Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter


Forgot your password?

Comment: Re:Easy grammar (Score 1) 626 626

Kenji Miyazawa, a very well known Japanese author of mainly children's stories, was very interested in Esperanto. The anime version of his "Midnight on the Galactic Railroad" has Esperanto in all the written materials you see in honour of this.

This was in the early part of the twentieth century, when there was a lot more interest in Esperanto worldwide. It probably is the case that there was at any rate more interest in it in Japan than you might have expected.

Comment: Re:In fairness... (Score 3, Informative) 119 119

(They spoke Aramaic long before they became Christian, of course.)

The people in question call themselves Assyrians at the present day; there are some Akkadian words preserved in their Aramaic language even now, although Akkadian itself probably died out in the earlier part of the first millennium BC.

The name "Syriac" is itself from a worn-down version of the same name; it was once used pretty much as the equivalent of "Aramaic" but is now generallly used to describe only one particular version of Aramaic which was a major literary language of Western Asia in early Christian times, and is still used as a liturgical language by Nestorian Christians as far afield as India. The script is used to write several modern Aramaic languages spoken by Christians.

These ancient communities have suffered greatly in the Middle East wars of recent times, and a huge proportion have left as refugees.

Comment: Re:In fairness... (Score 1) 119 119

Wrong Assyrians. The ones you're thinking of spoke Akkadian and wrote cuneiform.

Eventually their (Christian) descendants ended up speaking Aramaic like practically everyone else in the Near East at the time (it was the official language in the Western part of the Persian Empire); the modern Assyrian language is one of the many forms of modern Aramaic (now split into several different languages, much as Latin evolved into several different languages over much the same period) and this script is properly called Syriac, specifically Estrangela.

Comment: Surprisingly badly written article (Score 5, Informative) 144 144

"About one-fifth of university-aged people in East Asia now have this extreme form of myopia, and half of them are expected to develop irreversible vision loss. "

It doesn't actually say what "this extreme form" is, exactly. Presumably cut out in editing and nobody noticed that this was left stranded. There was probably a reference to so-called "high myopia", which does indeed cause people typically in their teens to go from the ordinary fully-corrected-with-glasses myopia to being much more so, with potential "myopic degeneration" of the retina. It's a mystery why this only happens to some myopes.

The figures are scaremongering. Although this has indeed been a notable public health problem for a good while - the government of Singapore has been concerned about it for over a decade - it is nonsense that 10% of student-age people will go blind from it.

I'm an ophthalmologist. I specialise in diseases of the retina.
