Nick on Quora

Que?

Taking the *Greek* Wikipedia article as a baseline, Dimitris Almyrantis?

I hate you.

The fact that the anthem of Rebetika, Frangosyriani, means “Catholic Girl from Syros”, is too obvious for the Greek Wikipedia page to mention; it does at least mention that the song’s composer Vamvakaris was himself a Catholic Boy from Syros (a frangosyrianaki, as he himself sings).

Ok, one thing about Syros jumps to my mind that is on the obscure side. As Wikipedia says, there are two main towns in Syros island: Syros town itself, inhabited by the Catholics indigenous to the island, and Ermoupolis, founded by Orthodox refugees during the Greek War of Independence.

Now in 1918–19, a linguist named John Voyatzidis did a dialectological tour of the Cyclades, on behalf of the Historical Dictionary of the Academy of Athens. He published his findings here:

Βογιατζίδης, Ι.Κ. 1923. Έκθεσις γλωσσικής αποστολής εις τας Κυκλάδας (1918–1919). Λεξικογραφικόν Αρχείον 6: 142–159.

Voyatzidis found that the old Cycladic dialect (which is related to Cretan) was already moribund: he could only found two or three people per island that spoke what he deemed to be authentic dialect. And this is a lot earlier than the mass dying off of the Greek dialects; but then again, the Cyclades were part of the Greek State since the very beginning.

One of the places he visited, of course, was Syros. In the old town of Syros, he heard the same thing as elsewhere on the Cyclades: one or two old timers speaking the authentic dialect, and the rest speaking a mixture of standard and dialect.

… When he went to Ermoupolis, all he heard was Standard Greek.

He published his lightbulb realisation here:

Βογιατζίδης, Ι.Κ. 1923. Πώς ανεπτύχθη η δημοτική μας γλώσσα. Ημερολόγιον της Μεγάλης Ελλάδος 218–225.

His lightbulb realisation might be obvious to us now, but I think he was actually the first one to say it at the time—so blinded were Greek linguists by the Greek Language Question polemics. Standard Modern Greek is a dialect koine. That’s why it was spoken in Ermoupolis and Athens—two towns that were essentially settled by people from throughout Greece, after Greek independence.

To date:

• Nick Nicholas’ answer to What does the Greek word “malaka” mean? 14,054 views
• What it says about me: I like talking about obscenities, but when I do, it’s still going to be as a linguist, with exploration of nuance and cultural difference. And contemporary Greek politics.
• What it says about Quora: Herp derp, Greek obscenity!
• Nick Nicholas’ answer to How did the “Swastika”, which is said to be the symbol of the Aryan race, get its place in Hinduism? 8,580 views
• What it says about me: I am familiar with the meta-history of Indo-European linguistics; and I have a devastating turn with colloquial English. (“I shit you not.”)
• What it says about Quora: There are many Indians on Quora.
• Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why was Richard White banned from Quora? 8,086 views
• What it says about me: I am deeply unhappy with the excesses of Quora moderation. Also, I like to draw artless cartoons on Quora.
• What it says about Quora: Richard White is a popular Quoran. And look, a picture!
• Nick Nicholas’ answer to How do you say “cheers” in Greek? What are some other common Greek toasts? 6,291 views
• What it says about me: I know Greek; and my Greek is in some ways antiquated.
• What it says about Quora: Lots of Quorans take Greeks out for drinks.
• Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is the difference between authorise and authorize? 6,100 views
• What it says about me: I know enough about the vagaries of English spelling, to know that Oxford University Press is a traitor to its own country, favouring Greek etymology over our proud Anglo-Norman history.
• What it says about Quora: Lots of Quorans are anxious about how to spell.

Not aware of such a term, but it’s a nice distinction: the endonym is really just a pronominal reference, so much “ours” that it doesn’t warrant a name at all.

I could coin the term hemeteronym, “ours-name”, for it, but I won’t. It’s a pronominal, or deictic, endonym.

Well, if it wasn’t, we would all be in trouble. It’s not plagiarism if you’re quoting yourself, and it’s addressing the question.

What it should make you vigilant to, of course, is whether the question you’d answered and the question you’re answering might need to be merged…

---

EDIT: No, it is considered self-plagiarism. See exchange between John Gragson and Jay Wacker, Quora policy architect, starting at https://productupdates.quora.com… , and culminating with:

You can reuse your own, so long as you block quote and attribute to the original answer. This is not a new policy. People don’t want to read the same answer again and again.

Germans have long thought that the Schlegel & Tieck translations of Shakespeare are better than the original. The conceit of Shakespeare being a translation from the original Klingon is an echo of that.

Not necessarily better, but certainly smoother is the best known translation of Cavafy, by Keeley & Sherrard. A lot of Cavafy is about his precarious linguistic eclecticism. It’s very hard to render in a non-diglossic language without sounding silly. Keeley & Sherrard, after others’ failed previous attempts, decided not to bother.

It’s not a faithful translation in that regard, no. But it is very readable.

No references were harmed or even looked at in the authoring of this answer.

It’s hard for us now to understand the awe and fear of ancient Greek religion. So when reading this answer, try not to think of Pericles and Demosthenes. Think instead of J. Random Tribesperson from, I dunno, Vanuatu or some place.

Booze was a scary thing to those who invented it, and no less scary to those who got hold of it. It made you act like you were possessed by a god. A scary god, who was also tried up somehow with sex and fertility. A god who was somehow acting out through you, and you had no control of yourself.

In fact, that’s the original meaning of the word enthusiasm. Being entheos, in-god: having a god inside you.

There were religious festivals to propitiate this strange, scary god called Dionysus. The festivals involved people getting drunk, which was a scary thing. And having the god speak through them in rant and song.

2500 years on outside your neighborhood bar at 3 am, I would argue not much has changed.

Because this was a religious ceremony, full of awe and solemnity, the drunken songs had names. Dionysus was somehow tied up with fertility, and given the stereotypes of the animal kingdom, some songs were called goat songs. I forget why other songs were called the kōmos, because I’m refusing to look up any references.

Because this was a religious ceremony and not a frat party or soccer match booze up, the songs had a religious bent. Being possessed by the god was scary, and the songs were about scary religious stories that invited awe and fear. You know. Myths.

Because the god was in them (they were drunk), they would tell the stories from the perspective of the god. In the first person.

At some stage, someone in the crowd listening to the holy drunken recitation of myths decided to join in.

And take turns telling the myth with them, in the first person.

Which turned into them acting out the myth story.

Drama was presented in Athens during the Dionysia, the religious festival of Dionysus. They involved song and dance, and a chorus of actors singing solemn songs, and having individuals talk back to them.

The Greek for goat song is tragōidia.

The Greek for kōmos song is kōmōidia.

Like you build a microservice in any other programming language, but with the advantage that concurrency is baked into the language.

You’ll need a messaging system as your backend for services, that can talk to Golang. Kafka will, and so will NATS.

You will need a HTTP server front end in Golang, that receives RESTful service calls and passes messages from the HTTP on to an incoming messaging queue, or reads messages from an outgoing messaging queue to HTTP. labstack/echo is an example of that.

You will need a message handler and distributor in Golang, that grabs messages from a messaging queue, invokes one or more microservices on them, and puts the output of those microservices on another messaging queue.

You will need a series of microservices, coded in Golang and all running at the same time, that read in a message and output a different message.

I did not build the base framework of nsip/nias2, the Golang Microservice set I’m contributing to; my CTO Matt Farmer did, and his code is very legible. Unlike mine.

And of course, consult How is Go (programming language) used in microservice architecture?

I can confirm this. I have just deleted my all-time most popular answer ever, and turned it into an answer wiki instead for What is the difference between realize and realise? Can it be used interchangeably?

The 20k views of that question are gone from both my stats graphs, and from my profile “About” sidebar. It took maybe an hour for the latter to refresh; the graphs lost the deleted answer immediately.

I can’t confirm the same for upvotes, because said answer never got any upvotes. As befits something that should have been an answer wiki to begin with. (It was just a link of related questions. And I hadn’t made it an answer wiki at the time, because No Onboarding On Quora.)

I am the first to say that Quora Inc are technically incompenent (in places; I was rather impressed with their recent post on CSS: Faster Paint Times by Michael Yong on Engineering at Quora).

But concretely, look more closely at the all time graph.

See how it starts back at 2013 or whenever? (I’m not checking, coz it’s slow.)

What’s the bet that the all time graph doesn’t start fetching data to plot from when you joined Quora, but from the start of time?

---

Oh, and 1.6 million views is modest, is it?

I’ve got 300k.

I hate you.

(Checks profile)

Oh, you’re that anti-anti-smoking dude! In that case, I love you. Coz God knows, you’re not getting a whole lot of love on this forum…