WSJ Versus Euskara

The saga continues, this is the must recent installment of the smear campaign against euskera by Rupert Murdoch, Jose Maria Aznar and their underling Keith Johnson.

It appeared at EITb:

Life

Controversial article

Face to face between Eusko Ikaskuntza and Wall Street Journal

01/11/2008

On November 6th, 2007, the American edition of the Wall Street Journal published in the front page the article "Basque Inquisition: How Do You Say Shepherd in Euskera" provoking Basque people’s indignation and answer.

On November 6th, 2007, the American edition of the Wall Street Journal published in the front page the article "Basque Inquisition: How Do You Say Shepherd in Euskera?" provoking Basque people’s indignation and Basque Government’s formal answer.

At thousands of kilometers far from the Basque Country, in New York, representatives of Eusko Ikaskuntza and Wall Street Journal’s assistant director will meet as it was expected.

In the last months they had a pending conversation about the controversial article that journalist Keith Johnson published in this diary about Basque language, a language that among some other adjectives he called “backward”, “rural” and “without any adapting possibilities”.

The article and its content were broadly spread by Basque media and from the first day, Basque internauts sent complain messages to the author, who realizing about the amount of received e-mails, decided to reply the readers stating that his intention “was never denigrate Basque language” and that he was sorry “about any offense he could have done to Basque speakers”.

That same day, Basque Government sent a complain letter to the newspaper and some days after, 180 high public figures from several fields and countries also sent a similar protest letter.

To finish with, Eusko Ikaskuntza gave 17.000 collected signatures in a campaign made on the web against the article too.

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