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September, 2008

שהחיינו וקימנו

Fri, 2008-09-26 01:09 — Konstantin

Google has finally added Hebrew to the rather astounding array of languages it can translate to and from English. As with the other languages, they're using their own statistical translation engine, which does a decent job at least with media-level language.

Of course, getting your bilingual corpus from places like Haaretz.com and Haaretz.co.il has its drawbacks. One news article I tried translating from English mentioned the word "home", meaning "residence" in context.

It got translated as דף הבית — "home page."

High Holidays 2008

Thu, 2008-09-25 13:34 — Konstantin
High Holidays 2008

Distributed as an informational postcard.

Liver Life Walk 2008

Wed, 2008-09-17 18:00 — Konstantin
Liver Life Walk 2008

Photograph by Russell Reno (on Flickr, under Creative Commons license).

Very false friends

Tue, 2008-09-16 23:43 — Konstantin

Wikipedia article on false friends.

In Hebrew, the word עני (ʿani) means poor.

(The spelling is ʿayin-nun-yud.)

In Arabic, the word غني (ghani) means rich.

(The spelling is ghayin-nun-ya. ʿayin and ghayin merged in Hebrew a few millenia ago; they're both represented by ʿayin in Hebrew. This means that the root of the two words is essentially the same.)

NILI 2008 Poster

Mon, 2008-09-15 11:42 — Konstantin
NILI 2008 Poster

Poster for the Netivot Israel Leadership Initiative trip, in which I participated in the winter of 2007. The photograph was taken by me on the shore of the Kinneret.