Nick on Quora

Greek. Heptanesian dialect, which is rather close to Standard Modern Greek.

A hundred years ago, Judeo-Italian and Judaeo-Greek.

Two hundred years ago, Italian (Venetian) among the nobility.

I’ve seen no evidence of Albanian ever spoken in Corfu.

It is part of both my privilege and my personality that I don’t often get comments that are anything more than polite disagreement. I make a point of avoiding answers or comments that would expose me to anything worse; and my privilege means that I rarely get dragged into anything worse.

There are topics around Quora that could expose me to age-old hatreds in the Balkans. But I’m not here to yell at or be yelled at by Turks, for instance. I’m here to share knowledge and learn from them. And it’s been great!

That privilege and personality combo means I dislike comment blocking (I’ve just vented about it), and am shocked at comment deletion. So, when I saw Jae Alexis Lee’s at the top of the answers stack, I braced myself…

… and once again, found myself nodding along with her at each point. If I was in her position, I’d be likely doing the same. I think my repertoire would be closer to Stan Hanks’, but then again, Stan Hanks has the same kinds of privilege I do, so I don’t know.

Polite disagreement is awesome. It is a learning opportunity, and I welcome it. There are several Quorans who don’t let me get away with facile statements (top of my list are Dimitra Triantafyllidou and Clarissa Lohr), and I am grateful to them that they don’t. I don’t edit my answer to reflect it, unless there are outright errors of fact; but I want people reading my answers to read the comments.

I’ve had one or two users get more in my face over the year; I’ve almost always ignored them, like Stan Hanks does (“feel free to have the last word, it should be obvious which of the two of us is nuts”). But there was one user I debated with. The guy got pretty unhinged (Dimitra, that was the guy you said would get a lawsuit in real life), but I wasn’t prepared to let him go, since he was posting on topics of my core scholarly competence. I was slightly peeved, but I remained quite polite, and I insisted in pointing out where I disagreed.

And it was remarkably civil outside of those comment threads. I think the guy appreciated the attention. In any case, he was only here for a week.

I would like the option of a radio button on why the downvote. There’s room between downvoting and reporting, and I’d love to see the feedback. Srsly.

Like Peter Flom said, the downvote can mean anything. Including “I don’t want this answer in my feed, even if there’s nothing wrong with it.”

OP clarified in comments that he meant {7, 8, 9}; but of course this could be any of {8, 9, 10}, or {8, Lied von der Erde, 9}, or {Lied von der Erde, 9, 10}. Any of those are legit.

The real grouping of symphonies that go together is {Lied von der Erde, 9, 10}. But I still don’t grok the 10th (which really does jump into the unknown with its tonality). And the Lied… yes, yes, the Abschied is sublime, and I actually like Li Po/Li Bai’s poems independently, but the rest of it doesn’t really work for me either.

So I’m going to choose to answer {7, 8, 9} after all.

• 7th
• 1st movt: The hero struggles against fate. (Yes, again. It’s a recurring theme for a reason.)
• 2nd: Wistful, distant horn calls, a little bit of grotesquerie in the background.
• 3rd: The night is dark and full of terrors.
• 4th: The night is urbane and fun.
• 5th: We will all. Have. Fun. With a Straussian rondo. Fun. That is what we will have.
• 8th
• 1st movt: Big cosmic Mass. Not really about Christianity at all (the mention of Christ in the hymn is rushed through), but certainly about awe and mystery and might.
• 2nd movt: It’s about what the ending of Goethe’s Faust is about. Redemption and the Eternal Feminine. Scene-painting, and (mostly) awe.
• 9th
• 1st movt: Farewell. Struggle. Exhaustion. Lamentation. Reconciliation. Transfiguration.
• 2nd: Dance as a dialectic of the world: the simple, plodding, but contented Ländler vs the sophisticated, vital, but self-destructive Waltz. With the Trio doing more wistful farewell, and the whole thing ending in a “My God, Why hast thou forsaken me”.
• 3rd: Anger, counterpoint tearing itself apart. With a flashforward to the redemption in the 4th movement.
• 4th: Death, as a slowly sinking, soulful hymn, with a countertheme of one last struggle back. Dying away, very slowly and heart-breakingly.

Ah, Habib. Other than you, right?

I have an upvote chain (h/t Laura Hale) going with my inner circle of Quora besties. I upvote them because they’re my friends, but then again, they’re my friends because they post good stuff. I do occasionally withhold upvotes from them, usually because I don’t think the answer was up to their usual standards; but I do feel guilty about it.

I’ve already posted who my besties are; the list in I love youse guys is obsolete (four months ago, that’s an eternity in Quora time), but indicative.

I upvote good stuff when I see it, and I do wish Quora mixed up my feed more; I upvote with that hope, and sometimes it works. But regular upvotes and following are positively correlated anyway.

These simple word lookup questions are the bane of anyone who follows a language topic, and they are not differentiated by topic from more substantive questions.

These simple word lookup questions are also Ground Zero for easily Googlable questions, on which see: Is it bad to ask questions on Quora that could easily be answered via a Google search? (Executive Summary: Quora Inc loves them, because they think Quora will replace Google. Many individual users want them to burn in hell.)

Downvoting questions are an acknowledged method to signal questions are low-quality, and a (less widely acknowledged, but necessary) method of controlling your own feed.

Those questions can’t be muted by topic.

They are low quality. Seriously, they are. They only add value to Quora if you think Quora will replace Google (which Adam DiCaprio actually did, in 2010).

I haven’t downvoted them, because I have a very high threshold for downvoting in general. But, IMHO, OP: Be that guy.

Is it fair for comments to be disabled, to begin with?

Fairness is about reciprocity.

My longstanding policy is to ignore such answers rather than downvote them; then again, I don’t downvote anyone unless the answer is misleading or offensive. But I sympathise with those like Frank Dauenhauer who do.

Note also that, given how blunt Quora’s UI is, the true meaning of upvote and downvote is not “this is an objectively good answer” and “this is an objectively bad answer”. It is “this is an answer that I want to see more of” and “this is an answer I want to see less of”.

(I tried to find chapter and verse in Laura Hale’s writings to back this up, because that’s what I recall her saying, and I can’t. Laura, feel free to chime in. And hey, aren’t you meant to be in town?)

Any Goddess of Barley in Greek would be named for the Greek for barley: alphi. That derives from proto-Indo-European *albhi- , and Albanian elp is a cognate.

Albion is the Celtic name of Britain, which survives as the Gaelic for Scotland, Alba. Its cognates are Welsh elfydd < *elbid ‘world, land’ and Gaulish albio– ‘world’. Per Albion – Wikipedia, there are two possible etymologies in proto-Indo-European: *albho- ‘white’ or *alb ‘hill’. I think Pokorny conflates them.

Per Pokorny, one guy (Specht) has speculated that *albhi ‘barley’ and *albho ‘white’ are related. *shrug* Who knows, maybe they are. But given how the Albh– stem shows up all over the place in place names (including the Alfeios river—and the Alps), I’d have thought that any Barley/White connection would be old—and would certainly predate the naming of Albion.

Braille – Wikipedia; English Braille – Wikipedia; Unified English Braille – Wikipedia

Braille is an encoding of alphabets; since the alphabetic repertoire is going to be different within Roman script, let alone other alphabets, there will be differences in the repertoire. Not all Braille alphabets will have a W, or a É, or a Ч. Moreover, Braille includes ligatures of letters and abbreviations; those are very much language-specific, depending on frequency within the language. The English character for <th> corresponds to the German character for <ch>, and the Albanian character for <dh>.

Ideally, each alphabet should have the same sign for A (or equivalent), B (or equivalent) and so forth, using phonetic correspondences where possible, and lining up with French Braille. So at least the core letters are meant to be the same. That has not always been the case, though it has become increasingly the case. American Braille, used until 1918, had not even half the same letters as French Braille in the alphabet.

The non-alphabetic characters of Braille, such as punctuation and symbols, have diverged even within English-language Brailles; hence the very recent adoption of Unified English Braille.

So the answer is no, although it has gotten better in the past century.

Well, as Zeibura S. Kathau has commented, Science is by nature descriptive. And linguistics is a science. A very soft science, I’ll grant you, but no less of one than geology or astronomy.

There’s a word for fields of study that say how things should be, rather than how things are. That word is not science. It’s engineering.

No value judgement hither or thither, btw. There is a role for language prescription in the world. Linguists dislike it because it gets in the way of their job; but then again, linguists are often prejudiced against looking at the social context of their object of study.