Nick on Quora

Do you mean, Rage against Quora, which has just been deleted?

It was good while it lasted. The rest is speculation.

My experience in studying Elec Eng at Melbourne as an undergrad was 25 years ago, so it would be monstrously unfair of me to answer this question.

I’ll do it anyway.

See how my bio says “former Sessional Lecturer at University of Melbourne”? That was in Linguistics, not Elec Eng. 🙂

That’s on me: I enrolled in Science/Engineering because it had the highest entrance score in the state and because I liked maths, not because I tinkered with a soldering iron. (I actually did get some electronic kits back in the day, but they didn’t maintain my interest.)

But still: Melbourne when I went through was utterly theoretical—and not even Good theoretical; it was much more “shut up and learn the formula” than not. They didn’t push practical anything particularly. Everyone knew that RMIT was where you got that kind of exposure, and that RMIT had the real industry links.

Of course, I got my degree in the middle of the Keating recession, and there weren’t a whole lot of jobs about in Australia in Elec Eng. But almost every one of my peers ended up a programmer instead. Which was the Science bit of their Science/Engineering degree.

Interested to hear if that’s changed.

Literal translation—and for a change, I’m ok with that:

ἅπαξ μόνον βιοῖς.

Hápax mónon bioîs.

Since Rage Against Quora has just been deleted, it will be difficult for this question to be answered.

I tested this on Necrologue. I checked a dozen recent bans, including people I knew had bios.

You are right.

I find this offensive.

As it turns out, I have read Christ Recrucified and Freedom and Death in Greek, and the Last Temptation and Zorba only in English, in Bien’s translation.

I have not read anyone else’s translation, so I can’t answer your A2A fully. The astonishing folksy stylistics of Kazantzakis are not going to come through in English. That’s actually just as well: an attempt to make them come through would be too distracting, as it is in translating Cavafy.

But from memory, Bien’s translation rang true to the spirit of the novels I had read in Greek. I recommend it.

I do it a fair bit. Sometimes to start a conversation, although that tends not to work that well. Sometimes because I’m having a discussion in comments, I’m asked a question, and I think it’s useful to get the answer out there. Less often, because I want to get some information out there of my own accord.

Quora policy says there’s nothing wrong with that, and I don’t think there is either. I own the answers, the community owns the questions. I might as well contribute to the community the questions that prompt good answers out of me.

Myself, I think it really is that people expect everyone to be notified about their comments, when they are new to Quora.

Remember that, with no onboarding, it takes a little while for it to become apparent who gets notified of anything, to begin with. It took me a couple of weeks to realise that my comments three levels down would not be read by the original commenter.

Yeah, what the rest of you good people all said, Robert Todd and Amy Dakin and Humphry Smith. It’s correct; it’s dysfluent; and given the pedagogical context, it’s excusable.

That’s why I love podium-arts.com by our own Ioannis Stratakis. He doesn’t dwell on it and drag it out in his recitations, he just gets on with it. It was a real language, after all.

It’s very hard to know. Language change is a bunch of stuff that happens, and language does not always change in an optimal direction. Greek has certainly retained its equivalent words, proxtes and methavrio (and even one more day out: antiproxtes, antimethavrio), it’s not like the concept had become suddenly useless.

The following is necessarily speculative. And these would be necessary but not sufficient conditions for the change.

• The formations were no longer semantically transparent, and sounded archaic. Ere and morrow were obsolete. Over meaning day after was likely a dead metaphor.
• The formations were useful, but not essential. So they did not have to be replaced when they dropped out of usage. We had days of the week, and we had calendar dates.
• More speculatively: as a highly literate society, the early modern English were more across what day of the week and date it was, than their mediaeval English counterparts, or their Greek contemporaries. If you are a peasant and don’t regularly go to church, why would you need to know what day of the week it is? I know I have no idea what day of the week it is, when I’m on holiday.

EDIT: Vote #1 Brian Collins: Brian Collins’ answer to Why have the words “overmorrow” and “ereyesterday” gone? Was it easier for speakers to use “the day after tomorrow” instead of “overmorrow”? OED tentatively agrees with him that overmorrow, ereyesterday were made up by Myles Coverdale. (See my comment there.)