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Day: December 24, 2016
What were the musical notes’ names in Ancient Greece?
The notes of the Ancient Greek musical system were organised into tetrachords, groups of four notes. Two tetrachords made an octave. The central octave went: {Hypate, Parhypate, Lichanos, Mese}, {Paramese, Trite, Paranete, Nete} It gets rather more complicated than that; the paramese, for example, is an interstitial note, and the tetrachords keep going above and […]
Should I continue learning Esperanto?
Was Newspeak inspired by Esperanto? We know what Orwell was satirising, and why he was annoyed with Esperanto. Don’t worry about it. Orwell was if anything more annoyed with Basic English, and would likely be annoyed with any conlang. (One of the examples he gives in Politics and the English Language is from a text […]
Is there a clinical term for a “shart?”
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shart Thanks for A2A… I think. From Fecal incontinence – Wikipedia, the closest I’m seeing is fecal leakage. But that doesn’t have the implication of controlled but misconstrued bowel movement that a “shart” has. Googling is not yielding a more formal term. Answered 2016-12-24 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Is-there-a-clinical-term-for-a-shart/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
If a Turkish Cypriot is a Christian, does that make them a Greek Cypriot?
Under the millet system, which is still recent memory in former Ottoman countries, creed was the determinant of identity. If you were Orthodox you were Rum/Romios, if you were Muslim you were a Turk—no matter what your ethnicity, and what your main language was. So a Greek Cypriot that converted to Islam 200 years ago […]
How do you define cliché in your own words?
The definitions offering are actually missing something here: A clichéd expression is an expression that was figurative or otherwise had rhetorical potency—but which has become deprecated by stylists in a language community, because they value novelty and freshness over familiarity and conventionality in discourse. This is a cultural judgement, and one that English-language culture in […]