This is an Automatic Translation.

Articles on Multilingualism

The battle of languages - the return to the mother tongue

By Yousef Elbes, Ph.D.

Twenty years ago, linguists, anthropologists and many scholars from different disciplines were anxiously discussing ways to slow down the rhythm in which many languages are vanishing. English language had invaded since decades many parts of the world as the language of education, business and communication.

At the beginning of the Information Technology (IT) boom, the technical limitations related to most of world languages have helped enormously in spreading English as the language of excellence. Until early 90s, putting an accent on a Latin language character was a technical challenge; dealing with Asian, Slavic or Semitic languages was a nightmare that should be avoided. Many nations have built their computer systems around English; most of their first sites were in English. The fear of language activists becomes greater; as the pace of IT expansion was showing no mercy. ...

The importance of Multilingualism

By Yousef Elbes, Ph.D.

In September 1301, the king of Aragon, James II, wrote urgently to his treasurer commanding him to get the royal "Librum medicine vocatum Avicenne" out of pawn. He had allowed his favourite surgeon to pawn the volume with a Barcelona merchant for 500 sueldos, but now he found a "valda necessarium" and had to have it back.
Five hundred sueldos was an enormous amount, the price of fifty meters of Persian cloth, of a good mule or of a horse and not even the royal treasury always found such sums easy to produce. The king had to repeat his order for the book''s redemption for months to come. This volume, on which the king placed so much store, can only have been Avicenna''s Canon, the great medical encyclopedia of Ibn Sina, translated into Latin in the twelfth century.* ...