Category: Uncategorized

To add to the others:

• Vote #1: Humphry Smith’s answer to In Ancient Greek, how common is this declension? It’s in the second declension group but called “attic declension.”
• Vote #1: Robert Todd’s answer to In Ancient Greek, how common is this declension? It’s in the second declension group but called “attic declension.”

The Attic declension is indeed specific to Attic: it represents a sound change specific to that dialect, whereby V̄ο > V̆ω, where V is any vowel that can be long. So Doric νᾱός, Ionic νηός, Attic νεώς.

As Robert Todd said:

Personally, I didn’t memorize these. I pick them up in continuous reading and apply the following mental adjustment to the “ο” stem second declension specimens – it it’s ο, ου, α then ω, if οι then ώ.

With λαγώς, you’re also seeing some vowels being merged together.

This is an annoying peculiarity of Attic, and Koine dropped it like a stone; abandoning the Attic declension is in fact a major source of Doric words in Koine.

I don’t even go as far as Robert in my memorisation: I just think “Oh, an omega is there. Attic Declension. I’ll treat it like an omicron. Or an omicron upsilon. Whatever works.” They really are just second declension nouns with a long final vowel.

The Filos Pergamos Bible is the 1993 translation by Spyros Filos, published by Pergamos publishers:

• Η Αγία Γραφή—Μεταφορά στη Νεοελληνική: Παλαιά Διαθήκη/Καινή Διαθήκη, Σπύρος Φίλος, Εκδόσεις Πέργαμος, Αθήνα, 1993/1994.
• Η Αγία Γραφή-Μεταφορά στη Νεοελληνική – Βικιπαίδεια

As discussed at https://www.quora.com/Are-there-… , my assumption is that the NTV is the “Four Professors’” translation of the New Testament, which was published by the Bible Society in 1967. But I don’t know that for a fact, and I don’t know what NTV stands for (New Testament Version? Neohellenic Translation Version?):

• Η Καινή Διαθήκη των Τεσσάρων Καθηγητών: Καινή Διαθήκη, Βασίλειος Βέλλας, Ευάγγελος Αντωνιάδης, Αμίλκας Αλιβιζάτος και Γεράσιμος Κονιδάρης, Ελληνική Βιβλική Εταιρία, Αθήνα, 1967.
• Η Καινή Διαθήκη των Τεσσάρων Καθηγητών – Βικιπαίδεια

Hello, Olivia. I’ve noticed you post a couple of things on Race & Ethnicity, but I’m flattered you’ve noticed me enough to A2A me this.

I’ve only ever received a couple of warnings. My story on my first warning, which *I* thought was ridiculous, is recounted in a two-parter:

What happened next? by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency

My first BNBR warning by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency

My friend Jennifer Edeburn and I have discussed this since. I see the argument for it; it’s Tatiana Estévez: “Having people insult each other as ‘banter’ doesn’t create a good atmosphere” by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency. I think it’s silly. But there you have it.

John Gragson thought that was even more chickenshit than the warning he got, as he commented at https://insurgency.quora.com/My-…. He got a BNBR warning for *that*. The irony, the irony.

And then of course there’s the moderation actions against Michael Masiello, Habib Fanny, Gigi J Wolf, Lara Novakov, Red Subijano, and Jeremy Markeith Thompson, that prompted my deactivation (and later on, most epic comic strip), as laid out in Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do you believe Quora moderation is doing a good and responsible job of maintaining this site’s policies? Why or why not?

There have been bans for formatting: I have seen a user who consistently used way too many bolds and caps and italics (her stuff read a bit like a ransom letter) get banned. (Don’t remember her name, but she was Indian, and posted a lot on Hinduism.) A very dim view was taken by Quora management in the Top Writer lounge, against a current teen user who used red colour in his posts. (“Severe violation.”) The ransom letter user was annoying, but “banned for formatting”… yeah, that looks bizarre.

There’s plenty of ridiculous-looking reasons about. Yes it can be argued that we only ever get one side of the story. Yes it can be argued that moderation needs to be “rule-bound” (translation: robotic) if it is to scale to deal with the population of Quora. Yes it can be argued that the guidelines are clear. (I’d argue against that: many of them, you could drive a truck through.) Yes, it’s Quora’s site, and they owe nobody any first amendment rights. Or anything, really.

And I still get to find some of the reasons for moderation sanction silly.

Stop reading this, and go upvote Michael Pothoven’s answer to What were the last years of the Byzantine Empire like in Constantinople?

I MEAN IT.

I’ll wait.

---

One of the conundrums of early Ottoman Constantinople is that there were many churches that were left alone after the Conquest, and not converted into mosques. The norm was that if a Christian city resisted a Muslim siege, all its churches could be converted to mosques; if the city surrendered, its churches would be left alone.

I don’t remember where I read this, but the solution to the conundrum I’ve seen proposed is that by then, Constantinople was so sparsely populated, that its outer suburbs were effectively separate settlements, surrounded by farmland. And those suburbs, cut off and living from subsistence farming, could easily have organised their own surrenders to the Ottomans, ignoring what was happening downtown.

Michael Pothoven paints a depressing picture of the last days of Constantinople. The detail I’ve given here, I find even more depressing.

User, Professor of Physics at MIT from 1966–2009, has just quit Quora after being edit blocked.

This is his farewell video.

Several of the topics he broaches on have been mentioned elsewhere, including:

• The place of humour in scholarship
• Quora vs Google
• Lazy do-my-homework questions on Quora
• Not feeling appreciated by Quora for the contributions he has made

There’s several things to discuss about this, but I’ll let you all tease them out in comments.

Oh, and he’s being actively courted by YouTube users to join Physics StackExchange instead.

The Albanian lëkurë means ‘skin, bark’. The German Leder means ‘leather’.

Consulting Vladimir Orel’s Albanian Etymological Dictionary:

lëkurë ‘skin, bark’ < *lauk-urā

lakur ‘naked’ < *lauk-ura

In both cases, *lauk– is derived from Indo-European *leuk̂- ‘to shine, to be white’.

German Leder, English leather < Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/leþrą < Proto-Indo-European *létrom ‘leather’. From The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, it appears *létrom is a word specific to Celtic and Germanic.

So, doesn’t look like it.

Nope.

Australians enjoy a good reputation in the parts of the world I have been to (Europe, North America), and I have not been to the parts of the world where they might not (India, Papua New Guinea?). I have been to New Zealand, but any animus there is jocular and reciprocated. The Austria/Australia confusion did not generate any disgruntlement I could detect while in Vienna or Salzburg.

I didn’t broadcast that I was Greek while in Istanbul, but I found that it would not have made a difference: the Thaw has happened. (I still did not feel comfortable volunteering that my father is Greek Cypriot.)

There are more countries in the world where it would make sense to hide that you’re Greek than that you’re Australian, but I haven’t been there either (countries immediately north of Greece).

As a general answer, rather than an answer as to your specifics, OP:

If a user has blocked you, they have chosen to stop all communication with you. That includes apologies. It is possible in theory for the blockee to reach out to the blocker; but it is extremely risky, and frowned upon, and “let it go” is good default advice:

• There are several instances documented here where the blockee meets the blocker at Quora meetup, and they’re having a mellow chat, during which the blockee asks “So, why’d you block me anyway?” And the blocker responds, “Oh, I did?” Sometimes, the blocker then even remembers to unblock the blockee.
• I have heard of instances where the blockee reaches out to the blocker via a mutual friend. You’d have to have a mutual friend, of course, who agrees to put themselves in the path of fire.
• There’s this approach: Do you think I deserved to get blocked for this comment to Habib Fanny’s fear of being killed on the basis of racial prejudice in USA? Now, this approach did work: the blockee expressed themselves unclearly, Habib assumed he was being attacked, and Habib accepted the blockee’s explanation and unblocked him. Note however:
• The question has since been deleted.
• The OP was universally derided in answers to the question that weren’t from Habib, and many of the reactions were decidedly un-BNBR. (The OP earned himself a block from one of the respondents in fact, just for raising the question.)
• Habib Fanny is a mensch. Most Quora users are not mensches.

My own prejudice is that someone who’s trigger happy about blocking is not someone I’d want anything to do with anyway. But then, I don’t often give people excuses to block me. (Not never, but not often.)

For Greek science and mathematics, e.g. Ptolemy and Galen, several texts survive only in Arabic translation.

The West was exposed to Greek philosophy and science via Arabic in the 1200s; the West only gained substantial access to the Greek originals in the Renaissance.

The Arabs did not, from memory, take substantial interest in Greek literature.

They’re minor things, but they’re things I keep slipping up on:

• Sometimes Golang hides the difference between a type and the pointer to the type. That doesn’t mean the asterisk is decorative. Most of the time, Golang doesn’t hide the difference, and you do need to put that asterisk in.
• It is idiomatic to assign foo, err := x multiple times in a row. Golang will let you repeat err as the second assigned variable. But it won’t let you repeat it as the first element: that’s always meant to be a new variable.
• If there’s any fluidity in your programming at all, the libraries you import will always lag behind the libraries you use.
• Strings are not byte arrays.

Compared to the smoking ruination that accompanies beginner’s errors in C, these are on the benign side, especially as they are often caught by the editor.