Nick on Quora

Remixing the others’:

Ut succurramus innovantes agiliter: To support by agilely innovating.

Vote #1 Alistair Smith: He’s got the most important stuff. Alistair Smith’s answer to What are the top 10 things everyone should know about Melbournians?

We are coffee snobs, we (well not me) are sports mad. We dress in black, and we wear layers because of the volatility of the weather. We (and I guess South Australia) are more lefty than the rest of the country; right wing shock jocks are much more a Sydney thing.

Alistair did #1–#6. I’ll add these as #7–10:

• We dislike Sydney. This is a fairly commonplace kind of city rivalry, and takes the form of sneering at their lack of culture (yes, they have the Opera House, we try to forget that). The worst thing we could say about the generic sitcom Hey Dad..! was “What do you expect of a comedy filmed in Sydney”. TV stations will try to keep the Sydney origins of most Australian TV shows quiet here.
• We have geographical divides. There is an impoverished West and an affluent East. There is a North of the River/South of the River split. People living in hipster Brunswick (such as, oh, everyone I knew at Melbourne Uni) would never venture any further south than St Kilda. Which is not very far south.
• There is an old stuffy class-conscious elite in Melbourne, though you really have to dig deep to find it. My one experience of it was being introduced to the venerable old historian Geoffrey Blainey, only to be asked by him whether I was related to the Nicholas family of Nicholas Aspro fame. (Australian Dictionary of Biography)
• Then again, Googling for links to them, maybe it’s just as well I’m not: Bloop, bloop, bloop – another one bites the dust.

Didn’t the Nicholas “Aspro” family write the book on the intergenerational pissing away of the family fortune?

• You will learn very little about Melburnians from watching The Real Housewives of Melbourne.

Oh. Vote #1 Alistair Smith.

Andrew Baird has blocked me, so I’ll post here my corrective that the Parthenon blew up because the Venetians bombarded it. Yes, the Ottomans stored their gunpowder there. They figured the Franks would never destroy the old stones they venerated. And there was noone in the Ottoman realm with the concerted evil of Michel Fourmont: the Ottomans, like their Greek subjects, did benign neglect of antiquities, not systematic destruction. They were not Wahhabis.

In fact, his picture of the Parthenon is an excellent illustration of what’s happened to the Ottoman presence in Greece for a different reason, and not even metaphorical. The Acropolis remained in use as the Athens citadel for millennia. There were any number of Byzantine, and Frankish, and Ottoman structures on the Sacred Rock. They were extirpated from the site in the 1830s, in the service of the single narrative of Hellenic Antiquity.

And a lot of the physical remains of Ottoman Greece were dispensed with in the same way. Particularly in Athens, and in Thessalonica only somewhat less so. (Not to mention turning the Hamza Bey Mosque there into the Alkazar porn cinema.)

So you have to look around to find minarets, and they’re something of a surprise when you do find them.

I’m not merging this with What are the differences between American, British, and Australian English accents? , but many answers there already get into this:

• Andrew Smith’s answer to What are the differences between American, British, and Australian English accents?
• Orin Hargraves’ answer to What are the differences between American, British, and Australian English accents?
• Tanay Sukumar’s answer to What are the differences between American, British, and Australian English accents?
• Anonymous’ answer to What are the differences between American, British, and Australian English accents?
• Fannana Mazumder’s answer to What are the differences between American, British, and Australian English accents?
• Paolo Lim’s answer to What are the differences between American, British, and Australian English accents?

Your safest starting point is to take What are the differences between British English and US English? , and triangulate it with What are the differences in grammar between Australian English and British English if any? (minimal), and How can you tell the difference between an Australian and an English accent? Obviously there are many regional differences, but are there any tricks to quickly differentiate? (more). We’re getting some vocabulary from American, and a little bit of spelling (though that’s more the fault of spellcheckers); but Australian English is closer to British than American English overall.

What I would have answered your question about my country (Australia) is largely already in Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do Australians like being Australian citizens?

But I’ll pretend I didn’t already answer it.

Many of the best things about Australia, it shares with the US, and they have a similar reason.

• The optimism.
• The social mobility.
• The relative (relative) lack of sectarian and ethnic conflict.
• The relative affluence.

In addition:

• The professed (professed) egalitarianism.
• The irreverence.
• The healthy (healthy) skepticism.
• The relaxed attitude to life.
• The beaches.
• Lamb.

The best things about my country (Greece) are:

• The depth of history.
• The lyricism of both its high and its popular culture. Which is bound up with its depth of history—and not just its Ancient history.
• The ability of Greeks to have a good time, at any pretext.
• The level of political engagement, and political education.
• The theatricality of interaction between people.
• The beaches.
• Lamb.

Yok, Mehrdad dostum. İstemiyorum.

Assimilating country names into a target language is something I have a lot of affection for. I don’t regard it as disrespectful, but as familiarising; I regard the alternative as exoticisation. I get greatly annoyed when I hear Greeks speak of themselves in English as Hellenes, or refer to Hellas.

We have six centuries in English of referring to Turkey as Turkey in English (and the -y suffix shows how old the word is in English; it’s not a new word like Serbia or Lithuania). That’s not a bad thing, that’s something to be proud of. It’s history. And respect for a country is also about respect for your history with that country.

How does one measure it? I’ve already responded to something similar: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Does the Greek language have a variety of regional dialects? and Nick Nicholas’ answer to Which of the Greek dialects sound harsh to a standard Greek speaker?

The most deviant “dialect” of Greek, Tsakonian, is not mutually intelligible with Greek, and outside of Greece is generally referred to as a distinct language.

I’d rather answer the question details:

Which one is regarded as being the closest to the standard language?

Peloponnesian. In fact, as a result of that, Peloponnesian dialects have been studied only minimally; people assumed there was nothing interesting there. Nikos Pantelidis has made his career as a linguist from pointing out that isn’t true; but I fear Pantelidis came along a century too late to find the really interesting stuff.

Which one is considered the most divergent?

Tsakonian and Cappadocian of the obscure dialects. Of the widely known and still spoken dialects, Pontic, followed by Cypriot.

Is there any kind of prejudice attached to those who speak any of these dialects?

Oh yes. They all bear the stigma of country bumpkinness; Greece is culturally very centralising. Northern Greek dialects (which sound the most different, because they’re missing half their vowels) get the stigma routinely; but all the dialects suffer it, ultimately. My cool aunt in Athens told me how lovely and singsong Cypriot was, not like her native hillbilly Thessalian (“stinks of the barn” is how she put it). A few days later, we’d channel-surfed past Cypriot TV, and she said “I always find it difficult to take them seriously, speaking their dialect on TV.”

The nice thing is when the prestige accent of Athens gets counterstigmatised. Mostly in Cyprus, for sociocultural reasons (they’re an acrolect of a live diglossia), but I’m pretty sure I heard the rapid-fire unaffricated speech of Athens mocked in Crete too.

Like Dylan Sakic, I’d need a lot more context, but here’s a stab.

Καθώς πρέπει is a calque of French comme il faut, “as it should be done”. It refers to social propriety, observing social etiquette, but it has an intense connotation of hypocrisy and stuffiness; it’s the kind of thing that “bourgeois” gets inevitably prefixed to.

Why are you picking up a Greek Orthodox angle to it? Presumably because the Orthodox Church is the repository of social conservatism in Greece, especially now that Greece is no longer a traditional society.

The opposition Nixon was truly worried about was the China Lobby, who determined US foreign policy for a couple of decades. But by 1972, the China Lobby seems to have been spent.

There was certainly opposition from conservatives, which is why it took Nixon to go to China to begin with. But their voices were drowned out in the applause.

From MacMillan, Margaret. 2007. Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World. New York: Random House.’

p. 297

[Taiwan] had counted, too, on the ability of the of the China lobby to keep American governments in line. They had failed to see that it was slowly fading away, although they should perhaps have taken notice when its chief organizer abruptly resigned in 1969 and moved to London to start producing plays and when the New York Times referred to the “once powerful China Lobby.”

p. 321–322.

At 98 percent, Nixon’s trip to China registered the highest public awareness of any event in the Gallup poll’s history. The right wing fulminated to little apparent effect. A furious Buchanan threatened to resign from the White House staff on the grounds that the United States had made a deal with a Communist regime and sold out its ally Taiwan, but in the end he did not carry out his threat. The conservative journalist William F. Buckley Jr., who had been brought along on the trip in an attempt to win him over, publicly condemned the Shanghai communiqué and went off to support John Ashbrook of Ohio, a little-known Republican congressman who was trying to stop Nixon’s reelection.

There’s a lot of complaining about Quora in this blog. I’m going to be putting more personal stuff in this blog, so I’ve decided to hive off Quora criticism into a new blog, The Insurgency. I’ll be forwarding existing posts from here into the new blog.