Nick on Quora

What you’re after is a country with an exaggeratedly strong nationalism, to the point of chauvinism, but not spilling over into racism. So you want a maxed out civic nationalism.

France invented civic nationalism, but they asssimilated all their indigenous minorities aggressively, and they’ve botched their assimilation of the Beurs, so that’s not a good example.

I’ve lived in three countries, Australia, America, and Greece, all with healthy chauvinism.

Greece.

There is a (popular?) school of thought in Greece that is xenophobic and racist. There is an (elite?) school of thought in Greece that emphasises culture over ethnicity, and exults that as long as you embrace our culture, you’re one of us. And they trot out Isocrates, Panegyricus §50 to support that: Isocrates

I have no problem accepting what Wikipedia says—that this is not what Isocrates meant at all, and the passage was actually an assertion of Athenian cultural chauvinism. And I don’t care. It’s a valid viewpoint, not because Isocrates did or didn’t say it, but because civic nationalism is a healthy thing that the Balkans needs more of.

Historically, “people are called Greeks because they share in our education” is what’s happened with the Arvanites and the Vlachs, to mention the two “loyal minorities”. And my (elite?) heart rejoices, when I see little second generation Zaireans speaking in Greek slang. Or knowing that the Nigerian Dr. Sam Chekwas so fell in love with Greek culture while he studied there, that he ran the only Greek bookstore in Astoria NY (Greektown, America), for decades.

You know the Greek Nazis chanting Δε θα γίνεις έλληνας ποτέ, Αλβανέ, Αλβανέ? (“You’ll never be a Greek, Albanian!”)

Those fuckers will never be as Greek as Dr Sam Checkwas.

… But. That’s the elite storyline. I think the popular storyline is winning. And that Greek nationalism is contaminated with racism.

Australia

Australian nationalism was contaminated with racism from the beginning. The White Australia policy wasn’t an aberration, it was part of what defined both the Commonwealth of Australia and the Australian labour movement.

It got up-ended in the late seventies, by the elite. The elite defined Australia to have civic nationalism. That was the actual point of multiculturalism—a point lost on the masses, who think it was only about “um… cuisine?”

Once again, I rejoice in that civic nationalism. I rejoice that I can be proud to be a citizen of this country, without having to genuflect at the altar of Damper (food) and Aussie Rules. I rejoice that no fucker gets to tell me “Go back to where you came from”.

But that’s a luxury of Greeks now being pretty well assimilated (I’m an outlier generationally—my parents came here at the end of the wave, and I spent time growing up in Greece). As you may know from the news, plenty of Australians never stopped telling people to Go back to where they came from; they just have been targeting more recent arrivals. And blocking even more.

So Australia’s not off the hook either.

America.

The US, too, was founded on racism.

But you tell me, American Quorans. Can an African-American, despite the lynchings and the whips, despite the microaggressions and the macroaggressions, despite feeling besieged and occupied in their own country—look at the flag, and still say “USA! Fuck yeah!”?

If they can, Dimitris, you have your answer.

For every meme, there is an equal and opposite, except even dumber meme. But somehow…

… I think the existence of this meme means something.

Well, linguistics is the scholarly discipline whose subject matter is language.

Historical linguistics is the scholarly discipline whose subject matter is the development of language through time. It explains language in terms of how it historically developed to get to this point (its diachrony).

Up until the 1920s, historical linguistics was the mainstream of linguistics. Saussure, himself an important historical linguist, identified that language is a system which needs to be made sense of on its own terms, as a contemporary phenomenon (its synchrony).

This led to Structuralism, which uncovered a lot of the structures of language that Historical Linguistics had missed, because they were treating language as a process and not a system. Historical Linguistics for example did not really differentiate phones and phonemes; it didn’t need to. The distinction is essential to phonology. And after Structuralism, other approaches to linguistics have continued to be synchronic.

Historical linguistics has been marginalised in all of this, and is very much niche now. Historical linguistics has been enriched by our better understanding of synchronic linguistics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics. But it is unfortunately out of fashion, with a lot of shortsighted linguists thinking it’s boring and old hat.

Fashion. Never forget that all of scholarship—not just the squishy humanities, but the sciences as well—are about fashion. There are fields of inquiry that fall out of fashion, and it’s not always for objectively sound reasons.

Inexplicably, OP, you’ve A2A’d me.

I played in school orchestra, and gave that up for university. I did have my dreams crushed later, with academia.

And for all that it’s the worst thing to have happened in my life, I would not take it back. It’s made me who I am.

So I don’t know about pit orchestras, although I am grateful for what they do, but I do know about dreams being crushed.

Allow me to say some avuncular shit per your request. Some of it will crush your dreams. Some of it should. None of it means you should not pursue the profession.

---

• Even the dream job is still just a job.
• With petty admin shit, with office fights, with jealousies, with long hours, and with not enough personal validation. There’s group validation, as part of a team; but that too is fleeting. It’s work.
• The pay is shit, and you gotta eat. Expect to be doing a day job. If you’re lucky, it’s a day job with its own set of fulfillments. If you’re unlucky, it’s like your night job, but even worse. Work out whether you’d be cool teaching or not.
• It’s not a soloist gig, but it’s still a gig to which many are called and few are chosen. (Unless you’re a violist; they’re always in demand, and it’s worth the lameass viola jokes.) Have a plan B. And C, and D. In fact, that applies now for any job ever, but it especially applies to the performing arts.

You know what I’d tell starry eyed kids wanting to do a PhD in linguistics? Do it, only if you can’t imagine yourself doing anything else in life. Otherwise, spare yourself the heartache.

I’m proud that I talked my best student out of it, and I hope she’s got a fulfilling career as a psychologist somewhere.

If your inmost soul craves being in a pit orchestra, Hayley, make it happen. But please go into it with your eyes open.

The fact you’re asking this suggests you will. Good luck!

*checks profile*

Oh and OP? You’re 16. You’re British, which means your uni situation is not as dire as in the US, so you still have time to dip your toe in and change your mind.

This has been mentioned several times elsewhere here, and it’s not just Australian, it’s a British inheritance. Though I think we here have ramped it up to eleven. And it certainly disconcerts visitors. Hell, it’s disconcerted me.

If Australians like you, they will make merciless fun of you.

If they’re being civil to you, that’s when you worry.

This has been brought up here as a partial explanation for Australians’ casual racist sounding banter: that the emphasis is on the banter, and the racism is not malicious. Maybe, maybe not; it’s complicated. But we certainly aren’t a nation to tiptoe about race relations, for better and worse.

But yeah. I did a launch of our department’s Working Papers, which I’d coedited, when I was 25.

I was heckled.

That was apparently a show of affection and respect. Who knew.

Exceptionally (or maybe not?), I’m including an academic book.

For Dimitra Triantafyllidou:

Speros Vryonis: The Decline of Medieval Hellinism in Asia Minor

(Unless she reads it first)

Our first argument on Quora, and it seems, an ongoing one, on whether the Greek population in Asia Minor was discontinuous between the arrival of the Turks (13th century) and internal migrations in the Ottoman Empire (16th century).

Vryonis’ work is the work that historians cite to prove that Greeks had been thoroughly assimilated in Western Turkey. About time I satisfied myself on how strong the proof is.

I encourage my followers stumbling on this to read the other answers. (I always do!) My perspective is rather different from theirs.

I’ll speak to Constantinople rather than Moscow, though I suspect it’s the same story.

Under the Ottoman Empire, the Orthodox Patriarchate was two things which would have blocked the Reformation.

• The Patriarchate was the ethnoreligious authority for the entire Rum Millet, the Orthodox Christian subjects of the empire. If you gave up on being Orthodox, you gave up on being Roman, as far as both the Christians and the Muslims of the Empire were concerned. (And Greek Catholics were not Romans, they were Franks.) So switching denomination was not meant to be a casual thing, it was a wrenching thing with huge implications for you, both politically and socially.
• It wasn’t really much different in Germany at the time, I guess…
• The Patriarchate was a deepset force of reactionary conservatism. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh and Voltaire-ish, but it really was. Just the venom heaped on vernacular Greek renderings of the Gospels is enough to tell you that. And Greek nationalists may well not have learned this at school, but the Patriarchate condemned the emergence of nationalism in the 18th century, as an unwelcome Western heresy. Not because the Evil Turks told them to. But because the Millet system worked just fine for them too.

There are only two Patriarchs from the Ottoman Empire that anyone outside a seminary has heard of, and I would love to be proven wrong.

• Gregory V of Constantinople was hanged at the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence. Not because he was a Greek nationalist: he was the guy condemning the emergence of nationalism. But a useful martyr to have on your books.
• Cyril Lucaris

OK, you may not heard of Lucaris. But plenty of Greek intellectuals have.

Know why people have heard of Lucaris? He was a thinker. He promoted education. He sponsored the first vernacular translation of the Gospels. He was in dialogue with Calvinists and Anglicans. He may have been responsible for a Calvinist-oriented Confession, and of course there was raging controversy, both then and now, about whether he had crossed over to Calvinism himself.

He was the closest the Patriarchate came, in fact, to the Reformation.

He had lots of enemies in the intrigue-ridden Church, he was deposed four times (!), and he was hanged by the Ottomans in 1638, on the pretext of disloyalty.

His legacy within the church?

The Council of Constantinople in 1638 anathematized both Cyril and the Eastern Confession of the Christian faith, but the Council of Jerusalem in 1672, specially engaged in the case of Cyril, completely acquitted him, testified that the Council of Constantinople cursed Cyril not because they thought he was the author of the confession, but for the fact that Cyril hadn’t written a rebuttal to this essay attributed to him.

In my opinion, that’s why the Reformation didn’t spread between Orthodox Christians.

This has been in my inbox for a while, and I didn’t know how to tackle it.

I want my brain acknowledged. For sure. I want my publications strewn around me, the children I got to have. But they too will be dust eventually. My plan to have them laminated and sent to Svalbard looks to be a non-starter.

So, what to have them say, what to have them say. For me to know that it has not all been in vain.

And then, Habib le toubib came up with what I’d want them to say. In a confoundingly, grotesquely different context.

Habib Fanny’s answer to If you knew you were about to be thrown into the woods, but could only bring one item, what would it be and why?

I was a decent person who by and large tried not to be a dick

Yes. Yes, that will do nicely.

Accelerated selection of the fittest. Where being loyal, cuddly, and Neotenous is no longer what makes you the fittest raptor dog. Bye bye labradors.

Dog leash manufacturers go out of business. The civil aviation authorities might need to work out a deal with city councils, in better tagging raptor dogs.

Significant changes in dogfood manufacture.

Significant drop in the popularity of drones. The raptor dogs really will be treating drones like frisbees.

Significant increase in the military’s use of raptor dogs. Helps them deal constructively with the loss of their drone investment.

Une jolie question, Mlle Demoritto!

This guy:

And not the fly-swatting end of it either.

My sister, my mother would have to chase around the house. I just dutifully held out my hand for it to be over and done with.

That may explain some things. I dunno.

The Jahwist, as in the hypothesised earliest source document of the Torah? I’m dismayed to find from Wikipedia that the documentary hypothesis is now falling apart, and increasingly scholars think there was no one unitary Jahwist document. Doesn’t matter to me if the Jahwist was a bunch of bits; that bunch of bits is still more interested in Judah than Israel, and still features Yahweh as a petty anthropomorphic figure.

The classic documentary hypothesis dates the Yahwist to the 10th century BC, although that too is now out of favour. That would certainly be the earliest date for a Yahwist corpus.

So the question becomes, what was the language of 10th century BC Judah?

Still Hebrew, although you can legitimately argue about how distinct palaeo-Hebrew and Phoenecian were at that early time. It’s the time of the Gezer calendar, discovered 20 miles west of Jerusalem.