br23 blog - minsk, belarus

In the spring of 2006, shortly before the tragic accident Rydel won the Gran Prix in the content competition organized by tut.by .

Maybe some of you remember, recently a British EU minister said there are no plans whatsoever to have BBC in Belarusian language. A fellow blogger Halldor2 (from the United Kingdom?) wrote an inquiry to BBC, to which he actually received a reply. Here’s BBC’s answer about Belarusian language broadcasting:
Dear Mr McDuff,
Thank you for your email […]

TOL reports that certain positive signals are coming in our direction from the “Old Europe” ([1], [2]), but the heart of the Old Europe, Great Britain, confirmed today that it won’t change anything in that regard and will go on ignoring Belarus, as it has been doing before.
Here’s a short summary of RFE/RL Belarus service […]

If we don’t keep fighting, Lukashenka’s regime will go on destroying everything, until nothing is left. This is something we all should understand about this dictatorial regime. Today I received the news the the First Belarusian newspaper “Nasha Niva” is under a serious risk of being closed down.

Department of ideology wants to close it down […]

I sent an e-mail to Microsoft about it several years ago, but since then nothing has changed. If in your browser settings you chose Belarusian as the first language (variable HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE or Tools | Internet Options | Languages in Internet Explorer), then all the materials on support.microsoft.com would always appear to you in Russian. Even […]

Google.by is owned by unknown cybersquatters (as it appears, they are most probably related to a Minsk web studio ActiveMedia). I first wrote about it in July 2003 [1]. At first, they had a graphical interface totally different from Google and their own database, which appeared to be just a tiny index of several thousand […]

As many of you probably know, the dominating language in the capital, Minsk, is Russian. You can hear it on the streets all the time, and Belarusian is nowhere to be heard (although you can see it on billboards and street signs). Here’s a recent web survey which I think should be, if not scientifically […]

A mysterious panegyric verse on the arms of the famous [BLANK] family from the little-known New Testament published in the Holy Ghost Monastery in Vilnia (Vilnius) in 1623:

Клейнотъ гербовъ совытый, з двоякой цноты
Домом зацным неданы есть: пре дѣльность, труд, поты
Двема кресты з стрѣлою дом […] славных:
Бог, Свѣтъ, Моужство, Очизна, з вѣков стародавных
Вы выешыли: крестами врага […]

Some websites and main-stream media have reprinted the news that our government wants to design its own Belarusian operating system which is supposed to be a big rival to Microsoft Windows, without really knowing what they are reporting about. The original source of the news was a press conference organized by the Ministry of Information. […]

A German linguist Sonja Heyl from Berlin’s Humboldt-Universität Institut für Slawistik has written a Belarusian language study guide, which will be published in 2006. It’s already listed on amazon.de:
• Lehrbuch der weißruthenischen Sprache (250 pages, 29 euro)
• Audio-CD, weißruthenische Sprache (19 euro)
That’s nice to know someone is doing this. So far, the only Belarusian-language book […]