Written by 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 [...]
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Accession of Turkey to the European Union: A Quick Reference of Common Pros and Cons
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 [...]
READ MORE »About the European Union’s arcane language: the EU does seem difficult for people to understand
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 [...]
READ MORE »From Adamic or the language of the Garden of Eden until the Tower of Babel: the confusion of tongues and the earliest dialects attested
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. [...]
READ MORE »Bronze Age village discovered in central-western Romania, in the region of Transylvania
The official Agerpres news agency reported on Wednesday that a village established in the Bronze Age has been recently discovered near Zalau town, northwestern Romania. The discovery was made following an archeological discharge relating to 2 square kilometers in Recea, close to Zalau. “It is for the fist time in Transylvania, central-western region of Romania, [...]
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 »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, [...]
READ MORE »Swastika: A Stupid Taboo in European and American countries
The swastika (Wikipedia)- from Sanskrit svástika स्वास्तिक – is an equilateral cross with its arms bent at right angles, in either right-facing (卐) or left-facing (卍) forms. The term is derived from Sanskrit svasti, meaning well-being. The Thai greeting sawasdee is from the same root and carries the same implication. It is a widely-used symbol [...]
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