Nick on Quora

Lots.

It seems that the dismal science, economics, is a popular answer here, and I’ll put my hand up for that as well.

(I just looked up the origin of the phrase The dismal science and… holy shit! Carlyle made up the phrase to decry economics as being amoral, and hence depressing—because economics was concluding that slavery was no longer economically viable! Whereas, Carlyle counterargued most morally and undismally, slavery was what God wanted for the black man!

Wow.)

Digression notwithstanding, the political debates of our decadent age are all about economic stewardship, and it becomes a civic responsibility for us to understand something of them.

But no, I don’t get it. I get that I like the whole Throw Money Down A Well as a model of generating value, but I don’t understand how it works.

I sat in on a lecture on Kant once, and I didn’t get it. So add philosophy. Though I respect that it’s about Really Important Stuff; and I did enjoy the course I took on philosophy of the mind—that seems a bit more concrete.

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I’m ignoring the Australian Football League Grand Final on the TV right now, so let me add this almost-relevant anecdote for Lyonel.

When I was doing my PhD, Sunday nights were way too quiet. So I’d put on the community radio Metal show. Because I needed some background noise.

I vaguely liked what Meshuggah they played, but otherwise, the aesthetics that the show hosts were talking about were unfathomable to me. I had no idea why band A was brutal and tight, and band B was derivative and dumb, and what the fine distinctions were between the subgenres.

But they did. And I was happy that they did. It gave me comfort.

Same in fact for Footy Classified now. No idea what Caro Wilson and Craig Hutchison are yelling at each other about. Don’t particularly care, either.

But I’m glad they care. It gives me comfort.

Well, ditto the economists and the philosophers.

OP noted that there were many answers already stashed away under What does Siktir (سیکتیر) means in Persian? I’ll paste here the comments that Dimitra Triantafyllidou and I left there for Greek. Some quite obvious parallels with Albanian and Romanian, as reported by Aziz Dida and Diana Crețu.

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Nick:

In Greek it just means “Turkish word for ‘get fuckedʼ ”; it’s actually never used in its literal meaning of copulation.

Cretan weddings traditionally take three days, and the final dish served to the guests (typically the entire goddamn village) is a simple rice broth.

The Cretan name for the dish is σιχτίρ πιλάφι sikhtir pilafi. “Fuck-off pilaf.”

Dimitra:

There is a Thracian dance (often danced in weddings) called “sikhtir havasi” It’s monotonous, fast and the footwork is not all that easy after you’ve had a few. The idea is the musicians started playing this to get people tired and get them to leave. It’s the first part of the video. It’s not that boring for a minute or two but after that…

Nick:

The Air in Fuck-Off! And it’s got the same purpose to it as Haydn’s Farewell Symphony! Oh, that’s delicious!

There’s the generic answer: the fine old Greek saying, Η μισή ντροπή δική σου, η άλλη μισή δική τους. “Half the embarrassment is yours, the other half is theirs.”

Yes. They will think you sound ridiculous, no fear of that. They will also be hugely impressed (especially if they’re in the Greek diaspora), and will encourage your efforts. Dive in. And quote that proverb to them. Give ’em sass. They will love it.

Martin Pickering, back me up?

There are specific answers; see e.g. Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s answer to I’m learning Greek. What is the best way to improve my speaking/grammar skills?

Greek: 1000 years ago, the language was already Early Modern Greek. Unfortunately, we have very very very few records of the vernacular to sift from, out of the archaic Greek everyone was writing.

• We have the Bulgarian Greek inscriptions from 1200 years ago, but by 1000 years ago, the Bulgars were using Slavonic.
• We have vernacular phrases being quoted hither and thither from 900 years ago.
• We have vernacular texts that we kinda sorta date from 900 years ago, but their language is probably closer to what the scribes wrote in the copies we have, which is nearer to 700 years ago.

So pinning down the vernacular from 1000 years ago is tricky.

The closest I’ll mention here is this snippet of a song about Alexios I Komnenos escaping a conspiracy from 1031, recorded (with much embarrassment about the vulgarity of the language) by his daughter Anna Comnena in her Alexiad:

Το Σάββατον της Τυρινής
χαρής, Αλέξη, εννόησές το
και την Δευτέραν το πρωί
ύπα καλώς, γεράκιν μου.

On Cheesefare Saturday
rejoice, Alexi, you worked it out.
And on Monday morning
fly well, my hawk.

In Contemporary Greek that would be:

Το Σάββατο της Τυρινής
να χαρείς, Αλέξη, το κατάλαβες
και τη Δευτέρα το πρωί
πήγαινε καλά, γεράκι μου.

Quite close; and for all that I changed two words, the first word (εννόησές) could still be used. The second word (υπάγω > ύπα) is still used, but its conjugation has changed, so people wouldn’t understand it.

The only phoneme to have changed since was υ (and οι), switching from /y/ to /i/. (So ύπα for “go!” was /ypa/.) In fact, we have a poem from 1030, making fun of a hillbilly priest pronouncing upsilon as /i/: so the modern pronunciation was already around at the time of the song snippet.

The only substantive difference, really, is all the final n’s being dropped. My guess: Modern Greek speakers would be reminded of Cypriot, which is phonologically conservative. (It also keeps double consonants; I have no idea when they disappeared from the rest of Greek, but I suspect it was later.)

Oh, that song snippet? Anna Comnena was not going to leave it alone in such vulgar garb. She appends a translation into something more decent:

κατὰ μὲν τὸ Τυρώνυμον Σάββατον ὑπέρευγέ σοι τῆς ἀγχινοίας, Ἀλέξιε, τὴν δὲ μετὰ τὴν Κυριακὴν Δευτέραν ἡμέραν καθάπέρ τις ὑψιπέτης ἱέραξ ἀφίπτασο τῶν ἐπιβουλευόντων βαρβάρων.

On the Saturday with the name of cheese, much commendation for your sagacity, Alexius. And on the day of Monday after the Sunday, just like some high-flying hawk, you have flown away from the barbarians who meant you harm.

Flattered you’ve A2A’d me, Habib. You’ve A2A’d some good people.

I program; I don’t program well or often, and I mostly program in antiquated languages (I maintained C code from 1985 for a decade, and Perl is my default language), but I program, sometimes even for my day job—my CTO has forced me to pick up Ruby and Golang. Miguel Paraz has been bemused that I don’t post about that, and gratified that I’ve started to (very little). I’m slowly getting back into NLP, and I may end up using the resources here for that.

The techo Quora is rather different to the humanities Quora, btw. The style’s more wooden. 🙂

School sector IT policy, and educational IT standards. By a strange set of happenstances, they’re my day job, and I’ve actually gotten reasonably knowledgeable about them over the past five or six years. It’s fairly niche stuff, so I haven’t had much excuse to talk about them here—although I’ve managed to talk shop with Scott Welch about them.

Artificial languages, including Esperanto, Lojban, and Klingon. They’ve taken up a huge chunk of my youth, and my online fame; and speakers of all three are on here. But they haven’t generated the traffic for me to get into them often.

I do talk a whole lot about topics I am not knowledgeable about, to compensate. I know how to use Wikipedia constructively…

Revelation is notorious for its grammatical errors; google Revelation and Solecism (fancy Greek for “bad grammar”) or Barbarism (fancy Greek for “L2 Greek”). You’ll see lots of attempts at explaining it, from the straightforward “he barely spoke Greek” to “he was cutting and pasting bits of the Septuagint without adjusting the grammar” to “there’s a deeper theological reason for it”.

Someone recently did a PhD on it, which seems to get a bit too theological for even theologians, as seen in this review of Morphological and Syntactical Irregularities in the Book of Revelation.

My time for struggling with that question, like so many others’, was high school.

I did not have Augustine to debate with, as Michael Masiello did. But it was pretty painful.

I looked over the poems I wrote at the time, to see if I had an answer at the ready back then. To my surprise, I think I did. I’ll append the Esperanto original in comments.

You, who guard the souls turned to shades,
treat them well.
They’ve lived through hell, they’ve missed beatitude;
let them at least find
some kind of rest with you, who
guard the souls turned to shades.

In your night-black cloudless reign,
let some light through now and then,
that the souls turned to shades may move more lightly,
even if, despite it all, still
with no hope, while hope is missing in your
night-black cloudless reign.

You will smash our life’s work to dust, you have had final victory,
you are rotting away all beauty.
Be contented and be compassionate, Great Source of Fear,
for already you are no longer feared
by those you guard, having smashed
their life’s work to dust, having had final victory.

Up until the late Middle Ages, English spelling (at least, as we reconstruct it) is not that bad. It is internally consistent, and, importantly, it varies from region to region, because they actually spoke different dialects from region to region. Yeah, the mute final <e> was an annoying way to indicate that a vowel was long, but you’re not left completely in outer space.

A sequence of bad things happened at around the same time in the 1500s.

Printing was invented, which motivated standardising spelling. And freezing it in time. Not as frozen as we now think, there was still plenty of variability, but the 1500s is the last time English spelling makes sense.

Unfortunately, the 1500s was a bad time to be fixing the spelling of English. It was halfway through the Great English Vowel Shift. It was at the start of a bunch of other sound changes, some of which were pretty radical. What happened to <gh> was nuts, which is why the pronunciation of <gh> now makes no sense.

(That <gh> was a /x/, like the <j> in Spanish. So throughout used to be pronounced /θɹuːxuːt/. Seriously.)

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the learnèd folk of the English language rediscovered Latin and Greek. So they started attempting to spell words in a fashion more appropriate to their Latin and Greek roots. And occasionally, even getting it right.

Sounds kept changing; English spelling didn’t. They changed pretty recently. Cue Samuel Johnson:

I remember an instance: when I published the Plan for my Dictionary, Lord Chesterfield told me that the word great should be pronounced so as to rhyme to state; and Sir William Yonge sent me word that it should be pronounced so as to rhyme to seat, and that none but an Irishman would pronounce it grait. Now here were two men of the highest rank, the one, the best speaker in the House of Lords, the other, the best speaker in the House of Commons, differing entirely.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, won—which, I guess, makes Irishmen of us all. (That’s why Reagan is pronounced Raygun. And why the Irish have a cup of tay.)

But we didn’t change the spelling of great to match; we still spell it as if it rhymes with seat.

Why no spelling reform in English, then? Well, as English-language spelling reform says, it could have been even worse. There was some 17th century reform: we don’t use warre or sinne or toune any more. Webster did, well, some things in the US. But really, the opportunity was lost in the 16th century, and we do lack the kind of centralised control that made centralised spelling reform possible elsewhere.

Ancient Greek has four past tenses; Modern Greek has two, and an auxiliary formation for the other two. The tenses differ in aspect.

The imperfect emphasises that the past action was ongoing or continuous.

The perfect emphasises that the past action is now complete. The main reason for doing that is, as Konstantinos Konstantinides points out, because the results of that past action are still relevant now.

The pluperfect emphasises that the past action was already complete before something else happened.

The last tense is the aorist; in other languages, it is usually called the simple past. It doesn’t indicate whether the action is or was complete or ongoing. In fact, aorist is the Greek word for “indefinite”. It simply states the action happened in the past, and it acts as a default past tense.

If you have to infer an aspect for the aorist, you can infer (by default) that the action is complete, but unlike the perfect, the results of the action are not with us now: it is, so to speak, history.

I’ll add to the other answers there’s a subtle nuance in paráklētos. A nuance so subtle, you’ll most often see it discussed in explanations of paráklētos, and the evidence for the distinction can be shaky.

Paráklētos follows the pattern of preposition + verbal adjective; it literally means “by-called” (hence, helper or advocate, some you call to be by your side). These kind of compounds are meant to have a distinction of permanence, according to how they are accented. If they are accented on the final syllable (paraklētós, -ḗ, -ón), the state they describe is temporary: it has happened once-off. If they are accented on the antepenult (paráklētos, -on), the state is permanent. So a paraklētós is a guy you can call on at that particular moment, to get you out of a jam. A paráklētos is someone you always call on to get you out of jams, a permanent advocate.

To illustrate with another example I just made up: if you describe someone as perirrapistós, “around-beaten”, you’re saying he’s just been beaten up. If you’re saying someone is perirrápistos, you’re saying they’re constantly being beaten up, that they look all beaten up, maybe that they’re a permanent victim.