1 June 2006 (5 Sivan 5766)
[no update due to a busy schedule]
9 June 2006 (13 Sivan 5766)
I have never been busier in my life. The last month of the academic year is always a busy period, but this time I have to prepare material for a workshop on Jewish computational linguistics I organize and a paper for a conference on Jewish languages, both of which will take place right after the end of this academic year. I wish I could say that I am now checking and finetuning what I have already prepared, but in actual fact I am only starting to prepare the material and the paper this weeek.
As the last occasion before the workshop and the conference to take some rest, I allowed myself to visit the annual Hebrew Book Week yesterday in Jerusalem, which started this Wednesday and will end next Saturday night. (I am afraid that I will also have to stop drinking beer, which I allow myself to drink every evening after work, or to drink it only once a week as a kind of incentive until I finish my preparation for the two important academic events.)
As a lover of books, it is always a pleasure to find myself surrounded by many books, especially new ones. But in the past few years I have come to feel both depressed and frustrated every time I visit this annual national event that is held in major cities in Israel.
What depresses me is the fact that even though all the major publishers in the country gather together at one place and exhibit almost all the books they have in stock, the quantity of books there is like in medium-sized bookstores in big cities in Japan or even less. I love Hebrew, but I am really sorry for people who can only read it. Naturally, there are many books on things Jewish and Israeli in Hebrew, but because of the number of speakers, hence the size of the book market, books in Hebrew on other topics are desperately smaller in quantity than in the five major languages in book publication worldwide (i.e., English, German, French, Russian and Japanese).
Nevertheless, I remember reading some statistical report that Israel fares much better than those countries with more or less the same size of the population, and I am very proud of this country and the people who have made this possible, especially considering the fact that a little more than a century ago Hebrew was spoken by nobody. I have been wondering, however, why this annual event, which every book lover in Israel enjoys, has to be only for a week or so during the whole year. I have been thinking that Steimatzky, the biggest bookstore chain in Israel, has been destroying the book culture here. Why can they not have one big bookstore in every major city instead of having small "kiosks" catering too much to tourists? Judging from the kind of books they sell at their "kiosks", I have to conclude that they consider books not as intellectual properties but as purely commercial merchandise.
16 June 2006 (20 Sivan 5766)
I am sorry to say this, but I see that precious human resources are wasted in Israel at least in two ways - one is avoidable, and the other is unfortunately unavoidable.
The avoidable one is the time and energy we ordinary people have to waste in our Kafkaesque struggles with the Israeli bureaucracy, especially with the Interior Ministry. I do not know why most of the procedures in the public sector in this country must be so inefficient and time-consuming - this may be part of the socialist legacy of Israel - but there is definitely enough room for improving efficiency, which in turn will save us a lot of headaches and frustration. If you have no Israeli citizenship like myself, you have to waste far more time and energy than those with Israeli citizenship. I have been struggling for months in vain since last September to get from the Interior Ministry a certain document, which I would have expected my employer to arrange for me. Without this document I will even be unable to leave Israel to visit Moscow for the coming conference of the European Association for Jewish Studies in late July. I started planning this trip almost a year ago, but I definitely underestimated the inefficiency of the bureaucracy here. I can only pray that I will manage to get it somehow before the trip.
The unavoidable waste of human resources is the sheer number of people working as security guards almost everywhere in the country. They do not contribute to the economy of the country; in other countries they could have been engaged in some productive job instead, but considering the special situation of the country, we have no other choice here. Although I respect them for what they are doing in exchange for not so high wages under not so easy physical conditions in order to guarantee security, one thing they do, or to be more precise, their employers seem to ask them to do, really bothers me. What I mean is their implicit racist polity. They mechanically suspect those who do not look "typically Jewish or Israeli", though the Jewish people are composed of racially heterogeneous groups, hence Zionism is not racism. Nevertheless, they assume that if you do not look "typically Jewish or Israeli", you are automatically suspected of endangering the security of the country, but on the other hand, if you do look "typically Jewish or Israeli", you are assumed to do nothing against the country. I fear that these two assumptions on which the racist policy of security companies is based, are naive and even dangerous, and are not the best ways to provide the maximum security, hence lead to the waste of human resources in the long run.
23 June 2006 (27 Sivan 5766)
[no update due to a busy schedule]
30 June 2006 (4 Tamuz 5766)
The older we get, the more quickly time is felt to pass. This is said to be because the older we get, the less new things we experience every day. This week I felt as if I had spent one month since it was packed with many stimulating encounters in the Workshop on Jewish Computational Linguistics I organized on Sunday at Bar-Ilan University and the 2nd International Conference of the Center for the Study of the Jewish Languages and Literatures from Monday through Thursday at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The idea to organize such a workshop was born from feedback I received from a colleague of mine on a paper I read under the title "Toward a Common Format for Databases of the Hebrew-Aramaic Component in Jewish Languages" in the 13th World Congress of Jewish Studies last summer in Jerusalem. He asked me to share my know-how about building lexical databases in Unicode and XML. Participants in the above mentioned conference were the audience I originally had in mind, so I planned my workshop a day before it. But this date turned out to be problematic for those participants in the conference who were also interested in the workshop; as they were busy preparing their talks at the last moment, some of them had to cancel their participation in the workshop. In the end ten out of twenty people who had originally registered turned out, including a colleague of mine who came all the way from South Africa.
I hope the participants could learn something new, including the use of Unicode-compliant XML software, including Oxygen XML Editor and eXist. I am even thinking of making this workshop an annual event as part of my humble contribution to the community of linguists working on Jewish languages, including Hebrew, mainly in Israel. Right after the workshop, I found two programs that would be able to benefit descriptive linguists - FieldWorks (especially one of its components called Language Explorer) and Lexique Pro. If I am to organize such a workshop next year, I'll probably teach how to use these two amazing tools.
Because I was busy preparing material for this workshop, I did not have enough time for preparing my talk for the conference. Therefore, I could not hear most of the talks that were given before mine on Monday and Tuesday as I had to work until the last moment. Nevertheless, it was so nice to see so many colleagues of mine at the same time. I was especially glad to meet Sarah Bunin Benor again, with whom I have been managing the Jewish Language Research Website and the jewish-languages mailing list since we launched them several years ago.
She made an interesting remark: almost all the talks that were linguistic rather than philological were given by those who were educated at least partially outside Israel. This has made me think about how Hebrew and Jewish linguistics is taught in Israel and about how I was educated. There seem to be three types of linguists: 1) theoretical linguists, who use data from languages (or even from a single language) for their theories; 2) descriptive linguists, who refer to linguistic theories for describing specific languages; 3) philologists, who are mostly negligent and/or ignorant of linguistic theories. I have reconfirmed that I belong to the second category. In my opinion many theoretical linguists are often too ignorant of linguistic realities, while quite a few philologists give talks that seem to me nothing but collections of anecdotes with no methodological framework.