What, civil liberties in the US have not been curtailed enough already? BNBR shall be the template for expressing civic dissent? Quora bots should take over as the nation’s police force AND judiciary? Quora product management is the template for American ingenuity? Six years of venture capital in, Quora finances are the template for American economic recovery?
That… sounds a lot like Qommunism.
Quora is a good space. Quora management is not good management. If Quomrade DiCaprio nominates, I’d react about the same way (from my safe Australian vantage point) as I react now to Citizen Trump nominating.
I don’t know the answer, but I do know how to read Greek Wikipedia: Αχέρων – Βικιπαίδεια
The Acheron was considered a river of Hades in antiquity. Which makes sense, given that Epirus, where it is located, was nowheresville to the Ancient Greeks. This also exaggerated their sense of its importance: far from being the second greatest river in the world, as Plato claimed in Phaedo (and the greatest was Oceanus itself), the Acheron is only 58 km long.
The Acherusian lake, which the Acheron flowed into, seems to have been associated with much of the spooky stuff by the Ancients, including the gates of Hades. The lake was drained in the 1960s, by the British concern Boots Ltd, and that has changed the flow of the river.
The Acheron in Antiquity
The Acheron now
Haralambos Gouvas, the local who drew the map above, thinks it’s pointless to try to correlate the Homeric geography of the Acheron with its modern geography.
From what I can tell, there are just small villages along the flow of the river. Ammoudia, Preveza (formerly Splantza), at the mouth of the Acheron, has a population of 330. Glyki (Γλυκή Θεσπρωτίας) has a population of 434; Kastri, Thesprotia has 760; Valanidorachi (Βαλανιδόραχη Πρέβεζας) has 334.
Ah yes. There isn’t enough of a bulls-eye on my back in Quora already.
There are two schools of thought on the origin of Aromanians, as discussed in Wikipedia:
A1. The Aromanians are descendants of Greeks (or at least, Greek-speakers) who were Latinised during Roman rule.
A2. Slight variant on this: the Aromanians are descendants of Roman colonists and soldiers, who spoke Latin from the beginning.
The Aromanians are not indigenous to the southern Balkans, and came from up north.
B1. Romania—which would make them transplanted Romanians
B2. Thrace, which would make them transplanted Thracians
As you will not at all be surprised to hear, Greeks prefer A1 (which makes the Aromanians Greek), and Romanians prefer B1 (which makes the Aromanians Romanian). Wikipedia seems to be weighing towards B2, which seems a little more plausible—less distance for the Aromanians to move.
What actual evidence do we have? Not a whole lot.
One piece of evidence is the Jireček Line, which divides up where Latin was probably the majority language from where Greek probably was, according to evidence from inscriptions. The Jireček Line runs north of FYRO Macedonia, much of Albania, and through central Bulgaria; that means it runs north of Aromanian territory. This corroborates B1 and B2.
A second piece of evidence is the torna, torna fratre phrase, discussed at length in Proto-Romanian language. In 587, during a military campaign in Haemus Mons (Balkan Mountains, central Bulgaria), a muleteer yelled at his mule “turn around, brother!” in proto-Romanian, in what the chronicler Theophylactus Simocatta calls “the local language”; the army used Latin for military commands, and the muleteer’s proto-Romanian “turn around” was misunderstood as the Latin command to retreat. Note that the meaning “turn” of Romanian toarnă is archaic, but torna is still Aromanian for “turn”.
The episode suggests that in 587 in central Bulgaria, proto-Romanian was the local language. The Haemus Mons pretty much is the Jireček Line, so that evidence also corroborates B2. “Haemus Mons” does not corroborate A1, even if the Greek PhD thesis about it (L’Aroumain et ses rapports avec le grec / Achille G. Lazarou) claims it does. (And the reprobate Westernising linguists I hanged out with in Greece did not have a lot of respect for Lazarou’s thesis: he had an agenda.)
So, no proof that Aromanians aren’t indigenous to Greece, FYRO Macedonia and Albania. But the theory that they migrated from what is now northern Bulgaria, if not Dacia itself, during the great migrations of the early middle ages, is somewhat more plausible.
I’m not interested in what Quora Inc. thinks about comments blocking; if Quora Inc. had its way, there would be no comments, and Quora certainly does not think comments are a big part of the desired user experience.
It seems a lot of users agree that Quora comment blockers should get to comment. Because:
tit for tat blocking would only exacerbate the situation, and is retributive justice (Robin Corey, Koyel Bandyopadhyay)
comment blockers should be given the benefit of the doubt as to why they block comments (Koyel Bandyopadhyay, McKayla Kennedy, Bart Loews), and should not be penalised as a group (Heather Jedrus): I don’t want anyone blocked (McKayla Kennedy)
comments are not the proper venue for disagreement; answers or downvotes or reporting are (Koyel Bandyopadhyay, Amanda Glover, Craig Good); and as Quora keeps saying, comments aren’t encouraged, and Quora is not for debate (Jon Sanchez, Amanda Glover)
comment blockers are intrinsically allowed to comment on others, because that’s what they want to do (Miguel Paraz, Jean-Baptiste Bertrand); block them if you don’t like it (Viktor Toth, Mohan Vanamalai, Cameron Williams, Lara Novakov, Marcus Sheldon Brandt)
You can always engage with me in messages instead of comments (Viktor Toth, Mohan Vanamalai)
Only a few respondents acknowledged an inherent discomfort with comment blockers commenting (Cameron Williams, Marcus Sheldon Brandt, Heather Jedrus, Robin Corey)—including the two comment blockers themselves (Viktor Toth, Mohan Vanamalai).
Well, I would rather the option of disabling comments from comment-blockers, and I certainly decline upvotes to comment-blockers. Of course, Quora UI being what it is, I don’t get options—things are either on or off universally. So I will just continue to shun comment blockers.
I have no interest in engaging in an anechoic chamber; if Quora killed comments (as they’d have preferred), I’d leave, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
It’s not just justice that’s retributive: morality is foundationally dependent on reciprocity. That’s the notion we call “fairness”.
Comment blockers may have whatever motivation they want for blocking comments: but if they take away all possibility of reciprocity, they get no engagement from me, and I fundamentally mistrust any comments they leave for anyone.
Bart Loews’ distinction is one I find specious: “This doesn’t mean that they’re refusing to advance conversation, often it’s just that they’ve received a disproportionate amount of hate and are looking to stem it off because they’re tired of deleting the same played out comments over and over again.” In doing the latter, they are also doing the former.
If you think private messages are going to encourage more civility than publicly visible comments, and you encourage private message instead of comments… well, you have enough confidence in human nature, that I’m surprised you’re blocking comments at all.
Reporting would assume that I have confidence and trust in Quora moderation.
I have resorted to answers instead of comments once or twice, when I had enough to say to warrant a competing answer (or when the competing answerer saw fit to block me). Given how downgraded comments are, they are a necessary alternative, and I acknowledge the usefulness of a retorting answer rather than a bogged down debate in comments.
I howl whenever she tries to put it on. After the first three times through, you see through all the faults. I end up watching anyway if it’s a good season.
(2nd in particular; and 5th because Josh Fricking Lyman gets at least some comeuppance. I must have been the only fan of Ryan Pierce, for that reason.)
Yes, although you won’t be surprised to hear that the change in the usual Columbo formula comes in the later telemovies, which tried to play with the format.
A most commendable question; and you’d think a Greek dialectologist would be ideally placed to answer this.
You would be wrong. Precisely because I’m used to dialects, it’s hard for me to make aesthetic judgements on them.
But let me attempt to at least posit why certain dialects might be considered harsh.
1. Cappadocian
It’s doubtful that most Greeks have ever even heard Cappadocian. Cappadocian is moribund, Cappadocians never had the numbers that Pontians had in Greece, and many Cappadocians had already shifted to Turkish before the population exchanges. So the full extent of my experience of what Cappadocian sounds like is the “Anatolian” (from Kayseri) in the 1830s dialect comedy Babel.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=M7P7mXegdXU
The Anatolian is introduced at 5:30, and yes, the very first thing he asks for is pastırma kayserili.
I’m guessing that Cappadocian will sound harsh to Greeks, because it sounds Turkish: language contact was most advanced there (even to the extent in places of vowel harmony). At an impressionistic level, it’s quite breathy, and the /a/ is back.
Then again, this recording of Pharasa [Çamlıca, Yahyalı] speakers in Greece doesn’t sound anywhere near as harsh as the music hall stereotype:
The other Anatolian dialect Pontic, by contrast, does not sound particularly harsh to me. At least, I don’t think so. Because the intonation really does soak in from the prestige language. Contrast below a newscast in Pontic in Greece (which sounds identical to Athens newscaster Greek), and a Russian Pontian speaker (who sounds, well, Russian):
EDIT: Just got this recording of Silli dialect (near Konya). Not unpleasant, but not very Greek-sounding, either:
2. Northern Greek
Northern Greek doesn’t sound particularly guttural or abrupt, but it is missing a lot of vowels. That makes it sound, at least, crunchy.
Here’s an interview with someone from Lesbos.
3. Assibilating dialects Greek
Assibilation is the process whereby non-sibilants become sibilants; in particular, tsitakismos (as the Greeks call it) is the subset of that process, whereby front [c] goes to a sibilant like [tʃ] or [tɕ]; palatalisation also made [s] go to [ʃ] in a lot of dialects.
Standard Greek doesn’t have Postalveolar consonants, and I’d fancy that any dialect that does have them would sound harsh to Standard Greek speakers.
That’s most dialects of Greek. Cretan, Cypriot, most Northern dialects, Pontic, Cappadocian, Italiot.
3. Standard Greek
Or at least, Peloponnesian, which is what Standard Greek is based on.
Ha! The rapid-fire intonation is what I have in mind. I don’t know for a fact what Standard Greek sounded like to Cretans or Cypriots when they first heard it, before they associated it with officialdom. But given how sing-song Cretan and Cypriot is, I imaging “harsh” would be one word.
The last Greek-ish state to fall to the Ottoman Empire was the Principality of Theodoro, in 1475. You know of it as Gothia: it’s in the Crimea, where Gothic survived to be recorded in the 16th century, before yielding to Greek. The Greek of the Crimea in turn survives as Mariupol Greek.
But the Principality of Theodoro was not a Byzantine outpost; it started as part of the Empire of Trebizond, before becoming autonomous. The Empire of Trebizond, which held out until August 1461, started out claiming to be a successor state of the East Roman Empire, after the Fourth Crusade. The Empire of Nicaea and the Despotate of Epirus did too. But Nicaea was the empire that ended up taking Constantinople back; so its claim was the claim that counted. And, Wikipedia informs me,
In 1282, John II Komnenos stripped off his imperial regalia before the walls of Constantinople before entering to marry Michael’s daughter and accept his legal title of despot. However, his successors used a version of his title, “Emperor and Autocrat of the entire East, of the Iberians and the Perateia” until the Empire’s end in 1461.
So it depends on whether, by Byzantine, you mean “part of the empire calling itself Roman, and whose capital was Constantinople”; “successor state of the pre-1204 Roman Empire whose capital was Constantinople”; or “state whose official language was Greek”. I don’t feel comfortable calling a state Byzantine if it doesn’t have Byzantium.
Now, the Byzantine Empire in 1453 consisted of Constantinople and a bit of the Peloponnese, around Mystras. The Despotate of the Morea was a province of the Byzantine Empire, that remained in Greek hands past 1453, under Demetrios Palaiologos and Thomas Palaiologos, brothers of Constantine XI. Not that they called themselves emperors after 1453, and not that they did much keeping of the Morea in Greek hands: they invited the Ottomans in to subdue a revolt by Albanians, right after the fall of Constantinople: Morea revolt of 1453–54
Mehmed had enough when the Palaiologos brothers started fighting each other. Mystras surrendered to Mehmed the Conqueror in 1460. The very last fortress of the Despotate, Salmeniko Castle, held out until July 1461 under Graitzas Palaiologos.
I don’t want to dignify the post-1453 Despotate of the Morea with the name Byzantine; but unlike Theodoro and Trebizond, there really isn’t anything else to call it. And Thomas Palaiologos was recognised in the West as the rightful heir of the Byzantine Empire.
Celia is closest in her initial formulation (which Michael does not contradict):
Opposites are paired items *in the same conceptual category*, with perfectly opposing (non-overlapping) qualities. To be one is to not be the other.
But the qualities not being overlapping is the most prototypical instance of opposition; you can have opposites on a cline, where there is no clear dividing line. The most clear instance of that is big and small, which are entirely subjective qualities (big and small relative to what?), and which are on a sorites scale (how many centimetres do you add to a dog’s height before it turns from small to big?)
So the fact that there is a cline of age, from infant to girl to maiden to woman to crone, is irrelevant. A woman can still be the opposite of a girl, particularly if we isolate the conceptual category as being not age, but (as Michael identified) womanhood, whether that is female + adulthood, or sexual maturity, or any of the murkier cultural constructs associated with girlhood and womanhood.
Mack’s notion that
The concept of “opposite” is geometric, geographic, or mathematical, not linguistic nor conceptual. In the observable world, few things have any actual opposite.
… well, I’ll just say that no linguist uses opposite in that extremely restrictive sense, and no layperson did either. If they did, big and small would not be opposites, because big and small are entirely conceptual and not geometric concepts (since they are subjective and contextual).
And “I’m an individual, I’m not a construct, you can’t put me in a pigeonhole”—that’s wishful thinking. Binary categories are how we understand the world. Intersex or queer individuals challenge the universal applicability of the binary category of gender; they don’t undo everyone else’s acceptance of that cultural construct for themselves.
I don’t like Michael’s answer, because I think the native speaker’s understanding of “opposite of girl” is far less refined most of the time. (It is, after all, a lay understanding.) But he is closer than Celia, in identifying that the conceptual category that the oppositeness is defined on is contextual, and in identifying several conceptual categories that it is aligned to.
If the context is sexual maturity, or adulthood, or other murkily related stuff, the opposite of girl is woman.
If the context is gender, the opposite of girl is boy.
By default? I’d say by default the opposite of girl is boy. There’s a reason Kalo Miles jumped to it. If for no other reason, because if you want to emphasise someone’s non-adulthood rather than their female gender, you don’t say “she’s only a girl!” You say “she’s only a child!”
EDIT: Oh, and the opposite wouldn’t be girls: we don’t consider inflection as making an opposite of a word. Opposites involve stems. Dictionary words, if you like. Baked in meaning.
I had to correct your spelling there: πεις, not πες.
In the context you’ve given, both are subjunctives, following μη “don’t”. Λες is the present subjunctive, meaning it’s imperfective (continuous); πεις is the aorist subjunctive (perfective). So “don’t keep telling me” vs “don’t tell me” (once-off).
Why would the lyricist switch aspect in the verb? Variety: he gets to say the same thing in the chorus twice, but with a different rhyme:
