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.
The proper answer is Kutluk Ozguven’s: Kutluk Ozguven’s answer to Why do some Greek surnames end with “oğlu” which means “son of” in Turkish?
Turkish Republic did not enforce surnames to its population before 1934. Turks had patronymous names like in Arabic countries or Iceland.
However Greeks and Armenians used family surnames of their choice. Unlike post-nationalist myths Greek Orthodox and Muslim populations were closer and more dependant to each other […]
Population exchange between Greece and Turkey was from 1923–1933. […]
Since Oglou was a sign of Turkish migration who were scorned upon in their arrival, many might have changed to more mainland Greek surmames.
Some didn’t bother.
Indeed: –oglou is a patronymic suffix specific to the descendants of refugees in Greece from Asia Minor; I’m not aware of any serious traditional usage within Greece in the 19th century. As Kutluk pointed out, Christians took up Turkish surnames in Turkey before Muslims did.
Often, that surname suffix was dropped by the arrivals in Greece, in favour of something more Hellenic. And nothing is more Hellenic than the Ancient Greek patronymic –ides. (Because of how memes happen, –ides also supplanted the Greek Pontic patronymic –ant[is], as in Ypsilanti[s].)
So if you see a surname ending in –ides, chances are the bearer is descended from Asia Minor. (Or Cypriot, where –ides also came into vogue. And these really are matters of vogue: in Crete –akis is universal as a surname suffix, and it was unknown before the 19th century.)
The surname Σαλπιγκτίδης Salpingtides, for example, is quite Hellenic, and rather challenging to romanise (you’ll usually see it as Salpigktidis in English.) It’s Ancient Greek for “bugler-son”—and it’s a transparent Hellenisation of Borazancıoğlu.
Some refugees refused to switch their surnames. The father of my coauthor George Baloglou was a refugee from Sille, near Konya. He kept his surname, which is Turkish for “honey-son”. Most of his extended family switched it to the Hellenised Melidis.
How about religious rights of muslims in Greece?
… Yeah, how about them? 🙂
Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why does the Greek Orthodox Church have religious hegemony in Greece?
When the Modern Greek State was founded, Orthodoxy became the state religion quickly; and it was considered coextensive with Greek national identity. That has allowed it a hegemony that Western Europeans are uncomfortable with; the Church of Greece gets veto, for example, on building places of worship for any creed, which is why there still isn’t a mosque in Athens. Is the 180 Year Wait for an Official Mosque in Athens Finally Over?
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.
Because Quora may have greater confidence in what its bots can do than most users have, but even Quora does not yet claim it has automated utilitarian ethics.
No need for concern though. We have been assured that all Anonymous questions are being carefully vetted before publication now.
😐
I’m so sorry I didn’t notice this A2A.
Quora has a time limit on blog posts. I got blocked for ten blog posts in half an hour.
Other answers on Quora asserted that the block was temporary. After 4 or 5 days, my block was not lifted, and I asked for Tatiana’s intervention. Tatiana lifted my block, and said it was a bug. When I asked for some assurance that it would not happen again, she repeated it was a bug.
So. Bug.
Let us know how you go!
This answer is an antithesis of Franklin Veaux’s answer, which I find unhelpful. I find his answer boils down to “because the West is right about sex”. And that’s not an explanation of “Why is the West so open about sex?”:
Because, through long experience, we have learned that societies are healthier, more egalitarian, safer, more fair, and more just when their members are open about sex.
(Who’s we? The contemporary West has, and South Asia or East Asia has not? Because what, the West is better? Wiser? More experienced? And yes, the West cares whether a society is more egalitarian or safe; that is not a universal value.)
Being closed about sex cloaks sex behind a veil of secrecy and shame. And when you treat sex with secrecy and shame, people suffer.
(The West has been an exemplar of treating people well, without secrecy and shame? The West has attained the pinnacle of righteousness, that the rest of the world strives for?)
I mean, you can believe all that. Hell, most of the time, *I* believe all that. But that’s hardly an answer to the question. Why the West?
Well, first of all, it was not ever thus. The West has waxed and waned about how open it has been about sex: the Elizabethans more than the mediaeval, the Victorians less. The Sexual revolution was foundational to the current Western openness about sex; and it was not a divine spark of inspiration that favoured only the West, it was an outcome of particular social pressures that converged by accident in the West.
And it’s not me saying so, it’s Wikipedia:
The Sexual revolution combined with some foundational attributes of Modern Western culture that Franklin presupposes, but that need to be made explicit:
Most of these are particular to the West. And it hasn’t gone smoothly and inexorably, and there’s a lot of reaction to it, particularly in America. But the confluence of factors has been a Western confluence, not a global confluence. Hence, the West is more open about sex than other parts of the world.
For obvious iconic reasons. It is the Emoji that looks the most like ejaculate. Even if it takes some imagination.
And food dye.
[math]unicode{x1F4A6}[/math]
What I find amusing, and of course semiotically inevitable, is how thoroughly this secondary meaning has become conventionalized. You’ll see the Emoji used to refer to ejaculate, without it being disambiguated through additional emoji. Such as, say, the eggplant.