Our puissant overlords are considering further directions in which to expand after their opening of ScienceBlogs.de, so now they're running a poll: let them know what languages you know and what language the next Sb should be in. They appreciate your input. It simplifies the assimilation.
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Japanese and French would definately be good ideas, as well as Spanish and, if possible/plausable, Chinese
I'm sure my fellow Russians would be interested in the Russian version of SB.
C'mon, like you have to ask?
You haven't achieved true nerdcore until you're blogging in Esperanto. Or better yet, Klingon!
Qapla'!
Interlingua, of course.
Can I suggest Arabic? Or Urdu? I'm making this suggestion on the basis that material which is just instructive and entertaining for us is actively subversive in parts of the Muslim world.
My Portuguese is too rusty to allow me to read science-oriented stuff in it. Que lastima!
C++
Alexander, I've been studying Russian for a few months now. I love it. However, I have no one to converse with. I don't think there are any Russian speakers in Tennessee (well, there might be one guy). Should be interesting when I take the trans-siberian and attempt to speak Russian to native speakers. That'll be fun.
Spanish and French are practical suggestions. Chinese would be more difficult but awesome.
Anything else would be beyond the scope of my language ability.
The next move is scienceblogs.ua, obviously!
Seriously, the most exciting options would seem to be along the lines of:
Chinese
Spanish
Russian
Japanese
Arabic
Farsi
Urdu
Oh yeah - and Texan.
Was I the only one that read "Sbers" phonetically at first and spent a good 10 seconds trying to figure out what language it could be in?
If I may humbly suggest my own native tongue, Swabian. And, if you want to be inclusive, Inuktitut would seem an appropriate addition.
I agree, though you really meant Befunge.
From my own experience I would say French is certainly a good idea. I observed that in political science in French speaking countries there is an incredible amount of resistance against English as academic lingua franca (an ironic expression in that context, I admit). Perhaps it is different for other subjects.
You might want to add Spanish to the list (which I don't speak, but I guess that is not a criteria here).
P.S.: Not much going on at ScienceBlogs.de so far. I felt pretty lonely commenting there today. Did I spend time on the wrong threads/blogs?
Whoops - forgot to answer the first question.
Languages known: English (native), French (some), Russian (some).
Deepsix, do not despair. Tennessee is by no means devoid of polyglots. I have some friends in Trenton, and one is doing language study abroad in Japan. (I don't think he knows any Russian, though.) :-)
Sigh. I agree that Russian is fun but, compared to Romance lanuages, it is quite a challenge for a native English speaker. (One word: Declension! I love the consistency of the spelling and pronunciation, though. English is such a mess!) I'm a second-generation Ukrainka-Amerikanka, and my only surviving grandparent grew up in New Jersey, so my family is no help in my learning Russian or Ukrainian. Sigh.
Hungarian!
Admittedly, that's just to earn extra girlfriend points from my native-speaking boyfriend...
Actually, if I must choose, I'll take Brainfuck.
Heh. This disagreement is almost, but not quite, trivial enough to start a religious war over.
Just replace all nouns with " the thing".
Then even bass players will understand it.
I can speak/write/understand a smattering of Swahili, so that may be a viable option.
Tuseme!
Q: Whaddaya call a drummer who just broke up with his girlfriend?
.
.
.
A: Homeless!
* * buddabump * *
C++? Are you mad? Don't you know that the only true scientific language is FORTRAN?
Borg.
Arabic, Urdu and Farsi are great ideas.
Much more likely to happen is French, which isn't a bad idea either. In France, everyone learns English at school now, but they start too late; in Québec, they apparently never learn it -- my thesis supervisor, who is from there, speaks and writes perfect English now, but he only started learning when he was 20.
Apart from German (native) and English (wellll... occasionally I have to stop and think whether to use the past tense or the present perfect tense...), I speak enough French that I could read a ScienceBlog in it, not enough Russian, and count me as illiterate in Chinese (Standard Mandarin, that is)... I've found out I can read scientific articles in Spanish and Italian, just from French, English, and the 6 years of Latin I had at school.
And yes, Klingon is cool.
A mess? If it were merely a mess like German (where, for example, sometimes long vowels are specially marked, sometimes short vowels are specially marked, and sometimes neither is marked), there wouldn't be much reason to complain. Alas, it isn't.
What about Latin?
What about Latin?
As a recovering Catholic, I'd have to say No--too churchy.
I can help with (occasional) translations into Russian.
English. May add some much needed colour. The American around here can get so tedious sometimes.
;-)
Why not all of them? There could be some Russian or Urdu-speaking scientists who might be suckered into writing now, instead of waiting for a whole new site to appear. If the experiment works well for the first one or two languages, make it an international edition where you can filter by language.
English. May add some much needed colour. The American around here can get so tedious sometimes.
Well, let's compromise and use Canadian then, eh? 'Course, we'll need a Royal Commission to look into the matter, first.
In the meantime, toques and cases of Molson for everybody! Hey, who left this poutine on the chesterfield?
I'd say based on the audience and amount of available literature, go with Russian, Arabic, French, Spanish, and Chinese, possibly Japanese and Hindi-Urdu (probably romanized for neutrality's sake).
ภาษาไทย
French
Je vous en prie...
<lift index finger> Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quam unam incolunt Belgae... sive casu sive [forgotten] deum immortalium...>
Neutrality, yes! Both will hate you precisely equally. :-) Besides, the ejumacated words of book-larnin' are the ones that are taken from Arabic/Persian respectively Sanskrit.
The market for Thai is a little small, I fear...
(In my comment, please disregard the third >.)
Just mention:
It's not translation of current SB into another language; its a whole new portal with new bloggers blogging that language.
I posted on the main thread I really think SB should consider a non-European, Asian language.
Hindi, Mandarin or Japanese. I'd prefer Japanese (i know it, and I'd get to learn cool sciencey words). Mandarin presents problems with the Chinese government. Both Hindi and Mandarin would allow SB to touch a very large international audience that possibly might not read German or English well enough to enjoy the other portals.
With one of them anyway.
Hmm... Klingonese ? Orcish ? Elven ?
Binary Coded Decimal ?
Nah.
I'd say French, Japanese and Arabic.
我想中文很好的。
Spanish would be awesome, but I fear it would be a tremendous flop. Even though spanish is spoken in almost every country in America, the spanish wikipedia still pales in comparison to the French, the German one, and even the Italian version. It's depressing how backwards latin-americans are in this respect, *sigh*
Cxu vi parolas esperante?
How wide spread is the use of Unicode? Lots of languages require different symbols ...
The next move is scienceblogs.ua, obviously!
Seriously, the most exciting options would seem to be along the lines of:
Chinese
Spanish
Russian
Japanese
Arabic
Farsi
Urdu
Oh yeah - and Texan.
Arabic, Urdu and Farsi are great ideas.
Much more likely to happen is French, which isn't a bad idea either. In France, everyone learns English at school now, but they start too late; in Québec, they apparently never learn it -- my thesis supervisor, who is from there, speaks and writes perfect English now, but he only started learning when he was 20.
Apart from German (native) and English (wellll... occasionally I have to stop and think whether to use the past tense or the present perfect tense...), I speak enough French that I could read a ScienceBlog in it, not enough Russian, and count me as illiterate in Chinese (Standard Mandarin, that is)... I've found out I can read scientific articles in Spanish and Italian, just from French, English, and the 6 years of Latin I had at school.
And yes, Klingon is cool.
A mess? If it were merely a mess like German (where, for example, sometimes long vowels are specially marked, sometimes short vowels are specially marked, and sometimes neither is marked), there wouldn't be much reason to complain. Alas, it isn't.
<lift index finger> Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quam unam incolunt Belgae... sive casu sive [forgotten] deum immortalium...>
Neutrality, yes! Both will hate you precisely equally. :-) Besides, the ejumacated words of book-larnin' are the ones that are taken from Arabic/Persian respectively Sanskrit.
The market for Thai is a little small, I fear...
(In my comment, please disregard the third >.)
With one of them anyway.
我想中文很好的。