1.
Paleohispanic scripts
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The Paleohispanic scripts are the writing systems created in the Iberian peninsula before the Latin alphabet became the dominant script. Most of them are unusual in that they are rather than purely alphabetic, despite having supposedly developed, in part. Some researchers conclude that their origin may lie solely with the Phoenician alphabet, the Paleoiberian scripts are classified into three major groups, southern, northern, and Greco-Iberian, with differences both in the shapes of the glyphs and in their values. Inscriptions in the scripts have been found mainly in the southern half of the Iberian Peninsula. They represent only 5% of the inscriptions found, and mostly read from right to left and they are, the Espanca script, the Tartessian or Southwestern script, also known as South Lusitanian, the Southeastern Iberian script, also known as Meridional. Inscriptions in the scripts have been found mainly in the NE of the Iberian Peninsula. They represent 95% of the inscriptions found, and mostly read from left to right and they are, the Northeastern Iberian script, also known as Levantine, Dual variant Non-dual variant the Celtiberian script Western variant Eastern variant. This unique writing system has been called a semi-syllabary, in addition, the original format did not distinguish voiced from unvoiced plosives, so that ga stood for both /ga/ and /ka/, and da stood for both /da/ and /ta/. On the other hand, the continuants were written with simple alphabetic letters, as in Phoenician, if correct, this innovation would parallel the creation of the Latin letter G by the addition of a stroke to C, which had previously stood for both /k/ and /g/. The Tartessian script is typologically intermediate between a pure alphabet and the Paleohispanic semi-syllabaries, although the letter used to write a plosive was determined by the following vowel, as in a semi-syllabary, the following vowel was also written, as in an alphabet. This redundant typology re-emerged in a few texts of northeastern Iberian and Celtiberian scripts. The only known full Paleoiberian signary, on the undated Espanca tablet, follows the Phoenician/Greek order for the first 13 of its 27 letters, Α Β Γ Δ Ι Κ Λ Μ Ν Ξ Π. However, the order of what appears to be /u/ directly after Τ, the obvious question about the origin and evolution of these scripts is how a purely alphabetic script was changed into, or perhaps unconsciously reinterpreted as, a partial syllabary. It may be instructive to consider an unrelated development in the evolution of the Etruscan alphabet from Greek, Greek had three letters, Γ, Κ, and Ϙ, whose sounds were not distinguished in Etruscan. Nonetheless, all three were borrowed, becoming the letters C, K, and Q. When the Etruscan alphabet was adapted to Latin, the letter C stood for both /k/ and /g/, as Etruscan had had no /g/ sound to maintain the original sound value of Greek Г. Something similar may have happened during the evolution of the Paleoiberian scripts, in Tartessian script, vowels were always written after the plosives, but they were redundant — or at nearly so — and thus it seems they were dropped when the script passed to the Iberians. Among the velar consonants, ka/ga of southeastern Iberian and the southwestern script derives from Phoenician/Greek Γ, ke/ge from Κ, Phoenician/Greek labial letter Β was the source of southwestern be, southeastern ba, the use of Π is uncertain but may have been the source of bi
2.
Sant Just Desvern
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Sant Just Desvern is a town near Barcelona, in the comarca of the Baix Llobregat, Catalonia, Spain. Baix Llobregat has an area of 486. 5km2, population of 643,419 inhabitants, density of 1322.5 inhabitants/km2, Sant Just Desvern is located in the 2, 078317º of longitude and 41, 381611º of latitude. It is situated at 122m over the line of the sea, the maximum height is located at 405 meters above sea level, almost in the top of Turó de Merlès and the lowest spot of this town is about 40 meters, located at the park of Torreblanca. The surface of the town is about 7,8 km2, the town has 35 km of streets. It has good connections to arrive to N-340, the highway A-2 and Rondes de Dalt, in the first division of comarcal, Sant Just Desvern was included in Barcelonès. But in the revision in 1987, along with Esplugas de Llobregat. The municipality borders are Sant Joan Despí to the southwest, Esplugues de Llobregat to the east, Barcelona is almost in the border line. The first mention of the town in a document dates back to the year 965 and its coat of arms depicts a blue bell inside a golden rhombus. The local city council uses the slogan pobleiciutat, Sant Just Desvern is home to several celebrities including players for the F. C. Barcelona football club and politicians including the ex-president of the Generalitat de Catalunya, José Montilla. The population was 15,874 in 2012, the town is home to the Walden 7, designed by Ricardo Bofill. The building has 16 stories high and this surface is 31.140 m2, the building has 446 apartments and nowadays live about thousand people. It has three swimming pools on the top, apart from that, Sant Just has a viewer near to the Walden. The viewer is a concrete chimney designed by engineer Clifford Tomlinson, it’s 105 meters in height and it was the highest chimney in Europe when it was constructed. The viewpoint is on the top accessed by an elevator with transparent floor, besides, the chimney has a widescreen restaurant high in a metallic ring high with panoramic views. The Church of Sant Just Desvern is documented since 987, the actual building is of 1571 and after the Spanish civil war was reconstructed because it was burnt. Moreover, Sant Just has some ancient farmhouses that are regarded like patrimony of the town and those are Can Campreciós, Can Ginestar, Can Segrera, Can Cardona, Can Solanes, Can Pedrosa, Can Carbonelletc. Just is based by industrial sector and the sector, which have a high specialization. The most important industries are chemical-pharmaceutical, perfume, machinery manufacturing, electrical equipment manufacturing, for services are machinery rental, whole sale trade and income distribution
3.
Navarre
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The first documented use of a name resembling Navarra, Nafarroa, or Naparroa is a reference to navarros, in Eginhards early 9th Century chronicle of the feats of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne. Other Royal Frankish Annals feature nabarros, there are two proposed etymologies for the name. Basque nabar, brownish, multicolor (i. e. in contrast to the mountainous lands north of the original County of Navarre. Basque naba, valley, plain + Basque herri, the linguist Joan Coromines considers naba to be linguistically part of a wider Vasconic or Aquitanian language substrate, rather than Basque per se. During the Roman Empire, the Vascones, a tribe who populated the southern slopes of the Pyrenees. In the mountainous north, the Vascones escaped large-scale Roman settlement, not so the flatter areas to the south, which were amenable to large-scale Roman farming—vineyards, olives, and wheat crops. Neither the Visigoths nor the Franks ever completely subjugated the area, the Vascones included neighbouring tribes as of the 7th century. In AD778, the Basques defeated a Frankish army at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass and that kingdom reached its zenith during the reign of King Sancho III, comprising most of the Christian realms to the south of the Pyrenees, and even a short overlordship of Gascony. When Sancho III died in 1035, the Kingdom of Navarre was divided between his sons and it never fully recovered its political power, while its commercial importance increased as traders and pilgrims poured into the kingdom throughout the Way of Saint James. In 1200, Navarre lost the key western Basque districts to Alphonse VIII of Castile, Navarre then contributed with a small but symbolic force of 200 knights to the decisive Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 against the Almohads. The native line of kings came to an end in 1234, however, the Navarrese kept most of their strong laws and institutions. To the south of the Pyrenees, Navarre was annexed to the Crown of Castile, but keeping a separate status. A Chartered Government was established, and the managed to keep home rule. After the 1839 Convention of Bergara, a version of home rule was passed in 1839. The relocation of customs from the Ebro river to the Pyrenees in 1841 prompted the collapse of Navarre’s customary cross-Pyrenean trade, amid instability in Spain, Carlists took over in Navarre and the rest of the Basque provinces. The end of the Third Carlist War saw a wave of Spanish centralization directly affecting Navarre. In 1893-1894 the Gamazada popular uprising took place centred in Pamplona against Madrids governmental decisions breaching the 1841 chartered provisions. Except for a faction, all parties in Navarre agreed on the need for a new political framework based on home rule within the Laurak Bat
4.
Iberian scripts
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The Iberian scripts are the Paleohispanic scripts that were used to represent the extinct Iberian language. Most of them are very unusual in that they are semi-syllabic rather than purely alphabetic. The oldest Iberian inscriptions date to the 4th or possibly the 5th century BCE, and it was used mainly in Alicante and Murcia. The northeastern Iberian script is known simply as the Iberian script. These have been mainly in the northeastern quadrant of the Iberian Peninsula, mostly along the coast from Languedoc-Roussillon to Alicante. The southeastern Iberian script is poorly attested, and there are gaps in the records, There are no positively identified symbols for /gu/, /do/. Unlike the northeastern Iberian script the decipherment of the southeastern Iberian script is not still closed, the southeastern inscriptions have been found mainly in the southeastern quadrant of Iberia, Eastern Andalusia, Murcia, Albacete, Alicante, and Valencia. If correct, this innovation would parallel the creation of the Latin letter G from C by the addition of a stroke and that is, in written Iberian, ga displayed no resemblance to ge, and bi had no connection to bo. This possibly unique writing system is called a semi-syllabary, the southeastern script was written right to left, as was the Phoenician alphabet, whereas the northeastern script reversed this to left to right, as in the Greek alphabet. The relation between the northeastern and southeastern Iberian scripts is not straightforward and it appears that either the glyphs themselves were changed, or that they assumed new values. For example, southern /e/ derives from Phoenician/Greek Ο, whereas northern /e/ resembles Phoenician/Greek Ε, however, it is clear that they had a common origin, and the most commonly accepted hypothesis is that the northeastern script derives from the southeastern script. Some researchers conclude that their origin lies solely with the Phoenician alphabet. Iberian language Paleohispanic scripts Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula Anderson, correa, José Antonio, «Los semisilabarios ibéricos, algunas cuestiones», ELEA4, pp. 75–98. Correa, José Antonio, «Representación gráfica de la oposición de sonoridad en las oclusivas ibéricas », AIΩN14, ferrer i Jané, Joan Novetats sobre el sistema dual de diferenciació gràfica de les oclusives sordes i sonores, Palaeohispanica 5, pp. 957–982. Gómez-Moreno, Manuel, «De Epigrafia ibérica, el plomo de Alcoy», Revista de filología española 9, hoz, Javier de, «La escritura greco-ibérica», Veleia 2–3, pp. 285–298. Hoz, Javier de, «El nuevo plomo inscrito de Castell y el problema de las oposiciones de sonoridad en ibérico», Symbolae Ludouico Mitxelena septuagenario oblatae, maluquer de Motes, Joan, Epigrafía prelatina de la península ibérica, Barcelona. Rodríguez Ramos, Jesús, Análisis de Epigrafía Íbera, Vitoria-Gasteiz 2004, rodríguez Ramos, Jesús, «La escritura ibérica meridional», Zephyrus 55, pp. 231–245. Untermann, Jürgen, Monumenta Linguarum Hispanicarum, Wiesbaden, II Die iberischen Inschriften aus Sudfrankreicht
5.
Southeastern Iberian script
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The main difference is that southeastern Iberian script doesn’t show the vocalic redundancy of the syllabic signs. From the writing point of view they are neither alphabets nor syllabaries, rather. The inscriptions that use the southeastern Iberian script had been mainly in the southeastern quadrant of the Iberian Peninsula, eastern Andalusia, Murcia, Albacete, Alicante. The southeastern Iberian inscriptions were made on different object types, but they number around 50, between them there are the lead plaque from Gador and the lead plaque from La Bastida de les Alcuses. The inscriptions that use this script almost always use the right to left direction of writing, the oldest inscriptions in southeastern Iberian script date to the 4th century BCE, and the modern ones date from the end of the 2nd century BCE. Ferrer i Jané, Joan, «El sistema dual de lescriptura ibèrica sud-oriental», Veleia 27, hoz, Javier de, «El desarrollo de la escritura y las lenguas de la zona meridional», Tartessos, pp. 523-587. Rodríguez Ramos, Jesús, «La escritura ibérica meridional», Zephyrus 55, III Die iberischen Inschriften aus Spanien, Wiesbaden. Velaza, Javier, Epigrafía y lengua ibéricas, Barcelona, the meridional Iberian writing - Jesús Rodríguez Ramos
6.
Greco-Iberian alphabet
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The inscriptions that use the Greco-Iberian alphabet had been found mainly in Alicante and Murcia and the direction of the writing is left to right. To represent the second rhotic rho gets an additional stroke, eta is used instead of epsilon to represent /e/. The only letter not found in the variant of the Greek alphabet is sampi. The letter forms are petroglyphic since the writing surface affords angular glyphs with straight lines, hoz, Javier de, «La escritura greco-ibérica», Veleia 2–3, pp. 285–298. Hoz, Javier de, «Epigrafía griega de occidente y escritura greco-ibérica», Los griegos en España, Rodríguez Ramos, Jesús, «Introducció a l’estudi de les inscripcions ibèriques», Revista de la Fundació Privada Catalana per l’Arqueologia ibèrica,1, pp. 13–144. III Die iberischen Inschriften aus Spanien, Wiesbaden, velaza, Javier, Epigrafía y lengua ibéricas, Barcelona. The Greek-Iberian writing- Jesús Rodríguez Ramos Detailed map of the Pre-Roman Peoples of Iberia
7.
Phoenician alphabet
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The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, is the oldest verified alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad consisting of 22 letters, all consonants and it was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia. The Phoenician alphabet is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs and it became one of the most widely used writing systems, spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it evolved and was assimilated by many other cultures. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet was derived from Phoenician. Another derivative script is the Aramaic alphabet, which was the ancestor of the modern Arabic script, the Modern Hebrew script is a stylistic variant of the Aramaic script. The Greek alphabet was derived from Phoenician. Phoenician was usually written from right to left, although there are texts written in boustrophedon. The earliest known inscriptions are the so-called Proto-Sinaitic script sporadically attested in the Sinai and in Canaan in the late Middle. The script was not widely used until the rise of new Semitic kingdoms in the 13th and 12th centuries BC, the Phoenician alphabet is a direct continuation of the Proto-Canaanite script of the Bronze Age collapse period. Beginning in the 9th century BC, adaptations of the Phoenician alphabet -- such as Greek, Old Italic, Anatolian, and the Paleohispanic scripts -- were very successful. This simple system contrasted with the scripts in use at the time, such as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Another reason for its success was the trading culture of Phoenician merchants. Phoenician inscriptions have been found in sites at a number of former Phoenician cities and colonies around the Mediterranean, such as Byblos. Later finds indicate earlier use in Egypt, Phoenician had long-term effects on the social structures of the civilizations that came in contact with it. As mentioned above, the script was the first widespread phonetic script and its simplicity not only allowed it to be used in multiple languages, but it also allowed the common people to learn how to write. The Phoenician alphabet was first uncovered in the 17th century, and it was at first believed that the script was a direct variation of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This idea was popular due to the recent decipherment of hieroglyphs. However, scholars could not find any link between the two writing systems, nor to hieratic or cuneiform, the theories of independent creation ranged from the idea of a single man conceiving it, to the Hyksos people forming it from corrupt Egyptian
8.
Greek alphabet
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It is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. In its classical and modern forms, the alphabet has 24 letters, Modern and Ancient Greek use different diacritics. In standard Modern Greek spelling, orthography has been simplified to the monotonic system, examples In both Ancient and Modern Greek, the letters of the Greek alphabet have fairly stable and consistent symbol-to-sound mappings, making pronunciation of words largely predictable. Ancient Greek spelling was generally near-phonemic, among consonant letters, all letters that denoted voiced plosive consonants and aspirated plosives in Ancient Greek stand for corresponding fricative sounds in Modern Greek. This leads to groups of vowel letters denoting identical sounds today. Modern Greek orthography remains true to the spellings in most of these cases. The following vowel letters and digraphs are involved in the mergers, Modern Greek speakers typically use the same, modern, in other countries, students of Ancient Greek may use a variety of conventional approximations of the historical sound system in pronouncing Ancient Greek. Several letter combinations have special conventional sound values different from those of their single components, among them are several digraphs of vowel letters that formerly represented diphthongs but are now monophthongized. In addition to the three mentioned above, there is also ⟨ου⟩, pronounced /u/, the Ancient Greek diphthongs ⟨αυ⟩, ⟨ευ⟩ and ⟨ηυ⟩ are pronounced, and respectively in voicing environments in Modern Greek. The Modern Greek consonant combinations ⟨μπ⟩ and ⟨ντ⟩ stand for and respectively, ⟨τζ⟩ stands for, in addition, both in Ancient and Modern Greek, the letter ⟨γ⟩, before another velar consonant, stands for the velar nasal, thus ⟨γγ⟩ and ⟨γκ⟩ are pronounced like English ⟨ng⟩. There are also the combinations ⟨γχ⟩ and ⟨γξ⟩ and these signs were originally designed to mark different forms of the phonological pitch accent in Ancient Greek. The letter rho, although not a vowel, also carries a rough breathing in word-initial position, if a rho was geminated within a word, the first ρ always had the smooth breathing and the second the rough breathing leading to the transiliteration rrh. The vowel letters ⟨α, η, ω⟩ carry an additional diacritic in certain words, the iota subscript. This iota represents the former offglide of what were originally long diphthongs, ⟨ᾱι, ηι, ωι⟩, another diacritic used in Greek is the diaeresis, indicating a hiatus. In 1982, a new, simplified orthography, known as monotonic, was adopted for use in Modern Greek by the Greek state. Although it is not a diacritic, the comma has a function as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό. There are many different methods of rendering Greek text or Greek names in the Latin script, the form in which classical Greek names are conventionally rendered in English goes back to the way Greek loanwords were incorporated into Latin in antiquity. In this system, ⟨κ⟩ is replaced with ⟨c⟩, the diphthongs ⟨αι⟩ and ⟨οι⟩ are rendered as ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩ respectively, and ⟨ει⟩ and ⟨ου⟩ are simplified to ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩ respectively
9.
Consonants
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In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. For example, the sound spelled th in this is a different consonant than the th sound in thin, the word consonant comes from Latin oblique stem cōnsonant-, from cōnsonāns sounding-together, a calque of Greek σύμφωνον sýmphōnon. Dionysius Thrax calls consonants sýmphōna pronounced with because they can only be pronounced with a vowel, the word consonant is also used to refer to a letter of an alphabet that denotes a consonant sound. The 21 consonant letters in the English alphabet are B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Z, and usually W and Y. The letter Y stands for the consonant /j/ in yoke, the vowel /ɪ/ in myth, the vowel /i/ in funny, and the diphthong /aɪ/ in my. W always represents a consonant except in combination with a letter, as in growth, raw, and how. In some other languages, such as Finnish, y represents a vowel sound. Such syllables may be abbreviated CV, V, and CVC and this can be argued to be the only pattern found in most of the worlds languages, and perhaps the primary pattern in all of them. However, the distinction between consonant and vowel is not always clear cut, there are consonants and non-syllabic vowels in many of the worlds languages. One blurry area is in segments variously called semivowels, semiconsonants, on one side, there are vowel-like segments that are not in themselves syllabic, but form diphthongs as part of the syllable nucleus, as the i in English boil. On the other, there are approximants that behave like consonants in forming onsets, some phonologists model these as both being the underlying vowel /i/, so that the English word bit would phonemically be /bit/, beet would be /bii̯t/, and yield would be phonemically /i̯ii̯ld/. Likewise, foot would be /fut/, food would be /fuu̯d/, wood would be /u̯ud/, the other problematic area is that of syllabic consonants, segments articulated as consonants but occupying the nucleus of a syllable. Other languages use fricative and often trilled segments as syllabic nuclei, as in Czech and several languages in Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Mandarin, they are historically allophones of /i/, and spelled that way in Pinyin. Ladefoged and Maddieson call these fricative vowels and say that they can usually be thought of as syllabic fricatives that are allophones of vowels and that is, phonetically they are consonants, but phonemically they behave as vowels. Many Slavic languages allow the trill and the lateral as syllabic nuclei, in languages like Nuxalk, it is difficult to know what the nucleus of a syllable is, or if all syllables even have nuclei. If the concept of syllable applies in Nuxalk, there are consonants in words like /sx̩s/ seal fat. Miyako in Japan is similar, with /f̩ks̩/ to build and /ps̩ks̩/ to pull, each spoken consonant can be distinguished by several phonetic features, The manner of articulation is how air escapes from the vocal tract when the consonant or approximant sound is made. Manners include stops, fricatives, and nasals, the place of articulation is where in the vocal tract the obstruction of the consonant occurs, and which speech organs are involved
10.
Vowel
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In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, with two competing definitions. There is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis and this contrasts with consonants, such as the English sh, which have a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal tract. In the other, phonological definition, a vowel is defined as syllabic, a phonetically equivalent but non-syllabic sound is a semivowel. In oral languages, phonetic vowels normally form the peak of many to all syllables, whereas consonants form the onset and coda. Some languages allow other sounds to form the nucleus of a syllable, the word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning vocal. In English, the vowel is commonly used to mean both vowel sounds and the written symbols that represent them. The phonetic definition of vowel does not always match the phonological definition, the approximants and illustrate this, both are produced without much of a constriction in the vocal tract, but they occur at the onset of syllables. A similar debate arises over whether a word like bird in a dialect has an r-colored vowel /ɝ/ or a syllabic consonant /ɹ̩/. The American linguist Kenneth Pike suggested the terms vocoid for a vowel and vowel for a phonological vowel, so using this terminology. Nonetheless, the phonetic and phonemic definitions would still conflict for the syllabic el in table, or the syllabic nasals in button, daniel Jones developed the cardinal vowel system to describe vowels in terms of the features of tongue height, tongue backness and roundedness. These three parameters are indicated in the schematic quadrilateral IPA vowel diagram on the right, there are additional features of vowel quality, such as the velum position, type of vocal fold vibration, and tongue root position. This conception of vowel articulation has been known to be inaccurate since 1928, Peter Ladefoged has said that early phoneticians. Thought they were describing the highest point of the tongue, and they were actually describing formant frequencies. The IPA Handbook concedes that the quadrilateral must be regarded as an abstraction. Vowel height is named for the position of the tongue relative to either the roof of the mouth or the aperture of the jaw. However, it refers to the first formant, abbreviated F1. Height is defined by the inverse of the F1 value, The higher the frequency of the first formant, however, if more precision is required, true-mid vowels may be written with a lowering diacritic. Although English contrasts six heights in its vowels, they are interdependent with differences in backness and it appears that some varieties of German have five contrasting vowel heights independently of length or other parameters
11.
Writing system
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A writing system is any conventional method of visually representing verbal communication. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a form of information storage. The processes of encoding and decoding writing systems involve shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning behind the sets of characters that make up a script, the general attributes of writing systems can be placed into broad categories such as alphabets, syllabaries, or logographies. Any particular system can have attributes of more than one category, in the alphabetic category, there is a standard set of letters of consonants and vowels that encode based on the general principle that the letters represent speech sounds. In a syllabary, each symbol correlates to a syllable or mora, in a logography, each character represents a word, morpheme, or other semantic units. Other categories include abjads, which differ from alphabets in that vowels are not indicated, alphabets typically use a set of 20-to-35 symbols to fully express a language, whereas syllabaries can have 80-to-100, and logographies can have several hundreds of symbols. Systems will also enable the stringing together of these groupings in order to enable a full expression of the language. The reading step can be accomplished purely in the mind as an internal process, writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, which used pictograms, ideograms and other mnemonic symbols. Proto-writing lacked the ability to capture and express a range of thoughts. Soon after, writing provided a form of long distance communication. With the advent of publishing, it provided the medium for a form of mass communication. Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that a system is always associated with at least one spoken language. In contrast, visual representations such as drawings, paintings, and non-verbal items on maps, such as contour lines, are not language-related. Some other symbols, such as numerals and the ampersand, are not directly linked to any specific language, every human community possesses language, which many regard as an innate and defining condition of humanity. However, the development of writing systems, and the process by which they have supplanted traditional oral systems of communication, have been sporadic, uneven, once established, writing systems generally change more slowly than their spoken counterparts. Thus they often preserve features and expressions which are no current in the spoken language. One of the benefits of writing systems is that they can preserve a permanent record of information expressed in a language. In the examination of individual scripts, the study of writing systems has developed along partially independent lines, thus, the terminology employed differs somewhat from field to field
12.
Alphabet
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An alphabet is a standard set of letters that is used to write one or more languages based upon the general principle that the letters represent phonemes of the spoken language. This is in contrast to other types of writing systems, such as syllabaries and logographies, the Proto-Canaanite script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is the first fully phonemic script. Thus the Phoenician alphabet is considered to be the first alphabet, the Phoenician alphabet is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and possibly Brahmic. Under a terminological distinction promoted by Peter T. Daniels, an alphabet is a script that represents both vowels and consonants as letters equally. In this narrow sense of the word the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet, in other alphabetic scripts such as the original Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic, letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants, such a script is also called an abjad. A third type, called abugida or alphasyllabary, is one where vowels are shown by diacritics or modifications of consonantal letters, as in Devanagari. The Khmer alphabet is the longest, with 74 letters, there are dozens of alphabets in use today, the most popular being the Latin alphabet. Many languages use modified forms of the Latin alphabet, with additional letters formed using diacritical marks, while most alphabets have letters composed of lines, there are also exceptions such as the alphabets used in Braille. Alphabets are usually associated with an ordering of letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, specifically by allowing words to be sorted in alphabetical order and it also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of numbering ordered items, in such contexts as numbered lists and number placements. The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, the Greek word was made from the first two letters, alpha and beta. The names for the Greek letters came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, aleph, which also meant ox, and bet, in the alphabet song in English, the term ABCs is used instead of the word alphabet. Knowing ones ABCs, in general, can be used as a metaphor for knowing the basics about anything, the history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. These glyphs were used as guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections. Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs and this script had no characters representing vowels, although originally it probably was a syllabary, but unneeded symbols were discarded. An alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs including three that indicate the vowel was invented in Ugarit before the 15th century BC. This script was not used after the destruction of Ugarit, the Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, which is conventionally called Proto-Canaanite before ca.1050 BC. The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram and this script is the parent script of all western alphabets
13.
Syllabary
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A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or moras which make up words. This loosely corresponds to shallow orthographies in alphabetic writing systems, most syllabaries only feature one or two kinds of syllabograms and form other syllables by graphemic rules. Otherwise they are synthetic, if they vary by onset, rime, nucleus or coda, or systematic, some scholars, e. g. Daniels, reserve the general term for analytic syllabaries and invent other terms as necessary. Some system provides katakana language conversion, in addition, the undecoded Cretan Linear A is also believed by some to be a syllabic script, though this is not proven. Chinese characters, the script used for Sumerian, Akkadian and other languages. They are therefore referred to as logosyllabic. The contemporary Japanese language uses two syllabaries together called kana, namely hiragana and katakana, which were developed around 700. They are mainly used to some native words and grammatical elements, as well as foreign words. Because Japanese uses mainly CV syllables, a syllabary is well suited to write the language, as in many syllabaries, however, vowel sequences and final consonants are written with separate glyphs, so that both atta and kaita are written with three kana, あった and かいた. It is therefore called a moraic writing system. Languages that use syllabaries today tend to have simple phonotactics, with a predominance of monomoraic syllables, few syllabaries have glyphs for syllables that are not monomoraic, and those that once did have simplified over time to eliminate that complexity. For example, the Vai syllabary originally had separate glyphs for syllables ending in a coda, the modern script has been expanded to cover all moras, but at the same time reduced to exclude all other syllables. g. Ko-no-so for Κνωσός Knōsos, pe-ma for σπέρμα sperma, the Cherokee syllabary generally uses dummy vowels for coda consonants, but also has a segmental grapheme for /s/, which can be used both as a coda and in an initial /sC/ consonant cluster. The languages of South Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as the Ethiopian Semitic languages, have a type of alphabet called an abugida or alphasyllabary, in the 19th century these systems were called syllabics, a term which has survived in the name of Canadian Aboriginal syllabics. In a true syllabary there may be graphic similarity between characters that share a common consonant or vowel sound, but it is not systematic or close to regular. For example, the characters for ke, ka, and ko in Japanese hiragana have no similarity to indicate their common k sound, compare abugida, where each grapheme typically represents a syllable but where characters representing related sounds are all similar graphically. For example, in Devanagari, an abugida, the characters for ke, ka and ko are के, का and को respectively. English, along many other Indo-European languages like German and Russian, allows for complex syllable structures
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Semi-syllabary
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A semi-syllabary is a writing system that behaves partly as an alphabet and partly as a syllabary. The term has traditionally been extended to abugidas, but for the purposes of this article it will be restricted to scripts where some characters are alphabetic and others are syllabic. The Paleohispanic semi-syllabaries are a family of scripts developed in the Iberian Peninsula at least from the 5th century BCE – possibly from the 7th century, some researchers conclude that their origin lies solely with the Phoenician alphabet, while others believe the Greek alphabet also had a role. In the syllabic portions of the scripts, each stop-consonant sign stood for a different combination of consonant and vowel, so that the written form of ga displayed no resemblance to ge. The Tartessian or Southwestern script had a special behaviour, although the letter used to write a stop consonant was determined by the following vowel, some scholars treat Tartessian as a redundant semi-syllabary, others treat it as a redundant alphabet. One of these is zhuyin, a script devised for transcribing certain varieties of Chinese. Zhuyin includes several systems, such as Mandarin Phonetic Symbols for Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese Phonetic Symbols for Taiwanese Hokkien and Hakka, zhuyin is not divided into consonants and vowels, but into onsets and rimes. Initial consonants and medials are alphabetic, but the nucleus and coda are combined as in syllabaries and that is, a syllable like kan is written k-an, and kwan is written k-u-an, the vowel is not written distinct from a final consonant. The modern Bamum script is essentially CV-syllabic, but doesnt have enough glyphs for all the CV syllables of the language, the rest are written by combining CV and V glyphs, making these effectively alphabetic. Correa, José Antonio, «Del alfabeto fenicio al semisilabario paleohispánico», Palaeohispanica 5, ferrer i Jané, Joan, «Novetats sobre el sistema dual de diferenciació gràfica de les oclusives sordes i sonores», Palaeohispanica 5, pp. 957–982. Rodríguez Ramos, Jesús, «La lectura de las inscripciones sudlusitano-tartesias», Faventia 22/1, Iberian Epigraphy – Jesús Rodríguez Ramos
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Lateral consonant
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A lateral is an l-like consonant in which the airstream proceeds along the sides of the tongue, but it is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth. Most commonly, the tip of the tongue makes contact with the teeth or the upper gum just behind the teeth. The most common laterals are approximants and belong to the class of liquids, plosives are never lateral, but they may have lateral release. The distinction is meaningless for nasals and for consonants articulated in the throat, consonants are not necessarily lateral or central. Some, such as Japanese r, are not defined by centrality, English has one lateral phoneme, the lateral approximant /l/, which in many accents has two allophones. One, found before vowels as in lady or fly, is called clear l, in some languages, like Albanian, those two sounds are different phonemes. East Slavic languages contrast and but do not have, in many British accents, dark may undergo vocalization through the reduction and loss of contact between the tip of the tongue and the alveolar ridge, becoming a rounded back vowel or glide. This process turns tell into something like, as must have happened with talk or walk at some stage, in central and Venice dialects of Venetian, intervocalic /l/ has turned into a semivocalic, so that the written word ła bała is pronounced. The orthography uses the letter ł to represent this phoneme, many aboriginal Australian languages have a series of three or four lateral approximants, as do various dialects of Irish. In Adyghe and some Athabaskan languages like Hän, both voiceless and voiced alveolar lateral fricatives occur, but there is no approximant, many of these languages also have lateral affricates. Some languages have palatal or velar voiceless lateral fricatives or affricates, such as Dahalo and Zulu, however, appropriate symbols are easy to make by adding a lateral-fricative belt to the symbol for the corresponding lateral approximant. Also, a diacritic may be added to the approximant. Nearly all languages with such lateral obstruents also have the approximant, however, there are a number of exceptions, many of them located in the Pacific Northwest area of the United States. For example, Tlingit has /tɬ, tɬʰ, tɬʼ, ɬ, ɬʼ/, other examples from the same area include Nuu-chah-nulth and Kutenai, and elsewhere, Chukchi and Kabardian. Standard Tibetan has a lateral approximant, usually romanized as lh. A uvular lateral approximant has been reported to occur in some speakers of American English, pashto has a retroflex lateral flap. There are a number of lateral click consonants,17 occur in. Xóõ. Lateral trills are also possible, but they do not occur in any known language and they may be pronounced by initiating or with an especially forceful airflow
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Sibilants
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Examples of sibilants are the consonants at the beginning of the English words sip, zip, ship, chip, and jump, and the second consonant in vision. The symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet used to denote the sibilant sounds in words are. More specifically, the sounds, as in chip and jump, are affricates, Sibilants have a characteristically intense sound, which accounts for their paralinguistic use in getting ones attention. In the alveolar hissing sibilants and, the back of the forms a narrow channel to focus the stream of air more intensely. With the hushing sibilants, such as English, and, the tongue is flatter, because all sibilants are also stridents, the terms are sometimes used interchangeably. However, the terms do not mean the same thing, the English stridents are /f, v, s, z, ʃ, ʒ, tʃ, dʒ/. The English sibilants are a high pitched subset of the stridents. The English sibilants are /s, z, ʃ, ʒ, tʃ, /f/ and /v/ are stridents, but not sibilants, because they are lower in pitch. Non-sibilant fricatives and affricates produce their characteristic sound directly with the tongue or lips etc. however, there is a great deal of variety among sibilants as to tongue shape, point of contact on the tongue, and point of contact on the upper side of the mouth. For example, a laminal denti-alveolar grooved sibilant occurs in Polish, the main distinction is the shape of the tongue. Most sibilants have a running down the centerline of the tongue that helps focus the airstream. Because of the prominence of these sounds, they are the most common and they occur in English, where they are denoted with a letter s or z, as in soon or zone. Alveolo-palatal, with a convex, V-shaped tongue, and highly palatalized and these sounds occur in English, where they are denoted with letter combinations such as sh, ch, g, j or si, as in shin, chin, gin and vision. Retroflex, with a flat or concave tongue, and no palatalization and these sounds occur in a large number of varieties, some of which also go by other names. The subapical palatal or true retroflex sounds are the very dullest, the latter three post-alveolar types of sounds are often known as hushing sounds because of their quality, as opposed to the hissing alveolar sounds. The alveolar sounds in fact occur in several varieties, in addition to the sound of English s, Palatalized. Palatalized alveolars are transcribed e. g. and occur in Russian, lisping, Alveolar sibilants made with the tip of the tongue near the upper teeth have a softer sound reminiscent of the lisping sound of English think. In these dialects, the sibilant is the normal pronunciation of the letters s and z, as well as c before i or e
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Syllable
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A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the water is composed of two syllables, wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a nucleus with optional initial and final margins. Syllables are often considered the building blocks of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic meter, syllabic writing began several hundred years before the first letters. The earliest recorded syllables are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur and this shift from pictograms to syllables has been called the most important advance in the history of writing. A word that consists of a syllable is called a monosyllable. Syllable is an Anglo-Norman variation of Old French sillabe, from Latin syllaba, συλλαβή means what is taken together, referring to letters that are taken together to make a single sound. συλλαβή is a noun from the verb συλλαμβάνω syllambánō, a compound of the preposition σύν sýn with. The noun uses the root λαβ-, which appears in the aorist tense, the present tense stem λαμβάν- is formed by adding a nasal infix ⟨μ⟩ ⟨m⟩ before the β b and a suffix -αν -an at the end. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the period ⟨. ⟩ marks syllable breaks, in practice, however, IPA transcription is typically divided into words by spaces, and often these spaces are also understood to be syllable breaks. When a word comes in the middle of a syllable. The liaison tie is used to join lexical words into phonological words. In the typical theory of structure, the general structure of a syllable consists of three segments. e. Nucleus and coda are grouped together as a rime and onset are only distinguished at the second level, the nucleus is usually the vowel in the middle of a syllable. The onset is the sound or sounds occurring before the nucleus, and they are sometimes collectively known as the shell. The term rime covers the nucleus plus coda, in the one-syllable English word cat, the nucleus is a, the onset c, the coda t, and the rime at. This syllable can be abstracted as a consonant-vowel-consonant syllable, abbreviated CVC, languages vary greatly in the restrictions on the sounds making up the onset, nucleus and coda of a syllable, according to what is termed a languages phonotactics
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Coin
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A coin is a small, flat, round piece of metal or plastic used primarily as a medium of exchange or legal tender. They are standardized in weight, and produced in quantities at a mint in order to facilitate trade. They are most often issued by a government, Coins are usually metal or alloy, or sometimes made of synthetic materials. Coins made of metal are stored in large quantities as bullion coins. Other coins are used as money in transactions, circulating alongside banknotes. Usually the highest value coin in circulation is less than the lowest-value note. In the last hundred years, the value of circulation coins has occasionally been lower than the value of the metal they contain. Exceptions to the rule of face value being higher than content value also occur for some bullion coins made of copper, silver, or gold, while the Eagle, Maple Leaf, and Sovereign coins have nominal face values, the Krugerrand does not. The first coins were developed independently in Iron Age Anatolia and Archaic Greece, India, Coins spread rapidly in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, throughout Greece and Persia, and further to the Balkans. Standardized Roman currency was used throughout the Roman Empire, important Roman gold and silver coins were continued into the Middle Ages. Fiat money first arose in medieval China, with the paper money. Early paper money was introduced in Europe in the later Middle Ages, the penny was minted as a silver coin until the 17th century. The first circulating United States coins were cents, produced in 1793, Coins were an evolution of currency systems of the Late Bronze Age, where standard-sized ingots, and tokens such as knife money, were used to store and transfer value. In the late Chinese Bronze Age, standardized cast tokens were made and these were replicas in bronze of earlier Chinese currency, cowrie shells, so they were named Bronze Shell. According to Aristotle and Pollux, the first issuer of coins was Hermodike of Kyme The earliest coins are associated with Iron Age Anatolia. Early electrum coins were not standardized in weight, and in their earliest stage may have been ritual objects, such as badges or medals, issued by priests. The first Lydian coins were made of electrum, a naturally occurring alloy of silver, most of the early Lydian coins include no writing, only an image of a symbolic animal. Anatolian Artemis was the Πὀτνια Θηρῶν, whose symbol was the stag, a small percentage of early Lydian/Greek coins have a legend
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Latin
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Latin is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. The Latin alphabet is derived from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, Latin was originally spoken in Latium, in the Italian Peninsula. Through the power of the Roman Republic, it became the dominant language, Vulgar Latin developed into the Romance languages, such as Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Romanian. Latin, Italian and French have contributed many words to the English language, Latin and Ancient Greek roots are used in theology, biology, and medicine. By the late Roman Republic, Old Latin had been standardised into Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin was the colloquial form spoken during the same time and attested in inscriptions and the works of comic playwrights like Plautus and Terence. Late Latin is the language from the 3rd century. Later, Early Modern Latin and Modern Latin evolved, Latin was used as the language of international communication, scholarship, and science until well into the 18th century, when it began to be supplanted by vernaculars. Ecclesiastical Latin remains the language of the Holy See and the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church. Today, many students, scholars and members of the Catholic clergy speak Latin fluently and it is taught in primary, secondary and postsecondary educational institutions around the world. The language has been passed down through various forms, some inscriptions have been published in an internationally agreed, monumental, multivolume series, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Authors and publishers vary, but the format is about the same, volumes detailing inscriptions with a critical apparatus stating the provenance, the reading and interpretation of these inscriptions is the subject matter of the field of epigraphy. The works of several hundred ancient authors who wrote in Latin have survived in whole or in part and they are in part the subject matter of the field of classics. The Cat in the Hat, and a book of fairy tales, additional resources include phrasebooks and resources for rendering everyday phrases and concepts into Latin, such as Meissners Latin Phrasebook. The Latin influence in English has been significant at all stages of its insular development. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, English writers cobbled together huge numbers of new words from Latin and Greek words, dubbed inkhorn terms, as if they had spilled from a pot of ink. Many of these words were used once by the author and then forgotten, many of the most common polysyllabic English words are of Latin origin through the medium of Old French. Romance words make respectively 59%, 20% and 14% of English, German and those figures can rise dramatically when only non-compound and non-derived words are included. Accordingly, Romance words make roughly 35% of the vocabulary of Dutch, Roman engineering had the same effect on scientific terminology as a whole
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Ancient Rome
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In its many centuries of existence, the Roman state evolved from a monarchy to a classical republic and then to an increasingly autocratic empire. Through conquest and assimilation, it came to dominate the Mediterranean region and then Western Europe, Asia Minor, North Africa and it is often grouped into classical antiquity together with ancient Greece, and their similar cultures and societies are known as the Greco-Roman world. Ancient Roman civilisation has contributed to modern government, law, politics, engineering, art, literature, architecture, technology, warfare, religion, language and society. Rome professionalised and expanded its military and created a system of government called res publica, the inspiration for modern republics such as the United States and France. By the end of the Republic, Rome had conquered the lands around the Mediterranean and beyond, its domain extended from the Atlantic to Arabia, the Roman Empire emerged with the end of the Republic and the dictatorship of Augustus Caesar. 721 years of Roman-Persian Wars started in 92 BC with their first war against Parthia and it would become the longest conflict in human history, and have major lasting effects and consequences for both empires. Under Trajan, the Empire reached its territorial peak, Republican mores and traditions started to decline during the imperial period, with civil wars becoming a prelude common to the rise of a new emperor. Splinter states, such as the Palmyrene Empire, would divide the Empire during the crisis of the 3rd century. Plagued by internal instability and attacked by various migrating peoples, the part of the empire broke up into independent kingdoms in the 5th century. This splintering is a landmark historians use to divide the ancient period of history from the pre-medieval Dark Ages of Europe. King Numitor was deposed from his throne by his brother, Amulius, while Numitors daughter, Rhea Silvia, because Rhea Silvia was raped and impregnated by Mars, the Roman god of war, the twins were considered half-divine. The new king, Amulius, feared Romulus and Remus would take back the throne, a she-wolf saved and raised them, and when they were old enough, they returned the throne of Alba Longa to Numitor. Romulus became the source of the citys name, in order to attract people to the city, Rome became a sanctuary for the indigent, exiled, and unwanted. This caused a problem for Rome, which had a large workforce but was bereft of women, Romulus traveled to the neighboring towns and tribes and attempted to secure marriage rights, but as Rome was so full of undesirables they all refused. Legend says that the Latins invited the Sabines to a festival and stole their unmarried maidens, leading to the integration of the Latins, after a long time in rough seas, they landed at the banks of the Tiber River. Not long after they landed, the men wanted to take to the sea again, one woman, named Roma, suggested that the women burn the ships out at sea to prevent them from leaving. At first, the men were angry with Roma, but they realized that they were in the ideal place to settle. They named the settlement after the woman who torched their ships, the Roman poet Virgil recounted this legend in his classical epic poem the Aeneid
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Ancient Greece
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Ancient Greece was a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th-9th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and this was followed by the period of Classical Greece, an era that began with the Greco-Persian Wars, lasting from the 5th to 4th centuries BC. Due to the conquests by Alexander the Great of Macedonia, Hellenistic civilization flourished from Central Asia to the end of the Mediterranean Sea. Classical Greek culture, especially philosophy, had a influence on ancient Rome. For this reason Classical Greece is generally considered to be the culture which provided the foundation of modern Western culture and is considered the cradle of Western civilization. Classical Antiquity in the Mediterranean region is considered to have begun in the 8th century BC. Classical Antiquity in Greece is preceded by the Greek Dark Ages and this period is succeeded, around the 8th century BC, by the Orientalizing Period during which a strong influence of Syro-Hittite, Jewish, Assyrian, Phoenician and Egyptian cultures becomes apparent. The end of the Dark Ages is also dated to 776 BC. The Archaic period gives way to the Classical period around 500 BC, Ancient Periods Astronomical year numbering Dates are approximate, consult particular article for details The history of Greece during Classical Antiquity may be subdivided into five major periods. The earliest of these is the Archaic period, in which artists made larger free-standing sculptures in stiff, the Archaic period is often taken to end with the overthrow of the last tyrant of Athens and the start of Athenian Democracy in 508 BC. It was followed by the Classical period, characterized by a style which was considered by observers to be exemplary, i. e. classical, as shown in the Parthenon. This period saw the Greco-Persian Wars and the Rise of Macedon, following the Classical period was the Hellenistic period, during which Greek culture and power expanded into the Near and Middle East. This period begins with the death of Alexander and ends with the Roman conquest, Herodotus is widely known as the father of history, his Histories are eponymous of the entire field. Herodotus was succeeded by authors such as Thucydides, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Plato, most of these authors were either Athenian or pro-Athenian, which is why far more is known about the history and politics of Athens than those of many other cities. Their scope is limited by a focus on political, military and diplomatic history, ignoring economic. In the 8th century BC, Greece began to emerge from the Dark Ages which followed the fall of the Mycenaean civilization, literacy had been lost and Mycenaean script forgotten, but the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet, modifying it to create the Greek alphabet. The Lelantine War is the earliest documented war of the ancient Greek period and it was fought between the important poleis of Chalcis and Eretria over the fertile Lelantine plain of Euboea. Both cities seem to have suffered a decline as result of the long war, a mercantile class arose in the first half of the 7th century BC, shown by the introduction of coinage in about 680 BC
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Dental consonant
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A dental consonant is a consonant articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth, such as /t/, /d/, /n/, and /l/ in some languages. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the diacritic for dental consonant is U+032A ◌̪ COMBINING BRIDGE BELOW, sanskrit, Hindi and all other Indic languages have an entire set of dental stops that occur phonemically as voiced and voiceless, and with or without aspiration. The nasal /n/ also exists in languages, but is quite alveolar. To the Indian speaker, the alveolar /t/ and /d/ of English sound more like the corresponding retroflex consonants of his own language than like the dentals. Spanish /t/ and /d/ are laminal denti-alveolar, whereas /l/ and /n/ are prototypically alveolar, likewise, Italian /t/, /d/, /t͡s/, /d͡z/ are denti-alveolar and /l/ and /n/ become denti-alveolar before a following dental consonant. In the case of French, the rear-most contact is alveolar or sometimes slightly pre-alveolar, the Sounds of the Worlds Languages
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Velars
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Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth. They often become automatically fronted, that is partly or completely palatal before a front vowel, and retracted. Palatalised velars are sometimes referred to as palatovelars, many languages also have labialized velars, such as, in which the articulation is accompanied by rounding of the lips. There are also labial-velar consonants, which are articulated at the velum and at the lips. This distinction disappears with the approximant since labialization involves adding of a labial approximant articulation to a sound, a velar trill or tap is not possible, see the shaded boxes on the table of pulmonic consonants. The velar consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are, The velar consonant is the most common consonant in human languages, the only languages recorded to lack velars may be Xavante, Tahitian, Wutung, Vanimo, Nori, and Waimiri-Atroarí. An areal feature of the Pacific Northwest coast is that historical *k became palatalized in many languages, likewise, historical *k’ has become and historical *x has become, there was no *g or *ŋ. In the Northwest Caucasian languages, historical * has also become palatalized, becoming /kʲ/ in Ubykh, in both regions the languages retain a labiovelar series as well as uvular consonants. In the languages of those families that retain plain velars, both the plain and labialized velars are pre-velar, perhaps to make them distinct from the uvulars which may be post-velar. Prevelar consonants are susceptible to palatalization, a similar system, contrasting *kʲ with *kʷ and leaving *k marginal at best, is reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European. Apart from the stop, no other velar consonant is particularly common, even the. Of course, there can be no phoneme /ɡ/ in a language that lacks voiced stops, like Mandarin Chinese, of the languages surveyed in the World Atlas of Language Structures, about 10% of languages that otherwise have /p b t d k/ are missing /ɡ/. Pirahã has both a and a phonetically, however, the does not behave as other consonants, and the argument has been made that it is phonemically /hi/, leaving Pirahã with only /ɡ/ as an underlyingly velar consonant. Hawaiian does not distinguish from, ⟨k⟩ tends toward at the beginning of utterances, before, since Hawaiian has no, and ⟨w⟩ varies between and, it is not clearly meaningful to say that Hawaiian has phonemic velar consonants. Several Khoisan languages have limited numbers or distributions of pulmonic velar consonants, khoekhoe, for example, does not allow velars in medial or final position, but in Juǀhoan velars are rare even in initial position. Normal velar consonants are dorso-velar, The dorsum of the rises to contact the velum of the roof of the mouth. In disordered speech there are also velo-dorsal stops, with the articulation, The velum lowers to contact the tongue. In the extensions to the IPA for disordered speech, these are transcribed by reversing the IPA letter for a velar consonant, velarization Place of articulation List of phonetics topics Ladefoged, Peter, Maddieson, Ian
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Voice (phonetics)
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Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterise speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced. It can also refer to a classification of sounds that tend to be associated with vocal cord vibration. That is the primary use in phonology to describe phonemes or in phonetics to describe phones. At the articulatory level, a sound is one in which the vocal cords vibrate. For example, voicing accounts for the difference between the pair of sounds associated with the English letters s and z, the two sounds are transcribed as and to distinguish them from the English letters, which have several possible pronunciations, depending on the context. If one places the fingers on the box, one can feel a vibration while zzzz is pronounced. In most European languages, with an exception being Icelandic, vowels. When used to classify speech sounds, voiced and unvoiced are merely used to group phones and phonemes together for the purposes of classification. The International Phonetic Alphabet has distinct letters for many voiceless and voiced pairs of consonants, in addition, there is a diacritic for voicedness, ⟨◌̬⟩. Diacritics are typically used with letters for prototypically voiceless sounds, in Unicode, the symbols are encoded U+032C ◌̬ COMBINING CARON BELOW and U+0325 ◌̥ COMBINING RING BELOW. For the example, ₍s̬₎ could be an with voicing in the middle, partial voicing can also be indicated in the normal IPA with transcriptions like and. The distinction between the use of voice and the phonological use rests on the distinction between phone and phoneme. The difference is best illustrated by a rough example, the English word nods is made up of a sequence of phonemes, represented symbolically as /nɒdz/, or the sequence of /n/, /ɒ/, /d/, and /z/. Each symbol is a representation of a phoneme. That awareness is an inherent part of speakers mental grammar that allows them to recognise words, however, phonemes are not sounds in themselves. Rather, phonemes are, in a sense, converted to phones before being spoken. The /z/ phoneme, for instance, can actually be pronounced as either the phone or the phone since /z/ is frequently devoiced, even in fluent speech, the sequence of phones for nods might be transcribed as or, depending on the presence or strength of this devoicing. While the phone has articulatory voicing, the phone does not have it, what complicates the matter is that for English, consonant phonemes are classified as either voiced or voiceless even though it is not the primary distinctive feature between them
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Iberian Peninsula
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The Iberian Peninsula /aɪˈbɪəriən pəˈnɪnsjᵿlə/, also known as Iberia /aɪˈbɪəriə/, is located in the southwest corner of Europe. The peninsula is divided between Portugal and Spain, comprising most of their territory. With an area of approximately 582,000 km2, it is the second largest European peninsula, at that time, the name did not describe a single political entity or a distinct population of people. Strabos Iberia was delineated from Keltikē by the Pyrenees and included the land mass southwest of there. The ancient Greeks reached the Iberian Peninsula, of which they had heard from the Phoenicians, hecataeus of Miletus was the first known to use the term Iberia, which he wrote about circa 500 BC. Herodotus of Halicarnassus says of the Phocaeans that it was they who made the Greeks acquainted with. According to Strabo, prior historians used Iberia to mean the country side of the Ἶβηρος as far north as the river Rhône in France. Polybius respects that limit, but identifies Iberia as the Mediterranean side as far south as Gibraltar, elsewhere he says that Saguntum is on the seaward foot of the range of hills connecting Iberia and Celtiberia. Strabo refers to the Carretanians as people of the Iberian stock living in the Pyrenees, according to Charles Ebel, the ancient sources in both Latin and Greek use Hispania and Hiberia as synonyms. The confusion of the words was because of an overlapping in political, the Latin word Hiberia, similar to the Greek Iberia, literally translates to land of the Hiberians. This word was derived from the river Ebro, which the Romans called Hiberus, hiber was thus used as a term for peoples living near the river Ebro. The first mention in Roman literature was by the annalist poet Ennius in 200 BC. Virgil refers to the Ipacatos Hiberos in his Georgics, the Roman geographers and other prose writers from the time of the late Roman Republic called the entire peninsula Hispania. As they became interested in the former Carthaginian territories, the Romans began to use the names Hispania Citerior. At the time Hispania was made up of three Roman provinces, Hispania Baetica, Hispania Tarraconensis, and Lusitania, Strabo says that the Romans use Hispania and Iberia synonymously, distinguishing between the near northern and the far southern provinces. Whatever language may generally have been spoken on the peninsula soon gave way to Latin, except for that of the Vascones, the Iberian Peninsula has always been associated with the Ebro, Ibēros in ancient Greek and Ibērus or Hibērus in Latin. The association was so known it was hardly necessary to state, for example. Pliny goes so far as to assert that the Greeks had called the whole of Spain Hiberia because of the Hiberus River, the river appears in the Ebro Treaty of 226 BC between Rome and Carthage, setting the limit of Carthaginian interest at the Ebro. The fullest description of the treaty, stated in Appian, uses Ibērus, with reference to this border, Polybius states that the native name is Ibēr, apparently the original word, stripped of its Greek or Latin -os or -us termination
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Roussillon
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Roussillon is one of the historical counties of the former Principality of Catalonia, corresponding roughly to the present-day southern French département of Pyrénées-Orientales. It may also refer to Northern Catalonia or French Catalonia, the first used by Catalan-speakers, a 1998 survey found that 34% of respondents stated they speak Catalan, and a further 21% understand it. Roussillon was a French province before the Revolution and it derived its name from Ruscino, a small fortified place near modern-day Perpignan where Gaulish chieftains met to consider Hannibals request for a conference. The region formed part of the Roman province of Gallia Narbonensis from 121 BC to AD462 and his successor, Amalaric, on his defeat by Clovis in 531, retired to Hispania, leaving a governor in Septimania. Roussillon was occupied by the Carolingians in 760, on the invasion of Hispania in 778, Charlemagne found the Marca Hispanica wasted by war and the inhabitants settled in the mountains. He granted some lands in the plains to Visigothic refugees from Moorish Hispania, in 792, the Saracens again invaded France, but they were repulsed by Count Guillaume of Toulouse - regent of the child Louis the Pious, King of Aquitaine - whose hegemony extended into Catalonia. The different portions of his kingdom in time grew into allodial fiefs and, in 893, but his rule only extended over the eastern part of what became the later province. The western part, the Cerdanya, was ruled in 900 by Miró as first count, the Counts of Roussillon were allied to their cousins the Counts of Empúries in a centuries-long conflict with the surrounding great nobles. Count Girard I participated in the First Crusade in the following of Raymond IV of Toulouse, and was one of the first to set foot in Jerusalem when it was stormed by the Crusaders in 1099. At the beginning of the 12th century, the prestige of the Counts of Barcelona began to rise to such a height that the Counts of Roussillon had no choice but to swear fealty to them. In 1111, Ramon Berenguer III, Count of Barcelona, inherited the fief of Besalú, the possession of Roussillon by its last count, Girard II, was challenged by his illegitimate brothers. To ensure that his brothers would not inherit his territories, in his will Girard II left all his lands to Alfonso II of Aragon, who took possession in 1172. Under the Aragonese monarchs, economic and demographic growth of the continued, and Collioure. As the French and Spanish crowns grew in power, the region of Roussillon, James I of Aragon had wrested the Balearic Isles from the Moors and joined these islands with Roussillon to create the Kingdom of Majorca, with its capital at Perpignan. In 1276, James I granted this kingdom to his son, the subsequent disputes of this monarch with his brother Peter III were exploited by Philip III of France in his quarrel with Peter III for the crown of the Two Sicilies. Philip III espoused James IIs cause and led an army into Aragon but, retreating and his successor, James III of Majorca, refused to do homage to Philip VI of France for the seigneury of Montpellier, and applied to Peter IV of Aragon for aid. Peter not only refused, but declared war and seized Majorca, the province was now reunited to the Crown of Aragon, and it enjoyed peace until 1462. In that year, the disputes between John II of Aragon and his son over the Crown of Navarre spurred Louis XI of France to support John against his subjects, who had risen in revolt
27.
Alicante
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It is also a historic Mediterranean port. The population of the city of Alicante proper was 328,648, estimated as of 2015, including nearby municipalities, the Alicante conurbation had 452,462 residents. The population of the area was 757,085 as of 2014 estimates. The name of the city echoes the Arabic name Laqant or Al-Laqant, the area around Alicante has been inhabited for over 7000 years. The first tribes of hunter-gatherers moved down gradually from Central Europe between 5000 and 3000 BC, some of the earliest settlements were made on the slopes of Mount Benacantil. The town of Leuce Akra was then founded by Greek settlers from Marseille around 325/324 b. C, by the 3rd century BC, the rival armies of Carthage and Rome began to invade and fight for control of the Iberian Peninsula. The Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca established the settlement of Akra Leuka. Although the Carthaginians conquered much of the land around Alicante, the Romans would eventually rule Hispania Tarraconensis for over 700 years. By the 5th century AD, Rome was in decline and the Roman predecessor town of Alicante, however neither the Romans nor the Goths put up much resistance to the Arab conquest of Medina Laqant in the 8th century. The Moors ruled southern and eastern Spain until the 13th century Reconquista, Alicante was finally taken in 1246 by the Castilian king Alfonso X, but it passed soon and definitively to the Kingdom of Valencia in 1298 with King James II of Aragon. It gained the status of Royal Village with representation in the medieval Valencian Parliament and this act cost the region dearly, with so many skilled artisans and agricultural labourers gone, the feudal nobility found itself sliding into bankruptcy. The end of the 19th century witnessed a sharp recovery of the economy with increasing international trade. During the early 20th century, Alicante was a capital that enjoyed the benefit of Spains neutrality during World War I. The Rif War in the 1920s saw numerous alicantinos drafted to fight in the long, the political unrest of the late 1920s led to the victory of Republican candidates in local council elections throughout the country, and the abdication of King Alfonso XIII. The proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic was much celebrated in the city on 14 April 1931, the Spanish Civil War broke out on 17 July 1936. The late 1950s and early 1960s saw the onset of a transformation of the city by the tourist industry. New construction benefited the economy, as the development of the tourism sector also spawned new businesses such as restaurants, bars. When Franco died in 1975, his successor Juan Carlos I played his part as the symbol of the transition of Spain to a democratic constitutional monarchy
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Ebro
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The Ebro or Ebre is one of the most important rivers on the Iberian Peninsula. It is the second longest river in the Iberian peninsula after the Tagus, the source of the river Ebro is in Fontibre, from the Latin words Fontes Iberis, source of the Ebro. Close by is the big artificial lake Embalse del Ebro created by the damming of the river, the upper Ebro rushes through rocky gorges in Burgos Province. Karst geological processes shaped the landscape of layers of carbonate rock of extensive limestone bedrock formed in an ancient seabed. Aragonite, a named for Aragon, attests to the fact that carbonates are abundant in the central Ebro Valley. The valley expands and the Ebros flow then becomes slower as its volume increases. There, larger tributaries flowing from the Central Pyrenees and the Iberian System discharge large amounts of water, as it flows through Zaragoza the Ebro, is already a sizeable river. There, the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar stands next to the Ebro, the soils in most of the valley are primarily poor soils, calcareous, pebbly, stony, and sometimes salted with saltwater endorheic lagoons. The semi-arid interior of the Ebro Valley has either drought summers and it is covered with chaparral vegetation. Summers are hot and winters are cold, the dry summer season has temperatures of more than 35 °C, occasionally reaching over 40 °C. In winter, the temperatures drop below 0 °C. In some areas the vegetation depends heavily on moisture produced by condensation fogs and it is a continental Mediterranean climate with extreme temperatures. There are many ground frosts on clear nights, and sporadic snowfalls, the biomes are diverse in these Mediterranean climate zones, Mediterranean forests, woodlands, and scrub. Hinterlands are particularly distinctive on account of extensive sclerophyll shrublands known as maquis, the dominant species are Quercus coccifera and Quercus ilex. These trees form monospecific communities or communities integrated with Pinus, Mediterranean buckthorns, Myrtus, Chamaerops humilis, junipers, Pistacia, Rosmarinus, Thymus, etc. The mountain vegetation is mostly coniferous forests that are drought adapted and their presence is related to the marine origin of the Ebro valley and the extensive marine deposits in the same area. After reaching Catalonia, the Ebro Valley narrows, and the river becomes constrained by mountain ranges, massive dams have been built in this area, such as the dams at Mequinenza, Riba-roja, Flix. In the final section of its course the river bends southwards, the massive calcareous cliffs of the Serra de Cardó range constrain the river during this last stretch, separating the Ebro Valley from the Mediterranean coastal area
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Silver
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Silver is a metallic element with symbol Ag and atomic number 47. The symbol Ag stems from Latin argentum, derived from the Greek ὰργὀς, a soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it exhibits the highest electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, and reflectivity of any metal. The metal is found in the Earths crust in the pure, free form, as an alloy with gold and other metals. Most silver is produced as a byproduct of copper, gold, lead, Silver is more abundant than gold, but it is much less abundant as a native metal. Its purity is measured on a per mille basis, a 94%-pure alloy is described as 0.940 fine. As one of the seven metals of antiquity, silver has had a role in most human cultures. Silver has long valued as a precious metal. Silver metal is used in many premodern monetary systems in bullion coins, Silver is used in numerous applications other than currency, such as solar panels, water filtration, jewelry, ornaments, high-value tableware and utensils, and as an investment medium. Silver is used industrially in electrical contacts and conductors, in specialized mirrors, window coatings, Silver compounds are used in photographic film and X-rays. Dilute silver nitrate solutions and other compounds are used as disinfectants and microbiocides, added to bandages and wound-dressings, catheters. Silver is similar in its physical and chemical properties to its two neighbours in group 11 of the periodic table, copper and gold. This distinctive electron configuration, with an electron in the highest occupied s subshell over a filled d subshell. Silver is a soft, ductile and malleable transition metal. Silver crystallizes in a cubic lattice with bulk coordination number 12. Unlike metals with incomplete d-shells, metallic bonds in silver are lacking a covalent character and are relatively weak and this observation explains the low hardness and high ductility of single crystals of silver. Silver has a brilliant white metallic luster that can take a polish. Protected silver has greater optical reflectivity than aluminium at all wavelengths longer than ~450 nm, at wavelengths shorter than 450 nm, silvers reflectivity is inferior to that of aluminium and drops to zero near 310 nm. The electrical conductivity of silver is the greatest of all metals, greater even than copper, during World War II in the US,13540 tons of silver were used in electromagnets for enriching uranium, mainly because of the wartime shortage of copper
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Bronze
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These additions produce a range of alloys that may be harder than copper alone, or have other useful properties, such as stiffness, ductility, or machinability. The archeological period where bronze was the hardest metal in use is known as the Bronze Age. In the ancient Near East this began with the rise of Sumer in the 4th millennium BC, with India and China starting to use bronze around the same time, everywhere it gradually spread across regions. The Bronze Age was followed by the Iron Age starting from about 1300 BC and reaching most of Eurasia by about 500 BC, the discovery of bronze enabled people to create metal objects which were harder and more durable than previously possible. Bronze tools, weapons, armor, and building such as decorative tiles were harder and more durable than their stone. It was only later that tin was used, becoming the major ingredient of bronze in the late 3rd millennium BC. Tin bronze was superior to arsenic bronze in that the process could be more easily controlled. Also, unlike arsenic, metallic tin and fumes from tin refining are not toxic, the earliest tin-alloy bronze dates to 4500 BCE in a Vinča culture site in Pločnik. Other early examples date to the late 4th millennium BC in Africa, Susa and some ancient sites in China, Luristan, ores of copper and the far rarer tin are not often found together, so serious bronze work has always involved trade. Tin sources and trade in ancient times had a influence on the development of cultures. In Europe, a source of tin was the British deposits of ore in Cornwall. In many parts of the world, large hoards of bronze artefacts are found, suggesting that bronze also represented a store of value, in Europe, large hoards of bronze tools, typically socketed axes, are found, which mostly show no signs of wear. With Chinese ritual bronzes, which are documented in the inscriptions they carry and from other sources and these were made in enormous quantities for elite burials, and also used by the living for ritual offerings. Pure iron is soft, and the process of beating and folding sponge iron to wrought iron removes from the metal carbon. Careful control of the alloying and tempering eventually allowed for wrought iron with properties comparable to modern steel, Bronze was still used during the Iron Age, and has continued in use for many purposes to the modern day. Among other advantages, it does not rust, the weaker wrought iron was found to be sufficiently strong for many uses. Archaeologists suspect that a disruption of the tin trade precipitated the transition. The population migrations around 1200–1100 BC reduced the shipping of tin around the Mediterranean, limiting supplies, there are many different bronze alloys, but typically modern bronze is 88% copper and 12% tin
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Ceramic
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A ceramic is an inorganic, non-metallic, solid material comprising metal, non-metal or metalloid atoms primarily held in ionic and covalent bonds. This article gives an overview of ceramic materials from the point of view of materials science, the crystallinity of ceramic materials ranges from highly oriented to semi-crystalline, vitrified, and often completely amorphous. Most often, fired ceramics are either vitrified or semi-vitrified as is the case with earthenware, stoneware, varying crystallinity and electron consumption in the ionic and covalent bonds cause most ceramic materials to be good thermal and electrical insulators. With such a range of possible options for the composition/structure of a ceramic, the breadth of the subject is vast. Many composites, such as fiberglass and carbon fiber, while containing ceramic materials, are not considered to be part of the ceramic family. The earliest ceramics made by humans were pottery objects or figurines made from clay, either by itself or mixed with materials like silica, hardened, sintered. Later ceramics were glazed and fired to create smooth, colored surfaces, decreasing porosity through the use of glassy, ceramics now include domestic, industrial and building products, as well as a wide range of ceramic art. In the 20th century, new materials were developed for use in advanced ceramic engineering. The word ceramic comes from the Greek word κεραμικός, of pottery or for pottery, from κέραμος, potters clay, tile, the earliest known mention of the root ceram- is the Mycenaean Greek ke-ra-me-we, workers of ceramics, written in Linear B syllabic script. The word ceramic may be used as an adjective to describe a material, product or process, or it may be used as a noun, either singular, or, more commonly, as the plural noun ceramics. A ceramic material is an inorganic, non-metallic, often crystalline oxide, nitride or carbide material, some elements, such as carbon or silicon, may be considered ceramics. Ceramic materials are brittle, hard, strong in compression, weak in shearing and they withstand chemical erosion that occurs in other materials subjected to acidic or caustic environments. Ceramics generally can withstand high temperatures, such as temperatures that range from 1,000 °C to 1,600 °C. Glass is often not considered a ceramic because of its amorphous character. However, glassmaking involves several steps of the process and its mechanical properties are similar to ceramic materials. Traditional ceramic raw materials include minerals such as kaolinite, whereas more recent materials include aluminium oxide. The modern ceramic materials, which are classified as advanced ceramics, include silicon carbide, both are valued for their abrasion resistance, and hence find use in applications such as the wear plates of crushing equipment in mining operations. Advanced ceramics are used in the medicine, electrical, electronics industries. Crystalline ceramic materials are not amenable to a range of processing
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Lead
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Lead is a chemical element with atomic number 82 and symbol Pb. When freshly cut, it is bluish-white, it tarnishes to a dull gray upon exposure to air and it is a soft, malleable, and heavy metal with a density exceeding that of most common materials. Lead has the second-highest atomic number of the stable elements. Lead is a relatively unreactive post-transition metal and its weak metallic character is illustrated by its amphoteric nature and tendency to form covalent bonds. Compounds of lead are found in the +2 oxidation state. Exceptions are mostly limited to organolead compounds, like the lighter members of the group, lead exhibits a tendency to bond to itself, it can form chains, rings, and polyhedral structures. Lead is easily extracted from its ores and was known to people in Western Asia. A principal ore of lead, galena, often bears silver, Lead production declined after the fall of Rome and did not reach comparable levels again until the Industrial Revolution. Nowadays, global production of lead is about ten million tonnes annually, Lead has several properties that make it useful, high density, low melting point, ductility, and relative inertness to oxidation. In the late 19th century, lead was recognized as poisonous, Lead is a neurotoxin that accumulates in soft tissues and bones, damaging the nervous system and causing brain disorders and, in mammals, blood disorders. A lead atom has 82 electrons, arranged in a configuration of 4f145d106s26p2. The combined first and second ionization energies—the total energy required to remove the two 6p electrons—is close to that of tin, leads upper neighbor in group 14. This is unusual since ionization energies generally fall going down a group as an elements outer electrons become more distant from the nucleus, the similarity is caused by the lanthanide contraction—the decrease in element radii from lanthanum to lutetium, and the relatively small radii of the elements after hafnium. The contraction is due to shielding of the nucleus by the lanthanide 4f electrons. The combined first four ionization energies of lead exceed those of tin, for this reason lead, unlike tin, mostly forms compounds in which it has an oxidation state of +2, rather than +4. Relativistic effects, which become particularly prominent at the bottom of the periodic table, as a result, the 6s electrons of lead become reluctant to participate in bonding, a phenomenon called the inert pair effect. A related outcome is that the distance between nearest atoms in crystalline lead is unusually long, the lighter group 14 elements form stable or metastable allotropes having the tetrahedrally coordinated and covalently bonded diamond cubic structure. The energy levels of their outer s- and p-orbitals are close enough to allow mixing into four hybrid sp3 orbitals
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Mosaic
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A mosaic is a piece of art or image made from the assemblage of small pieces of colored glass, stone, or other materials. It is often used in art or as interior decoration. Most mosaics are made of small, flat, roughly square, pieces of stone or glass of different colors, some, especially floor mosaics, are made of small rounded pieces of stone, and called pebble mosaics. Others are made of other materials, mosaics have a long history, starting in Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BC. Pebble mosaics were made in Tiryns in Mycenean Greece, mosaics with patterns and pictures became widespread in classical times, Early Christian basilicas from the 4th century onwards were decorated with wall and ceiling mosaics. Mosaic fell out of fashion in the Renaissance, though artists like Raphael continued to practise the old technique, Roman and Byzantine influence led Jews to decorate 5th and 6th century synagogues in the Middle East with floor mosaics. Mosaic was widely used on buildings and palaces in early Islamic art, including Islams first great religious building, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Mosaic went out of fashion in the Islamic world after the 8th century, modern mosaics are made by professional artists, street artists, and as a popular craft. Many materials other than stone and ceramic tesserae may be employed, including shells, glass. The earliest known examples of made of different materials were found at a temple building in Abra, Mesopotamia. They consist of pieces of colored stones, shells and ivory, excavations at Susa and Chogha Zanbil show evidence of the first glazed tiles, dating from around 1500 BC. However, mosaic patterns were not used until the times of Sassanid Empire, mythological subjects, or scenes of hunting or other pursuits of the wealthy, were popular as the centrepieces of a larger geometric design, with strongly emphasized borders. Pliny the Elder mentions the artist Sosus of Pergamon by name, describing his mosaics of the left on a floor after a feast. Both of these themes were widely copied, most recorded names of Roman mosaic workers are Greek, suggesting they dominated high quality work across the empire, no doubt most ordinary craftsmen were slaves. Splendid mosaic floors are found in Roman villas across North Africa, in such as Carthage. The tiny tesserae allowed very fine detail, and an approach to the illusionism of painting, often small panels called emblemata were inserted into walls or as the highlights of larger floor-mosaics in coarser work. The normal technique was opus tessellatum, using larger tesserae, which was laid on site, there was a distinct native Italian style using black on a white background, which was no doubt cheaper than fully coloured work. In Rome, Nero and his architects used mosaics to cover surfaces of walls and ceilings in the Domus Aurea, built 64 AD
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Amphora
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An amphora is a type of container of a characteristic shape and size, descending from at least as early as the Neolithic Period. Amphorae were used in vast numbers for the transport and storage of various products and they are most often ceramic, but examples in metals and other materials have been found. The amphora complements the large container, the pithos, which makes available capacities between one-half and two and one-half tons. In contrast, the amphora holds under a half-ton, typically less than 100 pounds, the bodies of the two types have similar shapes. Where the pithos may have small loops or lugs for fastening a rope harness. The necks of pithoi are wide for scooping or bucket access, the necks of amphorae are narrow for pouring by a person holding it by the bottom and a handle. The handles might not be present, the size may require two or three handlers to lift. For the most part, however, an amphora was tableware, or sat close to the table, was intended to be seen, stoppers of perishable materials, which have rarely survived, were used to seal the contents. Two principal types of amphorae existed, the amphora, in which the neck and body meet at a sharp angle. Neck amphorae were used in the early history of ancient Greece. Most were produced with a base to allow upright storage by embedding in soft ground. The base facilitated transport by ship, where the amphorae were packed upright or on their sides in as many as five staggered layers. If upright, the bases probably were held by some sort of rack, heather and reeds might be used as packing around the vases. Racks could be used in kitchens and shops, the base also concentrated deposits from liquids with suspended solid particles, such as olive oil and wines. Amphorae are of use to maritime archaeologists, as they often indicate the age of a shipwreck. They are occasionally so well preserved that the content is still present, providing information on foodstuffs. Amphorae were too cheap and plentiful to return to their origin-point and so, amphora is a Greco-Roman word developing in ancient Greek during the Bronze Age. The Romans acquired it during the Hellenization that occurred in the Roman Republic, cato is the first known literary person to use it
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Stele
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A stele is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected in ancient Western culture as a monument. Grave steles were often used for funerary or commemorative purposes, Stelae as slabs of stone would also be used as ancient Greek and Roman government notices or as boundary markers to mark borders or property lines. The surface of the stele usually has text, ornamentation, or both, the ornamentation may be inscribed, carved in relief, or painted. Traditional Western gravestones may technically be considered the equivalent of ancient stelae. The most famous example of an inscribed stela leading to increased understanding is the Rosetta Stone, an informative stele of Tiglath-Pileser III is preserved in the British Museum. Two steles built into the walls of a church are major documents relating to the Etruscan language, unfinished standing stones, set up without inscriptions from Libya in North Africa to Scotland were monuments of pre-literate Megalithic cultures in the Late Stone Age. The Pictish stones of Scotland, often carved, date from between the 6th and 9th centuries. An obelisk is a kind of stele. The Insular high crosses of Ireland and Britain are specialized steles, totem poles of North and South America that are made out of stone may also be considered a specialized type of stele. Gravestones, typically with inscribed name and often with inscribed epitaph, are among the most common types of stele seen in Western culture. Most recently, in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, the memorial is meant to be read not only as the field, but also as an erasure of data that refer to memory of the Holocaust. Steles have been the medium of stone inscription in China since the Tang dynasty. Chinese steles are generally rectangular stone tablets upon which Chinese characters are carved intaglio with a funerary, commemorative and they can commemorate talented writers and officials, inscribe poems, portraits, or maps, and frequently contain the calligraphy of famous historical figures. During the Han dynasty, tomb inscriptions containing biographical information on deceased people began to be written on stone tablets rather than wooden ones, erecting steles at tombs or temples eventually became a widespread social and religious phenomenon. Emperors found it necessary to promulgate laws, regulating the use of funerary steles by the population, Steles are found at nearly every significant mountain and historical site in China. The First Emperor made five tours of his domain in the 3rd century BC and had Li Si make seven stone inscriptions commemorating and praising his work, of which fragments of two survive. One of the most famous mountain steles is the 13 m high stele at Mount Tai with the calligraphy of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang commemorating his imperial sacrifices there in 725. A number of stone monuments have preserved the origin and history of Chinas minority religious communities
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Spindle (textiles)
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A spindle is a straight spike usually made from wood used for spinning, twisting fibers such as wool, flax, hemp, cotton into yarn. The spindle may also have a hook, groove, or notch at the top to guide the yarn, spindles come in many different sizes and weights depending on the thickness of the yarn one desires to spin. The origin of the first wooden spindle is lost to history because the materials did not survive, whorl-weighted spindles date back at least to Neolithic times, spindle whorls have been found in archaeological digs around the world. A spindle is part of traditional spinning wheels where it is horizontal, such as the Indian charkha. In industrial yarn production, spindles are used as well, see spinning jenny, spinning mule, modern hand spindles fall into two basic categories, drop spindles, and supported spindles. In both, the spindle is vertical and they also permit the spinner to move around while spinning, going about their day. However, there are limits to their size/weight. Drop spindles are commonly available in high-whorl, low-whorl, and centre-whorl versions, in a high-whorl spindle, the whorl sits very close to the top of the shaft which allows the spindle to spin very fast. A hook is placed on the top of the shaft to secure the yarn. In a low-whorl spindle, the whorl sits near the bottom of the shaft, which makes it slower, but more steadily. The newly spun yarn is wound around the shaft just above the whorl, in centre-whorl spindles the cop is usually built above the whorl. Most supported spindles continue to rest with the tip on ones thigh, on the ground, on a table, french spindles are twiddled between the fingers of one hand instead. A familiar sight from history books is a used in conjunction with a distaff. There are many methods for controlling the pre-spun fibre, such as coiling it around ones lower arm, or through a bracelet. Spindles can also be used for plying, intertwining two or more strands of yarn together in order to create a stronger, more balanced. The spindle is closely associated with goddesses, including the Germanic Holda, Norse Frigg and Freya, Egyptian Isis, Greek Artemis. It is often connected with fate, as the Greek Fates, because the spinning wheel was not in common use before the 16th century in Europe, the older stories are certainly referring to hand spinning done on a spindle. Supported spindles spin on such as bowls that are usually ceramic or wooden
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Celtiberian script
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This script is a direct adaptation of the northeastern Iberian script, the most frequently used of the Iberian scripts. They are thus to be classed as neither alphabets nor syllabaries, rather, the remaining 26 signs comprised 5 vowels,15 syllabic signs and 6 consonants. This is interpreted as evidence of an origin of the Celtiberian script. This is known as the ‘dual system’ in Paleohispanic scripts, which otherwise do not distinguish between pairs of voiceless and voiced stops. The Celtiberian inscriptions have been mainly in the Ebro valley and near the sources of the Tagus and Douro rivers. The Celtiberian inscriptions were made on different types of objects, almost always the direction of the writing is left to right. Hoz, Javier de, «La lengua y la escritura celtibéricas», tras la estela de Numancia, pp. 417–426. Jordán, Carlos, «¿Sistema dual de escritura en celtibérico. », Palaeohispanica 5, rodríguez Ramos, Jesús, «Sobre el origen de la escritura celtibérica», Kalathos 16, pp. 189–197. IV Die tartessischen, keltiberischen und lusitanischen Inschriften, Wiesbaden, schmoll, Ulrich, «Die iberischen und keltiberischen Nasalzeichen», KZ76, 280-295. Villar, Francisco, «Las silibantes en celtibérico», Lengua y cultura en la Hispania prerromana, villar, Francisco, Estudios de celtibérico y toponimia prerromana, Salamanca. Blanco, António Bellido, Sobre la escritura entre los Vacceos, in ZEPHYRUS – revista de prehistoria y arqueologia, LXIX, Enero-Junio 2012, Ediciones Universidad Salamanca, pp. 129–147. Preliminary proposal to encode the north-eastern Iberian script for the UNICODE standard
38.
Southwest Paleohispanic script
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The Southwest Script or Southwestern Script, also known as Tartessian or South Lusitanian, is a Paleohispanic script used to write an unknown language usually identified as Tartessian. Southwest inscriptions have been mainly in the southwestern quadrant of the Iberian Peninsula, in the south of Portugal. The name of this script is very controversial, the more neutral name is southwestern, because it refers only to the geographical location where the inscriptions had been found, but it needs some additional precision in a general context. Some researchers name this script Tartessian considering it the script of Tartessos, but on the other hand, the name South Lusitanian is inconvenient, as it may wrongly suggest a relation with the Lusitanian language. Other name proposals include Bastulo-Turdetanian and escrita cónia and this unique writing system has been called a semi-syllabary. A similar convention is found in Etruscan for /k/, which was written KA CE CI QU depending on the following vowel, some scholars treat Tartessian as a redundant semi-syllabary, others treat it as a redundant alphabet. The southwestern script is similar to the southeastern Iberian script. The main difference is that southeastern Iberian script doesn’t show the vocalic redundancy of the syllabic signs and this characteristic was discovered by Ulrich Schmoll and allows the classification of a great part of the southwestern signs into vowels, consonants and syllabic signs. This script is almost exclusively used in near a hundred large stones, almost always the direction of the writing is right to left, but also boustrophedon or spiral. A total of 75 southwest script steles are known, of these,16 can be seen in the Southwest Script Museum, in Almodôvar, where a stele with a total of 86 characters discovered in 2008 is also on display. Correia, Virgílio-Hipólito, «A escrita pré-romana do Sudoeste peninsular», De Ulisses a Viriato, ferrer i Jané, Joan, «Una aproximació quantitativa a l’anàlisi de l’escriptura del sud-oest», Palaeohispanica 16, pp. 39-79. Guerra, Amilcar, «Novos monumentos epigrafados com escrita do Sudoeste da vertente setentrional da Serra do Caldeirao», Revista portuguesa de arqueologia 5-2, pp. 219–231. Hoz, Javier de, «El origen de la escritura del S. O. », Actas del III coloquio sobre lenguas y culturas paleohispánicas, rodríguez Ramos, Jesús, «La lectura de las inscripciones sudlusitano-tartesias», Faventia 22/1, pp. 21–48. Schmoll, Ulrich, Die sudlusitanischen Inschriften, Wiesbaden, IV Die tartessischen, keltiberischen und lusitanischen Inschriften, Wiesbaden
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Paleohispanic languages
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The Paleohispanic languages were the languages of the Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula, excluding languages of foreign colonies, such as Greek in Emporion and Phoenician in Qart Hadast. After the Roman conquest of Hispania the Paleohispanic languages, with the exception of Proto-Basque, were replaced by Latin, aquitanian was a precursor of Basque, while Tartessian and Iberian remain unclassified. Hoz, Javier de, «Tartesio, fenicio y céltico,25 años después», Tartessos 25 años después, Rodríguez Ramos, Jesús, «Introducció a lestudi de les inscripcions ibèriques», Revista de la Fundació Privada Catalana per lArqueologia ibèrica,1, pp. 13–144. Untermann, Jürgen, Monumenta Linguarum Hispanicarum, Wiesbaden, II Die iberischen Inschriften aus Sudfrankreicht. III Die iberischen Inschriften aus Spanien, IV Die tartessischen, keltiberischen und lusitanischen Inschriften. Velaza, Javier, Epigrafía y lengua ibéricas, Barcelona, pre-roman languages and writing systems from Spain and Portugal – Jesús Rodríguez Ramos Detailed map of the Pre-Roman Peoples of Iberia
Media related to Iberian scripts at Wikimedia Commons