Re: CHAT: The EU expands (was Re: THEORY/CHAT: Talmy, Jackendoff and Matchboxes)

I'm going to soon hit the five-post daily limit, so some of my replies might
be a day late....

From: "Jean-François Colson" <fa597525@..>

> I don't like that too, but there are 2 precedents: Lëtzebuergesch
> (Luxembourgish? I'm not sure about its English name) and Irish Gaelic.
I've seen Luxembourgeois and Luxembourgish. And neither that or Irish are
used on the EU website http://europa.eu.int so I imagine Maltese would be
the same case. Also, Maltese-language websites would have to be encoded
either in Unicode or an obscure ISO Latin encoding, because of some of its
more exotic letters. None of the Windows (can't say about Mac) encodings
include Maltese or Esperanto, just Western and Central European, Baltic,
Greek and Cyrillic.

> Will Russia never join the EU in my lifetime (I'm 28)?
> Yes I know Russia has an important part of Asia in it and then the EU
would
> become the Eurasian Union ;-) , but is that really impossible in the near
> future? I remember Putin didn't say "no" in an interview on a French TV.
It will likely depend on who's President in the future. Remember, Russia has
had two national anthems since independence, one for Yeltsin (the Glinka
composition I really liked, though it had no lyrics) and one for Putin (the
old tune Stalin implemented except with new words). The head of state is no
figurehead, though I doubt Putin could be accurately described as a
dictator. There are some human rights issues, like there is for Turkey; a
major point of controversy is the Romani community and how they're being
treated. (Romania and Bulgaria will have to address this as well.)

Also, Russia is a lot like Britain in that they're not so friendly to the
EU, though they consider themselves European, and both used to be vast
empires and many conservatives are hanging on to that old mentality. That's
the impression I get.

> On the European bank notes (billets de banque), the word EURO is written
in
> the Latin and Greek alphabets. Will we have new banknotes when Byelorussia
> join?
I'm sure they will and it'll be EBPO. I'll be interesting if/when Israel
(and perhaps Lebanon) joins and both Hebrew and Arabic become official. I
recommend a font that's legible in small point sizes. Like Tahoma.

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