Ematen du amesgaiztoa ez dela bukatzen. Egunkariaren auzia ez da ixten.
Orain dela bost urte mezu hau zabaldu genuen hizkuntza-teknologiako hainbat eragilek hizkuntza-teknologiako hainbat posta zerrendetan. Berriro ekarri nahi izan dut hona Egunkariak hizkuntza-teknologiari egin zion ekarpena gogora dezagun.
Subject: Today Basque is “an even more” endangered language. (2003/03/05)
Dear colleagues
We know that this kind of message is not common in this mailing list, but we would like to inform you about a direct attack to the Basque culture, which has a direct influence in our research efforts.
The only Basque language newspaper in the world “Egunkaria” was temporarily closed on February the 20th and 10 top representatives of Basque culture arrested by a Spanish judge, under allegations of collaboration with terrorists. We want to stress that there has not been any trial yet; they have been held in protective custody. Before even finding the newspaper employees guilty, the judge decided to close down the newspaper. The closing of the newspaper is a preventive temporary measure, but Spanish law allows the closing to go on for five years. Even after a few weeks the newspaper becomes financially unfeasible.
It is worth mentioning that Egunkaria has the support of different political sensibilities in the Basque Society, and it is also well known in the International Community. The vast majority of Basque society does not agree with the closing of Egunkaria (list of supporters in http://www.euskalnet.net/ileturia/egunkaria/list.htm). The International Federation of Journalists (http://www.ifex.org/alerts/view.html?id=11985),
Reporters Without Borders (http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=4998)
and the president of the European Bureau of Lesser Used Languages, among others, have also criticized the measure.
Being Basque an endangered language (around 800.000 speakers) under a normalization process, currently available corpora are small in size, and one of the most promising sources for our research efforts was Egunkaria.
There is also an English version of it that would allow us to research on parallel corpora. One of the biggest linguistic corpora available for Basque is the compilation of the daily issues since 2000. Language technology was being used to search in their online news database (unfortunately, their internet edition was also closed). A document classification research project was underway, as well as a research project on a pragma-rhetorical analysis of the contents of EGUNKARIA.We do not want to initiate a debate. If you want more information or to express your sympathy, please refer to
http://www.sustatu.com/english/egunkaria.Today Basque is “an even more” endangered language.
Research groups and companies working on Human Language Technology from the Basque Country supporting this message:
AHOLAB group (http://bips.bi.ehu.es)
DELi group (http://www.deli.deusto.es)
ILCLI group on semantics, pragmatics and rhetoric
(http://www.sc.ehu.es/ilcli)
IXA NLP group (http://ixa.si.ehu.es)
Code & Syntax (http://www.codesyntax.com)
Diana Teknologia (http://www.diana-tek.com)
Eleka (http://www.eleka.net)
Elhuyar (http://www.elhuyar.com)
Hizkia Informatika (http://www.hizkia.fr)
UZEI (http://www.uzei.com)
Iruzkinak (1)