#Step aside English and Spanish and other Western languages

[mathmusicreading]

@yummysuika @ospreywhite I really appreciate your translation work; can you explain more about shichen timekeeping to me? Because I know a tiny bit of modern Mandarin Chinese, but I can't recognize the shichens as the zodiac animals:

Zi (I don't know "rat", so I actually can't make any argument here.)

Chou (I don't know "ox", but I reasonably could have expected "niu" for "cow".)

Yin (I know "tiger" as "hu".)

Mao (I don't know "rabbit", but to me "mao" is "cat".)

Chen (I know "dragon" as "long".)

Si (I don't know "snake", but now I find it interesting that it sounds like death, like snakes could be seen as evil in Chinese culture similar to how they are seen in the Christian world.)

Wu (I know "horse" as "ma".)

Wei (I know "sheep/goat" as "yang".)

Shen (I don't know "monkey", but I would have expected "Sun" or "Wu" or "Kong" because of "Monkey King".)

You (I know "rooster/chicken" as " ji".)

Xu (I know "dog" as "gou".)

Hai (I don't know "pig/boar" unless "pork" and "pig" are the same "siu".)

I tried asking my parents, but they just starting talking about how the Chinese zodiac is actually a 60-year cycle with the 12 animals and the 5 elements. So are these shichen names the "Pre-Han dynasty semi-descriptive terms"? Is it kind of like the difference between "midday" and "noon" in English? The former is a "descriptor", the latter is a "name", but they "mean" the same thing?

(I tried checking the etymology for "noon" on dictionary.com, so to be fair "ninth hour" is a descriptor, but in Modern English it's not really recognizable as such and so for the sake of my shichen question, I'm calling "noon" a "name".)

Or is this another language/dialect or due to the evolution of language (changing words and pronunciations)?

I was also looking up the Dragon Boat Festival being on the unluckiest day of the year, and it says, "The Chinese name of the festival is pronounced differently in different Chinese languages. Duanwu (端午) literally means 'starting horse'—i.e., the first "horse day" of the month according to the Chinese zodiac." so I was able to get the exact character for "wu". I think it's interesting that Wikipedia says "literally ... horse" but putting 午 into Google Translate yields "midday, noonday, seventh earthly branch, 11 a.m.-1 p.m." It's unfortunate that Wikipedia only says "different Chinese languages" for "Duanwu" instead of specifying them or time periods, but I appreciate it listing different romanizations by country for Cantonese.

Would you say there's any pattern to Chinese writers or English translators using the above terms vs. using "hour/time/head/body/tail of the (insert zodiac animal here)"? Like if one sounds better for a historical fantasy setting, or choosing to use the pinyin in English instead of translating to not be translating literally? ETA: I should have gotten onto a computer sooner. I asked my parents and then you guys because searching "shichen" in Wikipedia just resulted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_units_of_measurement. But further digging took me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_timekeeping. I'll probably get answers there (Maybe I'll even be able to explain to my dad why he was thinking of ten stems and not matching mathematically with "60 is from 12 times 5, not 10 times 6" when he was trying to lecture on the 60-year cycle for the Chinese zodiac, lol.), so my apologies for bothering you. I'd still appreciate your thoughts on what was formerly the last paragraph about writing and translation choices!

[itsclydebitches]

I just watched the Mulan teaser. Does it bother you when everyone speaks English in a setting where that makes no sense? It's authentic visually sure, but man I wish they would just go that extra step change the language as well. Chernobyl had this problem as well.

Honestly I haven’t really thought about it much, though the choice makes a certain amount of sense to me. Just because Disney is an American studio and, authenticity aside, it’s logical that they’d go for English as the primary language to write/act/work in. None of the other films (to my knowledge) feature other languages, even though German, French, Spanish, Maori, Arabic, etc. would also be equally authentic. 

That being said, I’m a white American. Really not my place to say what a story centered around Chinese characters, history, and mythology should look like. Personally I’d have been thrilled if they’d changed the language, but I’m not surprised they didn’t. Despite Disney’s international appeal they’re distributing with Westerners in mind and, sad as it is in many respects, they’ll expect their Disney films to release originally in English. 

[mykidsgay]

Aren’t Some Things Inherently Gendered?

"My kid now identifies as non-binary. I'm starting to wrap my head around this but I struggle just because there are so many things that ARE inherently gendered in our world. For example, their sister is pregnant, but what happens with aunt/uncle? Bathrooms and driver's licenses are marked for men and women, so what then? Mr. and Miss? I just don't get it."

Question Submitted Anonymously Answered by Pip Williams

—

Pip Says:

First up, I want to say thank you for listening to your kid and doing your best to take this on board and adapt to their identity. While most parents are familiar with the concept of transgender identities that fit the Western gender binary (i.e. trans men or women), so many still dismiss non-binary identities as made-up or “just a fad”, which couldn’t be further from the truth!

Cultures all over the world have had gender systems encompassing more than two genders for thousands of years. In several South Asian countries, for example, there is an officially recognized third gender known as hijras. Many indigenous North Americans accept and embrace the existence of two-spirit individuals, who embody the roles of third and/or fourth genders. Then there’s the Yorùbá people of Nigeria, who, prior to colonialism, didn’t subscribe to any concept of gender at all!

While I’m not saying your child ought to claim any of these example identities as their own (in fact, they should stay well away from labels with a separate cultural history to their own!), I hope that these examples illustrate how very few–if any–things in our world exist inherently divided along immutable binary gender lines, despite what our own culture and language would have you believe.

Let’s take a look at some of the examples you’ve given, and discuss how you can help your non-binary kid overcome our learned binarist approach!

First up: aunt versus uncle. It’s annoying how some roles in the English language have neutral options (e.g. parent, cousin, child), and some just… don’t. While some non-binary people may be comfortable picking a gendered term—I am non-binary and would prefer aunt, personally—it’s completely understandable that many aren’t. The good news is that this gives you license to let your imagination run wild!

Some of the more common alternatives I’ve heard to aunt or uncle are word smashes like ancle, untie, and pibling (short for “parent’s sibling”). If your family is Spanish speaking, riffs off the words tía and t��o include titi, tíe, or tíx (pronounced the same as tíe). If you don’t fancy any of these, get creative! Some of the ideas on page 24 of this zine might give you a jumping off point. Talk to your kid and find out what they’d be most comfortable with. Do they have a term in mind? Do they want to wait and see what weird baby language name their niece/nephew/nibling comes out with and roll with that? Remember: there are no rules!

Your next example was bathrooms. This one can get a little tricky, because depending on your country and/or state of residence, your kid may legally have to abide by legislation known as a “bathroom bill”. These controversial laws essentially determine which gendered facilities an individual is allowed to access without breaking the law. The most high profile of these is North Carolina’s HB2, thankfully partially repealed in March 2017. HB2 stated that individuals could only use facilities corresponding with their sex assigned at birth, as listed on their birth certificate. Many other states have failed to pass similar legislature, correctly identifying the bills’ discriminatory nature.

Aside from the complications bathroom bills can introduce, this once again comes down to personal choice. If your kid needs to pee in a space where only male and female bathrooms are available, they should pick based on where they feel safest and what makes them most comfortable. There are no wrong answers to these questions. Make sure your kid knows this, and knows that you will support them should they be challenged on their choice.

Thankfully, many places do have gender-neutral bathrooms, which can help avoid any difficulties. There are several apps that exist to help you find these facilities, such as Refuge Restrooms. If your child prefers gender-neutral facilities and these are not available in spaces where they spend a lot of time (e.g. school, the gym, or a place of worship), maybe you could support them in campaigning for their inclusion. It’s not a difficult change to make—in fact, I suspect you have at least one gender-neutral bathroom in your own home!

When it comes to drivers’ licenses, the gender marker “X” in place of “M” or “F” is either available or soon-to-be in Oregon, Washington D.C., and California. Other states, including New York and Washington state, are making similar provisions for other documents, such as birth certificates and ID cards. Research the options where you live, and discuss with your child what they support they need from you to access these accommodations. If there aren’t any official non-binary alternatives available to them right now, help your child pick the option that makes them more comfortable (or least uncomfortable), and make sure they know that the problem is with our binary tick-box culture, and not with their real and valid non-binary identity.

Finally, in terms of titles, “Mx” (pronounced “mix” or “mux”) has gained traction and official recognition in the UK as a neutral alternative to Mr./Mrs./Ms. Other options include ��Misc” and “Ind.” (short for individual), though these are significantly less commonly used—only by 0.8% and 2.5% of the non-binary population, respectively. Personally, I look forward to finishing my degree and becoming Dr. Williams; one of the many commonly used professional titles that do not indicate gender. These choices once again come down to personal preference, and what’s legally (and in the future, professionally) accessible for your child. If their choice of title is not legally recognised where you are, you should still respect it and encourage others in your family and community to do the same.

We live in a really exciting time, where needless binaries are, inch by inch, being rolled back as we speak. However, there’s still a way to go before trans and/or non-binary people’s rights catch up with those of the rest of the population. If there’s no precedent in your country or state for legal recognition of non-binary genders, you can do some digging and scope out any groups in your area working to change this. You could contact your local representatives, or raise awareness amongst your friends and peers. The possibilities are endless.

I hope that my answer gives you a starting point for discussions with your child about their needs and preferences going forward. Check out the Resources tab and Gender category on My Kid Is Gay for more reading as and when you need.

There’s plenty you can do as a parent and ally, but the most important step of all is listening to and supporting your child. Allow them to guide you and challenge your own notions of a prescriptive gender binary. Good luck!

***

Click through to read about our brilliant contributors!

[fayewonglibrary]

Viva the Divas! (1996)

FROM AMERICA TO ASIA, STYLISH WOMEN SINGERS ARE FORCING THE BAD BOYS OF POP MUSIC TO STEP ASIDE

BY: RICHARD CORLISS

There was something feminine about Elvis. His mouth formed the pout of a sullen schoolgirl; his hair was swathed in more chemicals than a starlet’s; his hips churned like a hooker’s in heat. Presley was manly too, in a street-punk way. For him, the electric guitar was less an instrument than a symbolic weapon–an ax or a machine gun aimed at the complacent pop culture of the ‘50s. Performing his pansexual rite to a heavy bass line, Elvis set the primal image for rock: a man and his guitar, the tortured satyr and his magic lute.

He also established the androgyny of the male star. When a guy could provide his own sexual menace, long hair, coquetry and falsetto singing, who needed women? Oh, they were allowed to scream in the audience, or maybe sing backup, but not to rock on, down and dirty, with the big bad boys. Even today girls are no more encouraged to pick up a Stratocaster than to pilot an F-16. They are expected to play only one instrument: the voice.

And do they! After nearly 40 years as second-class citizens, women singers are staging their own revolution, The upheaval may be demure, even ladylike; Miwa Yoshida does not froth on the concert stage, nor is Faye Wong likely to trash a hotel room. But they have stormed the barricades where it counts: on the charts of best-selling CDs and in the hearts of a billion or so fans around the world. They have reconfigured pop music. This is the era of the pop diva.

Diva means goddess. The dictionary definition is more modern: “an operatic prima donna.” Let’s fiddle a little with those words. “Operatic”: note the strenuous, hyperemotional, aria-like feel to many pop ballads. “Prima donna”: remove its suggestion of imperious temperament and translate it literally as “first lady.” Voila! Celine Dion or Gloria Estefan, Whitney or Mariah, Madonna or Enya, Miwa or Faye, Toni Braxton or Tina Arena, Annie Lennox or Alanis Morissette. They come from the U.S., of course, but also from French and English Canada, from Cuba, Ireland, Scotland, France, Germany, Australia, Japan and China. In every country, in any language: la diva.

Like so many other forms of popular culture, the diva genre exists both locally and globally at the same time. Dion, from French Canada, alternates albums in French and English. Estefan, born in Cuba and raised in Miami, records in Spanish and English. Dion was chosen to open the Olympic Games in Atlanta with a pop hymn, The Power of the Dream, backed by a 300-member gospel choir, and Estefan was there on closing night to sing her anthemic Reach. Both singers embodied success stories as potent as any come-from-behind Olympic fairy tale: Dion, the youngest of 14 children who has become this year’s Diva Deluxe; and Estefan, brave survivor of a 1990 bus crash that broke her back, who is now back on top. “So I’ll go the distance this time,” she intones, “seeing more the higher I climb.”

Divas can’t climb much higher. They nestle at or near the top of their country’s music charts. Some, like Dion, Houston and Mariah Carey–not to mention, for the moment, Canada’s crack-voiced outlaw diva Alanis Morissette–have been on the Top 10 lists in Europe, the Americas and the Pacific Rim simultaneously. More important, most are damn fine singers. They are a link between the great voices of the past (think of Ella Fitzgerald, Ethel Merman, Edith Piaf) and the ears of people who can’t get attuned to the howling self-pity of much contemporary rock but aren’t ready to give up on pop music.

Like the Olympic spirit, the divas’ internationalist impulse reflects both a curiosity about other cultures and a nose for smart marketing. To spur Japanese sales of her Colour of My Love album, Dion added a new song, To Love You More, from the Japanese TV mini-series Lover, backed instrumentally by the Japanese ensemble Kryzler & Kompany. Dion sang it in English, but the locals didn’t mind: they bought 1.5 million copies.

A diva needn’t be Western to have the international flair. Nothing forces Yoshida, the soul-jazz sensation who fronts the band Dreams Come True, to go west to increase her Japanese fan base. She still writes and performs songs in her native language. Yet she usually records in Britain, and she cut her first solo set, Beauty and Harmony, in New York City with some top American sidemen. The collaboration produced vocals that were more precise, more regimented, than her past work. But it showed the need for even top regional artists to prove their chops in the U.S., which is still revered as the big leagues for singers.

Some stars of the Pacific, like Tina Arena, have long set their sights on America. An Australian who has sung publicly since she was five, Arena has an easy authority as vocalist and songwriter; her cool-teen voice matches her rock-easy compositions, which are so infectious that six-year-olds would learn them instantly and so familiar that you might think they were big hits a decade ago (they’re all new, all hers). When Arena gets precision and voltage into the songs–Heaven Help My Heart, Greatest Gift, Standing Up–she sounds like a kid sister to Elaine Paige, superb star of London musicals, who introduced such instant standards as Don’t Cry for Me Argentina (from Evita), Memory (from Cats) and a quite different Heaven Help My Heart (from Chess). But England is not Arena’s destination. She’s moved to Los Angeles because, like a lot of divas, she may believe she can’t be a star until she’s an American star.

Wong is too cool to entertain those ambitions. Indeed, she prefers to record in her native Beijing, where she can concentrate on her music, rather than in Hong Kong, where for years she was a formulaic Canto-pop singer known as Shirley Wong. Her striking, angular looks–think of an elongated pixie who moonlights as a sorceress–made her a natural for movies, but her debut made few notice; in Beyond’s Diary she played the girlfriend of a pop musician.

Gradually she found her own style, on records and on film. Her second picture, Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express, made her a hip pinup to sophisticated moviegoers on both sides of the Pacific. The film also internationalized her choice of music. She plays a dizzy waitress in a fast-food restaurant who is obsessed with going to California and playing, over and over and over, the 1966 California Dreamin’ by the Mamas and the Papas. Over the end credits she sings a Cantonese cover of the Cranberries hit Dreams. And now, on her Restless CD, she meets the international market on her own terms: five of the songs have no intelligible lyrics at all, and two irresistibly obscurantist cuts were written and produced by Scotland’s Cocteau Twins. Wong remains the spooky gamin of Chinese music, and Restless is a wondrous blend of Canto-pop and lollipop.

Wong’s approach alternates between a blissed-out whisper and bright piping in a register so high only Pekingese pups can hear it. That puts her squarely in one tradition of divadom: the vocal virtuoso. For decades, two Americans defined this style. Patti LaBelle, a gospel-trained ranter, has enthralled the faithful with her mad-woman riffs. Bette Midler, known internationally as the blowsy star of movie comedies, built her career as a throwback singer who could evoke Sophie Tucker’s bawdiness and Bessie Smith’s soul-in-hell emotional exhaustion with equal power and facility. The virtuoso mode can also be heard in the florid, world-weary style of France’s Catherine Ribeiro and, with glances back to the glamour of Piaf and Dietrich, in the bitter brilliance of Germany’s Ute Lemper. Though their styles were unique, all these women kept bright the flame of the traditional torch singer.

But none of them became international superstars or encouraged others to do the same. For that you can thank Houston (and her mentor at Arista Records, Clive Davis). It was an old recipe–great chops, exotic looks and a clever choice of material–that served Lena Horne, Abbey Lincoln, Eartha Kitt, and Houston’s cousin Dionne Warwick. But in the harsh prevailing winds of mid-'80s rap and heavy metal, Houston was a welcome spring breeze. Her delicacy of phrasing made songs like Saving All My Love for You and The Greatest Love of All easy listening in the best sense. Her prom-queen glamour made her an ideal star for the early video era, an antidote to Cyndi Lauper’s goofy-girl atavism and Madonna’s bad-girl sass. Her first album, Whitney Houston, sold 10 million copies.

Houston has retained her eminence, if not pre-eminence, while curtailing her output: she has released less than a single regular album’s worth of songs, only 10, since 1990. But her example and her relative quiescence have spurred a dozen divas-in-waiting. Many noted the structure of Houston’s big hits–a slow-tempo devotional tune that escalates from the foreplay of whispers to the explosive orgasm of wails and whoops–and made the mistake of imitating it. (Houston made that error too.) Dion’s early English-language albums are almost touching in their fidelity to the Whitney formula. It took her a while to realize she could relax on record.

Today’s top Whitneyesque star is Mariah Carey. Like Houston, she’ll mix ballads with synthesized dance music; she’s a handsome woman with a video flair; she has a patron in Tommy Mottola, boss of her record company, who is also her husband. Carey has even outsold Houston in the '90s, because she releases albums at a busier pace.

One big difference: Houston sings straight soprano with some church inflection; Carey is a coloratura. She could even be called a cubist, for she appraises nearly every note in every song from a dozen or more angles. In When I Saw You from her current Daydream CD, Carey breaks the word knew into an amazing 26 separate notes (this is only an estimate: we played these four seconds over and over, and got up to 26 just before we went mad). Her jazzy riffs suggest demon virtuosity, but it could also be musical browsing. Maybe Carey can’t decide which interpretation is the right one, so she tries them all.

Like Carey, many female singers co-write their music. Many others don’t, and are thus handicapped by pop’s 30-year tyranny of singer-songwriters. Hey, if you don’t write, you’re not an artist. “Vocal interpreter” used to be an honorable job description–good enough for Ella, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole. Now the epithet is often an insult. It conjures up images of a Las Vegas lounge singer crooning Feelings.

All right, maybe the top pop songwriters of the day–Babyface and David Foster (who collaborated on Dion’s The Power of the Dream) and Diane Warren (who helped Estefan write Reach) aren’t Gershwin and Stephen Foster and Harry Warren. But they can write good songs for good singers. These three composers all had a hand in Toni Braxton’s fine Secrets CD–dusky, mellow, infectiously commercial, like a grownup Tina Arena.

And there’s plenty of other good music to record. Alison Krauss, a child fiddle prodigy from Illinois and later a world-class bluegrass singer with her band Union Station, became a star with her 1995 compilation Now That I’ve Found You. The set puts Krauss’s mountain-stream soprano on pretty display. She caresses standards from R. and B. (the title song), gospel (the soul-lifting When God Dips His Pen of Love in My Heart) and the Paul McCartney catalog (an elfin I Will). Think of it: a singer with no gimmick but a passionate talent and a great, rangy taste in music.

If there’s a knock on the modern divas–whether pop, like Carey, Houston and Dion, or pure, like Krauss–it’s that their material is just too amiable. Much of their music is not just middle of the road; it tiptoes on the white line in the middle of the middle of the road. Dammit, they sing like girls! And in social norms, the pop diva adheres to the proper side of the gender split in music. She is expected to be a sister before a lover; the operative slur word is “nice.” Pop is the boarding school where the good girls live. Rock is the shooting gallery where the naughty boys hang out.

Somewhere between these extremes there should be an outlaw diva. She can do cool-guy things: write songs about malaise and disorientation, play a harmonica, take herself very seriously, sell 16 million copies of her first big CD. Why, she could be Alanis Morissette–the anti-Whitney, the pariah Mariah, the outre Faye, the mean Celine.

Anyway, that’s how the 22-year-old comes across on a first listen of the Jagged Little Pill album. Morissette’s songs sound aggressive, grudging, desperate. Her alto lurches among the octaves, from growl to shriek. A typical phrase will end in a gasp, as if one of the emotional inferiors in her songs had suddenly retaliated by pressing thumb and forefinger on her windpipe. The voice of Sinead O'Connor, you imagine, in the mind of Patti Smith.

But Morissette is not that simple. A former teen star in her native Canada, she’s smart enough to give her choruses sing-along melodies–the likely contribution of co-writer Glen Ballard, who formerly produced Wilson Phillips, the trio of cool-harmonizing, second-generation pop stars. In the perkier tunes (You Learn, Head over Feet), the singer overdubs tight harmonies that might have come from Wilson Phillips. And that is Morissette’s dirty little secret: inside her edgy plaints are craft and a yen to please. She’s a mainstream diva in spite of herself.

Morissette may soon discover that the rock machismo she approximates is often just an acid flavor of the month: a hit, a burnout, a trivia question. But being a diva is a life’s work. The Scottish Annie Lennox has been at it for 20 years, developing a husky voice and a gift for weaving a dramatic spell that is almost visual. Her 1995 Medusa album has 10 old and new songs written by others. The opening cut, No More “I Love You’s,” relies on Lennox’s evocation of love’s demons–“Desire, despair, desire, so many monsters”–and her conjuring up, in a mid-song monologue, of a little girl for whom these monsters come to life. A woman’s bed of sad passion has telescoped into a child’s bedroom fears at midnight.

The final number on Medusa is Paul Simon’s 1973 Something So Right. In Lennox’s gorgeous reworking, she answers the pessimism of No More “I Love You’s” and completes the album’s circle. “Some people never say the words I love you, / But like a child I’m longing to be told.” Again a girl in a woman’s supple voice, Lennox finds salvation foraging in a child’s garden of cries from the heart. Lennox might be Piaf here–there’s that eerie understanding of a lyric–but with the fever adjusted to room temperature.

Piaf is still an icon, both for her poignant life story and for her ability to hurdle emotion over the language barrier. But in the world market of the '90s, when virtually every album with gigantic global sales is in some form of English, what’s a diva to do? Cultivate her own garden, for the worldwide boom in CD sales means there are more people searching for something different. Morissette’s album is bubble-gum music next to Tori Amos’ Boys for Pele, with its forbiddingly opaque lyrics, a voice that runs amuck over the octaves and the famous inside photo of Amos with a suckling piglet at her breast. Yet the album has sold millions. Moral: You can’t be too weird. You must be you.

That is the message attended to by Wong in her recent take-me-or-leave-me mode, and by Yoshida in her American experiment. It surely applies to singers who harbor nations within themselves. Enya, the Celtic lass whose ethereal soundscapes might have emanated from a very gentle UFO, sings in Gaelic, English and Latin–the languages of family, school and church. Her melodies are so mellow as to seem downright shy, yet they’re so popular that an entire genre of new music is known simply as Enya.

By that standard, the pop brand of Cuban-American music should probably be called Gloria. With time, the Estefan sound has grown full and wise, Latin rhythms accompanying rather than defining the melody. Estefan has also learned to write for her voice and disposition; on her latest album, Destiny, she has taken her own advice. Reach–higher.

And Celine Dion has reached inside. The Falling into You CD, a supercharged superproduction, will yield perhaps half a dozen smasheroo singles, and it’s a treat to hear her belt a song to bits. But a bigger piece of her heart can be found on The French Album. There the girl from Quebec sings in her mother’s language and in a voice so ardent and discreet it reminds you of Elvis in the intimate ballads he recorded in his time off from creating the bad-boy iconography of rock. Murmuring like the heart just before sleeping, Dion’s voice summons the power and the glory of the diva.

–With reporting by Charles P. Alexander/Montreal

------------------------------------------------------------------

SOURCE: TIME MAGAZINE

[brittysaucefanfic]

A Fate Unclaimed

Part 17

(First)(Previous)(Next)(AU 1)(AU 2)(AO3)

Lance lands face first on concrete, but it wasn't a hard fall, so he would have been fine. But then something lands on top of him and breaks his entire body, or at least that's what it feels like to him. He groans, and tries to push the weight off, but fails because it's too heavy.

Then the weight groans.

So, apparently, he was being smushed by a person. Said person shifts, digging their elbow into his spinal cord. Lance winces and turns his face to look at the person crushing him face first on concrete. Lance wants to scream when he sees a familiar mullet.

Apparently he was being smushed by Keith.

"Great, no wonder you were so heavy, one of your lookie loo pals tagged along." A voice says, and Lance looks up to see Macaria glaring down at him. Keith finally manages to get off him, and then puts his fists up. But he's shaky, like he's going to throw up. Lance hauls himself up with a hiss, knowing he's probably going to have a bruise where Keith elbowed him.

"What the hell?" Lance says, which, yes, probably isn't the best thing to say right off the bat when someone zaps you with a bunch of shadows. Way to try to piss off the scary demigod lady Lance. Macaria, however, just sighs at him. Which, weird, but at least it isn't being zapped again. His stomach rolls as he makes it to his feet at last.

"Where are we?" Keith continues, edging in front of Lance. "Where's our friends? What do you want with Lance?"

Lance lets Keith do his thing while he gathers his bearings. They're in some sort of concrete alleyway, just far enough in that he can barely hear cars, and he can't immediately find the exit. It's a clean alley though, or cleaner than one would expect. A little ways to the right, behind Macaria, is a metal door with the symbol of Hermes painted in gold.

For some reason Lance really wants in that door.

This, however, is a much weaker pull, so he can ignore it like it's nothing but an annoying bug. Lance turns back to Macaria, noticing his entire body was hidden behind Keith's in his distraction. And wow, muscles.

"We are just down the street from your friends, who are still in front of the door to Hell, and all I want to do is talk. Now move so I can do just that." She says, her tone bordering between exasperated and annoyed. Lance bites his lip, thinking about what he should do. He comes to a conclusion the moment he and Macaria lock eyes again.

Lance shoves Keith lightly out of the way.

"The glow." Lance says, his voice staying even for once. "I want to know what it is. But I want to have all of my friends here, just in case." Just in case you're a psycho.

Macaria thinks for a moment, giving Keith time to glare at Lance as he saves himself from hitting concrete. Lance ignores him, watching Macaria's face fall into resignation.

"Fine." She says, then snaps her fingers. All of a sudden there's three loud thumps behind them. He turns around and winces at what he sees. Poor Pidge ate concrete first.

"Help," Pidge wheezes out, reaching forward. "Me."

Lance isn't sure if he should feel sorry or feel amused. Both maybe. Keith rushes to Shiro, who drew the big straw and landed on top of the demigod dog pile. When Shiro and Hunk are off of Pidge she lays there groaning for a moment. Neither of the two who squished her look all that apologetic.

"You coming child?" Macaria says, her voice further away. When Lance turns around he sees her at the door he wanted to enter. The one with the symbol of Hermes. Could Hermes be his father? Maybe that's why he feels compelled. But then again, he's also compelled to Shiro, Allura and Macaria.

This is getting confusing.

Macaria opens the door a little, just enough for rock music to fill the allyway. When she raises an eyebrow at him beneath her sunglasses he's suddenly moving, no longer fighting the pull he has.

"Lance, wait-" Shiro calls out behind him. But it's too late, he's already walking through the doorway. He isn't sure what he's expecting to see once he passes the barrier, because there is one. The same type like the one at camp, but not quite as powerful. He isn't sure if he was expecting a club, or a trap house, or a door to Hell.

The lights inside are dim, easy on the eyes, but it isn't dark. The walls are smooth stone, with etched symbols like the ones he remembers seeing one of the Hecate cabin residents drawing in the sand. The walls encase a very large room, larger than what seems possible. On the edges of the room are simple wooden tables like one would see in an old timey tavern, except weirder.

Tables for two, tables for large groups, very tall tables with large chairs, small tables like it would be for a kid. The middle of the large room was open floor, with a white painted square on the stone. A dance floor maybe? At the very back of the room is a bar of smooth polished granite, and tv's hung on the wall above the shelves of liqueur and liquids. Hidden in the far left corner is a staircase with a body guard.

The tavern/bar/club isn't full, but it's crowded.

Most of them seem to be demigods. Or maybe just powerful beings, because everytime he looks at a person his vision flashes with gold. Some of it is muted, like usual, some of it are as blinding as Macaria's, and some of it are less gold and more of different colors. Red, white, black, pink. It's kind of dizzying.

"Follow me child." Macaria says and Lance faces her with a scowl.

"I have a name you know." He says, but he almost can't hear himself over the noise of the tavern/bar/club type place he's in.

"One which I have not been formally introduced, so I may call you child until you give me your name properly." She says, her voice floating over the crowd as she walks away. Lance is reminded of his grandmother's fairytales when he was young. Of the Fae, and the mind games they play to get what they want. Of how you always had to say things a certain way, like how you will not give them your name, but you can tell them.

Does that apply in this situation?

He spent so much time pondering, he almost misses Macaria slipping past the body guard at the stairs. He doesn't miss the flirty smile they share though, which is interesting.

"Lance!" Shiro says behind him. He turns to him, and gives him a patented 'Guilty Lance Smile'. Almost always gets him out of trouble. Or it does with Coran at least.

Shiro doesn't look mad though, only Keith really has that look, but his face has been twisted like that since they were five. They're all grouped just inside the door like a pack of terrified puppies. Lance looks back at the staircase, seeing the bodyguard staring at him. It seems like he's expecting Lance to follow Macaria, which yeah he's definitely doing.

Lance doesn't wait for his friends to follow before he marches up to the bodyguard.

The bodyguard looks inhumanly handsome up close, but in that burly biker dude sort of way. Sharp golden eyes, like one of Macaria's. The golden eyed man steps aside without even trying to stop Lance. There's footsteps behind him when he starts climbing the stairs, and Lance glances down to see his friends. Shiro looks like he's saying something, but the words fall on deaf ears.

Lance can't understand a word he's saying.

Perhaps that should have alarmed him, the fact that his friends were speaking in muted gibberish. But it doesn't. He just continues taking the stairs by two. At the top of the stairs is a hallway, a long one that curves at the end of Lance's line of sight. And all along the hallway walls are doors of every nature.

Some doors are tall enough to fit a bulldozer. Others barely big enough to fit a child. Some doors are wooden, some metal. Some look like they could collapse with a single touch, others aren't even doors at all. Those would include turnstiles, old western swing doors you see in the movies, a stack of streamers that shift with his footsteps.

Lance feels like he just walked into a weird version of Alice in Wonderland.

He isn't sure where he's going, or which door he should enter, so he just keeps walking. He doesn't stop until he hears Macaria whistle at him. Lance turns back to his friends, who are way too far behind him. They rush to him once he stops, and Keith starts mumbling that muted gibberish. He feels like he should know what Keith is trying to say but he doesn't. This is almost like when his family would speak Spanish around him just after the adoption.

His attention is pulled away once again by Macaria's sharp whistle.

Lance walks into a room, through a normal looking door and into an office like area. Macaria sits at a round table, the only furniture in the room other than the chairs. It makes him curious to where she got the cup of coffee. She's relaxed, twisting one of those golden locks around her finger.

Her sunglasses are pushed on top of her head, pushing back her hair to show a tattoo on the side of her neck. It looks like an oraborous, an intricate one that connects to another tattoo beneath her collar.

Lance takes a seat directly across from Macaria.

His friends are slow to enter the room, let alone sit down. And Shiro looks worried. Weird, that's Hunk's job. Lance's attention refocuses on Macaria at the sound of her cup being set down.

"No worries, we can talk in private now. Your friends can't understand a word we're saying." Macaria says. The end of her sentence curls, like it's just barely peeking into another language, except she didn't say anything in a different language. He just has the feeling like she did. Lance drags his eyes over to Shiro, who's muttering in gibberish again.

Shiro looks tense, his eyes begging Lance to listen to him. His mouth is moving again, and Lance vaguely recognizes the English word 'leave' forming on Shiro's lips. If he strained real hard, he could probably hear it too. Lance is caught in the realization of just how powerful Macaria is all over again.

Who is this woman?

******

This is done on my phone, and I can't sit at my computer to fix the links yet, so just bare with me!

Edit: Links are fixed!

******

(First)(Previous)(Next)(AU 1)(AU 2)(AO3)

[onlinequranschool-blog]

How to Learn Arabic Alphabet

Among the number of foreign languages that you can study, why should you learn Arabic? It is not an easy language to learn and has nothing in common with English. Therefore, a speaker of English will have a difficult time to learn it. But looking at the positive side, learning Arabic can offer several benefits.

If you think of the advantages of learning Arabic, the effort and time that you would dedicate to learn the language would all be worth it.

Arabic is a Southern-Central Semitic language. It is spoken in most parts of the Arabian Peninsula, parts of Middle East and North Africa. In these regions, the languages with the most number of speakers, in chronological order are Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Kurdish and Hebrew. These languages belong to different language families. Turkish is part of the Turkic family. The Indo-European language family is represented by Kurdish and Persian. Hebrew and Arabic belong to the Afro-Asiatic language family. Aside from these major languages, people in the Middle East speak around 20 minority languages.

Arabic is a macrolanguage that has 30 modern varieties or dialects. Literary Arabic, which is also called Standard Arabic or Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), is used today in formal speech and in writing in the Arab world while Classical Arabic was used in Islamic literature of the 7th to 9th centuries. It is the language of the Quran.

The basis of the Modern Standard Arabic is the classical version and the differences between the two are related to simplification and modernization in writing and speaking styles. The MSA is used in the modern versions of the Qur’an and the modern editions of the novels and poetries from the Abbasid and Umayyad periods.

Why Learn Arabic Language?

Arabic is the fourth most spoken language in the world. About 315 million people in 58 countries speak the Arabic as their first language…

Learning     Arabic will make you stand out, as there are very few people from the West     that speak Arabic. Having command of Arabic will make you appear clever     and sophisticated.

Learning     a language is learning about the culture of the country where the language     is spoken. Arab culture is rich and interesting. Learning the language     will enable you to read some of the famous classic literature. If you are     a fan of Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sindbad the Sailor, imagine reading the     many stories in The One Thousand and One Nights (Alf laylah wa laylah)     or the poems of Ḥāfeẓ and Ahmad Shawqi in their original versions.

You'll     be able to benefit economically. Natural resources abound in the Middle     East and speaking Arabic will open many job positions for you.

You'll     be able to experience true Arab hospitality. Arabs are very proud of their     language. Unlike the Germans who are not impressed when foreigners are     able to speak their language, the opposite is shown by Arabs. Once a     native speaker of Arabic hears a foreigner speak a few words in Arabic,     they would be very eager and happy to help you learn their language.

When     you learn Arabic you'll be able to appreciate the region's unique way of     life, cuisine, literature, music and art. You'll open the door to their     rich culture that is not often exposed to the Western world. You'll     appreciate their cultural practices and products and understand the values     that matter much to them, such as hospitality, dignity and honor.

You'll     be able to understand Islam better if you're able to read the     Qurʾān and understand its teachings.

You'll     have an edge over competition even if you are in the West. The demand for     people fluent in Arabic is quite high and only a few people from the West     attempt to learn Arabic. The     secret services in the U.S. need people who are fluent speakers of Arabic.     There are many businesses, including translating and interpreting that are     in need of Arabic speakers. Other fields that need Arabic speakers include     intelligence and foreign service, consulting, banking and finance,     education and journalism.

When     you know Arabic, you'll be able to have an easier time learning other     languages spoken in the region, such as Farsi or Persian, Turkish, Urdu     and even Hebrew. Most of the vocabularies of these languages are derived     from and similar to Arabic words so you will be able to quickly grasp the     semantic and grammatical concepts of the other languages.

Traveling     to the Middle East would be easier. A good number of Arabs are able to     speak English but the larger part of the population only uses Arabic as     their primary language. Even if you can only speak common words and phrases,     it is better to speak the local language. It would help you appreciate the     traditional villages and other points of interest.

If you     are an American, you might avail of the financial incentives the U.S.     government grants to people who are interested to learn Arabic. The     government has declared that Arabic is a language that has strategic     importance and the National Strategic Language Initiative promotes the     learning of several languages that are critical to the foreign policies     and relationships of the government. It provides learning opportunities     and scholarships for those interested to learn a critical language. The     support covers course from beginners to advanced levels, professional     development, teacher exchanges, opportunities for intensive instruction     and study abroad programs. You can check the scholarships available from     the Critical Language Scholarship Program, the Boren Awards of the     National Security Education Program and the Arabic Overseas Language     Flagship Program.

If you     are planning to join a trading firm, an import-export company or engage in     business yourself, many opportunities are available in the Arab nations.     Its population is growing and with a huge GDP, it is a prime market for     export of services and goods. Learning Arabic and the culture of the     people who speak the language will make it easier for you to negotiate and     conduct business.

Nations     that speak Arabic contributed significantly to global civilization. Many     Arabs contributed to the advancement of philosophy, medicine and science.     They have vast libraries that preserved the learnings from Byzantine,     Roman and Greek cultures. You can explore the world of architecture,     astrology, navigation, mathematics and literature in their first language.

Learning     Arabic can make you an ambassador for your home country. Many people in     the U.S. view Arabic speakers negatively because they only get to learn     about them from mass media and movies. The situation is the same in the     Arab world. If you are studying or working in the Middle East, you'll be     able to help break up the misconceptions the Arabs have about the     Americans and the United States.

You     gain vital language skills when you learn Arabic. It is easier to learn     French or Spanish and these languages will allow you to travel or work in     various countries, especially in Europe. However, you have more     competition because there are more learners and speakers of these     languages. If you learn Arabic, you are sure that there would be a great     demand for your language skills as the supply is scarce. Further, if you     learn Mandarin Chinese for example, your career focus would only be in a     few countries, whereas if you learn Arabic, your opportunities are wider     as the language is spoken in 58 countries.

How to Learn Arabic Language?

1- Decide which form of Arabic you want to learn

There are many types of Arabic. It is the mother tongue and official language of nearly 30 countries in the middle east and northern Africa. There are different accents and a variety of local pronunciations. If you’re planning to spend time in one area, you’ll want to choose the variation that pertains to that region.

One such example is Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, which is the most widespread regional Arabic dialect and is most often used in television and movies.

However, brand new students should also consider Modern Standard Arabic, the official language of 22 Arab countries and one of the official languages of the United Nations.

2- Start with the basics

It’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to learn Arabic by transcribing words instead of learning the Arabic alphabet first. Think about how we learned English back in school. First, you learn your letters, then you form those letters into words, then you learn how to form sentences, and then you learn more about proper syntax and grammar. Taking shortcuts will only slow you down.

3- Learn to use the Arabic dictionary

This task is not as easy as it sounds. In an Arabic dictionary, words are generally organized around three-letter roots. To look up a word, you need to know what the root is and what letter the root starts with – which is not necessarily the first letter in the word. Using the dictionary takes practice, but the sooner you learn it the better. It will make the entire process easier and more enjoyable.

4- Immerse yourself in study and practice

This is a critical step in learning any language, but doubly so when learning Arabic. The best way to learn a new word is to see it, hear it, write it and speak it, so combine those activities as much as you can.

One way for beginners to practice a foreign language is to watch children’s television programs in that language. The vocabulary is simpler, and the educational nature of those programs can be extremely helpful to new students of any age. As you gain proficiency, another tactic is to watch movies in the foreign language with English subtitles on. That way you gain a better “ear” for listening, and the subtitles give you the translation for what you’re hearing. Eventually, you’ll be able to switch off the subtitles and still understanding what is being said.

5- Speak the language

Seeing and hearing isn’t enough, however. It’s critical that you converse in Arabic with other people. It can be difficult to find a conversational partner if you’re not acquainted with native Arabic speakers. Thankfully, modern technology can do a lot to solve that problem.

There are many groups for students to learn Arabic online, and it’s become much easier to find tutors who will coach you and help you in your studies. Take advantage of these resources. The more you practice, the faster you will learn.

6- Never stop learning These steps are just the beginning. It’s easy to begin the journey of learning Arabic but challenging to see it through.

Mastering the Arabic language

will require years of study, but gaining conversation skills can come quickly if you dedicate yourself to the pursuit.

[click2watch]

EOS’ Grand Governance Experiment Has a New Enemy: China’s Great Firewall

Distributed though it may be, the EOS community has fought hard to remain united.

As of June, two rival groups were briefly in competition to launch the official EOS blockchain (or mainnet) using code released by the company behind the protocol, Block.One. The standoff was resolved, and the EOS community launched a unified network later that month.

However, in the time since, another rift has emerged, an East-West divide being made worse by a language barrier between Mandarin and English-speaking members, as well as differences in internet availability. Namely, Chinese internet controls – commonly known as the “Great Firewall” – make it difficult for those in China and the West to converse using the same platforms: Western EOS enthusiasts mostly gather on Telegram, while WeChat dominates in China.

The fact that two broadly separate conversations are happening in parallel has made it difficult for EOS to live up to its promise as a blockchain with built-in democratic governance. It’s also had tangible effects for EOS token holders, since some have had relatively easy access to dispute resolution, while others haven’t.

Dispute resolution emerged as an important theme early on in the network’s existence, as many community members had lost their private keys to scams and hacks. While the main arbitration body, the EOS Core Arbitration Forum (ECAF), was a source of confusion and controversy early on, it was at least able to keep some users with compromised addresses from having their tokens stolen.

In the West, at least.

Scammers and hackers targeted EOS users all over the world, but Chinese-speaking users were often unable to access ECAF’s service. None of its members spoke Mandarin, and since much of the conversation around arbitration had taken place on Telegram (and in English), many WeChat users weren’t aware that arbitration was even an option.

In recent weeks, however, the EOS community has begun to focus on bridging the East-West divide. A new organization, the EOS Mandarin Arbitration Community (EMAC) is working to increase Chinese speakers’ access to dispute resolution, and two of its members have joined ECAF.

“I do believe that the language barrier and cultural difference still exists,” an EMAC spokesperson told CoinDesk in a statement, adding:

“But with community collaboration I’m confident that they no longer pose as serious issue and we could eventually overcome them.”

An ‘official language of EOS’

In statements to CoinDesk – sent via WeChat – EMAC described English as “the ‘official language’ of EOS,” adding, “there is no doubt about that.”

Of course, EOS users speak a variety of languages, but several sources whose first language is not English said more or less the same thing: for the time being, fully participating in EOS requires English skills. (Indeed, aside from a few pleasantries, the conversations quoted here all took place in English.)

“We found it very difficult to find any information in Spanish,” a spokesperson for the block producer candidate EOS Argentina said of EOS’ early days. As for Portuguese-language content, Luiz Hadad EOS Rio, a Brazil-based block producer candidate, said it is “still very rare.”

Matías Romeo (left) and Jesús Chitty of EOS Argentina at a meet-up in Seoul. 

Korean is generally considered EOS’ third major language group. Even so, Orchid Kim, from the block producer candidate EOSYS, said “it has been a basic assumption that Korean community […] has to provide extra effort in various translations in order to be involved in the whole EOS community.”

For the most part, according to these block producers, the portions of Spanish, Portuguese and Korean-speaking communities that were interested in EOS spoke at least some English. (It would have been difficult to develop the interest otherwise.)

Today, all three block producers are involved with some sort of translation efforts, which they say are helping broaden their communities beyond English speakers.

Despite representing a Babel of world languages, then, the EOS community outside of China is participating in a more or less unified, English-dominated conversation. And while that conversation occurs on a gaggle of channels, most of those channels are at least on a single platform, Telegram.

The Great Firewall

While participating in this broader English-language conversation may be challenging for some parts of the community, for those in mainland China, it’s been extremely difficult.

“You can’t really access Telegram from inside China,” said former VP of product at Block.One, Thomas Cox, “so an entire swathe of our constituency was effectively frozen out. It wasn’t that we didn’t care, it’s that we didn’t know how to reach them very well.”

Moti Tabulo, head of ECAF, also noted the difficulties arising from Chinese internet controls. He pointed out that the use of a virtual private network (VPN) could allow access to Telegram.

Even so, Chinese users may be unwilling to stray far from their country’s dominant platform. As Stephen Zhang, an EMAC representative, said in an interview in August:

“WeChat is the tool in China. It’s not like Western social media network. They have Twitter, Facebook and different platforms to choose from, but in China WeChat is the communication tool.”

Importantly, though, the gulf between EOS’ Chinese and Western communities may have an additional dimension, besides language and choice of social media platform. As Tabulo noted, “the concepts can be difficult to translate.”

Amy Wan, founder and CEO of the blockchain startup Sagewise, recently gave an example of this sort of difficulty, though she didn’t reference EOS specifically: “I laugh when Westerners argue about decentralization. Only a few people in the world really control bitcoin, [ethereum], etc., and they’re all in China and don’t give a damn about decentralization.”

To make matters worse, a recent scandal has thrown fuel on these simmering cultural differences. An anonymous Twitter account recently posted unverified allegations – originating on WeChat – of “collusion, mutual voting and pay-offs that occur amongst the Chinese BP community” (block producers or BPs are elected by EOS token holders and fulfill a role similar to that of miners in bitcoin).

As CoinDesk reported, some people on the English-speaking, Telegram-using side of the community vowed to stop voting for China-based block producers entirely in the wake of these allegations. And in China, “most people are mad with this activity if it is true and the discussion of how to prevent it is very enthusiastic,” said EOS Beijing’s co-founder, who goes by Sven.

The incident points to the difficulty of building a governed blockchain that spans linguistic and cultural divides. There is an ongoing debate regarding the rules or “constitution” the EOS community should abide by, but it has so far occurred almost exclusively in English and on Telegram.

And of course, as mentioned above, hacks and scams have hit the Chinese EOS community harder than others because, according to EMAC, “very few of Mandarin token-holders are fluent in English to feel confident to directly communicate and interact with ECAF.”

Looking up

The situation appears to be improving, though.

Micheal Yeung of EOS Pacific, a block producer candidate, and others founded EMAC to “promote governance awareness among Mandarin community members and facilitate collaboration between Mandarin and non-Mandarin communities in governance and arbitration,” according to EMAC’s statement.

Michael Yeung, EMAC’s first chairman, who stepped down in July (center). Image via EOS Pacific.

The job has been difficult. In July the organization stopped providing direct help to victims of token theft after some of the victims began harassing EMAC volunteers, threatening them and exposing their private information.

Today, the organization focuses on providing the Chinese-speaking community with “education and training” on governance in EOS. In addition, two members of EMAC, Stephan Zhang and Siqi Yao, have joined ECAF, meaning EOS’ main arbitration body no longer lacks Mandarin speakers.

Meanwhile, another new organization, EOS Alliance, is hosting calls in Mandarin on arbitration and other topics, in particular the constitution. It is coordinating translations of governance-related documents to Mandarin, as well as working to reduce tensions. For example, it issued a statement on Chinese BPs’ alleged vote-buying that warned against “creat[ing] a sense that Chinese token holders or BPs are being unfairly picked on.”

Wan of Sagewise has joined EOS Alliance as the head of a working group on dispute resolution and arbitration. She told CoinDesk, “ever since connecting with [EMAC], we’ve been trying to collaborate and work with them in terms of bridging the divide and not having two discussions but one large, global discussion.”

Cox, who is serving as interim executive director of EOS Alliance and an adviser to EMAC, told CoinDesk that the situation is improving rapidly:

“I would say that as of a month ago there was a lot of sense of separation. I would say by now anybody who feels that there’s an unbridgeable divide probably was on vacation for four or five weeks.”

Still, he added, the attempt to unite the EOS community and keep it united is “an enormous undertaking.” EMAC echoed that sentiment, saying, “there is a long way ahead of us.”

Of course, EOS is far from the only project to face an East-West divide. As Wan alluded to, there is a prevalent perception that the bitcoin network is controlled by Chinese miners, which often generates resentment in the West.

In other cases, there’s an explicit assumption that the West needs one solution, while China needs its own: the smart contract platform Neo is often referred to as “China’s ethereum.” Nor is that phenomenon limited to crypto: the West has Google, China has Baidu; the West has Amazon, China has Alibaba.

Sven underscored this point when he told CoinDesk that while EOS suffered from a gulf between East and West, “this is not the problem of EOS, it is the problem of the world.”

Image via EOS Argentina

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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More Details Here → https://click2.watch/eos-grand-governance-experiment-has-a-new-enemy-chinas-great-firewall-3

[morocco2018-blog]

Country Report

The enchanting land of Morocco is a country full of wonders. It is located in North Africa. It spans from the Mediterranean Sea and across it Spain as well as the Atlantic Ocean to the north and the west. In the center of the nation are the Atlas Mountains that stretch from the central north to southwest. To the north of the Atlas Mountains, there are the Rif Mountains; it is also the highest mountain in North Africa and to the south the Sahara Desert. Morocco’s bordering country is Algeria to the east and south by the Western Sahara, which is a territory, claimed by Morocco. The cities and villages include some of the oldest Moorish architecture and are abundant with rich history, in terms of traditions, culture, religion, and geography. Most Moroccans are of Arab and Spanish ancestry. Spaniards lived in what is now known as Morocco around 3,000 years ago. Arabs began to move into the area in the 600's. Over the years, the two groups intermarried. The culture of Morocco mirrors Berber and Arab influences represented by its population. A third of the population speaks in Amazigh language following Arabic and French. Morocco’s two official languages are Modern Standard Arabic and Amazigh. French is Morocco’s unofficial second language. Morocco’s culture is very similar to Jordan’s both being monarchs and progressive Sunni Muslim countries.

Morocco is a constitutional monarchy headed by a king. Its Constitution gives the king broad powers. Members of the Alaouite dynasty have ruled Morocco monarchy. Morocco’s system it is an ancient one that dates back to the 17thcentury. It is believed that the royal family is direct descents of the Prophet Muhammad.  For centuries, Islam has been a major force that Moroccan monarchs have used to legitimize their authority. Mohammed VI the current monarch continues to modernize the country while preserving its heritage. The government also consists of a Prime Minister and Cabinet, which are officially appointed by the King, but the government’s program must be approved by a majority vote of the Chamber of Deputies. The Moroccan political arrangement places the king above all other branches of government, with unlimited political powers anchored in Islam. Rabat is the capital of Morocco, it rests along the shores of the Bouregreg River and the Atlantic Ocean. In addition, Morocco has a large number of important cities such as Casablanca, Fez, and Tangier. The Atlantic port of Casablanca is the largest one in the country.Morocco’s rich history dates back to 2001 BC when Neolithic hunters and herders occupied the region. The most significant moments in history happened in7thand 8thCentury AD when the Arab invasion of North Africa took place and the foundation of the first major Muslim dynasty. In 1904 zones of influence were carved out between France and Spain. By 1912Treaty of Fez established Morocco as a French colony and by 1956 Morocco gained its independence from France, while Spain still maintains two coastal areas.In1961 King Hassan II came to power, following the death of King Mohammed. 1963 Morocco held its first general elections in a failed attempt to depose of a monarchy and establish a republic. In 1976 Moroccan and Algerian troops clashed in Western Sahara causing a full-blown war. Algeria formed the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) with a government-in-exile. Morocco and Mauritania divide-up Western Sahara.By 1991The UN stepped in and declared a cease-fire. In 2003 more than 40 were killed when suicide bombers attacked multiple sites across Casablanca. In 2004 more than 500 were killed in a shattering earthquake in Northern Morocco. 2011Arab Spring protests spread across major cities in Morocco, finally causing King Mohammed to reform the constitution. Morocco’s rich history is visible through their architecture which is heavily is influenced by Islam, North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, a combination of these two influencers and can found throughout the country. Islam influence can be seen in the elaborate geometric patterns, ornamental Islamic calligraphy, and colorful ceramic tile mosaic. Hispano-Moorish North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula can be seen in their sharp white walls, stucco roofs among the arches and large domes. A blend of these two has created exceptional architecture.

Islam is Morocco's official religion. Morocco being a predominantly Muslim country the gender roles are very evident. The father traditionally heads the family whose decisions are indisputable and, in the case of his absence, the elder son is always there to take over. Islamic teachings regulate family and community life. Morocco is a very conservative culture this is evident in the way Moroccans greet each other.Moroccans typically greet with a handshake and sometimes two kisses (starting with the left cheek) but this only occurs when the two people greeting are of the same sex. All gestures should be done with your right hand. The left hand is considered impure and is saved for bathroom duties and cleaning chores. The dress code is also conservative. The traditional clothing is an aspect that has been influenced by the diverse cultural heritage. Traditional clothing for women and men consists of long flowing robes or headscarves and traditional slippers. Moroccan Cuisine is a mix of Arabic, Andalusia, Berber, and Mediterranean cuisine making it some of the most unique and diverse in the world due to its extremely rich flavors. The basis of Moroccans’ diet consists of barley and wheat form. The national dish is couscous. It consists of steamed wheat served with vegetables, fish or meat, and sauce.

Moroccans take pride in their film industry as they have an abundance of well-mastered movies. One of the most famous films is Wechma. Directed by a Moroccan. Wechmatranslates to Traces in English. The movie is a sad tale of Messaoud, a young rebellious troubled boy. He leads a life of crime that eventually ends in disaster. Critics agree that this important film marks the beginning of a modern cinematography in Morocco. In addition to the film industry, Morocco owns many key media outlets, including radio and television. Their most popular television stations are Medi 1 TV and 2M TV. As for radio stations, Aswat and Chada FM both play a variety of Arabic hits. Newspapers are primarily published in Arabic and French; the most known one is Al Maghrib, which was established in 1886.

The information I have learned from studying this fascinating country has inspired me to visit this country is its unique architecture and charming beauty. Along with its diverse culture and welcoming people. The media I have gathered has informed me that women are expected to dress conservatively, being it is a predominantly Muslim country it is important to respect their culture. Fridays are their holy days so a majority of shops and business will be closed on Friday. It is essential to carry cash very few places aside from larger supermarkets accept cards. I plan to research more on the country. There is still so much to be known about the place. I would like to watch more documentaries and informative videos to better prepare me for the journey ahead

[click2watch]

EOS’ Grand Governance Experiment Has a New Enemy: China’s Great Firewall

Distributed though it may be, the EOS community has fought hard to remain united.

As of June, two rival groups were briefly in competition to launch the official EOS blockchain (or mainnet) using code released by the company behind the protocol, Block.One. The standoff was resolved, and the EOS community launched a unified network later that month.

However, in the time since, another rift has emerged, an East-West divide being made worse by a language barrier between Mandarin and English-speaking members, as well as differences in internet availability. Namely, Chinese internet controls – commonly known as the “Great Firewall” – make it difficult for those in China and the West to converse using the same platforms: Western EOS enthusiasts mostly gather on Telegram, while WeChat dominates in China.

The fact that two broadly separate conversations are happening in parallel has made it difficult for EOS to live up to its promise as a blockchain with built-in democratic governance. It’s also had tangible effects for EOS token holders, since some have had relatively easy access to dispute resolution, while others haven’t.

Dispute resolution emerged as an important theme early on in the network’s existence, as many community members had lost their private keys to scams and hacks. While the main arbitration body, the EOS Core Arbitration Forum (ECAF), was a source of confusion and controversy early on, it was at least able to keep some users with compromised addresses from having their tokens stolen.

In the West, at least.

Scammers and hackers targeted EOS users all over the world, but Chinese-speaking users were often unable to access ECAF’s service. None of its members spoke Mandarin, and since much of the conversation around arbitration had taken place on Telegram (and in English), many WeChat users weren’t aware that arbitration was even an option.

In recent weeks, however, the EOS community has begun to focus on bridging the East-West divide. A new organization, the EOS Mandarin Arbitration Community (EMAC) is working to increase Chinese speakers’ access to dispute resolution, and two of its members have joined ECAF.

“I do believe that the language barrier and cultural difference still exists,” an EMAC spokesperson told CoinDesk in a statement, adding:

“But with community collaboration I’m confident that they no longer pose as serious issue and we could eventually overcome them.”

An ‘official language of EOS’

In statements to CoinDesk – sent via WeChat – EMAC described English as “the ‘official language’ of EOS,” adding, “there is no doubt about that.”

Of course, EOS users speak a variety of languages, but several sources whose first language is not English said more or less the same thing: for the time being, fully participating in EOS requires English skills. (Indeed, aside from a few pleasantries, the conversations quoted here all took place in English.)

“We found it very difficult to find any information in Spanish,” a spokesperson for the block producer candidate EOS Argentina said of EOS’ early days. As for Portuguese-language content, Luiz Hadad EOS Rio, a Brazil-based block producer candidate, said it is “still very rare.”

Matías Romeo (left) and Jesús Chitty of EOS Argentina at a meet-up in Seoul. Image via EOS Argentina.

Korean is generally considered EOS’ third major language group. Even so, Orchid Kim, from the block producer candidate EOSYS, said “it has been a basic assumption that Korean community […] has to provide extra effort in various translations in order to be involved in the whole EOS community.”

For the most part, according to these block producers, the portions of Spanish, Portuguese and Korean-speaking communities that were interested in EOS spoke at least some English. (It would have been difficult to develop the interest otherwise.)

Today, all three block producers are involved with some sort of translation efforts, which they say are helping broaden their communities beyond English speakers.

Despite representing a Babel of world languages, then, the EOS community outside of China is participating in a more or less unified, English-dominated conversation. And while that conversation occurs on a gaggle of channels, most of those channels are at least on a single platform, Telegram.

The Great Firewall

While participating in this broader English-language conversation may be challenging for some parts of the community, for those in mainland China, it’s been extremely difficult.

“You can’t really access Telegram from inside China,” said former VP of product at Block.One, Thomas Cox, “so an entire swathe of our constituency was effectively frozen out. It wasn’t that we didn’t care, it’s that we didn’t know how to reach them very well.”

Moti Tabulo, head of ECAF, also noted the difficulties arising from Chinese internet controls. He pointed out that the use of a virtual private network (VPN) could allow access to Telegram.

Even so, Chinese users may be unwilling to stray far from their country’s dominant platform. As Stephen Zhang, an EMAC representative, said in an interview in August:

“WeChat is the tool in China. It’s not like Western social media network. They have Twitter, Facebook and different platforms to choose from, but in China WeChat is the communication tool.”

Importantly, though, the gulf between EOS’ Chinese and Western communities may have an additional dimension, besides language and choice of social media platform. As Tabulo noted, “the concepts can be difficult to translate.”

Amy Wan, founder and CEO of the blockchain startup Sagewise, recently gave an example of this sort of difficulty, though she didn’t reference EOS specifically: “I laugh when Westerners argue about decentralization. Only a few people in the world really control bitcoin, [ethereum], etc., and they’re all in China and don’t give a damn about decentralization.”

To make matters worse, a recent scandal has thrown fuel on these simmering cultural differences. An anonymous Twitter account recently posted unverified allegations – originating on WeChat – of “collusion, mutual voting and pay-offs that occur amongst the Chinese BP community” (block producers or BPs are elected by EOS token holders and fulfill a role similar to that of miners in bitcoin).

As CoinDesk reported, some people on the English-speaking, Telegram-using side of the community vowed to stop voting for China-based block producers entirely in the wake of these allegations. And in China, “most people are mad with this activity if it is true and the discussion of how to prevent it is very enthusiastic,” said EOS Beijing’s co-founder, who goes by Sven.

The incident points to the difficulty of building a governed blockchain that spans linguistic and cultural divides. There is an ongoing debate regarding the rules or “constitution” the EOS community should abide by, but it has so far occurred almost exclusively in English and on Telegram.

And of course, as mentioned above, hacks and scams have hit the Chinese EOS community harder than others because, according to EMAC, “very few of Mandarin token-holders are fluent in English to feel confident to directly communicate and interact with ECAF.”

Looking up

The situation appears to be improving, though.

Micheal Yeung of EOS Pacific, a block producer candidate, and others founded EMAC to “promote governance awareness among Mandarin community members and facilitate collaboration between Mandarin and non-Mandarin communities in governance and arbitration,” according to EMAC’s statement.

Michael Yeung, EMAC’s first chairman, who stepped down in July (center). Image via EOS Pacific.

The job has been difficult. In July the organization stopped providing direct help to victims of token theft after some of the victims began harassing EMAC volunteers, threatening them and exposing their private information.

Today, the organization focuses on providing the Chinese-speaking community with “education and training” on governance in EOS. In addition, two members of EMAC, Stephan Zhang and Siqi Yao, have joined ECAF, meaning EOS’ main arbitration body no longer lacks Mandarin speakers.

Meanwhile, another new organization, EOS Alliance, is hosting calls in Mandarin on arbitration and other topics, in particular the constitution. It is coordinating translations of governance-related documents to Mandarin, as well as working to reduce tensions. For example, it issued a statement on Chinese BPs’ alleged vote-buying that warned against “creat[ing] a sense that Chinese token holders or BPs are being unfairly picked on.”

Wan of Sagewise has joined EOS Alliance as the head of a working group on dispute resolution and arbitration. She told CoinDesk, “ever since connecting with [EMAC], we’ve been trying to collaborate and work with them in terms of bridging the divide and not having two discussions but one large, global discussion.”

Cox, who is serving as interim executive director of EOS Alliance and an adviser to EMAC, told CoinDesk that the situation is improving rapidly:

“I would say that as of a month ago there was a lot of sense of separation. I would say by now anybody who feels that there’s an unbridgeable divide probably was on vacation for four or five weeks.”

Still, he added, the attempt to unite the EOS community and keep it united is “an enormous undertaking.” EMAC echoed that sentiment, saying, “there is a long way ahead of us.”

Of course, EOS is far from the only project to face an East-West divide. As Wan alluded to, there is a prevalent perception that the bitcoin network is controlled by Chinese miners, which often generates resentment in the West.

In other cases, there’s an explicit assumption that the West needs one solution, while China needs its own: the smart contract platform Neo is often referred to as “China’s ethereum.” Nor is that phenomenon limited to crypto: the West has Google, China has Baidu; the West has Amazon, China has Alibaba.

Sven underscored this point when he told CoinDesk that while EOS suffered from a gulf between East and West, “this is not the problem of EOS, it is the problem of the world.”

Chinese gate image via Shutterstock

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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