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Why does Iran have a variety of ethnic groups?
Mehrdad, canım, I don’t know. I will guess, but whatever I guess, Dimitris Almyrantis will guess better.
Here goes.
- The usual answer is, Iran is at a crossroads of civilisations. Maybe. But you know, so is Greece, so is Turkey, so is Russia, so is Spain. In itself, that’s not actually an answer; it’s only the beginnings of an answer.
- Like many countries, Iran has ethnic spillover at its borders—Kurds next to Iraqi Kurdistan, Arabs in Khuzestan. That’s only a small part of it.
- Iran was in the pathway of a major population movement, that of the Turkic peoples. Unlike Turkey, that did not result in a demographic takeover: the Persian ethnicity was well-established and prestigious, and the Azeris and Turkmens were not waging a war of cultural or religous conquest when they arrived. But it did result in the Torki being a sizeable and secure minority.
- Iran was ruled by a multiethnic empire until fairly recently, which did not particularly care about how Farsi or Torki you were. (At least, that’s what you and Pegah tell me!)
- Multiethnic empires facilitated internal migration of different ethnic groups: hence the Georgians and Armenians in Fereydan (which is nowhere near the Caucasus), or the Circassians imported by the shahs.
- Iran did not have time or incentive to embrace the strongly centralising, “One Ethnicity One Nation” ideal that took hold of much of Europe. So there was not much opportunity for Persians to assimilate other ethnicities—even those closest to them, such as the Mazandaranis or Gilakis, let alone the Lurs.
So: some accidents of history, including the movement of the Turkic peoples; multi-ethnic empire; and lack of overt assimilatory policies. Shi’a religion and common cultural heritage, rather than ethnicity, have been entrusted with the role of binding Iran together.
Why do you think Ottomanism and Pan-Islamism Failed?
Mariam Als, thank you for your A2As. I truly am not qualified to answer this, and I hope Dimitris Almyrantis will. Irene Avetyan, I’m looking at you too. This is more to provoke an answer out of them, and it’s not rooted in any great understanding of Ottoman or Turkish history.
(That, and I’m cleaning out my A2A queue today.)
There are various forces historically that give cohesion to States. We have seen a change in the relative strength of those forces in the last couple of centuries; and that has undermined both Ottomanism and Pan-Islamism, in favour of Nationalism.
I’m not familiar with the term Ottomanism, but I’ll assume it’s the whole notion of a multi-ethnic empire, with a dominant ethnicity and/or religion and/or culture. Europe was doing the same thing with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And the Ottoman Empire collapsed for the same reason as the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Nationalism was a more compelling cause for the non-dominant peoples within the empire.
I recently had an exchange with Erdi Küçük about footage of Greek POWs discussing their encounter with Atatürk.
https://www.quora.com/Who-is-Peg…
Greek with Turkish subtitles, no English unfortunately. The gist is, Atatürk had won, and had done away with the Ottoman Empire in the process; but he was still complaining to the Greek POWs of how disloyal they had been to the Empire, and how the Empire had indulged their theatrical performances of Greek nationalist plays with no recrimination. (“The stage was white with kilts and swords!”)
Erdi said something that blew me away with how perceptive it was:
You sort of realize that at that point, he’s still a bitter Ottoman officer who couldn’t get over the fact that empire is gone (and his viewpoint is exactly the reason why it’s gone), and he’s unhappy even at victory.
Atatürk’s viewpoint was still Ottomanist. It could not cope with the Greeks’ Nationalism.
Nationalism, admittedly, has been a poor fit for the Arabic-Speaking world. But it’s worked a treat for Turkey, which has embraced it whole-heartedly (even if it is launching its own Pan-Turkic system of alliances now). And, in a way I haven’t quite worked out, nationalism (or at least, a Shi’a-centric focus) has worked fine for Iran too.
If Ottomanism was frustrated by European Nationalism, Pan-Islamism failed even earlier: the Ummah had already stopped paying attention to a single caliph when the Fatimids and the Ummayads set up their own caliphates in the tenth century: Caliphate. Pan-Islamism was frustrated by the emergence of rival centres of power within the Arabic speaking Sunni world, long before the Turks were part of the picture: Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad, Fez, Cordoba; and there was no possibility that India, let alone Indonesia, would ever be yoked into the same political entity as the Arabs.
Any notion of Pan-Islamism is anachronistic; the Rashidun (the first caliphate of Islam) is not coming back, and the Rashidun was never going to stay united with it covering the amount of ground it did so quickly. The Ottoman Sultan was the nominal caliph; but I just can’t buy it that the Sultan’s caliphate meant all that much in terms of keeping the empire together. It didn’t make Morocco or Iran rush to join up.
What is your reason for having a goatee?
As I said in Nick Nicholas’ answer to How are men with goatees perceived, and how do they think they are perceived? : they were very fashionable in the mid 90s. I took it up after some facial hair experimentation, and Australians nowadays seem to have big problems with moustaches (because of overexposure in the 70s). I’m a stability-seeking kind of person, I liked it, and I stuck with it even after it became a lot less fashionable.
What is the point of life if you just die and most of us are forgotten in time?
Ah, Jeremy. This is not a trivial question. And most of the non-religious people have converged on the same answer; I liked Bobby Strick’s formulation.
When I was in my 20s, I yearned to cheat death by joining that 0.1%. Hence the whole “get my scientific papers laminated and sent to Svalbard” thing, which I was actually in earnest about.
And you know, it is wonderful to change the world, and it is wonderful to invent something. It is wonderful to have your name outlive you. But it won’t be for that long. Even if we survive as a civilisation another century, which is a big if, who gets to be remembered from 2000 years ago? Not that many. Who from 10000 years ago? Nobody. That’s not just the invention of literacy; that’s the way it goes. All that we are about, all our inventions and innovations and art and science and glory on this earth, all of it will be dust one day, and will be forgotten even before it is dust. At best, your greatest deed buys a century.
So. Ignore that 0.1%. Do not ignore the urge to create, or to change the world, or to make a difference; just don’t think it buys you more than a century. It has meaning, not because of what people will think of it 10 millennia hence: they won’t (even if there are people around by then). It has meaning, because the meaning is with us, right now, with our society, with our fellow humans, with our community of understanding.
Meaning, as any semiotician will tell you, is pointless without someone there to do the interpreting of the meaning. And who’s doing the interpreting? You’re looking at them. You’re it. And your fellow humans are it.
And that goes for the remaining 99.9% as well. The meaning of life? It’s with those who do the interpreting. It’s with us, your fellow humans. Right now. Live now in us. Live now for us. Live now with us. And we’ll do the same with you.
… Wow, Jeremy. Who knew semiotics could be so life-affirming!
What are the best public high schools with high ATARs in Melbourne (co-ed or girls only)?
School League Tables.
Mpf. They’re not all they’re cracked up to be. Is the point of education to get you into a top ranking uni course? Or to make a decent citizen of you?
At any rate, the current rankings for Victoria are out at:
If we exclude boys’ schools, then that nukes my own alma mater, Melbourne High School, as well as Yeshivah College. That alone earns you my undying resentment. 🙂
The top ten this year are:
- Bialik College. Jewish, Co-ed.
- MacRobertson Girls’ High. Selective Public, Girls’. (Sister school to Melbourne High)
- Mount Scopus. Jewish, Co-ed.
- (Yeshivah, Jewish, Boys: nuked.)
- (Melbourne High, Selective Public, Boys: nuked.)
- Loreto Mandeville Hall. Catholic, Girls’. (Btw, the denomination doesn’t mean that much for Christian schools: my Greek Orthodox third cousin went there.)
- Shelford Girls’ Grammar. Anglican, Girls’.
- Ruyton Girls’ School. Non-denominational Private, Girls’.
- Ballarat Clarendon College. Uniting Church, Co-ed. (Not in Melbourne)
- Haileybury Girls’ College. Anglican, Girls’.
The traditionally prestige Boys’ schools are actually a long way down the list: Scotch College is #28, Melbourne Grammar is #33.
The top government co-ed school is Nossal High at #34, but it is selective like Melbourne High. The top government normal neighbourhood school is Balwyn High, at #41.
And yes, girls’ are outperforming boys’ schools. To a far greater extent than I’d anticipated.
How has sport shaped Australia’s national identity?
I read Geoffrey Blainey: A Shorter History of Australia by Nick Nicholas on Aphypnēsis Amichaiou , which actually posed this question. And if I hadn’t left the book in the hotel… well, I still wouldn’t look it up.
But in brief:
- Australians defined themselves early on (like, 1820s) against the British, for being more fit and active, in their new country.
- Australians had a lot more leisure time than Dickensian Britons did; remember that the eight-hour day was pioneered in Australia in the 1850s. So sporting fixtures became a prominent part of the community already at that time: not just racecourses, satisfying their need for gambling, but also sports ovals, satisfying their need to watch sport and participate in sport.
- That participation thing is key: sport establishes itself more readily as part of your identity if you and most people you know actually play one.
- Sport gave a very early opportunity for Australians to assert a distinct identity against Britain, and even to beat Britain at its own game (particularly at cricket).
- Once those elements were in place, they just kept going. After cricket as an international spectator sport, athletics and tennis. Cricket and the football codes, as both participatory and spectator sports. The football codes as a new tribalism (something familiar elsewhere of course). The Ashes, rugby, tennis, the Olympics, the Empire and then Commonwealth games, as ways Australia gained international prominence.
The Decalogue of Nick #2: I’ve trained as a linguist, and I have done computational linguistics stuff
For Audrey Ackerman and Brian Collins and Zeibura S. Kathau.
Ask a Greek what they can tell you about Byzantium, and they won’t tell you what the millennium of the East Roman Empire achieved. They won’t tell you about the Palaeologan Renaissance, or the ambivalence about the Classical past, or the edifices of Roman Law, or the architectural marvels.
All they’ll tell you is that the Empire fell. And they don’t even pick the right instance when it fell. (The Empire at 1453 wasn’t worth saving.)
Well, so it is with my linguistics career. Scratch me just a little bit, and I will lament the defining woe of my life, that I did not become a professional linguist: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is your personal experience with obtaining a linguistics degree? (If I’m feeling prudent, I’ll admit that the outcome was the right one: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are your 3 worst mistakes? Would you fix any of them if you could go back in time? But only if I’m feeling prudent.)
What’s harder for me to do, as a glass half empty kinda guy, is admit how much I gained in the experience.
Linguistics gave me a sense of purpose when I had none. Linguistics gave me friends and companionship and stimulation. Linguistics gave me the place where I could act as glue between my peers—that trait that Clarissa Lohr continues to find approval-worthy in me. Linguistics gave me the opportunity to teach—and once I’d gotten to teach, nunc dimittis: I could have died a happy man, even if it was just three semesters.
And in truth, Linguistics gave me the opportunity to turn away from it, to say that no, I deserved better than to be strung along, and to regain myself even at the cost of losing myself.
I sidled into linguistics and out of electrical engineering towards the end of my undergraduate degree. Through a masters I did enough of the bridging undergraduate courses that they let me in to the PhD programme. They recognised, I guess, that I had some talent.
The Master’s was in discourse theory: Rhetorical Structure Theory, to be exact. Discourse structure and implicature was my early fascination in linguistics, and RST was all the rage back then (1994) in text generation. (Do people even call it text generation any more?)
When time came for me to pick a PhD topic, though, I wanted to go back to historical linguistics. Actually I wanted to go forward from discourse theory to historical linguistics: grammaticalisation gave a way for implicature to motivate language change that intrigued me. While I initially wanted to work on Tibetan (because Squiggles), I had a conversation with the doyen of grammaticalisation theory, Elizabeth C. Traugott, during which she asked, wouldn’t it be fascinating to look at how grammaticalisation interacted with diglossia.
Two years in to my thesis, I’d worked out that no, that was a dumb idea. But I was too far into my work by then. My topic was the development of the modern relativiser pu, and how it had diversified in meaning. I’d intended to work backward, and unearth all sorts of awesome instances of implicature and analogy from Early Modern Greek.
But theses don’t go as you’d planned. On the way towards internal reconstruction, I became captive to the diversity of Greek dialect—nature’s historical linguistic laboratory: they have a common starting point with dozens of divergent endpoints, so you can get an amazing sense of what is possible in language change. By the time I’d worked out what was happening in all the dialects, and detoured into what was happening in the rest of the Balkans, I’d run out of time. And space: the Balkan chapter ended up on the cutting room floor.
From the thesis, I’d gained an encyclopaedic familiarity with modern Greek dialect; a good knowledge of Early Modern Greek anyway (which I put to use in my later coauthored monograph, An Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds); and a smattering of Balkan linguistics. I’d planned to use my knowledge to write a reference grammar of Early Modern Greek by the time I was 50. That isn’t happening; and the guys who were working on it (Greek Grammar to fill the gap) have run out of funding and have retired.
What I did not get is any Ancient Greek; I don’t have any formal training in that, although once you’re a linguist, you can make sense of a grammar book just fine. (And I picked up what I needed to later.)
I also picked up a fair bit of linguistic typology from a decade of working as a research assistant, mainly under John Hajek. It was a rocky relationship, as you can well imagine from someone with my ego in a second fiddle role. But it was a good schooling too. And working on a phonological survey of Papua New Guinea, I got at least some of the phonology I did not get from the department.
I wrote a bunch of papers after I finished the PhD. Some got published. Some got submitted at the time journals got switched over from paper to electronic submission, and got lost in the mail. It was fun to write the papers; but it was also writing in a vacuum. I didn’t really have a network of peers to care about what I was writing (part of the problem of not being in Europe), and the problems I was working on seem to have been too obscure to have stimulated any interest anyway. In fact, the papers that generated the most interest were about social history (the Greek colony in Corsica). I have 8 finished unsubmitted papers, and 8 more incomplete, from when I stopped writing in 2008. I’m not strongly motivated to do anything with them.
I got more interaction, if anything, out of the Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος blog I used to do (and will do again, if Quora disappears in a puff of smoke). And some of my favourite questions on Quora are when I do my own detective work, to solve a linguistic problem I don’t already know the answer to.
For Amy Dakin.
I have also done some computational linguistic stuff. Most of it has been at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, where I had worked from February 1999 through to June 2016.
I’ve been reluctant to go publicly into the specifics of why I’m no longer employed there, until now. But then again, my time at the TLG should not suffer the same fate as Byzantine History: what I achieved (what *I* achieved) is more important than the way I ceased to.
I have very high regard for my fellow programmer of 13 years Nishad Prakash; and if anything even more regard for my fellow programmer of 4 years, John Salatas, who is still working there. They are far better craftsmen than I am. And I don’t mean to take anything away from their achievements by what I’m about to say.
But anything you see at the TLG that involves linguistics? Me. Anything that involves stylometrics? Me. Anything that involves Natural Language Processing? Formatting? Peculiar sigla? Comparison of texts? Me.
There’s a lot of computer science things that I’m proud of working out while there. Some algorithmic refinements to recursive Longest Common Subsequence detection, to work out common phrases between passages. Some fiendish DFA and NDFA work, to deal with the quirky ASCII encoding of Greek we have in character-by-character and wildcard search. A lot of cleverness in contextual grammatical disambiguation, that I’m not confident will ever see the light of day (or will be highlighted for users if it does).
And my crowning work: the morphological analyser of Greek. It originated in Perseus’ Morpheus, but I have stretched and pulled and broadened and narrowed and reranked it over the past 15 years, to deal with all the stages of Greek the TLG has thrown at it, from Homer through to misspelled 17th century Cretan land deeds—and to still yield some semblance of order. In the process, I dare say I have developed as intuitive a sense of what grammatical wackiness Byzantine authors could indulge in as anyone living: I’ve had to deal with it all.
I didn’t get to write the reference grammar of Early Modern Greek. But the morphological analyser I curated, with all the proper names of Athenian courtesans and Albanian chieftains, of Egyptian decans and minor saints, with all the mangled Byzantine optatives and grammarians’ fictional conjugations, with every last utterance of Sappho accounted for, and as much of Theodore Metochites’ as I could disentangle: that has been just as great an achievement.
Which I now no longer can contribute to.
But those of you with access to a TLG subscription: click on some words’ analyses, and do some parallel text comparisons, and look up some of the online lexica. And taste some of the joy of the Greek language and the Greek literary corpus, that I got to savour in my time.
And you’re welcome.
How do I tell a girl she has a nice rack?
When I was 12, I found in my local library a copy of Brush up your pidgin.
It’s a textbook of Tok Pisin, the pidgin of Papua New Guinea, played for laughs. It is hardly a serious textbook: the protagonists are a clueless British missionary and his sex starved wife, the Tok Pisin is respelled to look more familiar to English speakers, it pokes fun (though not, from memory, sneeringly) at the local culture.
Even though it was played for laughs, I actually learned a lot from that book. You could tell, even from that book, that Tok Pisin is a language with its own internal genius, which is quite far removed from English — even if its vocabulary is deceptively English baby talk. It may well have gotten me started as a linguist.
The final dialogue of the book introduces an Australian pilot, who flies the couple into the interior. Up to that point the dialogues are bilingual, British English and Tok Pisin. With the pilot, Australian English is also introduced.
And the pilot sees fit to comment to the missionary’s sex starved wife as follows:
- Australian English: Geez, you got a beaut pair of norks!
- Tok Pisin: Mi laikim susu bilong yu.
- British English: … You have a lovely blouse.
The Decalogue of Nick
I’ve been contemplating writing about who I am here for a little while. Partly because it’s some overdue self-therapy, as I’m in an odd place now in life—at something of a turning point. Partly because I’m making new friends here, who don’t actually know that much about who I am.
The pretext for this came up at Nick Nicholas’ answer to Who is Nick Nicholas?, a question I will once again thank Pegah Esmaili for—even though I did go asking for it at Nick Nicholas’ answer to Who is Michael Koeberg?
There will be a post on here for each of the following:
- The Decalogue of Nick #1: I’m Greek-Australian.
- The Decalogue of Nick #2: I’ve trained as a linguist, and I have done computational linguistics stuff.
- The Decalogue of Nick #3: I work in schools IT policy.
- The Decalogue of Nick #4: Long history of engagement with artificial languages.
- The Decalogue of Nick #5: I’m a middle-aged cishet man, recently married, no kids.
- The Decalogue of Nick #6: Loud as a poor coverup for shyness, and with one’s usual share of psychological baggage.
- The Decalogue of Nick #7: I play the mandolin badly and the violin worse.
- The Decalogue of Nick #8: Politically centre-left blah.
- Culturally Christian but Atheist.
- I post too much here.
The Decalogue of Nick #1: I’m Greek-Australian
For Kaan Kılıçaslan.
I was born in Launceston, Tasmania, in 1971, to a father who had migrated from Cyprus and a mother who had migrated from Crete. We moved to Crete when I was 8. We moved back to Melbourne when I was 12. I’ve lived there since, but for 6 months in Greece in 1995, and living in Irvine, CA 1999–2001.
That makes me bi-cultural, I guess, which is a common thing in the diasporas of the world. It makes me somewhat atypical for the Greek diaspora in Australia, which trickled to a halt in 1975 (and restarted a couple of years ago). By living in Greece in the early 80s, and by retaining an intellectual interest in Greek culture, I’m more familiar with Greece than my generation of Greek–Australians.
Thank God for the Modern Greek collection of the University of Melbourne. And Thank God I got to it while that was still possible; it’s been in offsite storage for a decade now.
My history means that I’m neither fully Greek nor fully Australian. When I was doing Modern Greek in high school, Greek–Australian literature and commentary was awash with people of my generation up, bemoaning the fact that they were culturally adrift, and couldn’t call either side fully home.
That struck me as dramatic folderol. A few years later, when I had more perspective, and I understood it better. I will never grok cricket: if you don’t get it by 12, you won’t. I will never feel quite at home in Greece: they don’t act like I act. The clash between my parents’ fearful defensive upbringing of me and my liberal surroundings had landed me with a fair bit of baggage, some of it certainly sexual: any Australian TV soap I see, I reflexively wince at the bogan sex addicts.
But you know, feeling at some distance from your fellows is not a bad thing. I have baggage, and certainly didn’t get enough sex in my 20s, but I don’t feel debilitated by it. I think it helps me more analytical, more considered about how identity works. And being bi-cultural, I feel something of a responsibility to explain things on forums like this. To act like a bridge. It’s a useful thing, and I appreciate the other bridges I have encountered here.
My cultural grounding has been Greek, and Diaspora Greek at that. I got to see the very tail end of Greece as a third-world country in 1980, with donkeys in the village and minimal westernisation, with intact dialect and entrenched patriarchy and matriarchy divides. I’m grateful I saw it. I’m grateful to trace some of my emotional lineage to it.
Since the diaspora acts as a time capsule, my upbringing in Australia was not that far from the village I lived in in 1980. A lot about how Greece has changed since the 80s strikes me as odd. Dimitra Triantafyllidou has been a wonderfully patient instructor to me, in helping me catch up: yes, they have standup comedy in Greece now, who knew. But it’s one axis of distance.
The other is that a lot of my knowledge of Greek culture since has been book-learning. It’s been thorough, it’s been enthusiastic, but it has also been very intellectualised. My hyperdemotic slang owes more to the books of Nikos Tsiforos than to anything I heard on the street. I’ve savoured the best of Modern Greek literature; but I’m not comfortable telling a funny story in Greek.
(And I was proud as punch, during my honeymoon, when I was able to recount to my Greek relatives Nick Nicholas’ answer to Where did you meet your spouse? Booze helped.)
But my values were formed in Australia. I view the world as an Australian. My loyalty is to Australia, my national pride is Australian, and it is all the stronger because I haven’t had the fallback of Anzac and damper to fall back on as a mythology. I’m Greek, I know all about mythologies. I am an Australian citizen; I know what that truly means: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do Australians like being Australian citizens?
When I came back from 6 months in Greece during my PhD in 1995, I announced to my parents that I could never live in a country where the civil service was that dysfunctional. My parents where agog: why would I give a shit about the civil service?! Greeks know how to live, man!
And yes, yes they do. But that’s not the life I have been formed to value. I value the life my fellow citizens value, here in Australia. I value order, and the rule of law, and the dependability of government services, and an uneventful civic life, and a healthy sarcasm towards the folly of the world.
Clarissa Lohr in PM, incidentally, wondered whether I failed to take to life in the US so completely, because my stock of identities was full already. Nah, it’s that I moved to the States at 28, formed no real friendships with locals, and I was stuck in fricking Irvine CA: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is it like to live in Irvine, CA? But you know, two is plenty already to keep in your head.