German influence on the Hebrew language

Here's a link readers might be interested in, on the effect German has had on Hebrew in the form of loanwords, most of which (according to the article) Hebrew speakers themselves aren't aware of the origin of. This seems to be the case in a lot of languages, and in Japanese and Korean as well are a number of loanwords from German like Arbeit (アルバイト, 아르바이트) and Röntgen (レントゲン, 뢴트겐선) that people either don't know the origin of, or assume to be English.

The same happens with French sometimes too, with words like enquette (アンケート, 앙케트) that many assume to be English too.

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Hebrew Wikipedia finally about to break the 100,000 article mark

Finally! See:

The total number of articles at the moment is 99,927. But the Hebrew Wikipedia differs from others in that it has a very deletionist policy, keeping the article count quite low. Not knowing any Hebrew (yet!), I can't comment on what it feels like to be an editor there but personally I find even the slightly deletionist policy of the German Wikipedia to be rather annoying.

Nevertheless, because of this policy in spite of a low article count the number of edits is really quite huge, almost 8.6 million. If edits alone determined ranking this would put it in 13th place, behind Swedish and just ahead of Finnish.

In spite of the heavy deletionist policy there the image shows that they care about article count at least a bit.

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Dungeons & Dragons alignments for religious and mythical characters

If you've ever played D&D or seen the somewhat famous Batman alignment chart, you'll know what this is about. Wherever possible I've tried to include the original text of what the people featured here have said (or what was written about them), but with some the text is either too long or the original text was too hard (=annoying) to find. If you happen to have it on hand though for one with a short quote then leave it in the comments below and I'll alter the image.

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Radis IN, Israel's Persian-language radio station / İsrail’de Farsça radyo yayını

Somewhere close to this half-cat, half-owl, Israelis are broadcasting in Persian.

Here's something interesting I stumbled across just now:

İsrail’in internet üzerinden yayın yapan Farsça radyo istasyonu Radis IN bir ay kadar önce yayınına başladı. 24 saatlik yayının tümü Farsça...

Radis IN, an Israeli radio station broadcasting online in Persian, started broadcasting one month ago. The 24-hour (and 7 days a week BTW) radio broadcast is all in Persian, containing programs on food...

Radyo istasyonu Müdürü Amir Shai; “Radyo görevlileri Farsça konuşan, bu kültür mirasını korumayı hedefleyen, İsrail’den tüm dünyaya seslerini duyurmak isteyen İsraillilerden oluşuyor” demekte.

Radio station manager Amir Shai said that "People working at the station are Israelis that speak Persian, want to protect this culture's heritage, and want to have their voices heard from Israel all over the world."

Radyo istasyonu Tel Aviv-Holon arasında küçük bir stüdyodan yayın yapmakta.

The radio station broadcasts from a small studie in between Tel Aviv and Holon.

Their site is all in Hebrew though so it's a good thing that the broadcast automatically loads or I might not have been able to find it. I've been listening to it for about ten minutes now and so far it's all music, though the singing is in Persian. Not sure how much actual talking in Persian there is, but considering that it's 24/7 I'm sure they have a variety of programs including news and discussions and whatnot.

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You know, Beaufort, Couturat, Zamenhof, de Waal et al. would probably like you to write graffiti on their graves

Not really Louis Couturat's tombstone. I suspect he would be pleased with a nice bit of Ido graffiti like this on his, however.

Interesting bit in an article here about Ben Yehuda, the man most responsible for taking Hebrew from a dead/liturgical language and turning it into a modern language that is now spoken by some 7 million people:

And while some of the words Ben Yehuda invented are now taken for granted - like ofanayim for bicycle - 2,000 of his words were stillborn. His word for tomato, for instance, which Hebrew speakers now universally call agvania, was badura. And his word for democracy: amunot.

Still, Ben Yehuda's achievement in midwifing a modern language that so keenly feels the press of its ancestors is immense. When he died in 1922, at age 64, his funeral was attended by 30,000.

Stavans closes his book - and the personal journey it traces - with a pilgrimage to Ben Yehuda's grave on the Mount of Olives. When he finds the gravestone, he notices that it has been spray-painted. A friend tells him that when a member of the Ben Yehuda family was informed about the desecration, apparently at the hands of ultra-Orthodox Jews, she asked, "In what language was the graffiti splashed on?"

"In Hebrew."

"Ah, then Ben Yehuda won."

It's actually pretty funny to think of a group of people with spray paint in their hands, hunched over the grave of the person that spent his life promoting the language, and then further strengthening it by writing graffiti in it, which is about as informal a setting as language can be used (generally the last place that a language begins to infiltrate and thus proof of its strength).

In the same vein, I couldn't imagine a greater honour for someone who had created and used a language for decades and decades that they intended to be the world's 2nd language than a nice bit of graffiti in the language they promoted (Linguistacho! Pro quo tu ne mortis plu frue?!).

Graffiti in another IAL, of course, would be an insult.

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Increasing the status of Kazakh as a state language in Kazakhstan, and comparisons to Hebrew

There's an article here about Kazakhstan's efforts to instate Kazakh as the state language, that is, to increase its status and I assume have it be the language of not just ethnic Kazakhs but also the minorities in the country as well. In the article they compare it to how Israel instated Hebrew as the country's national language. Quite a lot of countries do this as well, comparing how Israel instated Hebrew as the national language and basing their plans upon that. That's also one of the reasons why the people over at dnghu.org aren't concerned with making the language as simple as possible (as is the case with Esperanto, Ido, etc.) but rather with making it as authentic as possible, because in the only case where a language has been revived the emphasis was on authenticity and a shared sense of culture/religion, not simplicity.

So, here is one interesting part from the article (note that I've corrected some of the grammatical errors in the text):

In one of the interviews the Plenipotentiary Ambassador of the State (of) Israel in the Republic of Kazakhstan Ran Ishai noted: "...two distinctions in our language situations exist. We consider the first, that the situation with the Kazakh language is far easier, because our language (Hebrew) was not used at all. The second: we did not have other output on how to restore our language because to Israel there came immigrants from all over the world, with their cultures and various languages.

...Our experience shows, that restoration of a language is quite possible. Now in Israel the most popular language which people constantly speak is Hebrew. You cannot present yourself in Israeli life without Hebrew. And the same can occur in Kazakhstan; not only Kazakhs, but also national minorities, can speak in Kazakh. In Israel various national minorities live also, and they also speak in Hebrew. I do not think that obstacles exist for people to speak in the Kazakh language."

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