To Dmoz or not to Dmoz, that is the question…

Firstly, I am not a SEO expert. In fact, I am rather bad knowing how the WWW (not to talk about the Internet as a whole) works.

A year ago a (geek) friend of mine told me that to be on the Open Directory Project (Dmoz) was cool to promote our project of Indo-European Language Revival. Now I know that (obviously) it’s mostly a question of Pagerank and Google.

A year ago I sent what we had, our website dnghu.org, which was scarce in its original content, although it was not under construction, and it offered already some material … Read the rest “To Dmoz or not to Dmoz, that is the question…”

Swastika: A Stupid Taboo in European and American countries

Hindu Swastika The swastika (Wikipedia)– from Sanskrit svástika स्वास्तिक – is an equilateral cross with its arms bent at right angles, in either right-facing (卐) or left-facing (卍) forms. The term is derived from Sanskrit svasti, meaning well-being. The Thai greeting sawasdee is from the same root and carries the same implication.

It is a widely-used symbol in Dharmic religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism). Hindus often decorate the swastika with a dot in each quadrant. In India, it is common enough to be a part of several Devanagari fonts. It is also a symbol in the modern Unicode. It is … Read the rest “Swastika: A Stupid Taboo in European and American countries”

Om mani padme hum: an etymology of a mantra common to Hinduism and Buddhism

I was watching the TV this morning and heard some oriental-looking people in a (apparently) Tibetan film saying a sentence I had heard already in other films about India and the Tibet: oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ (Devanagari ॐ मणि पद्मे हूँ), probably the most famous mantra in Buddhism, the six syllabled mantra of the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteshvara (Tibetan Chenrezig). Then I remember that my sister-in-law has Oṃ (Skr. Aum) tattooed on his hand, withoug knowing what that means, and after finding a website that asserts “mani” is from Tamil origin (‘exported’ to Latin), I decided to write this … Read the rest “Om mani padme hum: an etymology of a mantra common to Hinduism and Buddhism”

Argumentation, debate, and dialectic in Science, applied to Linguistics

The title is somehow formal, but I couldn’t find a better one.
I tried to talk with my uncle again about Indo-European: I don’t care about a thousand ignorants saying “PIE is an invention”, but it’s obvious I don’t like a learned Latin professor like him promoting this idea among his students…

So, after introducing the question (“how are things in the Uni?..Oh…hmm, and, about Indo-European…”), and beginning the debate, we ended up by saying:

(Me) – How can you say you are objective? The whole family believes you (and not me) only because you are a Latin professor, but

… Read the rest

Doubtfully proven hypothesis: Holocaust vs. Revisionism, Creationism vs. Evolution, and Indo-European vs. Latin & Greek?

About the Proto-Indo-European language, one could say that a “proven hypothesis” is a fact. It’s not a certainty and it never will be until we invent time machines, but it’s a well-supported and widely accepted theory. With this kind of theory, it’s not a question of proven or unproven, because you can’t ever prove it. As far as the PIE reconstruction goes, there are a lot of competing reconstructions, and we’ll never know which one is right, although certain features can be established with a high level of confidence.

After reading what some pretentious guys from textkit.com had to … Read the rest “Doubtfully proven hypothesis: Holocaust vs. Revisionism, Creationism vs. Evolution, and Indo-European vs. Latin & Greek?”

Wikipedia articles: accuracy, vandalism, spam and administrators

I have discovered (among tons of anti-spam spam) a mail from a Wikipedian asking for collaboration on the discussion about some controversy regarding an article on Dnghu’s project, about Indo-European language revival – as far as I’ve read, it seems to deal with the question “is Modern Indo-European as Modern Hebrew?” – Even if I wanted to participate, I don’t know what else could I say, that is not already written down in our grammar.

Some months ago I saw that some links were coming from the Wikipedia article “Europaio” – of course, I felt excited … Read the rest “Wikipedia articles: accuracy, vandalism, spam and administrators”

Tamil vs. Sanskrit, or Indian ‘official classical languages’, and the first tongue in India (AKA. Indus Valley Civilization language)

I have read and heard many stupidities regarding linguistic status and language differences:

– Brazilian is a different language (i.e. not Portuguese), because Galician is a language also (yes, Galician is interestingly enough a ‘language’ which stops in the administrative division between Spain and Portugal – more or less like Valencian and Catalan).
– French is a beautiful language, and because of that many African countries learn it (yes, South-American Indians also wanted to learn Spanish because it was so cool).
– English comes from Latin, as French, Spanish or Portuguese (no comments)…
– Language x (say, Esperanto, Spanish or … Read the rest “Tamil vs. Sanskrit, or Indian ‘official classical languages’, and the first tongue in India (AKA. Indus Valley Civilization language)”

WordPress Translator Plugin, now version 1.2 in English and Spanish – inglés y español

I’ve added some new pairs which seem to work well – but for the Thai version, which gives usually an error message.

Catalan and Polish languages are now translated automatically, as there is no need to copy and paste the text. New languages include Danish, Persian, Ukrainian, Indonesian, Malay, Thai, Hebrew, as well as experimental Latin and Esperanto options.

Remember you can ask for a translator that works with any language pair included in the English one, although some non-English alternatives include very (very) bad translations.

The Spanish version has been changed to … Read the rest “WordPress Translator Plugin, now version 1.2 in English and Spanish – inglés y español”

Indo-European Grammar, 1st Printed Version in English, translated into Deutsch, français, español, italiano, Nederlands, Polski, português, Russian, and other languages thanks to direct web machine translation

The Final Version of A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, 1st Printed Edition, is ready for the Printer, after the Indo-European Revival News.

For more information on this release and the changes made since last version, please go to the Indo-European language Association.

The association has some collaborative websites prepared for volunteers ready to add some translated sections of the book, and also for experts and people interested in IE languages, to add information about the Proto-Indo-European language and its revival as a modern language within the European Union, namely Indo-European (in English), Indo-Europeen (en Français), Indogermanisch (auf Deutsch), indoeuropeo… Read the rest “Indo-European Grammar, 1st Printed Version in English, translated into Deutsch, français, español, italiano, Nederlands, Polski, português, Russian, and other languages thanks to direct web machine translation”