Archive for December, 2006
Saturday, December 30th, 2006
“X’minnek” – Maltese Poetry
Affarijiet, a mate of mine from Malta wrote a poem in Maltese called “X’minnek?” Where have you gone? It laments the gradual loss of the Maltese language under the pressure of a dominantly English-speaking community. If you know nothing about it, Maltese is viewed as a semitic language deriving from Arabic and has, due to [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by jangari
Monday, December 25th, 2006
Happy Solstice
I might take this opportunity to wish everybody a benign, theologically non-specific, northern hibernal solstice celebrations, as well as an inebriating anniversary of an arbitrarily selected point of the Earth’s rotation around the nearest star. Happy Solstice.
No Comments » - Posted in Nothing in particular by jangari
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006
English test for Immigrants? At least it isn’t Gaelic!
Australia, or, more specifically, the ever-infuriating John Howard, wants to impose a test of proficiency in English as a requirement for citizenship (he also wants to test ‘Australian Values’, but the idea is just too ludicrous to spend any more time on). I remembered reading Mike Carlton’s take on the concept of language proficiency tests [...]
5 Comments » - Posted in Linguistics,Politics by jangari
Friday, December 8th, 2006
Six AFIs for Ten Canoes
Ten Canoes completely dominated the AFIs last night in Melbourne by winning six awards out of the seven for which it was nominated, including the big one, Best Picture. The others were Direction, Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing and Sound. I suspect it would have taken out Best Music and Costume too, had there actually been [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by jangari
Friday, December 1st, 2006
Language ownership
A lot of people are weighing into this debate over the Mapudungun language and whether or not Microsoft are within their rights to use it in software development. All (by which I mean ‘most’) of the editorial concerning this issue has revolved around one central notion: whether or not languages can be considered intellectual property. [...]
