I’d like to thank my wife for arranging access for me to the State Library of Victoria (for free!) Inter alia, this gets me access to the OED.

OED?

First attested use: 1651, in a trial transcript:

Att. Gen. Was Mr. Love present when this letter was read? Far. Yes sure, he was present.

First instance in their list without a yes or aye, with sure at the start: 1914:

P. G. Wodehouse Man Upstairs 133 ‘Is that a fact?’ ‘Sure,’ murmured Archibald.

Then 1963:

Mrs. L. B. Johnson White House Diary 26 Nov. (1970) 11 If it had been a request to chop off one’s right hand one would have said, ‘Sure’.

The sarcastic sure example they give (“orig. N. Amer”) is earlier, 1907:

L. Scott To him that Hath iii. ix. 250 Just then her hand happened to fall on mine—accident, oh, sure!

OED does say that it is “chiefly N. Amer. in later use”.

So: popularisation was American, and probably the ’60s; but if P.G. Wodehouse used it, then America is not where it came from.

Originally Answered:

Which languages were spoken in Anatolia and modern Turkey when Turkic arrived?

I’m touched by Anon’s A2A’ing assumption of my omniscience, but I’m going to Wikipedia here, to confirm my vague hunch that the Anatolian languages of yore were long, long gone by the time the Seljuks came to town.

Anatolian languages

and it is generally thought that by the 1st century BCE, the native languages of the area were extinct.

With one exception:

Pisidian language

Known from some thirty short inscriptions from the first to second centuries CE, it appears to be closely related to Lycian and Sidetic.

Sidetic language

The Greek historian Arrian in his Anabasis Alexandri (mid-2nd century CE) mentions the existence of a peculiar indigenous language in the city of Side.

(The inscriptions we have are from 3rd–2nd century BCE)

In particular, if there was any evidence of Cappadocian surviving, we would likely have heard something about it from the Cappadocian Church fathers. Early research into Cappadocian Greek went hunting for evidence of Cappadocian in the language; lots of amateur speculation ensued, but no professional thought it worth pursuing.

So our default assumptions remain: the Seljuks found Armenian and Greek. And whatever babel of Caucasian languages there is in Lazistan.

Eh…

I looked through Compositions for the pieces I composed and put into music software in 2000. (I composed as a teenager, but didn’t quite know what I was doing; 2000 was when I had enough free time to try and polish things.)

(Not that I quite knew what I was doing in 2000 either.)

It’s a tie between a Scherzo I wrote,

and a Cretan folksong setting:

To my amusement, when I googled for this in Australia, I found that I know the researchers that came up with the latest research on this. The latest research I found was 10 years ago, though (which is why I know them); and I don’t think the numbers will have stayed the same.

http://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/…

As of 10 years ago:

1. Japanese: 333k
2. Italian: 322k
3. Indonesian: 210k
4. French: 207k
5. German: 127k
6. Chinese: 81k

French and German are the inherited elite education languages (they’re what I did). The newspapers have been bemoaning the fall in Asian language enrolments; so Japanese and Indonesian will have dropped; Chinese as a community language will have risen and Italian fallen.

From Languages in Victorian schools, the most popular taught languages in Australia now are French, German, Indonesian and Japanese. That means Italian has collapsed as a community language taught in schools, and Chinese hasn’t broken through yet (which surprises me).

Because such “commercials” are not inconsistent with Quora’s missions:

• publicly: to increase the world’s knowledge
• publicly, when the Founders let their mind wander: to serve as a cache/substitute for Google
• speculatively: to serve as a testbed for from sweet, sweet AI

They’re not very sociable, I admit. Even though I’ve done it myself, and recently at that. But, after all—all together now:

Quora is a Q&A site, not a social site.

Should they? No, because they don’t pass the threshold of Insincere or Trolling. And Quora has enough ease already in hammering down contributions to Quora.

However, such questions are indeed fingernails on a chalkboard to anyone living outside the US. A renowned Quoran of the Hellenic persuasion has once described such questions to me as αμερικανιές /amerikanˈjes/.

The colloquial modern Greek suffix –ja, plural –jes, < Mediaeval Greek –éa, is a flexible and expressive morpheme. It is not, however, complimentary.

Downvote the questions. They won’t go away, and they seem if anything to have been templated, which would mean that Quora was complicit in putting them up: Question patterns by Jay Wacker on The Quora Blog; Question Patterns (Quora feature)

Oh, you didn’t know about templated questions? Well, now you do.

I echo other respondents in expressing frustration at the vagueness of the question.

In English, there are two diacritics that can be applied to <e> to change its pronunciation.

<è> is occasionally used to ensure that the <e> is pronounced and not silent.

Grave accent

The grave accent, though rare in English words, sometimes appears in poetry and song lyrics to indicate that a usually-silent vowel is pronounced to fit the rhythm or meter. Most often, it is applied to a word that ends with –ed. For instance, the word looked is usually pronounced /ˈlʊkt/ as a single syllable, with the e silent; when written as lookèd, the e is pronounced: /ˈlʊkᵻd/ look-ed). In this capacity, it can also distinguish certain pairs of identically spelled words like the past tense of learn, learned /ˈlɜːrnd/, from the adjective learnèd /ˈlɜːrnᵻd/ (for example, “a very learnèd man”).

I make a point of writing learnèd. Very very few people do.

<ë> properly is used to split up a digraph, so the preceding vowel and the <e> are pronounced separately; e.g. Zoë /zoʊi/. However, <ë> was occasionally used for the same reason as <è> was. So (Brontë family) Brontë was a much more posh-looking rendering of the Irish surname Ó Pronntaigh, than the normal anglicisation Prunty or Brunty. Tolkien picked up that function of <ë> in his renderings of Elvish languages.

Probably, but not necessarily. As the astute Joachim Pense put it (answering this question, rather than the OP’s question):

Joachim Pense’s answer to Linguists believe Proto indo European is the root of all those European languages. Does this mean that at one time everyone spoke the same language?

No. Proto-Indo-European is a reconstruction that has a scope of many centuries and a large area. The reconstruction is not able to get to a finer resolution.

In fact, the idea has been put out there (by Trubetzkoy) that Indo-European may not have been a single language at all, but a Sprachbund of languages. The reconstruction assumes that it was a single language, but the reconstruction does that for methodological reasons: it’s not like we actually know.

Even if Indo-European was a single people, languages are not genetically transmitted. There’s a lot of genetic diversity in people who speak Indo-European languages now; there may have been some diversity back then too—especially if Indo-European was always a language that spread from place to place, whether culturally or militarily.

The question about this is always whether it’s a survival or a revival.

The Greeks of Cargèse for example convinced themselves that their main clan (the Stephanopoli) were descendants of the Comneni, and got the paperwork from the King of France to prove it. As a result, almost everyone from the village is now surnamed Stephanopoli de Comnène. (And they didn’t pronounce it /komniˈnos/ either, when they spoke Greek, but /komˈnenos/. Which shows you it wasn’t a survival, it was them reading Comnène out loud.)

From Komnenos, I see that Konstantinos Varzos did the Comnenan geneaologies in 1984 (1500 pp, linked from the article), and found the last descendant of the royal line died in 1719. And even he may have been lying about it.

So, did the surname survive? Sure. Did the family, as a patronymically passed down surname of the erstwhile Byzantine dynasty? Not as obvious.

What is Quora’s policy against users who frequently write factually incorrect answers? has an answer by a Quora Insider, and a Quora Trusted Reporter.

Triangulating between these two answers, and the Quora’s answer to How does Quora deal with reports of factually incorrect answers? policy:

• The official consequence of incorrect answers is collapsing the answer.
• Persistent incorrect answers may (at the mods’ discretion) be deemed spam.
• Incorrect answers are not a reason for banning users (in the stated policy); but spam is.
• In Marc Bodnick’s exegesis of the policy, persistent violation of policy results in bans, which makes the spam-connection explicit.

Of course, User (long live the resistance!) is right: it’s a theology. More specifically, the process of banning someone is a Star Chamber, as a result of being a cryptocracy. (See the intriguing Chrys Jordan’s answer to What if Quora were a country?) The spam connection is at the Star Chamber’s discretion to draw.

In fact, Marc’s answer had a pretty funny comment underneath:

Grant Barnes: Thank you. Will Quora say more about its criteria for factual accuracy in regard to questions of science?

https://www.quora.com/What-is-Qu…

Marc Bodnick: Probably not. Jay Wacker – have we said anything publicly about this?

Oops. You’ve lifted the curtain there.

Konstantinos Konstantinides, that Greek proverb’s actually rather more violent in the original: it’s literally “better they take your eye out than your name”. But your response assumed a readership well-informed about the proclivities of individual users, enough to make judgement calls about individual users. If Quora had confidence that we could all do that, and that those judgements would scale, they wouldn’t be modding the place so heavily.

Or at least unleashing bots and outsourced near-bots to do so…