Nick on Quora

Will they? No. Comments are essential to the social media nature of Quora, and the social media nature of Quora is not intrinsic to the stated mission of “to share and grow the world’s knowledge”™. In fact, I’ve read here that Adam D’Angelo wanted to do away with comments altogether, and had to be talked out of it.

No, I can’t find the source statement now, because Quora Search. And possibly because it was in a comment, and comments aren’t searchable. The source, I think, was the Facebook Secret TW Group.

The fact that comments aren’t searchable, though, is a kind of indirect confirmation.

You know how people put A2A at the top of their answers, because they like the asker, but are ambivalent about the question?

Sofia, if we ever meet up for coffee in Oakleigh (you’re a Greek in Melbourne, you probably live inside an Eaton Mall patisserie), I will be asking you: WHY YOU ASK ME IF CONFEDERATION!

Greece is already in a confederation, and has been in one since 1981. That hasn’t worked out wonderfully lately; and that was an identity that Greeks actually invested in. To a heart-breaking extent.

What Serdar said. The rapprochement Greeks and Turks have had since ’99 has been a wonderful thing. I’m deeply grateful for it. But you know, we have a saying in Greek.

And knowing how things work in our part of the world, there is probably an identical saying in Turkish.

Μακριά μακριά κι αγαπημένοι. Distant, distant, and [therefore] loving each other.

Greeks ruled by Erntoghan?! Turks ruled by Çipras?!

That would end the rapprochement pretty quickly.

(… although, then again: Turks ruled by Erdoğan?! Greeks ruled by Τσίπρας?!)

You mean, there’s a story there?

(Checks Frisk.)

Hm. Looks like there’s a story there.

gastēr “belly” is likely derived from *grastēr, “something that does graō”. Graō in turn is a really, really obscure word for “gnaw, eat”, that shows up once in Callimachus, and that also turns up in Ancient Cypriot, which was an archaic dialect. So, gastēr is “eater”. This verb graō is apparently cognate with Old Indic grásate “eat, devour”.

There is an equivalent word to gastēr in Old Indic: grastar-. It’s an astronomical term, referring to eclipses; the moon, I guess, is described as devouring the sun.

So, if you ever see this Halloween costume:

Halloween pregnancy ideas

—the Vedas had the same idea.

I saw a marginal note in Frisk that threw me btw.

Gastēr has not survived in Modern Greek. The related verb engastroō ‘to make something be in a belly’ is alive and well as gastrono, the colloquial word for ‘impregnate’.

But a millenium after Greeks decided to take the r out of *grastēr, they decided to put an r back into the same spot. Language change is random like that. Gastra, a word meaning “a belly-shaped container, a container with a swelling in the middle”, went to *grastra > ɣlastra. Which is the modern word for a flowerpot.

Or by extension, a model paid to look decorative on a TV show.

I don’t know whether that extends further, to maternity wear models.

Let’s try a more historically informed attempt at an answer.

The USA within the Anglosphere had a very early strain of resistance to British authority, which made it a Republic. Ireland had an even earlier strain of of resistance to British authority, which made it a Republic a lot later.

Most erstwhile colonies and dominions of Britain became Republics as well. Those that haven’t are the 15 Commonwealth realms. They include much of the West Indies and the Pacific, and I don’t quite understand what happened there. Among the dominions (I’ll be blunt: among countries that were majority White Britisher), they include the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

Of these four countries, Australia is the one with the most prominent republican history. So when you ask why Australians dislike their Queen so much, those other three countries, UK, Canada, and New Zealand, are who you’re comparing Australia to. And the question is only meaningful if you make that comparison.

Australia has had a republican movement since before Federation. The disproportionate presence of Irish in Australia compared to elsewhere was one cause for that; the convict origins somehow another; the national mythology of Australia as an improved and self-reliant version of Britain a third.

The Australian mainstream was as forelock-tuggingly British as it was anywhere else until the 70s, and delayed ratifying the Statute of Westminster 1931 (when the UK really finally kicked us out of home legislatively) for a decade. But there was an ongoing undercurrent that was not as pro-British, and a sequence of jabs at the mother country; us daring to have Isaac Isaacs as a Governor General for example, or the trade boycotts provoked by the Bodyline controversy in cricket, or us pivoting away from Churchill and towards FDR in WWII.

That level of republicanism and resentment of Britain may have been a minority narrative in Australia; but it was certainly much more prominent than in Canada (who after all needed to differentiate itself from its southern neighbour) or New Zealand (which is a gentle easy-going place).

The resentment of Britain is pretty mainstream now; anyone who speaks with a Cultivated Australian [= tweaked RP: Variation in Australian English] accent now is a figure of derision. I note with amusement the accent of Georgina Downer, scion of a long line of Tory Australian politicians, and daughter of Alexander Downer. Her dad still speaks with a plum in his mouth, and is the High Commissioner to the UK, like his father before him. Georgina does a lot of radio as a member of the local libertarian think tank (she’s waiting for preselection somewhere); and she sounds ’Strayan, because that is now the only way to become a politician in this country.

The resentment of British authority and the republicanism translate to antipathy to the monarchy, though it has to be said, minimal personal antipathy to Queen Elizabeth. Even our arch republican and Last Visionary prime minister Paul Keating has said as much. There is celebrity interest in Wills and Kate, and a complacent “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” sentiment from the majority of Australians; republicanism remains a minority sentiment. But it’s a sizeable minority.

Several ways to tackle this question. And it’s a very good question.

Both consonants and vowels in the IPA are defined, not against a word of a language (they can indeed change), but against an articulatory gesture. Because people’s oral cavities are pretty much the same, that works. [ç] is defined as a Voiceless palatal fricative, not as the <ch> in German ich (Which dialect of German?), or as the χ in Greek όχι (Which dialect of Greek? Which period, for that matter?)

For vowels, it’s only slightly more complicated. There is indeed a continuum of articulation, of where you place your tongue in your oral cavity, to produce vowels. But:

• There are eight reference vowels, the Cardinal vowels, which are defined through articulatory gestures as signposts for the rest of the IPA vowels;
• There is an articulatory space defined for vowels —

• —but the two dimensions of the space can actually be plotted precisely based on the formants of the vowel—the first and second peak of the vowel sound in a spectrogram. See Vowel diagram. So you can run a spectrogram on vowels, and get a precise plot of vowels like this:

—the classic vowel trapezium plots F1 against F2–F1.

In any case, the IPA is not intended for a precise plot on the trapezium. It’s intended for a close enough area of the mouth, that sounds the same to listeners as other speakers’ vowels, and that sounds different to other vowels of the same language. Two speakers’ vowels are not going to plot to exactly the same place. The IPA is used for linguistic transcription, which is based on contrast; it is not intended to substitute a spectrogram.

So if people start pronouncing cat slightly differently, but it’s still in the general area of [æ], few linguists are going to care. Particularly if the [æ] is still nowhere near the [ɑ] or [ɐ] or [a] of that dialect of English. If it does, why, we’ll relabel it to the other area of the vowel chart that it’s moved to. /kʰæt/ used to be /kʰat/ (and still is in some dialects of English).

If you’re one of the few linguists that do care, you’re not looking at the IPA anyway. You’re looking directly at the spectrograms.

You’ll see that the IPA vowel chart allows 7 degrees of height, and 3 degrees of backness; diacritics allow both to be tripled. The 7 degrees of height is new-fangled, and I’m not sure whether symbols like Close-mid central unrounded vowel [ɘ] have really been used seriously. Even with the diacritics ̟ ̱ ̝ ̞ , I doubt most transcriptions have ever bothered with more than four degrees of height.

So the IPA doesn’t need to make more symbols to keep up: it’s got an oversupply if anything. (The Labiodental flap symbol /ⱱ/ is the first new IPA consonant in decades.) You just make sure the definitions of the symbols are independent of words in any one language.

OP, thank you for clarifying the question. Given the clarification: absolutely, where relevant. There are a lot of questions that assume the OP’s location, and that get answered by others in ways that the OP didn’t anticipate. That’s not a privacy issue; that’s a good question formulation issue, and it’s incumbent on us the community to help the OP clarify the question.

Better us than Quora Content Review. “Needs Improvement” with no explanation ends up doing far more damage than good. “What the hell do I reword to get the bot to shut up?”

One of the two times I’ve been blocked to date is when someone asked about common law marriages, someone answered, neither specified what country they were talking about, and I chimed in with “that’s a very US-centric answer to a US-centric question.” I hope that guy is enjoying his Nick-free feed, but the fault wasn’t me, the fault was with the OP not being explicit in narrowing down their question.

EDIT: Ah, shit. Tonka Sukic already said all this, better.

My close followers will have noted a bunch of posts lately on Greek songs that move me. This is another one.

What have I done to you, to make you smoke. 1968. Lyrics: Lefteris Papadopoulos. Music: Mimis Plessas.

stixoi.info: Τι σου `κανα και πίνεις

The lyrics are nowhere near as indirect and allusive as some I’ve posted. It’s a torch song that first appeared in a movie, after all, not part of a concept album. And its language is visceral. Too visceral in fact for me to do justice to it in English. Not “smoke”, but “drink cigarettes” (idiomatic in Greek). Not “stare at the floor”, but “your eyes are nails on the floor”. Not “my heart breaks”, but “my insides spasm”.

And the music is a dignified, steady, impassioned lament.

I’m crying again.

What have I done to you, to make you smoke cigarette after cigarette,
and your bitter eyes be nailed to the floor?

Tell me, why won’t you let me, with two kisses,
take away the dark cloud from your murky eyes?

The pains that stab you are double pains for me,
the tears you cry are dripping into my heart.

If you only knew how my insides spasm for you,
standing so far from me and speaking not a word.

My wordless mouth, my extinguished moon,
I curse the hour and the fateful moment.

I’ll give up everything for you, everything: I’ll die,
just so no sigh will ever touch you again.

Five-odd a day?

Some are odd.

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do you feel differently about A2A questions, compared to questions you find on your own?

Some of my most fun answers are from insane, WTF A2As; Jeremy Markeith Thompson and Habib Fanny have been especial culprits.

A lot of them are scattergun (he’s a linguist guy! he’s an Australian guy! he hates Quora Inc!), and they sit guiltily in the in-queue until I give up.

I had a queue of maybe 300 a few months ago, that I hadn’t even noticed were there (Quora UI for the win). I tried to cut down on the backlog for weeks. Quora UI Fail eventually saved me: the really old answers just disappeared from my queue one day. (They disappeared on different days on mobile and on desktop.) One of them occasionally burbles up, from the depths of time…

As others point out, they were dead by 1968. However Hannah Nixon lived until 1967, and Frank Nixon until 1956. So they saw him Vice-President, and she fretted over how he looked in the Kennedy–Nixon debates.

How they reacted to him making Vice-President would be evidence enough of how they would have reacted to him becoming President. They were proud, of course. The way Nixon recounts it in his Memoirs, both parents encouraged him on no matter what: Frank from his death bed encouraged him to fight back against Harold Stassen during the California primaries; and while Hannah convalesced from an operation, Richard told her not to give up, only to be told by her never to give up—she’d just read an article about him being in the political wilderness.

Richard Nixon was a maudlin kind of a guy, but I believe the anecdotes: I wouldn’t have thought either is implausible behaviour for parents proud of their son’s political success.

There’s a moment in Oliver Stone’s Nixon when Hannah is asked by a reporter how she feels, and she says something frosty about her main concern being that he does right by God. That’s intended as foreshadowing, but the film is meticulously researched, and I do remember it sounding familiar. I haven’t found a trace in the Memoirs or in Ambrose’s biography; but Nixon reproduces the note Hannah gave him in the family bible on his Vice-Presidential inauguration, which he kept in his wallet for the rest of his life. Without the frostiness, the note says the same thing as the movie Hannah:

“You have gone far and we are proud of you always—I know that you will keep your relationship with your Maker as it should be for after all that, as you must know, is the most important thing in life.”

Greek neighbour here. And hello to my neighbours!

“Cultural appropriation.”

I don’t think that word means what you think it means.

I also happen to think that as a cultural critique, the notion of “cultural appropriation” is so vague, so clumsily wielded, so thoughtlessly conscripted in identity battles, that it deserves to be subverted by deplorables. Which is what this question sounds like.

Cultural appropriation is not cultural borrowing. Cultural appropriation is making bits and pieces of an oppressed culture your own, without acknowledging the origin and context of the bits and pieces, and without respecting the bearers of the source culture.

Believe me, Atatürk did not make everyone wear a hat instead of a fez, and wear a tux, as a gesture of disrespect to the Franks.

I’m Greek, and I have my own conflicts and questions about whether Turks are Europeans. I have the same questions about Greeks.

But, my “European” friend, that’s the price you pay for cultural hegemony. Your culture really is no longer your own. Every swarthy Other out there gets to partake of the culture you guys have been evangelising.

And you know what? That’s a good thing.