Written by Less than half of the Irish population voted on the Lisbon Treaty, the so-called Constitution of the European Union. In other words: 862,415 votes against and 752,451 in favour, giving a majority of 109,964 against, decided this time the future of nearly 500 million Europeans. Some pro-Europeans are asking now what eurosceptics have often asked [...]
READ MORE »Monthly archives for June, 2008
Air Berlin against the use of Catalan when flying to and from Catalan-speaking regions – Where is the European Union language policy based on “multilingualism” when one really needs it?
I don’t like to write about ‘domestic’ problems, so to speak, and I don’t usually do it because I cannot be neutral, but I think this one has transnational implications that go beyond Spain’s language policy – or, better, the language policy of Spain’s Autonomous (i.e. ‘slightly less than federal’) Communities – to reach the [...]
READ MORE »WordPress Translation Plugin: ‘Indoeuropean Translator Widget’ – now also Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Greek, Russian, Polish, Romanian, Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, …
The latest upgrades are only available in the simpler WordPress Translation Widget Plugin. You can download it from the official WordPress Plugin Repository site. New upgrades will automatically appear on your WordPress blog dashboard. As always, this widget plugin, when activated from the Design tab of your WordPress blog dashboard, will put links – with [...]
READ MORE »How ‘difficult’ (using Esperantist terms) is an inflected language like Proto-Indo-European for Europeans?
For native speakers of most modern Romance languages (apart from some reminiscence of the neuter case), Nordic (Germanic) languages, English, Dutch, or Bulgarian, it is usually considered “difficult” to learn an inflected language like Latin, German or Russian: cases are a priori felt as too strange, too “archaic”, too ‘foreign’ to the own system of [...]
READ MORE »When a language should be considered artificial – A quick classification of spoken, dead, hypothetical and invented languages
Following Mithridates’ latest post and comment on artificial language compared to revived language, I consider it appropriate to share my point of view on this subject. For me, the schematic classification of languages into “natural” and “artificial” could be made more or less as follows, from ‘most natural’ (1) to ‘most artificial’ (20): NOTE 1: [...]
READ MORE »Rhetoric of debates, discussions and arguments: Useful destructive criticism for scientific & academic research, reasons and personal opinions; the example of Proto-Indo-European language revival
Rhetoric (Wikipedia) is the art of harnessing reason, emotions and authority, through language, with a view to persuade an audience and, by persuading, to convince this audience to act, to pass judgement or to identify with given values. The word derives from PIE root wer-, ‘speak’, as in MIE zero-grade wrdhom, ‘word’, or full-grade werdhom, [...]
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