Originally Answered:

Types of Nouns?

Proper nouns and common nouns.

For the rest, see Wikipedia.

Greeks got him from Turks; he’s much bigger, I noticed, in Cyprus than in Greece. I don’t know enough to compare with Nasreddin in Muslim countries, but in Greek accounts he’s a promulgator of often absurdist folk wisdom. “The argument over the mattress” is a journalistic cliché in Greece.

The argument over the mattress?

Glad you asked.

One night, two people were arguing outside Nasreddin Hodja’s house. Nasreddin got fed up with the fighting, and at his wits’ end, he threw his mattress at them to shut them up.

The two people promptly ran off with his mattress.

Nasreddin returned back to his wife.

“What was that all about?” she asked.

“Oh, they were arguing over who’d get the mattress.”

If you’d asked this question 100 years ago, Pegah, I could give you an interesting answer. Then again, if you’d asked this question 100 years ago, you would have been my sworn enemy, and there’d have been no Quora to ask me this through anyway.

Australia:

Australia is absurdly urbanised, and those of us in the cities really don’t know enough about those of us in the country—even though our national mythology is all about how the country is where the Real Australians are.

We do know they listen to country music. We know that they wear jeans even more than urban Australians do.

And we know they all wear hats.

You can tell Lee Kernaghan is a Real Australian. He’s a country singer. And he wears a hat. A real Australian Akubra hat.

McLeod’s Daughters all wore hats (some of the time). It was a soap set in the country, with empowered female leads. Who wore hats some of the time. And jeans.

… This *is* safe to show in Iran, isn’t it? 🙂

I haven’t seen many hats in country Victoria. But I don’t think country Victoria is where the Real Australians are. It’s more the fine food and wine provedore for Melbourne, where urban Australians go to eat nice things. (And it’s a provedore, because that’s the kind of snobs we are.)

The hats seem to be more a NSW/Queensland thing. With sheep stations. And a Wide Brown Land. And Country Music.

The agrarian populist politician Bob Katter is from Queensland. He always wears a hat:

Alas, I am an effete urban Australian. The closest I’ve ever come to wearing a Real Australian hat was when I was in Texas:

Howdy pardner.

Yes. I don’t get it. I’m funny, but I’m not *that* funny. I’m knowledgeable, but that’s a dime a dozen here. My drawings are shit. I don’t get it.

… You know, this question is a good idea. We can find out! Yay!

Hello Curtis Lindsay. I’ve been upvoting you for a little while. In fact, because of you, I’m about to force myself to listen to *shudder* Chopin. (Michael Masiello will be pleased.)

It’s about time I disagreed with you about something.

I think OP’s dystopian scenario is not impossible. The thing about machine learning is, it doesn’t need to understand its input in terms of rules and emotional state; you don’t need a good notation to do it. It just needs the input to be quantifiable; which music performances are. If you feed a music composition system lots of Bach, it will spin out more Bach (and that’s been possible for the last twenty years). Maybe not divinely inspired Bach, but certainly competent Bach: there are, after all, rules and regularities recoverable from Bach’s music.

Well, same with what we impute as emotion in music. Rubato may be ineffable in effect on humans, but it’s not ineffable in execution. Neither is articulation, nor dynamics. I think they can be learned.

The thing is that, as Curtis said, we have had player pianos for a century, and they were much more accurate than humans. Conlon Nancarrow relied on that for his pieces. But they didn’t put pianists out of business.

The reason is that, even if technically—or even emotionally—a machine does replicate a good musician, that’s not why we go to concerts. Live gigs have in fact taken a downturn in attendance, and performers will tell you they’re already losing out in competition to digitised sound; except the digitised sound is recordings of Billy Holliday or Miles Davis or AC/DC or Yitzak Perlman.

If people would rather show up to your live gig than listen to Horowitz at home, it’s not because they expect you’ll do a “better” job than Horowitz. It’s because the live performance is the point, and they want to see humans, imperfections and all, grappling with the piece.

But that means that live performances will be more a niche thing: they’ll be competing with computer performances, as well as YouTube and CDs and DVDs. They’re already a niche thing though, and they’ve been a niche thing for decades.

Once answered, questions are indeed the community’s, and can’t be deleted: they belong as much to the answerer as to the asker, if not more. And believe me, the answerer does not want to see their answer disappear.

The only recourse you have is to ask a moderator to delete the question; but you’d have to have a very good reason, that cannot be addressed simply by going anonymous.

Same answer, man. If I wanted to have a competent grasp of probability, I would have stayed in engineering.

Take the money and run.

Why… with one million dollars… I could almost afford a decent house here in Melbourne!

Almost.

Heather Dubrow – Wikipedia

Heather Paige Dubrow (née Kent; born January 5, 1969) is an American actress and television personality. She portrayed Lydia DeLucca in the television series That’s Life in 2000, and has starred on the reality television series The Real Housewives of Orange County since its seventh season in 2012.

Heather Dubrow is deeply awesome, cool, and wonderful, for several reasons, not restricted to the following:

• Being the only sane person ever to have featured on Real Housewives of Orange County.
• Being actually well-educated, not just by Real Housewives standards, and not afraid to use three-syllable words.
• Inspiring one of the better Real Housewives impersonations by Amy Phillips:

• Casting Google’s Inbofox in Greek into utter confusion.

• /ˈhɛðəɹ dʊbˈɹow/ has somehow ended up as /ˈxiθer ˈdabrou/. Then again, the original Polish surname (e.g. Joshua Kjerulf Dubrow) would surely have been /dubrof/, wouldn’t it?
• And who knew Real Housewives was rendered in Greek as True Housewives In Despair. (They’ve picked up on Desperate Housewives, and titled the franchise Real Desperate Housewives.)
• Yes, I watch Real Housewives. What do you want me to do, POP A VEIN?

Yeah, the Ninth for me too. Not just for the finale: the first three movements are wonderful, and there’s sublimity in the Adagio.

It’s hard to do favourites, and I love all the odd-numbered symphonies (apart from the 1st, which is still Mozart on Red Bull, as JM Cortese put it). The 5th and 7th are both extremely tight constructions. But I’m too jaded now for their optimism to work on me like it used to.

Originally Answered:

What expression from your language would English speakers find really funny if translated word for word?

Ah, you remind me of the Golden Treasury of Greek-English expressions: we have not seen him yet, and we have removed him John

I posted an analyses of a few of these on my Greek linguistics blog in 2010: Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος

• Don’t you defecate us you and your cricket: Δεν μας χέζεις εσύ και ο γρύλος σου! = I rebuff your expression of concern. (Actually: Take your car jack and shove it, alluding to an old joke.)
• We have not seen him yet, and we have removed him John: ακόμα δεν τον είδαμε, Γιάννη τον εβγάλαμε. = We rushed to a conclusion. (Actually: We haven’t even seen the baby yet, and we’ve already come up with the name John for it; ‘remove’ = ‘take out, publish’.)
• Eye-removal beats name-removal: Κάλλιο να σου βγει το μάτι παρά το όνομα. = Better your eye be poked out than your reputation.
• Will I extract the snake from the hole; Εγώ θα βγάλω το φίδι από την τρύπα; = It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.
• He doesn’t understand Christ: Δεν καταλαβαίνει Χριστό = He does not understand common sense (Actually: “He doesn’t understand any Christ” = “Christianity” = “what is self evident in our culture”)
• He saw G.I. Christ: Είδε τον Χριστό φαντάρο = He is so terrified, he is hallucinating.

• He cannot crucify girlfriend: Δεν μπορεί να σταυρώσει γκόμενα = He can never get a girlfriend (Actually, “make the sign of the cross over, as a blessing” = “thank his lucky stars that he finally got one”)

There are funnier ones, those are just the ones I’ve published analyses of…