Sorry, as cute as your story sounds, it's completely wrong. You probably confuse the history of the Korean writing system (Hangul) with the Korean language. While the writing system was indeed created and introduced by royal order in the 15th century, spoken Korean evolved in a long process from languages of the Han and Buyeo tribes (with similarities to other languages in the Altaic family of languages) to a somewhat unified language in Unified Shila in the 7th century. Today's Korean language is the result of morphological and phonological changes to middle Korean that occured around the 16th or 17th century. Please check your facts.:)
No. And there is a simple reason for that. The law doesn't (yet) exist, it is being discussed at the moment. The draft from the government can be downloaded at http://www.bmj.bund.de/media/archive/1174.pdf
The article is factually wrong. "The TimesOnline is reporting that Germany has accepted a new piracy law, currently the toughest in Europe, which comes into effect on January 1, 2007." This is not true. Neither has Germany "accepted" such a law, nor is it true that it will come into effect on the date mentioned. On Wednesday, the ruling coalition of Social Democrats and Christian Democrats presented their draft of a proposed law containing many of the things mentioned in the article. This law will be discussed in both chambers of the parliament within the next 6 months. Individual politicians of both ruling parties, as well as many from the opposition have already called for changes to that draft. At this point, one can only speculate how the result will look like and when it will be passed.
Back in the early 1990s, I was involved in a project called ZaMIR Transnational Network where we used BBSes to link peace groups in ex-Yugoslavia (crossing borders of nations that were at war at that time). There was even a BBS running in the besieged city of Sarajevo. Internet technology may be the ubiquitous thing now, but remembering our efforts at FoeBuD at that time, I'm still amazed what you could actually do with simple dial-ups.
Don't forget FSP, the file service protocol. While rsync has its uses for many admins and SAFT is actually used by some people I know, I've yet to meet a person that has ever used fsp. Quite odd if there ever was a time that they frequently had to answer questions about it on usenet:)
HTTP is as stateless as Gopher is, so there's no difference here. Remember that cookies, session handling in PHP and the like are hacks on top of the HTTP protocol. Of course you can serve dynamic content with Gopher given a server that can pull such a stunt. Shameless plug: Visit gopher://gopher.hacx.cx/ for my dynamic Gopher server with CGI-like functions written in 26 lines of Perl (this includes all the documents on the gopher. Granted, most of the documents don't have more than 1 line of text).
Regards,
johl
Re:The Asia/Pacific election is a real mess
on
ICANN Voting Begins
·
· Score: 1
Just to top it of, looking at this page of statistics, it was hard to escape the conclusion that the vote was being stacked
I found the number of registered users from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (more than 150) especially confusing given the fact that there is virtually no Internet in North Korea.
Indo-Germanic, to be precise. Never mind that this kind of linguistic relationship is hardly sufficient to make a language easy to
learn; do you consider Hindi an easy learn?? Just nitpicking...
The nitpicking continues...:) English, German, Dutch, Frisian, Afrikaans and a couple of others belong to the group of Germanic languages. Unfortunately, there is also the confusing term "indo-germanic" to refer to the family of what is now called Indo-European languages by most linguists. You may want to have a look this link to learn about the Germanic origin of English. I agree that a random Indo-European language (e.g. Sanskrit) may not be easier to learn for a native speaker of another random Indo-European language (say, someone speaking Greek or French). These languages just share some basic gramatical features and a little vocabulary
I guess it's a bit US-centric to believe the influence of English is due to the US
I doubt that I'm US-centric given the fact that I'm German and never lived anywhere else than in Europe. You may be right about the Commonwealth, though. The point I tried to make is that the dominance of English is due to economic and political reasons, not due to the fact that it's easy to learn.
During my childhood, I have learned three
foreign languages (Latin, English, and Classic
Greek, in that order; German being my native
language), and I've made (pretty lame, I must
admit) attempts at French, Italian and Russian.
English was by far easiest to learn. Period.
Guess what: Learning Dutch might even be easier for you.:) Given the fact that both English and German belong to the family of Germanic languages, this is not at all surprising.
However, you may be able to imagine that, say, a Chinese native speaker will not profit from the fact that English and German are (grammatically and lexically) so close to each other that they would be regarded as dialects using the same standards that people apply when calling Mandarin and Szechuan "Chinese".
Apart from that, English is a horrible language to learn as a second language. Spelling is nowhere near being phontetic grammatical stuff like articles is simply unnecessary. The reasons why English became the current "world language" have nothing to do with it being "easy". It's the economic and political power of the US, nothing more.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, as cute as your story sounds, it's completely wrong. You probably confuse the history of the Korean writing system (Hangul) with the Korean language. While the writing system was indeed created and introduced by royal order in the 15th century, spoken Korean evolved in a long process from languages of the Han and Buyeo tribes (with similarities to other languages in the Altaic family of languages) to a somewhat unified language in Unified Shila in the 7th century. Today's Korean language is the result of morphological and phonological changes to middle Korean that occured around the 16th or 17th century. Please check your facts. :)
> Anybody with a link to the original law?
k orb-kabinettsbeschluss/ may be a nice resource.
No. And there is a simple reason for that. The law doesn't (yet) exist, it is being discussed at the moment. The draft from the government can be downloaded at http://www.bmj.bund.de/media/archive/1174.pdf
If you can read German, http://www.netzpolitik.org/2006/reaktionen-zum-2-
The article is factually wrong. "The TimesOnline is reporting that Germany has accepted a new piracy law, currently the toughest in Europe, which comes into effect on January 1, 2007." This is not true. Neither has Germany "accepted" such a law, nor is it true that it will come into effect on the date mentioned. On Wednesday, the ruling coalition of Social Democrats and Christian Democrats presented their draft of a proposed law containing many of the things mentioned in the article. This law will be discussed in both chambers of the parliament within the next 6 months. Individual politicians of both ruling parties, as well as many from the opposition have already called for changes to that draft. At this point, one can only speculate how the result will look like and when it will be passed.
Back in the early 1990s, I was involved in a project called ZaMIR Transnational Network where we used BBSes to link peace groups in ex-Yugoslavia (crossing borders of nations that were at war at that time). There was even a BBS running in the besieged city of Sarajevo. Internet technology may be the ubiquitous thing now, but remembering our efforts at FoeBuD at that time, I'm still amazed what you could actually do with simple dial-ups.
Don't forget FSP, the file service protocol. While rsync has its uses for many admins and SAFT is actually used by some people I know, I've yet to meet a person that has ever used fsp. Quite odd if there ever was a time that they frequently had to answer questions about it on usenet :)
HTTP is as stateless as Gopher is, so there's no difference here. Remember that cookies, session handling in PHP and the like are hacks on top of the HTTP protocol. Of course you can serve dynamic content with Gopher given a server that can pull such a stunt. Shameless plug: Visit gopher://gopher.hacx.cx/ for my dynamic Gopher server with CGI-like functions written in 26 lines of Perl (this includes all the documents on the gopher. Granted, most of the documents don't have more than 1 line of text).
Regards,
johl
Just to top it of, looking at this page of statistics, it was hard to escape the conclusion that the vote was being stacked
I found the number of registered users from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (more than 150) especially confusing given the fact that there is virtually no Internet in North Korea.
Indo-Germanic, to be precise. Never mind that this kind of linguistic relationship is hardly sufficient to make a language easy to
learn; do you consider Hindi an easy learn?? Just nitpicking...
The nitpicking continues...
I guess it's a bit US-centric to believe the influence of English is due to the US
I doubt that I'm US-centric given the fact that I'm German and never lived anywhere else than in Europe. You may be right about the Commonwealth, though. The point I tried to make is that the dominance of English is due to economic and political reasons, not due to the fact that it's easy to learn.
Guess what: Learning Dutch might even be easier for you. :) Given the fact that both English and German belong to the family of Germanic languages, this is not at all surprising.
However, you may be able to imagine that, say, a Chinese native speaker will not profit from the fact that English and German are (grammatically and lexically) so close to each other that they would be regarded as dialects using the same standards that people apply when calling Mandarin and Szechuan "Chinese".
Apart from that, English is a horrible language to learn as a second language. Spelling is nowhere near being phontetic grammatical stuff like articles is simply unnecessary. The reasons why English became the current "world language" have nothing to do with it being "easy". It's the economic and political power of the US, nothing more.
There's no HOWTO in Korean? Well, there's the Korean Linux Documentation Project, of course. Linux is quite successfull in Korea, actually.