 in the 2008 revision of the current Constitution of Greece.

Σύνταγμα

H τήρηση του Συντάγματος επαφίεται στον πατριωτισμό των Eλλήνων, που δικαιούνται και υποχρεούνται να αντιστέκονται με κάθε μέσο εναντίον οποιουδήποτε επιχειρεί να το καταλύσει με τη βία.

Upholding the Constitution is a responsibility entrusted to the patriotism of the Greek people, who are entitled and obligated to resist by any means necessary whoever attempts to do away with it by force.

Mutatis mutandis, Habib le toubib? You could do worse than this as a closer.

First and so far only eponymous BNBR. Story told in three parts:

• What happened next? by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency
• My first BNBR warning by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency
• Cartoons from my first BNBR by Nick Nicholas on Gallery of Awesomery

(My only anonymous BNBR, I *think*, was for a similar reason.)

I’ve answered a closely related question:

Nick Nicholas’ answer to How long would it take an isolated group of people to develop what would be considered their own language?

….

[Lots of provisos, which you must read]

A ballpark figure is going to be closer to between 500 and 1000 years. With all the provisos already given.

I love my folks, however problematic things have been between us, and I don’t begrudge them their struggles in a strange land, to do the best they could for their kids. (Maybe their objectivity, but not their struggle.)

But what was it like to be raised by immigrant parents?

Defensive.

Don’t assimilate to those drunkards. Remember your heritage. Stick to your own. We have morals. We have tradition. All they care about is horse races and booze anyway. Of course you’re going to make something yourself. No you’re not going to be a musician. No, you can’t date, you must attend to your studies. [The fact that I felt I needed to get permission!] Surely you’re going to want to go back to the mother country one day. What do you mean, “you could never function in a country without a civil service that works like clockwork”?!

Not a negative overall; I like that it’s given me a detachment from both the majority and the minority cultures, it’s a useful thing. But there’s a lot of sex I missed out on as a result…

They’re all Ancient Greek, really, and they’re all Greek star names from Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are all the Greek star names?

• α Virginis: Stachys is “Ear of Wheat”. It’s Aratus’ name, and the established name Spica is its Latin translation.
• ζ Hydrae: Hydrobius (whatever the name’s provenance) is “living in water” (or in Hydra, I guess)
• β Herculis: Kornephoros is supposed to be “club bearer”. The ancient Greek is in fact korynēphoros; mangling of Ancient Greek appears to be routine in my list. Its alternative name, Rutilicus, is also “a corruption of the Latin word titillicus, meaning ‘armpit’.” (Beta Herculis – Wikipedia)
• ε Virginis: Protrygater is “fore-harvester” (referring to the wine harvest). Again, this is Aratus’ name and the established name, Latin Vindemiatrix meaning ‘the grape-harvestress’, is derived from it.