Cantonese
Cantonese is a variety of Chinese spoken in the city of Guangzhou and its surrounding area in Southeastern China. It is the traditional prestige variety and standard form of Yue Chinese, one of the major subgroups of Chinese. In mainland China, it is the lingua franca of the province of Guangdong and neighbouring areas such as Guangxi, it is the official language of Hong Kong and Macau. Cantonese is widely spoken amongst Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and throughout the Western world. While the term Cantonese refers to the prestige variety, it is used in a broader sense for the entire Yue subgroup of Chinese, including related but mutually unintelligible languages and dialects such as Taishanese; when Cantonese and the related Yuehai dialects are classified together, there are about 80 million total speakers. Cantonese is viewed as a vital and inseparable part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swaths of Southeastern China, Hong Kong and Macau, as well as in overseas communities.
Although Cantonese shares a lot of vocabulary with Mandarin, the two varieties are mutually unintelligible because of differences in pronunciation and lexicon. Sentence structure, in particular the placement of verbs, sometimes differs between the two varieties. A notable difference between Cantonese and Mandarin is; this results in the situation in which a Cantonese and a Mandarin text may look similar but are pronounced differently. In English, the term "Cantonese" can be ambiguous. Cantonese proper is the variety native to the city of Canton, the traditional English name of Guangzhou; this narrow sense may be specified as "Canton language" or "Guangzhou language". However, "Cantonese" may refer to the primary branch of Chinese that contains Cantonese proper as well as Taishanese and Gaoyang. In this article, "Cantonese" is used for Cantonese proper. Speakers called this variety "Canton speech" or "Guangzhou speech", although this term is now used outside Guangzhou. In Guangdong and Guangxi, people call it "provincial capital speech" or "plain speech".
Academically called "Canton prefecture speech". In Hong Kong and Macau, as well as among overseas Chinese communities, the language is referred to as "Guangdong speech" or "Canton Province speech", or as "Chinese". In mainland China, the term "Guangdong speech" is increasingly being used amongst both native and non-native speakers. Given the history of the development of the Yue languages and dialects during the Tang dynasty migrations to the region, in overseas Chinese communities, it is referred to as "Tang speech", given that the Cantonese people refer to themselves as "people of Tang". Due to its status as a prestige dialect among all the dialects of the Yue branch of Chinese varieties, it is called "Standard Cantonese"; the official languages of Hong Kong are English, as defined in the Hong Kong Basic Law. The Chinese language has many different varieties. Given the traditional predominance of Cantonese within Hong Kong, it is the de facto official spoken form of the Chinese language used in the Hong Kong Government and all courts and tribunals.
It is used as the medium of instruction in schools, alongside English. A similar situation exists in neighboring Macau, where Chinese is an official language alongside Portuguese; as in Hong Kong, Cantonese is the predominant spoken variety of Chinese used in everyday life and is thus the official form of Chinese used in the government. The Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong and Macau is mutually intelligible with the Cantonese spoken in the mainland city of Guangzhou, although there exist some minor differences in accent and vocabulary. Cantonese first developed around the port city of Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta region of southeastern China. Due to the city's long standing as an important cultural center, Cantonese emerged as the prestige dialect of the Yue varieties of Chinese in the Southern Song dynasty and its usage spread around most of what is now the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi. Despite the cession of Macau to Portugal in 1557 and Hong Kong to Britain in 1842, the ethnic Chinese population of the two territories originated from the 19th and 20th century immigration from Guangzhou and surrounding areas, making Cantonese the predominant Chinese language in the territories.
On the mainland, Cantonese continued to serve as the lingua franca of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces after Mandarin was made the official language of the government by the Qing dynasty in the early 1900s. Cantonese remained a dominant and influential language in southeastern China until the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 and its promotion of Standard Chinese as the sole official language of the nation throughout the last half of the 20th century, although its influence still remains strong within the region. While the Chinese government vehemently discourages the official use of all forms of Chinese except Standard Chinese, Cantonese enjoys a higher standing than other Chinese langua
China
China the People's Republic of China, is a country in East Asia and the world's most populous country, with a population of around 1.404 billion. Covering 9,600,000 square kilometers, it is the third- or fourth-largest country by total area. Governed by the Communist Party of China, the state exercises jurisdiction over 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four direct-controlled municipalities, the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau. China emerged as one of the world's earliest civilizations, in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. For millennia, China's political system was based on hereditary monarchies, or dynasties, beginning with the semi-legendary Xia dynasty in 21st century BCE. Since China has expanded, re-unified numerous times. In the 3rd century BCE, the Qin established the first Chinese empire; the succeeding Han dynasty, which ruled from 206 BC until 220 AD, saw some of the most advanced technology at that time, including papermaking and the compass, along with agricultural and medical improvements.
The invention of gunpowder and movable type in the Tang dynasty and Northern Song completed the Four Great Inventions. Tang culture spread in Asia, as the new Silk Route brought traders to as far as Mesopotamia and Horn of Africa. Dynastic rule ended in 1912 with the Xinhai Revolution; the Chinese Civil War resulted in a division of territory in 1949, when the Communist Party of China established the People's Republic of China, a unitary one-party sovereign state on Mainland China, while the Kuomintang-led government retreated to the island of Taiwan. The political status of Taiwan remains disputed. Since the introduction of economic reforms in 1978, China's economy has been one of the world's fastest-growing with annual growth rates above 6 percent. According to the World Bank, China's GDP grew from $150 billion in 1978 to $12.24 trillion by 2017. Since 2010, China has been the world's second-largest economy by nominal GDP and since 2014, the largest economy in the world by purchasing power parity.
China is the world's largest exporter and second-largest importer of goods. China is a recognized nuclear weapons state and has the world's largest standing army and second-largest defense budget; the PRC is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council as it replaced the ROC in 1971, as well as an active global partner of ASEAN Plus mechanism. China is a leading member of numerous formal and informal multilateral organizations, including the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, WTO, APEC, BRICS, the BCIM, the G20. In recent times, scholars have argued that it will soon be a world superpower, rivaling the United States; the word "China" has been used in English since the 16th century. It is not a word used by the Chinese themselves, it has been traced through Portuguese and Persian back to the Sanskrit word Cīna, used in ancient India."China" appears in Richard Eden's 1555 translation of the 1516 journal of the Portuguese explorer Duarte Barbosa. Barbosa's usage was derived from Persian Chīn, in turn derived from Sanskrit Cīna.
Cīna was first used including the Mahābhārata and the Laws of Manu. In 1655, Martino Martini suggested that the word China is derived from the name of the Qin dynasty. Although this derivation is still given in various sources, it is complicated by the fact that the Sanskrit word appears in pre-Qin literature; the word may have referred to a state such as Yelang. The meaning transferred to China as a whole; the origin of the Sanskrit word is still a matter of debate, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The official name of the modern state is the "People's Republic of China"; the shorter form is "China" Zhōngguó, from zhōng and guó, a term which developed under the Western Zhou dynasty in reference to its royal demesne. It was applied to the area around Luoyi during the Eastern Zhou and to China's Central Plain before being used as an occasional synonym for the state under the Qing, it was used as a cultural concept to distinguish the Huaxia people from perceived "barbarians". The name Zhongguo is translated as "Middle Kingdom" in English.
Archaeological evidence suggests that early hominids inhabited China between 2.24 million and 250,000 years ago. The hominid fossils of Peking Man, a Homo erectus who used fire, were discovered in a cave at Zhoukoudian near Beijing; the fossilized teeth of Homo sapiens have been discovered in Fuyan Cave in Hunan. Chinese proto-writing existed in Jiahu around 7000 BCE, Damaidi around 6000 BCE, Dadiwan from 5800–5400 BCE, Banpo dating from the 5th millennium BCE; some scholars have suggested. According to Chinese tradition, the first dynasty was the Xia, which emerged around 2100 BCE; the dynasty was considered mythical by historians until scientific excavations found early Bronze Age sites at Erlitou, Henan in 1959. It remains unclear whether these sites are the remains of the Xia dynasty or of another culture from the same period; the succeeding Shang dynasty is the earliest to be confirmed by contemporary records. The Shang ruled the plain of the Yellow River in eastern China from the 17th to the 11th century BCE.
Their oracle bone script
Zhoushan
Zhoushan romanized as Chusan, is a prefecture-level "city" in northeastern Zhejiang Province in eastern China. It consists off Ningbo; the prefecture's city proper is Dinghai on Zhoushan Island, now administered as the prefecture's Dinghai District. During the 2010 census, Zhoushan Prefecture's population was 1,121,261, out of whom 842,989 lived in the urban districts of Dinghai and Putuo. On 8 July 2011 the central government approved Zhoushan as Zhoushan Archipelago New Area, a state-level new area; the archipelago was inhabited 6,000 years ago during the Neolithic by people of the Hemudu culture. During the Spring and Autumn period, Zhoushan was called Yongdong, referring to its location east of the Yong River. At the time, it belonged to the state of Yue; the fishermen and sailors who inhabited the islands engaged in piracy and became recruits for uprisings against the central authorities. At the time of the Eastern Jin, the Zhoushan Islands served as the base for Sun En's rebellion. Sun En, an adherent of the Taoist sect the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice, launched his rebellion around the year 400 and was defeated by Jin forces in 402.
Today's Zhoushan was first created as Wengshan County in Ming Prefecture in 738 under the Tang. In 863, the Japanese Buddhist monk Egaku and a Putuoshan local Zhang-shi placed a statue of Guanyin at Chaoyin Cave that would become a popular tourist and pilgrim destination. In 1073, under the Song, it was renamed Changguo County. During the Ming dynasty between the years 1530 and 1560, Japanese and Chinese pirates used Zhoushan as one of their principal bases from which they launched attacks as far as Nanjing. Under the early Qing dynasty, it played a similar role to Xiamen and Guangzhou as a frequent port of call for Western traders. Changguo Prefecture became Dinghai County within Zhejiang Province in 1688 under the Qing; the restriction of all European trade to the port of Guangzhou in 1760 forced Westerners to leave Zhoushan. One of the requests of Lord Macartney's embassy to the Qianlong Emperor in 1793 was an acquisition of "a small unfortified island near Zhoushan for the residence of English traders, storage of goods, outfitting of ships."
The Qianlong Emperor denied this request together with all the rest. British forces under Captain Charles Elliot captured Zhoushan on 5–6 July 1840 during the First Opium War and evacuated it in early 1841, after Elliot reached an agreement with Qishan, the Governor-General of Tianjin and Grand Secretary to the Daoguang Emperor, in exchange for cession of Hong Kong. At that time, Zhoushan was a well known port; the British Foreign Secretary Palmerston was famously livid when he learned that Elliot agreed to the cession of Hong Kong while giving up Zhoushan. Elliot was dismissed in April 1841 for his blunder, his replacement Sir Henry Pottinger led a British fleet that recaptured Zhoushan on 1 October 1841. The First Opium War ended with conclusion of the Treaty of Nanjing in which China opened up the cities of Guangzhou, Xiamen and Shanghai to residence by British subjects for the purpose of trade; as a result, Britain no longer had any use for Zhoushan but it kept the island until 1846 as a guarantee for the fulfilment of the stipulations of the treaty.
Dinghai was upgraded to a directly-controlled subprefecture sometime in 1841. Zhoushan was occupied by the British in 1860 during the Second Opium War. Wang Yijun, a leader of the Taiping rebels, attempted to retake Zhoushan from its Qing garrison on 13 February 1862 but was defeated and killed. Following the Xinhai Revolution and the establishment of the Republic of China, Dinghai Subprefecture reverted to a county. Sun Yat-sen wrote Travelling to Putuo. On 1 October 1942, the Japanese ship Lisbon Maru was transporting 1,800 POWs to Tokyo when she was attacked by the USS Grouper off Qingbing or Dongfu; the fishermen of nearby Dongji rescued 384 of the British prisoners from the wreckage. Amid the Chinese Civil War, Dinghai County lost Shengsi, which became an Archipelago Directly-controlled District of Jiangsu in 1946 a separate county in October 1949; the same year, Dinghai County was divided into Wengzhou Counties. In November, the Communists were repulsed by the defenders. Zhoushan was overrun by the Communists on 17 May 1950.
Wengzhou was merged back into Dinghai County, which made up part of Ningbo Prefecture, Shengsi made up a special area and county of the Songjiang Prefecture still part of Jiangsu. In March 1953, the Council of Ministers opted to establish the Zhoushan Prefecture, returning Shengsi and dividing Dinghai into Dinghai and Daishan. Ningbo's Xiangshan County was briefly incorporated into this new prefecture from 1954 to 1958. From 1958 to May 1962, Zhoushan was incorporated into Ningbo before becoming a separate prefecture again. Shengsi was temporarily assigned to Shanghai in the early 1960s; the short-lived Daqu County was created in 1962 before being redivided between Daishan and Shengsi four years later. Zhoushan was promoted to a prefecture-level "city" on 27 January 1987, with Dinghai and Putuo Counties upgraded to districts; the municipal People's Government was es
Brown-tail moth
The brown-tail moth is a moth of the family Erebidae. It is native to Europe, neighboring countries in Asia, the north coast of Africa. Descriptions of outbreaks, i.e. large population increases of several years duration, have been reported as far back as the 1500s. The life cycle of the moth is atypical, in that it spends nine months as larvae, leaving about one month each for pupae and eggs. Larvae are covered in hairs. Two red spots on the back, toward the tail, distinguish these species from other hairy moth larvae; the winged adults have white wings and a hairy white body with a tuft of brown hair at the tip of the abdomen. Females lay one egg cluster on the underside of a leaf of a host plant; the species is polyphagous, meaning that it feeds on many different species of trees, including pear, apple and oak. This species was accidentally introduced to the United States in the 1890s. During the early 20th century it was present from eastern Connecticut northward into New Brunswick, but a subsequent severe population collapse reduced the territory to parts of coastal Maine, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, by the late 20th century.
One theory for the decline appeared to be parasitism by a fly introduced to combat gypsy moths. Starting in 2015 there has been a population territory expansion in coastal Maine. In Europe, there are multiple parasitic and predator species, yet there is still a history of population outbreaks. Hairs from the caterpillars are toxic for humans, causing a poison ivy-like itchy rash of up to weeks' duration due to mechanical and chemical irritation. Direct contact with larvae is not necessary, as the hairs can become windblown. Toxins in the hairs remain potent for up to three years. Outdoor activities such as mowing a lawn or raking leaves in the fall can cause exposure; the upper surface of the wings of this species is pure white. Males may have some brown color on the underside of the forewing. Wingspan is 36–42 millimetres; the body is hairy, white except for the tail, covered in reddish-brown hairs, much more prominent in the females. Males have larger antennae, used to detect pheromones released by unmated females.
Females have a larger body. As winged adults, this species is superficially similar in appearance to Euproctis similis and Hyphantria cunea, but female E. similis have a yellow tail tuft and H. cunea lacks tail tuft coloration. The female lays one cluster of 200 to 400 eggs on the underside of a leaf; the egg cluster is covered with hairs from her anal tuft. The larva is hairy, brown with white markings, two prominent red spots toward the tail end; the hairs provide protection from predators. The species overwinters communally as larvae within a tough, silken tent constructed around branch-tip leaves and anchored to twigs. In areas where the species is abundant, these tents are a familiar sight, can be seen on a huge range of plants in late fall and winter when unaffected leaves have fallen; this species can be found throughout Europe, except in the most northern countries in the westernmost countries of Asia, such as Turkey and Israel, the countries across the northern parts of Africa. Fernand and Kirkland recount historic mentions of brown-tail moths dating back to 1500s, describing outbreaks in Paris and Berlin so severe as to strip all trees of leaves.
Carl Linnaeus described the species in the tenth edition of Systema Naturae. The brown-tail moth is an invasive species in the United States and Canada, having arrived in Somerville, MA circa 1890 and becoming widespread there and in neighboring Cambridge by 1897. Initial outbreaks were most evident in apple trees. Doctors reported "poisonings" far worse than poison ivy rash. Within a few years it was seen as a serious, fast-spreading and health problem. Through the early parts of the 20th century it was present in much of New England from eastern Connecticut to Maine, northward into New Brunswick, but the 1906 introduction of a parasitic fly to counter Gypsy moths collaterally impacted brown-tail moths. By the late 20th century the habitat was reduced to the coast and islands of Maine, parts of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Cold and wet weather hinders re-expansion of the population outside its current territories, although starting in 2015 there has been a population spike and territory expansion in coastal Maine.
In addition to North America, there have been reports of this species appearing in China and New Guinea. Photographs taken from aerial fly-overs are used to identify areas where the trees have been denuded of leaves and where the branch-tip tents are present; the female sex hormone has been synthesized and field-tested in moth traps as a means of monitoring moth populations during the June/July flight season. The white-winged adults are nocturnal and attracted to light; the brown-tail moth produces one generation a year. It has four life stages. Eggs are laid in hatch in August; the annual cycle is one month as eggs, nine months as larvae, one month pupae, one month Imagoes. Pre-diapausing larvae: Emerge and feed gregariously starting in August after about three weeks of egg incubation. Diapausing larvae: As a response to shortened periods of daylight, larvae build communal winter nests in the fall, inside of which they overwinter; these involve webbing binding l
Cultivar
The term cultivar most refers to an assemblage of plants selected for desirable characters that are maintained during propagation. More cultivar refers to the most basic classification category of cultivated plants in the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants. Most cultivars arose in cultivation. Popular ornamental garden plants like roses, daffodils and azaleas are cultivars produced by careful breeding and selection for floral colour and form; the world's agricultural food crops are exclusively cultivars that have been selected for characters such as improved yield and resistance to disease, few wild plants are now used as food sources. Trees used in forestry are special selections grown for their enhanced quality and yield of timber. Cultivars form a major part of Liberty Hyde Bailey's broader group, the cultigen, defined as a plant whose origin or selection is due to intentional human activity. A cultivar is not the same as a botanical variety, a taxonomic rank below subspecies, there are differences in the rules for creating and using the names of botanical varieties and cultivars.
In recent times, the naming of cultivars has been complicated by the use of statutory patents for plants and recognition of plant breeders' rights. The International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants offers legal protection of plant cultivars to persons or organisations that introduce new cultivars to commerce. UPOV requires that a cultivar be "distinct, uniform", "stable". To be "distinct", it must have characters that distinguish it from any other known cultivar. To be "uniform" and "stable", the cultivar must retain these characters in repeated propagation; the naming of cultivars is an important aspect of cultivated plant taxonomy, the correct naming of a cultivar is prescribed by the Rules and Recommendations of the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants. A cultivar is given a cultivar name, which consists of the scientific Latin botanical name followed by a cultivar epithet; the cultivar epithet is in a vernacular language. For example, the full cultivar name of the King Edward potato is Solanum tuberosum'King Edward'.'King Edward' is the cultivar epithet, according to the Rules of the Cultivated Plant Code, is bounded by single quotation marks.
The word cultivar originated from the need to distinguish between wild plants and those with characteristics that arose in cultivation, presently denominated cultigens. This distinction dates to the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, the "Father of Botany", keenly aware of this difference. Botanical historian Alan Morton noted that Theophrastus in his Historia Plantarum "had an inkling of the limits of culturally induced changes and of the importance of genetic constitution"; the International Code of Nomenclature for algae and plants uses as its starting point for modern botanical nomenclature the Latin names in Linnaeus' Species Plantarum and Genera Plantarum. In Species Plantarum, Linnaeus enumerated all plants known to him, either directly or from his extensive reading, he recognised the rank of varietas and he indicated these varieties with letters of the Greek alphabet, such as α, β, λ, before the varietal name, rather than using the abbreviation "var." as is the present convention. Most of the varieties that Linnaeus enumerated were of "garden" origin rather than being wild plants.
In time the need to distinguish between wild plants and those with variations, cultivated increased. In the nineteenth century many "garden-derived" plants were given horticultural names, sometimes in Latin and sometimes in a vernacular language. From circa the 1900s, cultivated plants in Europe were recognised in the Scandinavian and Slavic literature as stamm or sorte, but these words could not be used internationally because, by international agreement, any new denominations had to be in Latin. In the twentieth century an improved international nomenclature was proposed for cultivated plants. Liberty Hyde Bailey of Cornell University in New York, United States created the word cultivar in 1923 when he wrote that: The cultigen is a species, or its equivalent, that has appeared under domestication – the plant is cultigenous. I now propose another name, for a botanical variety, or for a race subordinate to species, that has originated under cultivation, it is the equivalent of the botanical variety except in respect to its origin.
In that essay, Bailey used only the rank of species for the cultigen, but it was obvious to him that many domesticated plants were more like botanical varieties than species, that realization appears to have motivated the suggestion of the new category of cultivar. Bailey created the word cultivar, assumed to be a portmanteau of cultivated and variety. Bailey never explicitly stated the etymology of cultivar, it has been suggested that it is instead a contraction of cultigen and variety, which seems correct; the neologism cultivar was promoted as "euphonious" and "free from ambiguity". The first Cultivated Plant Code of 1953 subsequently commended its use, by 1960 it had achieved common international acceptance; the words cultigen and cultivar may be confused with
Asterids
In the APG IV system for the classification of flowering plants, the name asterids denotes a clade. Common examples include the forget-me-nots, the common sunflower, morning glory and sweet potato, lavender, olive, honeysuckle, ash tree, snapdragon, psyllium, garden sage, table herbs such as mint and rosemary, rainforest trees such as Brazil nut. Most of the taxa belonging to this clade had been referred to the Asteridae in the Cronquist system and to the Sympetalae in earlier systems; the name asterids resembles the earlier botanical name but is intended to be the name of a clade rather than a formal ranked name, in the sense of the ICBN. The phylogenetic tree presented hereafter has been proposed by the APG IV project. Genetic analysis carried out after APG II maintains that the sister to all other asterids are the Cornales. A second order that split from the base of the asterids are the Ericales; the remaining orders cluster into two clades, the lamiids and the campanulids. The structure of both of these clades has changed in APG III.
In APG III system, the following clades were renamed: euasterids I → lamiids euasterids II → campanulids Asterids in Stevens, P. F.. Angiosperm Phylogeny Website. Version 7, May 2006
