Nick on Quora

I’ve read Dimitris M Papadakis’ response, and I’m quite happy to vehemently disagree with him. And of course…

Many modern Greek citizens may, of course claim otherwise, but there ought to be a distinction between those who happen to be Greek citizens and those who have a Greek mind and adhere to a Greek, that is genuinely “hellenic”, worldview.

… the disagreement is all about whether Modern Greek identity can admit any “oriental” element at all, or whether all Greek popular culture should have impeccably classical credentials.

Not a Tsifteteli

Possibly a bit closer to a Tsifteteli

The dance is certainly an innovation in Greece, and appears to have been come about with rebetiko music. While there are some elements to rebetiko that were indigenous to Greece, the major impetus for it came with refugees from Asia Minor, and tsifteteli similarly reflects Asia Minor popular culture. The claims of Byzantine or Ancient Greek antecedents are pretty blatant stretching.

It’s fair to say that the tsifteteli is low culture; word association with tsifteteli will bring up skyladiko “dog pound”, the low rent brash bouzouki joints out of town.

In my book, that’s just fine. There’s a prudishness in Greek folk culture (folk song outside of Cyprus does not acknowledge women have bodies—except for during carnival, when they only acknowledge they have bodies). The self-consciously sensuous dancing of the tsifteteli is something I find a welcome antidote to it.

Yes, it’s a dance starlets use to show off:

But notice, the cool young male thing to the left is having just as good a time of it.

One of the oddities of tsifteteli is that, quite often, it’s women that end up dancing it with each other. Not necessarily because they’re flirting with each other; more like, there isn’t enough critical mass of men feeling unselfconscious enough to join them. Which in any case means there’s a little more going on than:

None whatsoever beyond entertainment and flirting or lusting over the female body in front of you.

… and, really, they said the same about waltzes.

Well, Lyonel Perabo mon vieux, this is going to be an unimaginative answer, but thanks for asking.

• University education: Bachelor of Electrical Engineering
• Well, no electricity, so that’s irrelevant. Good, I hated engineering.
• University education: Bachelor of Computer Science
• … No computers either. And too much damn competition from all the other time travelling geeks.
• University education: Masters in Cognitive Science
• Dude, you can’t get a job with that now
• University education: Doctorate in Linguistics
• Quite apart from the woe is me of Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is your personal experience with obtaining a linguistics degree? …

Well, let’s think about it. 1516, Crete and Cyprus were both under Venetian rule. They were colonial outposts, but the Renaissance was starting to make an impression there: there were Petrarchan sonnets in Cypriot, and literary societies in Crete. (The best of Cretan literature was still a century down the road.)

If I was a city dweller and/or Catholic, I’d have access to Renaissance learning. I’d probably write even worse Latin poetry than I write here to Michael Masiello, and I might get a gig in Venice. Aldus Manutius has just died, but I hear they’re still hiring Classical Greek proofreaders.

If I were a villager and Orthodox, there would be two paths for someone through book learning. The clergy would be one, and I think my chanting would be passable, as demonstrated here.

The other would be as a notary. I could have abysmal spelling in Greek, codeswitching with Italian for every third word. And five centuries down the road, some poor shmuck working in a digital library of Ancient and Mediaeval Greek would be tweaking their morphological analyser, to deal with the mess I’d bequeathed them.

I’m going to miss you, Manolis Varouchas.

From Klimt’s Two Adeles: The Bloch-Bauer Paintings: Adele I is on permanent display in the Neue Galerie, and Adele II is on permanent loan to the Museum of Modern Art. I can’t find the status of the other three.

What Garrick Saito said, only with more anger and venom.

Quora does incur a reputation loss, by being seen as robotic and unnuanced in its enforcement of moderation. In fact, Laura Hale has argued that public statements by Marc Bodnick about who should be banned don’t reflect who actually gets banned—which means that there’s less than complete message discipline about Quora moderation or concern about perception of it, to begin with.

But since we’re all expendable and fungible (and that includes Top Writers), Quora doesn’t particularly care—or at least, it thinks that the benefits of offering a safe space through BNRB outweigh the risks of anodyne discourse, or hurt feelings.

In any case, it takes months for new Quorans to work out any issues with Quora moderation, it’s inside baseball, and it will not deter people from signing up in any real sense.

So yes. It’s a tiny drop in the bucket and insignificant in the grand scheme of things (whatever that might look like).

As, no doubt, is this:

User’s answer to How do I find out what comment caused a Quora Moderation warning?

As I observed at the time, if the episode was not a clear message from Quora’s administration that my presence and contributions are not valued or appreciated in any way, it was completely indistinguishable from one, and it has left me seriously considering deleting all of my answers before leaving Quora for good.

Adding my reaction to the thread when I saw it:

https://www.quora.com/My-partner…

I can only think that this perspective on who is and isn’t Dutch is tied up with Western European, civic notions of nationhood, rather than stereotypically Eastern European, ethnic notions: the 2nd generation Surinamese born in Rotterdam is more Dutch than the 2nd generation Dutch-Canadian, because he lives there and is acculturated there.

Why did Quora rescind automatically forcing users to follow any question they answer? It was a great feature previously (and the time before that, though that was before my time on Quora). Having to follow manually each time is extremely annoying. At least make it optional under settings.

What infuriates me most about this feature on-again off-again (as opposed to all the other myriad missteps of Quora Product “Development”) is that it was only divulged to the Top Writers. Presumably, it was rescinded in response to the preferences of the Top Writers: Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer to At what points has Quora enabled and disabled the feature that automatically follows questions that you answer?

The Top Writers are not representative of all Quora writers. And this preference certainly isn’t mine.

Dimitra Triantafyllidou. In a good way. Because she often calls me to account, and not infrequently corrects me. I don’t enjoy it, but I do appreciate it.

BNRB (Grrr) compels me not to name the bad nemesis (in the literal sense). Suffice to say, he’s a guy with what I consider an unhealthy obsession with treating questions about the Roman Empire as questions about the Byzantine Empire. (Yes, they are contiguous, but we know what time period anyone but an ideologue means when they ask Roman Empire questions, and it isn’t the 15th century.) He’s blocked me, I’ve muted him (because I regard blocking as unmannered), and I mostly stay out of his foul-mouthed way.

I keep them open in a separate tab for a later time; I might take a day or so to get to them. I often get a lot out of longer answers (though not always), but they’re not part of my inbetween-tasks graze of my Quora feed.

“I have a deal with Dimitra Triantafyllidou. She gets to be MVW on Culture of Greece, and I get to be MVW on Greek (language). She gets to teach me on Greek culture, and I… get to be corrected by her on Greek language.”

(If Dimitra didn’t know about the deal before, she sure does now.)

I write lots of scattered other stuff too, including linguistics, music, and conlangs; but Greek language is my main gig.

Oh, and I draw cartoons of people I like here. This, so far, I like the best, not least because it features Lyonel Perabo, who A2A’d me:

Edward Conway dreams of Fire and Ice by Nick Nicholas on Gallery of Awesomery

What do they think? *sigh*

The students at the Classics Department in the University of Auckland have this channel on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/…

In which they have published three recordings of pop songs sung in Ancient Greek, with Erasmian pronunciation.

They are exceedingly clever renderings, both in translation and staging. Mama Mia even has a Sappho quote. The students at the Classics Department in the University of Auckland make me proud to be Antipodean. (Because Australians like taking credit for their cooler cousins.)

If you can read Modern Greek, and delve into the comments…

… Well, if you delve into YouTube comments, you deserve what you got. But it is particularly disspiriting. Poke your own eyes out level disspiriting. I am grateful that at least some Greeks leapt to these kids defense’ (even if a couple of them still thought Erasmian was bogus). The majority just made dick jokes (spelling “dick” in Erasmian: πόυτσο. Ha. Ha. Ha).

Most Greeks aren’t aware that Ancient Greek was pronounced differently, and too many of those who are think it’s a Western conspiracy against them. They don’t base this on any knowledge of Ancient Greek epigraphy, or any consideration of how noone is going to invent the alphabet and then come up with a dozen ways of writing /i/. They base this on a rigid refusal to think outside the Reuchlinian box of their own knowledge of Greek.