Nick on Quora

Booooring… another LibLeftie:

Economic Left/Right: -3.13

Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.64

Given the addendum from OP: https://www.quora.com/Were-the-c… (which I’ve added to question details):

The bulk of Ancient Greek drama that has survived has survived as part of the postclassical school curriculum, and has been transmitted through manuscript. Even so, we know that bits of the text that the authors must have written (for the text to make sense) has been left off or garbled. Not a huge amount—a verse here, a couple of verses there; but enough that editors exercise their own ingenuity when reconstructing the complete text, and different editors’ of the dramatic texts will be different.

(Usually, it’s the editors, not the translators doing the conjecturing.)

Outside the manuscript tradition, we have significant chunks of Menander in papyrus, but classical dramatists indeed survive only in small fragments; and for the most part, these aren’t snatches of papyrus, but one or two verses quoted here and there by later authors—usually grammarians.

I can’t recall an instance where Kissinger did, though there were plenty of instances where he undermined Nixon or disobeyed instructions. I am reading Dallek’s Nixon and Kissinger right now though, and will update if I find an instance.

Haldeman came closer by routinely failing to pass on Nixon’s enraged instructions to fire everybody. In his sober moments, Nixon was grateful to him for that.

The closest Nixon came to being usurped was just before his resignation. Def Sec Schlesinger and I think Haig agreed they’d block any attempt by Nixon to launch thermonuclear warfare.

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EDIT: Now that I have got up to the relevant chapter of Nixon and Kissinger (p. 530). The Yom Kippur War coincided with the Saturday Night Massacre. Nixon was in no state to deal with the war, and left the handling it to Kissinger. I was prepared to think of much of it as delegation, though it was increasingly hard to: anything Nixon said during the war, Kissinger considered counterproductive.

On the night of the 24th of October, the US needed to head off Soviet threats to intervene unilaterally in the Middle East. The Washington Special Action Group, a committee for serious crisis management within the National Security Council, met, and raised the military alert to Defcon III. It worked: the Soviets, caught by surprise, stood down, and the war was over in a couple of days.

As Wikipedia mentions, citing one historian’s account:

When Kissinger asked Haig whether [Nixon] should be wakened, the White House chief of staff replied firmly ‘No.’ Haig clearly shared Kissinger’s feelings that Nixon was in no shape to make weighty decisions

Dallek’s account sounds like something Toby Ziegler would say in the West Wing, when a fairly similar scenario played out:

It was an amazing turn of events: None of the seven officials who met for over three hours until 2 A.M. had ever been elected to anything by voters. Yet they were setting policy in a dangerous international crisis. Kissinger rationalized Nixon’s absence by saying that he had never attended WSAG meetings. However, the WSAG had never confronted a crisis of this gravity before. More important, the group made decisions that should only come from the president, though Kissinger and Haig were confident that they reflected the President’s views. Others at the meeting were not so sure.

Well, there’s the classic ENGLISH SENTENCES WITHOUT OVERT GRAMMATICAL SUBJECTS by Quang Phuc Dong of the South Hanoi Institute of Technology (pseudonym of James D. McCawley, 1967), and several others in that vein. But that’s linguists writing about swearing, not swearing per se. (There’s was quite a trend of little “who, me?” bombs in linguistic examples in the late 60s and early 70s, prominently including John called Sam a republican, and then he insulted him from George Lakoff).

OP then asks:

Why censor people’s right to swear just because it is science?

Because it’s science. Scholarly papers are meant to at least pretend that they are arriving at rational conclusions through objective consideration of arguments. Swearing is avoided in scholarly papers, for the same reasons exclamation points are. Because it makes you look like you’re not a scholar, and can’t string together a convincing argument.

έχω πει, the perfect tense, is only used in perfective contexts (completed actions); so you can’t use it for “I have been saying”. You will use the imperfect, έλεγα, for that. So Greek makes no distinction between “I was saying” and “I have been saying”.

The English “I have been saying” looks like it’s both perfect and imperfect; in fact, the tense is imperfect, and the use of the perfect in that combination has its secondary meaning, of “present relevance”. If anything, if you want to emphasise the present relevance in Greek, you will end up switching from the imperfect to the present tense, with an adverbial phrase to indicate that the action was continuous in the past. So:

Σου το έχω πει: I’ve told you

Σου το έλεγα: I was telling you; I have been telling you

Σου το έλεγα εδώ και μήνες: I was telling you for months

Σου του λέω εδώ και μήνες : I have been telling you for months (lit. I am telling you for months)

Because when Latin started transliterating Greek, φ was still pronounced as /pʰ/: a p followed by an h. The shift of /pʰ/ to /ɸ/ to /f/ occurred later (the first evidence for it, Koine Greek phonology notes, is from Pompeii.)

Brian is of course correct that naming simply isn’t as stable as, say, the Swadesh-100 list of core vocabulary, or for that matter syntax (VSO, SOV, SVO).

Things change much more quickly now than they used to, so you could object to Brian’s example. In English, the most popular names change radically every couple of decades; name fashions moved in a time scale of centuries in the 1500s. In Greece, where naming traditions were much more conservative until quite recently, names are specific to regions, and perpetuated from grandparent to grandchild. (Manuel is stereotypically Cretan, Athanasius is mainland.)

Christian names (not only from the Bible, but also names of saints) have of course also displaced other naming traditions to greater or lesser extents.

Well, writ large, you see change in naming tradition in the branches of Indo-European as well. Germanic, Greek and Indic share a naming tradition of compounds: Themistocles “glory of law”, Archimedes “counsel of leaders”. This is likely an Indo-European inheritance, and may or may not have been just for nobles. But there’s no trace of it in Latin.

OP, your question appears to be about musical notation (written language), not about the language of music per se.

Western musical notation developed out of Mensural notation , which in turn developed out of Neumatic notation.

The Byzantine Notation system is an independent development of neumatic notation, used in the Greek church, which looks nothing like Western notation. The Znamenny chant notation is the Russian derivative of Byzantine Notation. Hold that thought.

The comparison to make is not between musical written notation and different spoken languages. The comparison to make is between written notation of music and written notation of language.

The written notation of language is a script. In Europe, there’s Roman script, Greek script, and Cyrillic script.

There are many different spoken languages in Western Europe, but all use the same Roman script. They all use the same Roman script, because they all got literacy through the Catholic church, which used Latin.

The countries of Orthodox Eastern Europe did not use Roman script. They used Cyrillic (which was based on Greek), because they all got literacy through the Orthodox church.

There was an Ancient Greek musical notation, but it did not survive. Music notation in mediaeval Europe started in the church. And there was a Catholic tradition of notation (neumes, then mensural), and an Orthodox tradition of notation (Byzantine and znamenny).

Since all Catholic countries shared the same musical notation, it was straightforward for them to keep sharing the same musical notation, when it developed into something recognisably modern in the 1600s (even if by then music was also secular, and they weren’t all Catholic).

So there is only one written musical language for western music, for the exact same reason there is only one script for Western European languages.

Consider the thoughtful responses in Is it bad to ask questions on Quora that could easily be answered via a Google search?

And the headline response by Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, Quora cofounders:

Adam D’Angelo’s answer to Why do some people ask questions on Quora that could easily be answered by using a search engine?

Charlie Cheever’s answer to Why do some people ask questions on Quora that could easily be answered by using a search engine?

I think their vision of Quora acting as a cache for Google is… well, ambitious. Insane. Counterproductive, even.

But that’s their vision for the company until we’re told otherwise; so for them, Quora would not be better. (And you’re not a stakeholder, OP.)

Our top three guesses for your English dialect:

1. New Zealandish

2. Australian

3. Singaporean

Our top three guesses for your native (first) language:

1. English

2. Swedish

3. Chinese – See more at: Which English? on GamesWithWords.org

Was it the She’ll be right answer?

I didn’t mention sheep once, how did they get New Zuhluhnd?