Nick on Quora

The canonical counterpoint duets are surely Bach’s Two Part Inventions:

It doesn’t get better. God bless Gerubach on YouTube.

The artificial language Lojban was not expressly designed to be used by machines; it (or rather its antecedent Loglan) was designed as a test of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, its overt basis in predicate logic being sufficiently alien that its inventor thought it would serve the purpose.

Lojban is something of a kitchen sink language in its design, but its design has several aspects which are appealing to at least some AI enthusiasts:

• It has spoken syntactic brackets, and it can be parsed syntactically by an LALR parser (defined in Yacc); so its syntax as formally specified is unambiguous.
• It is also morphologically unambiguous, at the cost of some restrictive phonotactics. (I’m seeing that loanword phonotactics are less restrictive than they were in my day.) So a stream of phonemes can be broken up into morphemes only one way.
• It was a well-elaborated list of 1300-odd basic predicates, with their arguments fully specified. It has prepositions supporting a full case grammar, and (unofficially) conventions for deriving compound predicate arguments from their components. (I was involved in the latter.) This does not quite make its semantics as unambiguous as they’d like, but it certainly puts it on a very formal footing.

Syntactic and morphological ambiguity are not the big challenge of natural language processing; stats tends to take care of that. Semantics is always sloppier, but I’m not sure that the new generation stats-mongerers are that fussed about formal semantics either. But yes, Lojban has been attractive to several AI people for that reason. Ben Goertzel, who is on here, has been vocal about this; see e.g. Aspects of Artificial General Intelligence.

Two ways of solving this: via Greek and via Latin.

Greek first. I don’t care if the Aeneid is in Latin.

• Iliad: Nominative Iliás, Genitive Iliádos, so the stem is Iliad-. (The nominative in proto-Greek would be *Iliad-s.) Hence, Iliad-ic.
• Odyssey: Nominative Odússeia, Genitive Odusseías, so the stem is Odussei-. First declension, –ikos didn’t attach to those, Latin does its own thing, mumble mumble stuff I don’t actually know, which leads to Odysse(i)-an.
• In Greek, the Aeneid is Aineiás, by analogy with Iliás. So if Aeneid were an originally Greek word, its adjective would be Aene(i)ad-ic.
• In Latin, for whatever reason, the Aeneid is Nominative Aenei-s, Genitive Aenei-dis (treating the word as Latin) or Aenei-dos (treating the word as Greek. So the stem is Aeneid-, not Aenead– in Latin (therefore Aeneid in English), and if we treat Aeneid as a Latin word, the adjective is Aeneid-ic.

Google: 239 hits for Aeneidic, 146 for Aeneadic, both of which look to be used by reputable sources.

Been on Quora for close to two years. Have had two benburrs (h/t Gigi J Wolf), both resulting from quoting someone else (and both of which I reject as intractable tone policing):

• My first BNBR warning by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency (January 2017)
• Shoot the messenger by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency (April 2017)

I’m pretty conflict averse, I’d like to think, which may explain it. I also don’t seem to have been as much of a target as, say, Habib. (Yet…)

Guidelines for this blog by Nick Nicholas on Necrologue

• The user named must have reached a reasonable level of notability: at least 100 followers. No exceptions, though I have been tempted.

Guidelines for this blog by Nick Nicholas on Necrologue

I solicit personal messages from users, to let me know who’s been banned or blocked: How does Nick Nicholas keep track of all those Quora users who are banned, edit blocked, deactivated, etc?

• This blog will publish notifications as they come to the editor’s attention.
• This information must be independently verifiable (big red banner on their profile; posting by the user indicating that they are leaving Quora; notice of edit blocking in user log).
• Posts on this blog will only name the users in question. Speculation about why people have been banned or blocked will not be entertained. If I find what could be construed as speculation or BNBR violations, I will invite commenters to delete their comments.
• No value judgement about why people have been banned will be entertained. Some people may well have deserved it. Maybe even most. Some may not. But the purpose of this blog is to raise visibility of moderator actions; not to protest it.
• BNBR applies in comments.

See also Category definitions by Nick Nicholas on Necrologue for the kinds of user status tracked. As of April,

• Deactivation notices will not be published by default to Necrologue. The community is invited to submit such notices to Argologue instead.

I’m not going to speak to the details of the question, but to the general question: how to help instill your ethnic identity abroad, in a child whose identity you have some say in. (If you don’t have a direct say in it, Andrew Crawford’s answer applies: be a good role model.)

• Acknowledge that the child will have the identity of the country they are brought up in, and that identity will ultimately prevail. You can cocoon the child a fair bit before they go to school, and to some extent even after. But if you get too defensive about your ethnic identity, that will end up backfiring in the child’s teens, and your cherished ethnic identity will be something they rebel against, reject, flee from, and ultimately resent. You don’t want that.
• Immerse the child in the culture of your ethnic identity at home. That means TV and books and talking the language at home and little songs and games, and trips back to the mother country. Try not to convey resentment or superiority over the host culture: that will backfire too.
• Immerse the child in the culture of your ethnic identity outside of the home. That means hanging out in the local ethnic community, and building a store of fond memories and associations. It means the culture will be real and lived for the child, not a mere abstraction or playacting at home.

The way to instill your ethnic identity is to build fond associations of family and rootedness and affect in the child with that identity. And even so, being Greek in Melbourne in the 1980s was not the same as being Greek in Athens in the 1980s. Being Greek in Melbourne in the 2010s, even less so. It’s a losing battle. But by being positive and warm about it, you can make the loss more gradual, and more reluctant.

Quora?

The site which has socially hacked its editor so that almost all users are convinced they can’t use emojis at all ([math]unicode{x1F61D}[/math]), and almost all of those users are patting themselves on the back at how wonderful it is that no emoji shall sully their path? ([math]unicode{x1F644}[/math])

That Quora?

Quora does not have emojis that it has advocated for the creation of in Unicode, no. But are there any emojis proper to Quora, and characteristic of it—that we might term, Quora’s own emojis?

Well, to research this question, I perused Quora’s Instagram account: Quora (@quora) • Instagram photos and videos, which seems to be using all the emojis saved up from Quora itself. The most common emoji there was the globe, which accompanies all mentions of internationalisation. ([math]unicode{x1F30E}[/math])

And yes, that’s the version of the globe emoji showing the Americas. Never forget that Quora is in Mountain View, CA; they certainly don’t.

I tried to repeat the experiment on Quora’s Twitter feed, Quora (@Quora) | Twitter; but I was quickly overwhelmed by the Shutterstock photos, and the overrepresentation of answers by Quora employees.

*shudder*

So. If Quora were to claim an emoji as its own, what emoji would it be?

I give you: the Thinking Face emoji!

[math]huge{unicode{x1F914}}[/math]

It is an emoji which can convey multiple perspectives simultaneously.

• The thought-provoking knowledge to be found on Quora!
• The cogitational acrobatics of Quora’s Artificial Intelligence engines!
• The head-scratching UX decisions! (OK, make that chin-scratching.)
• The difficulty of working out whether this question was for real!
• The decision processes of Quora Policy leads on whether to explicitly ban emojis from answers, and how it should be worded! (h/t User)

Neharik Umashankar

IMPORTANT NOTICE:
Over the next couple of weeks(1 May 2017–17 May 2017), I have my final exams. During that time, my account will be deactivated. Fear not; I will be back!

Because Greek didn’t have an ŋ letter, although they knew that the sound existed.

Phonetically, the final -n in prefixes was often assimilated phonetically to the following letter:

• syn ‘with’ + pathos ‘passion’ > sym-patheia ‘sympathy, compassion’
• syn ‘with’ + labē ‘taking’ > syl-labē ‘syllable: sounds “taken together”’
• syn ‘with’ + rhaphē ‘sewing’ > syr-raphē ‘sewing together’

Now if you put syn- in front of a velar, and the -n- undergoes assimilation to a velar just as it did to a bilabial or a liquid, then you would expect the n to go to an ŋ:

• syn ‘with’ + kopē ‘cutting’ > syŋ-kopē ‘syncope, cutting off’
• syn ‘with’ + grapheus ‘writer’ > syŋ-grapheus ‘author’
• syn ‘with’ + khysis ‘pouring’ > syŋ-khysis ‘confusion’

Those forms show up in Greek alright, but they’re written with a gamma where you’d expect the ŋ: <sygkopē>, <syggrapheus>, <sygkhysis>.

But we do have evidence that the gamma in that position stood for an ŋ after all.

1. In Latin, that first <g> was transliterated as an <n>: sygkopē = syncope.
2. There was no ŋ letter in Greek, so you would expect ŋ to be written down as a letter that sounded like ŋ—either <n> (same manner of articulation, not same place) or <g> (same place of articulation, not same manner).
3. The Greeks themselves said that that first <g> had a different sound, which they called agma; a fragment of Marcus Terentius Varro says that a grammarian called Ion had suggested agma should have been the 25th letter of the Greek alphabet. AGMA, A FORGOTTEN GREEK LETTER

ut Ion scribit, quinta uicesima est littera, quam uocant agma, cuius forma nulla est et uox communis est Graecis et Latinis, ut his uerbis: aggulus, aggens, agguilla, iggerunt. in eius modi Graeci et Accius noster bina G scribunt, alii N et G, quod in hoc ueritatem uidere facile non est. similiter agceps, agcora.

As Ion writes, there is a 25th letter, which is called ‘agma’, which has no shape, but a phonetic value that is the same in Greek and Latin, as in the following words: aggulus, aggens, agguilla, iggerunt. In words of this type, the Greeks and our Accius write a geminate GG, while others write NG, because it is difficult to recognize the real sound in the former; similarly agceps, agcora.