Tuesday, November 28, 2006

On Wanting to Speak Portuguese: And Pining for a Peace Universal

What if the best blogs in the world aren't in English? Or Persian? Or Chinese? Or German? Or Tagalog? Or Portuguese? Or...

Sometimes I feel like I am missing out. My blog-search engines are failing me, it seems. I can only understand English, and there are so many blogs out there in other languages. Native-speakers of other languages know English but this English-speaker knows only...English. I don't want to be limited. I don't want to be parochial. Google's Language Tools are helpful, but...

I view with admiration the many blogs in Portuguese and wish it were my native tongue, so to do justice to the posts by the likes of João Moutinho whose A Paz Universal is another first-class example of a Baha'i-content blog. I counted 178 links on his blog. This man is a blogger. -gw

"Tranquility zone @ portimão [Portugal],"
uploaded on flickr November 25, 2006
Some rights reserved

4 comments:

Marco Oliveira said...

I think language is an obstacle to bloggers and their readers.
Because I write in Portuguese, most of my readers are Portuguese and Brazilians.
But if were writing in English maybe my audience would be wider...
We certainly need and International Auxiliary Language!

In the meantime, I'll teach Joao how to add a translation tool to his blog. :-)

Anonymous said...

I'm sure if your blog were in English, your readership would be enormous indeed. Given your careful attention to quality and detail, you set the gold standard for the rest of us Baha'i bloggers.

João Moutinho said...

Thanks for remember me. I was a quite suprised.
I'm just preparing for portugese became the international language.
Somethin Else, I can' find the blog of Omid Djalili.
I met his sister in Holy Land, she was the soul of our orientee group. I missed her a lot.

child_of_africa said...

巴哈伊-- Baha'i in Chinese... in case you would like to use this to do some searches for more blogs that you cannot understand :)