Nick on Quora

The traditional way of doing that is to use a Greek numeral; you could use them indiscriminately for ordinals, cardinals, and in antiquity even multiplicatives. So World War II, Henry VIII: Βʹ Παγκόσμιος Πόλεμος, Ερρίκος ο Ηʹ, which are in fact read out loud as Δεύτερος Παγκόσμιος Πόλεμος, Ερρίκος ο Όγδοος, with ordinals and not cardinals. (It is “Second World War”, never “World War Two”.) This is done for names and titles.

The ordinal numbers can have a superscript inflection ending, as is done in Romance languages. That does not happen with titles, but it is optional with non-titles: you can say α[math]^{ος}[/math], β[math]^{ος}[/math], γ[math]^{ος}[/math] πρωταθλητής for 1st, 2nd, 3rd champion. Alternatively, the suffix can be hyphenated: α-ος.

These days, you will also see Arabic rather than Greek numerals, always with the inflection, and the inflection can appear with no hyphen or superscript: 1[math]^{ος}[/math], 1ος. This is newer, and if Google is any indication, that’s the most common mechanism now. In the 80s, my primary school, Sitia Second, was named Βʹ Δημοτικό Σητείας (primary schools and high schools are numbered in each town); its blog now names it 2o ΔΗΜΟΤΙΚΟ ΣΧΟΛΕΙΟ ΣΗΤΕΙΑΣ. Patras Third High School, which is old and venerable, is listed on Wikipedia as Γ’ Γυμνάσιο Πατρών; but its Facebook page names it as 3ο ΓΥΜΝΑΣΙΟ ΠΑΤΡΩΝ.

Anything for you, Jeremy.

For much of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, Greek identity was a tug of war between a Romaic and a Hellenic construct, between an identification with Ancient Greece via Western Europe (or vice versa), and the folk culture informed by the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires.

The Hellenes have won, but that victory is fairly recent. I don’t believe it truly predates the European Union. And that victory has certainly not been as thorough-going as people like to think.

Turks have been the Other for Greeks too long for them to identify with the Turks. Especially when Greeks have so much invested in identifying as European.

All I can say is, there is a joy of recognition when I talk to Turks, that I don’t feel talking to Germans. That’s not just because of the commonalities in low rather than high culture. It’s also because those commonalities have been deprecated in official discourse. They have not been ignored, but they have been cast as something to be embarrassed about. So when I do encounter those commonalities, they are all the more resonant for me.

Written registers are a reasonably recent thing in human language, so the peculiarities of written language would qualify as innovations.

The catch is, the characteristics of written language I can think of are matters of degree, rather than categorical differences from spoken language. But they include things like syntactic complexity, anaphora referring back a long way, intolerance of ambiguity (because of the lack of access to immediate feedback), and notions of periodically structured sentences.

The bulk of material on the Web, like the bulk of written material in general, is in standardised forms of languages. If you know the standardised form of your language, or the official language of your country, you can access the Web as well. And if you’ve gone to school at all, then you know a standard language. That’s a big part of the reason you went to school in the first place.

But the web does not suppress non-standard languages. On the contrary, it actually gives them a space to flourish. There is no gatekeeping for publishing content on the web, the way there is for Print Media; and the web encourages informal expression, which is associated with non-standard languages. Reportedly, texting has also encouraged people to use dialect, for the same reason. There is certainly much more Cypriot Greek content online proportionately, than has ever appeared in print.

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Can you write an English sentence, phonetically, in another script without changing the language?

Erica Friedman’s answer to What was the 2017 New York Top Writer’s meetup like?

I was able to get there a little early and meet some of the Quora Staff and speak with them. It’s very easy when one is removed from the gears of a community to imagine that nothing is being done when, in fact, a great deal is being done, just not all of it working the way we want. I came away from those talks excited and energized about the direction Quora is taking.

Jen Zhou

I’ll be on vacation starting this Sunday (U.S., Pacific time) for 9 days or 10. In another country, I don’t think I can use Quora.

Do read this in conjunction with:

Stefan Hill’s answer to Why didn’t the Byzantine Empire have ethnic conflicts like the Ottoman Empire did?

Ethnicity was not important in the Medieval world. Common people did not have to communicate with the state. They were supposted to work and pay taxes. The best they could hope for was to be left alone.

In the 19th century that changed.

The flashpoints in the Early Byzantine Empire were religious and doctrinal, but those often ended up being closely correlated with ethnicity—particularly with dyophysitism vs monophysitism (to use each side’s pejoratives). The bulk of the peoples lost by the Empire to the Caliphate were not native speakers of Greek, after all.

After Chalcedonian Christianity, “heresies” remained a flashpoint, but you do also start seeing more clearly ethnic-based conflict. I don’t know what else to call the Uprising of Asen and Peter, for instance:

The Uprising of Asen and Peter (Bulgarian: Въстание на Асен и Петър) was a revolt of Bulgarians and Vlachs living in the theme of Paristrion of the Byzantine Empire, caused by a tax increase. It began on 26 October 1185, the feast day of St. Demetrius of Thessaloniki, and ended with the creation of the Second Bulgarian Empire, ruled by the Asen dynasty.

In fact, the victorious brothers raised a church to the same St Demetrius whose cult site was in Salonica; in other words, they asserted religious continuity with the Empire, but not political allegiance:

After their return, many of the protesters were unwilling to join the rebellion. The brothers Peter and Asen built the Church of St Demetrius of Thessaloniki in Tarnovo, dedicated to Saint Demetrius, who was traditionally considered a patron of the Byzantine city of Thessaloniki, and claimed that the Saint had ceased to favour the Byzantines: “God had decided to free the Bulgarians and the Vlach people and to lift the yoke that they had borne for so long”.

Thank you for the A2A, Jelle Zijlstra, and why do I suspect that you’ve read my page Astral Planes?

There’s 17 * 65536 characters in Unicode. Each 65536 characters is called a Plane. The first plane, the BMP, is the plane that most characters you will ever encounter are in. Only two other planes are used (or indeed likely to be used), and they contain obsolete, archaic scripts or characters in scripts that won’t get used much at all, and that most people will rarely encounter.

Or, per Plane (Unicode) – Wikipedia

In the Unicode standard, a plane is a continuous group of 65,536 (= [math]2^{16}[/math]) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16 decimal, which corresponds with the possible values 00–10 hexadecimal of the first two positions in six position format (hhhhhh). Plane 0 is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), which contains most commonly-used characters. The higher planes 1 through 16 are called “supplementary planes”, or humorously “astral planes“.

Thank you Wikipedia.

[citation needed]

Actually, you know what? I’ll cite me. Astral Planes

So as of Unicode 3.0.1 (August 2000), Unicode is organised into 16 planes, each of 64K; this gives over a million codepoints, which should be enough for all needs, past present and future. The Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), or Plane 0, is the first 64K, which is what was in use until 2000, and where just about everything useful will still reside. The other planes are termed Supplementary.

The supplementary planes are an innovation in how characters are internally represented—programmers have to assume a character can have a million possible values, not just 64K, which means they often have to change their existing code. Furthermore, they are not drastically common in use: most ‘real’ scripts (though not all) are ensconced in the BMP. […]

The informal name for the supplementary planes of Unicode is “astral planes”, since (especially in the late ’90s) their use seemed to be as remote as the theosophical “great beyond”. There has been objection to this jocular usage (see “string vs. char” and subsequent discussion on Unicode list); and as Planes 1 and 2 spread in use there will be less occasion to feel that the planes really are ‘astral’. But the jocular reference is harmless, and it serves as a reminder that we’re not quite there yet.

Astral plane is a joke on Astral plane: they’re “planes” of characters, but they were inaccessible and immaterial, you’d never get to them, your software would never get to them, and you’d never need to get to them: they were abstruse and obscure. The joke was coined on the Unicode mailing list.

The term is still in use; e.g. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/i… . And the term still means something: legacy products still fail to support them (such as… oh, the Quora text editor).

There’s a simple reason why those planes aren’t particularly astral any more. In amongst the Deseret and Nabataean and Egyptian hieroglyphs, there is one set of characters in the supplementary planes that sees a *lot* of usage now, and that users have come to expect all their platforms to support. Those characters weren’t in Unicode when I wrote my page in 2003, but they’re there in the Astral Planes now.

Those characters are, of course, Emoji.