Nick on Quora

Plato Phaedo 116e

ἀλλ’ ἄγε δή, ὦ Κρίτων, πειθώμεθα αὐτῷ, καὶ ἐνεγκάτω τις τὸ φάρμακον, εἰ τέτριπται· εἰ δὲ μή, τριψάτω ὁ ἄνθρωπος.

But come, Crito, let us obey him, and let someone bring the poison, if it is ready; and if not, let the man prepare it.

Demosthenes 24.105

Ἐὰν δέ τις ἀπαχθῇ, τῶν γονέων κακώσεως ἑαλωκὼς ἢ ἀστρατείας ἢ προειρημένον αὐτῷ τῶν νόμων εἴργεσθαι, εἰσιὼν ὅποι μὴ χρή, δησάντων αὐτὸν οἱ ἕνδεκα καὶ εἰσαγόντων εἰς τὴν ἡλιαίαν, κατηγορείτω δὲ ὁ βουλόμενος οἷς ἔξεστιν.

If any man be put under arrest after being found guilty of ill-treating his parents or of shirking service, or for entering any forbidden place after notice of outlawry, the Eleven shall put him into prison and bring him before the Court of Heliaea, and any person being a lawful prosecutor may prosecute him.

That outcome of <y> is specific to English, and as Y – Wikipedia says, it is through the influence of the obsolete English letter yogh, which was conflated with <y>:

Yogh – Wikipedia

The letter yogh (Ȝ ȝ; Middle English: yoȝ) was used in Middle English and Older Scots, representing y (/j/) and various velar phonemes. It was derived from the Old English form of the letter g. … It stood for /ɡ/ and its various allophones—including [ɡ] and the voiced velar fricative [ɣ]—as well as the phoneme /j/ (⟨y⟩ in modern English orthography).

The velar instances of yogh were replaced by <gh>; the palatal instances were replaced by the arguably similar-looking <y>.

Perusing the entry for τιμάω in Liddell–Scott, the negative meaning you mention is not Epic, and first turns up in Plato and Aristophanes; LSJ describes it as an “Attic law term”. The transition is:

• to honour (since Homer)
• to award (as an honour) (in Tragedy)
• to award a penalty to someone, including a fine or a death sentence (in Attic legal contexts)
• (medial) to estimate the extent of one one’s own penalty (in Attic legal contexts)

It is a specialist meaning, and I’d expect that the main meaning, ‘to be honoured’, continued to be dominant; it certainly is the meaning you would expect in a non-legal context.

Evangelos Lolos’ answer to Does modern Greek still have Latin prefixes and suffixes? gives the prominent Latin affixes of Modern Greek.

No, I’m not going to cite them here. You’re going to have to go over there and upvote him yourself.

The suffixes Evangelos quotes are vernacular; they aren’t part of the whole apparatus of scholarly Latinate terminology.

Greek has had a very, very long history of calquing Latin terms with Greek affixes and stems. In fact, Greek even translates Linnaean binomens (or it used to; I’m pretty sure they’ve given up now). Then again, a whole lot of Classical Latin terms were calqued from Greek anyway.

So there is no precedent, or appetite, for using Latin prefixes or suffixes in Greek. Hybrid terms like automobile or television end up rendered as Greek only terms: autokinēton, tēleorasis. Modern coinages get calqued: amphiphylophilos (‘both gender loving’) for bisexual, metapoikiakos for post-colonial, diapanepistēmiakos for inter-university. The international Latin scientific vocabulary was never going to be a match for Greek cultural pride.

It’s only very, very recently that Greeks have stopped calquing; hence transexoual is much more common than diemphylikos ‘across-in-gender’. (There’s a nice subtlety in em-phylos ‘in-gender’ being a gender you were born with—the analogy is with innate; so that diaphylikos ‘across-gender’ is reserved for ‘intersex’.) But, as Christina-Antoinette Neofotistou, the trans woman involved in the coinages herself conceded, the Greek coinages don’t have the positive connotations that the English loans do, and she’s ended up just saying trans or transdzender and intersex, and dismissing the Greek coinages as pedantic.

I’ll admit to wincing when I saw her write, a bit further down, transfovia. That’s the kind of hybrid word Greek was never ever ever supposed to accept. But like I said: things have changed. At least (thank God) she said ousiokratia instead of esentsialismos.

Yes, of course we calqued essentialism.

See also: A cis lament for the Greek language by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile

The results of Are you seeing ads on Quora? by Nick Nicholas on Assorted Polls as of this writing:

79 answers received. 13 have never seen an ad, 66 have.

Of the 13 who have never seen an ad, 6 are current TW, and 7 are not. Of those who are not, 3 are in North America, 2 in Europe, 2 in Asia.

Of the 66 who have seen ads, 1 is a former TW, and the remaining 65 are not TW. Of the 66, 10 are in Asia, 6 in Europe, 41 in North America, 5 in Oceania, 2 in South America, and 2, somehow, are Other.

This confirms that Top Writers are not seeing ads; the immunity of Former Top Writers, which has also been reported, is not necessarily universal. No clear correlation with region in visibility of ads.

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Would you participate in Quora in Klingon if it existed?

BTW people: this blog is free to everybody to contribute to…

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Is there a difference between asking which language is older and asking which species is older?

An attempt at a longer-format answer.

Congratulations to Vicky Prest and John Gragson, both of whom are scratching their heads right now about getting the Quill despite their BNBR run-ins. 🙂

Having compiled the answer wiki for Who should be in the final batch of Top Writers 2017?, I will limit myself to the comment that the question ended up being just as accurate a predictor about who would be booted out of Quora, as who would get the Quill…

(7 nominees from the community got the Quill, 4 got banned, 3 got deleted.)

The other answers are good, but I like to step back with questions like these, to the cultural context.

In former times, expertise and professional use of language were elite activities; people who would use language professionally had an education that encompassed the literary canon and rhetoric; and the dominant literary aesthetic prioritised an extensive, nuanced vocabulary and shows of erudition.

Currently the literary aesthetic has changed, to something more sparse and less preoccupied with nuance and flourish. Professional use of language has been decoupled from literature and erudition. And Plain English has been elevated as a priority in that professional use of language, particularly given the amount of information professionals are expected to digest daily. People write in dot points, not in paragraphs. People write for other people who would rather not be reading your stuff at all, and certainly don’t look to be entertained by it.

That’s not just in Australia. That is throughout the Anglosphere.

It does not extend to the entire world, though. In particular, it does not extend to the Subcontinent (if I can surmise correctly from OP’s name), at least not in the education system. Babu English may be a nasty colonialist term, but it does continue to reflect a disconnect in values around language aesthetics and utilitarianism, between the subcontinent and the rest of the Anglosphere. There is a concern about using rich vocabulary and structure, which other countries have simply abandoned in their education systems, in favour of efficiency and clarity.

I’m trying to avoid value judgements here. Some things were lost in the transition, other things were gained. I am certainly not proud of point form becoming my native discourse. And in fact, I have used words here that have made me feature in Masiello’s Mega Words.

But I don’t use those words in my day job. And I don’t expect to read them there either.

OP is certainly right about one thing. This is indeed a cultural difference.

Excellent answer from Alket Cecaj, Alket Cecaj’s answer to Why are the taxes so high in Greece?

• Clientelism is how it started
• The government must provide; there isn’t a native notion of ground roots enterprise and small government. If the government must provide, well, that costs money. So far, as Alket argued, that’s no different from Scandinavia.
• Mistrust of institutions is how it is indulged
• This is the unhealthy flipside to clientelism, and that’s the kind of thing you don’t see in Scandinavia. Malcolm Gladwell actually used Greece as an example a decade ago. Greeks don’t dodge taxes because there’s lack of enforcement. Greeks dodge taxes because they don’t trust their government. Any more than their government trusts them. (Or rather, they only trust it to dispense clientelism.) The more they dodge taxes, the more the government taxes the dupes who still pay taxes.
• Inefficiency and profligacy is how it is perpetuated
• We’re a long, long way from Scandinavia now…
• Μαζί τα φάγαμε, as Pangalos said. “We wasted it together.” A genuine government–people collaboration.
• From time to time, even on Quora, someone brings up the reparations that Germany should have paid Greece for WWII—reparations that the Greek government had agreed to forego in the early 60s. If only those reparations had been paid, the argument goes, Greece wouldn’t be in the mess it is now. I was overjoyed to see a blog commenter snark once, “Right. Because we would have wisely invested that money, and not thrown it around to buy votes.”
• Neoliberal EU orthodoxy is how it has gone haywire.
• The Greek government can’t deflate its currency, and it needs to keep repaying impossible loans to its creditors; so it desperately raises whatever revenue it can, including taxing anyone left in Greece who still has any money. That of course guarantees that tradespeople are driven out of business or even further into the cash economy (has barter started there yet?); and any business that could have invested in Greece flees to Bulgaria instead.