In my experience, Perth by far. Enough that the South African presence in Perth is very visible: it’s one of the largest ethnic subgroups there. (Perth has not had the same level of Mediterranean or Asian migration as Sydney or Melbourne.) South African restaurants are common there, and very uncommon in Melbourne (though I’ve still found a couple of places that had biltong.)
It helps that Perth is so much closer to South Africa, of course.
This phrase is a false friend.
In Modern Greek, it sounds like “eternal hell”. In Modern Greek it would in fact be αιώνια κόλαση: the word order is slightly more fixed, adjectives before feminine nouns must have an -a and not an -o ending, and the third declension has been merged into the first.
In Ancient Greek, it is not eternal hell. It is eternal punishment, eternal chastisement. That particular word for punishment was used a lot in the New Testament and Christianity for what happens to sinners after death; so it was transferred across to the place where that punishment happens. Lampe’s dictionary mentions that meaning in a couple of passages in the 4th century AD, but they still look like meaning just “punishment” to me. The earliest examples Kriaras’ dictionary of Early Modern Greek has meaning “hell” are from 16th century Crete.
A semantic dictionary of late mediaeval Greek remains a desideratum; Trapp’s Lexikon is wonderful, but as Trapp himself admitted to me, it simply doesn’t do semantics. (In fact, it skips words that existed already, because it’s about new words; there is no entry in Trapp for kolasis.)
Every once in a while, I take offence at the possibility that any Unicode script might not be rendered on my Mac—even if I never use the script, will never see the script, and will have no idea what the script even is. And I go hunting for free fonts.
There are five cuneiform blocks in Unicode: Ugaritic (Unicode block), Old Persian (Unicode block), and three blocks for Sumero-Akkadian: Cuneiform (Unicode block) , Cuneiform Numbers and Punctuation, and Early Dynastic Cuneiform.
These are the fonts sitting on my computer, and the blocks they contain. Fonts containing Sumero-Akkadian are in boldface.
The Akkadian and Aegean fonts are by George Douros, and the world owes him gratitude for his Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts, including his typographically meticulous fonts for Greek.
My maternal grandparents (Crete) had five (1940–1953). John, Helen, Maria, Georgia, George.
My paternal grandparents (Cyprus) had nine (1926–1947), of which one was still-born (Angelica) and one died of smallpox as a toddler (Kostas). George,† Helen, Chris, Stavros, Dora,† Andrew, Savvas. As Savvas once said to me, “the machine kept going, until it stopped.” The first child migrated when the last was six months old; I think they all were in the same room only once after that, when Dora was dying of cancer in ’81.
As Albanians here know, I am intrigued by Albania, to the extent of filling a few Albanian Quorans’ feeds. That was triggered in the main by an interest in Balkan linguistics, plus Albanian being the local isolate branch of Indo-European.
I didn’t have a particularly negative impression of Albanians before I came to Quora. Unfortunately, what little contact I had with Albanians was in the context of the influx of Albanians as workers in Greece in the 90s: they were somewhat guarded, quite busy trying to make ends meet, and treated with contempt by Greeks. (The grudging respect came later, and it needed the next wave of migration to come through. Just as has happened with Greeks in Australia, in fact.) And of course Albania had just come out of the dead years of Hoxha, chaotically.
I knew from reading that there were intellectuals in Albania, that they were proud, and that I’d have a lot in common with them culturally. I just didn’t really get the opportunity to explore it that much until now.
I have had a very positive experience of Albanians in my two years of Quora, just as I have had of most Turks, and of most Iranians; I just regret I haven’t had the chance to interact with as many Bulgarians or Macedonians. I don’t think my perception has changed, but it has certainly filled out somewhat.
Quora for the most part relies on users to write questions (hence their frequent absurdity). On occasion, they have hired freelancers to write questions in areas they think are underrepresented. See Nick Nicholas’ answer to Has Quora ever hired people to ask questions on a particular topic?
Linguists and lay people answer this question differently, but that’s because they have different focuses on what language competence means.
A linguist thinks of language as a rule system—a grammar, and a lexicon. As far as a linguist is concerned, the grammar is the common property of the entire language community: if you are a native speaker of the language, then by definition you know all the rules of the language.
A linguist knows that the vocabulary of a language is open-ended, and no one can know all of it; but they also know that vocabulary varies by register, and that to be competent in the lexicon of the language is to use the appropriate words for the appropriate register. If people don’t look at you funny when you speak in a given social context, then you have all the vocabulary you need.
So to a linguist, because of the way they think about language, all native speakers command the language equally well.
The reason a lay person does not hold that view is that lay people introduce value judgements in how they think about linguistic registers (because they use language in a social context), and they prioritise some registers over others as worth commanding. In particular, lay people are concerned about how well people command the prestigious variants and dialects of a language.
Those variants and dialects are not native to all speakers of the language at large, and many speakers have to learn them explicitly, as “non-native” users. That’s why it is meaningful to say that some people know them better than others.
Lay people also appreciate good command of style. They appreciate adept rhetoric and subtle usage of words. These are skills which some people will exhibit more talent or training in than others.
Linguistics does have the tools with which to understand the display of that skill. But linguistics has been reluctant to prioritise this as an aspect of linguistic competence. Mostly, because the evaluation of these rhetorical skills is culture-bound, and subjective, and communicative competence is less so. (Although not as much less so as they prefer to think: culture certainly plays a role in communicative competence too.)
The evaluation of how skillful your rhetoric is is the kind of evaluation that linguists are more comfortable leaving to literature studies.
Google translation does not work by rules and grammars. Machine translation gave up on that decades ago. Pity, because I spent well over a decade coding morphological rules for Greek, and it was a lot of fun.
Machine translation works on statistics. To gather the statistics, you need a large amount of bilingual texts.
Now, there is an order of magnitude more ancient Greek than ancient Latin texts, much of it translated. And there are a substantial number of mediaeval Greek texts as well.
But even if the interest was there in ancient Greek machine translation, the material would not be.
So machine translating ancient Greek would be a lot more hassle than for Latin. And because of the cultural history of Western Europe, there is much less demand for it than there would be for Latin.
Compare the number of translation requests for tattoos on this site, in Latin and in ancient Greek.
Content policy: more lax than for questions and answers:
Quora’s answer to Does Quora enforce its moderation policies on blog content and comments?
Blogs on Quora are generally unmoderated. Most policies that apply to question-and-answer pages do not apply to blogs. However, there are several rules for blogs and posts:
(The exceptions are spam, and a much higher barrier than BNBR for “niceness”.)
Language policy: Question already asked, with no official reply: What is Quora’s language policy regarding blogs on Quora?
Unresolved, but *probably* English-only, given the wording of Quora’s answer to Does content on Quora need to be written in English?
Quora requires that content on English Quora (quora.com) be written in English.
That’s “content”, not just “questions and answers”.
I have seen a couple of blog posts not in English, but I haven’t gone looking, nor known of instances where Quora requested a blog not in English be taken down. I don’t get the impression Quora moderation is that engaged with blogs to begin with.
It depends on where the Greeks are.
Greeks in the diaspora loved it. It is a movie that pokes caricatured fun at the antiquated notions that the first generation of migrants had, and how they did not assimilate and retained a rural worldview. That kind of caricature is a commonplace of second-generation members of diaspora when they get into comedy; it’s hardly unique to the Greek diaspora. (Compare for example the comedy done by the Indian and Pakistani diaspora in the UK.) Greeks in the US, Canada, and Australia were in on the joke, and they lapped it up.
Greeks in Greece and Cyprus… dunno, and I’d be interested to hear. What’s critical is that the worldview caricatured in the movie is a worldview that has long died out in Greece itself: the first generation of migrants remained in a 1950s rural timewarp. Greeks in Greece are likely to feel extremely detached from it: it’s not their modern-day reality, and its not their country. There’s that underlying truth at work, painful for anyone in the diaspora: those who left and those who stayed behind are no longer the same people.
For what it’s worth, the Greek title of the movie was Γάμος αλά Ελληνικά, “Wedding, Greek-Style”. It was a title reminiscent of the madcap comedies of the Greek comedy film industry of the ’50s and ’60s, and that was not a coincidence.
The most interesting reaction, which I monitored at the time, was that of emigre Greeks. I’m using the distinction between migrant and emigre Greeks on purpose: by the latter, I mean the much smaller, much better educated, affluent and urbane wave of Greek professionals who have moved to work in Western Europe and America over the last 20 or 30 years, as opposed to the peasants who moved to become factory fodder and small-businesspeople in the early to mid 20th century.
The two waves have very little in common, and don’t particularly associate. The clash has been most prominent in Canada, where the “emigres” are earlier, political dissidents from the ’70s, and in much greater numbers. The ’50s migrants and the ’70s migrants have formed separate community clubs: they can’t be in the same room with each other. There’s a wave of Greeks coming to Australia now, where Greeks are into their third generation (they are most of the waiters in Greektown, where I live). I’m not paying attention, but I’m sure there’s some cultural friction here too.
Anyway. I was subscribed to the HELLAS-L mailing list at the time, which was the mailing list for those emigres, in Greeklish: it was the main vehicle of Greek online until the Web became a mass presence in Greece and Cyprus.
Many of the emigres on the list were dripping with contempt for the film, and not a few of them demanded that it should have been called My Big Fat Greek-American Wedding. Because they wanted nothing to do with the hicks that film depicted. (I was gratified to see the main complainer being needled by someone else: “You’ve already been in the US for a decade; watch out you don’t get de-Hellenised yourself!”
The vehemence is because the film does not depict a reality the emigres have grown up with—but it does depict a reality they are adjacent to, living in America and Canada and Britain; so they couldn’t feel the same detachment I imagine Greeks in Greece would have experienced. It was more pressing for them to dissociate themselves from it.
Some of the threads on that mailing list are available here: Google Groups—provided you can read Greeklish.