Ischia
Ischia is a volcanic island in the Tyrrhenian Sea. It lies at the northern end of the Gulf of about 30 kilometres from the city of Naples, it is the largest of the Phlegrean Islands. Trapezoidal, it measures 10 km east to west and 7 km north to south and has about 34 km of coastline and a surface area of 46.3 square kilometres. It is entirely mountainous; the island is densely populated, with 60,000 residents. Ischia is the name of the main comune of the island; the other comuni of the island are Barano d'Ischia, Casamicciola Terme, Lacco Ameno, Serrara Fontana. Ischia's main industry is tourism, centering on thermal spas that cater to European and Asian tourists eager to enjoy the fruits of the island's natural volcanic activity, its hot springs, its volcanic mud; the trapezoidal island is formed by a complex volcano southwest of the Campi Flegrei area at the western side of the Bay of Naples. The eruption of the trachytic Green Tuff ignimbrite about 56,000 years ago was followed by caldera formation.
The highest point of the island, Monte Epomeo, is a volcanic horst consisting of a Green Tuff ignimbrite deposit, submerged after its eruption and uplifted. Volcanism on the island has been affected by tectonism that formed a series of horsts and grabens. Many small monogenetic volcanoes were formed around the uplifted block. Volcanism during the Holocene produced a series of pumiceous tephras, tuff rings, lava domes, lava flows; the latest eruption of Ischia, in 1302, produced a spatter cone and the Arso lava flow, which reached the NE coast. The surrounding waters including gulfs of Gaeta and Pozzuoli are both rich and healthy, providing a habitat for around 7 species of whales and dolphins including gigantic fin and sperm whales. Special research programmes on local cetaceans have been conducted to monitor and protect this bio-diversity. Virgil poetically referred to it as Inarime and still as Arime. Martianus Capella followed Virgil in this allusive name, never in common circulation: the Romans called it Aenaria, the Greeks, Πιθηκοῦσαι, Pithekoūsai.arime and Pithekousai both appear to derive from words for "monkey".
However, Pliny derives the Greek name from the local ceramic clay deposits, not from píthēkos. If the island was, like Gibraltar, home to a population of monkeys, they were extinct by historical times as no record of them is mentioned in ancient sources; the current name appears for the first time in a letter from Pope Leo III to Charlemagne in 813: the name iscla mentioned there would derive from insula, though there is an argument made for a Semitic origin in I-schra, "black island". An acropolis site of the Monte Vico area was inhabited from the Bronze Age, as Mycenaean and Iron Age pottery finds attest. Euboean Greeks from Eretria and Chalcis arrived in the 8th century BC to establish an emporium for trade with the Etruscans of the mainland; this settlement was home to a mixed population of Greeks and Phoenicians. Because of its fine harbor and the safety from raids afforded by the sea, the settlement of Pithecusae became successful through trade in iron and with mainland Italy; the ceramic Euboean artifact inscribed with a reference to "Nestor's cup" was discovered in a grave on the island in 1953.
Engraved upon the cup are a few lines written in the Greek alphabet. Dating from c. 730 BC, it is one of our most important testimonies to the early Greek alphabet, from which the Latin alphabet descended via the Etruscan alphabet. According to certain scholars the inscription might be the oldest written reference to the Iliad. In 474 BC, Hiero I of Syracuse came to the aid of the Cumaeans, who lived on the mainland opposite Ischia, against the Etruscans and defeated them on the sea, he occupied Ischia and the surrounding Parthenopean islands and left behind a garrison to build a fortress before the city of Ischia itself. This was still extant in the Middle Ages, but the original garrison fled before the eruptions of 470 BC and the island was taken over by Neapolitans; the Romans seized Ischia in 322 BC. In 6 AD, Augustus restored the island to Naples in exchange for Capri. Ischia suffered from the barbarian invasions, being taken first by the Heruli by the Ostrogoths, being absorbed into the Eastern Roman Empire.
The Byzantines gave the island over to Naples in 588 and by 661 it was being administered by a Count liege to the Duke of Naples. The area was devastated by the Saracens in 813 and 847. After the Sicilian Vespers in 1282, the island rebelled, recognizing Peter III of Aragon, but was retaken by the Angevins the following year, it was conquered in 1284 by the forces of Aragon and Charles II of Anjou was unable to retake it until 1299. As a consequence of the island's last eruption in 1302, the population fled to Baia where they remained for 4 years. In 1320 Robert of Anjou and his wife Sancia visited the island a
Writing system
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 being a reliable form of information storage and transfer; 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. Writing is recorded onto a durable medium, such as paper or electronic storage, although non-durable methods may be used, such as writing on a computer display, on a blackboard, in sand, or by skywriting; 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 morpheme, or other semantic units. Other categories include abjads, which differ from alphabets in that vowels are not indicated, abugidas or alphasyllabaries, with each character representing a consonant–vowel pairing. Alphabets use a set of 20-to-35 symbols to express a language, whereas syllabaries can have 80-to-100, logographies can have several hundreds of symbols. Most systems will have an ordering of its symbol elements so that groups of them can be coded into larger clusters like words or acronyms, giving rise to many more possibilities in meanings than the symbols can convey by themselves. Systems will enable the stringing together of these smaller groupings in order to enable a full expression of the language; the reading step expressed orally. A special set of symbols known as punctuation is used to aid in structure and organization of many writing systems and can be used to help capture nuances and variations in the message's meaning that are communicated verbally by cues in timing, accent, inflection or intonation.
A writing system will typically have a method for formatting recorded messages that follows the spoken version's rules like its grammar and syntax so that the reader will have the meaning of the intended message preserved. Writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, which used pictograms and other mnemonic symbols. Proto-writing lacked the ability to express a full range of thoughts and ideas; the invention of writing systems, which dates back to the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic Era of the late 4th millennium BC, enabled the accurate durable recording of human history in a manner, not prone to the same types of error to which oral history is vulnerable. Soon after, writing provided a reliable form of long distance communication. With the advent of publishing, it provided the medium for an early form of mass communication; the creation of a new alphabetic writing system for a language with an existing logographic writing system is called alphabetization, as when the People's Republic of China studied the prospect of alphabetizing the Chinese languages with Latin script, Cyrillic script, Arabic script, numbers, although the most common instance of it, converting to Latin script, is called romanization.
Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that a writing system is always associated with at least one spoken language. In contrast, visual representations such as drawings and non-verbal items on maps, such as contour lines, are not language-related; some symbols on information signs, such as the symbols for male and female, are not language related, but can grow to become part of language if they are used in conjunction with other language elements. Some other symbols, such as numerals and the ampersand, are not directly linked to any specific language, but are used in writing and thus must be considered part of writing systems; every human community possesses language, which many regard as an innate and defining condition of humanity. However, the development of writing systems, the process by which they have supplanted traditional oral systems of communication, have been sporadic and slow. Once established, writing systems change more than their spoken counterparts.
Thus they preserve features and expressions which are no longer current in the spoken language. One of the great benefits of writing systems is that they can preserve a permanent record of information expressed in a language. All writing systems require: at least one set of defined base elements or symbols, individually termed signs and collectively called a script. In the examination of individual scripts, the study of writing systems has developed along independent lines. Thus, the terminology employed differs somewhat from field to field; the generic term text refers to an instance of writte
Gulf of Naples
The Gulf of Naples called the Bay of Naples, is a 15-kilometer-wide gulf located along the south-western coast of Italy. It opens to the west into the Mediterranean Sea, it is bordered on the north by the cities of Naples and Pozzuoli, on the east by Mount Vesuvius, on the south by the Sorrentine Peninsula and the main town of the peninsula, Sorrento. The Peninsula separates the Gulf of Naples from the Gulf of Salerno, which includes the Amalfi coast; the islands of Capri and Procida are located in the Gulf of Naples. The area is a tourist destination, with the seaside Roman ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, along the north coast. Along with the island of Ischia and gulfs of Pozzuoli and Gaeta, local waters are home to varieties of whales and dolphins including fin and sperm whales, it is said that the Roman emperor Caligula built a bridge of boats across the bay and rode across it in a chariot wearing the armor of Alexander the Great. The Gulf of Naples hosted the sailing events for the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome.
According to information from Mario Scaramella, twenty nuclear torpedo sea mines were alleged by the International Atomic Energy Agency to have been laid on 10 January 1970, by a Soviet November class attack submarine, in the Gulf of Naples at the time of the Cold War to destroy or deny access to the US Sixth Fleet. 1960 Summer Olympics official report. Volume 1. P. 86. 1960 Summer Olympics official report. Volume 2. Part 2. Pp. 963–1023. Purcell, N. R. Talbert, T. Elliott, S. Gillies. "Places: 433059". Pleiades. Retrieved March 8, 2012. CS1 maint: Multiple names: authors list
Runes
Runes are the letters in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets, which were used to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialised purposes thereafter. The Scandinavian variants are known as futhark or fuþark. Runology is the study of the runic alphabets, runic inscriptions and their history. Runology forms a specialised branch of Germanic linguistics; the earliest runic inscriptions date from around 150 AD. The characters were replaced by the Latin alphabet as the cultures that had used runes underwent Christianisation, by 700 AD in central Europe and 1100 AD in northern Europe. However, the use of runes persisted for specialized purposes in northern Europe; until the early 20th century, runes were used in rural Sweden for decorative purposes in Dalarna and on Runic calendars. The three best-known runic alphabets are the Elder Futhark, the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the Younger Futhark; the Younger Futhark is divided further into the long-branch runes.
The Younger Futhark developed further into the Medieval runes, the Dalecarlian runes. The runic alphabet is a derivation of the Old Italic scripts of antiquity, with the addition of some innovations. Which variant of the Old Italic family in particular gave rise to the runes is uncertain. Suggestions include Raetic, Etruscan, or Old Latin as candidates. At the time, all of these scripts had the same angular letter shapes suited for epigraphy, which would become characteristic of the runes; the process of transmission of the script is unknown. The oldest inscriptions are found in northern Germany. A "West Germanic hypothesis" suggests transmission via Elbe Germanic groups, while a "Gothic hypothesis" presumes transmission via East Germanic expansion; the runes were in use among the Germanic peoples from the 1st or 2nd century AD. This period corresponds to the late Common Germanic stage linguistically, with a continuum of dialects not yet separated into the three branches of centuries: North Germanic, West Germanic, East Germanic.
No distinction is made in surviving runic inscriptions between long and short vowels, although such a distinction was present phonologically in the spoken languages of the time. There are no signs for labiovelars in the Elder Futhark The term runes is used to distinguish these symbols from Latin and Greek letters, it is attested on a 6th-century Alamannic runestaff as runa and as runo on the 4th-century Einang stone. The name comes from the Germanic root run-, meaning "secret" or "whisper". In Old Irish Gaelic, the word rún means "mystery", "secret", "intention" or "affectionate love." In Welsh and Old English, the word rhin and rūn means "mystery", "secret", "secret writing", or sometimes in the extreme sense of the word, "miracle". Ogham is a Celtic script carved in the Norse manner; the root run- can be found in the Baltic languages, meaning "speech". In Lithuanian, runoti means both "to cut" and "to speak". According to another theory, the Germanic root comes from the Indo-European root *reuə- "dig".
The Finnish term for rune, means "scratched letter". The Finnish word runo means "poem" and comes from the same source as the English word "rune"; the runes developed centuries after the Old Italic alphabets from which they are historically derived. The debate on the development of the runic script concerns the question regarding which of the Italic alphabets should be taken as their point of origin and which, if any, signs should be considered original innovations added to the letters found in the Italic scripts; the historical context of the script's origin is the cultural contact between Germanic people, who served as mercenaries in the Roman army, the Italian peninsula during the Roman imperial period. The formation of the Elder Futhark was complete by the early 5th century, with the Kylver Stone being the first evidence of the futhark ordering as well as of the p rune; the Raetic alphabet of Bolzano is advanced as a candidate for the origin of the runes, with only five Elder Futhark runes having no counterpart in the Bolzano alphabet.
Scandinavian scholars tend to favor derivation from the Latin alphabet itself over Raetic candidates. A "North Etruscan" thesis is supported by the inscription on the Negau helmet dating to the 2nd century BC; this features a Germanic name, Harigast. Giuliano and Larissa Bonfante suggest that runes derived from some North Italic alphabet Venetic: but since Romans conquered Veneto after 200 BC, the Latin alphabet became prominent and Venetic culture diminished in importance, Germanic people could have adopted the Venetic alphabet within 3rd century BC or earlier; the angular shapes of the runes are shared with most contemporary alphabets of the period that were used for carving in wood or stone. There are no horizontal strokes: when
Archaic Greek alphabets
Many local variants of the Greek alphabet were employed in ancient Greece during the archaic and early classical periods, until they were replaced by the classical 24-letter alphabet, the standard today, around 400 BC. All forms of the Greek alphabet were based on the shared inventory of the 22 symbols of the Phoenician alphabet, with the exception of the letter Samekh, whose Greek counterpart Xi was used only in a sub-group of Greek alphabets, with the common addition of Upsilon for the vowel /u, ū/; the local, so-called epichoric, alphabets differed in many ways: in the use of the consonant symbols Χ, Φ and Ψ. The system now familiar as the standard 24-letter Greek alphabet was the regional variant of the Ionian cities in Asia Minor, it was adopted in Athens in 403 BC and in most of the rest of the Greek world by the middle of the 4th century BC. A basic division into four major types of epichoric alphabets is made according to their different treatment of additional consonant letters for the aspirated consonants and consonant clusters of Greek.
These four types are conventionally labelled as "green", "red", "light blue" and "dark blue" types, based on a colour-coded map in a seminal 19th-century work on the topic, Studien zur Geschichte des griechischen Alphabets by Adolf Kirchhoff. The "green" type is closest to the Phoenician; the "red" type is the one, transmitted to the West and became the ancestor of the Latin alphabet, bears some crucial features characteristic of that development. The "blue" type is the one from which the standard Greek alphabet emerged. *Upsilon is derived from waw. The "green" type uses no additional letters beyond the Phoenician set, also goes without Ξ. Thus, the aspirated plosives /pʰ/, /kʰ/ are spelled either as Π and Κ without a distinction from unaspirated /p/, /k/, or as digraphs ΠΗ, ΚΗ; the clusters /ps/, /ks/ are spelled ΠΣ, ΚΣ. This is the system found in Crete and in some other islands in the southern Aegean, notably Thera and Anaphe; the "red" type lacks Phoenician-derived Ξ for /ks/, but instead introduces a supplementary sign for that sound combination at the end of the alphabet, Χ.
In addition, the red alphabet introduced letters for the aspirates, Φ = /pʰ/ and Ψ = /kʰ/. Note that the use of Χ in the "red" set corresponds to the letter "X" in Latin, while it differs from the standard Greek alphabet, where Χ stands for /kʰ/, Ψ stands for /ps/. Only Φ for /pʰ/ is common to all non-green alphabets; the red type is found in most parts of central mainland Greece, as well as the island of Euboea, in colonies associated with these places, including most colonies in Italy. The "light blue" type still lacks Ξ, adds only letters for /pʰ/ and /kʰ/. Both of these correspond to the modern standard alphabet; the light blue system thus still has no separate letters for the clusters /ps/, /ks/. In this system, these are spelled ΦΣ and ΧΣ, respectively; this is the system found in several Aegean islands. The "dark blue" type is the one that has all the consonant symbols of the modern standard alphabet: in addition to Φ and Χ, it adds Ψ, Ξ; this system is found in the cities of the Ionian dodecapolis, Knidos in Asia Minor, in Corinth and Argos on the northeastern Peloponnese.
The letter eta had two different functions, both derived from the name of its Phoenician model, hēth: the majority of Greek dialects continued to use it for the consonant /h/, similar to its Phoenician value. However, the consonant /h/ was progressively lost from the spoken language, in those dialects where this had happened early on in the archaic period, Η was instead used to denote the long vowel /ɛː/, which occurred next in its name and was thus, in the /h/-less dialects, its natural acrophonic value. Early psilotic dialects include eastern Ionic Greek, the Aeolic Greek of Lesbos, as well as the Doric Greek of Crete and ElisThe distribution of vocalic Η and Ε differs further between dialects, because the Greek language had a system of three distinct e-like phonemes: the long open-mid /ɛː/, the long close-mid /eː/, the short vowel /e/. In the psilotic dialects of Anatolia and adjacent eastern Aegean islands, as well as Crete, vocalic Η was used only for /ɛː/. In a number of Aegean islands, notably Rhodes, Milos and Paros, it was used both for /h/ and for /ɛː/ without distinction.
In Knidos, a variant letter was invented to distinguish the two functions: Η was used for /h/, for /ɛː/. In south Italian colonies Taranto, after c. 400 BC, a similar distinction was made between Η for /ɛː/, for /h/. This latter symbol was turned into the diacritic sign for rough breathing by the Alexandrine grammarians. In Naxos the system was different: here, the same letter was used for /h/ and for a long vowel, but only in those cases where a long e-like sound had
Latin alphabet
The Latin or Roman alphabet is the writing system used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Due to its use in writing Germanic and other languages first in Europe and in other parts of the world, due to its use in Romanizing writing of other languages, it has become widespread, it is used in China and has been adopted by Baltic and some Slavic states. The Latin alphabet evolved from the visually similar Cumaean Greek version of the Greek alphabet, itself descended from the Phoenician abjad, which in turn derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics; the Etruscans, who ruled early Rome, adopted the Cumaean Greek alphabet, modified over time to become the Etruscan alphabet, in turn adopted and further modified by the Romans to produce the Latin alphabet. During the Middle Ages, the Latin alphabet was used for writing Romance languages, which are direct descendants of Latin, as well as Celtic, Germanic and some Slavic languages. With the age of colonialism and Christian evangelism, the Latin script spread beyond Europe, coming into use for writing indigenous American, Austronesian and African languages.
More linguists have tended to prefer the Latin script or the International Phonetic Alphabet when transcribing or creating written standards for non-European languages, such as the African reference alphabet. The term Latin alphabet may refer to either the alphabet used to write Latin, or other alphabets based on the Latin script, the basic set of letters common to the various alphabets descended from the classical Latin alphabet, such as the English alphabet; these Latin-script alphabets may discard letters, like the Rotokas alphabet, or add new letters, like the Danish and Norwegian alphabets. Letter shapes have evolved over the centuries, including the development in Medieval Latin of lower-case, forms which did not exist in the Classical period alphabet. English is the only major modern European language requiring no diacritics for native words, it is believed that the Romans adopted the Cumae alphabet, a variant of the Greek alphabet, in the 7th century BC from Cumae, a Greek colony in Southern Italy.
The Ancient Greek alphabet was in turn based upon the Phoenician abjad. From the Cumae alphabet, the Etruscan alphabet was derived and the Romans adopted 21 of the original 27 Etruscan letters: Latin included 21 different characters; the letter ⟨C⟩ was the western form of the Greek gamma, but it was used for the sounds /ɡ/ and /k/ alike under the influence of Etruscan, which might have lacked any voiced plosives. During the 3rd century BC, the letter ⟨Z⟩ – unneeded to write Latin properly – was replaced with the new letter ⟨G⟩, a ⟨C⟩ modified with a small vertical stroke, which took its place in the alphabet. From on, ⟨G⟩ represented the voiced plosive /ɡ/, while ⟨C⟩ was reserved for the voiceless plosive /k/; the letter ⟨K⟩ was used only in a small number of words such as Kalendae interchangeably with ⟨C⟩. After the Roman conquest of Greece in the 1st century BC, Latin adopted the Greek letters ⟨Y⟩ and ⟨Z⟩ to write Greek loanwords, placing them at the end of the alphabet. An attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three additional letters.
Thus it was during the classical Latin period that the Latin alphabet contained 23 letters: The Latin names of some of these letters are disputed. In general the Romans did not use the traditional names as in Greek: the names of the plosives were formed by adding /eː/ to their sound and the names of the continuants consisted either of the bare sound, or the sound preceded by /e/; the letter ⟨Y⟩ when introduced was called "hy" /hyː/ as in Greek, the name upsilon not being in use yet, but this was changed to "i Graeca" as Latin speakers had difficulty distinguishing its foreign sound /y/ from /i/. ⟨ Z ⟩ was given zeta. This scheme has continued to be used by most modern European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet. For the Latin sounds represented by the various letters see Latin pronunciation. Diacritics were not used, but they did occur sometimes, the most common being the apex used to mark long vowels, which had sometimes been written doubled. However, in place of taking an apex, the letter i was written taller: ⟨á é ꟾ ó v́⟩.
For example, what is today transcribed Lūciī a fīliī was written ⟨lv́ciꟾ·a·fꟾliꟾ⟩ in the inscription depicted. The primary mark of punctuation was the interpunct, used as a word divider, though it fell out of use after 200 AD. Old Roman cursive script called majuscule cursive and capitalis cursive, was the everyday form of handwriting used for writing letters, by merchants writing business accounts, by schoolchildren learning the Latin alphabet, emperors issuing commands. A more formal style of writing was based on Roman square capitals, but cursive was used for quicker, informal writing, it was most c
