Go to Uri Granta’s answer to Why can’t I use some basic emotional marks and emoji on Quora?
Open Suggest Edits.
Discover that emojis, and Plane 1 characters, ARE INDEED SUPPORTED BY QUORA, via its unicode macro. [math]unicode{x1F60E} unicode{x1F631} [/math]
And if you do start using emojis, don’t be surprised if people start reporting you for bad formatting.
Quora did not have any staff on the ground in a Spanish-speaking country, as of the launch of Quora en Español:
Quora in Spanish, which for the moment will be managed entirely from its headquarters in Mountain View in order to create a homogeneous product. (Some thoughts on the launch of Quora in Spanish – Enrique Dans)
In their interviews at around the time of the launch, D’Angelo and VP of Engineering Xavier Amatriain emphasised the importance of machine learning in many aspects of Quora, including moderation:
A glance at the English version suggests they are on the right track: in addition to an impressive moderating system that allows good answers to surface in the early stages and gain a high level of visibility, the company uses machine learning to carry out tasks such as moderation, spam detection or choosing the recommended questions for each user. In fact, the reason why Xavier Amatriain was signed up was his experience in the development of the largely recognized algorithms for Netflix recommendations. (Some thoughts on the launch of Quora in Spanish – Enrique Dans)
As of 28 October 2016, users on Quora en Español had the impression that there are no native-speaking moderators: ¿Hay actualmente algún moderador en Quora que sea hablante nativo de español?. I discount Aurelio Germes’ answer, that the community is self-moderating so Quora staff receiving moderation requests should not be considered as moderators. Maria Sefidari’s guess in that answer is that while there are more or less a dozen moderators on Quora in English, there are only one or two for Quora en Español, given how recently it has come out of beta; but she anticipates that it will grow and will include native speakers.
There is only one staff member with the title “Writer Relations International at Quora”, as far as Google is concerned, and they are also mentioned in the press released about the launch of Quora en Español. While I do not know what the job description “Writer Relations” involves, moderation appears to be a subset of it.
EDIT: Sihem Soibinet-Fekih, French Writer Relations, is also based in Mountain View, but is a native speaker of French.
I was a late convert to fish; it grossed me out until adulthood, and even now I’m on the picky side. But I do have a holy trinity of fish faves:
As OP hinted, Greek is one. English is not one. The difference between the two is, I believe, instructive.
Greek planitarkhis πλανητάρχης means “planet ruler” (or “planet leader”); the Classicising form of it in English would be planetarch. The term was coined in Greek in the early 1990s, when the fall of the Soviet Union meant that the world transitioned from two superpowers to one. The term refers to the US President, as the most powerful man in the world under the new dispensation: Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής. It is commonplace in journalistic Greek, which loves those kinds of figurative flourishes: the Greek press would rather use “The Planetarch” in headlines than “Obama” or “Trump” or “POTUS”.
Looking online, Google Books confirms it as a post-1991 word: the first instance cited is from 1993, in a fictional conversation with Bill Clinton in Takhydromos magazine (“You’re a Planetarch, I’m just an inhabitant of the planet.”) Recently, the term has also started to be used more loosely, to refer to world champions in sport (Olympiakos basketball team, Andy Murray, Lewis Hamilton).
Recent news reports, somewhat gleeful about a prospective diminution of American power, are eager to speculate that the mantle of planetarch is passing to Xi Jinping (Ο Σι Τζινπίνγκ θέλει να γίνει… πλανητάρχης)
or Vladimir Putin (Νέος πλανητάρχης ο Β.Πούτιν: Κυρίαρχος στη Σύνοδο των G20 – Eπεισόδιο Κίνας-ΗΠΑ και γελοιοποίηση του Μ.Ομπάμα (εικόνες-βίντεο) – Pentapostagma.gr). Of course, what that really means is that we’re moving back into a multipolar world where there is no single Planetarch; but Greek journalistic cliches are going to be slow to adjust.
Alexis Heraclides in 2001 (Hē Hellada kai ho “ex anatolōn kindynos”) identifies the expression as originating in Greek:
Οι ΗΠΑ γίνονται «ο Αμερικάνος», ο «ιμπεριαλιστής», ο «Πλανητάρχης» (το τελευταίο ίσως είναι μοναδική ελληνική πρωτοτυπία).
The USA is reduced [in popular parlance] to “The American”, “The Imperalist”, “The Planetarch” (the latter is perhaps a unique Greek original coinage).
I would be delighted to hear of any other language with a similar expression.
English, of course, does not have an expression like “Planet Leader” (outside of science fiction). What it did have, up until the fall of the Soviet Union, was Leader Of The Free World. That term acknowledged the duopoly of power before 1991, just as Planetarch acknowledges the temporary monopoly of power after 1991. English also has World Leader, which is again an explicitly multipolar term: there are always multiple World Leaders, not just the one.
As shown by both the Wikipedia definition and answers to the Quora question Why is the President of the United States of America sometimes referred to as the leader of the free world? Is this term still true today?, Americans are rather embarrassed by that old Cold World locution “Leader Of The Free World”.
It was heavily referenced in American foreign policy up until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, and has since fallen out of use, in part due to its usage in rhetoric critical of American policy.
The Quora questions, written from an Anglosphere perspective, suggest that the world is already too multipolar for “Leader Of The Free World” to make sense, and the allies of the US too independent-minded. You can see why an American or a Brit would think so.
You can also see why a Greek, with their national discourse of being victimised by Great Powers, would be inclined not to think so: weak countries are hyperconscious of hegemony, in a way that hegemons aren’t. So where Americans see bickering French and Russian challenges and plucky Britain, Greeks have long been inclined to seeing one overriding hegemon bossing everyone around, even when that picture doesn’t quite ring true anymore. (And when it doesn’t, they pass on the mantle to Putin or Xi, rather than recognising that there is no mantle any more.)
So if other countries have a similar discourse of Planetarchs, they won’t be in the Anglosphere, and they likely won’t be close allies of the US—who would make a point of avoiding a discourse claiming that the US rules everyone. They’d be countries like Greece, which are either powerless or which like to think they’re powerless.
There are a few others, but they are mostly neighbours of Greek and Latin, or else motivated by them.
Writing systems using two separate cases are bicameral scripts. Languages that use the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Coptic, Armenian, Adlam, Varang Kshiti, Cherokee, and Osage scripts use letter cases in their written form as an aid to clarity. Other bicameral scripts, which are not used for any modern languages, are Old Hungarian, Glagolitic, and Deseret. The Georgian alphabet has several variants, and there were attempts to use them as different cases, but the modern written Georgian language does not distinguish case.
Now, of these, Cherokee, Osage, Deseret, Adlam, Varang Kshiti are recent scripts, that got the idea from Latin. That leaves us with:
So all the scripts that have case are either modern, and got the idea from Latin, or were neighbours of Greek. They developed case either at the same time as Greek and Latin (9th century), or later on.
The explanation is that case was a meme that originated in Latin and Greek, at the same time—independently or not, who can tell; it originated as a space compression technique associated with the high cost of parchment; and it spread out geographically from Greek to its cultural neighbours. It didn’t spread any further than Armenian and Coptic. Arabic and Syriac would have been next, and I don’t think their letter shapes would have made sense with case. Amharic would have made more sense I guess, but I don’t know how much cultural contact there was between Coptic and Amharic, and I don’t think casing was that prevalent in Coptic anyway.
Russian: Addressing taxi/bus driver by “шеф”/”командир” – where does it come from?
A taxi, and particularly a bus driver, is the “chief” or “commander” of a small mobile unit with a lot of “horsepower.”
Such a driver is also responsible for the safety of several passengers. At least in New York City, this person is “in charge” not only of the vehicle, but everyone that is in/on it at any given time. A bus driver has the right to ask a passenger to move (to balance the vehicle) give a seat to a handicapped person, or do other things that make vehicle safer. Assaulting one carries extra penalties otherwise associated with assaulting a policemen.
Any Russian speaker in the city would understand why such terms are used.
In fact, Russian is a far better illustration of “master” for bus drivers than Cypriot Greek, which the question details suggest.
The Cypriot Greek term alluded to in details is mastros, which is cognate with master in English, and which derives either from Old French maistre or Venetian mestre. It has a cognate in Standard Greek mastoras, which grammatically points back to Byzantine Greek maistor, and ultimately Latin magister. (Of course, magister is also behind maistre and mestre and master.)
The thing is, words related to master don’t just mean “master”. Some of you will have noticed me address Michael Masiello as Magister, for example. That’s the (Mediaeval) Latin for “teacher”. A teacher is a master of their pupils, particularly in the old school way of schooling.
In Cypriot, the primary meaning of mastros is “boss”. A boss is a kind of master, but it’s the kind of master that makes sense under contemporary capitalism, rather than mediaeval feudalism.
There is a secondary meaning in Cypriot of mastros, which corresponds to the primary Greek meaning of mastoras. That meaning is “craftsperson, tradesperson”, and by extension “expert”. And it’s the friendly term with which you address a builder, a plumber, a carpenter, and so forth. It acknowledges their exercise of a practical skill.
That sense of course is hardly alien to English: we have master craftsmen and apprentices, we speak of someone being a master of their art or craft.
I don’t know for a fact why a bus driver in Cyprus is addressed as mastros. It could be, as in Russia, that you address him as “boss” because the vehicle, and your life, is entrusted in his hands. My own hunch is that you address him as “craftsman”, like you would any builder or plumber, out of deference to his professional exercise of skill.
See
There have been many proposals for spelling reform in English over the years, and in fact the variant spellings color and –ize have been around for a long time. (They reference Latin and Greek respectively, whereas colour and –ise are taken from French.)
As discussed in English-language spelling reform – Wikipedia, the spelling reforms proposed by Noah Webster had the most success of any, but they only succeeded in the US. Not all of his proposals were accepted: see 26 of Noah Webster’s Spelling Changes That Didn’t Catch On
Active users are roughly 3% of all users, last time the now deactivated Laura Hale checked: Percentages of active accounts by Laura Hale on quora numbers. Is there a significant differential between active and inactive users for the national proportion of users? Maybe, but I don’t think Laura had looked into it.
The latest data from Alexa (Mar 2017) is:
Quora.com Traffic, Demographics and Competitors
India exceeded the US in 2014, by quite a margin: Shreesha Mokhashi’s answer to What are the numbers and percentages of Quora members by country?
For my favourite folk story, I refer you to:
Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are some Greek folklore stories?
Vote #1 Daniel Ross: Daniel Ross’ answer to Were ancient Greeks and Persians aware of their Indo-European roots?
I don’t have a rabbit to pull out of my hat, like Daniel Ross mentioned I did for Latin and Greek. But there is a related question:
And my take in that question was:
Probably. And they probably wouldn’t have cared.
Not aware of any ancient authority explicit pointing out cognates, even though some words of Old Persian Herodotus cited were, I think, cognates.