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I’ve already addressed a narrower version of the same question: Nick Nicholas’ answer to In the traditional British public school system, why is (or was) it believed that knowledge of “the classics” was necessary?

In the Renaissance, when Roman and Greek literature were rediscovered, that literature was treated as the source and reference point of all culture. To know that literature was to be cultured. […]

And the point of a liberal arts education back then, as it was in Ancient Greece, was not to get you a job. You didn’t go to uni for that; you went out as an apprentice, and people looked down on you as a mechanical. The point of a liberal arts education was to be cultured. To appreciate good literature. To form good judgement. To have good character. […]

And everyone doing science or literature read Latin, because that’s what intellectuals wrote in. And because they now had access to the classics, they would try to speak it more like the Romans did, and less like the mediaeval clerks did. Doing science and reading Cicero were part of the same package. It was all part of being cultured.

In the 16th and 17th and 18th century, the English developed their own literature. Gradually more and more science was written outside of Latin. So you didn’t need just Latin to appreciate good literature or do science. But the public school system stuck with it, because their ancestors did, and because Classical literature was still felt to be awesome, and because old habits died hard. And because you didn’t get a public school education to get a job. You got one to be cultured. Besides, any job you were likely to get as an aristocrat would be tied up with being cultured anyway.

Things have changed. Riff-raff […] get to go to high school and university. And we need to keep getting a job in mind, because we are riff-raff and not cashed up members of the aristocracy. And the Classics are only one option among many, and hardly the most prestigious one even among the liberal arts.

Some of you will have noticed Quora Compass by Nick Nicholas on Assorted Polls:

Much as the Political Compass tries to simplistically plot peoples’ political orientation, the Quora Compass tries to simplistically plot users’ attitudes towards Quora, on two axes that I find of interest: “Loyalist” vs “Insurgent” (substitute your own epithets), and “Knowledge Repository” vs “Social Media”.

The Quora Compass is simplistic. The current form of the poll is even more simplistic; just two scaled question answers, with much selection bias. It would be nice to workshop something with a few more questions, and I welcome suggestions. But I find the concept interesting, and I will be updating the results of the poll here.

So. The Quora Compass classifies users along two axes. As Jennifer Edeburn formulated the questions,

• Insurgent: Quora has many flaws and really needs to do a lot of work to reduce my frustration with the platform
• Loyalist: Quora is fine, sure there are mistakes made occasionally but I’m sure they have a good reason for everything they do.
• Knowledge Repository: I don’t really feel that it adds value to have a group of users that I comment or exchange with routinely.
• Social media: I value the time spent conversing with my friends about my answers or theirs more highly than I do the time spent reading randomly in the feed or answering questions.

For convenience, I’ll call the last two categories Expertists vs Socialisers.

The Compass is all about the quadrants; and inspired by this:

I will name the quadrants as follows:

• Loyalist Expertist (closest alignment to the goals of Quora): Dogs
• Loyalist Socialiser: Dolphins
• Insurgent Expertist: Bees
• Insurgent Socialiser: Cats

If I were to put caricatures on this chart:

• Marc Bodnick
• Richard Stallman
• Oscar Wilde (author)
• Cary Grant (actor)

If I were to put Quora friends on the chart, according to their self-nominated scores:

And these are the results of the poll so far. 127 results. [Updated: 2017–04–20]

• Loyalists: 60; Insurgents: 48; Neutral: 19
• Socialisers: 30; Expertists: 66; Neutral: 31
• Loyalist Expertist (closest alignment to the goals of Quora): Dogs: 31
• Loyalist Socialiser: Dolphins: 11
• Insurgent Expertist: Bees: 30
• Insurgent Socialiser: Cats: 13

In first posting:

Fairly even distribution, except that Dolphins are rare: if you are loyal to the aims of Quora as an expert forum, you have confidence in Quora’s moderation policies. But the allegiance to Quora’s aim as an expert forum is more pervasive than the confidence in moderation.

Currently [UPDATE 2017–04–20]: Clearly many more bees and dogs—expertists—than dolphins and cats; since the initial results, cats are as rare as dolphins.

It was only when I read Dimitris Almyrantis’ response, that I realised the question refers to the ad hoc use of ASCII romanisations online—such as Greeklish for Greek, Finglish for Persian, Arabic chat alphabet, Informal romanizations of Cyrillic, and so on.

So my answer will be along the same lines as his and Alice Tsymbarevich’s: if you are a writer in a language that doesn’t use Latin script, how often do you switch to Latin script, either as a Romanisation, or as loan words?

• Dimitris Almyrantis’ answer to As a non-Latin script writer, how often do you use Latin script?
• Alice Tsymbarevich’s answer to As a non-Latin script writer, how often do you use Latin script?

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I am close to three decades older than Dimitris. (When the hell did *that* happen?) Because of that, I remember a time when Unicode had not yet permeated the world, when any language other than English forced you to jump through hoops of squabbling encoding schemes, and when it truly was much easier all round just to give up and use ASCII.

So how often did I use Latin script for Greek in the 90s? A lot. A hell of a lot. Online, much more than Greek script. And there were norms of Greeklish, and squabbles over the norms, and people able to read five or six different transliteration conventions in the one thread without blinking, because that’s just how it was, and there was never any possibility of standardisation. We didn’t even particularly regard that as a bad thing. And I have a residual affection for it, which Dimitris never had to develop.

More recently? There are still domains where ASCII is less hassle for Greek, but they are fewer and fewer, and I strongly suspect most Greeklish these days comes out of Greeks in Latin-script countries, using public lab computers (so they can’t install a Greek keyboard). I see Greeklish in YouTube or blog comments, and in reports of SMS chat; but it’s a lot less than it used to be.

I used to use Greeklish in the subjects of emails whose body was in Greek script, out of worry that the subjects would get mangled. I stopped worrying about that a few years ago.

When I was working at the TLG, I had a lot (a lot) of chat with my Greek colleague there about things we were programming together. He’d type in Greeklish, coz who can be bothered switching keyboards. I would try to type in Greek. But I was codeswitching so much into English for IT terminology (much more than him), that switching keyboards got infuriating for me too; and I’d often just stay in Greeklish.

EDIT: Here’s an example:

Nick Nicholas:

οχι [No]

ειναι front end [It’s front end]

John Salatas:

a den einai tou morphea? [Oh, it isn’t Morpheus’?]

Nick Nicholas:

einai, alla to pilateuw sto TLGMisc [*not script-switched back from front end* It is, but I’m futzing with it in TLGMisc]

οποτε δε χρειαζεται repos [*script switched* So it doesn’t need a …]

depopulation [*autocorrect*]

re population [… repopulation]

Contemporary Greek in general script-switches, in ways like Alice described for Cyrillic, although arguably much more so: foreign names are often left in Roman script now, and increasingly so are English unassimilated loans. Even if my technical Greek were better than it is, script switching for English-in-Greek is just a reality of typing Greek now.

Yes; see Why is the splashing sweat emoji associated with semen?

For evidence that this is happening:

• Definitions offered by the public under: U0001f4a6 Sweat Droplets Emoji
• Urban Dictionary: U0001f4a6

• A boy sends this emoji when he is horny. ” Hey send nudes?? [math]unicode{x1F4A6}unicode{x1F4A6}[/math]”
• A girl would send this to her man, basically telling him that she was wet, while a man would send this to his girl saying that he came. Also it could just mean cum.
  Girl (text): Make me wet big daddy[math]unicode{x1F4A6}unicode{x1F4A6}unicode{x1F4A6}[/math] Boy (text): You made me cum so much[math]unicode{x1F4A6}unicode{x1F4A6}[/math]

And, well, Google. Lots of instances where it means sweat. Lots of instances where it means water. And lots of instances where it means vaginal secretions or semen. Disambiguating emoji, such as the eggplant or the tongue, may be present, and they may not.

Australia. Nothing you will buy to eat at a lunch place in the CBD and that will go into a plate will cost you less than 5 USD. Add a coffee, insist that whatever goes in the plate be edible, and you’re not spending less than 10 USD. If I’m short of cash, I’ll make do with a sushi roll or two; 2 USD a piece. I often just bring in a can of tuna and some nuts.

For starters, the proper Dothraki pronunciation is [ˈxaleːsi], not [kʰaˈliːsiː]. That’s not canon from GRRR Martin, because GRRR Martin is a language dolt, but Peterson’s Dothraki is not mere funny-looking English.

Of course, it only matters what you heard the actors say on the TV anyway.

I agree with what Lara l Lord said: Lara l Lord’s answer to Is Khalisi a weird name for a baby?. I’ll add that, because “creative” names are reasonably recent in English, they remain contentious and subject to mockery, in ways that places with a more longstanding tradition of creative names won’t have: see discussion starting at https://www.quora.com/Is-Khalisi…

The mockery of people called Tarquin? Dharma? Neveah? Quest? The mockery of the names of Destiny, Mysteri and Cross, Carlton Gebbia’s kids from Real Housewives of Beverley Hills? It’s real. And it serves a social purpose. You may think you’re an untrammelled individual, and there’s no such thing as society. But there is such a thing as society, and mockery is how it enforces its norms.

See also Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why do English-speaking people often have strange first names?

Yes, and there’s a linguistic pragmatics set of principles at work there, over and above the inherent limitations of language pointed out by Daniel Bamberger : see Daniel Bamberger’s answer to Is there such a thing as “taking things too literally”?

The Cooperative principles defined by Grice are a way of making sense of how people don’t take things literally. The underlying understanding, when you’re talking with someone, is that your interlocutor is not being an arsehole, and is not talking to you just to troll you. You assume that what they are telling you makes sense and is relevant. So if their literal meaning comes across as trolling, you try to think up figurative and indirect meanings, which make what they’re saying make sense.

This kind of second guessing of literal meaning underpins humour, figurative language, metaphor, literature, wit, allusion—all the potent stuff in language. The fact that the meaning is indirect in such expressions, and has to be teased out by listeners assuming that you are not trolling them, is a big part of their potency.

And of course doing that teasing out of indirect meaning requires a large amount of emotional intelligence and social context—which notoriously puts autistic people at a disadvantage. But yes, there is a societal expectation that you will use Gricean principles to make sense of figurative language, and if you fail to do so, you are taking things too literally for that social norm.

Very broad question. I’m going to give you one recommendation:

Understanding Language Change by April M. S. McMahon. 1994.

Magnificent, and goes into a lot more of the mechanics of language change, informed by sociolinguistics, than the older treatments.

The linguistics textbooks will tell you that the unfortunate case of Genie (feral child) demonstrates that puberty delimits a window of opportunity for language acquisition, past which full language acquisition is not possible. Genie learnt enough English for the first time at 13 to communicate, but her English was never grammatical.

There are plenty of horrors surrounding Genie’s case, and quite apart from the monstrous lapses in ethics around how she was handled, any scientific conclusions gleaned from her are problematic.

Genie was cut off from any linguistic or social input, because her father was convinced she was brain damaged. If she wasn’t before, his abuse guaranteed that she was after. If she was handicapped before, which we have no way of knowing, her ability to acquire language may well have been compromised anyway.

On the other hand, she seems to have developed an adequate command of sign language (itself a political football between linguists and psychologists, while they were belly flopping on their professional ethics all around her). Sign language was the psychologists’ idea, not the linguists’, so we don’t really know how much better her sign language was than her spoken language. In any case, once she was released from the lab to endure further physical and sexual abuse, her command of sign language seems to have been impaired as well.

What have we actually learnt about first language acquisition from Genie’s case? Probably not as much as people like to think. And hopefully, we will never have the opportunity to repeat such an experiment again.

Tikhon Jelvis has just followed me, and I don’t want to annoy him by liking Go. 🙂

And I do like Go. But treating Golang as a general all-purpose language is silly and hype-y.

Golang is a low level, strictly typed language. It is almost as pleasant as a low level language can get: a lot of syntactic sugar has gone in to hide pointers and types from the developer, and to backdoor void * through the empty interface. (The interface is the one thing about Golang that I still bristle at.)

But the low level stuff is all still there. And it makes more sense to deal with low level stuff in applications where you need to, than in naturally high-level or prototype-y code. It makes more sense in context where it is useful to have a compiled binary.

I’m using Go in messaging infrastructure. I’m happy to, it makes sense to use a low level language there, and I’d rather cut Golang code than C code. (25 years of cutting C code does not make it any more congenial.) But I’d hesitate to use Golang in natural language processing.

(I find Python much more abhorrent than Golang, but in natural language processing, the library (NLTK) is king. If only Ruby had gotten there first.)

Performance, from what I gather, got better: my CTO was very enthused about the recent upgrade to v1.8 in the compiler, and you don’t care about compiler upgrades in more mature languages. The maturity nevertheless has come along, it seems, compared to earlier versions. The code is still low-level looking, and not at all as readable as Ruby or *shudder* Python; but because of the sugar, it is easier to write and to read than C.