Nick on Quora

Some astonishingly good answers, particularly Ben Kelley and Melodie Neal.

To a European, we are clearly New World, and closer to the US than to Europe, as others have explained. Melbourne is more European (and it has gotten even more European since the 90s, with the promotion of foodie culture and laneway restaurants in the CBD); but that doesn’t make it very European.

We are still a long way from anywhere, and relatively isolated geopolitically if not commercially. Our cityscapes are still spread out and very suburban compared to Europe. We still have a dearth of engaged citizenry and public intellectuals; which is why Waleed Aly is too good for us (and I’m happy he’s gotten himself a commercial infotainment forum). White Australians have an acute dearth of history. Traditional Anglo-Australian (“Aussie”) culture is somewhat on the wane, which is not really a positive development, and likely more a victim of globalisation than of us ethnics.

OTOH: we are not weighed down by history, just like the US isn’t. We still pay some lipservice to egalitarianism; class is emerging (popular derision of “bogans”), but it’s nowhere near as entrenched as it has been in at least some of Europe. We are a placid, confident place to live, though not as placid or confident as we used to be. We are no longer a cultural wasteland. Clive James, bless him, was part of a mass exodus of intellectuals to Britain in the ’60s; he’s recently admitted that they were too stupid to recognise that there was a cultural upsurge happening just as they left, from the new European migrants.

Yes, the majority narrative of why multiculturalism is a good thing stops after “um… cuisine”. And there are clear and pressing problems ongoing with our indigenous community, with the xenophobic mistreatment of asylum seekers, and with the twin problems of the failure to integrate Lebanese Australians better, and the stoking of islamophobia that takes that as a pretext.

On aggregate, I’ll still say, our rendering of multiculturalism has translated into a somewhat less rooted, yet open and resilient society. So far.

No. To ask a question, you need to log in. When you login, your account reactivates. So you have to deactivate it again afterwards.

I’ve already broken up with Mary C. Gignilliat on this one. And made up again.

And we’re not even together.

Days? No. Hours? No.

Mehmet Usta is reputed to be the best Turkish restaurant in town. 47 mins. No problem, I’m there.

I think the longest drive we’ve done (that’s me and my wife, not me and Mary) is 1.5 hrs to a Sardinian place in Yea, Victoria. But the pleasant drive in the country was part of the deal.

Because they think a library is not a place of silent study, but a place of either

• group study
• checking your Facebook feed
• socialising
• eating lunch (!)
• or being on the phone to their mates (!!)

Incidentally, having just been subjected to the first three in my local public library, where I came for some peace and quiet,

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE!!!

I don’t care if you’re reciting the periodic table in cute off-the-boat Greek accents. Fuck off and do that at the local café.

The more interesting question is, was it ever thus, and is it everywhere thus? The answer is no. When books were being used in libraries, rather than decorative (so, 20 years ago), there really was a lot less of that.

A commendable initiative, Martin!

I will of course leave out (a) Facebook friends who never actually did anything here, (b) people I actually don’t remember, and (c) people with answers in the single digits.

3 + 7.

1. Michael Lining. 10 answers, 5 followers

He’s a trumpeter and a recording artist, which should have gotten my follow.

Instead, he got my follow for this:

Michael Lining’s answer to How do you feel about Donald Trump winning the election?

He voted Trump, and he explained why, in a forum he knows is anti-Trump, respectfully and intelligently.

A lot of you are freaking out right now. Hell, a lot of me is freaking out right now. But this guy is not the enemy. This guy is your fellow citizen. And I’m very glad he spoke up.

2. Fırat Aktaş. 16 answers, 9 followers

Because I burst out laughing in a tram, reading Why are Turkish men beautiful?

3. Erdi Küçük. 11 answers, 8 followers

Several good answers on Turkish culture and politics. His answer on Is Atatürk the ideal example of Plato’s philosopher-king? has a very insightful sting.

4. Latinists and Hellenists and Linguists:

James Garry. 57 answers, 9 followers

Classics major. Knows his Latin, knows his Classics. Knows stuff. To my fellow Latinists and Hellenists: he’s one of us.

Ioannis Stratakis. 15 answers, 9 followers

The best reciter of reconstructed Ancient Greek I’ve heard, bar none: podium-arts.com. Well across his Classics. Do not be intimidated by the afro in his profile pic.

Gabriel Bertilson. 11 answers, 3 followers

Hellenist and historical linguist. Too few of us around.

Julien Daux. 23 answers, 8 followers

Knows how French and Hebrew work.

James Cottam. 95 answers, 5 followers

Undergrad classicist at Oxon. Glad to know they still teach them well there.

Diana Vesselinova. 38 answers, 7 followers

Bulgarian linguist. And cat owner.

Nick Sallas. 18 answers, 6 followers.

Sensible, well-informed stuff about Greek, ancient and modern, and Greece; I particularly appreciate his perspective as a heritage language learner.

As in George Soros?

Likely Esperanto. “He will soar”. Possibly Hungarian: “Next in line”.

His father was called Tivadar Schwartz, and was an important figure in Esperanto culture (Teodoro Ŝvarc): not so much for stuff he wrote (including under the pseudonym Teo Melas—yes, the guy knew his Ancient Greek: Melas = Schwartz = Black), but because he founded Literatura Foiro, the defining Esperanto literary journal.

Having a Jewish name in pre-war Hungary was not a life-enhancing move, and Theo changed the surname in 1936. The Esperanto Wikipedia (George Soros – Vikipedio) is skeptical whether Esperanto was the prime mover behind the surname change; the English Wikipedia (George Soros – Wikipedia) mentions that the palindrome was also attractive.

George Soros was exposed to Esperanto plenty as a kid, though apparently he is not a native speaker, and he doesn’t speak it now. He hasn’t had much to do with the language since his youth, though the Esperanto Wikipedia mentions he was dragged to From Zamenhof to Soros: A Symposium organised by the Universal Esperanto Association in New York, 2010.

You won’t, Quora is vigilant about not making its stats available. Even fairly superficial stats.

The closest you will get is quora numbers, by the esteemed Laura Hale. It’s based on some hand collected data: not deep or complete, it can’t be, but representative and well-analysed. She does have stats on some of your questions.

Ah, Philip my old friend. I know why you’re asking, and you know where this is going.

What does Nick Nicholas’ Quora Bio on emoji say?

Emoji: Blot on the purity of Unicode

What does Nick Nicholas think about the inclusion of emojis in Unicode?

CLEANSE THEM WITH FIRE!

⛐⛏⛔⛑✘☹☠

Why does Nick Nicholas think that? Is he some sort of antiquated un-hip spoilsport?

Yes, but there’s so much more to it than that.

Unicode is meant to be an universal encoding of scripts of human languages, to be comprehensive and rigorous. It is meant to resist logos, and vanity symbols, and short term fads: it is intended to persist for the ages. It is meant to deal with finite, well-understood, stable repertoires of script signs. Inclusion of any new additions to the repertoires are meant to be pondered and debated by linguists and typographers. And it is meant to deal with communicative needs borne of real texts. Real, plain texts, not vagaries of formatting or iconography.

It’s been po-faced in the past. The German National Standards body ensured Klingon never made it into Unicode, for instance, for fear of bringing the standard into disrepute.

And then the emojis came.

It’s not just that they’re frivolous. (And yes, I also wasn’t happy about Dylan getting the Nobel for Literature.) It’s that they’re not stable, they’re not for the ages, they’re not finite, and they’re not text. Yes, they’re part of text messages. So are memes.

Emojis were included in legacy Japanese character sets, because that’s how the Japanese telcos encoded the blasted things. It was a kludge. It was not meant to be enshrined for the ages: using characters to do icons was a short term fix, and certainly not a sustainable one. Emojis are not the kinds of thing that are meant to be a well-defined, stable sign system, with additions debated by linguists and typographers: that truly defeats the purpose of emojis. Not to mention, emojis really do go against the spirit of Unicode.

But the Japanese telcos went with them, and then Apple went with them, and there we are.

The Unicode Technical Committee defends the inclusion, as they must. They say that they do not count as logos, or vanity symbols, or short term fads, and they are appropriately managed through a standards process that normally engages linguists and typographers. Not everyone in the Unicode community was convinced, but it’s done.

Damn me if I’m going to be happy about it, but.

Jane Marr! Why no A2A from you!

I’ve long been looking for an excuse to speak here of my favourite poem of all time.

It’s an odd choice. It’s an extremely formalist choice. It needs some setup.

Esperanto poetry is very formalist, for cultural reasons you can easily guess. At least, it was up through the 70s, which is what I read up to. Lots of rondels. Lots of sonnets. All sonnets Petrarchan. All rhymes meticulous.

Victor Sadler, an officer at the Universal Esperanto Association, published a slender volume in 1967, Memkritiko “Self Criticism”. (See discussion in Esperanto.) The shtick of the volume is that he found the poems in the Association archives, and he annotates them sarcastically. Very po-mo, but this would have been at the very outset of po-mo.

My favourite poem is a Petrarchan sonnet in his collection. Its subject matter is about dissolution.

Its form is about dissolution.

It’s a Petrarchan sonnet, but its verses are way too short. Trimeter and Dimeter, going down to a single foot at the end. The rhymes are off-rhymes, which is not normal in Esperanto. And in the sestet, the off-rhymes end up merging.

It’s like a sand castle, slowly washing away. Especially in the last three verses.

Mi, dezirante ĉerkon
(kapitulaci,
ekshipokrito laca,
ĉi ŝakan ŝercon),

pluportis mian serĉon
ĝis la palaco
de ĉi korpo kuraca,
en kies riĉon

mi kitelumas
pli pace miajn ostojn
ol feton lulas

la utero; kaj ekson
mian ĝi teksas
en naskon.

I, wishing for a coffin
(to quit,
a tired ex-hypocrite,
this joke of chess),

continued my search
until the palace
of this healing body,
in whose riches

I besmock
my bones more peacefully
than the womb lulls

the fetus; and it weaves
my expiration
into birth.

OK, here’s one.

’ve after modals has already been reanalysed to of; not just as a written form, but in spoken English: would of, could of, should of.

Prediction: this gets expanded further by analogy, to link other modals and auxiliaries, now that the of is no longer analysed as a verb. can of, had of.

Stranger things have happened.

No, not Stranger things of happened. There are grammatical constraints at work here.