Ancient Greek civilization, also commonly called Ancient Greece, was a large area, mostly along the northeast shore of the Mediterranean Sea, where people spoke the Greek language. The area was much larger than today's country of Greece. The Greek civilization thrived from the archaic period of the 8th to the 6th centuries BC to 146 BC. The period ended with the Roman conquest of Greece at the Battle of Corinth.

For most of the time, the Greeks did not have one government or ruler although they had a common language and culture. Greek is an Indo-European language.

There were many city-states, each with its own constitution. Athens, Sparta and Corinth were powerful city-states. Some had kings, and others, like Athens, had a form of democracy. As time went on, the most powerful city-states collected others into groups known as "leagues". That applied to many of the Greek colonies in Asia Minor, most of which had close ties to one or to another of the three biggest cities.

In the middle of the period, Classical Greece flourished during the 5th to 4th centuries BC. Athenian leadership repelled the threat of Persian invasion during the Greco-Persian Wars. The Athenian Golden Age ended with the defeat of Athens at the hands of Sparta in the Peloponnesian War in 345 BC.

In the last period, Greece was unified by the conquests of Alexander the Great. The city-states continued under the overall influence of Macedonia during the Hellenistic Period.

Greek culture had some influence on the Roman Empire, the main power of the Ancient World. That made classical Greece part of the foundation of Western civilization. Greek was also the language of the Byzantine Empire.

Timeline of Greek history

The history of Ancient Greece went through several stages:
Mycenaean culture (c.1600–c.1100 BC) was an early Greek culture during the Bronze Age on the Greek mainland and on Crete.
The Bronze Age collapse, or the Greek Dark Ages (c.1100–c.750 BC).
 The Archaic period (c.750–c.500 BC) had Artists make larger free-standing sculptures in stiff poses with the dreamlike "archaic smile". The period ends with the overthrow of the last tyrant of Athens in 510 BC.
 The Classical period (c.500–323 BC) had an artistic style that was considered by later observers to be an outstanding example such as the Parthenon. Politically, the classical period was dominated by Athens and the Delian League during the 5th century. They were displaced by Spartan hegemony during the early 4th century. Finally, there was the League of Corinth, which was led by Macedon.

 The Hellenistic period (323–146 BC) had Greek culture (Hellenistic art) and power expand into the Near and the Middle East. This period begins with the death of Alexander and ends with the Roman conquest.
Roman Greece was between the Roman victory at the Battle of Corinth in 146 BC and the establishment of Byzantium by Constantine as the capital of the Roman Empire in 330 AD.
The final phase of antiquity is the period of Christianization during the later 4th to the early 6th centuries and ended with the closure of the later version of Plato's Academy by Justinian I in 529 AD.

Early history

Literacy
In the 8th century B.C., the Greeks learned how to read and write a second time. They had lost literacy at the end of the Mycenaean culture, as the Mediterranean world fell into the Dark Ages. The Greek Dark Ages (~1100 BC–750 BC), also called the Bronze Age collapse, is a period in the history of Ancient Greece and Anatolia for which there are no written records and few archaeological remains.

The Greeks learned about the alphabet from another ancient people, the Phoenicians. They made some adjustments to it. In particular, the Greeks introduced regular letters for vowels, which were more important in their language. Their alphabet was, in turn, modified by the Etruscans and then the Romans, and much of the world now uses the Roman alphabet.

Political structure
Ancient Greece had one language and culture but was not unified until 337 BC, when Macedonia defeated Athens and Thebes. That marked the end of the Classical period and the start of the Hellenistic period. Even then, the conquered cities were merely joined to Philip II of Macedon's Corinthian League, were not occupied and ruled themselves.

City-states in Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece consisted of several hundred more or less independent city states. That was different from other societies, which were either tribal or kingdoms that ruled over relatively large territories.

The geography of Greece, which is divided and sub-divided by hills, mountains and rivers, certainly contributed to the nature of ancient Greece. On the one hand, the ancient Greeks had no doubt that they were "one people" since they had the same religion, same basic culture, and same language. However, each city-state, or polis, was independent; unification was something rarely discussed by the ancient Greeks. Even during the second Persian invasion of Greece, although a group of city-states allied themselves to defend Greece, most poleis remained neutral, and after the Persian defeat, the allies quickly returned to infighting.

The major features of the Ancient Greek political system were:
Its fragmentary nature since there was not one country but many little countries, called city-states.
The focus on cities in tiny states.
The colonies that they set up around the Mediterranean were independent of the founding city but were sympathetic to their mother city.
Conquest or direct rule by another city-state was quite rare.
The cities grouped themselves into leagues, and members sometimes quit one league and joined another.

Later, during the Classical period, the leagues were fewer and larger, and dominated by one city (particularly Athens, Sparta and Thebes). Often cities would be forced to join under threat of war or as part of a peace treaty. After Philip II had conquered the heartlands of ancient Greece, he did not try to annex the territory or unify it into a new province. However, he forced most of the cities to join his own Corinthian League.

Kingdoms
Some city-states were democratic, some were aristocratic and some were monarchies. Some had many revolutions in which one kind of government replaced another. One famous Greek kingdom is Macedon, which became briefly the largest empire that the world had seen at the time by conquering the Persian Empire (including ancient Egypt) and reaching India. Other famous kingdoms are Epirus and Thessaly.

Monarchies in ancient Greece were not absolute because there was usually a council of older citizens (the Senate or, in Macedonia, the Congress) who gave advice to the King. These men were not elected or chosen in a lottery, unlike in the democratic city-states.

Citizens
Citizens who could participate in government in ancient Greece were usually men who were free-born in that city. Women, slaves and (usually) residents who were born elsewhere did not have the right to vote. The details differed by city-state.

For example, in Athens, the residents of Athens were of three groups: citizens, metics (resident aliens) and slaves. Citizens were residents whose ancestors had been Athenians for three generations. Male citizens had the rights of free men and could be chosen to fulfill any official state position. "Of the estimated 150,000 residents of the city-state of Attica, only about one fifth held the privilege of citizenship". Women who were citizens in Athens could not participate in political offices, but in Sparta they could.

Colonies

The number of Greeks grew, and soon, not enough food could be grown for all of the people. When that happened, a city-state would send people off to start a new one, known as a colony.

Because the terrain was rough, most travel was by sea. For that reason, many new cities were established along the coastline. First new cities were started in Anatolia (Asia Minor) and later along the Black Sea, in Cyprus, in southern Italy, in Sicily and around what is now Benghazi in Libya. They even started a city, Naucratis, on the river Nile, in Egypt. Today's Syracuse, Naples, Marseille and Istanbul started as the Greek cities Syracusa, Neapolis, Massilia and Byzantium.

The big four
By the 6th century BC, some city-states became much more important than the others: Corinth, Thebes, Sparta and Athens.

The Spartans were very well-disciplined soldiers. They defeated the people who lived near them, who had to farm the land for the Spartans. These helots had to give the Spartans part of the food that they grew and so the Spartans did not have to work. Instead, they learned how to be better soldiers. There were not many Spartans, but there were many helots. Spartan military strength controlled the helots. The Spartans had two hereditary kings who led them in war. At home they were also ruled by a group of old men, called the Gerousia (Senate).

Athens became a democracy in 510 BC. The men came to a place in the centre of the city and decided what to do. It was the first place in the world in which the people decided what their country should do. They would talk and then vote on what to do at the Boule (Council). However, the women and the slaves did not vote. The slaves were owned by their masters and could be sold to someone else. The Athenian slaves were less free than the Spartan helots were. Every year, Athenian citizens elected eight strategoi (generals), who led them in war.

Greco-Persian Wars

In 499 BC, the Greek city-states in Anatolia rebelled because did not want Persia to rule them anymore. Athens sent 20 ships to fight the Persians on the sea. The Greeks in Anatolia were defeated. Persian King Darius I decided to punish Athens. He sent soldiers and ships to fight Athens.

Athens asked for help from Sparta, which was unable to because it then had a religious festival. Athens sent its own soldiers against the Persian soldiers and at the Battle of Marathon (490 BC) defeated the Persians. Help from Sparta then came.

At the Battle of Thermopylae, the Spartans were led by Leonidas and resisted the huge Persian army. After a couple of days, a traitor, Ephialtes, led the Persians around the pass behind the Greek army. Realising that defeat was inevitable, Leonidas released many of his men. Those who stayed knew that it would be a fight to the death. Leonides kept elite hoplites (foot soldiers) who had living sons at home. Some Thespians and Thebans who volunteered to stay.

On the third day, Leonidas led his 300 Spartan hoplites and their allies against Xerxes I and his mighty army. The Spartan-led forces fought the Persian force to their deaths to block the pass long enough to keep Xerxes and his army occupied while the rest of the Greek army escaped.

After Thermopylae, many Greeks wanted to go south to the Peloponnese. Because the Isthmus of Corinth, the way into the Peloponnese, is very narrow, many of them wanted to fight the Persians there.

Athens is north of Corinth and had a navy. The Athenian leader Themistocles wanted to fight the Persians by the island of Salamis. Xerxes decided to send his fleet against the Greek fleet before the Greek ships could go to the Peloponnese. The Greek fleet defeated the Persians at the Battle of Salamis. Xerxes then went home with many of his soldiers, but a Persian army stayed in Greece. It was defeated at the Battle of Platea in 479 BC.

Peloponnesian War
After the Persians' defeat at Platea, the Spartans did very little. However, Persia was still dangerous. Athens asked the Greek city-states on the islands in the Aegean and in Anatolia to join it. They agreed because they were afraid of Persia and formed the Delian League and Athens was their leader. Many of the city-states of the Delian League had to pay Athens tribute money. Athens used it to build many ships and the Parthenon. During the Peloponnesian War, Sparta was still strong on land, but Athens was stronger on the sea. Several times, there was war between Athens and Sparta. Athens then decided to send many ships to Sicily to Syracuse.  Sparta sent help to Syracuse, and Athens was defeated. None of the Athenian ships came back.

Sparta now wanted to build ships to fight Athens. It took a long time for Sparta to defeat Athens, but at the Battle of Aegospotami, the Spartans destroyed most of Athens's ships. The Athenians used advanced ships, called triremes, which had their combat systems and were propelled by oarsmen. On the front of the trireme was a large bronze battering ram. The oarsmen would row the trireme at an enemy boat and ram a hole into its hull. This was the most effective way for the trireme to destroy other boats. The hoplites on the trireme would board the enemy ship and capture it. However, the Athenian fleet of triremes was destroyed in a battle in 405 BC. Athens surrendered the following year and the war was over. Athens never recovered its previous domination.

Daily life
Men, when they were not working, fighting or discussing politics, could at festive times go to watch dramas, comedies or tragedies. Ancient Greek theatre often involved politics and the gods of Greek mythology. Women were not allowed to perform in the theatre and so male actors played female roles.

Women did domestic work, such as spinning, weaving, cleaning and cooking. They were not involved in public life or politics. Those from rich families, however, had slaves to carry out domestic work for them.

Ecumene
The ecumene (US) or oecumene (UK) is an ancient Greek term for the known world. In antiquity, it was the parts of the world known to Greek geographers, which was basically the Mediterranean world. Europe, Asia and Africa (north of the Atlas mountains and Egypt). The Greeks were well aware of the Persian Empire, and Alexander the Great's army got as far as parts of what is now Pakistan.

Under the Roman Empire, the term came to mean civilisation itself, which was wider than the Greeks had supposed.

Games
The famous Olympic Games were held at Olympia every four years. They were for men only, and women were not allowed to attend, even as spectators. The sports included running, javelin throwing, discus throwing and wrestling. The games were unusual because the athletes could come from any Greek city-state.

Another competition, the Heraean Games, was held for women and was also held at Olympus at a different time from the men's event.

The rules for girls in Sparta were different from other city-states. They were trained in the same events as boys because Spartans believed that strong women would produce strong babies, who would become future warriors. Their girl athletes were unmarried and competed while they were nude or wore short dresses. Boys were allowed to watch the athletes in the hope of creating marriages and offspring.

Later, during the classical period, girls could compete in the same festivals as males.

Refer

More reading
Pickering, David 2007. Ancient Greece. Collins.

Other websites

 Ancient Greece — links for Middle School students from Courtenay Middle School
 http://www.ancientgreece.com/s/Life/

Ancient Greece


In Object-oriented programming, an object is an instance of a Class. Objects are abstractly a collection of fields. Fields are like variables, with a name and a value. Fields can also be named functions, these fields are called methods. Fields are usually private, i.e. not visible outside the object. Instead private data is changed by using an interface, i.e. a bunch of methods.

Suppose there is a bank account; this bank account has a current balance, but it also has a history of things that were done. However these fields are private. Rather there are methods like deposit() and withdraw() and checkBalance(). Most applications (and other objects) only change this object through this interface.

Banks usually impose a credit limit. Suppose, there are 1000 dollars on the account. If the client does not have a special agreement with the bank, he cannot take out more money than there is on the account; so he can withdraw() a maximum of 1000 dollars. He might have an agreement with the bank, so he can borrow money from the bank (but has to pay a fee). In that case, he might be able to withdraw 1500 dollars (or 2000 dollars). So the withdraw method has to do a lot of checks as described above.
The account manager might see the account differently, she might have methods to set the maximum amount that can be taken out of the account, or to set the fee or interest rate that the customer has to pay for the money to be borrowed.

As an object is an instance of a class; it has certain things from that class. It can perhaps be compared to other objects of that class. Two apples, one red and bigger, the other green and smaller. On the other hand: It is not that easy to compare different objects. A green apple does not have much in common with a steel wrench.

Related pages
 Class (programming)

Other websites
 The Java Tutorials: Object-oriented programming concepts

Object-oriented programming

Object (computer science)


Lawrence Eisenberg (December 21, 1919 – December 25, 2018) was an American biomedical engineer and science fiction writer. He is best known for his short story "What Happened to Auguste Clarot?", published in Harlan Ellison's anthology Dangerous Visions. Eisenberg's stories have also been printed in a number of leading science fiction magazines, including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, and Asimov's Science Fiction. His stories have been reprinted in anthologies such as Great Science Fiction of the 20th Century, The 10th Annual of the Year's Best S-F, and Great Science Fiction By the World's Great Scientists. He is also known for the limericks he posted in the comments sections of various articles in The New York Times.

Life
Eisenberg was born in New York City in 1919 to Sidney Eisenberg, a furniture salesman, and Yetta Yellen, and grew up in the Bronx during the Great Depression. Eisenberg graduated from James Monroe High School in the Bronx, then attended City College of New York before going to Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where he received his Ph.D. in Electronics.  After serving as a radar operator in the Army Air Forces during World War II, Eisenberg married Frances Brenner, a political scientist and social worker, in 1950; she died in 2017. They had one daughter and one son. The couple had lived for many years on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but by the time of Eisenberg's death he had been living in Somerville, Massachusetts. His death on December 25, 2018, was reported by The New York Times under the headline, "Larry Eisenberg, 99, Dead; His Limericks Were Very Well Read". His daughter, Beth Eisenberg, told the Times he died in a hospice in Lincoln, Massachusetts, of complications of acute myeloid leukemia.

Eisenberg was for many years a biomedical engineer at Rockefeller University, where he and Dr. Robert Schoenfeld were co-heads of the Electronics Laboratory, and taught there until 2000. He designed the first transistorized radio-frequency coupled cardiac pacemaker circa 1960, in collaboration with Dr. Alexander Mauro. It is on display at Caspary Hall, Rockefeller University.

Meet Larry Eisenberg, a feature-length documentary about Eisenberg's life, is in production.

Writing
Eisenberg published his first short story, "Dr. Beltzov's Polyunsaturated Kasha Oil Diet", in Harper's Magazine in 1962. His first science fiction publication was later that year with his story "The Mynah Matter" in the August 1962 Fantastic Stories of Imagination, with Eisenberg debuting alongside Roger Zelazny.

Shortly after that, Eisenberg began publishing his stories in many of the leading science fiction magazines of the day, including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, and If. Eisenberg's science fiction takes a humorous approach to storytelling. As Eisenberg has said, "I enjoy wedding humor with science fiction, particularly where some unsavory aspect of our society can be pricked."

Many of Eisenberg's stories feature his character Professor Emmet Duckworth, a research scientist and two-time winner of the Nobel Prize. Duckworth's "bright ideas seem great at first but always end in disaster" with one of the professor's many inventions being "an addictive aphrodisiac clocking in at 150,000 calories per ounce —along with a propensity to turn those taking it into walking bombs." A number of the Duckworth stories were collected in Eisenberg's short story collection, The Best Laid Schemes, published in 1971 by MacMillan.

Eisenberg is best known for his short story "What Happened to Auguste Clarot?," which was published in the anthology Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison. His stories have also been reprinted in anthologies such as Great Science Fiction of the 20th Century, The 10th Annual of the Year's Best SF, and Great Science Fiction By the World's Great Scientists.

He published two books of limericks (both with George Gordon) in 1965: Limericks for the Loo and Limericks for Lantzmen; and one collection of short stories, Best Laid Schemes. Latterly he gained a cult following for the limericks he posted in the comments sections of various New York Times articles and was referred to as the "closest thing this paper has to a poet in residence".

Eisenberg wrote the following limerick about his life
A nonagenarian, I,
A sometime writer of sci-fi,
Biomed engineer,
Gen'rally of good cheer,
With lim'ricks in ready supply.

From a New York Times reader: "The Eisenberg Certainty Principle":
There once was a poet named Larry
Whose thoughts one could never quite parry
For when Larry had spoken
The mold it was broken
Though the topics invariably vary.

Bibliography

Short story collection
 The Best Laid Schemes, MacMillan, New York, 1971.

Limericks and other books
 Limericks for Lantzmen (1965) with George Gordon.
 Limericks for the Loo (July 1966) with George Gordon.
 Games People Shouldn't Play (November 1966) with George Gordon.

Selected short fiction

References

External links

1919 births
2018 deaths
Writers from New York City
Military personnel from New York City
American biomedical engineers
City College of New York alumni
Polytechnic Institute of New York University alumni
Rockefeller University people
American male novelists
American male short story writers
Jewish American novelists
American science fiction writers
American short story writers
Deaths from acute myeloid leukemia
Deaths from cancer in Massachusetts
James Monroe High School (New York City) alumni

Larry Eisenberg


Two-ten-jack is a Japanese trick-taking card game for two players that takes its name from the three highest-scoring (and lowest-scoring) cards in the game: the 2, 10 and Jack in three different suits.

Play

Preliminaries
The object of two-ten-jack is to get the most points by taking tricks containing positive point cards while avoiding tricks containing negative point cards.

Two players receive six cards each from a standard 52-card deck ranking A K Q J 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 and the remaining undealt cards are placed between the players to form the stock. Non-dealer leads the first trick and winner of each trick leads to the next. Players replenish their hands between tricks by each drawing a card from the stock with the winner of the last trick drawing first. Play continues until all of the cards in the entire deck have been played. Points are then tallied before the deck is reshuffled and dealt anew.

Following, Trumping, and Speculation
In two-ten-jack a player may lead any card and the other player must play a card of the same suit if able, or otherwise must play a trump card if able. If a player has neither cards in the lead suit or trump, then any other card may be played. The highest trump card, or the highest card of the lead suit if no trumps were played, takes the trick

In two-ten-jack hearts are always the trump suit and the ace of spades is a special trump card known as speculation ranking above all of the hearts. Rules for playing speculation are as follows:
 If a trump (heart) is led, a player may follow with speculation and must play speculation if no other trumps are held in the hand.
 If a spade is led, a player may follow with speculation and must likewise play speculation if no other spades are held in the hand.
 If a club or diamond is led and the other player has neither of these, speculation may be played, and must be played if no other trumps are available.
 A player leading speculation must declare it as either a spade or trump.

Scoring and winning
Cards are worth the following point values:
 2, 10 and J are worth +5 each
 2♣, 10♣ and J♣ are worth -5 each
 2♠, 10♠, J♠ and A♠ are worth +1 each
 6 is worth +1 point
Hence the total number of card points per deal is +5. Winner is the first player to reach 31 points.

See also
 List of Japanese games

External links

Japanese card games
Picture group
Trick-and-draw games

Two-ten-jack


Kings is a 2007 Irish film written & directed by Tom Collins and based on  Jimmy Murphy's play The Kings of the Kilburn High Road. The film is bilingual, having both Irish and English dialogue. It premiered at the Taormina Film Festival (Italy) in June 2007, and was selected as Ireland's official entry for the 2008 Academy Awards in the best foreign-language film category. The film tells the story of a group of Irish friends who, after emigrating to England 30 years previously, meet for the funeral of a friend. In 2008, the Irish postal service, An Post, issued a series of stamps honouring the Irish film industry. Colm Meaney, as Joe Mullan, was featured on the 55 cent stamp.

Plot
In the mid-1970s a group of young men leave the Connemara Gaeltacht, bound for London and filled with ambition for a better life. After thirty years, they meet again at the funeral of their youngest friend, Jackie. The film intersperses flashbacks of a lost youth in Ireland with the harsh realities of modern life.

For some the thirty years has been hard, working in building sites across Britain. Slowly the truth about Jackie's death become clear and the friends discover they need each other more than ever. However, by the end, the friends split up for good, going their separate ways.

Cast

Awards
In 2007, Tom Collins won the Directors Guild of America / Ireland New Finders Award. The film itself was nominated for a record 14 Irish Film and Television Awards (IFTAs) in 2008, – going on to win 5 IFTAs, including Best Irish Language Film

IFTA Awards (2008)-

Won –

Best Actor in a Supporting Role in a Feature Film – Brendan Conroy
Best Editing – Dermot Diskin
Best Original Score – Pol Brennan
Best Sound – Ken Galvin, Ronan Hill, Dominic Weaver
Special Irish Language Award

Nominated –

Best Actor in a Lead Role in a Feature Film – Colm Meaney
Best Actor in a Supporting Role in a Feature Film – Donal O'Kelly
Best Costume Design – Maggie Donnelly
Best Director of Photography – P.J. Dillon
Best Hair & Make-Up – Muriel Bell, Pamela Smyth
Best Production Design – David Craig
Best Director for Film – Tom Collins
Best Script for Film – Tom Collins
Best Film – Jackie Larkin, Tom Collins

References

External links

2007 films
Irish-language films
2007 drama films
Irish drama films
English-language Irish films

Kings (2007 film)


The Isthmus of Corinth is a narrow bit of land which connects the Peloponnese peninsula with mainland Greece.  It is near to the city of Corinth. The narrow Corinthian Canal cuts through the isthmus, connecting the Aegean Sea to the Gulf of Corinth.

Geography of Greece

hr:Korintski kanal

Isthmus of Corinth


බැටළුවා (Ovis aries) is a quadrupedal, ruminant mammal typically kept as livestock. Like all ruminants, sheep are members of the order Artiodactyla, the even-toed ungulates. Although the name "sheep" applies to many species in the genus Ovis, in everyday usage it almost always refers to Ovis aries. Numbering a little over one billion, domestic sheep are also the most numerous species of sheep.

ගැලරිය

බැටළුවා


Petticoat Junction is an American sitcom that originally aired on CBS from September 1963 to April 1970. The series takes place at the Shady Rest Hotel, which is run by Kate Bradley, her three daughters Billie Jo, Bobbie Jo, and Betty Jo, and her uncle Joe Carson.

The series is one of three unrelated shows about rural characters created by Paul Henning. Petticoat Junction was created after the success of Henning's sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–1971). The success of Petticoat Junction led to a spin-off, Green Acres (1965–1971).

References

CBS network shows
1960s sitcoms
1963 television series debuts
1970 television series endings
English-language television programs

Petticoat Junction


Austrian Air Services, officially licensed as Österreichischer Inlands- und Regionalflugdienst GesmbH (German for Austrian Domestic and Regional Flight Service), was an airline headquartered in Austria, operating domestic and regional flights on behalf of Austrian Airlines.

History
Austrian Air Services was founded on 4 February 1980, with the first revenue flight on 1 April of that year. The company originally was owned by Austrian Airlines (26 percent) and the airport authorities of the five largest airports of the country (see below) to 14.8 percent each, but later became a wholly owned subsidiary of Austrian Airlines. In 1993, 86 people worked for the airline. On 2 May 1994, Austrian Air Services was disestablished.

Destinations
Austrian Air Services operated scheduled flights to the following domestic destinations:

Graz - Graz Airport
Linz - Linz Airport
Klagenfurt - Klagenfurt Airport
Salzburg - Salzburg Airport
Vienna - Vienna International Airport (base)

Fleet
The initial fleet of Austrian Air Services consisted of two Fairchild Swearingen Metroliner aircraft. From 1988 onwards, the fleet was expanded with larger Fokker 50 airliners. When the airline was disestablished in 1994, its then eight aircraft of that type were acquired by Tyrolean Airways.

Incidents
On 17 September 1984, an Austrian Air Services Fairchild Swearingen Metroliner (registered OE-LSA) was damaged beyond repair in a belly landing at Vienna International Airport, following the failure to deploy the landing gear. There were no reports of any notable injuries to the eight passengers and two pilots on board.

References

Defunct airlines of Austria
Airlines established in 1980
Airlines disestablished in 1994

Austrian Air Services


Yasuoka Detachment or Yasuoka Task Force, was an armored Japanese Imperial Army unit in 1939.  It was commanded by Lt. General Yasuoka Masaomi, composed of 3rd Tank Regiment and 4th Tank Regiment (seventy-three tanks total), 64th Infantry Regiment/IJA 23rd Division, 2/28th Infantry Regiment/IJA 7th Division, the 2nd Battalion of the 13th Field Artillery Regiment, and 24th Independent Engineer Regiment. It was an armored Detachment of the Kwantung Army organized for the Japanese July 1939 offensive of the Battle of Khalkhin Gol.

The Yasuoka Task Force planned to attack Soviet forces on the Halha's east bank, north of the Holsten River while simultaneously, the main force of the IJA 23rd Division would eliminate Soviet forces on the east bank and then cross to the west bank of the Halha River and drive south to the Kawamata Bridge, destroying Soviet artillery batteries and supply dumps along the west bank.  The link-up of the two pincer columns in the vicinity of the Kawamata Bridge would encircle the Soviet forces and then destroy them.

The Japanese tank regiments operating on the east bank from July 2, separated and not coordinating with each other or their attached infantry, engineers and artillery failed to break through the Soviet defenses resulting in the loss of half their armor. On July 9 the Yasuoka Task Force was dissolved, Lt. General Yasuoka Masaomi was relieved and the Armour regiments withdrawn.

Sources
 Drea, Edward J., Nomonhan: Japanese-Soviet Tactical Combat, 1939; Leavenworth Paper #2, Combat Studies Institute, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 66027, 1981.

External links
 Nomonhan: Japanese-Soviet Tactical Combat, 1939

Detachment, Yasuoka
Military units and formations established in 1939

Yasuoka Detachment


Craig McGill is a writer, journalist and media analyst. He has written three books which have been translated into several foreign languages: Football Inc: How Football Fans are Losing the Game, Do No Harm: Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy and Human Traffic: Sex, Slaves and Immigration.

Previously deputy news editor for the Scottish edition of the Daily Mirror, he has written for Time magazine, The Guardian and The Sunday Times. His UK stories include revealing gangsters selling a hitlist called "Know the Provo" in Scottish pubs and David Tennant being the new Doctor Who.   AllMediaScotland, a Scottish website voted him a Media Personality of the Year.

He was educated at St Timothy's and St Andrews in Glasgow and Napier University, Edinburgh, where he was editor of the student newspaper Veritas, following in the footsteps of founding editor Neil McIntosh.

McGill now works in PR.

In 2010, he revealed Matt Smith as the eleventh doctor, following a leak at the BBC.

External links
 Official Site
 Profile page at fusionpress.co.uk
 Craig McGill Is Mentally Ill, article at ninthart.com
 Craig McGill Is Still Mentally Ill, follow-up article at ninthart.com

Scottish journalists
Scottish biographers
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)

Craig McGill


Gay Street is a street in Baltimore, Maryland that gets its name from Nicholas Ruxton Gay, who surveyed the area in 1747.  It begins at the intersection of East Pratt Street near the Baltimore World Trade Center (at the Inner Harbor) and proceeds north and east through Baltimore until it crosses Orleans Street (U.S. Route 40) and becomes Ensor Street.  According to the Baltimore City web site, the Gay Street corridor escaped the Great Baltimore Fire in 1904.

Urban development in the 1970s essentially cut Gay Street in half in east Baltimore. Old Town Mall, a retail strip that
spans from Orleans to Aisquith and Monument Streets, was converted from a working street to a pedestrian mall. The street from that point north to Chase Street was essentially paved over, and the land was fitted into the surrounding street grid. Despite the rebuild, there are still a few housing units in the area that still follow the angular path that Gay Street cut through the neighborhood. Just north of Monument Street next to the Cain athletic field, there is a well-worn pedestrian path that follows the old route of Gay Street in defiance of the grass and meandering concrete sidewalk that borders the park.

Gay Street continues north from Chase, is briefly cut by the recently rebuilt (2000s) median of Broadway, then continues up to (and ends at) North Avenue, also known as U.S. Route 1 and U.S. Route 40 Truck through Baltimore city.

External links

 Shopworn by Brennen Jensen, Baltimore City Paper 10/9/2002.
 Gorsuch-Mitchell Papers, 1698-1921 Maryland Historical Society
 Gay Street Historic District
 Coordinates:  (South Gay Street)
 Coordinates:  (North Gay Street)

Streets in Baltimore

Gay Street (Baltimore)


Iron-hulled sailing ships represented the final evolution of sailing ships at the end of the age of sail. They were built to carry bulk cargo for long distances in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were the largest of merchant sailing ships, with three to five masts and square sails, as well as other sail plans. They carried lumber, guano, grain or ore between continents. Later examples had steel hulls. They are sometimes referred to as "windjammers" or "tall ships". Several survive, variously operating as school ships, museum ships, restaurant ships, and cruise ships.

History

Iron-hulled sailing ships were mainly built from the 1870s to 1900, when steamships began to outpace them economically, due to their ability to keep a schedule regardless of the wind.  Steel hulls started to become common from 1885, providing an even greater strength to weight ratio. Even into the twentieth century, sailing ships could hold their own on ultra-long voyages such as Australia to Europe, since they did not require bunkerage for coal nor freshwater for steam, and they were faster than steamers, which usually could barely make . Many sailed under the Finnish flag during at least some part of their careers. Ship-owner Gustaf Erikson of Mariehamn, Åland, Finland, was noted for his fleet during the interwar period. Other sailing ship companies carrying on despite the onset of the machine age were F. Laeisz of Hamburg and A.D. Bordes of Dunkirk.

The four-masted, iron-hulled ship, introduced in 1875 with the full-rigged , represented an especially efficient configuration that prolonged the competitiveness of sail against steam in the later part of the 19th century. The largest example of such ships was the five-masted full-rigged ship , which had a load capacity of 7,800 tons. She was also one of the fastest, regularly logging  average speed on transatlantic voyages. Unfortunately speed was her undoing, as she collided with a steamer that underestimated the speed of the Preussen when crossing before her. The second-largest example was France II.

Design

The last large commercial sailing vessels, designed well after the Industrial Revolution, used engineered iron and steel in their construction. In general, the ships displaced between 2,000 and 5,000 tons and were cheaper than their wooden-hulled counterparts for three main reasons: (1) iron was stronger and enabled larger ship size, capable of delivering considerable economies of scale, (2) iron hulls took up less space, allowing more room for cargo in a given hull size, and (3) iron required less maintenance than a wooden hull.

The large sail plans and raked bows of these vessels invite confusion with clippers, but there are significant differences. Clippers were optimized for speed, these vessels were optimized for cargo capacity and ease of handling. Most clippers were of composite construction (iron structure, wooden planking), full rigged and had a cargo capacity of less than 1,000 tonnes; these vessels were iron and steel hulled, usually barque rigged, and had far greater cargo capacities. Clippers had already begun to disappear when these vessels emerged.

Typically, such vessels were equipped with steel masts and yards and steel cables, where possible. Often the running rigging was handled by motor-driven winches powered by donkey engines.  The combination of a large, efficient sail plan and hydrodynamic hull allowed these sailing ships to sustain high cruising speeds; most four-masted barques were able to cruise at  with favorable winds. Some logged  regularly and Herzogin Cecilie is known to have logged .

Crew

A sailing ship from this era could have a crew of as few as 14, with a typical crew being master, mate, boatswain (bosun), 15 seamen and 5 apprentices.  Herzogin Cecilie in 1926 sailed around Cape Horn with "only 19 men aboard, although not from choice." The crew roster of  on her last commercial voyage around Cape Horn in 1949 under the Finnish flag listed a total complement of 33:
The master
4 officers (1st, 2nd, 3rd mate and bosun)
13 able seamen
5 Ordinary seamen
5 deckboys
4 cook/assistant cook and steward/assistant steward
1 donkeyman (mechanic)
Owners ran their sailing ships with close attention to costs.  Officers and essential skilled crew, such as sailmakers, were still paid poorly: the captain of Moshulu in 1938 received about $100/month and the average sailmaker about $20/month. "The wages of other crew members were minuscule. A skilled able seaman (rated as an A.B.) received not more than, and often much less than, sixteen dollars per month." Crews were readily available in spite of abysmal pay because Germany and Scandinavian countries still required sail experience for mariner's licences.

Discipline, at the end of the 19th century, "especially on American sailing ships, could be brutal, often unnecessarily so."  As the end of the sailing ship era drew near by the 1930s, "such tactics had pretty much disappeared in the Finnish ships [and] in the ... German ships."  However, even the Finnish mates occasionally enforced discipline with their fists while sailing with minimal crews of largely inexperienced youths when "... instant obedience to orders was essential."

Economics

Though a fast-disappearing breed by the 1920s, sailing ships were used commercially until the 1950s. They occupied a niche in the transport of low-value bulk cargoes of little interest to steamship companies, e.g., lumber, coal, guano or grain (60,000 sacks on Pamir). Cargoes were carried from remote ports, with fuel and water unavailable, such as Australia (carrying wool or grain), remote Pacific islands (guano) and South America (nitrates). These vessels usually followed the clipper route around the world, ideally carrying different cargoes on each leg of their route, but most frequently sailing in ballast. The last leg from Australia to Europe, where the cargo was wheat or barley, became the source of The Great Grain Races as the ships' masters attempted to sail the leg as fast as possible, essentially only for prestige and pride — usually from the grain ports of South Australia's Spencer Gulf to Lizard Point at the Cornwall coast and on to the harbour of destination in Britain or continental Europe.

In the 1930s 'good money' could be made in the grain trade from Australia to Europe, "the carrying rates could vary from perhaps four dollars to eight dollars per ton." The owners of the Parma bought their vessel in 1932 for about ten thousand dollars and then loaded over 5,200 tons or 62,650 sacks of grain, for a gross income of $40,000.  "The ship paid for herself and all her expenses for the year from the income of that one voyage even though she had sailed in ballast halfway around the world."  In most of those years, the ships in the grain trade could clear about $5,000 each.

The Germans in particular maintained profitable commerce through the 1930s to the west coast of South America, shipping general cargo out and nitrates home. They had built powerful vessels, such as the , Padua and Priwall especially for the difficult west-bound voyage around Cape Horn, and their captains were expected to make three round trips around the Horn over a two-year period.

Despite the cost, some of the ships used the Panama Canal, towed by tugs the entire course, avoiding the Horn.

Remaining ships

A few such tall ships can still be seen at international maritime events such as SAIL Amsterdam, the Kiel Week and Hanse Sail.

The largest remaining original sailing ship is the four-masted barque , today a restaurant ship moored in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. The largest sailing ship still in service is a Russian school ship, the four-masted barque . The last metal-hulled sailing ship in original layout is the , today a museum ship at Mariehamn.

Remaining iron or steel-hulled ships include:

See also
 Barque
 Grain race
 List of large sailing vessels
 Tall ship
 Windjammer

Notes

References
Apollonio, Spencer (Editor). The Last of the Cape Horners, Firsthand Accounts from the Final Days of the Commercial Tall Ships. Washington, D.C.: Brassey's. 2000.
Randier, Jean. Men and Ships around Cape Horn 1616-1939. New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1969.
Stark, William F. The Last Time Around Cape Horn. The Historic 1949 Voyage of the Windjammer Pamir. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003.
Villiers, Alan. Voyaging With The Wind: An Introduction to Sailing Large Square Rigged Ships. London: National Maritime Museum, 1975.

Merchant sailing ship types
Tall ships
Windjammers

Iron-hulled sailing ship


Written Chinese () comprises Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese language. Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is logosyllabic: a character generally corresponds to one syllable of spoken Chinese, and may be either be a word on its own, or a part of a polysyllabic word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of a great number of characters: college-educated Chinese speakers know about 4,000. The large number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets or other complementary systems as auxiliary means of representing Chinese.

Various current Chinese characters have been traced back to the late Shang dynasty , but the process of creating characters is thought to have begun some centuries earlier in the Late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, . After a period of variation and evolution, Chinese characters were standardized under the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE). Over the millennia, these characters have evolved into well-developed styles of Chinese calligraphy. As the varieties of Chinese diverged, a situation of diglossia developed, with speakers of mutually unintelligible varieties able to communicate through writing using Classical Chinese. In the early 20th century, Classical Chinese was replaced in this role by written vernacular Chinese, corresponding to Standard Chinese, a form based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. Although most other varieties of Chinese are not written, there are traditions of written Cantonese, written Shanghainese and written Hokkien, among others.

Some Chinese characters have been adopted into writing systems of other neighbouring East Asian languages, but are currently used only in Japanese and to a lesser extent in Korean, as Vietnamese is now written using alphabetic script.

Structure

Written Chinese is not based on an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Instead, Chinese characters are glyphs whose components may depict objects or represent abstract notions. Occasionally a character consists of only one component; more commonly two or more components are combined to form more complex characters, using a variety of different principles. The best known exposition of Chinese character composition is the Shuowen Jiezi, compiled by Xu Shen around 120 CE. Since Xu Shen did not have access to Chinese characters in their earliest forms, his analysis cannot always be taken as authoritative. Nonetheless, no later work has supplanted the Shuowen Jiezi in terms of breadth, and it is still relevant to etymological research today.

Derivation of characters

According to the Shuowen Jiezi, Chinese characters are developed on six basic principles. (These principles, though popularized by the Shuowen Jiezi, were developed earlier; the oldest known mention of them is in the Rites of Zhou, a text from .) The first two principles produce simple characters, known as :

The remaining four principles produce complex characters historically called  (although this term is now generally used to refer to all characters, whether simple or complex). Of these four, two construct characters from simpler parts:

The last two principles do not produce new written forms; instead, they transfer new meanings to existing forms:

In contrast to the popular conception of Chinese as a primarily pictographic or ideographic language, the vast majority of Chinese characters (about 95% of the characters in the Shuowen Jiezi) are constructed as either logical aggregates or, more often, phonetic complexes. In fact, some phonetic complexes were originally simple pictographs that were later augmented by the addition of a semantic root. An example is  (now archaic, meaning 'lampwick'), which was originally a pictograph of a lamp stand , a character that is now pronounced  and means 'host', or the character  was added to indicate that the meaning is fire related.

Chinese characters are written to fit into a square, even when composed of two simpler forms written side-by-side or top-to-bottom. In such cases, each form is compressed to fit the entire character into a square.

Strokes

Character components can be further subdivided into individual written strokes. The strokes of Chinese characters fall into eight main categories: horizontal (一), vertical (丨), left-falling (丿), right-falling (丶), rising (lower element of 冫), dot (、), hook (亅), and turning (乛, 乚, 乙, etc.).

There are eight basic rules of stroke order in writing a Chinese character:

 Horizontal strokes are written before vertical ones.
 Left-falling strokes are written before right-falling ones.
 Characters are written from top to bottom.
 Characters are written from left to right.
 If a character is framed from above, the frame is written first.
 If a character is framed from below, the frame is written last.
 Frames are closed last.
 In a symmetrical character, the middle is drawn first, then the sides.

These rules do not strictly apply to every situation and are occasionally violated.

Layout

Since Chinese characters conform to a roughly square frame and are not linked to one another, they do not require a set orientation in writing. Traditionally, Chinese text was written in vertical columns which were read from top to bottom, right-to-left; the first column being on the right side of the page, and the last column on the left. Text written in Classical Chinese also uses little or no punctuation, with sentence and phrase breaks being determined by context and rhythm.

In modern times, the familiar Western layout used for Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scriptsleft-to-right orientation on horizontal lines advancing from top to bottom on the pagehas become more popular in regions using simplified Chinese such as in mainland China, where the government mandated left-to-right writing in 1955, although the vertical format is still used for effect or where space requires it, such as signs or on spines of books. The government of Taiwan followed suit in 2004 for official documents, but vertical writing on lines advancing from right to left on the page remains popular everywhere else, such as in print.

(Chinese script is less frequently written from right to left on horizontal lines; such an orientation, conceptually corresponding to vertical writing on lines advancing from right to left with only a single character per vertical line, seldom occurs apart from occasional usage in signage or banners, though left-to-right orientation is more common.)

The use of punctuation has also become more common, whether the text is written in columns or rows. The punctuation marks used in simplified Chinese are clearly influenced by their Western counterparts, although some marks are particular to Asian languages: for example, the double and single quotation marks (『 』 and 「 」); the hollow period dot (。), which is otherwise used just like an ordinary period full-stop; and a special kind of comma called an enumeration comma (、), which is used to separate items in a list, as opposed to clauses in a sentence. Traditional Chinese retains the use of these quotation marks while simplified Chinese has abandoned them for western ones.

History

Chinese is one of the oldest continually-used writing-systems still in use. The earliest generally accepted examples of Chinese writing date back to the reign of the Shang dynasty king Wu Ding (1250–1192 BCE). These were divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones, primarily ox scapulae and turtle shells. Characters were carved on the bones in order to frame a question; the bones were then heated over a fire and the resulting cracks were interpreted to determine the answer. Such characters are called  or oracle bone script.

In 2003, some 11 isolated symbols carved on tortoise shells were found at Jiahu, an archaeological site in the Henan province of China, some bearing a striking resemblance to certain modern characters, such as . Since the Jiahu site dates from about , it predates the earliest confirmed Chinese writing by more than 5,000 years. Dr Garman Harbottle, of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, US, who headed a team of archaeologists at the University of Science and Technology of China, in Anhui province, has suggested that these symbols were precursors of Chinese writing, but Professor David Keightley, of the University of California, Berkeley, US whose field of expertise is the origins of Chinese civilization in the Neolithic and early Bronze Ages, employing archaeological and inscriptional evidence, suggests that the time gap is too great for a connection.

From the late Shang dynasty, Chinese writing evolved into the form found in cast inscriptions on Chinese ritual bronzes made during the Western Zhou dynasty (–771 BCE) and the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BCE), a kind of writing called . Jinwen characters are less angular and angularized than the oracle bone script. Later, in the Warring States period (475–221 BCE), the script became still more regular, and settled on a form, called , that Xu Shen used as source material in the Shuowen Jiezi. These characters were later embellished and stylized to yield the seal script, which represents the oldest form of Chinese characters still in modern use. They are used principally for signature seals, or chops, which are often used in place of a signature for Chinese documents and artwork. Li Si promulgated the seal script as the standard throughout the empire during the Qin dynasty, then newly unified.

Seal script in turn evolved into the other surviving writing styles; the first writing style to follow was the clerical script. The development of such a style can be attributed to those of the Qin dynasty who were seeking to create a convenient form of written characters for daily usage. In general, clerical script characters are "flat" in appearance, being wider than the seal script, which tends to be taller than it is wide. Compared with the seal script, clerical script characters are strikingly rectilinear. In running script, a semi-cursive form, the character elements begin to run into each other, although the characters themselves generally remain separate. Running script eventually evolved into grass script, a fully cursive form, in which the characters are often entirely unrecognizable by their canonical forms. Grass script gives the impression of anarchy in its appearance, and there is indeed considerable freedom on the part of the calligrapher, but this freedom is circumscribed by conventional "abbreviations" in the forms of the characters. Regular script, a non-cursive form, is the most widely recognized script. In regular script, each stroke of each character is clearly drawn out from the others. Even though both the running and grass scripts appear to be derived as semi-cursive and cursive variants of regular script, it is in fact the regular script that was the last to develop.

Regular script is considered the archetype for Chinese writing and forms the basis for most printed forms. In addition, regular script imposes a stroke order, which must be followed in order for the characters to be written correctly. (Strictly speaking, this stroke order applies to the clerical, running, and grass scripts as well, but especially in the running and grass scripts, this order is occasionally deviated from.) Thus, for instance, the character  must be written starting with the horizontal stroke, drawn from left to right; next, the vertical stroke, from top to bottom; next, the left diagonal stroke, from top to bottom; and lastly the right diagonal stroke, from top to bottom.

Simplified and traditional forms

In the 20th century, written Chinese diverged into two canonical forms, simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese. Simplified Chinese was developed in Mainland China in order to reduce the number of characters and the average stroke count per character. The People's Republic of China claims that the rapid increase in literacy rates have been achieved as a result, but some external observers attribute the achievement to education reforms and the increase in standards of living instead. Little systematic research has been conducted to prove that simplified Chinese has affected literacy rates in any way as the only studies conducted in mainland China focused on arbitrary statistics quantifying the number of strokes saved on average in samples of running text.

The simplified forms have also been widely criticized for being inconsistent. For instance, traditional  is simplified to , in which the phonetic on the right side is reduced from 17 strokes to just three. (The speech radical on the left has also been simplified.) However, the same phonetic component is used in its full form, even in simplified Chinese, in such characters as  and ; these forms remained unmodified because they were relatively uncommon and would therefore represent a negligible stroke reduction. On the other hand, some simplified forms are simply long-standing calligraphic abbreviations, as for example , for which the traditional Chinese form is .

While simplified Chinese became standard in Mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia, traditional Chinese continues to be the standard in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and other overseas Chinese communities. Throughout this article, Chinese text is given in both simplified and traditional forms when they differ, with the traditional forms being given first. The two forms are never mixed together when written.

Function

At the inception of written Chinese, spoken Chinese was monosyllabic; that is, Chinese words expressing independent concepts (objects, actions, relations, etc.) were usually one syllable. Each written character corresponded to one monosyllabic word. The spoken language has since become polysyllabic, but because modern polysyllabic words are usually composed of older monosyllabic words, Chinese characters have always been used to represent individual Chinese syllables.

For over two thousand years, the prevailing written standard was a vocabulary and syntax rooted in Chinese as spoken around the time of Confucius (), called Classical Chinese, or . Over the centuries, Classical Chinese gradually acquired some of its grammar and character senses from the various dialects. This accretion was generally slow and minor; however, by the 20th century, Classical Chinese was distinctly different from any contemporary dialect, and had to be learned separately. Once learned, it was a common medium for communication between people speaking different dialects, many of which were mutually unintelligible by the end of the first millennium CE. A Mandarin speaker might say , a Cantonese , a Shanghainese , and a Hokkien , but all four will understand the character  to mean 'one'.

Chinese languages and dialects vary by not only pronunciation, but also, to a lesser extent, vocabulary and grammar. Modern written Chinese, which replaced Classical Chinese as the written standard as an indirect result of the May Fourth Movement of 1919, is not technically bound to any single variety; however, it most nearly represents the vocabulary and syntax of Mandarin, by far the most widespread Chinese dialectal family in terms of both geographical area and number of speakers. This version of written Chinese is called vernacular Chinese, or . Despite its ties to the dominant Mandarin language, Vernacular Chinese also permits some communication between people of different dialects, limited by the fact that Vernacular Chinese expressions are often ungrammatical or unidiomatic in non-Mandarin dialects. This role may not differ substantially from the role of other linguae francae, such as Latin. For those trained in written Chinese, it serves as a common medium; for those untrained in it, the graphic nature of the characters is in general no aid to common understanding (characters such as "one" notwithstanding). In this regard, Chinese characters may be considered a large and inefficient phonetic script. However, Ghil'ad Zuckermann's exploration of phono-semantic matching in Standard Chinese concludes that the Chinese writing system is multifunctional, conveying both semantic and phonetic content.

The variation in vocabulary among dialects has also led to the informal use of "dialectal characters", as well as standard characters that are nevertheless considered archaic by today's standards. Cantonese is unique among non-Mandarin regional languages in having a written colloquial standard, used in Hong Kong and overseas, with a large number of unofficial characters for words particular to this language. Written Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging, although for formal written communications Cantonese speakers still normally use Vernacular Chinese. To a lesser degree Hokkien is used in a similar way in Taiwan and elsewhere, although it lacks the level of standardization seen in Cantonese. However, the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China is currently releasing a standard character set for Hokkien, which is to be taught in schools and promoted amongst the general population.

Other languages

Chinese characters were first introduced into Japanese sometime in the first half of the first millennium CE, probably from Chinese products imported into Japan through Korea. At the time, Japanese had no native written system, and Chinese characters were used for the most part to represent Japanese words with the corresponding meanings, rather than similar pronunciations. A notable exception to this rule was the system of man'yōgana, which used a small set of Chinese characters to help indicate pronunciation. The  later developed into the phonetic syllabaries hiragana and katakana.

Chinese characters are called  in Mandarin, after the Han dynasty of China; in Japanese, this was pronounced kanji. In modern written Japanese, kanji are used for most nouns, verb stems, and adjective stems, while hiragana are used for grammatical elements and miscellaneous words that have no common kanji rendition; katakana are used for transliteration of loanwords from other languages, the names of plants, animals and certain scientific or technical words, onomatopoeia and emphasis. The Jōyō kanji, a list of kanji for common use standardized by the Japanese government, contains 2,136 characters—about half the number of characters commanded by literate Chinese speakers.

When used for Korean, Chinese characters are called hanja, which served as the first writing system for the language. Many Chinese characters were introduced into Korean for their meaning, just as in Japanese. However, with the creation during the reign of King Sejong of hangul, an alphabetic writing system in which letters are grouped into syllabic square blocks, the use of hanja in Korean has largely been replaced by hangul in South Korea and almost exclusively replaced by hangul in North Korea (where it is called chosŏn'gŭl).

Similarly, Vietnamese was originally written using Chinese-derived characters called chữ nôm script, which has been supplanted by the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet in modern usage.

Chinese characters are also used within China to write non-Han languages. The largest non-Han group in China, the Zhuang, have for over 1300 years used Chinese characters. Despite both the introduction of an official alphabetic script in 1957 and lack of a corresponding official set of Chinese characters, more Zhuang people can read the Zhuang logograms than the alphabetic script.

Media
Over the history of written Chinese, a variety of media have been used for writing. They include:
 Bamboo and wooden slips, from at least the thirteenth century BCE
 Paper, invented no later than the second century BCE
 Silk, since at least the Han dynasty
 Stone, metal, wood, bamboo, plastic and ivory on seals.

Since at least the Han dynasty, such media have been used to create hanging scrolls and handscrolls.

Literacy
Because the majority of modern Chinese words contain more than one character, there are at least two measuring sticks for Chinese literacy: the number of characters known, and the number of words known. John DeFrancis, in the introduction to his Advanced Chinese Reader, estimates that a typical Chinese college graduate recognizes 4,000 to 5,000 characters, and 40,000 to 60,000 words. Jerry Norman, in Chinese, places the number of characters somewhat lower, at 3,000 to 4,000. These counts are complicated by the tangled development of Chinese characters. In many cases, a single character came to be written in multiple ways. This development was restrained to an extent by the standardization of the seal script during the Qin dynasty, but soon started again. Although the Shuowen Jiezi lists 10,516 characters—9,353 of them unique (some of which may already have been out of use by the time it was compiled) plus 1,163 graphic variants—the Jiyun of the Northern Song dynasty, compiled less than a thousand years later in 1039, contains 53,525 characters, most of them graphic variants.

Dictionaries

Written Chinese is not based on an alphabet or syllabary, so Chinese dictionaries, as well as dictionaries that define Chinese characters in other languages, cannot easily be alphabetized or otherwise lexically ordered, as English dictionaries are. The need to arrange Chinese characters in order to permit efficient lookup has given rise to a considerable variety of ways to organize and index the characters.

A traditional mechanism is the method of radicals, which uses a set of character roots. These roots, or radicals, generally but imperfectly align with the parts used to compose characters by means of logical aggregation and phonetic complex. A canonical set of 214 radicals was developed during the rule of the Kangxi Emperor (around the year 1700); these are sometimes called the Kangxi radicals. The radicals are ordered first by stroke count (that is, the number of strokes required to write the radical); within a given stroke count, the radicals also have a prescribed order.

Every Chinese character falls (sometimes arbitrarily or incorrectly) under the heading of exactly one of these 214 radicals. In many cases, the radicals are themselves characters, which naturally come first under their own heading. All other characters under a given radical are ordered by the stroke count of the character. Usually, however, there are still many characters with a given stroke count under a given radical. At this point, characters are not given in any recognizable order; the user must locate the character by going through all the characters with that stroke count, typically listed for convenience at the top of the page on which they occur.

Because the method of radicals is applied only to the written character, one need not know how to pronounce a character before looking it up; the entry, once located, usually gives the pronunciation. However, it is not always easy to identify which of the various roots of a character is the proper radical. Accordingly, dictionaries often include a list of hard to locate characters, indexed by total stroke count, near the beginning of the dictionary. Some dictionaries include almost one-seventh of all characters in this list. Alternatively, some dictionaries list "difficult" characters under more than one radical, with all but one of those entries redirecting the reader to the "canonical" location of the character according to Kangxi.

Other methods of organization exist, often in an attempt to address the shortcomings of the radical method, but are less common. For instance, it is common for a dictionary ordered principally by the Kangxi radicals to have an auxiliary index by pronunciation, expressed typically in either pinyin or zhuyin fuhao. This index points to the page in the main dictionary where the desired character can be found. Other methods use only the structure of the characters, such as the four-corner method, in which characters are indexed according to the kinds of strokes located nearest the four corners (hence the name of the method), or the Cangjie method, in which characters are broken down into a set of 24 basic components. Neither the four-corner method nor the Cangjie method requires the user to identify the proper radical, although many strokes or components have alternate forms, which must be memorized in order to use these methods effectively.

The availability of computerized Chinese dictionaries now makes it possible to look characters up by any of the indexing schemes described, thereby shortening the search process.

Transliteration and romanization

Chinese characters do not reliably indicate their pronunciation, even for one dialect. It is therefore useful to be able to transliterate a dialect of Chinese into the Latin alphabet or the Perso-Arabic script Xiao'erjing for those who cannot read Chinese characters. However, transliteration was not always considered merely a way to record the sounds of any particular dialect of Chinese; it was once also considered a potential replacement for the Chinese characters. This was first prominently proposed during the May Fourth Movement, and it gained further support with the victory of the Communists in 1949. Immediately afterward, the mainland government began two parallel programs relating to written Chinese. One was the development of an alphabetic script for Mandarin, which was spoken by about two-thirds of the Chinese population; the other was the simplification of the traditional characters—a process that would eventually lead to simplified Chinese. The latter was not viewed as an impediment to the former; rather, it would ease the transition toward the exclusive use of an alphabetic (or at least phonetic) script.

By 1958, however, priority was given officially to simplified Chinese; a phonetic script, hanyu pinyin, had been developed, but its deployment to the exclusion of simplified characters was pushed off to some distant future date. The association between pinyin and Mandarin, as opposed to other dialects, may have contributed to this deferment. It seems unlikely that pinyin will supplant Chinese characters anytime soon as the sole means of representing Chinese.

Pinyin uses the Latin alphabet, along with a few diacritical marks, to represent the sounds of Mandarin in standard pronunciation. For the most part, pinyin uses vowel and consonant letters as they are used in Romance languages (and also in IPA). However, although  and , for instance, represent the voice/unvoiced distinction in some languages, such as French, they represent the unaspirated/aspirated distinction in Mandarin; Mandarin has few voiced consonants. Also, the pinyin spellings for a few consonant sounds are markedly different from their spellings in other languages that use the Latin alphabet; for instance, pinyin  and  sound similar to English 'ch' and 'sh', respectively. Pinyin is not the sole transliteration scheme for Mandarin—there are also, for instance, the zhuyin fuhao, Wade-Giles, Yale, EFEO and Gwoyeu Romatzyh systems—but it is dominant in the Chinese-speaking world. All transliterations in this article use the pinyin system.

See also
Mainland Chinese Braille
Taiwanese braille (Taiwanese Mandarin)
Cantonese braille
Chinese input methods for computers
Modern Chinese characters
Chinese family of scripts

References

Citations

Works cited

Further reading

  (English translation of Wénzìxué Gàiyào 文字學概要, Shangwu, 1988.)

External links
Yue E Li and Christopher Upward. "Review of the process of reform in the simplification of Chinese Characters".  (Journal of Simplified Spelling Society, 1992/2 pp. 14–16, later designated J13)
WrittenChinese.com English to Chinese Dictionary Includes example sentences, stroke orders, and pronunciation audio
MDBG Chinese Dictionary Lookup available in Chinese characters, pinyin, or English, results includes stroke animations and pronunciation audio

Chinese
Chinese orthography
Chinese scripts

Written Chinese


Donald Revell (born 1954 in Bronx, New York) is an American poet, essayist, translator and professor.

Revell has won numerous honors and awards for his work, beginning with his first book, From the Abandoned Cities, which was a National Poetry Series winner. More recently, he won the 2004 Lenore Marshall Award and is a two-time winner of the PEN Center USA Award in poetry. He has also received the Gertrude Stein Award, two Shestack Prizes, two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. His most recent book is Drought-Adapted Vine (Alice James Books, 2015). He also recently published his translation of Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell (Omnidawn Publishing, 2007).

Revell has taught at the Universities of Tennessee, Missouri, Iowa, Alabama, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. He currently lives in Las Vegas. In addition to his writing, translating, and teaching, Revell was Editor of Denver Quarterly from 1988–94, and has been a poetry editor of Colorado Review since 1996.

Revell received his B.A. in 1975 and his M.A. in 1977 from Binghamton University, and his Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo in 1980.

Honors and awards
 2017 Nevada Writers Hall of Fame
 2008 NEA Translation Award
 2005 Silver Pen Award
 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry finalist for Pennyweight Windows
 2005 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
 2004 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for My Mojave
 2003 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry
 1992 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry
 1991 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry
 1988 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
 1985 Pushcart Prize

Published works

Poetry collections
White Campion (Alice James Books, 2021)
 The English Boat (Alice James Books, 2018)
 Drought-Adapted Vine (Alice James Books, 2015)
 Tantivy (Alice James Books, 2012)
 The Bitter Withy (Alice James Books, 2009)
 A Thief of Strings (Alice James Books, 2007)
 Pennyweight Windows: New And Selected Poems (Alice James Books, 2005)
 My Mojave (Alice James Books, 2003)
 Arcady (Wesleyan University Press, 2002)
 There Are Three (Wesleyan University Press, 1998)
 Beautiful Shirt (Wesleyan University Press, 1994)
 Erasures (Wesleyan University Press, 1992)
 New Dark Ages (Wesleyan University Press, 1990)
 The Gaza of Winter (University of Georgia Press, 1988)
 From the Abandoned Cities (Harper & Row Publishers, 1983)

Translations
 Last Verses by Jules Laforgue (Omnidawn, 2011)
 A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud (Omnidawn, 2007)
 The Self-Dismembered Man: Selected Later Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire (Wesleyan University Press, 2004)
 Alcools: Poems by  Guillaume Apollinaire (Wesleyan University Press, 1995)

Essay collections
 The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye (Graywolf Press, 2007)
 Invisible Green: Selected Prose (Omnidawn, 2005)
 Scholium  (Poetry, May 2015)

Reviews
In a retrospective review of Revell's work written by Stephanie Burt for The Nation, she comments on Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems: Revell now seeks a poetry appropriate not only to loneliness but to anger and happiness, not only to freighted symbols but to facts, not only to doubt but to faith. What's more, he seems to have found what he seeks.

In Time magazine, Lev Grossman wrote about Pennywight Windows: it takes guts to write more poems about peace, war, God and children, but Revell's are so fresh, it's as if he's the first person ever to do it. He makes you feel how painfully near grace and redemption are at all times, and yet how unattainable.

There is a theme here and in other reviews of Revell's recent books. Stephanie Burt opens her review with a comment about how much Revell's work has changed in twenty years, noting the stylistic evolution, and the  increasingly spiritual focus of Revell's work, which Grossman observes in his, and which Revell corroborates in an interview by Poets & Writers: "What's next for me? I am concerned with the governance of heaven, which is mostly silence. Living in Utah and Nevada, I take my current instruction from snow and sand. They are heavenly forms-substantial and effortless. May poems be so."

References

External links
 Alice James Books Website
 American Poetry Review > Donald Revell: An Interview
 Poetry Foundation > Death, by Donald Revell
 Video: Donald Revell Reading for Omnidawn
 Boston Review > Donald Revell Responds to Bloom
 American Poetry Review' > Excerpt from Invisible Green''

Living people
1954 births
American male poets
Poets from New York (state)
Writers from the Bronx
Poets from Nevada
Writers from the Las Vegas Valley
University of Utah faculty
University of Nevada, Las Vegas faculty
University of Missouri faculty
Iowa Writers' Workshop faculty
American essayists
American translators
National Endowment for the Arts Fellows
American academics of English literature
American male essayists
Binghamton University alumni
Journalists from New York City

Donald Revell


Alan Fletcher (born 1956) is president and CEO of the Aspen Music Festival and School and a music administrator and composer. He came to Aspen in March 2006 from the positions of Head of the School of Music and Professor of Music at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he had been since 2001, and before that from leadership and faculty positions including provost and senior vice president at the New England Conservatory, where he was engaged for 16 years. He holds doctorate and master's degrees from The Juilliard School and a bachelor's degree from Princeton University, and has studied with distinguished composers such as Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, Edward T. Cone, and Paul Lansky.

He has won numerous composing awards and commissions, including recent commissions for the Pittsburgh Symphony and the National Gallery of Art. He lectures nationally and internationally on music and music administration, has a blog for Gramophone, and has written Op/Ed pieces for newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Symphony, and Baltimore Sun. In addition, he sat on some of the field's most prestigious committees such as The Gilmore Prize Artistic Board and Jury, on which he served with former AMFS artistic administrator Ara Guzelimian.

He lives in Aspen, Colorado with his partner Ronald Schiller.

External links
     Aspen Music Festival and School.com website
      Look for Alan Fletcher on the Instant Encore.com website

References

Living people
American male classical composers
1956 births
Pupils of Roger Sessions
Aspen Music Festival and School faculty
Carnegie Mellon University faculty
New England Conservatory faculty
Juilliard School alumni
Princeton University alumni
Pupils of Milton Babbitt
Pupils of Edward T. Cone
Pupils of Paul Lansky
LGBT classical composers
American LGBT composers
20th-century classical composers
21st-century classical composers
21st-century American composers
20th-century American composers

Alan Fletcher (composer)


Thrash metal is an extreme metal type of heavy metal music that is characterised by its high speed and aggression.

Origins
The origins of thrash metal are generally traced to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when a number of bands began incorporating the sound of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal with elements of hardcore punk and more specifically Thrashcore, creating a new genre and developing into a separate movement from punk rock. This genre is much more aggressive compared to its relative, speed metal.

Thrash metal bands
 Anthrax
 Artillery
 Bound For Glory
 Celtic Frost
 Coroner
 D.R.I.
 Dark Angel
 Death Angel
 Deaths Head
 Defiance
 Destroyer 666
 Excel
 Exodus
 Flotsam and Jetsam
 Forbidden
 Hellhammer
 Helloween
 Kreator
 Megadeth
 Mercenary
 Metal Church
 Metallica
 Mortal Sin
 Nevermore
 Overkill
 Onslaught
 Pantera
 Sepultura
 Sabbat
 Sanctuary
 Slayer
 Suicidal Tendencies
 Tankard
 Testament
 Trivium
 Venom
 Voivod

References

Heavy metal subgenres

Thrash metal


Natural disasters in Colombia are the result of several different natural hazards that affect the country according to its particular geographic and geologic features. Human vulnerability, exacerbated by the lack of planning or lack of appropriate emergency management, and the fragility of the economy and infrastructure contribute to a high rate of financial, structural, and human losses.

Some of the natural hazards present in Colombia are:

 Earthquakes
 Floods
 Landslides
 Volcanoes

Geologic

Colombia is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire and Andean Volcanic Belt due to the collision of the South American Plate and the Nazca Plate.  This produces an increased risk of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.  Some natural disasters of this type are:
The 1875 Cúcuta earthquake
The 8.2  Tumaco earthquake shook Colombia and Ecuador with a maximum Mercalli intensity of IX (Violent), killing 300–600, and generating a large tsunami.
The 1982 Popayán earthquake
The 1985 eruption of Nevado del Ruiz volcano and subsequent Armero tragedy
The 1994 Páez River earthquake
The 1999 Armenia earthquake that affected heavily the city of Armenia, Colombia in the Quindío department.

Hydrologic

Rainfall is heaviest in the Pacific lowlands and in parts of eastern Colombia, where rain is almost a daily occurrence and rain forests predominate. Precipitation exceeds 760 centimeters annually in most of the Pacific lowlands, making this one of the wettest regions in the world. The highest average annual precipitation in the world is estimated to be in Lloro, Colombia, with 13,299 mm (523.9 inches). In eastern Colombia, it decreases from 635 centimeters in portions of the Andean piedmont to 254 centimeters eastward. Extensive areas of the Caribbean interior are permanently flooded, more because of poor drainage than because of the moderately heavy precipitation during the rainy season.
The Caribbean Region of Colombia, valleys of Magdalena river and Cauca river and the eastern savannahs are prone to floods during the two main monsoon seasons (April and November).  The opposite phenomenon of drought is also frequent. January through March and July through September are the dry seasons, when abnormally dry periods cause shortage in the water supply to crops and urban centers.

Climatic

The presence of coastal regions both in the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans increases the risk of hurricanes and tropical storms. Waves in the trade winds in the Atlantic Ocean—areas of converging winds that move along the same track as the prevailing wind—create instabilities in the atmosphere that may lead to the formation of hurricanes.  Some of the events of this type that have affected the country are:
Tropical Storm Bret (1993)
Hurricane Cesar–Douglas
Hurricane Joan–Miriam

Health and disease

Some of the main public health issues in Colombia are: malnutrition, pregnancy-related deaths, neonatal deaths, acute respiratory disease-related deaths in children under 5 years, diarrhea-related deaths in children under 5 years, lack of vaccinations, tropical diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, hemorrhagic dengue fever, yellow fever, Chagas disease and leishmaniasis,  poly-parasitism, snakebites and violence related causes of mortality.

References

Natural disasters in Colombia
Colombia

Natural hazards in Colombia


Saint Lucy (283–304) was born in Syracuse, Italy. Lucy's mother tried to arrange a marriage for her. Lucy did not want to marry. Her mother agreed, but the rejected bridegroom was not happy. He betrayed Lucy to the governor as a Christian. Lucy was killed. She died at age 21.

Related page
St. Lucia Day

Christian saints

Saint Lucy


Elaine Lobl Konigsburg (February 10, 1930 – April 19, 2013) was an American writer.

Early life
Elaine Lobl Konigsburg was born on February 10, 1930 in New York. She was the daughter of Adolph, a businessman, and Beulah (Klein) Lobl. E.L. Konigsburg married a man named David Konigsburg in 1952. With David, she had three children, named Paul, Laurie, and Ross. She went to Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Konigsburg was a follower of the Jewish religion.

Konigsburg is the author of many children's books, some including The Outcast of 19 Schuyler Place, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and Silent to the Bone. She began her career as an author later in her life. She left teaching after the birth of her first child in 1955, and returned to teach again in 1960. She stopped teaching again two years later, to move to New York for her husband's job. With all of her kids at school, she had time to begin her writing career.

Accomplishments
E. L Konigsburg is the only author to have two books on the Newbery List at one time. In addition, in 1967, her book was honored in the "Book Week Children's Festival". She also won the William Allen White award for From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

Books
 Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth
 From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
 About the B'nai Bagels. New York, Atheneum
 A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver
 The Dragon in the Ghetto Caper
 The Second Mrs. Giaconda
 Father's Arcane Daughter
 Throwing Shadows (stories)
 Journey to an 800 Number
 Up from Jericho Tel
 Samuel Todd's Book of Great Colors
 Samuel Todd's Book of Great Inventions
 Amy Elizabeth Explores Bloomingdale's
 T-Backs, T-Shirts, COAT, and Suit
 The View from Saturday

Sources
 "E(laine) L(obl) Konigsburg." Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults. Detroit: Gale, 2002.Biography in Context. Web. 23 Mar. 2015 E(laine) L(obl) Konigsburg." St. James Guide to Children's Writers. Gale, 1999. Biography in Context. Web. 23 Mar. 2 2015

Writers from New York (state)

E. L. Konigsburg


Recharacterisation in law (and sometimes in accountancy) means the treatment of a certain course of conduct in a different manner to which the participants describe it.

The term is most important in the penal law of Continental legal systems. In some civil law countries, judges are empowered to "recharacterise the facts" of a case to make the charges more closely align with the evidence. In these systems, the legal charges contained in the indictment are only suggestions from the public prosecutor to the court. The judge may, if it becomes clear that the facts actually support different or additional charges, change the legal characterisation of those facts.

Under English law, Lord Hanworth MR referred to the proposition:

When the recharacterisation of the facts results in additional charges, or charges which carry a greater penalty, the defense council is usually given an opportunity to be heard concerning the recharacterisation and may request a suspension of the trial to study the recharacterisation. In others, this right to suspend the trial is only implicated if the recharacterisation results in more serious charges.

In some legal systems, the court may not recharacterise the facts if it will result in more serious charges.

 In the United States the term recharacterisation (or recharacterization) is usually used to refer to money which is advance to a company as a loan by a shareholder or other insider, which is recharacterised on bankruptcy as a capital contribution to the shareholder's equity.
 Also in the US, recharacterization is used in tax law to refer to treatment for tax purposes of a transaction, agreement, event, etc., differently than for other purposes.  Examples include recharacterization of gains as dividends under , recharacterization of purported debt instruments as equity under case law and rulings under , and recharacterization of entities under "check the box" regulations .
 In other common law legal systems, recharacterisation usually refers to the risk that a title transfer arrangement could be treated instead as the grant of a security interest. If a transaction is recharacterised in this manner, there is a risk that the transaction may be void if it has not been registered under applicable registration laws. The title transfer arrangements that are perceived to be vulnerable to recharacterisation are transfers of margin (such as a title transfer under an English Law ISDA Credit Support Annex as collateral for a derivatives transaction), or transactions which involved an actual transfer of securities backed by cash (such a stock loan or repo transaction). Retention of title clauses may also sometimes be recharacterized in this manner. Security interests which are expressed as fixed charges are sometimes recharacterised as floating charges. However, in most common law systems, there is a resistance to recharacterisation transactions of this nature, and the law generally provides that the parties own characterisation of the transaction should be applied unless there are strong countervailing reasons to recharacterise.
 Another area in which the courts have had to address recharacterization risk is in relation to the transfer of receivables, frequently in securitization transactions. To be effective a securitization normally requires a "true sale" of receivable, but in certain countries there is a risk of the transfer being recharacterised.  If the originator retains a right or an obligation regarding the transferred assets, for example, where the transferor has agreed to assume and bear the credit risk for the transferred receivables, or where the transferor is entitled or obligated to repurchase and regain the transferred receivables, under many legal systems this would be recharacterised as either an on-loan or a collection agency arrangement.
 Certain sophisticated financial instruments (such as a synthetic lease) are considered to be a recharacterization risk in some jurisdictions.

However, the application of recharacterization is also a general principle of the law of most countries, and may be applied to an artificial arrangement which seeks to artificially overcome a certain law or regulation. For example, in Street v Mountford [1985] 1 AC 809 the House of Lords confirmed that an agreement described as a license for non-exclusive occupation of a property should, in fact, be treated as a lease for the purposes of determining the licensees' (or tenants') rights, although Lord Templeman did not actually use the phrase "recharacterisation" in his speech.  Similar, in many jurisdictions, tax authorities have power recharacterize transactions that are "shams", or which otherwise have no commercial substance except to mitigate tax liability.

References

Business law
Contract law
English law
Tax law
Legal terminology

Recharacterisation


The Sounion Kouros is an early archaic Greek statue of a naked young man or kouros (Ancient Greek κοῦρος, plural kouroi) carved in marble from the island of Naxos around 600 BCE. It is one of the earliest examples that scholars have of the kouros-type which functioned as votive offerings to gods or demi-gods, and were dedicated to heroes. Found near the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion, this kouros was found badly damaged and heavily weathered. It was restored to its original height of 3.05 meters (10.0 ft) returning it to its larger than life size. It is now held by the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.

Ancient Greeks were influenced by their Egyptian neighbors when creating kouroi. The Egyptian influence is especially evident in the pose of the figure. Archaic sculptors intended to idealize the human form which is made evident by the modeling of the Sounion Kouros. Sculptors of kouri attempted to convey slight movement and more naturalism over the course of the 6th century BCE.

Influences
Ancient Greeks were heavily influenced by Egyptian ka statues which were figures intended to provide a resting place for the spirit, or ka, of the deceased. This influence is most evident in large-scale wooden statues, or xoana, from Ancient Greece. Kouroi share similarities with Egyptian ka statues, including the frontal stance, arms by the sides and advanced left leg. For example, the Pythian Apollo at Megara, Herakles at Erythrai, and the first Apollo Lykios look very much Egyptian. Although Egyptian influence is evident, the kouros-type show differences from Egyptian works. The male youth of the Sounion kouros, for example, is nude as he does not wear a skirt, and is free-standing without a supporting structure.

Function
The Sounion Kouros is an early example of Greek kouroi which were used as votive offerings to gods and demi-gods, and dedicated to heroes in hero cults. Kouroi were sometimes intended to represent a mortal or hero and sometimes intended to represent a god or demi-god. They were dedicated as votive offerings in sanctuaries and used as memorial markers in a funerary context. It is probable that the Sounion kouros served as a votive offering to Poseidon as it was found near the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion.

Form

The figure stands in the conventional pose of this "extremely uniform style of early Greek sculpture." The stiff body faces frontally, with fists clenched by its thighs, and its wide shoulders contrasting the narrow waist and hips. The shoulders and hips are stable. Although the left foot is advanced, the figure's weight is distributed equally on both feet. The body and head are aligned creating balance and symmetry. Fixed to a cylindrical neck, the head is large and square. The face is flat and the lips curve into an archaic smile. Some details are abstracted: the figure has large volute earlobes, oversized almond-shaped eyes, and elongated proportions. When looking at the sides of the face, one can see that "the distance from the cheeks to the temples is disproportionately large."
 Some red coloring remains in the strands of braided hair. The hair pattern creates a row of shell-like curls which start on the forehead and hang down the statue's back. The hair is tied with a double ribbon in a Heracles knot.

The figure is extensively modeled creating harsh contour lines especially on the knees and abdomen. The muscles are "rendered by grooves, with a decorative intent that is carried to the point of excess and stylisation." The inguinal ligament which creates a triangle shape in the lower abdomen is strongly modeled. Grooves on the abdomen suggest two more abdominal muscles than what is anatomically correct.

Idealization
In Ancient Greece, idealized figures were simultaneously considered beautiful and to represent strong morality and a virtuous nature. Idealized sculptures were pleasing to both the eyes of humans and the gods so they were used as offerings. As it was found near the Temple of Poseidon, it is probable that the Sounion Kouros was considered a beautiful votive offering for the pleasure of the god. The Sounion Kouros is idealized as it was the intent of the artist "to convey an ideal of the human form – one that subscribes to a number of stylised and formal patterns than its real-life, physical or natural appearance." Sculpted in the beginning of the 6th century BC, the Sounion Kouros is representative of Archaic sculptors' shift to render naturalistic figures: "That interest in pattern and symmetry is characteristic of Archaic sculpture, although it gives way to the apparent attempt to imitate the natural form of the human body during the course of the sixth century BCE."

Greek men wore nudity as a costume when they were aspiring to be associated with the ideal, elite, aristocratic, or heroic. The kouros-type were offerings to gods and dedicated to heroes so kouroi wore the costume of nudity to symbolize the heroic sentiment, a concept referred to as Heroic nudity. The Sounion Kouros was an offering to Poseidon so it probably displays heroic nudity as well.

Movement
Traces of the sculptor's desire to create movement can be extrapolated although the figure appears to be perfectly stable. First, Archaic sculptors neither possessed or valued an acute sense of proportion, so they equated great size to great movement. The size of the legs in relation to the size of waist could have conveyed movement in the Sounion Kouros. The figure can be compared to the Assos reliefs which display a "disparity between the size of the waist and leg as an attempt to express expanded muscles." Second, if the movement was simple, an early Archaic sculptor would choose to represent those factors "according to his instinct, experience, and judgment, he deems most widely characteristic of that movement and most easily apprehended."

A single advanced leg is the basic movement which laid the foundation for Greek artists after the Archaic period to convey movement. Although kouroi seems to have a rigid stance "the figure is like a wound-up spring ready for action... Neither standing nor walking, the kouros suggests the perfect 'nimble-footed' or 'swift in knees' readiness of the Homeric hero." For example, in twin kouroi dedicated as funerary monuments to hero brothers Kleobis and Biton in ca 570 BCE "the slightly flexed elbows of the figures seem to recall a tugging motion." According to  mythology, the two brothers pulled their mother in a cart for 5 or 6 miles before dying of exhaustion.

Construction and history
Each side of the kouros was carved separately from the other and little attention was given to seamlessly attach them to create a convincingly three-dimensional form.

The statue was found buried near the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion in 1906. It was discovered in a pit with its base alongside fragments of other statues which were all dedicated to Poseidon and probably stood in front of the god's sanctuary. They were most likely left at the site after the destruction of the sanctuary and its votive offerings by the Persians when the temple was destroyed in 480 BC during the second Persian invasion of Greece.

Current condition
The Sounion Kouros has suffered considerable damage and was heavily weathered, probably due to being displayed outdoors. Most of the left leg and the lower right leg below the knee were missing. The left arm below the shoulder and parts of the right arm were missing as well. Lastly, the face was badly chipped.

Bibliography
Mattusch, Carol. Greek Bronze Statuary: From the Beginnings Through the Fifth Century B.C. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Osborne, Robin. Archaic and Classical Greek Art. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998: 75-85.

Post, Candler Rathfon. "The Development of Motion in Archaic Greek Sculpture." Harvard Studihes in Classical Philology 20 (1909): 95-164.

Sculpture in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens, edited by Nikolaos Kaltsas, Ethnikon Archaiologikon Mouseion (Greece), p. 39

"Sounion Kouros." University of Cambridge Faculty of Classics. October 2, 2013. Accessed October 4, 2017. https://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/museum/collections/museum-highlights/sounion-kouros.

Spivey, Nigel. Greek Art. London, UK: Phaidon, 1997: 103-168.

Woodford, Susan. An Introduction to Greek Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988: 38-56.

Notes

7th-century BC Greek sculptures
1906 archaeological discoveries
Archaic Greek sculptures
National Archaeological Museum, Athens
Archaeological discoveries in Greece
Kouroi
Poseidon

Sounion Kouros


Custard is a kind of food prepared with milk and eggs. Custard can be the dessert or its sauce.

Custard is an important part of dessert recipes from many countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Australia,  and Malaysia.

Desserts

Custard