American Buddhist Net

A new computer program has quickly deciphered a written language last used in Biblical times—possibly opening the door to "resurrecting" ancient texts that are no longer understood, scientists announced last week.

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LANZHOU, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Chinese specialists of Tibetan studies have discovered some well-preserved pre-Buddhist Tibetan religious scriptures in northwestern China's Gansu Province.

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This sounds like quite a find. If anyone has more info, please send it in or post it. Thanks. ABN

Many Tibetan children are learning most of their classes in Mandarin Chinese, a language they must master if they want to find a job and keep up in modern Tibet.

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A Chinese man who saved a one-armed, one-legged monkey says the primate has paid him back - by killing all of his chickens.

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This story has a double-meaning for people who know Chinese. The phrase "kill a chicken to frighten the monkeys" in Chinese indicates a draconian method of controlling either a group of people or a large population. The idea is that killing one or two people will scare the rest into silence. Quite a different expectation from the posted story. ABN

HONG KONG - A call by officials in southern China to ditch Cantonese in favour of Mandarin for prime-time TV shows Wednesday sparked fears about the future of the dialect.

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KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Three Malaysian Muslims went on trial Tuesday for allegedly torching a church during the height of a dispute over whether non-Muslims can use the word "Allah" to refer to God.

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Sweetwater Zen Center will be hosting a workshop on non-violent communication on Saturday, July 24th.

In the 1970s, a group of deaf Nicaraguan schoolchildren invented a new language. The kids were the first to enrol in Nicaragua’s new wave of special education schools. At first, they struggled with the schools’ focus on Spanish and lip-reading, but they found companionship in each other. It was the first time that deaf people from all over the country could gather in large numbers and through their interactions – in the schoolyard and the bus – Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) spontaneously came into being.

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Malaysia has banned a book and two comics by a political cartoonist that were critical of the government, saying they were "undesirable" and could incite people to revolt.

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June 22: Over 300 Buddhist texts written by great Indian masters of the ancient Nalanda University including Nagarjuna, Shantarakshita, Dhigna, Dharmakirti are available only in Tibetan language and not in Japanese and Chinese languages, said His Holiness the Dalai Lama in his teaching of the Heart Sutra at Ishikawa concert hall this afternoon in Kanazawa, the capital of Ishikawa Prefecture.

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The Ten Commandments don’t forbid killing or coveting your neighbor’s wife, claims Joel M. Hoffman, a Bible scholar and linguist. Hoffman says the commandment “thou shall not covet” is a mistaken translation of Hebrew for “thou shall not take.” The commandment that “thou shall not kill” should be “thou shall not murder.”

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Mandarin Blue, RAF Chinese Linguists in the Cold War, 1951-1962, by Reginald Hunt, Geoffrey Russell and Keith Scott, Hurusco Books, ISBN 978-0956023506

The 1950s in Britain was a decade of post-war reconstruction, growing prosperity and conscription, when some 2.5 million young men had to do their "national service" in the name of queen and country.

For most it meant endless square-bashing and a fairly mindless submission to authority, but for a lucky few it involved discipline of the mind rather than the body. For over 5,000 conscripts this meant learning Russian, and their little known story was vividly told in Secret Classrooms by Geoffrey Elliott and Harold Shukman (2002). A much smaller number, under 300, spent their national service studying Chinese, and this is the topic of this fascinating study by three men who were drafted into the Royal Air Force (RAF) in the 1950s.

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My four-year-old wouldn’t come to me to comb her hair. After calling her several times I told her “Oh, look at that red bird eating berries.” Of course, there was no bird and no berries. She quickly ran to me, keen on looking at the bird. “Where’s the bird ....?” she looked around.

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The Misconception: You smile when you are happy.

The Truth: Voluntary and involuntary smiles are different, and involuntary smiles are used to communicate you aren’t looking for a fight.

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I imagine most readers already know this, but I posted it because it's interesting and a good springboard for considering how our interpretations of what others mean when they communicate are fraught with ambiguities like this. Be it tone of voice, word choice, expression, or gesture, we humans make mistakes in our interpretations of others very often. Consider how a single misinterpretation of a tone of voice can lead to a cascade of mutual misinterpretations. Also, the eye muscle part of "genuine" smiles can be faked. I do not believe there is any way to be certain of another person's mood except to ask them, and that can only be done with a trusted friend. Thus, most human communication is dominated by ambiguity and doubt, and this may explain why we tend to form sub-cultures bent on simple tangibles like money, territory, or hating that other sub-culture. ABN

UPDATE: YouTube removes ‘We Con the World’ video.

I have been trying to understand the emotions and cultural contexts that would cause or allow people to produce a video like this one, and I think I may have figured it out, at least to my satisfaction.

First a little subjective background so you know where I am coming from.

To me, the video is so horrible it almost makes me shiver. The reason I feel this way is the video entails laughing at the deaths of the nine people killed in the flotilla raid and laughing at and mocking the people of Gaza, who no matter how you think of them, are fully under the control of Israelis. To laugh at a defeated enemy or someone under your control violates, for me, deeply held personal (and cultural) values concerning honor, decency, and fairness.

Cambodia's "jungle woman", who spent 18 years living in a dense forest, has fled back to the wild after struggling to adapt to society.

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The president's top counterterrorism adviser on Wednesday called jihad a "legitimate tenet of Islam," arguing that the term "jihadists" should not be used to describe America's enemies.

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I agree with his attempt to clean up our uses of these terms. ABN

Christine Kenneally

LANGUAGES are wonderfully idiosyncratic. English puts its subject before its verb. Finnish has lots of cases. Mandarin is highly tonal.

Yet despite these differences, one of the most influential ideas in the study of language is that of universal grammar. Put forward by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, it is widely interpreted as meaning that all languages are basically the same and that the human brain is born language-ready, with an in-built program that is able to decipher the common rules underpinning any mother tongue. For five decades this idea has dominated work in linguistics, psychology and cognitive science. To understand language, it implied, you must sweep aside the dazzling diversity of languages and find the common human core.

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Well-worth reading. ABN

Why the crisis in translation matters.

One of the truly great war correspondents, a monumental figure who reported from Afghanistan for 20 years and won almost every literary prize offered in Italy; a humanistic French-Tunisian scholar who has sought a middle way between Islam and secularism; an Eritrean writer whose epic saga of his country's troubled history subverts both official versions, the Ethiopian and the American. They are some of the most important voices in the world today, honored intellectuals in their own countries. You're not likely to have heard of Ettore Mo, Abdelwahab Meddeb, or Alemseged Tesfai, however, because they are rarely translated into English. In the English-speaking world, in fact, major publishing houses are inexplicably resistant to any kind of translated material at all.

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BEIJING // While China is often seen as the centre for the production of cheap and sometimes poor quality goods, there are certain other exports the world’s most populous nation hopes will endure: language and culture.

Starting in 2004, the country has opened hundreds of Confucius Institutes around the world, usually based in universities, where people can learn the Chinese language.

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Washington drug agents have illegally seized signed petitions for marijuana legalization, according to organizers of ballot initiative I-1068.

Marijuana advocacy group Sensible Washington says it has learned that a dozen signed copies of the marijuana legalization initiative for Washington State of which it is the sponsor, were seized last week by the federally-funded WestNET drug task force.

Advocates say that the drug agents who seized the petitions are interfering with a constitutionally-protected legislative procedure.

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New York, May 20 : An American court has backed a teacher who was suspended from a public school for using words such as 'furburger', 'schmeckle' and 'blow job' while teaching her sex ed/HIV/AIDS class.

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Give that a moment's thought. ABN

Part 2

OsloFreedomForum — May 12, 2010 — Julian Assange is a spokesman and advisory board member of WikiLeaks, a transparency website whose mission is to "open governments" and expose human rights abuses.

The seemingly empathetic nurse struck up conversations over the Internet with people who were pondering suicide. She told them what methods worked best. She told some that it was all right to let go, that they would be better in heaven, and entered into suicide pacts with others.

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SHANGHAI - Visitors seeking to see China on a budget would do well to brush up their English language skills to take advantage of a scheme that offers free lodging in Chinese homes in exchange for English tutoring.

With the cost of one hour of English tuition costing up to 500 yuan ($73.26) — unaffordable for the vast majority of Chinese — a not-for-profit Chinese organization called Tourboarding launched the initiative last month.

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If journalism's role is to help people be meaningful participants in a democratic society then journalism has to take on important questions in the prophetic voice, author and professor Dr. Robert Jensen told Raw Story.

"I think the journalism of neutrality is an illusion and I think the journalism that that has produced has been inadequate to democracy," said Jensen, one of conservative David Horowitz's 101 most dangerous academics.

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Good that he says this, but it is obvious to many people. Mainstream media not only embraces a completely fake "neutrality," it is also owned by corporate America. You could say the same for American academia. We are living in a stifling, suicidal status quo maintained by psychopaths and toadies. Been true for a long time. ABN