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.
Category: Uncategorized
How Reddit trolls have infiltrated Quora
I am passing this on from a source who prefers to remain anonymous. For obvious reasons.
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:
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.
Is Khalisi a weird name for a baby?
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?
Is there such a thing as “taking things too literally”?
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.
What are some good books to read about language families/language evolution/general linguistics?
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.
Did Quora add emoji support?
I’ve written on this several other places, but: the Quora editor natively supports Plane 0 Unicode characters, and has a mathematical formatting command, unicode{xHEX}, to allow Plane 1 characters. The majority of characters considered emoji are Plane 1. What you are seeing are the minority that are Plane 0.
With the mathematical formatting command, you can enter any emoji you want in Quora. And you will be reported shortly after, though that may involve a hasty edit to the current formatting policy. As Alexander Lee discovered with his use of red text.
Do you think that answering an “A2A” on Quora that’s late by two weeks or so is meaningless and useless?
Sometimes, being late to answer is doing a disservice to someone, if noone else has stepped up; e.g. Why have I reached my limit for making blog posts on Quora? (noticed and answered one week late).
But I get overwhelmed by my A2A queue. And the only way I can keep my sanity, and keep finding Quora enjoyable, is by acquiescing to the fact that:
- I don’t have to answer every question.
- I don’t have to answer every question first.
- If the question gets answered by other people badly, there is always time to offer your better answer later. I do it with random bad answers I find from three years ago, after all.
- If anyone wants an aooga aooga, mayday mayday, urgent answer… I’m not sure Quora is the place for them; *I*’m certainly not the answerer for them. My PMs are open if you want to push me along. It can backfire though.
How much of the Klingon language being spoken today was actually used on the series?
Marc Okrand, who invented the language, was a consultant on all the TOS Star Trek movies. He made sure all the Klingon spoken was canonical, and if the actors flubbed their lines, he retconned them.
Okrand was not involved with the Klingon used on the TV series. As a result, the TV series featured words like wIjjup for “my friend”, where –wIj is supposed to be a possessive suffix. And that’s when the script writers bothered to use the Klingon Dictionary at all.
Be hesitant with TNG for any Klingon utterances you hear that are one word long. Don’t take seriously anything more than one word long.
What is the neutral word order in Modern Greek?
SVO in Standard Greek. The linguist Erma Vasiliou has argued in her PhD that it’s VSO in Cypriot. http://arrow.latrobe.edu.au:8080…“
Which are the centers of Hellenism in USA, Canada or Australia. Do they have TV stations in Greek language?
There are Greek Communities in all capital cities of Australia, but the largest communities by a wide margin are in Sydney and Melbourne, and Melbourne is renowned as the main Greek Community.
SBS, the national multicultural broadcaster, has been putting out Greek programming on tv and radio for decades. Radio station 3XY, a rock music mainstay in baby boomer times, has been a Greek only radio station for close to two decades now in Melbourne. There is no homegrown Greek TV channel, but satellite TV and cable TV do a brisk trade in rebroadcasting content from Greece. Antenna has the cable TV channel monopoly.