Armenian Wikipedia, Rosetta, Mormon language learning, Gaza tunnel diggers

I haven't been writing here much recently, simply because I've been so occupied with reading. Maybe two months ago I came across this study showing the effects of massive amounts of reading (1+ million words) and how it compared to time spent abroad, and apparently the general rule is 1 million words equalled about the same improvement as a year overseas. This one here is interesting too, especially the chart a few pages down. That chart shows that the volume of text needed to be exposed to 10,000 words at least once is 600,000+ words. To see them three times each: 3+ million.

So I thought I would read The Wheel of Time (4+ million words) in two languages and see what a difference it makes. And also to truly get a feel for what a million words is like. A million is a lot of words. I'm currently halfway through book 5. I read up to book 8 in English before back in the 1990s, and decided that I would stop reading until the series was completed, which it was two years ago.

I don't like to treat Page F30 as a polyglot blog, given the limitations it places on what one can write about, but this spreadsheet might be interesting to readers.

Words means the number of words I've deleted that day (I use Readlang.com for this), words learning is the number of words registered there, and it goes up as new words are added and others I don't need to review anymore are deleted. Total is the total number of new words I assume have been put in my head since starting this, 1400 is just a number to make the graph look nice, pages is the number of pages read that day, words read is pages multiplied by 350. Then divide that by new words, which gives words per new word. That last column has turned out to be less meaningful than I thought because it depends on my mood whether I click on a word or not. Sometimes I feel like adding a word I kind of know but want to see a few more times anyway, and other times I don't.

On days off I can read 20,000+ words, on work days I can get 10,000 words in, sometimes fewer.

Date	Words	Running total	Words learning	Total		Pages	Words read	New words	Words per new word
July 7	22	201	720	921	1400	61	21350	45	474,44
July 8	25	226	751	977	1400	56	19600	56	350,00
July 9	25	251	792	1043	1400	68	23800	66	360,61
July 10	45	296	772	1068	1400	56	19600	25	784,00
July 11	137	433	652	1085	1400	30	10500	17	617,65
July 12	33	466	664	1130	1400	63	22050	45	490,00
July 13	16	482	670	1152	1400	31	10850	22	493,18
July 14	8	490	693	1183	1400	45	15750	31	508,06
July 15	2	492	715	1207	1400	39, on page 685	13650	24	568,75
July 16	13	505	734	1239	1400	102, on page 39	35700	32	1 115,63
July 17	2	507	737	1244	1400	29, on page 68	10150	5	2 030,00
July 18	110	617	637	1254	1400	21, on page 89	7350	10	735,00
July 19	120	737	535	1272	1400	64, on page 153	22400	18	1 244,44
July 20	55	792	490	1282	1400	41, on page 194	14350	10	1 435,00
July 21	41	833	456	1289	1400	19, on page 213	5795	7	827,86
July 22	39	872	431	1303	1400	17, on page 230	5950	14	425,00
July 23	18	890	418	1308	1400	13, on page 243	4550	5	910,00
July 24	36	926	423	1349	1400	34, on page 277	11900	41	290,24
July 25	35	961	415	1376	1400	29, on page 306	10150	27	375,93
July 26	18	979	450	1429	1400	54, on page 360	18900	53	356,60
July 27	24	1003	449	1452	1400	40, on page 400	14000	23	608,70
July 28	24	1027	448	1475	1400	40, on page 440	14000	23	608,70
July 29	8	1035	449	1484	1400	25, on page 465	8750	9	972,22
July 30	36	1071	453	1524	1400	47, on page 512	16450	40	411,25
July 31	52	1123	453	1576	1400	82, on page 594	28700	52	551,92

So let's let to the other items in the title.

Armenian Wikipedia: I remember being disappointed at its tiny size a year or two ago, and apparently it has exploded since then due to a national campaign to have everyone write one article each. Here's one video encouraging Armenians to contribute:





Rosetta: the mission, not the language learning software. I an extremely pleased with them releasing daily images of the comet as Rosetta approaches. Dawn had better do something similar when it approaches Ceres in the next few months, as the lack of images during the Vesta approach was simply unacceptable.

• CometWatch 30 July
• CometWatch 29 July
• CometWatch 28 July
• CometWatch 25-27 July
• CometWatch - 24 July

Mormons: NPR has an article on the techniques they use to learn languages. I've always been impressed by the way they learn languages, since the first time I ever spoke with a non-Japanese person only in Japanese with a Mormon from Brazil in Nagoya.

Gaza tunnel diggers: This documentary with French subtitles is one of the more interesting documentaries I've seen in a while. It is a few years old, and is just 50 minutes of following a few of these tunnel diggers around as they do their thing. It has music but no extra commentary, which is great. A documentary without the typical dozens and dozens of quips from specialists speaking on the matter in their office is a rare treat.

Read more...

Short story recorded in 19 Arabic dialects (so far)

Keep an eye on this page and this page on Reddit - it's a short story read in the dialects of any Arabic speakers who want to participate. 19 so far, discussion here, and probably lots more to come.

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Maltese Genesis rewritten as Arabic

Found something interesting from Wordreference in 2006, a discussion on Maltese vs. Arabic (mutual intelligibility and similarities) with nothing too controversial: Maltese is not simply a dialect of Arabic but does strongly resemble Arabic in Tunisia, etc. etc.

On the third page (the one the link goes to) though a moderator has taken a passage from Maltese Genesis and rewritten it in Arabic (I've rearranged it to put the two closer together):

Fil-bidu Alla ħalaq is-sema u l-art:
في البدو الله خلق السما والأرط (أرض)

u kienet l-art tahwid u baħħ; u d-dlam kien fuq wicc l-abbissi u fuq wicc l-ibħra kien jittajjar l-ispirtu ta' Alla.
وكانت الأرط تهويد وبحّ والضلام (ظلام) كان فوق وتش (وجه) الأبسّي (الوهدة) وفوق وجه الأبحرة كان يتطيّر الإسبيرتو (الروح) تاالله (تاع الله) .

U qal Alla: ̋Ha jkun id-dawl.̏ U d-dawl sar.
وقال الله: ها يكون الضول (الضوء) والضول صار.

U ra Alla d-dawl li kien tajjeb. U Alla fired id-dawl mid-dlam.
   ورا الله اللي (إنه) كان طيب. والله فرد الضول مالضلام

U d-dawl Alla semmieh jum, u d-dlam sejjahlu lejl. U dalam u sebah - L-ewwel jum.
 والضول الله سماه يوم والضلام صيّحله ليل. وضلم وصبح -الأول يوم.



On a related note, here's a pdf file entitled A Comparative Study of Some Semantic Differences Between Maltese and Koranic Arabic. In spite of their similarities it looks like there is a near endless supply of false friends between the two. The Wordreference thread also had this note:

(Interesting I thought that they use the verb صيّح to "call" سمّى whereas in Arabic it's only to shout or scream .

and:

However it demonstrates that in Maltese you can often write a sentence which is mostly Arabic, or you can write one which is mostly Romance. I could re-write that paragraph from Genesis using many more Romance words if I wanted. That stylistic flexibility is very interesting in this language, and choosing from what stock you populate your sentences postures your utterance in different ways.

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Portuguese becomes working language of the...Association of National Olympic Committees of Africa

Well, it's not quite the United Nations that Portuguese would like to see itself added to, but for what it's worth it has been added alongside Arabic to make four: English, French, Portuguese and Arabic. The website is still only available in English and French.

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Two-way Arabic and Maltese conversation

I just came across this example of an Arabic speaker visiting Malta and speaking to a woman who talks to him in Maltese, and they carry out a conversation using their respective languages. You'll notice that it is a bit halting but functions well enough when done slowly, probably about the same comprehension you'd get with a French and Italian speaker slowing down the pace and speaking as clearly as possible. What I'm uncertain of (since I don't know any Arabic besides the script) is if the woman is simply toning down her Maltese, or throwing in a few Arabic words or choosing words that she knows are Arabic cognates. In other words, are they operating from a 100% L1 base or do they have a bit of an idea of which words the other knows and does not know?

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Arabic only the 29th most translated language on Index Translatonium

From here in French, from Morocco:

Index Translatonium, UNESCO's international translation library, has highlighted the very alarming status of Arabic as a target language. With 12,263 works translated into Arabic, this language is in 29th position - far behind Czech in 14th place, Serbian in 23rd, and Romanian in 24th. 

The top five most translated languages are English in first, then French, German, Russian, and Italian. 

Looking at the numbers by country, Germany is at the top of the list with 250,000 translated works. After that is Spain, France, and Japan. Morocco does not make the top 50 due to having only 373 translated works. 

Translatonium has more than two million entries for 500,000 authors in 148 countries since 1982. It was created in 1932 by the defunct League of Nations, it was taken over by UNESCO in 1946, then computerized in 1979. Since that date, member countries have been obligated to send a list of their published translations every year.

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French ministry of foreign affairs now has Twitter account in Arabic

As according to this article in French, which mentions that the French version of its Twitter account has 134,000 followers. As is often the case with articles like this, there isn't even a link to the Twitter account it is discussing. Fine then, I will find it...here it is in French, English, and Arabic.

Number of followers:

French: 134,973
English: 475
Arabic: 119

When I first saw the article Arabic was around eighty-something.

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Turkey's CHP party website now available in Arabic

Here's something I noticed in the Turkish media today - Turkey's CHP (originally the leading party, in opposition for quite some time now but finally rid of Deniz Baykal as leader) now has an Arabic version of its website. It looks like this:

This is the first language to be added after English.

Next up? According to the article in the first link, they are preparing a Russian version as the next language.

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Kelka maestroverki dil moderna liriko Araba now all typed up

Over the past few days I've been typing up a document from here, a collection of Arabic poems and (very) short stories translated into Ido from 1926. They're actually quite good, and I wonder if perhaps recording them (Ido voice, Ido text on screen, English subtitles that can then serve as a base for Google Translate into all the other languages it provides) would be a good idea. Also, now that it's 2010 it shouldn't be hard to find the original Arabic poems either, and those would serve very well as example phrases from Arabic to Ido.

There are certainly some typos in the text too, so let me know what you notice.


MONDO-BIBLIOTEKO V.

KELKA MAESTROVERKI
DIL
MODERNA LIRIKO ARABA

TRADUKITA DA RAFAEL NAKHLA S.J.
DIREKTERO DIL ARABA STUDII EN L'UNIVERSITATO
SANTA JOSEF EN BEIRUT (GRANDA LIBANO)

EDITERIO P. AHLBERG

P. AHLBERGS BOKFÖRLAG,
STOCKHOLM
1926.

Imprimerio Ed. NIMAX, Luxemburg.




PREFACO DI LA TRADUKINTO.

La Proxim Oriento Arablingua, precipue Egiptia, Palestina, Libano e Siria (1), esas mondo-famoza, kom ex-centro di la maxim antiqua civilizeso, e kom nuna grandega muzeo de antiquaji. De la maxim fora landi, quale Usa, Brazilia, Arjentinia, Chinia, Japonia, Australia, la turisti venas omnayare milope, por vizitar e admirar ta nekomparebla muzeo. Mem ti qui ne havis la feliceso vidar Oriento par la korpal okuli, vidis ol per l'okuli dil anmo, lektante la libri historiala, a la naraci dil voyajeri, o l'artikli di la revui.

Same kam pri la civilizeso generale, eventas pri l'Araba literaturo specale; me volas dicar ke la Proxim Oriento Arablingua judikesas dal Europani ed Amerikani, kom *nura* muzeo de antiquaji. Depos yarcenti, erudita Orientalisti dil tota mondo trairas omnadirecione ta nemezurebla muzeo. Per longeg e penoza serchadi, ili sucesis deskovrar, en olua maxim fora anguleti, centi e centi de manuskripti precoza, qui jacas depos yarcenti, tote celit en lia etuyo de dika polvo. Ili lektis e rilektis milfoye ta verki; ili editis e rieditis oli; ili tradukis e ritradukis oli a la maxim importanta lingui. Singlamonate ekiras de l'imprimerii Europan ed Amerikana plura tala edituri e tradukuri.

To omna esas sendube granda glorio por la Proxim Orienta Arablingua, ma to esas samtempe granda desfortuno! Nam, judikante lu, pri literaturo, kom muzeo de antiquaji, nur kom tala, la civilizita nacioni nule sorgis pri explorar e konocar la belaji, advere poka ma ver e granda, di la nuntempa literaturo Araba. La marveloza richaji di dia ancestri deturnis ili de la konoco di nia propra richaji!

Por esar yusta, me devas deklarar ke la tota kulpo ne gravesas nur sur l'eruditi di Europa ed Amerika. Ni ipsa, Proxim-Orientani, esas multe plu grave kulpoza, nam ni facis preske nur esforco por konocigar ed admirigar dal tota mondo civilizata la trezodi di nia moderna literaturo. E pro ke ni ipsa konocas e prizas oli plu multe kam irg altra naciono, nia kulpo esas neexkuzeble granda!

Esante pasionoz admirero di nia literaturo nuntempa, precipue di nia poezio, me judikis ke mea devo, kom bon Orientano, esas utiligar nia bel e richa linguo internaciona Ido, por deskovrar, per la maxim simpla moyeno, nia nekonocata trezori kulturala, a mili de mea estimata samideani. Me intencis nur publikigar, en la revuo MONDO, kin o sis tradukuri di maestroverki di nia poezio moderna. Tre felice por nia nekonocata literature, ta kelka tradukuri multe plezis a la granda pioniro dil movado Idala e redaktero di MONDO, mea kar amiko Sioro Ahlberg. Il pregis me plurafoye ed insiste prokurar ad il suficanta nombro de samspeca tradukuri, por editar broshureto 48-pagina, en la mikra biblioteko di MONDO.

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Spoken articles on the Turkish Wikipedia

While we're on the subject, Wikipedia in Turkish has a few spoken articles as well. You can see them all here, but those that might be particularly interesting for Page F30 readers are:

• Tanrı'nın Şehri - City of God or De Civitate Dei, the book by Augustine.
• Kayıp Cennet - Paradise Lost, by Milton.
• Tanrı - God. Just like Persian has its own word for God separate from Allah (khodâ, خدا) so does Turkish that goes back to their common roots with Mongolia. See Tengriism in English for more on that.
• Arthur C. Clarke. A man who needs no introduction..
  
• Stargate Universe. I actually know nothing about Stargate but others certainly do.
• El-Kanun fi't-Tıb or Canon Medicinae, the medieval book of medicine originally written by a Persian in Arabic and later translated into Latin and other languages.
• Haçkar or Khachkar, the Armenian cross you can see there on the right.
  

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Turkish Ministry of Education adds Arabic to foreign languages

Here's an article in Turkish from eight days ago, on how the Ministry of Education in Turkey has added Arabic to the list of languages that can be learned in schools. Part of the article:

The Ministry of Education has added Arabic to the list of foreign languages to be learned in schools after the removal of travel visas between Turkey and its neighboring countries. Right now the foreign languages that can be selected in schools are English, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and Russian, to which Arabic has now been added.

Since a cabinet decision is needed in order for a language to be taught in schools, the Ministry of Education made a request to the cabinet on the 24th of March, which it then approved on 8 April. The decision of the cabinet went into effect yesterday with an issuance in the Official Gazette (Resmi Gazete).

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Literary Arabic present in the brain of Arabic speakers as a second language, not a mother tongue

(Thanks to Zeinelabidin Elhassi for the link)

An article here from a few months ago tells us of a study showing that literary Arabic (i.e. MSA, the Arabic used for communication between Arabic speakers of different countries) registers in the brain as a second language, not a mother tongue.

This is one of the reasons why my tentative plans are to eventually learn Maltese first before tackling Arabic, because:

-Maltese plus Persian (which I'm studying now) may make MSA fairly intelligible from the start, and
-Arabic is so fragmented anyway that students are generally expected to learn one or more regional variants in addition to MSA.

Zein also commented on that subject on Auxlang before, calling it a good idea. Perhaps next year will be a good time, and hopefully by then there will be more places to learn Maltese online.

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Future online potential for top ten languages on the internet

Internetworldstats has a chart here that is often referenced when gauging the online presence of languages throughout the world. The chart features the top ten languages on the internet as well as their penetration, meaning the percentage of those using those languages that have access to the internet. Some languages have a high penetration and thus not much left expansion left (German, Japanese) while other languages have a very low penetration and thus much growth left to carry out. I turned the table into a graph that you can see below. The part in red shows the amount of people using the language that have access to the internet, and the grey part above represents the remaining potential for the language - people that speak the language but do not yet have internet access.

 

One language with a huge amount of potential is French, because of the large French-speaking population in Sub-Saharan Africa. Arabic is another one. Spanish has a large potential but is beginning to make use of it, as Spanish countries on the whole are more developed than French- and Arabic-speaking countries in Africa.

If you rearrange the languages by their potential number of users it then looks like this:

 

Keep in mind that for the sake of simplicity the numbers here represent only the population of native speakers, so a Korean who happens to be fluent in English or any other language will only count as 1 Korean. English is a language that benefits from an extremely wide L2 speaker pool that languages like Chinese do not have, and Spanish and French also have quite a bit of this too. Brazilians proficient in Spanish for example are expected to increase from the current approximately 5 million to 40 or 50 million in about a decade, and there are many L2 speakers of French throughout Europe (Romania for example) and other parts of the world.

Also, the amount of freedom citizens of a certain country have is also a big deciding factor too. Chinese has a large online presence but when the government of the largest group of speakers is able to completely cut citizens off from the internet when it wants, the online presence of the language suffers as well.

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Approval of a Wikipedia in Egyptian Arabic (Masry) ignites debate over the difference between a language and a dialect

This is actually news from last year, but the comments in this article are very interesting. In addition to that you can also see the debate on the page for the request itself from earlier last year.

While there is no clear definition on what makes a language a language and a dialect a dialect, one clear sign you're dealing with a separate language is when speakers of the language/dialect begin to have trouble writing in the official standard, and much prefer to write in their own tongue. A comment on the first link who speaks Egyptian Arabic says that he (she?) just feels that much more comfortable writing in Egyptian Arabic, and that this isn't necessarily a rejection of Standard Arabic because once an article appears in Egyptian Arabic then it is not that hard a task for someone else to translate it into Standard Arabic afterwards for the Arabic Wikipedia.

The Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia now has over 3,000 articles. This might just be the font, but taking a look at both of them I find the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia much friendlier-looking, as with less accents over the letters it looks a bit more like the Persian font I'm used to.

Want to hear what Egyptian Arabic sounds like? Okay, here you go:

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90% of high schools in Seoul offer Japanese as a second foreign language / 서울 고교 제2외국어 90%는 일본어

This is of course about second foreign languages, thus those that are chosen after English which is mandatory.

7일 서울시교육청이 밝힌 `2009 고교 교육과정 편성 현황` 자료에 따르면 서울 시내 고교 308곳 중 90%인 278곳이 일본어를 제2외국어 선택과목으로 개설했다.

According to resources from the "2009 high school status of education" (just made this name up on the fly, probably has a different official title) published on the 7th, out of 308 high schools located in Seoul, 278 of them (90%) have established Japanese as an optional second foreign language.

어순이 한국어와 비슷해 고등학교 수준에서 배우기 어렵지 않고 교원을 확보하기 쉽기 때문으로 분석된다. 일본어에 이어 중국어는 189개교가 채택하고 있었다. 과거 한때 제2외국어로 가장 인기 있었던 프랑스어와 독일어를 가르치는 학교는 각각 52곳과 47곳에 그쳐 이들 언어 인기가 시들해진 것으로 분석됐다.

It's estimated that this is due to Japanese having a similar word order to Japanese, being a language easy for high school students to learn, and because obtaining teachers for the subject is easy. After Japanese, Chinese was adopted by 189 schools. French and German, once the most popular as a 2nd foreign language, were limited to 52 and 47 schools, showing a drop in popularity for them.


It also mentions that there's a surprisingly large number of people that choose Arabic (29,278 students), but the reason for this is that apparently it's a very easy subject on the university admittance test compared to other languages, so this is more about tactics than actually having an interest in the language. Not a single school actually teaches Arabic in Korea, according to the article.


Wikipedia also has some more info:

일본어도 한국어 및 터키어 등과 비슷한 주어-목적어-동사 형식으로 이루어져 있고 문법적으로도 서로 비슷한 점이 많아서 한국인들과 터키인들이 일본어를 배우기가 다른 언어에 비해서 쉬운 편이다. 대한민국에서는 2001년에 중학교 교과목에 일본어가 편입되었고, 중국어와 함께 2009년 현재 중학교에 들어갈 신입생들이 선택할 수 있는 제2외국어 중의 하나이다.

Japanese, like Korean and Turkish, has a SOV word order and a number of similarities, making Japanese an easier language for Koreans and Turks to learn than others. In 2001 Japanese entered the junior high curriculum as a subject, and as of 2009 along with Chinese it is one of the 2nd foreign languages freshmen in junior high can choose.

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Cyprus seeks recognition of Cypriot Maronite Arabic language. Also, could Cypriot Maronites understand Jesus?

From Wikipedia: "Symbol of the Maronite Patriarchal Synod, featuring the Maronite Cross."

Not a story you hear about every day:

The Republic of Cyprus has submitted a Declaration on the Recognition of the Cypriot Maronite Arabic Language on November 5, 2008.

According to an official announcement, Cyprus has adopted the Recommendation of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, dated on 27 September 2006.

The Declaration was made in recognition of the concept of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, and which the Republic of Cyprus has ratified.

and:

The Committee of Experts, which has already been activated, recommends specific actions aimed at protecting and promoting the Cypriot Maronite Arabic language.

For the full text of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, see here. It goes into quite a bit of detail on what the charter incurs but it's not legal gobbeldygook either so give it a read over if interested.

There's also an article on the language here that claims the following:

Cypriot Arabic is regarded as being the closest living language that is a relic of the medieval Syria-Iraq region.

The language is entirely vernacular or unwritten, spoken by some 1,300 people, and is considered a diluted version of Aramaic-a biblical language. It is a window on the ancient history of our region, the link to all our past. If a Cypriot Arabic speaker went back in time to the days of Jesus, and heard him speak, he would not need an interpreter as they speak the same language.

True? Maybe somebody on Unilang has the answer.

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More BBC News in other languages on YouTube by the end of the year

Great news, because it's never much fun to try to use a site's own video player when YouTube is always the easiest to use. Actually BBC radio in other languages is quite easy on the computer, but video's not quite as fun and will sometimes need to buffer or can tax system resources. Unfortunately it won't be in Turkish yet, but hopefully that'll happen soon too:

BBC Global News has extended its relationship with YouTube, the leading online video community, by signing an agreement to add six BBC video news channels in Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, Persian and Urdu to its existing BBC World News channel.

In what is the first multi-language deal by a major international news broadcaster with YouTube, users will have access to high quality, independent and impartial news clips produced by the BBC World Service in six languages.

Video news stories will run each day across the different language Channels and each channel will be branded and tailored to its specific audience.

The videos will also be fully discoverable via Google Video search.

Here are all the other languages you can currently listen to BBC in.

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How to increase the number of military personnel in the U.S. that speak Arabic

Valletta, the capital of Malta. Malta speaks a language that is basically an Arabic base with a ton of Italian influence, and a lot like the Arabic spoken in Tunisia.

An idea I've had for some time now fleshed out in some more detail:

Ever since September 11th 2001 you can see every once in a while about how the military or the CIA or some other part of the government is having troubles creating fluent Arabic speakers within its ranks. The main problem here is a simple one: Arabic is hard to learn. It's easy to give up on Arabic, not because it's impossible to learn, but it can give that impression to people for the first few months before everything begins to click as eventually languages do. Here's one article from the New York Times yesterday about this:

Three years ago, the Defense Department set out to increase sharply the number of military personnel who speak strategically important languages. Progress has been slow, and the military has not determined how to reach its goal — or what exactly that goal is.

Figures from the department indicate that only 1.2 percent of the military receives a bonus paid to those who can speak languages judged to be of critical importance for the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other areas of strategic concern.

...

He noted that after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the United States urgently worked to develop a cadre of Russian speakers and scholars. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, neither the military nor other government agencies executed a similarly ambitious program for Arabic speakers.

The services have adopted a number of programs that have had some success. The Army developed a program to recruit native speakers of strategically important languages to serve as translators; so far, more than 600 have graduated.

In short, there's some progress but progress is slow. The other problem with Arabic is that it's not really one language either:

The proficiency test was extremely rigorous -- the one thing people don't understand about Arabic is that it is not one language, but rather several different mutually unintelligible dialects resting under a literary language which is completely divorced from all of them. The literary language alone takes up to ten years to fully master. To gain even a passive understanding of these dialects takes several more years of intensive study.

In addition to this, the difficulty of conducting background checks on people that have Arabic as a first language makes it harder than would be expected to find good translators:

Many of these applicants still have relatives abroad, often in countries that raise alarm among security officers. Former intelligence officials say that besides the problems of conducting thorough background checks in those countries, the agency also worries that recruits could be blackmailed if their families were vulnerable.

So what is needed then is some way to make Arabic easier to learn for those that don't have it as a first language, and at the same time it can't just be standard Arabic either, and thus should incorporate learning regional varieties at the same time, a tall order.

So here is an idea to make this process somewhat easier. One four-year Arabic language training program for the military could be devised as follows:

• First four to six months: train the students in Interlingua for the first month or two, then spend the next months going over relevant texts about the Middle East to give the students a good background knowledge of what they are about to get into. Why Interlingua? Because the next step is to:
• Learn Maltese. Maltese is basically Arabic plus a huge amount of Italian influence (some 52% of the vocabulary comes from Romance sources) in the same way that English is a Germanic language plus a huge amount of influence from Latin and French, and is similar to Tunisian Arabic. The students, having already learned Interlingua (Interlingua is a constructed language that is a lot like Italian without any complicated grammar) will now be familiar with most of the vocabulary that comes from Romance languages (thus almost 50%) and will have a head start in learning it. Note that it also doesn't use the Arabic alphabet so there's no problem there. They then study Maltese for six months in class and then are sent to Malta for a year of intensive training. Malta is an island and a part of the European Union, which also makes it safer and less of a culture shock (it's 98% Roman Catholic for example) for the students who will still only be starting their second year.

An example of Maltese from the Wikipedia article on the demographics of Valletta:

Demografija

Il-populazzjoni tal-Belt Valletta naqset drastikament matul is-snin, u illum il-ġurnata l-kwota naqset għal madwar terz mill-perjodu bl-aktar popolazzjoni. Dan il-proċess aċċelera aktar wara t-Tieni Gwerra Dinjija hekk kif żvilupp ġdid fis-subborgi ra lill-popolazzjoni timxi 'l barra mill-belt kapitali, però l-Belt xorta baqgħet u għadha bħala ċ-ċentru amministrattiv u kummerċjali ta' Malta.

From this paragraph alone can be recognized the words demographics, population, drastic, quota (?), mill-period (probably millennium), process, accelerate, capital, centre, administrative, commercial. Some Italian words in there too like sviluppo (development).

• Now the students are familiar with a semitic language, and have a strong practical foundation that will enable them to understand through actual experience how regional varieties of Arabic differ from standard Arabic. Now they come back to the U.S. and learn standard Arabic, in an immersion setting like this one perhaps. The students will already know Maltese and will adapt very quickly to standard Arabic. Do this for a year or more. Then finally:
• Give the students training in one other regional version of Arabic, depending on which area they will be expected to start working in. By this time they should already have an idea of where they could make themselves most useful, and a decision will be made in accordance with that and which region has the largest need for them. Depending on the facilities available this could be done in the U.S. or may require sending them abroad.

These four years won't be enough to make the students capable translators from the start (translators need years of cultural experience anyway and this can't be rushed), but it will accomplish two things:

1) Make the language less intimidating by gradually moving towards standard Arabic only after Interlingua and Maltese instead of starting from day one with standard Arabic, complete with a different script and grammar and culture and everything else that combines to give the student the impression that "Wow, I'm seriously never going to learn this; time to give up and think about working in another field".
2) Give the students a better background in regional varieties of the language. There are a ton of articles that explain the problem agencies have with recruiting people that know Arabic but have no familiarity with any regional varieties, and are less useful than expected when listening to recordings / translating and analyzing documents.



Finally, Persian/Farsi is not as much of a problem considering how much easier it is to learn. The only problem there is the impression that Persian is as hard as Arabic, so this fact just needs to be made more clear when thinking about trying to train more people in the language in the long term. Persian is basically a language of no great difficulty, masked in a difficult-looking exterior.

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New York Times reports on Wikimania 2008 in Alexandria, Egypt, makes common mistake (aka page counts do not determine the size of a Wikipedia)

Wikimania 2008 went on a few days ago in Alexandria, Egypt, and the New York Times covered it. That's good news. The bad news is that they are once again displaying a lack of insight as to what makes a Wikipedia a good Wikipedia. Here's what it says:

Perhaps it is this context that explains the enthusiasm for building a stronger Arabic Wikipedia among the young people here and the fervor about contributing articles in their native language. Among the Arab attendees, who came from a variety of fields, including computer science, medicine, engineering and architecture, the woeful shape of the Arabic Wikipedia has been a cause of chagrin, even embarrassment. It has fewer than 65,000 articles, which places it 29th among the various Wikipedias, just behind Slovenian, and well behind the artificial international tongue Esperanto.

Places it well behind...in terms of what? In terms of number of pages? Well, not even in terms of that. Looking at the total number of pages including redirects and everything else (in other words just the number of pages, not articles) we have:

300 754 for Arabic,
227 181 for Esperanto, and
153 314 for Slovenian.

More important than that is the number of edits. The number of edits generally makes the difference between an encyclopedia worth reading and one that is simply a collection of one-shot pages. That is, an encyclopedia with 100 articles with 10 edits for each is more worth reading than one with 500 articles with 1 edit for each. Here's where they stand on edits:

1.8 million for Esperanto,
2.7 million for Arabic, and
1.4 million for Slovenian.

The conclusion? The Arabic Wikipedia is the best of the three. I don't want to detract from the effort put into the Esperanto Wikipedia, but simply focusing on article counts also takes credit away from people who spend a lot of time putting effort into making outstanding articles, and gives it over to those that likely don't deserve it as much.

The point stands, of course, that Arabic should have a much larger Wikipedia than it has now. It's just a pity that they picked two bad examples to compare it to. A much better way to compare it would have been to note that it's only twice the size of Estonian (spoken by 1.4 million people), and waaay behind Norwegian, with only 5 million people.

For a complete list of Wikipedias by language, see this page. Also see List of Wikipedias by sample of articles here.

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Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's comments on Obama's planned troop withdrawal now available in full

Topography of Iraq / Topografie de Iraq

This is turning out to be an interesting story. Iraq's prime minister Nouri al-Maliki (Nouri Kamel Mohammed Hassan al-Maliki, نوري كامل محمّد حسن المالكي) made some comments in an interview with Der Spiegel the other day about how Obama has the better plan for troop withdrawal in Iraq, after which there were some halfhearted denials about a mistranslation by Der Spiegel and that he might not have really meant that, but it turns out that the translator wasn't working for Der Spiegel but actually for al-Maliki himself and now Der Spiegel has published the entire interview here:

Maliki: As soon as possible, as far as we're concerned. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.

SPIEGEL: Is this an endorsement for the US presidential election in November? Does Obama, who has no military background, ultimately have a better understanding of Iraq than war hero John McCain?

Maliki: Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems. Of course, this is by no means an election endorsement. Who they choose as their president is the Americans' business. But it's the business of Iraqis to say what they want. And that's where the people and the government are in general agreement: The tenure of the coalition troops in Iraq should be limited.

I still know next to no Arabic though, so once the Arabic text comes out I'm going to ask a few people I know about it.

Edit: Politico.com now has a direct translation on what was said:

The following is a direct translation from the Arabic of Mr. Maliki’s comments by The Times:

“Obama’s remarks that — if he takes office — in 16 months he would withdraw the forces, we think that this period could increase or decrease a little, but that it could be suitable to end the presence of the forces in Iraq.”

He continued: “Who wants to exit in a quicker way has a better assessment of the situation in Iraq.”

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