Tisza
The Tisza or Tisa is one of the main rivers of Central and Eastern Europe. Once, it was called "the most Hungarian river" because it flowed within the Kingdom of Hungary. Today, it crosses several national borders; the Tisza begins at the confluence of the White Tisa and Black Tisa. From there, the Tisza flows west following Ukraine's borders with Romania and Hungary into Hungary, into Serbia, it enters Hungary at Tiszabecs. It traverses Hungary from north to south. A few kilometers south of the Hungarian city of Szeged, it enters Serbia, it joins the Danube near the village of Stari Slankamen in Vojvodina, Serbia. The Tisza drains an area of about 156,087 km2 and has a length of 1,419 km — seco Its mean annual discharge is 792 m3/s, it contributes about 13% of the Danube's total runoff. Attila the Hun is said to have been buried under a diverted section of the river Tisza; the river was known as the Tisia in antiquity. It may be referred to as the Theiss in older English references, after the German name for the river, Theiß.
It is known as the Tibisco in Italian, in older French references it is referred to as the Tibisque. Modern names for the Tisza in the languages of the countries it flows through include: Romanian: Tisa; the length of the Tisza in Hungary used to be 1,419 km. It flowed through the Great Hungarian Plain, one of the largest flat areas in central Europe. Since plains can cause a river to flow slowly, the Tisza used to follow a path with many curves and turns, which led to many large floods in the area. After several small-scale attempts, István Széchenyi organised the "regulation of the Tisza" which started on August 27, 1846, ended in 1880; the new length of the river in Hungary was 1,419 km, 1,358 km total, with 589 km of dead channels and 136 km of new riverbed. The resultant length of the flood-protected river comprises 2,940 km out of 4,220 km of all Hungarian protected rivers. In the 1970s, the building of the Tisza Dam at Kisköre started with the purpose of helping to control floods as well as storing water for drought seasons.
However, the resulting Lake Tisza became one of the most popular tourist destinations in Hungary since it had similar features to Lake Balaton at drastically cheaper prices and was not crowded. The Tisza is navigable over much of its course; the river opened up for international navigation only recently. After Hungary joined the European Union, this distinction was lifted and vessels were allowed on the Tisza. Conditions of navigation differ with the circumstances: when the river is in flood, it is unnavigable, just as it is at times of extreme drought; the Tisza has a rich and varied wildlife. Over 200 species of birds reside in the bird reserve of Tiszafüred; the flood plains along the river boast large amounts of diverse animal life. In particular, the yearly "flowering" of the Tisza is considered a local natural wonder; the flowering attracts vast numbers of mayflies, a well known spectacle. In early 2000, there was a sequence of serious pollution incidents originating from accidental industrial discharges in Romania.
The first, in January 2000, occurred when there was a release of sludge containing cyanide from a Romanian mine and killed 2,000 tonnes of fish. The second, from a mine pond at Baia Borsa, northern Romania, resulted in the release of 20,000 cubic metres of sludge containing zinc and copper occurred in early March 2000. A week the third spill occurred at the same mining site at Baia Borsa, staining the river black including heavy metals; this series of incidents were described at the time as the most serious environmental disaster to hit central Europe since the Chernobyl disaster. Use of river water for any purpose was temporarily banned and the Hungarian government pressed the Romanians and the European Union to close all installations that could lead to further pollution. Examination of river sediments indicates that pollution incidents from mines have occurred for over a century; the following rivers are tributaries to the river Tisza: Vișeu Kosivska Shopurka Iza Sarasău Bic Săpânța Șaroș Teresva Baia Tereblia Rika Batar Borzhava Tur Someș Someșul Mare Șieu Bistrița Someșul Mic Someșul Cald Someșul Rece Crasna Bodrog Ondava Latorica Laborec Uzh Cirocha Stara Vicha Kerepets Sajó Hernád Zagyva Körös Sebes-Körös Berettyó Crișul Alb Crișul Negru Mureș (entering near S
Slovakia
Slovakia the Slovak Republic, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east, Hungary to the south, Austria to the west, the Czech Republic to the northwest. Slovakia's territory spans about 49,000 square kilometres and is mountainous; the population is over 5.4 million and consists of Slovaks. The capital and largest city is Bratislava, the second largest city is Košice; the official language is Slovak. The Slavs arrived in the territory of present-day Slovakia in the 6th centuries. In the 7th century, they played a significant role in the creation of Samo's Empire and in the 9th century established the Principality of Nitra, conquered by the Principality of Moravia to establish Great Moravia. In the 10th century, after the dissolution of Great Moravia, the territory was integrated into the Principality of Hungary, which would become the Kingdom of Hungary in 1000. In 1241 and 1242, much of the territory was destroyed by the Mongols during their invasion of Central and Eastern Europe.
The area was recovered thanks to Béla IV of Hungary who settled Germans which became an important ethnic group in the area in what are today parts of central and eastern Slovakia. After World War I and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Czechoslovak National Council established Czechoslovakia. A separate Slovak Republic existed during World War II as a totalitarian, clero-fascist one-party client state of Nazi Germany. At the end of World War II, Czechoslovakia was re-established as an independent country. A coup in 1948 ushered in a totalitarian one-party state under the Communist regime during whose rule the country existed as a satellite of the Soviet Union. Attempts for liberalization of communism in Czechoslovakia culminated in the Prague Spring, crushed by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. In 1989, the Velvet Revolution ended the Communist rule in Czechoslovakia peacefully. Slovakia became an independent state on 1 January 1993 after the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia, sometimes known as the Velvet Divorce.
Slovakia is a developed country, with a high-income advanced economy and a high Human Development Index, a high standard of living and performs favourably in measurements of civil liberties, press freedom, internet freedom, democratic governance and peacefulness. The country maintains a combination of market economy with a comprehensive social security system. Citizens of Slovakia are provided with universal health care, free education and one of the longest paid parental leave in the OECD; the country joined the European Union on 1 May 2004 and joined the Eurozone on 1 January 2009. Slovakia is a member of the Schengen Area, NATO, the United Nations, the OECD, the WTO, CERN, the OSCE, the Council of Europe and the Visegrád Group. Although regional income inequality is high, 90% of citizens own their homes. In 2018, Slovak citizens had visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 179 countries and territories, ranking the Slovak passport 10th in the world; as part of Eurozone, Slovak legal tender is the world's 2nd-most-traded currency.
Slovakia is the world's largest per-capita car producer with a total of 1,040,000 cars manufactured in the country in 2016 alone and the 7th largest car producer in the European Union. The car industry represents 43% of Slovakia's industrial output, a quarter of its exports; the first written mention of name Slovakia is in 1586. It derives from the Czech word Slováky; the native name Slovensko derives from an older name of Slovaks Sloven what may indicate its origin before the 15th century. The original meaning was geographic, since Slovakia was a part of the multiethnic Kingdom of Hungary and did not form a separate administrative unit in this period. Radiocarbon dating puts the oldest surviving archaeological artefacts from Slovakia – found near Nové Mesto nad Váhom – at 270,000 BCE, in the Early Paleolithic era; these ancient tools, made by the Clactonian technique, bear witness to the ancient habitation of Slovakia. Other stone tools from the Middle Paleolithic era come from the Prévôt cave in Bojnice and from other nearby sites.
The most important discovery from that era is a Neanderthal cranium, discovered near Gánovce, a village in northern Slovakia. Archaeologists have found prehistoric human skeletons in the region, as well as numerous objects and vestiges of the Gravettian culture, principally in the river valleys of Nitra, Ipeľ, Váh and as far as the city of Žilina, near the foot of the Vihorlat and Tribeč mountains, as well as in the Myjava Mountains; the most well-known finds include the oldest female statue made of mammoth-bone, the famous Venus of Moravany. The statue was found in the 1940s in Moravany nad Váhom near Piešťany. Numerous necklaces made of shells from Cypraca thermophile gastropods of the Tertiary period have come from the sites of Zákovská, Podkovice and Radošina; these findings provide the most ancient evidence of commercial exchanges carried out between the Mediterranean and central Europe. The Bronze Age in the geographical territory of modern-day Slovakia went through three stages of development, stretching from 2000 to 800 BCE.
Major cultural and political development can be attributed to the significant growth in production of copper in central Slovakia and northwe
Ukrainian language
Ukrainian is an East Slavic language. It is the official state language of Ukraine, one of the three official languages in the unrecognized state of Transnistria, the other two being Romanian and Russian. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic script. Historical linguists trace the origin of the Ukrainian language to the Old East Slavic of the early medieval state of Kievan Rus'. After the fall of the Kievan Rus' as well as the Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia, the language developed into a form called the Ruthenian language; the Modern Ukrainian language has been in common use since the late 17th century, associated with the establishment of the Cossack Hetmanate. From 1804 until the Russian Revolution, the Ukrainian language was banned from schools in the Russian Empire, of which the biggest part of Ukraine was a part at the time, it has always maintained a sufficient base in Western Ukraine, where the language was never banned, in its folklore songs, itinerant musicians, prominent authors.
The standard Ukrainian language is regulated by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine by its Institute for the Ukrainian Language, Ukrainian language-information fund, Potebnya Institute of Language Studies. The Ukrainian language retains a degree of mutual intelligibility with Russian; the first theory of the origin of Ukrainian language was suggested in Imperial Russia in the middle of the 18th century by Mikhail Lomonosov. This theory posits the existence of a common language spoken by all East Slavic people in the time of the Rus'. According to Lomonosov, the differences that subsequently developed between Great Russian and Ukrainian could be explained by the influence of the Polish and Slovak languages on Ukrainian and the influence of Uralic languages on Russian from the 13th to the 17th centuries. Another point of view developed during the 19th and 20th centuries by linguists of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Like Lomonosov, they assumed the existence of a common language spoken by East Slavs in the past.
But unlike Lomonosov's hypothesis, this theory does not view "Polonization" or any other external influence as the main driving force that led to the formation of three different languages from the common Old East Slavic language. This general point of view is the most accepted amongst academics worldwide outside Ukraine; the supporters of this theory disagree, about the time when the different languages were formed. Soviet scholars set the divergence between Ukrainian and Russian only at time periods. According to this view, Old East Slavic diverged into Belarusian and Ukrainian to the west, Old Russian to the north-east, after the political boundaries of the Kievan Rus' were redrawn in the 14th century. During the time of the incorporation of Ruthenia into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Belarusian diverged into identifiably separate languages; some scholars see a divergence between the language of Galicia-Volhynia and the language of Novgorod-Suzdal by the 12th century, assuming that before the 12th century, the two languages were indistinguishable.
This point of view is, however, at variance with some historical data. In fact, several East Slavic tribes, such as Polans, Severians, White Croats and Ulichs lived on the territory of today's Ukraine long before the 12th century. Notably, some Ukrainian features were recognizable in the southern dialects of Old East Slavic as far back as the language can be documented; some researchers, while admitting the differences between the dialects spoken by East Slavic tribes in the 10th and 11th centuries, still consider them as "regional manifestations of a common language". In contrast, Ahatanhel Krymsky and Alexei Shakhmatov assumed the existence of the common spoken language of Eastern Slavs only in prehistoric times. According to their point of view, the diversification of the Old East Slavic language took place in the 8th or early 9th century. Ukrainian linguist Stepan Smal-Stotsky went further, denying the existence of a common Old East Slavic language at any time in the past. Similar points of view were shared by Yevhen Tymchenko, Vsevolod Hantsov, Olena Kurylo, Ivan Ohienko and others.
According to this theory, the dialects of East Slavic tribes evolved from the common Proto-Slavic language without any intermediate stages during the 6th through 9th centuries. The Ukrainian language was formed by convergence of tribal dialects due to an intensive migration of the population within the territory of today's Ukraine in historical periods; this point of view was supported by George Shevelov's phonological studies. As the result of close Slavic contacts with the remnants of the Scythian and Sarmatian population north of the Black Sea, lasting into the early Middle Ages, the appearance of voiced fricative γ in modern Ukrainian and some southern Russian dialects is explained, that emerged in Scythian and the related eastern Iranian dialects from earlier common Proto-Indo-European *g and *gʰ. During the 13th century, when German settlers were invited to Ukraine by the princes of Galicia-Vollhynia, German words began to appear in the language spoken in Ukraine, their influence would continue under Poland not only through German colonists but through the Yiddish-speaking Jews.
Such words involve trade or handicrafts. Examples of words of German or Yiddish
Albanian language
Albanian is an Indo-European language spoken by the Albanians in the Balkans and the Albanian diaspora in the Americas and Oceania. It comprises an independent branch within the Indo-European languages and is not related to any other language in Europe. Gheg and Tosk constitute the major dialects of the Albanian language with Gheg spoken in the north and Tosk spoken in the south of the Shkumbin. Standard Albanian is a standardised form of spoken Albanian based on the Tosk dialect, it is the official language of Albania and North Macedonia as well as a minority language of Italy, Montenegro and Serbia. Centuries-old communities speaking Albanian dialects can be found scattered in Croatia, Italy as well as in Romania and Ukraine; the language is spoken by 7 million people in Albania, Greece, North Macedonia and Montenegro. However, due to the large Albanian diaspora, the worldwide total of speakers is much higher than in Southern Europe; the Albanian language is the official language of Albania and Kosovo, co-official in North Macedonia.
Albanian is a recognised minority language in Croatia, Montenegro, Romania and in Serbia. Albanian is spoken by its Minority in Greece in the Thesprotia and Preveza regional units and in a few villages in Ioannina and Florina regional units in Greece, it is spoken by 600,000 Albanian immigrants in Greece. Albanian is the third most spoken language in Italy; this is due to a substantial Albanian immigration to Italy. Italy has a historical Albanian minority of about 500,000, scattered across southern Italy, known as Arbëreshë. 1 million Albanians from Kosovo are dispersed throughout Germany and Austria. These are refugees from Kosovo who migrated during the Kosovo War. In Switzerland, the Albanian language is the sixth most spoken language with 176,293 native speakers. Albanian became an official language of the Republic of North Macedonia on January 15, 2019. There are large numbers of Albanian speakers in the United States, Chile and Canada; some of the first ethnic Albanians to arrive in the United States were Arbëreshë.
Arbëreshe have a strong sense of identity, are unique in that they speak an archaic dialect of Tosk Albanian called Arbëreshë. In North America there are 250,000 Albanian speakers, it is spoken in the eastern area of the United States in cities like New York City, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Ohio and Detroit. Greater New Orleans has a large Arbëresh community. Oftentimes, wherever there are Italians, there are a few Arbëreshe mixed with them. Arbëreshe Americans, therefore are indistinguishable from Italian Americans due to being assimilated into the Italian American community. In Argentina there are nearly 40,000 Albanian speakers in Buenos Aires. 1.3 million people of Albanian ancestry live in Turkey, more than 500,000 recognizing their ancestry and culture. There are other estimates, that place the number of people in Turkey with Albanian ancestry and or background upward to 5 million. However, the vast majority of this population is assimilated and no longer possesses fluency in the Albanian language, though a vibrant Albanian community maintains its distinct identity in Istanbul to this day.
In Egypt there are around 18,000 Albanians Tosk speakers. Many are descendants of the Janissary of Muhammad Ali Pasha, an Albanian who became Wāli, self-declared Khedive of Egypt and Sudan. In addition to the dynasty that he established, a large part of the former Egyptian and Sudanese aristocracy was of Albanian origin. In addition to the recent emigrants, there are older diasporic communities around the world. Albanian is spoken by Albanian diaspora communities residing in Australia and New Zealand; the Albanian language has two distinct dialects, Tosk, spoken in the south, Gheg spoken in the north. Standard Albanian is based on the Tosk dialect; the Shkumbin river is the rough dividing line between the two dialects. Gheg is divided into four sub-dialects, in Northwest Gheg, Northeast Gheg, Central Gheg, Southern Gheg, it is spoken in northern Albania and throughout Montenegro and northwestern North Macedonia. One divergent dialect is the Upper Reka dialect, however classified as Central Gheg.
There is a diaspora dialect in Croatia, the Arbanasi dialect. Tosk is divided into five sub-dialects, including Northern Tosk, Labërisht, Çam, Arbëresh. Tosk is spoken in southwestern North Macedonia and northern and southern Greece. Cham Albanian is spoken in North-western Greece, while Arvanitika is spoken by the Arvanites in southern Greece. In addition Arbëresh is spoken by the Arbëreshë people, descendants of 15th and 16th century migrants who settled in southeastern Italy, in small communities in the regions of Sicily and Calabria; the Albanian language has been written using many different alphabets since the earliest records from the 14th century. The history of Albanian language orthography is related to the cultural orientation and knowledge of certain foreign languages among Albanian writers; the earliest written Albanian records come from the Gheg area in makeshift spellings based on Italian or Greek. The Tosk dialect was written in the Greek alphabet and the Gheg dialect was written in the Latin script.
Both dialects had been written in the Ottoman Turkish version of the Arabic
Russian language
Russian is an East Slavic language, official in the Russian Federation, Belarus and Kyrgyzstan, as well as being used throughout Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, the Caucasus and Central Asia. It was the de facto language of the Soviet Union until its dissolution on 25 December 1991. Although nearly three decades have passed since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russian is used in official capacity or in public life in all the post-Soviet nation-states, as well as in Israel and Mongolia. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages, one of the four living members of the East Slavic languages, part of the larger Balto-Slavic branch. Written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century onward. Russian is the largest native language in Europe and the most geographically widespread language in Eurasia, it is the most spoken of the Slavic languages, with 144 million speakers in Russia and Belarus. Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers and the seventh by total number of speakers.
The language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Russian is the second most widespread language on the Internet after English respectively. Russian distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called soft and hard sounds; every consonant has a hard or a soft counterpart, the distinction is a prominent feature of the language. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Stress, unpredictable, is not indicated orthographically though an optional acute accent may be used to mark stress, such as to distinguish between homographic words, for example замо́к and за́мок, or to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words or names. Russian is an East Slavic language of the wider Indo-European family, it is a lineal descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus', a loose conglomerate of East Slavic tribes from the late 9th to the mid 13th centuries. From the point of view of spoken language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian and Rusyn, the other three languages in the East Slavic languages.
In many places in eastern and southern Ukraine and throughout Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably, in certain areas traditional bilingualism resulted in language mixtures such as Surzhyk in eastern Ukraine and Trasianka in Belarus. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, although vanished during the 15th or 16th century, is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. Russian has notable lexical similarities with Bulgarian due to a common Church Slavonic influence on both languages, as well as because of interaction in the 19th and 20th centuries, although Bulgarian grammar differs markedly from Russian. In the 19th century, the language was called "Great Russian" to distinguish it from Belarusian called "White Russian" and Ukrainian called "Little Russian"; the vocabulary, principles of word formations, and, to some extent and literary style of Russian have been influenced by Church Slavonic, a developed and russified form of the South Slavic Old Church Slavonic language used by the Russian Orthodox Church.
However, the East Slavic forms have tended to be used in the various dialects that are experiencing a rapid decline. In some cases, both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use, with many different meanings. For details, see Russian phonology and History of the Russian language. Over the course of centuries, the vocabulary and literary style of Russian have been influenced by Western and Central European languages such as Greek, Polish, German, French and English, to a lesser extent the languages to the south and the east: Uralic, Turkic and Arabic, as well as Hebrew. According to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Russian is classified as a level III language in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers, requiring 1,100 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency, it is regarded by the United States Intelligence Community as a "hard target" language, due to both its difficulty to master for English speakers and its critical role in U.
S. world policy. Feudal divisions and conflicts as well as other obstacles to the exchange of goods and ideas that ancient Russian principalities have suffered from before and during the Mongol yoke strengthened dialectical differences and for a while prevented the emergence of the standardized national language; the formation of the unified and centralized Russian state in 15th and 16th centuries and the gradual emergence of a common political and cultural space have created the need for a common standard language. The initial impulse for the standardization came from the government bureacracy for the lack of a reliable tool of communication in administrative and judicial affairs became an obvious practical problem; the earliest attempts at standardizing Russian were made based on the so-called Moscow official or chancery language. Since the underlying logic of language reforms in Russia reflected the considerations of standardizing and streamlining language norms and rules in order to ensure the Russian language's role as a practical tool of communication and administration.
The current standard form of Russian is regarded as the modern Russian literary language. It arose in the beginning of the 18th century with the modernizat
Divisions of the Carpathians
Divisions of the Carpathians are categorization of the Carpathian mountains system. Below is a detailed overview of the major ranges of the Carpathian Mountains; the Carpathians are a "subsystem" of a bigger Alps-Himalaya System that stretches from the western Europe all the way to southern Asia, are further divided into "provinces" and "subprovinces". The last level of the division, i.e. the actual mountain ranges and basins, is classified as "units". The main divisions are shown in the map on the right. To generalize, there are three major provinces: Western Carpathians, Eastern Carpathians, Southern Carpathians; the division is undisputed at the lowest level, but various divisions are given for the higher levels for the penultimate level. A geomorphological division has been used as much. Where the classification of a higher level "title" is known/sure, it is added at the end of the name in brackets, e.g. "". TaxonomyThe names are given in the language of the corresponding country and marked by the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes: AT=Austria CZ=Czech Republic HU=Hungary PL=Poland RO=Romania RS=Serbia SK=Slovakia UA=UkraineThe most confusing and diverse is the classification of the Beskids, including the Western Beskids, the Central Beskids and the Eastern Beskids.
Their geologic features are distinct, but multiple traditions and nationalities have developed overlapping variants for the divisions and names of these ranges. In Romania, it is usual to divide the Eastern Carpathians in Romanian territory into three formal groups, instead in Outer and Inner sections of Eastern Carpathians; the Romanian approach is shown by adding the following abbreviations to the names of units within Romania: MMB = Maramureș-Bukovinian Carpathians MMT = Moldavian-Transylvanian Carpathians MC = Curvature Carpathians Similar standard is traditionally applied within broader use of the term "Wooded Carpathians", that encompasses all mountain ranges within central section of Outer Eastern Carpathians, including Eastern Beskids with Polonynian Mountains, all mountains within northern section of Inner Eastern Carpathians, including Vihorlat-Gutin Area and Maramureș-Rodna Area. The Transylvanian Plateau is encircled by, geologically a part of, the Carpathians, but it is not a mountainous region and its inclusion is disputed in some sources.
Its features are included below. The Serbian Carpathians are sometimes considered part of the Southern Carpathians, sometimes not considered part of the Carpathians at all. They're included below; the Outer Carpathian Depressions lay outside the broad arc of the entire formation and are listed as part of the individual divisions of the Carpathian Mountains, i.e. of Western Carpathians, Eastern Carpathians etc. With the difficulty of finding their exact subdivisions, they are given only as a list of the final units from the west to the east and south, in a separate listing at the end. Lower Austrian Inselberg Swell + Mikulov Highlands Dyje-Svratka Vale Ždánice Forest Litenčice Hills Chřiby Kyjov Hills White Carpathians Maple Mountains Myjava Hills Váh Valley Land Vizovice Highlands Silesian-Moravian Foothills Silesian Foothills Wieliczka Foothills Wiśnicz Foothills Western section of the Western Beskids Hostýn-Vsetín Mountains Moravian-Silesian Beskids Turzovka Highlands Jablunkov Furrow Rožnov Furrow Jablunkov Intermontane Silesian Beskids Żywiec Basin Northern section of the Western Beskids Little Beskids Maków Beskids or Middle Beskids Island Beskids Gorce Rabka Basin Sącz Basin Eastern section of the Western Beskids Beskid Sądecki + Ľubovňa Highlands Čergov + Czerchów Mountains Pieniny Central section of the Western Beskids Orava Beskids + Żywiec Beskids Kysuce Beskids +Żywiec Beskids (the ol
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