antonim

Babe, wake up, a new episode of Pirahã/Everett drama has dropped! In 2024 LangSciPress published a Festschrift for Daniel Everett, with an article by Geoff Pullum where he fiercely defended Everett's work and attacked Chomskyans, available here: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/434 (Daniel Everett on Pirahã syntax)

Now an American linguist who works in Brazil, Denny Moore, has published a response to the article: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009832

Geoffrey K. Pullum has repeatedly made severe accusations that the linguist Daniel L. Everett suffered mistreatment in Brazil because his research on the Pirahã people and their language threatened Chomskyan theory. The present article presents a large trove of previously unavailable evidence (official Brazilian government documents, citizen information requests, interviews, etc.) that are directly relevant for assessing the claims that Everett was slandered and unjustly blocked from field research. The evidence disproves these claims, which have circulated widely in what I am designating as the Persecution Hoax. The evolution of Everett’s problems with Brazil’s National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples (FUNAI) is traced and found to be due to his own behavior and not to the action of Noam Chomsky or his affiliated linguists, nor to envious linguists in Brazil. Some variants of the Persecution Hoax myth, which are incompatible with the evidence and with each other, are described, along with comments. This myth is unfavorable for the development of indigenous linguistics in Brazil, as are Pullum’s suggestions for fieldwork. This is discussed briefly and alternative suggestions are offered.

Vodeći ljudi EU-a i njenih vodećih članica spremno su zanemarili kršenje međunarodnog prava i svrstali se iza SAD-a i Izraela namijenivši si ulogu onih koji (uglavnom) promatraju i odobravaju zračne napade kojima su učinkovito prekinuti pregovori što su možda mogli biti uspješni. Među rijetkima koji ima suprotan stav je, očekivano, španjolski premijer Sánchez

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51758910

Archived

In the name of promoting inter-ethnic harmony, China is to force dozens of ethnic minorities within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to assimilate into Han-dominated society by enacting a landmark law during the upcoming fourth session of the 14th National People’s Congress (NPC) which opens on Mar 5. The law will require ethnic minorities to use Mandarin Chinese as their main language of instruction, overturning decades-old policies that date back to the era of Mao Zedong, noted ft.com Mar 3.

[...]

The sweeping law marks the latest effort in a signature “Sinicization” campaign under Chinese leader Xi Jinping and prescribes legal action against anyone, inside or outside the country, who undermines “national unity” or provokes “separatism”.

The so-called Han majority accounts for more than 90% of the PRC’s population of 1.4 billion and the country’s constitution recognises 55 ethnic minorities, and a dozen languages — some with their own written scripts — and hundreds of dialects.

Under the new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, while minority languages may still be taught as a second language, groups such as Tibetans, Uyghurs and Mongolians will no longer be entitled to use their native tongues for core subjects in schools and universities, the report noted.

[...]

The new law “overturns the multicultural promises upon which China was founded”, moving from “an idea of unity through difference or unity through pluralism, to one of unity through sameness, through the elimination of difference”, Benno Weiner, a historian of modern China, Tibet and Inner Asia at Carnegie Mellon University, has said.

“The conclusion that Xi Jinping and others seem to have come to is that diversity is dangerous.”

[...]

Worryingly, one clause in the new law is cited as saying only the state has the right to promote “a system of symbols of Chinese civilisation”, which can be used “in public facilities and architectural design, scenic area exhibitions, place naming and public activities”. Such policies, if enforced, meant there was “no way” that non-Han people would be able to safely express “any type of discontent without being accused of being essentially separatists or terrorists,” Weiner has said.

[...]

The article is paywalled, available on archive(.)is (which should be avoided, see here), but it doesn't contain any real new info beyond the first, visible paragraphs.

From Handzeichnungen portfolio, printed in 1920.

We, the undersigned organizations representing civil society, nonprofit institutions, and technology companies, write to express our strong opposition to Google’s announced policy requiring all Android app developers to register centrally with Google themselves in order to distribute applications outside of the Google Play Store, set to take effect worldwide in the coming months.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43420929

The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog.

In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.