I’m back

By: | Post date: 2017-09-12 | Comments: 8 Comments
Posted in categories: Admin

I’m back.

This is going to all sorts of audiences, so I now need to spell out where I’m back to, and where I’m back from.

I maintained two blogs up until 2011. hellenisteukontos.blogspot.com was a blog about Greek linguistics, and opuculuk.blogspot.com was a blog about everything else. Hellenisteukontos in particular developed quite a following, and was even cited in print a few times.

I resumed writing online in 2015 at Quora (see my profile there), and I continued doing so until it became untenable for me to (see my statement). I dare say I developed a following there too.

One thing I did relearn during my stay on Quora was that I can write both about stuff I do know about, and stuff I actually don’t know about—but with enough insight that I can make a reasoned argument. That’s something I enjoyed doing greatly, and I hope to keep doing it. Just as I hope to keep sharing the expertise I have on things I am an expert in.

When I decamped from Quora, I followed an exodus of users to Medium (see my profile there), and I may have provoked a few others to join me. For all Quora’s grotesqueries (and they are legion), Quora was a more congenial place to me than Medium: compared to my Quora feed (admittedly after two years of curation), Medium was a lot more clickbait, a lot more superficial, and a lot more full of sterile political posturing. I will continue to check in there with the Quora Diaspora, but I won’t be making it my home.

So I’m coming home to the blogs I had left six years ago, but I am relocating them to WordPress instances: http://hellenisteukontos.opoudjis.net and http://opuculuk.opoudjis.net. I encourage you to update any links you have to the prior blogs; I will not be updating them. I have migrated both my blogspot and my relevant Quora content to those two new instances on my website. Quora makes it very difficult to get your content out of its honeytrap, and none of the topics or comments export. I’ve spent a couple of days categorising the Quora posts; you’ll pardon me if I don’t manually retag them as well.

I have also broadened the scope of Hellenisteukontos: moving forward it will cover not the Set Intersection of Greek and Linguistics, but the Set Union. Greek culture, music, literature and history are in scope of it now; so is general linguistics and linguistics of other languages.

I won’t be posting with the same level of frequency I did on Quora, a frequency that was clearly unsustainable. I aim to be doing larger essays, although I did plenty of essay writing on Quora anyway. But I will welcome people suggesting Quora questions for me to answer here. I will not be posting anything to Quora; my friends from Quora are free to do with my content what they will on Quora (so long as they link back here.)

I look forward to reconnecting with old friends and new, and I look forward to thinking out loud and posting what strikes my fancy, in a forum that I find more congenial.

I’m back.

8 Comments

  • Gavin Wraith says:

    I have only just discovered this wonderful blog. Having studied classics at school (UK 1940s and 1950s), when I retired (from teaching mathematics) I came across the Hittite language for the first time. There seem to be all manner of interesting correspondences between Greek and Hittite, but all my text books were written long before Hittite came to light. The trouble is, I am not a professional palaeolinguist, and specific correspondences that seem plausible to amateur me may be just misleading bullshit. For example, take Hittite “Illuyankas” , the dragon deity. It seems to me that this should mean “wriggly snake”. “ankas” sounds snaky (anguilla), and I would guess “*illuyanna” to be cognate with “aillein” in Greek – note the typical metathesis, and the asterisk to mean that this word has not actually been encountered yet. Much else beside. The Hittite corpus is still tiny, of course, but has anybody incorporated its contribution to Greek etymology yet? Anybody on this blog who can throw more light on such things?

    • opoudjis says:

      Hittite is not one of my strengths, but Frisk’s etymological dictionary of Greek dates from 1974, so it will have something. I anticipate that others more learned than me will chime in.

  • David Marjanović says:

    Yay!

  • Ως ευ παρέστης, ΝικΝικ! πολύ-πολύ καιρό είχαμε να τα πούμε ?

  • Πολύ χαίρομαι, μας έλειψαν τα κείμενά σου!

    • opoudjis says:

      Δεν ξέρω κατά πόσο είναι αξιοποιήσιμα τα κείμενα που προώθησα εδώ και στο Ηλληνιστεύκοντος από την Κβόρα· για θέματα ρωμαίικα ήταν πολύ πιο εκλαϊκευτικά. Πάντως δεν απουσίασα εντελώς, απλώς ήμουν σε κάπως πιο κλειστό χώρο…

  • Clarissa says:

    Mi antaŭĝojas sekvi tiun ĉi blogon!

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