br23 blog - minsk, belarus

This week Belarusian Culture and Education Center in Poznan (Poland) started collecting signatures against Russian language broadcasts of “Deutsche Welle” to Belarus…
To the credit of “Deutsche Welle”, though, it must be said that two weeks ago their Belarusan page has became bilingual: in addition to Russian, about 30-50% of their materials are being published in […]

Did you know that we have a lot of loan German words in Belarusian language? For the most part they came to Old Belarusian via Polish, when we were living in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, being a real European nation. Just to give you an example, here are a few German words that end […]

“The Muscovites were waxing powerful, but were still vassals. It was in that period [14-15th centuries] that the Muscovites began to call their state by the Greek name for Rus’, Rossiya (Russia), and to call themselves Russians. These Muscovite-Russians had never ruled over Kiev; but the disability did not prevent them from regarding Moscow as […]

This is already the second time in October that people protest in Minsk against Russian language broadcasts of Deutsche Welle to Belarus. And by the way, Belarusian authorities had apparently no problem with that, as Minsk city authorities granted a permission for this street protest.
Photo 1
“Mova? - Nein!
Jazyk? - Ja!”
(”Mova” is the Belarusan word for […]

A Turkish court fined 20 people for using the letters Q and W on placards at a Kurdish new year celebration, under a law banning characters not used in the Turkish alphabet. The court in the southeastern city of Siirt fined each of the 20 people 100 new lira for holding up the placards, written […]

Barbara Oertel brings to light a few critical remarks about Deutsche Welle’s choice of language (Russian over Belarusan) in an article that was published today in a popular German newspaper “die tageszeitung”, I quote:
…Dennoch stößt das Brüsseler Projekt auf Kritik - besonders bei EU-Parlamentariern aus den neuen Mitgliedstaaten. Die Kommission riskiere, sich zu Russlands Komplizen […]

In October, Harvard University is hosting a symposium on Belarus and a theater from Vitebsk (according to NAABS newsletter, this is “the first North American appearance by any professional Belarusan theater”). Besides, professor Curt Woolhiser from Harvard is going to teach a course in Belarusian at Harvard for graduate students. Great news, professor Woolhiser! Bravo, […]

A well-known Belarusian poetess Danuta Bichel (Данута Бічэль) from Western Belarus writes in her diary:
“In the morning I listened to Radio Liberty. Our writer Svetlana Alexievitch declares her love for Belarus in Russian. That must be some love, to have become a writer and not learn the language. There is no Belarus without Belarusian language… […]

Bravo, mister Onyszkiewicz!
Kudos to the Vice-president of the European Parliament Janusz Onyszkiewicz who today openly critisized the Russian-language broadcasting plans of “Deutsche Welle” to Belarus. The Vice-president of the European Parliament said, I quote:
“this [the Russian language launch] squares with Minsk’s plans to destroy the Belarusian language, relegate it to a kind of regional […]

A Minsk branch (www.swisshost.by) of a Swiss web hosting company (www.pchighway.com) which in turn is a reseller/client of a a Swiss telecommunications company Sunrise (www.sunrise.ch) has launched a free e-mail service for Belarusians (www.telegraf.by).
Their emailing service offers 2 gigabytes of free space, with free IMAP/POP3, spam blocker, three domain choices (telegraf.by, biz.by, me.by); the web […]