Card counting
Card counting is a casino card game strategy used in the blackjack family of casino games to determine whether the next hand is to give a probable advantage to the player or to the dealer. Card counters are a class of advantage players, who attempt to decrease the inherent casino house edge by keeping a running tally of all high and low valued cards seen by the player. Card counting allows players to bet more with less risk when the count gives an advantage as well as minimize losses during an unfavorable count. Card counting provides the ability to alter playing decisions based on the composition of remaining cards. Card counting referred to as card reading refers to obtaining a sufficient count on the number and high-card location of cards in trick-taking games such as contract bridge or spades to optimize the winning of tricks; the most common variations of card counting in blackjack are based on statistical evidence that high cards benefit the player more than the dealer, while the low cards, help the dealer while hurting the player.
Higher concentration of high cards benefit the player in the following ways. 1) It increases the player's chances of hitting a natural Blackjack, which pays out 3:2. 2) Also, when the shoe has a high concentration of 10s, players have a better chance of winning when doubling on a 9, 10, or 11, by drawing a high card, thus making a high hand. 3) Furthermore, it makes splitting higher cards more profitable, since it increases the probability of being dealt a 10 or Ace to one of those split cards, thus making a strong hand. 4) On the other hand, Low cards benefit the dealer, since according to blackjack rules the dealer must hit stiff hands while the player has the option to hit or stand. Thus a dealer holding will bust every time if the next card drawn is a 10, making this card essential to track when card counting. 5)Finally, a high enough concentration of 10's can make the insurance bet more profitable, since it increases the probability of having a 10 underneath that Ace. Contrary to the popular myth, card counters do not need unusual mental abilities to count cards, because they are not tracking and memorizing specific cards.
Instead, card counters assign a point score to each card they see that estimates the value of that card, they track the sum of these values – a process called keeping a "running count." The myth that counters keep track of every card was portrayed in the 1988 film Rain Man, in which the savant character Raymond Babbitt counts through six decks with ease and a casino employee erroneously comments that it is impossible to count six decks. Basic card counting assigns a negative, or zero value to each card value available; when a card of that value is dealt, the count is adjusted by that card's counting value. Low cards increase the count as they increase the percentage of high cards in the remaining set of cards, while high cards decrease it for the opposite reason. For instance, the Hi-Lo system subtracts one for each dealt 10, Queen, King or Ace, adds one for any value 2-6. Values 7-9 therefore do not affect the count; the goal of a card counting system is to assign point values that correlate to a card's Effect of Removal.
The EOR is the actual effect of removing a given card from play, the resulting impact on the house advantage. The player may gauge the effect of removal for all cards dealt, assess the current house advantage of a game based on the remaining cards; as larger ratios between point values are used to create better correlation to actual EOR with the goal of increasing the efficiency of a system, such systems use more different numbers and are broken into classes depending on such as level 1, level 2, level 3, so on, with regard to the ratio between the highest and lowest assigned point values. The High-Low system is considered a level-one count, because the running count never increases or decreases by more than a single, predetermined value. A multilevel count, such as Zen Count, Wong Halves or Hi-Opt II, makes finer distinctions between card values to gain greater play accuracy. Rather than all cards having a value of +1, 0, or −1, an advanced count might include card ranks that are counted as +2 and −2, or +0.5 and -0.5.
Advanced players might additionally maintain a side count of specific cards, such as a side count Aces, to deal with situations where the best count for betting accuracy differs from the best count for playing accuracy. Many side count techniques exist including special-purpose counts used when attacking games with nonstandard profitable-play options such as an over/under side bet; the disadvantage of higher-level counts is that keeping track of more information can detract from the ability to play and accurately. A card-counter might earn more money by playing a simple count quickly—more hands per hour played—than by playing a complex count slowly; the following table illustrates a few ranking systems for card counting. Many others exist; the KO Strategy was first introduced in 1992 as the "All Sevens" count in The Book of British Blackjack. The primary goal of a card counting system is to assign point values to each card that correlate to the card's "effect of removal" or EOR, thus enabling the player to gauge the house advantage based on the composition of cards still to be dealt.
Larger ratios between point values can better
Lottery
A lottery is a form of gambling that involves the drawing of numbers at random for a prize. Lotteries are outlawed by some governments, while others endorse it to the extent of organizing a national or state lottery, it is common to find some degree of regulation of lottery by governments. Though lotteries were common in the United States and some other countries during the 19th century, by the beginning of the 20th century, most forms of gambling, including lotteries and sweepstakes, were illegal in the U. S. and most of Europe as well as many other countries. This remained so until well after World War II. In the 1960s casinos and lotteries began to re-appear throughout the world as a means for governments to raise revenue without raising taxes. Lotteries come in many formats. For example, the prize can be a fixed amount of cash or goods. In this format there is risk to the organizer. More the prize fund will be a fixed percentage of the receipts. A popular form of this is the "50–50" draw where the organizers promise that the prize will be 50% of the revenue.
Many recent lotteries allow purchasers to select the numbers on the lottery ticket, resulting in the possibility of multiple winners. The first recorded signs of a lottery are keno slips from the Chinese Han Dynasty between 205 and 187 BC; these lotteries are believed to have helped to finance major government projects like the Great Wall of China. From the Chinese "The Book of Songs" comes a reference to a game of chance as "the drawing of wood", which in context appears to describe the drawing of lots; the first known European lotteries were held during the Roman Empire as an amusement at dinner parties. Each guest would receive a ticket, prizes would consist of fancy items such as dinnerware; every ticket holder would be assured of winning something. This type of lottery, was no more than the distribution of gifts by wealthy noblemen during the Saturnalian revelries; the earliest records of a lottery offering tickets for sale is the lottery organized by Roman Emperor Augustus Caesar. The funds were for repairs in the City of Rome, the winners were given prizes in the form of articles of unequal value.
The first recorded lotteries to offer tickets for sale with prizes in the form of money were held in the Low Countries in the 15th century. Various towns held public lotteries to raise money for town fortifications, to help the poor; the town records of Ghent and Bruges indicate that lotteries may be older. A record dated 9 May 1445 at L'Ecluse refers to raising funds to build walls and town fortifications, with a lottery of 4,304 tickets and total prize money of 1737 florins. In the 17th century it was quite usual in the Netherlands to organize lotteries to collect money for the poor or in order to raise funds for all kinds of public usages; the lotteries proved popular and were hailed as a painless form of taxation. The Dutch state-owned Staatsloterij is the oldest running lottery; the English word lottery is derived from the Dutch noun "lot" meaning "fate". The first recorded Italian lottery was held on 9 January 1449 in Milan organized by the Golden Ambrosian Republic to finance the war against the Republic of Venice.
However, it was in Genoa that Lotto became popular. People used to bet on the name of Great Council members, who were drawn by chance, five out of ninety candidates every six months; this kind of gambling was called Semenaiu. When people wanted to bet more than twice a year, they began to substitute the candidates names with numbers and modern lotto was born, to which both modern legal lotteries and the illegal Numbers game can trace their ancestry. King Francis I of France discovered the lotteries during his campaigns in Italy and decided to organize such a lottery in his kingdom to help the state finances; the first French lottery, the Loterie Royale, was held in 1539 and was authorized with the edict of Châteaurenard. This attempt was a fiasco, since the tickets were costly and the social classes which could afford them opposed the project. During the two following centuries lotteries in France were forbidden or, in some cases, tolerated. Although the English first experimented with raffles and similar games of chance, the first recorded official lottery was chartered by Queen Elizabeth I, in the year 1566, was drawn in 1569.
This lottery was designed to raise money for the "reparation of the havens and strength of the Realme, towardes such other publique good workes". Each ticket holder won a prize, the total value of the prizes equalled the money raised. Prizes were in the form of other valuable commodities; the lottery was promoted by scrolls posted throughout the country showing sketches of the prizes. Thus, the lottery money received was an interest free loan to the government during the three years that the tickets were sold. In years, the government sold the lottery ticket rights to brokers, who in turn hired agents and runners to sell them; these brokers became the modern day stockbrokers for various commercial ventures. Most people could not afford the entire cost of a lottery ticket, so the brokers would sell shares in a ticket. Many private lotteries were held, including raising money for The Virginia Company of London to support its settlement in America at Jamestown; the English State Lottery ran from 1694 until 1826.
Thus, the English lotteries ran for over 250 years, until the government, under constant pressure from the opposition in p
Casino
A casino is a facility which houses and accommodates certain types of gambling activities. The industry that deals in casinos is called the gaming industry. Casinos are most built near or combined with hotels, retail shopping, cruise ships or other tourist attractions. There is much debate over whether the social and economic consequences of casino gambling outweigh the initial revenue that may be generated; some casinos are known for hosting live entertainment events, such as stand-up comedy and sporting events. The term "casino" is a confusing linguistic false friend for translators. Casino is of Italian origin; the term casino may mean summerhouse, or social club. During the 19th century, the term casino came to include other public buildings where pleasurable activities took place. In modern-day Italian a casino is either a brothel, a mess, or a noisy environment, while a gaming house is spelt casinò, with an accent. Not all casinos were used for gaming; the Catalina Casino, a famous landmark overlooking Avalon Harbor on Santa Catalina Island, has never been used for traditional games of chance, which were outlawed in California by the time it was built.
The Copenhagen Casino was a theatre, known for the mass public meetings held in its hall during the 1848 Revolution, which made Denmark a constitutional monarchy. Until 1937, it was a well-known Danish theatre; the Hanko Casino in Hanko, Finland—one of that town's most conspicuous landmarks—was never used for gambling. Rather, it was a banquet hall for the Russian nobility which frequented this spa resort in the late 19th century and is now used as a restaurant. In military and non-military usage in German and Spanish, a casino or kasino is an officers' mess; the precise origin of gambling is unknown. It is believed that gambling in some form or another has been seen in every society in history. From the Ancient Greeks and Romans to Napoleon's France and Elizabethan England, much of history is filled with stories of entertainment based on games of chance; the first known European gambling house, not called a casino although meeting the modern definition, was the Ridotto, established in Venice, Italy in 1638 by the Great Council of Venice to provide controlled gambling during the carnival season.
It was closed in 1774. In American history, early gambling establishments were known as saloons; the creation and importance of saloons was influenced by four major cities: New Orleans, St. Louis and San Francisco, it was in the saloons that travelers could find people to talk to, drink with, gamble with. During the early 20th century in America, gambling became outlawed and banned by state legislation and social reformers of the time. However, in 1931, gambling was legalized throughout the state of Nevada. America's first legalized casinos were set up in those places. In 1976 New Jersey allowed gambling in Atlantic City, now America's second largest gambling city. Most jurisdictions worldwide have a minimum gambling age. Customers gamble by playing games of chance, in some cases with an element of skill, such as craps, baccarat and video poker. Most games played have mathematically determined odds that ensure the house has at all times an overall advantage over the players; this can be expressed more by the notion of expected value, uniformly negative.
This advantage is called the house edge. In games such as poker where players play against each other, the house takes a commission called the rake. Casinos sometimes give out complimentary comps to gamblers. Payout is the percentage of funds returned to players. Casinos in the United States say that a player staking money won from the casino is playing with the house's money. Video Lottery Machines have become one of the most popular forms of gambling in casinos; as of 2011 investigative reports have started calling into question whether the modern-day slot-machine is addictive. Casino design—regarded as a psychological exercise—is an intricate process that involves optimising floor plan, décor and atmospherics to encourage gambling. Factors influencing gambling tendencies include sound and lighting. Natasha Dow Schüll, an anthropologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, highlights the decision of the audio directors at Silicon Gaming to make its slot machines resonate in "the universally pleasant tone of C, sampling existing casino soundscapes to create a sound that would please but not clash".
Dr Alan Hirsch, founder of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago, studied the impact of certain scents on gamblers, discerning that a pleasant albeit unidentifiable odour released by Las Vegas slot machines generated about 50% more in daily revenue. He suggested. Casino designer Roger Thomas is credited with implementing a successful, disruptive design for the Las Vegas Wynn Resorts casinos in 2008, he broke casino design convention by introducing natural sunlight and flora to appeal to women. Thomas put in skylights and antique clocks, defying the commonplace notion that a casino should be a timeless space; the following li
First Transcontinental Railroad
The First Transcontinental Railroad was a 1,912-mile continuous railroad line constructed between 1863 and 1869 that connected the existing eastern U. S. rail network at Omaha, Nebraska/Council Bluffs, Iowa with the Pacific coast at the Oakland Long Wharf on San Francisco Bay. The rail line was built by three private companies over public lands provided by extensive US land grants. Construction was financed by both state and US government subsidy bonds as well as by company issued mortgage bonds; the Western Pacific Railroad Company built 132 mi of track from Oakland/Alameda to Sacramento, California. The Central Pacific Railroad Company of California constructed 690 mi eastward from Sacramento to Promontory Summit, Utah Territory; the Union Pacific built 1,085 mi from the road's eastern terminus at Council Bluffs near Omaha, Nebraska westward to Promontory Summit. The railroad opened for through traffic on May 10, 1869 when CPRR President Leland Stanford ceremonially drove the gold "Last Spike" with a silver hammer at Promontory Summit.
The coast-to-coast railroad connection revolutionized the settlement and economy of the American West. It brought the western states and territories into alignment with the northern Union states and made transporting passengers and goods coast-to-coast quicker and less expensive. Paddle steamers linked Sacramento to the cities and their harbor facilities in the San Francisco Bay until 1869, when the CPRR completed and opened the Western Pacific grade to Alameda and Oakland; the first transcontinental rail passengers arrived at the Pacific Railroad's original western terminus at the Alameda Mole on September 6, 1869 where they transferred to the steamer Alameda for transport across the Bay to San Francisco. The road's rail terminus was moved two months to the Oakland Long Wharf about a mile to the north. Service between San Francisco and Oakland Pier continued to be provided by ferry; the CPRR purchased 53 miles of UPRR-built grade from Promontory Summit to Ogden, Utah Territory, which became the interchange point between trains of the two roads.
The transcontinental line was popularly known as the Overland Route after the principal passenger rail service that operated over the length of the line until 1962. Building a railroad line that connected the United States coast-to-coast was advocated in 1832 when Dr. Hartwell Carver published an article in the New York Courier & Enquirer advocating building a transcontinental railroad from Lake Michigan to Oregon. In 1847 he submitted to the U. S. Congress a "Proposal for a Charter to Build a Railroad from Lake Michigan to the Pacific Ocean", seeking a congressional charter to support his idea. Congress agreed to support the idea. Under the direction of the Department of War, the Pacific Railroad Surveys were conducted from 1853 through 1855; these included an extensive series of expeditions of the American West seeking possible routes. A report on the explorations described alternative routes and included an immense amount of information about the American West, covering at least 400,000 sq mi.
It included the region's natural history and illustrations of reptiles, amphibians and mammals. The report failed however to include detailed topographic maps of potential routes needed to estimate the feasibility and select the best route; the survey was detailed enough to determine that the best southern route lay south of the Gila River boundary with Mexico in vacant desert, through the future territories of Arizona and New Mexico. This in part motivated the United States to complete the Gadsden Purchase. In 1856 the Select Committee on the Pacific Railroad and Telegraph of the US House of Representatives published a report recommending support for a proposed Pacific railroad bill: The necessity that now exists for constructing lines of railroad and telegraphic communication between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of this continent is no longer a question for argument. In order to maintain our present position on the Pacific, we must have some more speedy and direct means of intercourse than is at present afforded by the route through the possessions of a foreign power.
The U. S. Congress was divided on where the eastern terminus of the railroad should be—in a southern or northern city. Three routes were considered: A northern route along the Missouri River through present-day northern Montana to Oregon Territory; this was considered impractical due to extensive winter snows. A central route following the Platte River in Nebraska through to the South Pass in Wyoming, following most of the Oregon Trail. Snow on this route remained a concern. A southern route across Texas, New Mexico Territory, the Sonora desert, connecting to Los Angeles, California. Surveyors found during an 1848 survey that the best route lay south of the border between the United States and Mexico; this was resolved by the Gadsden Purchase in 1853. Once the central route was chosen, it was obvious that the western terminus should be Sacramento, but there was considerable difference of opinion about the eastern terminus. Three locations along 250 miles of Missouri River were considered: St. Joseph, accessed via the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad.
Kansas City, Kansas / Leavenworth, Kansas accessed via the Leavenworth and Western Railroad, controlled by Thomas Ewing Jr. and by John C. Fremont. Council Bluffs, Iowa / Omaha, accessed via an extension of Union Pacific financier Thomas C. Durant's proposed Mississippi and
Homing pigeon
The homing pigeon is a variety of domestic pigeon derived from the rock pigeon, selectively bred for its ability to find its way home over long distances. The wild rock pigeon has an innate homing ability, meaning that it will return to its nest, using magnetoreception; this made it easy to breed from the birds that found their way home over long distances. Flights as long as 1,800 km have been recorded by birds in competitive pigeon racing, their average flying speed over moderate 965 km distances is around 97 km/h and speeds of up to 160 km/h have been observed in top racers for short distances. Because of this skill, homing pigeons were used to carry messages as messenger pigeons, they are referred to as "pigeon post" if used in post service, or "war pigeon" during wars. Homing pigeons are incorrectly categorized as English Carrier pigeons, a breed of fancy pigeons selectively-bred for its distinctively rounded hard wattle; the purpose of using them was to send mails. Male and female pigeons can be differentiated by physical characteristics of the head, beak and breast, though visual identification of sex by physical characteristics alone can be inaccurate.
Males stand taller, have larger beaks, crops and eye ceres, as well as round heads and thicker napes. Females, on the other hand, tend to be shorter with smaller beaks and ceres, as well as flatter heads and fuller breasts. Male and female pigeons show different behaviours; the "coo" of males is louder and more insistent when courting. Display behaviour differs between the sexes. Most notably, a male turns 360 degrees with an inflated crop and a loud "coo", to show interest in a female or to defend or discourage another pigeon from entering its territory, while females never turn full circle, but rather do a 270-degree back-and-forth rotational motion. During breeding season during the warmer months, a male pigeon will court the female by puffing out his chest, bobbing his head and strutting in circles around her, all the while cooing his affections. If she accepts, she will allow him onto her back. After mating, the male will build a nest out of gathered sticks in a suitable crevice, while the female watches and makes changes.
Urban birds will gladly use a roof on a building. The female will lay two eggs; the first egg would be laid late in the evening, the other egg forty hours after, which will hatch in 17 to 20 days, depending on the weather. Both parents aid in rearing the nestlings. Fledglings leave the nest around four to five weeks after hatching; the sport of flying homing pigeons was well-established as early as 3000 years ago. They were used to proclaim the winner of the Ancient Olympics. Messenger pigeons were used as early as 1150 in Baghdad and later by Genghis Khan. By 1167 a regular service between Baghdad and Syria had been established by Sultan Nur ad-Din. In Damietta, by the mouth of the Nile, the Spanish traveller Pedro Tafur saw carrier pigeons for the first time, in 1436, though he imagined that the birds made round trips and back; the Republic of Genoa equipped their system of watch towers in the Mediterranean Sea with pigeon posts. Tipu Sultan of Mysore used homing pigeons; the pigeon holes may be seen in the mosque's minarets to this day.
In 1818, a great pigeon race called. In 1860, Paul Reuter, who founded Reuters press agency, used a fleet of over 45 pigeons to deliver news and stock prices between Brussels and Aachen, the terminus of early telegraph lines; the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo was first delivered by a pigeon to England. During the Franco-Prussian War pigeons were used to carry mail between besieged Paris and the French unoccupied territory. In December 1870, it took ten hours for a pigeon carrying microfilms to fly from Perpignan to Bruxelles. Pigeons carried messages only one way, to their home, they had to be transported manually before another flight. However, by placing their food at one location and their home at another location, pigeons have been trained to fly back and forth up to twice a day reliably, covering round-trip flights up to 160 km, their reliability has lent itself to occasional use on mail routes, such as the Great Barrier Pigeongram Service established between the Auckland, New Zealand, suburb of Newton and Great Barrier Island in November 1897 the first regular air mail service in the world.
The world's first'airmail' stamps were issued for the Great Barrier Pigeon-Gram Service from 1898 to 1908. Homing pigeons were still employed in the 21st century by certain remote police departments in Odisha state in eastern India to provide emergency communication services following natural disasters. In March 2002, it was announced that India's Police Pigeon Service messenger system in Odisha was to be retired, due to the expanded use of the Internet; the Taliban banned use of homing pigeons in Afghanistan. To this day, pigeons are entered into competitions, with the winner receiving prize money at the end. Research has been performed with the intention of discovering how pigeons, after being transported, can find their way back from distant places they have never visited before. Most researchers believe that homing ability is based on a "map and compass" model, with the compass feature allowing birds to orient and the map feature allowing birds to determine their location relative to
Gambling
Gambling is the wagering of money or something of value on an event with an uncertain outcome, with the primary intent of winning money or material goods. Gambling thus requires three elements be present: consideration, a prize; the outcome of the wager is immediate, such as a single roll of dice, a spin of a roulette wheel, or a horse crossing the finish line, but longer time frames are common, allowing wagers on the outcome of a future sports contest or an entire sports season. The term "gaming" in this context refers to instances in which the activity has been permitted by law; the two words are not mutually exclusive. However, this distinction is not universally observed in the English-speaking world. For instance, in the United Kingdom, the regulator of gambling activities is called the Gambling Commission; the word gaming is used more since the rise of computer and video games to describe activities that do not involve wagering online gaming, with the new usage still not having displaced the old usage as the primary definition in common dictionaries.
Gambling is a major international commercial activity, with the legal gambling market totaling an estimated $335 billion in 2009. In other forms, gambling can be conducted with materials which are not real money. For example, players of marbles games might wager marbles, games of Pogs or Magic: The Gathering can be played with the collectible game pieces as stakes, resulting in a meta-game regarding the value of a player's collection of pieces. Gambling dates back before written history. In Mesopotamia the earliest six-sided dice date to about 3000 BC. However, they were based on astragali dating back thousands of years earlier. In China, gambling houses were widespread in the first millennium BC, betting on fighting animals was common. Lotto games and dominoes appeared in China as early as the 10th century. Playing cards appeared in the ninth century in China. Records trace gambling in Japan back at least as far as the 14th century. Poker, the most popular U. S. card game associated with gambling, derives from the Persian game As-Nas, dating back to the 17th century.
The first known casino, the Ridotto, started operating in 1638 in Italy. Many jurisdictions, local as well as national, either ban gambling or control it by licensing the vendors; such regulation leads to gambling tourism and illegal gambling in the areas where it is not allowed. The involvement of governments, through regulation and taxation, has led to a close connection between many governments and gaming organizations, where legal gambling provides significant government revenue, such as in Monaco or Macau, China. There is legislation requiring that the odds in gaming devices be statistically random, to prevent manufacturers from making some high-payoff results impossible. Since these high-payoffs have low probability, a house bias can quite be missed unless the odds are checked carefully. Most jurisdictions that allow gambling require participants to be above a certain age. In some jurisdictions, the gambling age differs depending on the type of gambling. For example, in many American states one must be over 21 to enter a casino, but may buy a lottery ticket after turning 18.
Because contracts of insurance have many features in common with wagers, insurance contracts are distinguished under law as agreements in which either party has an interest in the "bet-upon" outcome beyond the specific financial terms. E.g.: a "bet" with an insurer on whether one's house will burn down is not gambling, but rather insurance – as the homeowner has an obvious interest in the continued existence of his/her home independent of the purely financial aspects of the "bet". Nonetheless, both insurance and gambling contracts are considered aleatory contracts under most legal systems, though they are subject to different types of regulation. Under common law English Law, a gambling contract may not give a casino bona fide purchaser status, permitting the recovery of stolen funds in some situations. In Lipkin Gorman v Karpnale Ltd, where a solicitor used stolen funds to gamble at a casino, the House of Lords overruled the High Court's previous verdict, adjudicating that the casino return the stolen funds less those subject to any change of position defence.
U. S. Law precedents are somewhat similar. For case law on recovery of gambling losses where the loser had stolen the funds see "Rights of owner of stolen money as against one who won it in gambling transaction from thief". An interesting wrinkle to these fact pattern is to ask what happens when the person trying to make recovery is the gambler's spouse, the money or property lost was either the spouse's, or was community property; this was a minor plot point in a Perry Mason novel, The Case of the Singing Skirt, it cites an actual case Novo v. Hotel Del Rio. Ancient Hindu poems like the Gambler's Lament and the Mahabharata testify to the popularity of gambling among ancient Indians. However, the text Arthashastra recommends control of gambling. Ancient Jewish authorities frowned on gambling disqualifying professional gamblers from testifying in court; the Catholic Church holds the position that there is no moral impediment to gambling, so long as it is fair, all bettors have a reasonable chance of winni
Thousand Character Classic
The Thousand Character Classic known as the Thousand Character Text, is a Chinese poem, used as a primer for teaching Chinese characters to children from the sixth century onward. It contains one thousand characters, each used only once, arranged into 250 lines of four characters apiece and grouped into four line rhyming stanzas to make it easy to memorize, it is sung in a way similar to children learning the Latin alphabet sing an "alphabet song." Along with the Three Character Classic and the Hundred Family Surnames, it formed the basis of literacy training in traditional China. The first line is Tian di xuan huang and the last line, Yan zai hu ye explains the use of the grammatical particles "yan", "zai", "hu", "ye". There are several stories of the work's origin. One says that Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty commissioned Zhou Xingsi to compose this poem for his prince to practice calligraphy. Another says that the emperor commanded Wang Xizhi, a noted calligrapher, to write out one thousand characters and give them to Zhou as a challenge to make into an ode.
Another story is that the emperor commanded his princes and court officers to compose essays and ordered another minister to copy them on a thousand slips of paper, which became mixed and scrambled. Zhou was given the task of restoring these slips to their original order, he worked so intensely to finish doing so overnight that his hair turned white. The popularity of the book in the Tang dynasty is shown by the fact that there were some 32 copies found in the Dunhuang archaeological excavations. By the Song dynasty, since all literate people could be assumed to have memorized the text, the order of its characters was used to put documents in sequence in the same way that alphabetical order is used in alphabetic languages; the Buddhist Uyghur Kingdom of Qocho used the thousand character classic and the Qieyun and it was written that "In Qocho city were more than fifty monasteries, all titles of which are granted by the emperors of the Tang dynasty, which keep many Buddhist texts as Tripitaka, Yupuan, Jingyin etc."In the dynasties following the Song, the Three Character Classic, the Hundred Family Surnames, 1,000 Character Classic, came to be known as San Bai Qian, from the first character in their titles.
They were the universal introductory literacy texts for students exclusively boys, from elite backgrounds and for a number of ordinary villagers. Each was available in many versions, printed cheaply, available to all since they did not become superseded; when a student had memorized all three, he could recognize and pronounce, though not write or understand the meaning of 2,000 characters. Since Chinese did not use an alphabet, this was an effective, though time consuming, way of giving a "crash course" in character recognition before going on to understanding texts and writing characters. Wani, a semi-legendary Chinese-Baekje scholar, is said to have transmitted the Thousand Character Classic to Japanese along with 10 books of the Analects of Confucius during the reign of Emperor Ōjin. However, this alleged event precedes the composition of the Thousand Character Classic; this makes many assume that the event is fiction, but some believe it to be based in fact using a different version of the Thousand Character Classic.
The Thousand Character Classic has been used as a primer for learning Chinese characters for many centuries. It is uncertain; the book is noted as a principal force—along with the introduction of Buddhism into Korea—behind the introduction of Chinese characters into the Korean language. Hanja was the sole means of writing Korean until the Hangul script was created under the direction of King Sejong the Great in the 15th century; the Thousand Character Classic's use as a writing primer for children began in 1583, when King Seonjo ordered Han Ho to carve the text into wooden printing blocks. Forty-four legends from Cheon to Su among Thousand Character Classic were inscribed one by one on the reverse of Sangpyung Tongbo; the Thousand Character Classic has its own form in representing the Chinese characters. For each character, the text shows its sound; the vocabulary to represent the saegim has remained unchanged in every edition, despite the natural evolution of the Korean language since then. However, in the editions Gwangju Thousand Character Classic and Seokbong Thousand Character Classic, both written in the 16th century, there are a number of different meanings expressed for the same character.
The types of changes of saegims in Seokbong Thousand Character Classic into those in Gwangju Thousand Character Classic fall under the following categories: Definitions turned more generalized or more concrete when semantic scope of each character had been changed Former definitions were replaced by synonyms Parts of speech in the definitions were changedFrom these changes, replacements between native Korean and Sino-Korean can be found. "rare saegim vocabularies" are presumed to be pre-16th century, for it is thought that they may be a fossilized
