• Violences conjugales : une femme meurt tous les 4 jours
  EN FRANCE, une femme meurt des suites de violences conjugales tous les quatre jours. C’est le résultat alarmant d’une enquête menée sur deux années (2003 et 2004) pour le compte du ministère de la Cohésion sociale, publiée hier, alors que se tient demain la Journée internationale de l’ONU contre les violences faites aux femmes.
• Sherazade brûlée vive par un prétendant éconduit
  Dimanche 13 novembre, Sherazade Belayni, 18 ans, a été aspergée d’essence et brûlée vive par un jeune garçon dont elle avait refusé la demande en mariage. «Des témoins ont reconnu les deux agresseurs», raconte Abdel, 25 ans, le frère de la victime. Parmi eux, un garçon «pakistanais» qui travaillait, comme Sherazade, dans un magasin du centre de Neuilly-sur-Marne (Seine-saint-Denis) où réside cette famille marocaine. «Il était venu à la maison demander sa main. Mais ni Sherazade ni la famille n’était d’accord», poursuit Abdel.

Certaines n’ont même pas le temps d’être mariée avant de subir les sévices conjugaux. Magnifique. On se sent en sécurité, c’est fou…

Je ne sais pas si c’est la coutume au Pakistan de brûler vive les nanas qui te disent non, mais va falloir rééduquer une partie de la population si c’est le cas…

Via Damien

I Am A: True Neutral Half-Elf Fighter Ranger

Alignment:
True Neutral characters are very rare. They believe that balance is the most important thing, and will not side with any other force. They will do whatever is necessary to preserve that balance, even if it means switching allegiances suddenly.

Race:
Half-Elves are a cross between a human and an elf. They are smaller, like their elven ancestors, but have a much shorter lifespan. They are sometimes looked down upon as half-breeds, but this is rare. They have both the curious drive of humans and the patience of elves.

Primary Class:
Fighters are the warriors. They use weapons to accomplish their goals. This isn’t to say that they aren’t intelligent, but that they do, in fact, believe that violence is frequently the answer.

Secondary Class:
Rangers are the defenders of nature and the elements. They are in tune with the Earth, and work to keep it safe and healthy.

Find out What D&D Character You Are

new mouse ‘pro solution’ targeting female professonals and MAC [sic] users.

So, in Korea, only chicks and Mac users are pros, right? I’ll be damned…

Once in a while we need some erudition, just to make sure the ole chatterbox doesn’t go to waste… The Missus and I just came back from a visit to me ma’s, where most of my academic stuff is stashed quasi-permanently. I was browsing some of my old loves, when I stumbled upon a copy of the 蒙語老乞大 [copies of the 老乞大 usually are published back to back with copies of the 朴通事, but this one came instead with a copy of the 飜譯老乞大 [”translated 老乞大”, ie from the original Chinese into Korean], which made binding this book an interesting task: while old crap in the Chinese world was written top to bottom, and right to left, Mongol was written top to bottom, and left to right. So while the copy of the 飜譯老乞大 starts from the [as a Westerner] “last” page, the 蒙語老乞大 starts from “our” first page. You read this book from both ends, which is quite entertaining…

Anyway, that thing, 蒙語老乞大, was published in the mid 18th Century [around 1741] by the 司譯院, the government branch that trained interpretors in the four predominant foreign languages: Chinese, Japanese, Mongol and Manchu. Needless to say, the corpus and methods didn’t exactly vary, which is great for research purposes, since you can pretty much rely on most documents to be identical, save for the foreign language. Here’s a page [the first one, as a good student I have learnt that you always start with page 1] from the 蒙語老乞大:

click on the image to see a mucho larger version

The first column on the left is the title, in Chinese, duh, then small sentences in the uighur mongol script and the transliteration side by side, and the translation in Korean below. This is extremely interesting material, since it gives us not only a glimpse in 18th Century written Korean, but also a hint on the pronounciation of 한글 syllables back then. Consider this as a late Rosetta stone.

Example:

This is the first sentence. The second word, abaɣai, is transcribed as 아바개, which implies that 애 was pronounced as a diphtong back then [ie 아이].

Another interesting bit in the use of 한글 as a transliteration tool is the appearance of non-regular forms, at least things deemed “impossible” while writing proper Korean. Like
쵸
ㅗ
for a long [cho:]. I’ve seen actually more [in numbers and diversity] in Japanese texts, but there are a few odd ones still. The 飜譯老乞大, on the other hand, is full of strange combinations, trying to stick as much as possible to the Chinese original, and would make the recent mania of transcribing 北京 as 베이징 and the like laughable. Try ㅊㅠㅕㄴ in one syllable, and you’ll see what I mean. Ah, plus two dots on the left to indicate the tone…

As a bonus, lemme translate this first page, so you get an idea what they were teaching:

1. Big brother, where are you from? [where did you come from?]
2. I came from Chosŏn’s capital.
3. And where are you going now?
4. I am going to Beijing.
5. When did you leave the capital?
6. I left the first day of this month.

That dude sounds like a Seoul cab driver, with all them nosy questions…

Et en force cette fois : voici le “TuningComputer R1″. A quand R2D2 ?

Gasp! Intel Inside, Crapvalcade outside!