Ketten ...

Ich habe heute einer Freundin auf eine Mail geantwortet ... bei Ihr sieht's im Moment nicht so toll aus ... vor kurzer Zeit habe ich über ähnliches mit demjenigen gesprochen, der mir am nächsten steht. Ich möchte beiden dieses Gedicht widmen – ihr, weil ich hoffe, dass das Gesagte hift, ihm, weil es ihn gibt.

Es ist seltsam: auch hier muss ich jede Zeile mit dem "Gegenstand" beginnen – es geht nicht anders ...

Ketten

Ketten ... wir alle haben sie
Ketten ... sie binden und doch lassen sie frei
Ketten ... machmal werden sie schwer
Ketten ... und dann sind sie wieder ganz leicht
Ketten ... können die Seele zerstören
Ketten ... können sie retten
Ketten ... sind nichts anders als Bänder
Ketten ... sind Beziehungen
Ketten ... sind Leidenschaft
Ketten ... bedeuten Vertauen
Ketten ... bedeuten sich aufgeben
Ketten ... bedeuten sich festzulegen
Ketten ... versperren uns manchmal die Sicht
Ketten ... kann man sprengen
Ketten ... sind Geborgenheit
Ketten ... haben Schlösser

Ketten ... an dem Tag, an dem wir sie als Last empfinden, sie uns weh tun, dann sollten wir daran denken, dass wir selbst sie sprengen können

Ketten ... solange sie Geborgenheit und Sicherheit geben, dürfen sie auch verlangen, oft mehr als sie zugeben vermögen

Ketten ... sind Teil unseres Lebens, wir müssen nur lernen, richtig mit ihnen umzugehen

Ketten ... wir sollten den Schlüssel zum Schloss unserer Ketten, nur denjenigen geben, die sorgsam damit umzugehen wissen, denn sie sind es, die Einfluss auf unser Leben selbst haben

Ketten ... ich habe meine kennengelrnt – und Du, kennst Du Deine?

African Music

Well, for now I call it African Music ... it is just: we don't know enough about this huge continent here in Europe and I suppose also in the rest of the world and so it is hard for us to feel the differences ... why don't they tell us more about the rest of the world???

It's been some weeks now that I met Outi who is Finnish and married with Ismaila Sané who is from Senegal. What I still find so strange is that I chose some people to contact by chance and ... well ... she's another one wanting to change the world :-)

We believe in local languages, in local culture and that they need to be maintained. We want our kids to learn the languages of the various families, simply because it is the only way to really connect them with their original cultures and give them their very own identity.

How many of us are out there? I mean: are you, who are reading another one like us? If so: just join us :-)

For now I would like to have you listen to the song Outi sent me today - I like it.

Wasser ...

Ich schreibe eigentlich nie Gedichte ... nur irgendwo muss ich es doch von meiner Großmutter geerbt haben, denn manchmal muss ich einfach schreiben.

Dieses hier habe ich vor ca. 10 Tagen geschrieben - ob es gut zum Veröffentlichen ist, weiss ich nicht ... aber es ist für jemand ganz besonderes ...

Wasser

So wie Wasser sein

Die Räume ausfüllen, die man ausfüllen kann, die sich öffnen

So wie Wasser sein

Die Räume verlassen, wenn sie sich mit anderem füllen

So wie Wasser sein

Wasser ... Unendlichkeit ...

Wasser ... kann Felsen sprengen
Wasser ... kann Flächen glätten
Wasser ... kann einen tragen
Wasser ... spendet Leben
Wasser ... kann es nehmen
Wasser ... ist der Ursprung allen Lebens
Wasser ... umgibt uns
Wasser ... ist in uns
Wasser ... ist wie ein Spiegel
Wasser ... und doch sieht man hindurch

Wasser ... kann einen untergehen lassen
wenn man nicht gelernt hat, damit umzugehen

Wasser ... sich treiben zu lassen
Wasser ... darin schwimmen lernen
Wasser ... Deine Wellen ...
Wasser ... Du streichelst mich

So wie Wasser sein

Die Räume ausfüllen, die man ausfüllen kann, die sich öffnen

So wie Wasser sein

Die Räume verlassen, wenn sie sich mit anderem füllen

Doch ist es nicht so, dass wir nicht mehr sind, wenn das Wasser, die Essenz des Lebens nicht mehr da ist?

Apertium ... three lines to localize ...

Hi Apertium is a MT (machine translation) tool which is particularly strong in translating similar languages. It is also used for pre-translation of Wikipedia articles for certain language pairs (Spanish-Catalan, Spanish-Occitan etc.) and shall be included in the Ubuntu distribution. Therefore it would be nice to have the three needed sentences localized in as many languages as possible.

To see which languages are actually there please have a look at

http://apertium.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/apertium/trunk/apertium-tolk/po/

From there you can create the .po file for your language. Once you translated the file please send it to: apertium-stuff@lists.sourceforge.net maybe sending also a copy to me s.cretella (at) voxhumanitatis.org (just to make sure the file goes through - you never know).

Of course, I understand if you don't know how to work with .po files.
In that case please indicate the language code (and language) you are translating in in the subject of your e-mail and send the lines below translated to the apertium-stuff list above and a copy to me. Please note that only the lines starting with msgstr need translation, the rest remains untouched.

If you work with particular languages that could create utf-8 coding problems in e-mails, pleas just copy and paste the text into a file and send us the file with the translated lines.

#: main_window.glade.h:2
msgid "Mark unknown words"
msgstr "Mark unknown words"

#: main_window.glade.h:3
msgid "This program is licensed under the GPL."
msgstr "This program is licensed under the GPL."

msgid "Translator"
msgstr "Translator"

An example of the screenshot can be seen here.

Thank you in advance for your help :-)

(Not even close to) Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about ... Sicilian ... Neapolitan

Thanks to Pat for having me sent the link - I am adding a first part and the link to the original article here, so that whoever reads this blog can find them.
*****
(Not even close to) Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Sicilian School, the ritmo cassinese, and the beginnings of vernacular literature in Italy, including Neapolitan.

Between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and about the year 1000, there existed in Europe a kind of “universal Catholic culture” (a phrase used by a number of sources); it was sustained by the official and scholarly use of Latin, even in the face of vernacular (meaning “of the people”) languages which were developing throughout the territories of the former Empire. These vernacular tongues would one day be known as Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, etc.—i.e., the large family of modern “Romance” languages. It is not surprising that residual Latin should have remained strongest in Italy, at the center of the empire, even as that empire disintegrated. Even the Lombards, the “barbarian” invaders who had invaded Italy many centuries earlier (569 b.c.) quickly absorbed both the religion (Christianity) and the language (Latin) of the territory they had subjugated. Thus, in Italy, the appearance of literature recognizable as early Italian comes about a century later than similar literature in early French or early Spanish (here, using for comparison the years 1150-1200, when both La Chanson de Roland for French and El Cantar de Mio Cid for Spanish appeared).

Read the complete article.

Copyright: Jeff Matthews

Afrophonewikis and localzations of Mediawiki

I just learnt from the afrophonewikis list that three African languages finished the first localisation milestone, that is: Swahili, Sesotho sa Leboa and Amharic. That is really wonderful. Thanks Gerard for letting us know.

Well at this stage I also would like to thank those who actually did all the localization work and in particular Siebrand who is doing the organizational work, which is mainly done in the background and is key to whatever is done in terms of translation on Betawiki. Knowing how time consuming the organizational part is a special thanks to him.

Of course: whoever feels to be able to contribute, please do so and should you know people who could eventually help: tell them. The more the message gets out the better it is for all of your communities. Something that people often forget: the communities' work is their very own success - so please: write your very own success story by contributing to your community's projects.

OmegaWiki and licenses ... a thought

There are many dictionaries around and there is no real central place for them because they are under different licenses and some are proprietary.

There is an approach to so called authoritative databases which get connected to OmegaWiki, but in some way that is problematic since you don't see the whole stuff "together" - you need to go from the community "place" to the other one and vice versa to see if there are contents.

Like always when I do things in the house I have ideas and often can see things like a picture in my mind.

Bèrto is changing the architecture of the Database and we will have a new version, that is OmegaWiki 2.0.

The database design I saw is really easy to understand and so it is also easy to "imagine" new stuff.

Now the data within the community database is licensed under CC-BY and GFDL license - Francis (Apertium) just told me in the chat that there is a really good Friulan dictionary under GPL license. So why not include this into OW? I already hear you know: but that is GPL and with that not compatible ....

Well if I look at an expression page right now we have the lemma + the definition and sometimes various different definitions that are defined meanings. IMHO it would make sense to be able to see the contents that refer to that very same lemma from other dictionaries. The only thing needed is "tagging the entries as being part of this or that license" and therefore they are shown under a different header. You would have some thing:

Contents available under CC-BY and GFDL double license
Contents available under GFDL license
Contents available under GPL license

As long as we don't allow for the export of mixed licensed lists I don't see a problem, because the contents show up one after the other, like book titles. I am wondering if this fits in the actual database without the need to have separate ones where you then need to connect to ...

It is just a thought not really thought out well ... but there is something in there
...