Posted by aharoni on 2009-02-13
YouTube may be a competitor to Wikipedia as one of the most massively multilingual sites on the web.
Many people who comment there don’t seem to care that English is the lingua franca of the web. They just write in Russian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Catalan and Croatian and it creates a soup of languages. And that is a Very Good Thing. It makes languages seen and promotes tolerance. Variety and tolerance are mighty good.
Posted in Catalan, Internet, Portuguese, Russian, language | Tagged: Indonesian, YouTube | 4 Comments »
Posted by aharoni on 2008-12-09
In most Hebrew language courses a significant majority of students are female. The only exception is the course “Medieval Hebrew: Piyyut and Spanish Poetry”, which has 70% of male students. Calling this course “the hardest” wouldn’t be very objective, but it is safe to say that the Even-Shoshan Dictionary is not very useful for understanding the texts that we read there.
In Linguistics courses i took the ratio of male-to-female students was pretty much even. The same goes for “Spanish for beginners”.
However, in the “Advanced Portuguese” course all students are male.
(Hi, Jane.)
Posted in Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish, gender, linguistics, university | Leave a Comment »
