Indo-European languages & Europe

This is a story about how an unethical individual, who regards fundamental rights differently as applied to him and to others, can manage to frighten a company to the extent of making them think about limiting his clients’ freedom of expression, with a simple home-made “cease and desist” email threat. No China, no Cuba, no Iran involved. Just Spain in 2009. Too sad to be true.

The latest improvements and language pairs added to the Google Translation Engine have been included in the simple Wordpress Translation Plugin downloadable from this personal blog.
It now includes links to automatic translations from and into all language pairs offered by Google Translation Engine, apart from other language pairs (from individual languages, like English) into other [...]

The progress of the ’star wars’ (AKA missile shield) affair, which Russia seemed willing to aggravate by talking about plans to station missiles in Kaliningrad, without any concerns whatsoever for the welfare of Kaliningraders and Europeans, should make the European Union reexamine its current policy under the Kaliningrad Strategy, of collaborating with Russia by facilitating [...]

Spanish President (i.e. Prime Minister) José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero promised he will personally support Turkey’s accesion to the European Union for 2010, because – he says – “that great country has been waiting for too long at the doors of Europe”. That is probably a follow-up of his concept of the Alliance of Civilizations, which [...]

Apparently Darwin’s anniversary is giving more fuel to the Brights & co. to ignite still more flames, like the latest digged (and meneado) “Atheism Is Not Arrogant“. Here is a quick criticism of that concept of “Atheism” from a non-atheist and non-religious point of view:

As a statement of non-belief, ‘atheism’ is not inherently arrogant
That [...]

Mark Mardell asks in his post Learn EU-speak:
Does the EU shroud itself in obscure language on purpose or does any work of detail produce its own arcane language? Of course it is not just the lingo: the EU does seem difficult for people to understand. What’s at the heart of the problem?
His answer on [...]

No, I didn’t have a revelation today. I am just offering a little support exactly to what Dawkins and his Brights dislike, to show them extreme action causes extreme (re)actions. I’d like to play their radical game, too, offering some help in linguistics to those who have only naïve theories on the language of Eden.
These [...]

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948, arising directly from the experience of the Second World War. It represents the first global expression of rights to which all human beings are inherently entitled.

Article 1
All human beings [...]