Nick on Quora

Phonemes exist. That’s one of the key findings of 20th century linguistics.

Where do they exist? In the Noosphere I guess; but they are mental constructs which underlie not only our articulation of language, but also our mental organisation and understanding of language. So unlike a lot that is in the noosphere, they do have a psychological, measurable reality.

Letters (Graphemes) are a means of capturing phonemes in writing. They’re some arbitrariness to them, but they definitely have referents with psychological reality. So they are signs, and they have as much existence as any sign in the world—that is, as much existence as numbers or words do.

Vote #1 Christopher Kowalewski: That’s the working through of internal reconstruction that you only see the results of in the textbooks.

Now, Chad Turner suggests I’d know the answer. God, *I* don’t know the answer. But Sihler does: New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. Or at least, Sihler knows as much of the answer as there is to be known.

§531. Other tense and mood stems of the Latin perfect system are all based upon a combination of the Latin perfect stem, whichever that happens to be, with an element *-is-, of wholly obscure origin but most commonly imagined to be related somehow to the s-aorist. […]

1. Pluperfect Indicative. Functionally the past of the perfect, in effect, like New English had gone. Latin -eram, -erās, -erat from *-is- together with *-ā-, the optative formation which functions as an anterior tense marker in -bā- and erā- ‘was’. (The vowel of -er- is of course ambiguous per se, but its historical value can be surmised from the pluperfect in *-issē-, 4, below.) […]

3. Perfect Subjunctive. […] So *-is-ī- plus endings, whence by regular sound laws –erim, -erīs, -erit, -erīmus.

4. Pluperfect Subjunctive. Descriptively, the stem in *-is- with an additional element *-sē- of profoundly obscure origin; so *-is-sē-, whence -issem, -issēs, -isset.—The same *-sē- is found in the imperfect subjunctive.

So, to unpack this. If we look at the pluperfect ama-v-eram ‘I had loved’, the pluperfect person inflection (-m) comes from the same place as the person inflection of eram ‘I was’. And the vowel -ā- in -eram comes from the same place as the -ā- of eram. But the -er- in the suffix is not the same stem as the er- in eram. It is a development of proto-Latin *-isām.

And how do we know that the “wholly obscure” *-is- infix is not the same as the stem of esse? Because the -i- still shows up, e.g. in the pluperfect subjunctive. But also because a verb doesn’t get just plunked at the end of a finite verb, †amavi eram. If you have a compound verb in Latin, you expect the auxiliary to be combined with a non-finite verb, like amare habeo > French aimerai.

Add that the perfect –v– is specific to Latin (it’s absent from Sabine: Sihler §528), so it can’t be that old in the language: certainly not old enough that an †amavXXXXX eram could have been lost in the depths of time.

Quora’s Real Name Policy is nabbing you, as Konstantinos Konstantinides pointed out: Do I have to use my real name on Quora? What is Quora’s Real Names policy?. Quora requires you to use your legal name (or some close approximation of it: nicknames should be OK, but sometimes turn out not to be).

Legal names in English are capitalised. If you don’t capitalise them, Quora bots assume you are dodging your legal name, and possibly that you are falsifying your name somehow (pseudonyms on social media are routinely lowercase).

If you have legal ID with a lowercase rendering of your name on it, you can submit that to Quora, and require them to comply. … You will then quite possibly find that they can’t anyway, because they’ve automated Titlecase.

A front runner would have to be AKEL, the Cypriot Communist party, which has a history of support in both communities. In fact Turkish Cypriots felt particularly betrayed when AKEL eventually came out against the Annan plan.

The notes of the Ancient Greek musical system were organised into tetrachords, groups of four notes. Two tetrachords made an octave.

The central octave went:

{Hypate, Parhypate, Lichanos, Mese}, {Paramese, Trite, Paranete, Nete}

It gets rather more complicated than that; the paramese, for example, is an interstitial note, and the tetrachords keep going above and below the central octave. See Musical system of ancient Greece – Wikipedia

Was Newspeak inspired by Esperanto?

We know what Orwell was satirising, and why he was annoyed with Esperanto. Don’t worry about it. Orwell was if anything more annoyed with Basic English, and would likely be annoyed with any conlang. (One of the examples he gives in Politics and the English Language is from a text advocating Interglosa.)

Yes, there is an ideology behind Esperanto. It does not actually influence the linguistic materials themselves terribly much. The ideology is benign, as far as those things go (Lanti’s Sennacieco, which Orwell bristled at, was as overt as it ever got), and is not as much in the foreground as it used to be anyway.

I can confirm Edward Conway’s answer, as I was who he tested it out with.

I was surprised that moderation can not only scrutinise but edit PMs, but Nikki Primrose has just reported the same experience: I received a notification that I’d violated BNBR but the link was to a message in my inbox that I’d never replied to. What is that about? She got Benburred (h/t La Gigi) for receiving an offensive message (?!), but her correspondant got his message removed from her inbox.

My first surmise is that someone reported you, but..

… OP, this was happening while you were typing? That sounds… draconian, and unmanageable. And it certainly doesn’t sound like a reaction to a report. It does sound extraordinary that people’s PMs should be prefiltered, especially for something relatively innocuous.

I don’t know that you can get it back; but an appeal to mods is always worth trying.

Yes, Shashank, I know. 🙂

Would be nice, wouldn’t it. I’m not aware of one.

Quality of course can’t be gauged automatically, but the request answers popup doesn’t even bother telling you who the Most Viewed Writers are, let alone sort them accordingly.

Oh, but it does show you their bios. Which are now credentials. That should tell you something…

Thanks for A2A… I think.

From Fecal incontinence – Wikipedia, the closest I’m seeing is fecal leakage. But that doesn’t have the implication of controlled but misconstrued bowel movement that a “shart” has.

Googling is not yielding a more formal term.

The way I see the world, it is noticeable not to acknowledge someone acting on your A2A. Human beings function that way. Quora may think they are above human sociability (which is why they keep denying that this is also a social site). But Quora users are not.

I don’t obsess about every upvote, but I will certainly notice it if noone upvotes an answer I’ve given—including the A2A’er. And I will read something in to that.

What form should the acknowledgement take? Well, there are multiple forms, and there is widespread confusion about exactly what the Thank button is for (How many of you use Quora’s “Thank” function after reading a good answer? Is sending “Thanks” without upvoting kind of like a backhanded compliment on Quora? What is the difference between sending “Thanks” and agreeing with/upvoting an answer on Quora? These features seem kind of similar.) My own behaviour, like Edward Conway’s, is to reserve Thanks for very good answers.