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In the 19th and early 20th century, there were several phonetic alphabets and spelling reform proposals in circulation; Romic alphabet was one instance. Linguists working on different languages had their own transliteration conventions in place, for use not only in citing non-Roman languages, but also for dialectal transcription.

The International Phonetic Association was initially founded to promote Romic; but in 1888 it devised a single, language-neutral phonetic alphabet, the International Phonetic Alphabet, to serve as an international standard. So its historical significance was in overriding the disparity of spelling reform proposals, language-specific transcriptions, and multiple phonetic alphabets, with one international standard, which has gained ground continuously since. Think of it as the metric system for phonetics.

And just like the metric system, there is one country that holds out against it:

Americanist phonetic notation

On the one hand, as the Wikipedia article points out, that’s slightly unfair: the Americanist notation is a systematisation of the various pre-IPA, diacritics-based transliterations, and it is still used plenty in reputable contexts: it’s fine to transliterate Russian <ч> as <č> if you’re doing transliteration instead of phonetics. Like citing a name or something.

Historical linguistics also holds out against the IPA, and uses traditional transliterations instead. So a Sanskrit retroflex n is going to be written as <ṇ>, and not /ɳ/. The Gothic Hwair is going to be transliterated as <ƕ>, and not <ʍ>.

If on the other hand you are using the Americanist notation in a discussion of synchronic phonetics—well, as far as I’m concerned you should be bastinado’d.

But I think that of the imperial system as well.

https://www.quora.com/careers/wr…

Quora’s mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge, and internationalization is a critical part in achieving this mission. We recently launched Quora en Español, and we’re eager to make Quora available in more languages soon. Quora is looking for a Writer Relations Manager to activate and manage the writer community on Quora auf Deutsch.

As part of the marketing team and cross-functional internationalization team, you will play a dynamic role in helping early adopters, active contributors, and influential figures find success on Quora auf Deutsch from the beta period, launch, and beyond. You’re a native German speaker, curious, driven, and excited to make a significant impact in helping achieve the company’s mission. This is a full-time position based in Quora’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, with some travel required.

Responsibilities:

• Help attract, encourage, build, and manage Quora’s writer community in German-speaking markets
• Be an active member of the Quora auf Deutsch community
• Evangelize Quora’s policies and take responsibility for major moderation decisions affecting active writers
• Develop and execute marketing strategies targeted towards recruiting valuable to Quora
• Pursue growth-related partnerships and opportunities for Quora
• Work closely with Product and Engineering teams to better understand Quora auf Deutsch users

Requirements:

• Passion for being part of an active writing community
• Experience growing and managing online communities
• Mastery of German language; ability to write prolifically with proper grammar
• Fluency in English
• Deep understanding of German culture and internet industry trends
• Proven ability to work independently with enthusiasm, energy, and drive
• Experience working with technical teams at product-centric companies
• Thoughtful usage of Quora and passion for our mission

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

I do not need one, but I do want to give some away! It advances my goal of increasing the readership of Dispatches from the Other Language Quoras, for one.

PM or comment to get one.

EDIT: No more invitations available!

They did. The French Revolution inspired a lot of Greek intellectuals in the two decades before the Greek Revolutionary War, laying down the theory for what a Greek state should look like. In his Memoirs, General Yannis Makriyannis mentions the great warriors who have inspired him to deeds of valour; his list includes George Vasikhton.

A queer little word, querent, and one that tripped me up when I beheld it come from the Magister:

Michael Masiello’s answer to Why do many students believe that their major will limit or prevent them from getting jobs or degrees in other fields?

Sure, there are other means of finding this out, but Quora is a Q&A site, and these querents probably hope to hear from people who have made the transitions they’re curious about.

Others have used the word on Quora before; Adrián Lamo has a particular fondness for it. But if you search for the word in questions, you’ll notice a common theme:

• How do I communicate bad results to a querent as an astrologer?
• In Lenormand tarot, what does it mean if the querent appears in the last column with no future ahead?

I fancied myself as recognising the word, I know my Latin: querent < quaerens, one who asks. Yes. But there’s more that I’d missed:

Definition of QUERENT

inquirer; specifically : one who consults an astrologer

Querent – Wikipedia:

Querent became used to denote “a person who questions an oracle” because it is usually when one has a problem that requires otherworldly advice that one would seek out the oracle in the first place. This oracle may simply be a divinatory technique, such as the I Ching, that is manipulated by the querents themselves without recourse to any other human agency. Alternatively it may involve another person, someone perhaps seen as a “fortune teller” – particularly a practitioner of tarot reading or other form of mediumship – from whom advice is sought.

Now, The Magister is no common Quoran using a fancy word because it looks fancy. The Magister is, well, The Magister.

By calling people who ask questions querents, he is implying that they seek professional advice from Quora, looking upon it as an oracle. Or tarot reader. Or astrologer. Or Magic 8-Ball.

I’m a bit incredulous at the other reactions to this question; but of course, you’ve A2A’d the right person.

You’re right, OP. bind and band and bundle all mean similar things. A band is something that you bind things with. An bundle is a bunch of things that have been bound together. Hey, bound is the past tense of bind! And for that matter, there’s also bond, which is a binding agreement. And as it turns out, bend as well (Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/bandijaną), possibly because you bend a bow in order to bind it.

If you go to bind – Wiktionary, you’ll see that every one of those words derives from Proto-Indo-European/bʰendʰ-.

So if they’re all related, why do the vowels change?

Because Indo-European used ablaut to indicate various kinds of grammatical change. Ablaut involves vowel change in the stem, instead of using suffixes or prefixes to the stem. It is an old process, which is no longer productive; but you see it all over the place in several branches of Indo-European. You see it in the strong verbs of English: sing sang sung. You see it in the German stems underlying your three words: Proto-Germanic/bindaną, bandiz, bundą.

You’ll see it in Ancient Greek too. The related words temnō “I cut”, atomos “uncuttable”, at–mētos “uncut” are parallel to sing sang sung.

A fair bit of philosophy and logic (and theology, which they were bound up with) was done in the West, and was built on subsequently. The De dicto and de re distinction is Thomas Aquinas’ handiwork, for example.

European nationhood is mostly a Romantic era creation, but its raw materials came out of the Middle Ages. As others have alluded to, modern Western literature and art in some aspects was built on mediaeval foundations (though a lot of it was also reinvented in the Renaissance, based on classical foundations).

The Middle Ages kept a critical mass of the Classics around, although it is fair to say that they did not make as much use of the literature as they did of the philosophy (and history, at least in the East).

There’s not a lot to be had in the region of course. From the Greek perspective:

• Serbs are our “brothers in Orthodoxy”—but I don’t know if that actually amounts to a positive stereotype. I don’t think relations between Greeks and Serbs have actually been close enough to rise to the level of positive stereotype.
• Albanians may have been vilified at the start of the mass migration of the 90s, but latterly they have actually become the model minority. Nationalists still hate them, but more moderate Greeks, my impression is, admire them for their work ethic, and for their readiness to assimilate.
• This is of course because there are migrants further down the pecking order now. Like Bulgarians…

Well, not as spectacular a story as some. Just answers.

7 days:

5k is on the low end, so maybe less traffic than usual. I have been busy with freelance work this past couple of weeks, so I have been writing somewhat less than my usual deluge of stuff. Spike yesterday is from the inexplicably popular Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are some cultural faux pas in Australia?

30 days:

That’s more like it: it varies between 5k and 10k these days. Some spikes, but actually no one overwhelming answer.

3 months:

The gaps at the start are of course the days the stats died (The Statistics Black Hole by Nick Nicholas on The Memes of Production). The peaks are my most viral answer to date, and not an answer I take any warm fuzzies in: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Which Indian states are well known in other countries?

Vote #1 Jay Wacker: Jay Wacker’s answer to What exactly is Wikidata and what is its relationship to Quora topics and questions?

To break down what Jay said just a bit further:

An ontology is an organisation of concepts in the world. Quora’s existing hierarchy of topics is one, contributed to by Quora askers, Quora topic gnomes, and whatever the initial seeding of it was within Quora.

Wikidata’s ontology is a rather bigger ontology. It has been contributed to by Wikipedia editors, in all the various language versions, and many other online projects.

In addition to the benefits Jay has mentioned: the Wikidata ontology has more information about its topics than the Quora one does. In particular, it has more explicit links between subtopics and their parent topics; more identification of topics as people; more identifications of topics as places, and the geographical coordinates of those places. (As well as all the information contained within the related Wikipedia articles; and the infoboxes in Wikipedia are all machine-readable by design.)

By matching Quora topics to Wikidata topics, Quora can work out parent/child topic links, which are pretty crucial to how topics are used. (You have to explicitly tell Quora that sociolinguistics is a subtopic of linguistics, and if you don’t, people subscribing to linguistics will not receive new sociolinguistics questions. Multiply that by every new topic ever.) Quora can produce maps of location topics, and work out which places are close to each other, which can also help the related topic suggester. Quora can narrow down which topics are (famous?) people. Quora can work out which topics are bona fide ambiguous, where it hasn’t already.

Questions and answers rely on a topic ontology. Quora is now upgrading from a smallish homebrew ontology, to a much bigger and authoritative homebrew ontology.