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To corroborate John Simpson’s answer to In “whosoever looks upon a woman to lust after her,” might that ‘to’ indicate a purpose clause?:

The Greek literally says Ἐγὼ δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν ὅτι πᾶς ὁ βλέπων γυναῖκα πρὸς τὸ ἐπιθυμῆσαι αὐτῆς, ἤδη ἐμοίχευσεν αὐτὴν ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ αὑτοῦ, “towards the desiring of her”. That “towards” is indeed purposive, and it’s also not particularly Classical in taking an infinitive (though Classical Greek did use it as a purposive preposition: πρὸς τί “to what end?”, literally “towards what?”)

Classical usage of the infinitive with πρός is more literal: πῶς ἔχεις πρὸς τὸ ἐθέλειν ἂν ἰέναι ἄκλητος ἐπὶ δεῖπνον; “what is your attitude towards going to dinner uninvited?” But in this context, it looks clearly purposive to me.

I’ve wanted to know the answer to this question bad enough, that I want to spend time in Corfu or Zante next time I’m in Greece.

Though as a friend has justly pointed out to me, there’s no way I’d grok the cultural differences between the Ionian Islands and the rest of Greece as a tourist within a couple of days at a resort hotel.

The music is Italianate: mandolins and barbershop quarters. There’s less Turkish in the dialect. But from the stories written by Konstantinos Theotokis | Greek author in the early 1900s, the peasantry was as patriarchal and closeminded in Corfu as they were in Thessaly or Crete. My suspicion is, not massively different. The peasantry were the peasantry, and whether the local overlord was a nobleman in the Libro d’Oro or the local ağa didn’t impact their daily life.

I hope someone else can tell more!

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.

I am passing this on from a source who prefers to remain anonymous. For obvious reasons.

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Some weeks back, an Anonymous poster wrote how some people were deliberately posting trolling questions. The answer in question was posted on Facebook, but it appears that the Quora moderators didn’t take any action, if the recent reappearance of trolls is anything to go by. Quora users User and Hardik Chopra are two troll accounts that have been made to post questions like this.

Meanwhile, it turns out some users from Reddit are responsible for it.

Reddit links:

• Trolling Sapiosindianpeoplequora • r/
• I did this. • r/indianpeoplequora

I want to point out that most people on that subreddit are *not* deliberately posting questions like this. It was made just to laugh at silly questions and answers by Indian Quorans. But some people have now deliberately started to post questions like this in hope of getting a response and annoying others.

For those of you who are not Indians, IIT’s is merely the Indian equivalent of Ivy League. Their chief obsessions is attacking IIT’ s and IIT’ians on Quora because they think that IITians get far too much attention here from Indian students who are preparing for its entrance examinations and also from other people.

overview for gdchgdxht0 is Hardick Chopra

overview for 9852174563_ is User

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.