US Air Strike Kills 85 Civilians

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

We intervened without hesitation in Libya and the place is now a dump, its people crossing over to Europe by the literal boatload. I've come to the conclusion that Muslim countries tend towards Islamism. Any liberal democracy will only be temporary before Islamism reasserts itself. Dictatorship is the longest lasting barrier to Islamism.

I have found myself questioning if our constitutional arrangments and forms of government is even transferable to those without a specific historical and cultural imperitive to maintain it.

Can democracy really be sustained by a people lacking at least some history of self instigated revolution?

It can be argued, and we'll never know, that things would be even worse in Libya if we had not intervened and they'd be better is we'd intervened under the same circumstances in Syria. Muslims will never accept the merits of democracy so long as they see democratically run counties in Europe and the Anglosphere acting in a way they consider two-faced and mercenary.

If we want to spread democracy we have to commit to it - if we don't we might as well do what Israel does and bombs any country to pieces if it looks at us funny.

As soon as a word is borrowed from one language to another it starts to assimilate in spelling, morphology, pronunciation and meaning. It may go all the way in all aspects or only in one of them. Since the word in question is an English word, it is useless to refer to Spanish any more. So IN ENGLISH guerilla and gorilla are homophones thus pronounced identically.

You're right about the way it's pronounced, it's pretentious to try to pronounce is in a Spanish accent unless you actually speak fluent Spanish.

They aren't exactly homophone though because guerrilla and gorilla are pronounced with different vowel sounds in the syllable.

[Gilrandir]

They aren't exactly homophone though because guerrilla and gorilla are pronounced with different vowel sounds in the syllable.

Pronunciation (and transcription) of both:
http://nordmine.ru/dic/guerilla

http://wooordhunt.ru/word/gorilla

They ARE homophones. If you mean the first syllable: almost any unstressed vowel in English either becomes a schwa or an /i/. In both words in question it is schwa.

[Husar]

Pronunciation (and transcription) of both:
http://nordmine.ru/dic/guerilla

http://wooordhunt.ru/word/gorilla

They ARE homophones. If you mean the first syllable: almost any unstressed vowel in English either becomes a schwa or an /i/. In both words in question it is schwa.

Heresy!

In German we also call the Belgian city of Liège Lüttich, even though it's not hard to say Liège.
This could all have been solved with Esperanto, or was it Espresso?...