1.
Writing
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Writing is a medium of human communication that represents language and emotion through the inscription or recording of signs and symbols. In most languages, writing is a complement to speech or spoken language, Writing is not a language but a form of technology that developed as tools developed with human society. Within a language system, writing relies on many of the structures as speech, such as vocabulary, grammar and semantics. The result of writing is called text, and the recipient of text is called a reader. Motivations for writing include publication, storytelling, correspondence and diary, Writing has been instrumental in keeping history, maintaining culture, dissemination of knowledge through the media and the formation of legal systems. As human societies emerged, the development of writing was driven by pragmatic exigencies such as exchanging information, maintaining financial accounts, codifying laws, in both ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica writing may have evolved through calendrics and a political necessity for recording historical and environmental events. H. G. Wells argued that writing has the ability to put agreements, laws and it made the growth of states larger than the old city states possible. It made a continuous historical consciousness possible, the command of the priest or king and his seal could go far beyond his sight and voice and could survive his death. The major writing systems—methods of inscription—broadly fall into four categories, logographic, syllabic, alphabetic, another category, ideographic, has never been developed sufficiently to represent language. A sixth category, pictographic, is insufficient to represent language on its own, a logogram is a written character which represents a word or morpheme. A vast number of logograms are needed to write Chinese characters, cuneiform, and Mayan, where a glyph may stand for a morpheme, many logograms have an ideographic component. For example, in Mayan, the glyph for fin, pronounced ka, was used to represent the syllable ka whenever the pronunciation of a logogram needed to be indicated. In Chinese, about 90% of characters are compounds of an element called a radical with an existing character to indicate the pronunciation. However, such phonetic elements complement the elements, rather than vice versa. A syllabary is a set of symbols that represent syllables. A glyph in a syllabary typically represents a consonant followed by a vowel, or just a vowel alone, phonetically related syllables are not so indicated in the script. For instance, the syllable ka may look nothing like the syllable ki, syllabaries are best suited to languages with a relatively simple syllable structure, such as Japanese. Other languages that use syllabic writing include the Linear B script for Mycenaean Greek, Cherokee, Ndjuka, an English-based creole language of Surinam, most logographic systems have a strong syllabic component
2.
Middle Ages
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In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or Medieval Period lasted from the 5th to the 15th century. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance, the Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history, classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern period. The medieval period is subdivided into the Early, High. Population decline, counterurbanisation, invasion, and movement of peoples, the large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the seventh century, North Africa and the Middle East—once part of the Byzantine Empire—came under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate, although there were substantial changes in society and political structures, the break with classical antiquity was not complete. The still-sizeable Byzantine Empire survived in the east and remained a major power, the empires law code, the Corpus Juris Civilis or Code of Justinian, was rediscovered in Northern Italy in 1070 and became widely admired later in the Middle Ages. In the West, most kingdoms incorporated the few extant Roman institutions, monasteries were founded as campaigns to Christianise pagan Europe continued. The Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty, briefly established the Carolingian Empire during the later 8th, the Crusades, first preached in 1095, were military attempts by Western European Christians to regain control of the Holy Land from Muslims. Kings became the heads of centralised nation states, reducing crime and violence, intellectual life was marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasised joining faith to reason, and by the founding of universities. Controversy, heresy, and the Western Schism within the Catholic Church paralleled the conflict, civil strife. Cultural and technological developments transformed European society, concluding the Late Middle Ages, the Middle Ages is one of the three major periods in the most enduring scheme for analysing European history, classical civilisation, or Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Modern Period. Medieval writers divided history into periods such as the Six Ages or the Four Empires, when referring to their own times, they spoke of them as being modern. In the 1330s, the humanist and poet Petrarch referred to pre-Christian times as antiqua, leonardo Bruni was the first historian to use tripartite periodisation in his History of the Florentine People. Bruni and later argued that Italy had recovered since Petrarchs time. The Middle Ages first appears in Latin in 1469 as media tempestas or middle season, in early usage, there were many variants, including medium aevum, or middle age, first recorded in 1604, and media saecula, or middle ages, first recorded in 1625. The alternative term medieval derives from medium aevum, tripartite periodisation became standard after the German 17th-century historian Christoph Cellarius divided history into three periods, Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. The most commonly given starting point for the Middle Ages is 476, for Europe as a whole,1500 is often considered to be the end of the Middle Ages, but there is no universally agreed upon end date. English historians often use the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 to mark the end of the period
3.
Initial
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In a written or published work, an initial or drop cap is a letter at the beginning of a word, a chapter, or a paragraph that is larger than the rest of the text. The word is derived from the Latin initialis, which means standing at the beginning, an initial often is several lines in height and in older books or manuscripts, sometimes ornately decorated. In illuminated manuscripts, initials with images inside them, such as illustrated here, are known as historiated initials. They were an invention of the Insular art of the British Isles in the eighth century, Initials containing, typically, plant-form spirals with small figures of animals or humans that do not represent a specific person or scene are known as inhabited initials. Certain important initials, such as the Beatus initial or B of Beatus vir. at the opening of Psalm 1 at the start of a vulgate Latin psalter and these specific initials, in an illuminated manuscript, also were called Initiums. The classical tradition was slow to use letters for initials at all. The radical innovation of insular manuscripts was to make much larger, not indented, and for the letters immediately following the initial also to be larger. Subsequently they became larger still, coloured, and penetrated farther and farther into the rest of the text, the decoration of insular initials, especially large ones, was generally abstract and geometrical, or featured animals in patterns. Historiated initials were an Insular invention, but did not come into their own until the later developments of Ottonian art, Anglo-Saxon art, and the Romanesque style in particular. After this period, in Gothic art large paintings of scenes tended to go in rectangular framed spaces, in the very early history of printing the typesetters would leave blank the necessary space, so that the initials could be added later by a scribe or miniature painter. Later initials were printed using separate blocks in woodcut or metalcut techniques, the initial may sit on the same baseline as the first line of text, at the same margin, as it does here. This is the easiest to typeset on a computer, including in HTML, an example follows, Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat, duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum, alternatively, the initial may be in the left margin, with the text indented, as shown here. In word processors and HTML, this may be implemented using a table with two cells, one for the initial and one for the rest of the text, the difference between this and a true drop cap may be seen when the text extends below the initial. For example, With a drop cap, the initial sits within the margins and runs several lines deep into the paragraph and this keeps the left and top margins of the paragraph flush. In modern computer browsers, this may be achieved with a combination of HTML and CSS by using the float, left, a CSS-only solution alternatively can use the, first-letter pseudo-element. An example of this format is the paragraph, orem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit
4.
Old English
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Old English or Anglo-Saxon is the earliest historical form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers probably in the mid 5th century, Old English developed from a set of Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic dialects originally spoken by Germanic tribes traditionally known as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. As the Anglo-Saxons became dominant in England, their language replaced the languages of Roman Britain, Common Brittonic, a Celtic language, Old English had four main dialects, associated with particular Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish and West Saxon. It was West Saxon that formed the basis for the standard of the later Old English period, although the dominant forms of Middle. The speech of eastern and northern parts of England was subject to strong Old Norse influence due to Scandinavian rule, Old English is one of the West Germanic languages, and its closest relatives are Old Frisian and Old Saxon. Like other old Germanic languages, it is different from Modern English. Old English grammar is similar to that of modern German, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs have many inflectional endings and forms. The oldest Old English inscriptions were using a runic system. Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of 700 years, from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain in the 5th century to the late 11th century, some time after the Norman invasion. While indicating that the establishment of dates is a process, Albert Baugh dates Old English from 450 to 1150, a period of full inflections. Perhaps around 85 per cent of Old English words are no longer in use, Old English is a West Germanic language, developing out of Ingvaeonic dialects from the 5th century. It came to be spoken over most of the territory of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms which became the Kingdom of England and this included most of present-day England, as well as part of what is now southeastern Scotland, which for several centuries belonged to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Other parts of the island – Wales and most of Scotland – continued to use Celtic languages, Norse was also widely spoken in the parts of England which fell under Danish law. Anglo-Saxon literacy developed after Christianisation in the late 7th century, the oldest surviving text of Old English literature is Cædmons Hymn, composed between 658 and 680. There is a corpus of runic inscriptions from the 5th to 7th centuries. The Old English Latin alphabet was introduced around the 9th century, with the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms by Alfred the Great in the later 9th century, the language of government and literature became standardised around the West Saxon dialect. In Old English, typical of the development of literature, poetry arose before prose, a later literary standard, dating from the later 10th century, arose under the influence of Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester, and was followed by such writers as the prolific Ælfric of Eynsham. This form of the language is known as the Winchester standard and it is considered to represent the classical form of Old English
5.
United States Constitution
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The United States Constitution is the supreme law of the United States of America. The Constitution, originally comprising seven articles, delineates the national frame of government, Articles Four, Five and Six entrench concepts of federalism, describing the rights and responsibilities of state governments and of the states in relationship to the federal government. Article Seven establishes the procedure used by the thirteen States to ratify it. In general, the first ten amendments, known collectively as the Bill of Rights, offer specific protections of individual liberty, the majority of the seventeen later amendments expand individual civil rights protections. Others address issues related to federal authority or modify government processes and procedures, Amendments to the United States Constitution, unlike ones made to many constitutions worldwide, are appended to the document. All four pages of the original U. S, according to the United States Senate, The Constitutions first three words—We the People—affirm that the government of the United States exists to serve its citizens. From September 5,1774 to March 1,1781, the Continental Congress functioned as the government of the United States. The process of selecting the delegates for the First and Second Continental Congresses underscores the revolutionary role of the people of the colonies in establishing a governing body. The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union was the first constitution of the United States and it was drafted by the Second Continental Congress from mid-1776 through late-1777, and ratification by all 13 states was completed by early 1781. Under the Articles of Confederation, the governments power was quite limited. The Confederation Congress could make decisions, but lacked enforcement powers, implementation of most decisions, including modifications to the Articles, required unanimous approval of all thirteen state legislatures. The Continental Congress could print money but the currency was worthless, Congress could borrow money, but couldnt pay it back. No state paid all their U. S. taxes, some paid nothing, some few paid an amount equal to interest on the national debt owed to their citizens, but no more. No interest was paid on debt owed foreign governments, by 1786, the United States would default on outstanding debts as their dates came due. Internationally, the Articles of Confederation did little to enhance the United States ability to defend its sovereignty, most of the troops in the 625-man United States Army were deployed facing – but not threatening – British forts on American soil. They had not been paid, some were deserting and others threatening mutiny, spain closed New Orleans to American commerce, U. S. officials protested, but to no effect. Barbary pirates began seizing American ships of commerce, the Treasury had no funds to pay their ransom, if any military crisis required action, the Congress had no credit or taxing power to finance a response. Domestically, the Articles of Confederation was failing to bring unity to the sentiments and interests of the various states
6.
Asterisk
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An asterisk is a typographical symbol or glyph. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a star, computer scientists and mathematicians often vocalize it as star. In English, an asterisk is usually five-pointed in sans-serif typefaces, six-pointed in serif typefaces and it can be used as censorship. It is also used on the Internet to correct ones spelling, the asterisk is derived from the need of the printers of family trees in feudal times for a symbol to indicate date of birth. The original shape was seven-armed, each arm like a shooting from the center. In computer science, the asterisk is used as a wildcard character, or to denote pointers, repetition. Origin Adamantius is known to have used the asteriskos to mark missing Hebrew lines from his Hexapla. The asterisk evolved in shape over time, but its meaning as a used to correct defects remained. In the Middle Ages, the asterisk was used to emphasize a part of text. However, an asterisk was not always used, one hypothesis to the origin of the asterisk is that it stems from the five thousand year old Sumerian character dingir,
7.
Samuel Johnson
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Johnson was a devout Anglican and committed Tory, and is described by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history. He is also the subject of perhaps the most famous biography in English literature, born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, Johnson attended Pembroke College, Oxford for just over a year, before his lack of funds forced him to leave. After working as a teacher, he moved to London, where he began to write for The Gentlemans Magazine and his early works include the biography Life of Mr Richard Savage, the poems London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, and the play Irene. After nine years of work, Johnsons A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755 and it had a far-reaching effect on Modern English and has been described as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship. This work brought Johnson popularity and success, until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary 150 years later, Johnsons was viewed as the pre-eminent British dictionary. His later works included essays, an annotated edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare. In 1763, he befriended James Boswell, with whom he travelled to Scotland. Towards the end of his life, he produced the massive and influential Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Johnson was a tall and robust man. His odd gestures and tics were disconcerting to some on first meeting him, after a series of illnesses, he died on the evening of 13 December 1784, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Born on 18 September 1709, to Michael Johnson, a bookseller and he did not cry and, with doubts surrounding the newborns health, his aunt exclaimed that she would not have picked such a poor creature up in the street. Since it was feared that the baby die, the vicar of St Marys was summoned to perform a baptism. Two godfathers were chosen, Samuel Swynfen, a physician and graduate of Pembroke College, Oxford, and Richard Wakefield, a lawyer, coroner, Johnsons health improved and he was put to wet-nurse with Joan Marklew. He soon contracted scrofula, known at time as the Kings Evil because it was thought royalty could cure it. Sir John Floyer, former physician to King Charles II, recommended that the young Johnson should receive the royal touch, however, the ritual was ineffective, and an operation was performed that left him with permanent scars across his face and body. Johnson demonstrated signs of intelligence as a child, and his parents, to his later disgust. His education began at the age of three, and was provided by his mother, who had him memorise and recite passages from the Book of Common Prayer. When Samuel turned four, he was sent to a nearby school, a year later, Johnson went to Lichfield Grammar School, where he excelled in Latin. During this time, Johnson started to exhibit the tics that would influence how people viewed him in his years
8.
Joseph Addison
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Joseph Addison was an English essayist, poet, playwright, and politician. He was the eldest son of The Reverend Lancelot Addison and his name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend, Richard Steele, with whom he founded The Spectator magazine. Addison was born in Millstone, Wiltshire, but soon after his birth his father, Lancelot Addison, was appointed Dean of Lichfield and he was educated at Charterhouse School, where he first met Richard Steele, and at The Queens College, Oxford. He excelled in classics, being noted for his Latin verse. In 1693, he addressed a poem to John Dryden, and his first major work and his translation of Virgils Georgics was published in the same year. While in Switzerland in 1702, he heard of the death of William III and he returned to England at the end of 1703. For more than a year he remained without employment, but the Battle of Blenheim in 1704 gave him an opportunity to distinguish himself. In 1705, with the Whigs in political power, Addison was made Under-Secretary of State, Addisons biographer states, In the field of his foreign responsibilities Addisons views were those of a good Whig. He had always believed that Englands power depended upon her wealth, her wealth upon her commerce, and her commerce upon the freedom of the seas, from 1708 to 1709 he was MP for the rotten borough of Lostwithiel. Addison was shortly afterwards appointed secretary to the new Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Wharton, under the influence of Wharton, he was Member of Parliament in the Irish House of Commons for Cavan Borough from 1709 until 1713. From 1710, he represented Malmesbury, in his county of Wiltshire. He encountered Jonathan Swift in Ireland and remained there for a year, subsequently, he helped found the Kitcat Club and renewed his association with Richard Steele. In 1709 Steele began to bring out Tatler, to which Addison became almost immediately a contributor, thereafter he started The Spectator and this paper, which at first appeared daily, was kept up until 20 December 1714. His last undertaking was The Freeholder, a paper, 1715–16. He wrote the libretto for Thomas Claytons opera Rosamond, which had a premiere in London in 1707. In 1713 Addisons tragedy Cato was produced, and was received with acclamation by both Whigs and Tories and he followed this effort with a comedic play, The Drummer. In 1712, Addison wrote his most famous work of fiction, Cato and it has a prologue written by Alexander Pope and an epilogue by Dr. Garth. The play was a success throughout Britain and its possessions in the New World and it continued to grow in popularity, especially in the American colonies, for several generations
9.
Boustrophedon
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Boustrophedon /ˌbuːstrəˈfiːdən/ is a kind of bi-directional text, mostly seen in ancient manuscripts and other inscriptions. Every other line of writing is flipped or reversed, with reversed letters, rather than going left-to-right as in modern European languages, or right-to-left as in Arabic and Hebrew, alternate lines in boustrophedon must be read in opposite directions. Also, the characters are reversed, or mirrored. It was a way of writing in stone in Ancient Greece. By analogy, the term may be used in areas to describe this kind of alternation of motion or writing. For example, it is used to describe the print head motion of certain dot matrix printers. In that case, while the print head moves in opposite directions on alternate lines, the Hungarian folklorist Gyula Sebestyén writes that ancient boustrophedon writing resembles how the Hungarian rovás-sticks of old Hungarian writing were made by shepherds. The notcher holds the stick in his left hand, cutting the letters with his right hand from right to left. When the first side is complete, he flips the stick over vertically, when unfolded horizontally, the final result is writing which starts from right to left, and continues from left to right in the next row, with letters turned upside down. Sebestyén states that the ancient boustrophedon writings were copied from such wooden sticks with cut letters, the wooden boards and other incised artifacts of Rapa Nui also bear a boustrophedonic script called Rongorongo, which remains undeciphered. In Rongorongo the text in alternate lines was rotated 180 degrees rather than mirrored, the Luwian language had a hieroglyph version, hieroglyphic Luwian, that read boustrophedon. The Hieroglyphic Luwian is read boustrophedon, with the direction of any individual line pointing into the front of the animals or body parts constituting certain hieroglyphs. However, unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs with their numerous ideograms and logograms which show an easy directionality, a modern example of boustrophedonics is the numbering scheme of sections within survey townships in the United States and Canada. In both countries, survey townships are divided into a 6-by-6 grid of 36 sections, public Land Survey System, Section 1 of a township is in the northeast corner, and the numbering proceeds boustrophedonically until Section 36 is reached in the southeast corner. Canadas Dominion Land Survey also uses boustrophedonic numbering, but starts at the southeast corner, Rongorongo is the current theory of the first written language on Easter Island. It is believed to be written in boustrophedonics, yet no accurate translation has been deciphered, Rongorongo shares many characteristics with other Polynesian languages groups. The term is used by postmen in the United Kingdom to describe street numbering which proceeds serially in one direction then turns back in the other and this is in contrast to the more common method of odd and even numbers on opposite sides of the street. In art history, it means that you read from bottom left in a series of pictures
10.
Beowulf
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Beowulf is an Old English epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative lines. It may be the oldest surviving poem in Old English and is commonly cited as one of the most important works of Old English literature. A date of composition is a matter of contention among scholars, the only certain dating pertains to the manuscript, the author was an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet, referred to by scholars as the Beowulf poet. The poem is set in Scandinavia, Beowulf, a hero of the Geats, comes to the aid of Hrothgar, the king of the Danes, whose mead hall in Heorot has been under attack by a monster known as Grendel. After Beowulf slays him, Grendels mother attacks the hall and is also defeated. Victorious, Beowulf goes home to Geatland and later king of the Geats. After a period of fifty years has passed, Beowulf defeats a dragon, after his death, his attendants cremate his body and erect a tower on a headland in his memory. The full poem survives in the known as the Nowell Codex. It has no title in the manuscript, but has become known by the name of the storys protagonist. In 1731, the manuscript was damaged by a fire that swept through Ashburnham House in London that had a collection of medieval manuscripts assembled by Sir Robert Bruce Cotton. The Nowell Codex is currently housed in the British Library, the poem may have been brought to England by people of Geatish origins. Others have associated this poem with the court of King Alfred the Great or with the court of King Cnut the Great. The poem deals with legends, was composed for entertainment, though Beowulf himself is not mentioned in any other Anglo-Saxon manuscript, scholars generally agree that many of the other personalities of Beowulf also appear in Scandinavian sources. This does not only people, but also clans and some of the events. Three halls, each about 50 metres long, were found during the excavation, the majority view appears to be that people such as King Hroðgar and the Scyldings in Beowulf are based on real historical people from 6th-century Scandinavia. 19th-century archeological evidence may confirm elements of the Beowulf story, Eadgils was buried at Uppsala according to Snorri Sturluson. When Eadgils mound was excavated in 1874, the finds supported Beowulf and they showed that a powerful man was buried in a large barrow, c 575, on a bear skin with two dogs and rich grave offerings. These remains include a Frankish sword adorned with gold and garnets and he was dressed in a costly suit made of Frankish cloth with golden threads, and he wore a belt with a costly buckle
The dictionary definition of paragraph at Wiktionary
