Two blogs worth mentioning: one on Aramaic, the other on Ido...plus Nicholas Kristof

Two blogs I thought I would draw attention to today:

One is called simply The Aramaic Blog, and it's about Aramaic. I found about it on a thread on Reddit.com here, that gave a version of The Lord's Prayer that was apparently directly translated from Aramaic into English instead of through Greek and Latin, but was a bit suspicious since it didn't provide any context at all to the translation. Sure enough, a few hours later somebody had found a more accurate link (the link to the blog) that actually shows the original Aramaic (actually there is no real 'original Aramaic' but it's as close as you can get) and exactly what it means. As expected, a more accurate translation isn't as flowery as the one given on the Reddit thread.

The other one is a new blog in Ido, started by our friend Anvarzhon Zhurajev in Tallinn, Estonia, who is doing the language a huge service by arranging this year's renkontro in the city. He's also the owner of the site ido4all.com.



...oh, and one more worth mentioning: Nicholas Kristof from the New York Times has a Twitter page as well. He writes some of the most worthwhile columns on the newspaper such as on iodized salt (I wrote a post on that in Turkish here to try to get the issue a bit more attention in the non-English world considering how cheap a problem it is to solve), and his most recent column on the real face of sex tourism in Cambodia, that ends with the following:

I hope that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will recognize slavery as unfinished business on the foreign policy agenda. The abolitionist cause simply hasn’t been completed as long as 14-year-old girls are being jolted with electric shocks — right now, as you read this — to make them smile before oblivious tourists.