Nick on Quora

Originally asked as: What would a conversation between heavenly bodies be like?

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Downtown at Brazzers HQ:

—Hey stranger! Woah! Nice sixpack, dude!

—Yeah, gotta work out when I can. Hey, you’ve healed up nice!

—Yeah, you like? I went with the single Ds. Better match for my frame.

—Awesome. So. Standard set of positions in this shoot?

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Oh, I’m sorry, you meant a different kind of heavenly bodies.

Well, to take my mind from the gutter right up to the sublime, I invoke Michael Masiello’s answer to What was God doing during the infinity prior to creating man? (I’m an atheist.)

The thing to understand is that temporality is the dimension in which finite beings, who undergo change, who begin and end, perceive reality and have their being. It is sequential, narrative-like, a process of generation and corruption.

God is typically conceived as eternal, atemporal: he sees all of what finite, conditioned minds would perceive as “times” uno mentis in ictu, as Boethius would say, “in one stroke of the mind.” There is only one eternal moment, one word eternally speaking. This is sometimes called a nunc stans (see nunc stans – definition of nunc stans in English | Oxford Dictionaries).

What sort of conversation do you have with someone timeless? Someone for whom there is no new information to exchange, nothing to learn? Never mind understanding such a being, how do you even meaningfully talk to someone in the nunc stans?

No, Arrival (2016 movie) did not really cover this off.

Well, what conversations do the heavenly spheres have? They’re just as timeless, just as unchanging: nothing to learn, nothing to forget, nothing to exchange that won’t already have been exchanged. Even in the physical universe, what discourse can there be between bodies whose nunc isn’t stans, but which does measure in the billions of years?

You might say my imaginary discussion between two professionals in peak physical condition, in the San Fernando Valley, is inane. I’d say by our metric, the discourse of Mercury and Mars would be much more inane:

—Orbit.

—Other Orbit.

—I see you.

—Then you won’t. Then you will again.

—Is this over yet?

—Orbit.

—Other Orbit.

—I see you.

—Then you won’t. Then you will again.

More of a polyglot game, this, than a linguist game, but: switch the TV to a foreign language film halfway through, and try to work out what the language is. The fact that the language almost always sustains a local film industry does constrain the possible choices.

The rule of thumb I worked out quite early is, if they look Swedish and sound Turkish, they’re Hungarian.

Tough one, I agree. And it turns out OP was after Ancient Greek.

For Modern Greek, I agree with Yiannis Papadopoulos’ answer to What is the Greek equivalent of “Skin in the Game”? that “skin in the game” is about emotional investment, not “putting your ass on the line”. It’s easier for me to actually think of negative rather than positive statements.

• Positive: τον κόφτει “it cuts him”—using an archaic form of the verb “cut”, rather than the normal modern form κόβει.
• Negative: αμέτοχος “unengaged, unparticipating” (learnèd); δεν τον κόφτει “it doesn’t cut him”, πέρα βρέχει “it rains far away” (i.e. he’s indifferent), ζαμανφού “I don’t care” [archaic slang: this is of course just French je m’en fous, “I don’t give a fuck”]

Plato?

• τῆς δὲ ζημίας μεγίστη τὸ ὑπὸ πονηροτέρου ἄρχεσθαι, ἐὰν μὴ αὐτὸς ἐθέλῃ ἄρχειν (Republic 347c): But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule.

Nothing. Any sanction to collapse questions or answers from a banned user is separate from the action taken to ban that user. That’s not to rule it out from happening, but it is not automatically triggered, as far as we know.

Another recent data point: Abhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir

Quora ban

I wasn’t given a reason — all I know is that I was automatically logged out yesterday, and the next moment I’m locked out of logging in because I’m permanently banned. I lost a lot of detailed answer drafts, some content I’d written in response to questions in Quora messages, and a 8000+ word blog post criticising The Political Compass. I’m glad I’d at least posted the long comments I was writing before I got banned.

Esperanto neurotically tried to avoid lexical ambiguity, but didn’t get there for compounding, and between that and soundalikes, it’s doing ok. Raymond Schwartz was the main punmaster of the language.

Examples: the sundry aĝo “age” compounds in La Diversaj Aĝoj de l’ Homo, or the groanworthy “tumble dry” of Molière in El “Verdkata Testamento” (1926); Ero (lava rulo; The Miser is L’avarulo).

Lojban really is designed to avoid lexical ambiguity, including at compounding, and I don’t remember much play there, if any.

Klingon has a fair bit of polysemy, and that has been used for jokes. I’ve mentioned here, I think, my spontaneous pun when I walked into my first Klingon meetup, and a guy I’d managed to antagonise said SaH ’Iv? (“Who cares?”) Quick as a pistol, I responded jISaH jIH, naDev jIHmo’: “*I*’m present, because I’m here.” (The verb is ambiguous.)

Polysemy also explains a joke by Okrand, which at first glance seems to be an anti-joke:

Doq’a’ SuvwI’pu’? ghobe’! SuD! “Are warriors red? No! They are blue!”

The chuckle by Michael Dorn on the recording was… unnerving.

But SuD doesn’t just mean blue. (Or green. Or, in violation of how human colour works, yellow.) SuD also means “to take a risk”…

Native speaker, which makes these all the odder:

• women as… well, women instead of wimmin.
• pronounciation. Analogy ftw.

Hate to bring the serious to the answer, but I’m with Jiim Klein:

1. Pidgins are called that because of their origins, rather than their grammar, although they do tend to be remarkably similar.
2. “Foreigner talk”, the way people dumb down language when talking to non-fluent speakers, are informally called pidgins, and indeed foreigner talk is a major origin of actual pidgins.
3. Language games are typically not called pidgins.
4. The recurring features of pidgins are things like dropping grammatical markers, using unmarked inflections, very simple syntactic structures.

Now, I’m not up on my memes, coz I’m old.

• Lolcat is a mix of foreigner talk, baby talk (which has overgeneralised inflections rather than unmarked inflections), and all-out whimsy; I find it hard to believe that any real pidgin would use the I of I can haz cheezeburger?, let alone the are of I are crying cuz I are out of focuss.
• Doge (meme) has a syntactic frame much too restricted to be a pidgin (many mis-subcategorisation, much exclamatory, such ludic), and a far more subtle sense of modifiers than any pidgin would bother with.
• I don’t know Doggo. If Doggo is not Doge, and is exemplified in How did the doggo language start? • r/OutOfTheLoop: doggo does a bork and u r doing me a frighten—then again, too much play on normal English syntax, and too much play with wrong inflections and derivations to be pidgin-like: a pidgin would just cut it down to Yu mekim mi frait.

You point out the use of gerunds for tense in Doggo as a pidgin: a pidgin is not going to know what a gerund is, because pidgins drop all the grammar they can. Tense in pidgins are separate words; the classic English-based pidgins use words like by-and-by (future), finish (perfective), been (past).

I mean, if people stuck on a plantation with no common language but what the masters barked at them spontaneously started speaking in Doggo, then yeah, Doggo would be a pidgin. But what I’m finding doesn’t look like a pidgin. What I’m finding is comically inverted English, rather than radically stripped down English.

The most authoritative analysis of what markets Quora could most usefully move into is by Josephine Stefani: Josephine Stefani’s answer to What other languages should Quora support?

The upshot is, I’m guessing Quora picked German and Italian because it is probably easier to actually set up shop in these markets. But if it really wishes to adhere to its well-worn slogan of ‘sharing and growing the world’s knowledge’, I think it should have a look at other parts of the world that really need it: Arabic, Russian (maybe), Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian …

My own answer identified Arabic and Russian too, but Josephine did an awesome job of it.

It will not in itself make me leave Quora.

But it adds to the things that make me think badly of Quora—along with the UX Russian Roulette, the Black Maria of moderation removing people in the middle of the night and the headscratchingly inexplicable decisions, the lack of a clear mission, yadda yadda yadda.

I will leave Quora, as I’ve answered before, when it stops being fun—or to be more precise, when it is unfun substantially more often than it is fun. Outage is frustrating; if I’m halfway through a response on a comment, intensely frustrating, as was the case a couple of days ago. So long as its impact is less than weekly, I’ll put up with it. But these things can have a drip drip drip, cumulative effect.