Notices by Amir E. Aharoni (aharoni@wikis.world), page 2

When I translate from English into Hebrew, I often find myself writing not only letters, but also words in a different direction.

Take this sentence from @mediawiki user interface: "The wikitext request body parameter must be provided". In English grammar, "wikitext request body parameter" is a four-word compound noun. In a way, it actually has five words, because "wikitext" is written as one word, but it is clearly made up of two words.

In English, the head noun is usually in the end of the compound noun. Here, it's "parameter". All the words before it are modifiers.

There is a somewhat similar construct in Hebrew, in which one noun is modified by other nouns. It's usually called "construct state" in English descriptions of Semitic languages.

In Hebrew, however, it goes in the other direction: the head noun is in the beginning, and the modifier nouns are after it.

@evan Nations or countries? Not the same thing.

I made lunch while my
Wife fixed a clogged
Sink, and our
Children thought that it's very
Cool because The
Super Mario Bros. Movie is the
Greatest cinematic masterpiece
Of all time , and
I thought that it's very
Cool because gender roles
Suck.

I guess I'm kind
Of boring.

This is my attempt at making Palak Paneer. Also some rice and Chhole masala with some veggies. Every time I share Indian food pics, I get lots of ♥️s and 👍🏻s from my Indian friends, and also a bunch of comments saying that this is totally not how it's supposed to look like. I love you all! But you know what's most important? My family likes eating it.

I want to tell you about an unsung hero of @wikipedia software localization: @mcdutchie, one of the most epically prolific translators on translatewiki. He translates to Dutch and to Interlingua, making Interlingua one of the very few languages that are almost always close to 100% localization of @mediawiki core and extensions. This is especially amazing given the fact there is no machine translation into Interlingua, which probably means that he types everything by hand.

(And yes, I know that saying that someone is both "epic" and "unsung" is a bit of an etymological fallacy. What I mean is that he's epic to the people who follow the inner workings of translatewiki.net, but unsung to the rest of the world. This little post is trying to fix it.)

@evan OK... I wasn't familiar with this term. That's a very, very big if. It's an oversimplification, and it's somewhere on the spectrum between useless and harmful. So yes, I guess you could say I'm not a fan of this term. Not necessarily because it's not true; *in some ways* it is true. But I'm mostly not a fan because the actual reality of the number of states on that land cannot be usefully described in one microblogging post.

@evan That's not what I said, and I'm not even sure what "one state reality" means. It's not a term I remember seeing.

@evan Of course it isn't.

There was something very similar to a civil war in Gaza in 2007, and it's not remembered much.

The expressions of the Duolingo characters' happiness about my correct answers are somewhat incongruous with the exercises' content.

I've been listening to Daily Show as a podcast since 2018 (I had neither the time nor the equipment to watch it on an actual TV).

I struggled through the year without a permanent host, listened to all the episodes with the temporary ones, and even enjoyed many of them.

I unsubscribed in the middle of the first new Jon Stewart episode.

I don't have any deep commentary about this. He was just not funny.

Unsubscribed from 99% Invisible after about 8 years. It's not just the Robert Moses stuff, which was too long, but not too awful by itself. It's just that everything there became tired.

Also, the ads became too awful. I can skip them, but juat knowing that they are there makes me cringe.

I pay for a few podcasts, and I'd pay for this one to be how it was in 2019 or at least 2021. AFAIK, it's not an option.

Unsubscribed from Vox's Today Explained podcast after about 6 years. I enjoyed it as one of my main news sources, but then they called someone who writes for Electronic Intifada "a journalist". It is legitimate to agree with that website; it is not legitimate to call it "journalism".

Annual reminder that the holiday celebrated more or less today is commonly called "Lunar New Year" in the U.S. and in some other English-speaking countries, but actually it's the New Year in the culture of China and some other East Asian countries. English Wikipedia correctly says that are lots of Lunar New Years in different seasons—Jewish, Muslim, Indian, Native American, etc.

I am indifferent to pretty much all holidays, but I wish happiness to all who celebrate.

@evan That's certainly one example (relevant, but one sided). The comparison of Benny Gantz to Joe Manchin is another (if anyone really insists on comparing Gantz to an American politician, maybe I'd suggest Mr. Biden, but even that is *far* from perfect). Talking a lot about Israel-U.S. connections (which are true) and not mentioning Palestine-Russia connections (which really shouldn't be ignored). And so much more, not just in this in this interview, but in everything he writes.

For people reading English mainstream media about Palestine and Israel issues... I'd like to say that a lot of it is actually OK! I'm mostly for mainstream media, and you should be, too.

But then there's Thomas Friedman, who is, like, the heart of the mainstream and who is taken seriously by lots of people for reasons I can't comprehend. Some of the things he says are sensible and some are mind-blowing malarkey. If you don't live in the Middle East, telling the two apart is probably too hard.

@sslaia that, and even more. Russian school students learn about six: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and prepositional. In advanced linguistics, even more than six are identified, but there's no consensus on how to call them (vocative, partitive, etc.)

@clacke except Japanese is ACTUALLY not related to anything :)