New Edition of “A Grammar of Modern Indo-European” Published

A new full-revised version of Dnghu‘s main book, A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, Third Edition, has been published.

Details on the revision are found at the Indo-European Linguistics blog.

Information on this major release and all subsequent changes will be published at Dnghu’s site on Indo-European Language Grammar. Files containing Proto-Indo-European vocabulary will be found at the Proto-Indo-European lexicon‘s site.

If you like the files, please recommend them to your friends in your social networks!

The official site where all newest version’s files and formats published should be found will be from now on indo-european.info… Read the rest “New Edition of “A Grammar of Modern Indo-European” Published”

How to Fix a MySQL Character Encoding Mismatch in WordPress

An upgrade to a newer WordPress version, or (as in my case) to a newer version of MySQL, might trigger a problem which has been described since version 2.2: old UTF-8 characters are then represented by strange characters, say “é” will appear instead of “é”.

After reading some posts (e.g. this or this one) about how to fix it, I decided to solve it using one of the simple plugins out there. I tried both, UTF-8 Database converter and WP Sanitize Plugin.

But they just converted the database encoding the simple way. Which was fine, since I … Read the rest “How to Fix a MySQL Character Encoding Mismatch in WordPress”

WordPress Translation plugin errors corrected – version 1.6.1, now with Google Translate Menu

The latest WordPress Translate Plugin released (1.6) showed an error in the website address conversion. It has been corrected, and a new version 1.6.1 has been released for those languages that had already the plugin with versions 1.5 and 1.6.

Also, a Google Translate Menu version has been included in the plugin package, along with the horizontal and vertical versions. Its output is similar to the one offered by Google, but without the Google style, logos and links, so that it is fully customizable for your blog’s theme. You can see the output of the Translate Menu at the … Read the rest “WordPress Translation plugin errors corrected – version 1.6.1, now with Google Translate Menu”

A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, Second Edition, published online, and its printed version available at Amazon

The latest version of A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, version 4, Second Printed Edition, was published online some days ago. It includes a lot of minor corrections, new examples and sections, and hundreds of pages of Indo-European words and their etymology. It is – as always – licensed under a dual CC-by-sa and GNU FDL.

It has been eventually approved for its printed version at Amazon, and is now available for purchase. The general features of the printed edition are as follows:

  • Page Count: 824
  • Price: 19.99$
  • Binding Type: US Trade Paper
  • Trim Size: 7″ x
… Read the rest “A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, Second Edition, published online, and its printed version available at Amazon”

WordPress Translation Plugin – Added Afrikaans, Belarusian, Persian, Welsh, Irish, Malay, Macedonian, Yiddish..The newest languages in Google Translate

I have added the newest languages offered by Google to the English version of the WordPress Translation Plugin: Afrikaans, Belarusian, Persian, Welsh, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili or Yiddish.

Because Google is offering a new plugin of its own for any language combination, I think my plugin has become mostly a PHP code to play with, and it will remain so. Their newest Gadget will probably be an excellent tool to offer visitors of any website the possibility to translate with Google, if they don’t have the Google toolbar already installed.

Also, Microsoft is apparently competing with its Bing … Read the rest “WordPress Translation Plugin – Added Afrikaans, Belarusian, Persian, Welsh, Irish, Malay, Macedonian, Yiddish..The newest languages in Google Translate”

Freedom of expression in a digital world: how fear over “cease and desist” threats can be used by individuals to restrict basic human rights

This is the story of how an unethical individual, who regards fundamental rights differently as applied to him and to others, can manage to frighten a company to the extent of making them think about limiting his clients’ freedom of expression, with a simple home-made “cease and desist” email threat. No China, no Cuba, no Iran involved. Just Spain in 2009. Too sad to be true.

I wrote it in Spanish because it is interesting for my group of study of Spanish and European Information Technology Law. I’ve translated it here for anyone interested in Spanish law, jurisprudence and international … Read the rest “Freedom of expression in a digital world: how fear over “cease and desist” threats can be used by individuals to restrict basic human rights”

WordPress Translation Plugin – Now Google Translation from and into Turkish, Hungarian, Hebrew, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Catalan, Galician, Indonesian,…

The latest improvements and language pairs added to the Google Translation Engine have been included in the simple WordPress Translation Plugin downloadable from this personal blog.

It now includes links to automatic translations from and into all language pairs offered by Google Translation Engine, apart from other language pairs (from individual languages, like English) into other online machine translators, viz Tranexp.

Available language pairs now include (new pairs in bold): English, Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, … Read the rest “WordPress Translation Plugin – Now Google Translation from and into Turkish, Hungarian, Hebrew, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Catalan, Galician, Indonesian,…”

Königsberg (AKA Kaliningrad) under international law: Russian, German, Polish, Lithuanian, or simply Prussian?

The progress of the ‘star wars’ (AKA missile shield) affair, which Russia seemed willing to aggravate by talking about plans to station missiles in Kaliningrad, without any concerns whatsoever for the welfare of Kaliningraders and Europeans, should make the European Union reexamine its current policy under the Kaliningrad Strategy, of collaborating with Russia by facilitating the transit of goods and persons and helping its socio-economic development.

Instead of just hearing what Russians have to claim before the international community, the EU should ask the international community by which right keeps the Russian Federation hold on Königsberg territory… Read the rest “Königsberg (AKA Kaliningrad) under international law: Russian, German, Polish, Lithuanian, or simply Prussian?”

Accession of Turkey to the European Union: A Quick Reference of Common Pros and Cons

Spanish President (i.e. Prime Minister) José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero promised he will personally support Turkey’s accesion to the European Union for 2010, because – he says – “that great country has been waiting for too long at the doors of Europe”. That is probably a follow-up of his concept of the Alliance of Civilizations, which was created within the UN thanks to his personal promotion, mainly with the support from Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Common criticism to Turkey’s membership by Europeans include:

1. Turkey is not in Europe, and the European Union should only accept European

… Read the rest “Accession of Turkey to the European Union: A Quick Reference of Common Pros and Cons”