Political Science, Boston College 

בעקבות פניה של 'פרספקטיבה', שינה ארגון אונסק"ו – המתיימר להגן על חופש העיתונות – את הסטטוס של עבדאללה אל-מותרגי' מעיתונאי למחבל

 

 

ביום חמישי 'פרספקטיבה' פרסמה כיצד  גינתה מנכ"לית אונסק"ו, ארגון החינוך, המדע והתרבות של האו"ם, את הריגתו של "העיתונאי" הפלסטיני עבדאללה אל־מורתג'י בידי ישראל, וכיצד אונסק"ו אף הכניס את שמו של אל-מורתגי' לאתר זיכרון מיוחד לעיתונאים אשר "נהרגו בעת מילוי תפקידם. האתר משמר את תרומתם לחופש הביטוי, דמוקרטיה ושלום."

אלא שסרטון של אל-מורתג'י שעלה באינטרנט (ונחשף בבלוגים של Elder Of Ziyon ו-Israellycool), מוכיח כי ה"עיתונאי" אינו אלא פעיל טרור של גדודי עז-אדין אל-קאסם של החמאס.

ביום חמישי פנתה 'פרספקטיבה' לאונסק"ו בדרישה להסיר את שמו של אל-מותרגי' מעמוד הזכרון של העיתונאים באתר הארגון, לאור המידע שנחשף לגביו. כעבור יום אחד, הגיבו אנשי אונסק"ו לפניית 'פרספקטיבה' וקיבלו את עמדתה במלואה. אונסק"ו ביטל את הודעת הגינוי לישראל שפרסם, והסיר את שמו של אל-מורתג'י מרשימת העיתונאים שנהרגו בעת מילוי תפקידם.

בנוסף פרסם אונס"קו את ההודעה הבאה לעיתונות:

ביום 14 בנובמבר, מנכ"לית אונסקו, אירינה בוקובה, פרסמה עדכון בנוגע להצהרה שפרסמה ב-29 באוגוסט 2014, בעניין עבדאללה מורתג'י, בהקשר של המנדט של אונסק"ו להגן על חופש הביטוי וחופש עיתונות.

ההצהרה המקורית שפורסמה ביום 29 באוגוסט ניתנה בהתאם למדיניות של אונסק"ו לגנות כל ההרג של עיתונאי. במהלך שבוע זה, הובא מידע לתשומת לבו של אונסק"ו כי מר מורתג'י היה חבר בקבוצה חמושה מאורגנת – לוחם פעיל, ולכן, לא עיתונאי אזרח. המידע נחשף לאור וידאו שפורסם לאחרונה באינטרנט  בו עבדאללה מורתג'י מדבר כחבר בקבוצה מזוינת מאורגנת.

לכן אונסק"ו מבטל את ההצהרה של ה-29 באוגוסט.

"אני מוקיעה את הניסיונות להפוך את מקצוע העיתונות לכלי שרת בידי חמושים," הכריזה אירינה בוקובה. "מעמדם האזרחי של עיתונאים הוא קריטי, במיוחד במצבים של סכסוך, על מנת להבטיח את הזרימה החופשית של רעיונות ומידע החיוניים לציבור הרחב, ולצורך השבת היציבות והשלום", הכריזה המנכ"לית.

'פרספקטיבה' משבחת את ארגון אונסק"ו על ההחלטה החשובה.

 

POW!

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האירוע התרחש ב – 1959 בבית דגן, עם פרה חיה, נושמת ומעכלת (אבל כנראה שלא ממש נהנית). הידיעה המלאה...

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Last week The Cable reported that

The U.S. State Department plans to cut its entire $500,000 in annual funding next year to an organization dedicated to sneaking into abandoned Syrian military bases, prisons, and government facilities to collect documents and other evidence linking Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its proxies to war crimes and other mass atrocities….

For the past two years, the U.S. State Department has channeled a total of $1 million in funds to the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), a group of international war crimes prosecutors that sends local researchers, lawyers, and law students into Syrian battle zones to collect and extract files and other evidence that can help map the Syrian command structure and identify the military orders authorizing illegal activities, including barrel bomb campaigns, the starvation of besieged towns, and a spate of mass murders that have pushed the conflict’s death toll past 190,000 since March 2011.

Why? No explanation was given, and apparently there was an argument within the administration: the Commission spokesman “hinted that the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, Stephen Rapp, had not supported the decision. ‘Ambassador Rapp and his team have been highly supportive of our work but they do not control the funding,’ she said.”

But the goal that will instantly occur to many people, including me, is that the administration no longer wants to pursue war crimes trials against Assad and his regime. Instead, we may be seeking accommodation with him–and an accommodation about Syria with Assad’s sponsor, which is Iran. Last week Mr. Obama wrote his fourth letter to Iran’s “Supreme Leader.” The Wall Street Journal reports that:

Mr. Obama’s letter also sought to assuage Iran’s concerns about the future of its close ally, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, according to another person briefed on the letter. It states that the U.S.’s military operations inside Syria aren’t targeted at Mr. Assad or his security forces.

Once upon a time Obama said “Assad must go,” but that is no longer policy–nor do we want to learn more about his war crimes.

Sadly, there is a direct and exact precedent for this move by the Obama administration: in 2009 it cut off funding for groups that were examining Iran’s own crimes. The Boston Globe broke that story in October 2009:

לטאמבלר יש בעיה גדולה עם חיפוש יעיל בעברית. לחיפוש טוב יותר (אך גם כן לא מושלם), ניתן לעיין באתר...

"הישראלים מודעים היטב לתנאי החיים הירודים ברצועת עזה, אלא שהם מביאים בחשבון את ההקשר". תגובה לחנוך מרמרי

I walked into the 7th-floor common room in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences building at the University of Edinburgh yesterday and saw this message on the shared whiteboard:

The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense.

Classy graffiti, I thought. This is a very intellectual place. And suddenly I realized that I haven't posted a linguist joke here since June 2006. And in March that year I had said that "I try to post one linguist joke a year, whether you need it or not." I am 8 years behind schedule!

As I waited for the coffee machine to deliver my mug of java I looked out past the majestic scenery of the extinct volcano known as Arthur's Seat, and across the Firth of Forth beyond, and found myself wondering if, in that same tense bar, auxiliary have was sitting in a booth with a past participle. That would be perfect.

Linguist jokes. I should post more of them. I'll try to catch up.

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OK THIS IS AWESOME, and “awesome” is not a word that I use lightly.

As a gift for the second birthday of the Wikidata project, nice people at Google created a tool that helps people link articles in different languages that are not linked yet. They prepared a list with thousands of pairs of articles in different languages that are supposed to be about the same subject according to their automatic guesswork. The tool only shows such articles, and a human editor must check whether they actually match, and if they do—make the linking automatically.

There were thirty six such articles for the Hebrew–English pair. About four of them were unrelated, and I fixed the linking between the rest of them. Some of them required manual intervention, because there were interfering links to unrelated subjects. For some simple cases it took me just a few seconds, and for a few complicated ones—a few minutes.

I also tried doing the same for Russian–English, but there are over a thousand article pairs there, so I only did a few. I also did a few for Catalan and Greek, and I finished all ten pairs for Bengali, even though I don’t actually know Greek or Bengali. I just used a bit of healthy intuition and Google Translate, and I’m pretty sure that I did it well.

You can help!

Here are my suggested instructions for doing this.

Preparation:

1. Log in to mediawiki.org. This account is used also for the tool.
2. Now go to the tool’s site. Click Login, and allow the tool to use your mediawiki.org account.
3. Go to settings, and choose your pair of languages.
4. Go to “Check by list” and you’ll see a list of article pairs. If there are no suggested article pairs for the language pair you selected, go back to number 3 choose some other languages. As I wrote above, from my experience, you don’t need to know a language thoroughly to perform this useful work ;)

Now click a link to a pair of articles that looks reasonable. Articles in both languages will open side by side.

1. If the articles are definitely not about the exact same subject, click “No” in the list and find another pair.
2. If the articles are about the same subject and one of them doesn’t have any interlanguage links, click “Add links” in the interlanguage area. In the box that will open, write the language name of the other language in the first field and the title of the article in the other field, and then click the “Link with page” button. A list of articles in other languages will be shown. If it looks reasonable, click “Confirm”, and then “Close dialog and reload page”. That’s it, the pages are linked! Click “Yes” in the list in the linking tool and proceed to another article pair.
3. If the articles are about the same subject, but both of them appear to have links to other language, it’s possible that explicit interlanguage links are written in the source code of the articles. To resolve this, do the following:
   1. Open both articles for editing in source mode.
   2. Scroll all the way down and find whether they have explicit interlanguage links.
   3. If these are correct links to articles about the same subjects in other languages, go to those articles, and link them using Wikidata. Note that it often happens in such cases that these are links to redirects, so the actual current title may be different.
   4. If these are links to articles about other subjects, even if they are related, remove those links. For example, if the article in Bengali is about an island, and the article in Dutch is about a city on that island, remove the link – these subject are distinct enough. Ditto if the article in English is about an American human rights organization and the article in French is about a French human rights organization.
   5. If you were able to remove all the explicit links from the source, go back to point 2 above and link the articles using Wikidata.
   6. If it’s too complicated to remove these links for any reason, feel free to go to another article, but it would be nice to leave a note about this on the articles’ talk pages so that other editors would clean this up some time.

That’s it. It may get a tad complicated for some cases, but if you ask me, it’s a lot of fun.

Filed under: language, Wikipedia Tagged: Wikidata

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Or Kashti of Haaretz reports on a study that suggests that Hebrew speakers can read their native language more quickly than Arabic speakers can read theirs:

The study, conducted over the last three years, examined the speed and efficacy with which Hebrew and Arabic speakers read texts in their native languages. The texts were taken from two standardized tests, the psychometric exam and the international PISA exam.

Arabic, unlike Hebrew, is a diglossic language, meaning the oral language is different from the written (literary) one. The difference between spoken and written Arabic is so great, the researchers wrote, “that acquisition of the written language could be defined as acquiring a second language” – which in turn could influence “the development of linguistic mechanisms necessary for reading.”

Another difference is that Arabic orthography – meaning the shape of the letters and the use of diacritical marks – is more complex than that of Hebrew, making it harder to read. [...]

This is one of the first studies to examine differences in reading ability among adults who have already mastered their mother tongue, as opposed to children.

The researchers found that, on average, Arabic speakers need seven seconds longer than Hebrew speakers to read 200 words aloud, while reading a 200-word text silently takes them about 16 seconds longer. And not only do Hebrew speakers read faster, but they also read more accurately, the study found.

These gaps cannot be explained by cognitive differences among the students or by other variables like parental education or socioeconomic status, the researchers said.

“The difference in reading efficiency stems from the differing speed of deciphering words in each language, something that’s apparently directly connected to the orthographic structure of the Arabic language and the fact that it’s a diglossic language,” Ibrahim said. “Reading in Arabic simply doesn’t reach the requisite level of automation, as it does for Hebrew or English readers.”

This raises all sorts of questions and requires various caveats (Prof. Rafiq Ibrahim says they should stop using texts translated from English or Hebrew on the Arabic exam), but it’s interesting enough I thought I’d pass it along and see what people have to say. (Thanks, Kobi!)

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ניסיתם כבר את מעדן מוו של "טרה"? חבל לכם על הזמן. המרקם, הטעם, אין דברים כאלה. עכשיו כשאסור לקנות מילקי, זו ממש הזדמנות מעולה לגרום לסמנכ"ל השיווק של טרה להסתכל על המספרים היומיים ולהגיד "וואלה? זה עובד הקמפיין הזה עם מנשה נוי". ביום שישי שודרה כתבה על מנשה נוי "אולפן שישי". 15 דקות מתחו אותנו […]

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מה שהפך אותו לשחקן עם ההופעה השנייה-הכי-קצרה שזכה באוסקר על תפקיד ראשי. (המקום הראשון שייך לדייוויד...

Nothing to do here

זה פוסט אמיתי

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Jim Benton

From Anschel Schaffer-Cohen:

I'm an avid Language Log reader, and as an amateur student of language politics I'm always fascinated by your discussions of language vs. dialect vs. topolect, and the role played by mutual intelligibility. As such, I was fascinated to see this quote show up in my Facebook newsfeed:

From the last sentence this is obviously (translated into) Portuguese, a language I don't speak and have never studied. But as a Spanish speaker, not only is it entirely understandable to me, I actually had to get to the end of the third sentence before I realized it wasn't in Spanish in the first place! These first sentences are an example of something I've only ever seen before between Yiddish and German, where some simple sentences ("Du bist alt", "דו ביסט אַלט", "You are old") are identical in both languages. Is there a word for this? And is there anyone out there who, following the Chinese example, considers Spanish and Portuguese to be "dialects" of Iberian?

This is clearly an issue of great interest to me, but it would be otiose to list the countless posts I've made on related topics. If you Google on "victor mair + language log + intelligibility" and "victor mair + language log + dialect", you will find a bunch of relevant posts. The most recent post in the series: "Mutual unintelligibility among Sinitic lects" (10/5/14).

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October 14th, 2014: As a reward for reading down here, here is a blog with pictures of my dog!! – Ryan

אד או׳ניל (אל בנדי) קורא את אותו עיתון גם בנשואים פלוס וגם במשפחה מודרנית.

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