In my Antipodean bonhomie, I have asked the no-nonsense Sophia de Tricht if I can call her Soph. Starting at https://www.quora.com/How-do-bel…

The exchange went swimmingly:

—The last person who called me Soph won’t be playing the violin anytime… well, ever

—So when I sold my violin and took up the mandolin a couple of years ago, it was a preemptive strike!

—I think a mandolin would also dissolve in one of the several 55 gallon drums of acid that guy is currently a greasy film on the top of

And capped off, of course, with:

https://www.quora.com/How-do-bel…

You’ve heard of Sic Semper Tyrannis, right?

Well, this is “Sic Semper To Anyone who doesn’t call me Sophia”.

I trust the heels + sailor cap ensemble adequately captures your whole I Mean Business vibe, does it not?

Lazily: because Stravinsky wrote it at the time he was writing his Neoclassical stuff.

The Symphony of Psalms does not have the obvious shoutouts to the Baroque or Classical period that Pulcinella or Oedipus Rex does, and in parts it sounds closer to his earlier Russian period. It certainly ostinatoes like early Stravinsky. Good catch, Anon.

(Could this be the first intelligent Anon question I’ve seen?)

But it’s certainly not as flashy as early Stravinsky: it’s somber and reserved (apart from the berserk horn in the final movement, which a friend said was a shout out to Richard Strauss), and it hews close to older understandings of liturgical music. It doesn’t fit nicely in the neoclassical Stravinsky opus, but it still fits better there than with what he was doing in 1910.

You know, I don’t know. Luckily, Wikipedia does: Labours of Hercules.

Some ancients tells us that Peisander of Camirus wrote the official account of the labours as an epic. Some other ancients (via Clement of Alexandria) tells us that Peisander got his material from some other guy called Pisinus of Lindus.

Neither of these particularly matter to you, because neither guy’s work has been preserved. The writeup we do have of the labours is the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus, a first/second century AD compendium, which is our go-to source for a lot of the fine print of Greek mythology.

Many are Greek, though they’re old and obscure enough to be headscratchers. If they aren’t Greek, they certainly aren’t going to be Hebrew or Persian (Greeks were in Greece a long time before they were anywhere near either); the origins of non-Greek names are more readily sought in old Anatolian and Middle Eastern civilisations, like Ugaritic or Lycian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ze…

Zeus is the Greek continuation of *Di̯ēus, the name of the Proto-Indo-European god of the daytime sky, also called *Dyeus ph2tēr (“Sky Father”). The god is known under this name in the Rigveda (Vedic Sanskrit Dyaus/Dyaus Pita), Latin (compare Jupiter, from Iuppiter, deriving from the Proto-Indo-European vocative *dyeu-ph2tēr), deriving from the root *dyeu- (“to shine”, and in its many derivatives, “sky, heaven, god”). Zeus is the only deity in the Olympic pantheon whose name has such a transparent Indo-European etymology.

That wikipedia artcle quotes from Burkert’s Greek Religion, so let’s see what etymologies he mentions as likeliest:

Greek:

• Hera: hōra “timely”? “ready to get married”?
• Poseidon: Lord of… the Earth? of the Waterways? Source of Waters?
• Athena: Athens may have come first, -ene is a location suffix.
• Apollo: God of the Apellai initiation ritual
• Artemis: probably from Asia Minor; proposals include “healthy”, “butcher”, and “Bear Goddess”
• Ares: Chaos of War.
• Hermes: from herma, a cairn of stones (with phallic cultic connotations)
• Demeter: not in love with the traditional etymology “Earth Mother”, but somehow it connects to cereals.

Not-Greek:

• Aphrodite: Proceeding from the foam? Adaptation of Phoenecian Ashtoreth? Phoenecian “dove” or “fertile”?
• Dionysius: Zeus’ Something, but Zeus’ Son is guesswork, and the second bit may be non-Hellenic. The other names are certainly non-Hellenic: Bacchus is Lydian, Thyrsus Ugaritic.
• Hephaestus: Not Greek, and there has been speculation of Etruscan (via Lemnos) and Lycian origins.

Originally Answered:

Is creole and patois the same thing? Why or why not?

In a prescientific sense, of course. Patois is what French people called the corrupted gibberish that white people spoke in France, and Creole is what French people called the corrupted gibberish that brown people spoke in the colonies.

Thank god for science, right?

A creole in linguistics is the development of a pidgin language, as it becomes learned by children, and starts acquiring more of the irregularities and patterns of normal languages. Creoles often resulted when French colonials spoke broken French to dispossessed colonised peoples, and those peoples turned that broken French into their own language. Haitian Creole for example. So a creole is a particular stage in the development of new languages.

You’ll occasionally hear the suspicion that English was at one stage a creole, though the breakdown of inflection when the Vikings came to town is not quite the same scenario.

Dialects are regional variants of languages. You might occasionally hear linguists use patois as a more regionally restricted subclass of dialect. But patois has a snooty derogatory connotation to it, and dialectologists tend not to think of their objects of study in that way; so you won’t see them use it.

Wogs is the Australian equivalent; and yes, emphatically so, although it’s starting to be dated now, as Greeks and Italians go into third generation. There was overt reclamation in the 90s, though the residue left is more a matter of the more-assimilated using it against the less-assimilated. See Wikipedia on Wog.

JM Cortese speaks for what happened in the US. Her perspective is certainly not mine. And I know the difference between being called a wog by a skip (Anglo-Australian), and being called a wog by a fellow wog.

Like Niko Vasileas said, we don’t have deciphered writings from the Minoans, so we don’t know for certain much of anything. But:

• We know the Greeks were Indo-European, and the Minoans likely were not.
• We know much of Greek mythology has Indo-European content in it.
• We know some things about Minoan religion from their sculptures and frescoes: Minoan religion. And they don’t look Greek.
• We suspect there was at least some Mother Goddess stuff going on in Minoan religion. Or at least a lot of stuff involving boobs and snakes.
• We know there were some faint echoes of something in later Greek mythology, including the Labyrinth and the Minotaur, but also the infancy of Zeus in Crete.

But no, the pre-Greek Cretans would have had their own mythology. The Dorian Cretans would have had Greek mythology, though maybe with some admixture. The people speaking Eteocretan language a thousand years after Minoa may have had Greek mythology, or they may have had syncretism: there is a bilingual Eteocretan–Greek inscription (Dreros 1) in a Delphinium, a temple of Leto, Apollo and Artemis.

As for Greek potamos, I’ve checked in Dictionnaire-Etymologique-Grec : Chantraine (It’s online?! Download while you can!!!)

Its likeliest source is as a noun derived from e-pet-on “to fall” (so, waterfall, torrent); but the meaning means that rivers always fall, which doesn’t sound right. The alternative derivation given, proposed by Wackernagel, is a relation to German Faden “embrace” (which would indeed go back to Proto-Indo-European pot-). More detail in Frisk’s etymological dictionary.

No, I don’t know how “embrace” is more plausible than “waterfall”.

EDIT: Frisk’s dictionary is at the same place. (For now.)

Oh! Faden “embrace” is related to the Greek verb pet-annumi, and its noun petasma, “spread, broadening”. So “something that gets wider”. Ok. And the Old English parallel is flōdes fœðm, “spread of the flood”?

Derivations Frisk rejects: potamos < *topamos, cf. Lithuanian tekù “to run”; and some guy who inevitably said “I dunno, therefore Pelasgian”.

On Sunday, I met another Quoran IRL for the first time.

Was it Dimitra Triantafyllidou?

Noooo… I don’t live in Greece, I just sometimes act like it.

Was it Michael Masiello?

… Nooo, despite Gigi J Wolf’s best efforts, I do not live in the US (let alone the OC), I live in Australia.

Was it Lyonel Perabo?

… Wha? No, PAY ATTENTION. Australia. I live in Australia.

Was it…

NOT AUSTRIA!!!

… Was it Tracey Bryan?

*facedesk* Fictive Quoran Interlocutor, you are getting on my goat. MELBIN, Australia. Mel-boooourne. Melbourne. Not Brisvegas. Melbourne

Was it David Stewart?

… Nah. Not seeing it. But at least you’ve got the right city now.

Was it Miguel Paraz?

Well, he probably works two blocks from me, but I did say to him once that I promised to ignore him. I think I meant it as a joke. Miguel! It was a joke! And my pen was running out of ink! (Sorry to you too, Trace.)

Was it Brian Collins?

You’re getting warmer, Fictive Quoran Interlocutor, but Brian hasn’t moved here yet. Brian! Move over here already!

… So who was it?

I rejoice that you have asked, Fictive Quoran Interlocutor. It was a most felicitous happenstance: I approached this Quoran about his non-work–related content, and it has turned out since that we have day-job business together, which was bringing him into the country next door.

And so it was that I met, direct from the frozen wastes of Nunavut, via the only slightly less frozen wastes of Toronto, the Dispenser of one-line fortune cookie wisdom, the Scourge of the Mountain View Mensa,

Scott Welch:

That figures, you Jimmy Liu-loving reprobate…

What the hell, Fictive Quoran Interlocutor!

… Hang on. Adam DiCaprio, is that you?

I can neither deny nor asseverate that this is how we spent our Sunday lunch:

It was ace fun, Scott. And you’ve got a very slickly engineered system in Edsby! Looking forward to more, and safe flight home!

To Toronno.

There is the general answer, and then there is my answer.

For the general answer, I could not hope to rival the eloquence of Michael Masiello. But as a grotesque injustice to Michael, I think the anarchist theorist Mikhail Bakunin does rival him.

Mikhail Bakunin, What is authority? (1882)

Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure.

I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such an individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.

---

That’s what we all should do.

What do I do?

I look for a tone that suggests the person knows what they’re talking about. Depending on the subject matter, it includes preparednesss to concede weaknesses in their argument, extent of supporting detail, professional-sounding phrasing, orderly presentation. Those things aren’t proof, but they are correlated with an argument that I can follow, and verify to myself.

There are plenty of ideological answers that start from different axioms. There’s no real point questioning axioms; they are departure points, not conclusions. One can only ultimately reject axioms by rejecting the whole edifice built on them. As a shortcut, there are perspectives I have rejected—as have we all; so I will be biased towards answers that share my axioms.

But I am prepared to be convinced by answers, phrased in good faith, that have different starting points to those I favour, but still are coherent and persuasive.

I’m less open than I’d like, but not completely closed.

Formal qualifications don’t mean that much to me (and I find Quora’s preoccupation with them amusing). I got a PhD, and I know how the sausage is made. A PhD doesn’t guarantee you know what you’re talking about, though it does mean you have some project management skills. Being exposed to a discipline’s norms and discourse, however, does mean a lot to me. To give an example, I don’t reject Tim O’Neill for being an amateur historian; he’s as thorough and as well-read as any professional. He’s also as unpleasant as any professional, which is why I don’t particularly seek his answers out; but his reasoning, as opposed to his tone, are legit.

To give a second example, Brian Collins is still finishing an MA in linguistics; and from the breadth of what he discusses, and his familiarity with the literature, I’ll take what he has to say as seriously as any linguistics PhD on here. (There aren’t that many.)