Nick on Quora

We can. Anyone can answer anything about anything, Quora’s creeping credentialism notwithstanding.

As a Quora reader, you have the responsibility to weigh against each other peoples’ credentials, answers, tone, and the exchanges they have in comments (including errors and disagreements pointed out there).

It really varies according to who I’ve been upvoting of late. Currently, the first two people on my feed refresh are Vicky Prest and Jordan Yates, with astonishing regularity. A month ago, it was Laura Hancock week. I get notifications from Michael Masiello, which I presume is why he’s not more heavily represented on my feed.

Dimitra Triantafyllidou and I have a running pretend feud about how we disagree about lots. We don’t disagree about lots, though, and we’re always pleasantly surprised when we disagree about anything! She gets an upvote when we don’t, and she gets an upvote when we do: she argues her point well, and sometimes even changes my mind.

Don’t tell her I said that, though.

I benefit from different political opinions to my left, and I particularly appreciate answers from Victoria Weaver. I’m not going to become a communist, but I’m interested in where’s she’s going with technocommunism, and we have enough good will for each other that’s she’s promised me a lovely bridge to shoot me under, when the Revolution comes.

No, I haven’t listed Clarissa Lohr here. I don’t know that I actually disagree with her all that much. She’s too circumspect about her own ideology for me to.

On my right (and to me, American libertarianism is to my right) I did upvote Rob Weir a fair bit, because he presented that ideological perspective cogently, and I was vaguely interested to hear more. More vaguely than the Quora feed assumed I was: I was soon deluged with libertarianism 24–7, and I ended up muting him.

When Bergsland and Vogt (1962) debunked the assumption in Glottochronology that core vocabulary is lost at a constant rate among languages [Bergsland, Knut; & Vogt, Hans. (1962). On the validity of glottochronology. Current Anthropology, 3, 115–153], the lexically conservative language they brought up was Icelandic.

The lexically innovative language they brought up was Inuit, which has taboo replacement of words. (If a word has been used as the name of someone recently deceased, or even sounds like it, you get rid of it. It might come back in a couple of generations, if anyone remembers it.) Australian indigenous languages do the same. Such languages may well be stable grammatically, but their vocabulary undergoes a huge amount of churn.

Just to get the ball rolling:

• Short variable names
• Error checking routines (the !err testing gets prolix quickly)
• Never use a var when you can use a :=
• defer is your friend

OP, you know about the first translation of the New Testament into Modern Greek by Maximus of Gallipoli, in 1638! That is awesome!

And it would be awesome if that was the version that the channel used in the video:

But no. The text is Neophytos Vamvas’ translation, and you can read along here:

N. Vamvas (Bambas) Old and New Testament

You did some great detective work: of course it’s Byzantine Text Type, it’s an Orthodox translation.

The language does look a bit old fashioned, doesn’t it? Not just Koine old fashioned, and not straying very far from the syntax of the original: Τας εντολάς εξεύρεις “you know the commandments”. It sounds not just katharevousa, but positively 18th century.

And indeed: his New Testament translation dates from 1833, with the Old Testament following in 1850.

Here’s the Wikipedia article about the translation: Η Αγία Γραφή, Τα Ιερά Κείμενα Μεταφρασθέντα εκ των Θείων Αρχετύπων – Βικιπαίδεια. And here’s a speech about him from the Archbishop of Athens: Ο Αρχιεπίσκοπος κ. Ιερώνυμος μιλά για τον Νεόφυτο Βάμβα.

The Church of Greece seems to be friendlier towards him now than it would have been at the time: he (or his collaborators) translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew and not from the Septuagint, and knowing he’d get no support from the Orthodox Church, he’d cooperated with the protestant British and Foreign Bible Society, which the Orthodox Church loathed. (In fact his translation is the preferred translation of the Evangelical and Pentecostal churches of Greece, and had also initially been the translation used by the Jehovah’s Witnesses.) This Orthodox blog post attacks it as a translation from the King James Bible: Λάθη στή μετάφραση τοῦ Βάμβα. Χρήστος Σαλταούρας.

Vamvas got the idea for the translation in Paris, working with Adamantios Korais, started the translation as a teacher in Corfu, completed it as a teacher in Syros, and then got a job as a philosophy lecturer in the new University of Athens, where he ended up as Dean of Arts.

The Vamvas translation was the only modern translation until the 1960s that didn’t provoke street riots (unlike the demotic translation of the New Testament by Pallis in 1902); and given that it is not a Demotic translation, I suspect it is the favourite of the Orthodox church now, even if they distanced themselves from it beforehand.

While I roll my eyes at The Mission Statement, Quora has stated two rationales for its walled garden which guarantee that the Internet Archive will stay on their spider block list:

• Authors retain copyright for their contributions, and Quora only retains a non-exclusive license to publish. The terms & conditions do not authorise blanket republication elsewhere without the author’s permission, and Quora would consider spidering to be republication. It’s why Quora is so restrictive on author’s self-archiving: you can only archive your own posts, and you can’t include others’ comments.
• Quora wants people to be able to unperson themselves from Quora—to delete their accounts and contributions to Quora, without them being retrievable elsewhere.

Laura Hancock and Vicky Prest, especially when Laura changed her profile pic to what basically looks identical to Vicky’s profile pic at small resolution.

I said *small* resolution.

In fact, I saw a selfie on a post by Vicky once, and was about to comment “hey, I thought you never posted pictures of yourself”—only to realise oops, Laura.

And I think it’s more the profile pics than anything else. I mean yes, they have some similarities: both cool, both non-het, both sex positive, both “outspoken”; but really, not *that* similar.

OK:

ἀγάπα σεαυτόν agápa seautón. That’s the imperative. Konstantinos Konstantinides’ ἀγαπᾶν σεαυτόν agapân seautón is the infinitive “to love yourself”. The quote from St Matthew in Evangelos Lolos uses the future indicative agapēseis: “you shall love your neighbour like yourself.”

Chad Turner went with the middle voice imperative of philéō: φιλέου “be loved [by thyself]”. The verb is fine—Greek philosophers used philéō more than agapáō, and I think agapáō became more popular in Koine. But the cultural resonance of the New Testament use of agapáō is pretty strong; and while the middle voice as a reflexive is intelligible, the unambiguous reflexive seauton is a lot clearer. (If you want to use this verb in the imperative, it’s φίλει σεαυτόν phílei seautón.)

OK, let’s dispense with hora quickly. Not to belabour it, but yes, coincidence.

Probabilities add up pretty quickly in real life, in a way that clashes with our seeking of patterns: See Birthday problem – Wikipedia. If you put 23 randoms in the same room, there is a 50% probability that two of them will share the same birthday.

The probability is so high, because the coincidence is not that, say, Amy and Nick both have the same birthday on August 29. It’s that any two people out of the 23 will have the same birthday on any of the 365 days of the year. That’s a lot of possible coincidences.

Two random bisyllabic words in two languages, sounding kinda similar and meaning kinda the same thing? It’s guaranteed. Coincidences do happen.

The Bulgarian word for “come!” being elate, and identical to Greek ελάτε? That’s a lot more plausible as a loanword.

The most random spread of Greek, I’d say, is meli in Hawaiian: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are some (longer) words that appear or are considered false cognates, but which could plausibly be actual cognates?

What’s the furthest spread of Ancient Greek in lexis? It’s a great question, and I don’t think I’ll do it justice.

• Via Christianity, there’s a smattering of Greek words in most languages with a tradition of Christianity. Bishop and church barely look like episkopos and kyriake [oikia].
• Via Latin and Modern scholarship, there’s more than a smattering of Greek words in probably more languages by now.

Neither of those are what you’re after though.

• There are some Greek words in Hebrew, such as sanhedrin < synedrion, Epikoros < Epicurus.
• Then there’s um… *googles*… *finds hit in Google Books*… *hey, I own that book!* A History of Ancient Greek (I own it in the Greek original).

This leviathan of a book has 110 pages on language contact between Greek and: Semitic, Thracian, Illyrian, Phrygian, Carian, Lycian, Lydian, Iranic, Etruscan, Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, Celtic, Indic, Arabic. (The contact could be either way.)

They’re all neighbours of Greek, and the furthest reach is Indic. Let me pick the far reaches I find interesting:

• Iranic: Middle Persian dēnar, Modern dīnar < δηνάριος. Middle Persian drahm, Modern dirham < δραχμή. Middle & Modern Persian almās < ἀδάμας ‘diamond’. Middle Persian asēm, Modern sīm < ἄσημος ‘silver’. Sogdian nwm < νόμος ‘law’. Khotan Saka lakāna < λακάνη ‘basin’. Pashto mēčan, Ormuri mučin < μηχανή ‘grindstone’.
• Gaulish: possibly calques, e.g. goddess name Rocloisia ‘listener’ < ἐπήκοος, tooutios < πολίτης ‘citizen?’
• Old Indic stratega < στρατηγός ‘general’, meriakha < μεριδιάρχης ‘battalion commander’, anakaya < ἀναγκαῖος ‘honorary title, initially relative of ruler’; these military terms lasted for just a couple of centuries, and never made it into Sanskrit. Sanskrit did borrow some trade terms: khalīna < χαλινός ‘bridle’, paristoma < περίστρωμα ‘bedcover’, kastīra < κασσίτερος ‘tin’, melā < μέλαν ‘ink’.
• Sabeshan Iyer adds: kēndra < κέντρον ‘centre’, suranga < σύριγξ ‘tunnel/underground passage’
• Arabic: any pre-Islamic loans are via Aramaic or Persian; e.g. dirham. In the Koran, the only loans direct from Greek are fulk < ἐφόλκιον ‘ship’ and possibly iblīs < διάβολος ‘devil’. Another 15 words are via Aramaic or Pahlavi; e.g. zawǧ < ζεῦγος ‘pair’, qamīṣ < καμίσιον ‘shirt’, burūǧ < πύργος ‘tower’.