Nick on Quora

As you found out in comments, OP, the history came along for the ride with the literature: Thucydides and Caesar were read more as literature, than because schools actually cared what happened in Syracuse in 415 BC. But they are great literature.

Why were the Classics valued in elite schools in 19th century England?

Well, I can argue the intrinsic merit of the Classics, but I won’t. Instead, I will pick up on your response to Andrew Munro, and I’ll do a historical justification.

In the Renaissance, when Roman and Greek literature were rediscovered, that literature was treated as the source and reference point of all culture. To know that literature was to be cultured. There was literature already happening in the vernacular languages; but in the 16th century, at the time of Shakespeare, noone was studying Shakespeare as the repository of art and emotion and example and challenge that it is now. All there was was the Classics, and the Bible.

And the point of a liberal arts education back then, as it was in Ancient Greece, was not to get you a job. You didn’t go to uni for that; you went out as an apprentice, and people looked down on you as a mechanical. The point of a liberal arts education was to be cultured. To appreciate good literature. To form good judgement. To have good character.

Which of course presupposed that you were rich, and you were getting yourself an education for fun. Absolutely.

That’s also why people were doing science, btw. For fun. Not because the government funded them to; if the scientists weren’t already loaded, they got themselves a patron who was. And they were not goddamn engineers. Engineers were the people who attached themselves as apprentices.

And everyone doing science or literature read Latin, because that’s what intellectuals wrote in. And because they now had access to the classics, they would try to speak it more like the Romans did, and less like the mediaeval clerks did. Doing science and reading Cicero were part of the same package. It was all part of being cultured.

In the 16th and 17th and 18th century, the English developed their own literature. Gradually more and more science was written outside of Latin. So you didn’t need just Latin to appreciate good literature or do science. But the public school system stuck with it, because their ancestors did, and because Classical literature was still felt to be awesome, and because old habits died hard. And because you didn’t get a public school education to get a job. You got one to be cultured. Besides, any job you were likely to get as an aristocrat would be tied up with being cultured anyway.

Things have changed. Riff-raff like you, OP, and me, and the now rather peeved Michael Masiello (whose rejoinder I hereby solicit), get to go to high school and university. And we need to keep getting a job in mind, because we are riff-raff and not cashed up members of the aristocracy. And the Classics are only one option among many, and hardly the most prestigious one even among the liberal arts.

Plus, the attraction of learning the original languages has gone away. A lot of Classics PhDs I met in the States were somewhat shaky in the Ancient Greek (but a lot better in their Foucault) There was a lot of Latin being used in the 18th century; now it’s a curio. It’s even more marginal for Ancient Greek; it always was.

But there’s still some great literature there. And it’s still literature that pervades how the West thinks of itself.

Now, cynically, the insistence on learning Classics in the original in public schools in the 19th century was an elitist thing, to mark you off from the riff-raff. It didn’t necessarily mean you grokked those speeches by Demosthenes and those dramas by Euripides. And yet, the speech-makers of Britain learned a lot from Demosthenes. Those that were paying attention in the public schools did put that learning to use.

Ultimately, why would you, OP, value knowing Shakespeare? At best, because it is beautiful, and because it teaches you about life. (And movies.) At worst, because everyone else had to suffer through it at school, and you got to suffer through it too. Or, even worse, so you can be a snob, and lord it over the unlettered chavs.

Well, same back then with the Classics, I’d say.

Read less Lynn Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves) and more David Crystal (Making a Point)!

(That was a genius move of Profile Books, btw: to publish both the Punctuation Panic book, and its Refutation.)

As Crystal argues compellingly, Internet and SMS discourse don’t make people forget the rules of formal punctuation they have been taught in school (sometimes, successfully). As Zeibura S. Kathau puts it (What does your English accent sound like?): “I can speak Job Interview too.”

But it does allow them to ignore those rules in certain registers, which are more relaxed about the rules of formal grammar, and where you need not punctuate in Job Interview. That does not mean there are no rules at all in that register; ending an exchange with a period in an text means something distinct, in a register where the default is to leave it out. Not to mention the use of periods to represent. emphatic. speech. like. this.

And if you can command two registers of grammar and punctuation, rather than one, why, surely you’re better off.

Now, Quora tends to the formal rather than the informal side of punctuation: Wikipedia rather than Twitter. And yes, some contributors are slack about it, because they treat Quora as an extension of their Twitter or texting register. We speak a toned down version of Job Interview here, and some don’t tweak to that immediately. That does not necessarily mean those posters can’t speak Job Interview.

What Billy Kerr said. To elaborate: the <Otón> transcription is a phonetic transcription from French. The <Óthōn> transcription is the longstanding traditional hellenisation of Otto; it was used inter alia for King Otto of Greece. It incorporates the –th– of the old spelling Otho; and it ends in –ōn, which makes it declinable. (In Demotic, it switches to 1st declension, and becomes <Óthōnas>.)

So the distinction between <Othōn> and <Oton> is like the distinction between, say, Christopher Columbus and Cristoforo Colombo.

I’ll add that the original Ottos that Byzantines encountered were spelled in a number of ways, including Othōn, Ōthōn, but also Ōttos, Óton, and Ónto.

Mid-2012.

I need to put some text content here. So I’ll say what people said when Derryn Hinch, way too prominent Australian reporter, shaved off his beard.

The image everyone conjured was that of Daffy Duck, sans bill:

Oh, and I don’t deserve to be on the same thread as Michaelis Maus. But there you go.

That would be the standard modern Greek relativiser I did my PhD on, in fact.

Add Hebrew ašer > še, Bulgarian deto.

Anon (you didn’t need to Anon this time, Anon), I can rule out Albanian: që in standard Albanian, çë in Arvanitika are not locative.

The plural of anecdote is not data, but short of Laura Hale cranking up her dataset, that’s what you’re going to get.

Of the almost 200 people I follow, I have followed a handful for their questions rather than their answers. But most of them have been prodigious questioners, which makes them noteworthy. A couple of them, the questions were either quite good, or genuinely insane (and thus still noteworthy).

Answer written with no knowledge of Acadien French other than that gathered through episodes of Acadieman.

Remember. Dialects never sound funny because of something intrinsic to the local phonetics. It’s always political. It’s always about the relative prestige of the speakers.

And it’s not about how dialects are supposedly ill-lettered corruptions of the pristine standard language. Canadian French preserves the pre-revolutionary pronunciation of <oi> as /we/ instead of /wa/. How much respect does that win them in France?

In any case, who’s comparing Acadien to Quebecois? Someone with Parisian French? Someone with Parisian French, assuming they’ve even heard any Acadien, thinks Quebecois and Acadien are as bad as each other, a choice between hanging and drowning.

So who’s saying Acadien is funny sounding, and Quebecois isn’t?

Mm?

Let’s look at the politics. One the one side, a large, compact, relatively homogeneous (outside of Montreal), assertive Francophone population, who have had their Quiet Revolution.

On the other, a minority within a minority, codeswitching incessantly to English (as Acadieman reflects), uncomfortable with both the maudits anglais and the maudits québecois (watch season 3 of Acadieman—if you can find it; I can’t now. It featured Quebec seceding from Canada and invading New Brunswick.)

(Seriously, if you can find it, let me know. It was deeply awesome.)

In that kind of power imbalance, not only will the Quebecois think the Acadiens sound funny: the Acadiens themselves will accept that they sound funny.

And that’s nothing to do with phonetics.

See also the related questions:

• Should Thrace and Constantinople be given back to Greece?
• Is there any chance of Constantinople reuniting with Greece any time in the near future?
• Is there any chance of Anatolia reuniting with Greece any time in the near future?

Never mind it being an unwise military venture. Never mind NATO. Never mind that Greece needs that like it needs a hole in the head.

Retake what? Anatolia was ethnically cleansed a century ago, and so was Greece. The Muslim Greek-speakers left in the Of valley are there because they’re Muslims, and they’ve made a point of being good Islamic scholars: they don’t want to be reunited with anyone. There’s something like 3000 Rumlar left in Turkey: Greeks in Turkey.

There’s nothing to retake but graves. Germany had a better claim on Kaliningrad, and they passed.

Like I said elsewhere (Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do modern Greek people feel that Istanbul/Constantinople belongs to them?). Constantinople will still be ours. Istanbul will not, once more, be ours.

Please God no.

For the sentiment this proposal awakens in the soul of historical linguists, refer:

xkcd: Physicists

Plenty of people use machine learning on historical linguistics. They usually end up being picked up by science reporters, getting all the publicity that historical linguists don’t. And when they do, historical linguists roll their eyes, and turn the page.

Historical linguistics involves dirty data. Historical linguists know how to clean it up, and they know what the standards of proof are: that’s the comparative method. The Linguistatron 3000 someone did as their Honours thesis usually doesn’t know how to clean it up, and they get stuck on learning noise.

Why yes, I am arrogant. Why do you ask?

The non-arrogant version of this answer is Brian Collins’.

EDIT: See Steve Rapaport’s answer for a most entertaining instance of linguists cleaning up after a Linguistatron 3000 paper in Science. Pro tip: if you want to know about linguistics, don’t read Science.

Which Quora user has the most followers?

is one metric.

#1 D’Angelo is being followed for reasons of legacy, he rarely posts. #3 Jimbo Wales is active, but not massively active; his followership is more about Wikipedia fame. #2 Balaji Viswanathan is likely your man by that metric.