1.
The Scotsman
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The Scotsman is a Scottish compact newspaper and daily news website published from Edinburgh. It was a broadsheet until 16 August 2004, the Scotsman Publications Ltd also issues the Edinburgh Evening News and the Herald & Post series of free newspapers in Edinburgh, Fife, and West Lothian. As of February 2016, it had a print circulation of 22,740, with a full-price paid-for circulation of 61. 6% of this figure. Scotsman. com websites, including the site, job site, property site, mobile site. The paper was pledged to impartiality, firmness and independence, after the abolition of newspaper stamp tax in Scotland in 1850, The Scotsman was relaunched as a daily newspaper priced at 1d and a circulation of 6,000 copies. Their premises were originally at 257 High Street on the Royal Mile, in 1860 they obtained a purpose built office on Cockburn Street in Edinburgh designed in the Scots baronial style by the architects Peddie & Kinnear. This backed onto their original offices on the Royal Mile, the building bears the initials JR for John Ritchie the founder of the company. In 1902 they moved to new offices at the top of the street, facing onto North Bridge. This huge building had three years to build and also had connected printworks on Market Street. The printworks connected below road level direct to Waverley Station in an efficient production line. In 1953 the newspaper was bought by Canadian millionaire Roy Thomson who was in the process of building a media group. The paper was bought in 1995 by David and Frederick Barclay for £85 million, the daily was awarded by the Society for News Design the World’s Best Designed Newspaper™ for 1994. Ian Stewart has been the editor since June 2012, after a reshuffle of senior management in April 2012 during which John McLellan who was the papers editor-in-chief was dismissed, ian Stewart was previously editor of Edinburgh Evening News and remains as the editor of Scotland on Sunday. In 2012, The Scotsman was named Newspaper of the Year at the Scottish Press Awards, Johnston Press have downsized to refurbished premises at Orchard Brae House in Queensferry Road, Edinburgh, a move which was quoted as saving the group £1million per annum in rent. The newspaper backed a No vote in the referendum on Scottish independence and it has had live webcams and panoramas around Scotland. It also has sections for other Scotsman Publications including Scotland on Sunday, List of newspapers in Scotland List of newspapers by date Merrill, John C. and Harold A. Fisher. The worlds great dailies, profiles of fifty newspapers pp 273–79 Official website The Scotsman Digital Archive 1817-1950 Johnston Press Comprehensive Design Architects
2.
Studebaker Scotsman
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The name was based on the reputation of Scottish frugality, the cars being built for function with minimal luxury. When Studebaker-Packards financial situation worsened in 1955 and 1956, company leaders decided, rather than meet the Big Three automakers head-on, to compete with low-priced, hubcaps and grille were painted, buyers paid extra for a basic recirculating heater for the passenger compartment. Interiors were fitted with painted cardboard panels—gray vinyl being the standard for upholstery. The only chrome plating was on the front and rear bumpers, painted bumpers were an option to reduce the cost of the car even further. On two-door models, the windows were fixed without winders. Standard windshield wipers were vacuum-powered, resulting in reduced performance as engine load increased, the only apparent frill was Studebakers heavily promoted Cyclops Eye speedometer, the same as that used on the 1956 Studebakers. Dealers were instructed to avoid installing extra-cost accessories, on the rationale that a buyer who wanted frills on a car could buy a regular Champion for an extra $200. Priced below the competition from $1,776 for the sedan, Scotsman sales were projected at 4,000 cars for the short 1957 model year. In fact, over 9,000 were sold—not only to frugal or low-budget customers, for, despite its austerity, the Scotsman delivered exceptional value and economy. The small six-cylinder engine delivered a claimed 30 mpg‑US of gasoline when the transmission was chosen. This was unheard-of mileage for a car of its size in 1957, although it came at a price, With only 101 hp, the Scotsman was by no means a rip-roaring performer. It took about 20 seconds to reach 60 mph from rest, at a time when sub-10-second 0-60 mph times were becoming more common, however, it appears that few complained about poor performance in the early days of the Interstate highway. Following up on the success of the first Scotsman, the 1958 models were changed little. An ever-so-slightly altered grille and round taillamp lenses were adopted, which allowed the company to keep prices as inexpensive as possible, promotional materials now referred to the Studebaker Scotsman rather than Studebaker Champion Scotsman, a promotion of sorts from a sub-series to a model in its own right. In a push to increase sales, Studebaker also offered the Econ-o-miler in 1958. The Econ-o-miler used the Scotsmans frugal exterior and interior elements and was pushed as a taxi model, in addition, Studebakers police-package cars in 1958 were often Scotsmans with Commander and President V-8 engines. The Scotsman, which got off to a start for 57, continued its success in 1958, outselling the Champion, Commander. The Scotsman proved that Studebaker need not attempt to follow the trends of the rest of the industry
3.
Demography of Scotland
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The demography of Scotland includes all aspects of population, past and present, in the area that is now Scotland. Scotland has a population of 5,295,000, the population growth rate in 2011 was estimated as 0. 6% per annum according to the 2011 GROS Annual Review. Covering an area of 78,782 square kilometres, Scotland has a density of 67. 2/km2. Other concentrations of population include the northeast coast of Scotland, principally the regions around the cities of Aberdeen and Inverness, the Highlands of Scotland and the island group of Eilean Siar have the lowest population densities at 9/km2. Glasgow has the highest population density at 3, 289/km2, from 1 April 2011 the GROS merged with the National Archives of Scotland to become the National Records of Scotland. In conjunction with the rest of the United Kingdom, the National Records for Scotland is also responsible for conducting a census of population. The most recent one took place in March 2011 with the due to take place in 2021. In the United Kingdom a census was taken every 10 years from 1801 with the exception of 1941 due to the Second World War, Population data for years prior to that is provided from directories and gazetteers Notes a. There was no census in 1941 however there was a National Registrar of the Civilian Population in 1939 b, data for 1961 onwards rounded to nearest thousand c. The age distribution based on the 2011 census was as follows, the 2001 and 2011 censuses recorded the following ethnic groups, A question on national identity was asked in the 2011 census, what do you feel is your national identity. Respondents could identify themselves as having more than one national identity, the remainder chose other national identities. The council areas with at least 90% of the population stating some Scottish national identity were North Lanarkshire, Inverclyde, East Ayrshire, the lowest proportions of people stating some Scottish national identity were in Edinburgh and Aberdeen. The council areas with the highest proportions of people stating British as their national identity were Argyll and Bute and Shetland. Below is a table of national identity sorted by council area based on the results of the 2011 census, The statistics from the 2011 census, English is by far the most commonly spoken language in Scotland. Two regional languages of Scotland, Scottish Gaelic and Scots, are protected under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, abilities in these languages for those aged three and above were recorded in the UK census 2011 as follows. Several other languages are spoken amongst immigrants to Scotland, the most commonly spoken of these is Polish. In the 2011 census 54,186 respondents aged three and over said that Polish was their language, amounting to 1. 06% of the total population of Scotland aged three and over. Glaciers then scoured their way across most of Britain, and only after the ice retreated did Scotland again become habitable, mesolithic hunter-gatherer encampments formed the first known settlements, and archaeologists have dated a site near Biggar to around 8500 BC
4.
Scotland
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Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and covers the northern third of the island of Great Britain. It shares a border with England to the south, and is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the North Sea to the east. In addition to the mainland, the country is made up of more than 790 islands, including the Northern Isles, the Kingdom of Scotland emerged as an independent sovereign state in the Early Middle Ages and continued to exist until 1707. By inheritance in 1603, James VI, King of Scots, became King of England and King of Ireland, Scotland subsequently entered into a political union with the Kingdom of England on 1 May 1707 to create the new Kingdom of Great Britain. The union also created a new Parliament of Great Britain, which succeeded both the Parliament of Scotland and the Parliament of England. Within Scotland, the monarchy of the United Kingdom has continued to use a variety of styles, titles, the legal system within Scotland has also remained separate from those of England and Wales and Northern Ireland, Scotland constitutes a distinct jurisdiction in both public and private law. Glasgow, Scotlands largest city, was one of the worlds leading industrial cities. Other major urban areas are Aberdeen and Dundee, Scottish waters consist of a large sector of the North Atlantic and the North Sea, containing the largest oil reserves in the European Union. This has given Aberdeen, the third-largest city in Scotland, the title of Europes oil capital, following a referendum in 1997, a Scottish Parliament was re-established, in the form of a devolved unicameral legislature comprising 129 members, having authority over many areas of domestic policy. Scotland is represented in the UK Parliament by 59 MPs and in the European Parliament by 6 MEPs, Scotland is also a member nation of the British–Irish Council, and the British–Irish Parliamentary Assembly. Scotland comes from Scoti, the Latin name for the Gaels, the Late Latin word Scotia was initially used to refer to Ireland. By the 11th century at the latest, Scotia was being used to refer to Scotland north of the River Forth, alongside Albania or Albany, the use of the words Scots and Scotland to encompass all of what is now Scotland became common in the Late Middle Ages. Repeated glaciations, which covered the land mass of modern Scotland. It is believed the first post-glacial groups of hunter-gatherers arrived in Scotland around 12,800 years ago, the groups of settlers began building the first known permanent houses on Scottish soil around 9,500 years ago, and the first villages around 6,000 years ago. The well-preserved village of Skara Brae on the mainland of Orkney dates from this period and it contains the remains of an early Bronze Age ruler laid out on white quartz pebbles and birch bark. It was also discovered for the first time that early Bronze Age people placed flowers in their graves, in the winter of 1850, a severe storm hit Scotland, causing widespread damage and over 200 deaths. In the Bay of Skaill, the storm stripped the earth from a large irregular knoll, when the storm cleared, local villagers found the outline of a village, consisting of a number of small houses without roofs. William Watt of Skaill, the laird, began an amateur excavation of the site, but after uncovering four houses
5.
United States
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Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci
6.
Scottish Americans
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Scottish Americans or Scots Americans are Americans whose ancestry originates wholly or partly in Scotland. Scottish Americans are closely related to Scotch-Irish Americans, descendants of Ulster Scots, in the 2013 American Community Survey 5,310,285 were identified as Scottish and 2,976,878 of Scotch-Irish descent. Large scale emigration from Scotland to America began in the 1700s after the Battle of Culloden where the Clan structures were broken up, the Scots went in search of a better life and settled in the thirteen colonies, mainly around South Carolina and Virginia. The table shows the ethnic Scottish population in the United States from 1700 to 2013, in 1700 the total population of the American colonies was 250,888, of whom 223,071 were white and 3. 0% were ethnically Scottish. In the 2000 census,4.8 million Americans self-reported Scottish ancestry,1. 7% of the total US population, another 4.3 million self-reported Scotch-Irish ancestry, for a total of 9.2 million Americans self-reporting some kind of Scottish descent. Americans of Scottish descent outnumber the population of Scotland, where 4,459,071 or 88. 09% of people identified as ethnic Scottish in the 2001 Census. A Christian bard from the Hebrides accompanied Bjarni Herjolfsson on his voyage around Greenland in 985/6 which sighted the mainland to the west. The first Scots recorded as having set foot in the New World were a man named Haki, the Scottish couple were runners who scouted for Thorfinn Karlsefnis expedition in c. 1010, gathering wheat and the grapes for which Vinland was named, the controversial Zeno letters have been cited in support of a claim that Henry Sinclair, earl of Orkney, visited Nova Scotia in 1398. In the early years of Spanish colonization of the Americas, a Scot named Tam Blake spent 20 years in Colombia and he took part in the conquest of New Granada in 1532 with Alonso de Heredia. He arrived in Mexico in 1534-5, and joined Coronados 1540 expedition to the American Southwest, Scottish-American naturalist John Muir is perhaps best known for his exploration of Californias Sierra Nevada mountains during the 19th century. After the Union of the Crowns of Scotland and England in 1603, King James VI, a Scot, promoted joint expeditions overseas, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, Jamestown, was thus named for a Scot. The earliest Scottish communities in America were formed by traders and planters rather than farmer settlers, the hub of Scottish commercial activity in the colonial period was Virginia. Regular contacts began with the transportation of indentured servants to the colony from Scotland, trade between Scotland and the American colonies was finally regularized by the parliamentary Act of Union of Scotland and England in 1707. Scots arriving in Florida and the Gulf Coast traded extensively with Native Americans, American bluegrass and folk music styles have roots in the Appalachian ballad culture of Scottish and the Scotch-Irish Americans. There has also been a tradition of influences between Scottish American and African American communities. Psalm-singing and gospel music are a mainstay of African American churchgoers, the great influx of Scots Presbyterians into the Carolinas introduced African slaves to this form of worship. The style of gospel-singing was also influenced by Scottish Gaelic-speaking settlers from the Western Isles, the first foreign tongue spoken by some slaves in America was Scottish Gaelic picked up from Gaelic-speakers from the Western Isles
7.
Scotch-Irish Americans
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While an estimated 36 million Americans reported Irish ancestry in 2006, and 6 million reported Scottish ancestry, an additional 5.4 million identified more specifically with Scotch-Irish ancestry. The term Scotch-Irish is used primarily in the United States, with people in Great Britain or Ireland who are of a similar ancestry identifying as Ulster Scots people and these included 200,000 Scottish Presbyterians who settled in Ireland between 1608-1697. Many English-born settlers of this period were also Presbyterians, although the denomination is today most strongly identified with Scotland, when King Charles I attempted to force these Presbyterians into the Church of England in the 1630s, many chose to re-emigrate to North America where religious liberty was greater. Later attempts to force the Church of Englands control over dissident Protestants in Ireland were to lead to further waves of emigration to the trans-Atlantic colonies, the term Scotch-Irish is first known to have been used to refer to a people living in Northeastern Ireland. In a letter of April 14,1573, in reference to Ulster, Elizabeth I of England wrote, We are given to understand that a nobleman named Sorley Boy and others, who be of the Scotch-Irish race. This term continued in usage for over a century before the earliest known American reference appeared in a Maryland affidavit in 1689/90, today, Scotch-Irish is an Americanism, rarely used in England, Ireland or Scotland. Smaller numbers of migrants came from Wales and the southeast of England, and others were Protestant religious refugees from Flanders, the German Palatinate. What united these different national groups was a base of Calvinist religious beliefs and that said, the large ethnic Scottish element in the Plantation of Ulster gave the settlements a Scottish character. Upon arrival in North America, these migrants at first usually identified simply as Irish, at first, the two groups had little interaction in America, as the Scots-Irish had become settled decades earlier, primarily in the backcountry of the Appalachian region. Many of the new Irish migrants also went to the interior in the 19th century, attracted to jobs on large-scale infrastructure projects such as canals, the usage Scots-Irish developed in the late 19th century as a relatively recent version of the term. The word Scotch was the favored adjective for things of Scotland, including people, until the early 19th century and it was never properly used as a noun. People in Scotland refer to themselves as Scots, as a noun, although referenced by Merriam-Webster dictionaries as having first appeared in 1744, the American term Scotch-Irish is undoubtedly older. An affidavit of William Patent, dated March 15,1689, in a case against a Mr. Matthew Scarbrough in Somerset County, Maryland and it was no more sin to kill me then to kill a dogg, or any Scotch Irish dogg. Leyburn cites the following as early American uses of the term before 1744, another Church of England clergyman from Lewes, Delaware, commented in 1723 that great numbers of Irish have transplanted themselves and their families from the north of Ireland. The Oxford English Dictionary says the first use of the term Scotch-Irish came in Pennsylvania in 1744,1744 W. MARSHE Jrnl,21 June in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 177, The inhabitants are chiefly High-Dutch, Scotch-Irish, some few English families and its citations include examples after that into the late 19th century. In Albions Seed, Four British Folkways in America, historian David Hackett Fischer asserts and it is true that many sailed from the province of Ulster. Part of much larger flow which drew from the lowlands of Scotland, the north of England, Many scholars call these people Scotch-Irish
8.
Canada
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Canada is a country in the northern half of North America. Canadas border with the United States is the worlds longest binational land border, the majority of the country has a cold or severely cold winter climate, but southerly areas are warm in summer. Canada is sparsely populated, the majority of its territory being dominated by forest and tundra. It is highly urbanized with 82 per cent of the 35.15 million people concentrated in large and medium-sized cities, One third of the population lives in the three largest cities, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Its capital is Ottawa, and other urban areas include Calgary, Edmonton, Quebec City, Winnipeg. Various aboriginal peoples had inhabited what is now Canada for thousands of years prior to European colonization. Pursuant to the British North America Act, on July 1,1867, the colonies of Canada, New Brunswick and this began an accretion of provinces and territories to the mostly self-governing Dominion to the present ten provinces and three territories forming modern Canada. With the Constitution Act 1982, Canada took over authority, removing the last remaining ties of legal dependence on the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Canada is a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy, with Queen Elizabeth II being the head of state. The country is officially bilingual at the federal level and it is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many other countries. Its advanced economy is the eleventh largest in the world, relying chiefly upon its abundant natural resources, Canadas long and complex relationship with the United States has had a significant impact on its economy and culture. Canada is a country and has the tenth highest nominal per capita income globally as well as the ninth highest ranking in the Human Development Index. It ranks among the highest in international measurements of government transparency, civil liberties, quality of life, economic freedom, Canada is an influential nation in the world, primarily due to its inclusive values, years of prosperity and stability, stable economy, and efficient military. While a variety of theories have been postulated for the origins of Canada. In 1535, indigenous inhabitants of the present-day Quebec City region used the word to direct French explorer Jacques Cartier to the village of Stadacona, from the 16th to the early 18th century Canada referred to the part of New France that lay along the St. Lawrence River. In 1791, the area became two British colonies called Upper Canada and Lower Canada collectively named The Canadas, until their union as the British Province of Canada in 1841. Upon Confederation in 1867, Canada was adopted as the name for the new country at the London Conference. The transition away from the use of Dominion was formally reflected in 1982 with the passage of the Canada Act, later that year, the name of national holiday was changed from Dominion Day to Canada Day
9.
Australia
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Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It is the worlds sixth-largest country by total area, the neighbouring countries are Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and East Timor to the north, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to the north-east, and New Zealand to the south-east. Australias capital is Canberra, and its largest urban area is Sydney, for about 50,000 years before the first British settlement in the late 18th century, Australia was inhabited by indigenous Australians, who spoke languages classifiable into roughly 250 groups. The population grew steadily in subsequent decades, and by the 1850s most of the continent had been explored, on 1 January 1901, the six colonies federated, forming the Commonwealth of Australia. Australia has since maintained a liberal democratic political system that functions as a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy comprising six states. The population of 24 million is highly urbanised and heavily concentrated on the eastern seaboard, Australia has the worlds 13th-largest economy and ninth-highest per capita income. With the second-highest human development index globally, the country highly in quality of life, health, education, economic freedom. The name Australia is derived from the Latin Terra Australis a name used for putative lands in the southern hemisphere since ancient times, the Dutch adjectival form Australische was used in a Dutch book in Batavia in 1638, to refer to the newly discovered lands to the south. On 12 December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office that it be formally adopted, in 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known officially as Australia. The first official published use of the term Australia came with the 1830 publication of The Australia Directory and these first inhabitants may have been ancestors of modern Indigenous Australians. The Torres Strait Islanders, ethnically Melanesian, were originally horticulturists, the northern coasts and waters of Australia were visited sporadically by fishermen from Maritime Southeast Asia. The first recorded European sighting of the Australian mainland, and the first recorded European landfall on the Australian continent, are attributed to the Dutch. The first ship and crew to chart the Australian coast and meet with Aboriginal people was the Duyfken captained by Dutch navigator, Willem Janszoon. He sighted the coast of Cape York Peninsula in early 1606, the Dutch charted the whole of the western and northern coastlines and named the island continent New Holland during the 17th century, but made no attempt at settlement. William Dampier, an English explorer and privateer, landed on the north-west coast of New Holland in 1688, in 1770, James Cook sailed along and mapped the east coast, which he named New South Wales and claimed for Great Britain. The first settlement led to the foundation of Sydney, and the exploration, a British settlement was established in Van Diemens Land, now known as Tasmania, in 1803, and it became a separate colony in 1825. The United Kingdom formally claimed the part of Western Australia in 1828. Separate colonies were carved from parts of New South Wales, South Australia in 1836, Victoria in 1851, the Northern Territory was founded in 1911 when it was excised from South Australia
10.
England
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England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west, the Irish Sea lies northwest of England and the Celtic Sea lies to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east, the country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain in its centre and south, and includes over 100 smaller islands such as the Isles of Scilly, and the Isle of Wight. England became a state in the 10th century, and since the Age of Discovery. The Industrial Revolution began in 18th-century England, transforming its society into the worlds first industrialised nation, Englands terrain mostly comprises low hills and plains, especially in central and southern England. However, there are uplands in the north and in the southwest, the capital is London, which is the largest metropolitan area in both the United Kingdom and the European Union. In 1801, Great Britain was united with the Kingdom of Ireland through another Act of Union to become the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In 1922 the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom, leading to the latter being renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain, the name England is derived from the Old English name Englaland, which means land of the Angles. The Angles were one of the Germanic tribes that settled in Great Britain during the Early Middle Ages, the Angles came from the Angeln peninsula in the Bay of Kiel area of the Baltic Sea. The earliest recorded use of the term, as Engla londe, is in the ninth century translation into Old English of Bedes Ecclesiastical History of the English People. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its spelling was first used in 1538. The earliest attested reference to the Angles occurs in the 1st-century work by Tacitus, Germania, the etymology of the tribal name itself is disputed by scholars, it has been suggested that it derives from the shape of the Angeln peninsula, an angular shape. An alternative name for England is Albion, the name Albion originally referred to the entire island of Great Britain. The nominally earliest record of the name appears in the Aristotelian Corpus, specifically the 4th century BC De Mundo, in it are two very large islands called Britannia, these are Albion and Ierne. But modern scholarly consensus ascribes De Mundo not to Aristotle but to Pseudo-Aristotle, the word Albion or insula Albionum has two possible origins. Albion is now applied to England in a poetic capacity. Another romantic name for England is Loegria, related to the Welsh word for England, Lloegr, the earliest known evidence of human presence in the area now known as England was that of Homo antecessor, dating to approximately 780,000 years ago. The oldest proto-human bones discovered in England date from 500,000 years ago, Modern humans are known to have inhabited the area during the Upper Paleolithic period, though permanent settlements were only established within the last 6,000 years
11.
Northern Ireland
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Northern Ireland is a constituent unit of the United Kingdom in the north-east of Ireland. It is variously described as a country, province, region, or part of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland shares a border to the south and west with the Republic of Ireland. In 2011, its population was 1,810,863, constituting about 30% of the total population. Northern Ireland was created in 1921, when Ireland was partitioned between Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland by an act of the British parliament, Northern Ireland has historically been the most industrialised region of Ireland. After declining as a result of the political and social turmoil of the Troubles, its economy has grown significantly since the late 1990s. Unemployment in Northern Ireland peaked at 17. 2% in 1986, dropping to 6. 1% for June–August 2014,58. 2% of those unemployed had been unemployed for over a year. Prominent artists and sports persons from Northern Ireland include Van Morrison, Rory McIlroy, Joey Dunlop, Wayne McCullough, some people from Northern Ireland prefer to identify as Irish while others prefer to identify as British. Cultural links between Northern Ireland, the rest of Ireland, and the rest of the UK are complex, in many sports, the island of Ireland fields a single team, a notable exception being association football. Northern Ireland competes separately at the Commonwealth Games, and people from Northern Ireland may compete for either Great Britain or Ireland at the Olympic Games. The region that is now Northern Ireland was the bedrock of the Irish war of resistance against English programmes of colonialism in the late 16th century, the English-controlled Kingdom of Ireland had been declared by the English king Henry VIII in 1542, but Irish resistance made English control fragmentary. Victories by English forces in war and further Protestant victories in the Williamite War in Ireland toward the close of the 17th century solidified Anglican rule in Ireland. In Northern Ireland, the victories of the Siege of Derry and their intention was to materially disadvantage the Catholic community and, to a lesser extent, the Presbyterian community. In the context of open institutional discrimination, the 18th century saw secret, militant societies develop in communities in the region and act on sectarian tensions in violent attacks. Following this, in an attempt to quell sectarianism and force the removal of discriminatory laws, the new state, formed in 1801, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, was governed from a single government and parliament based in London. Between 1717 and 1775 some 250,000 people from Ulster emigrated to the British North American colonies and it is estimated that there are more than 27 million Scotch-Irish Americans now living in the US. By the close of the century, autonomy for Ireland within the United Kingdom, in 1912, after decades of obstruction from the House of Lords, Home Rule became a near-certainty. A clash between the House of Commons and House of Lords over a controversial budget produced the Parliament Act 1911, which enabled the veto of the Lords to be overturned. The House of Lords veto had been the unionists main guarantee that Home Rule would not be enacted, in 1914, they smuggled thousands of rifles and rounds of ammunition from Imperial Germany for use by the Ulster Volunteers, a paramilitary organisation opposed to the implementation of Home Rule
12.
Argentina
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Argentina, officially the Argentine Republic, is a federal republic in the southern half of South America. With a mainland area of 2,780,400 km2, Argentina is the eighth-largest country in the world, the second largest in Latin America, and the largest Spanish-speaking one. The country is subdivided into provinces and one autonomous city, Buenos Aires. The provinces and the capital have their own constitutions, but exist under a federal system, Argentina claims sovereignty over part of Antarctica, the Falkland Islands, and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. The earliest recorded presence in the area of modern-day Argentina dates back to the Paleolithic period. The country has its roots in Spanish colonization of the region during the 16th century, Argentina rose as the successor state of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, a Spanish overseas viceroyalty founded in 1776. The country thereafter enjoyed relative peace and stability, with waves of European immigration radically reshaping its cultural. The almost-unparalleled increase in prosperity led to Argentina becoming the seventh wealthiest developed nation in the world by the early 20th century, Argentina retains its historic status as a middle power in international affairs, and is a prominent regional power in the Southern Cone and Latin America. Argentina has the second largest economy in South America, the third-largest in Latin America and is a member of the G-15 and it is the country with the second highest Human Development Index in Latin America with a rating of very high. Because of its stability, market size and growing high-tech sector, the description of the country by the word Argentina has to be found on a Venice map in 1536. In English the name Argentina probably comes from the Spanish language, however the naming itself is not Spanish, Argentina means in Italian of silver, silver coloured, probably borrowed from the Old French adjective argentine of silver > silver coloured already mentioned in the 12th century. The French word argentine is the form of argentin and derives of argent silver with the suffix -in. The Italian naming Argentina for the country implies Argentina Terra land of silver or Argentina costa coast of silver, in Italian, the adjective or the proper noun is often used in an autonomous way as a substantive and replaces it and it is said lArgentina. The name Argentina was probably first given by the Venitian and Genoese navigators, in Spanish and Portuguese, the words for silver are respectively plata and prata and of silver is said plateado and prateado. Argentina was first associated with the silver mountains legend, widespread among the first European explorers of the La Plata Basin. The first written use of the name in Spanish can be traced to La Argentina, a 1602 poem by Martín del Barco Centenera describing the region, the 1826 constitution included the first use of the name Argentine Republic in legal documents. The name Argentine Confederation was also used and was formalized in the Argentine Constitution of 1853. In 1860 a presidential decree settled the name as Argentine Republic
13.
Chile
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Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a South American country occupying a long, narrow strip of land between the Andes to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, Chilean territory includes the Pacific islands of Juan Fernández, Salas y Gómez, Desventuradas, and Easter Island in Oceania. Chile also claims about 1,250,000 square kilometres of Antarctica, the arid Atacama Desert in northern Chile contains great mineral wealth, principally copper. Southern Chile is rich in forests and grazing lands, and features a string of volcanoes and lakes, the southern coast is a labyrinth of fjords, inlets, canals, twisting peninsulas, and islands. Spain conquered and colonized Chile in the century, replacing Inca rule in northern and central Chile. After declaring its independence from Spain in 1818, Chile emerged in the 1830s as a relatively stable authoritarian republic, in the 1960s and 1970s the country experienced severe left-right political polarization and turmoil. The regime, headed by Augusto Pinochet, ended in 1990 after it lost a referendum in 1988 and was succeeded by a coalition which ruled through four presidencies until 2010. Chile is today one of South Americas most stable and prosperous nations and it leads Latin American nations in rankings of human development, competitiveness, income per capita, globalization, state of peace, economic freedom, and low perception of corruption. It also ranks high regionally in sustainability of the state, Chile is a founding member of the United Nations, the Union of South American Nations and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. There are various theories about the origin of the word Chile, another theory points to the similarity of the valley of the Aconcagua with that of the Casma Valley in Peru, where there was a town and valley named Chili. Another origin attributed to chilli is the onomatopoeic cheele-cheele—the Mapuche imitation of the warble of a locally known as trile. The Spanish conquistadors heard about this name from the Incas, ultimately, Almagro is credited with the universalization of the name Chile, after naming the Mapocho valley as such. The older spelling Chili was in use in English until at least 1900 before switching over to Chile, stone tool evidence indicates humans sporadically frequented the Monte Verde valley area as long as 18,500 years ago. About 10,000 years ago, migrating Native Americans settled in fertile valleys, settlement sites from very early human habitation include Monte Verde, Cueva del Milodon and the Pali Aike Craters lava tube. They fought against the Sapa Inca Tupac Yupanqui and his army, the result of the bloody three-day confrontation known as the Battle of the Maule was that the Inca conquest of the territories of Chile ended at the Maule river. The next Europeans to reach Chile were Diego de Almagro and his band of Spanish conquistadors, the Spanish encountered various cultures that supported themselves principally through slash-and-burn agriculture and hunting. The conquest of Chile began in earnest in 1540 and was carried out by Pedro de Valdivia, one of Francisco Pizarros lieutenants, who founded the city of Santiago on 12 February 1541. Although the Spanish did not find the gold and silver they sought, they recognized the agricultural potential of Chiles central valley
14.
Brazil
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Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. As the worlds fifth-largest country by area and population, it is the largest country to have Portuguese as an official language. Its Amazon River basin includes a vast tropical forest, home to wildlife, a variety of ecological systems. This unique environmental heritage makes Brazil one of 17 megadiverse countries, Brazil was inhabited by numerous tribal nations prior to the landing in 1500 of explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral, who claimed the area for the Portuguese Empire. Brazil remained a Portuguese colony until 1808, when the capital of the empire was transferred from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, in 1815, the colony was elevated to the rank of kingdom upon the formation of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves. Independence was achieved in 1822 with the creation of the Empire of Brazil, a state governed under a constitutional monarchy. The ratification of the first constitution in 1824 led to the formation of a bicameral legislature, the country became a presidential republic in 1889 following a military coup détat. An authoritarian military junta came to power in 1964 and ruled until 1985, Brazils current constitution, formulated in 1988, defines it as a democratic federal republic. The federation is composed of the union of the Federal District, the 26 states, Brazils economy is the worlds ninth-largest by nominal GDP and seventh-largest by GDP as of 2015. A member of the BRICS group, Brazil until 2010 had one of the worlds fastest growing economies, with its economic reforms giving the country new international recognition. Brazils national development bank plays an important role for the economic growth. Brazil is a member of the United Nations, the G20, BRICS, Unasul, Mercosul, Organization of American States, Organization of Ibero-American States, CPLP. Brazil is a power in Latin America and a middle power in international affairs. One of the worlds major breadbaskets, Brazil has been the largest producer of coffee for the last 150 years and it is likely that the word Brazil comes from the Portuguese word for brazilwood, a tree that once grew plentifully along the Brazilian coast. In Portuguese, brazilwood is called pau-brasil, with the word brasil commonly given the etymology red like an ember, formed from Latin brasa and the suffix -il. As brazilwood produces a red dye, it was highly valued by the European cloth industry and was the earliest commercially exploited product from Brazil. The popular appellation eclipsed and eventually supplanted the official Portuguese name, early sailors sometimes also called it the Land of Parrots. In the Guarani language, a language of Paraguay, Brazil is called Pindorama
15.
France
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France, officially the French Republic, is a country with territory in western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The European, or metropolitan, area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, Overseas France include French Guiana on the South American continent and several island territories in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. France spans 643,801 square kilometres and had a population of almost 67 million people as of January 2017. It is a unitary republic with the capital in Paris. Other major urban centres include Marseille, Lyon, Lille, Nice, Toulouse, during the Iron Age, what is now metropolitan France was inhabited by the Gauls, a Celtic people. The area was annexed in 51 BC by Rome, which held Gaul until 486, France emerged as a major European power in the Late Middle Ages, with its victory in the Hundred Years War strengthening state-building and political centralisation. During the Renaissance, French culture flourished and a colonial empire was established. The 16th century was dominated by civil wars between Catholics and Protestants. France became Europes dominant cultural, political, and military power under Louis XIV, in the 19th century Napoleon took power and established the First French Empire, whose subsequent Napoleonic Wars shaped the course of continental Europe. Following the collapse of the Empire, France endured a succession of governments culminating with the establishment of the French Third Republic in 1870. Following liberation in 1944, a Fourth Republic was established and later dissolved in the course of the Algerian War, the Fifth Republic, led by Charles de Gaulle, was formed in 1958 and remains to this day. Algeria and nearly all the colonies became independent in the 1960s with minimal controversy and typically retained close economic. France has long been a centre of art, science. It hosts Europes fourth-largest number of cultural UNESCO World Heritage Sites and receives around 83 million foreign tourists annually, France is a developed country with the worlds sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP and ninth-largest by purchasing power parity. In terms of household wealth, it ranks fourth in the world. France performs well in international rankings of education, health care, life expectancy, France remains a great power in the world, being one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with the power to veto and an official nuclear-weapon state. It is a member state of the European Union and the Eurozone. It is also a member of the Group of 7, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization, originally applied to the whole Frankish Empire, the name France comes from the Latin Francia, or country of the Franks
16.
Poland
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Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe, situated between the Baltic Sea in the north and two mountain ranges in the south. Bordered by Germany to the west, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south, Ukraine and Belarus to the east, the total area of Poland is 312,679 square kilometres, making it the 69th largest country in the world and the 9th largest in Europe. With a population of over 38.5 million people, Poland is the 34th most populous country in the world, the 8th most populous country in Europe, Poland is a unitary state divided into 16 administrative subdivisions, and its capital and largest city is Warsaw. Other metropolises include Kraków, Wrocław, Poznań, Gdańsk and Szczecin, the establishment of a Polish state can be traced back to 966, when Mieszko I, ruler of a territory roughly coextensive with that of present-day Poland, converted to Christianity. The Kingdom of Poland was founded in 1025, and in 1569 it cemented a political association with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by signing the Union of Lublin. This union formed the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the largest and most populous countries of 16th and 17th century Europe, Poland regained its independence in 1918 at the end of World War I, reconstituting much of its historical territory as the Second Polish Republic. In September 1939, World War II started with the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, followed thereafter by invasion by the Soviet Union. More than six million Polish citizens died in the war, after the war, Polands borders were shifted westwards under the terms of the Potsdam Conference. With the backing of the Soviet Union, a communist puppet government was formed, and after a referendum in 1946. During the Revolutions of 1989 Polands Communist government was overthrown and Poland adopted a new constitution establishing itself as a democracy, informally called the Third Polish Republic. Since the early 1990s, when the transition to a primarily market-based economy began, Poland has achieved a high ranking on the Human Development Index. Poland is a country, which was categorised by the World Bank as having a high-income economy. Furthermore, it is visited by approximately 16 million tourists every year, Poland is the eighth largest economy in the European Union and was the 6th fastest growing economy on the continent between 2010 and 2015. According to the Global Peace Index for 2014, Poland is ranked 19th in the list of the safest countries in the world to live in. The origin of the name Poland derives from a West Slavic tribe of Polans that inhabited the Warta River basin of the historic Greater Poland region in the 8th century, the origin of the name Polanie itself derives from the western Slavic word pole. In some foreign languages such as Hungarian, Lithuanian, Persian and Turkish the exonym for Poland is Lechites, historians have postulated that throughout Late Antiquity, many distinct ethnic groups populated the regions of what is now Poland. The most famous archaeological find from the prehistory and protohistory of Poland is the Biskupin fortified settlement, dating from the Lusatian culture of the early Iron Age, the Slavic groups who would form Poland migrated to these areas in the second half of the 5th century AD. With the Baptism of Poland the Polish rulers accepted Christianity and the authority of the Roman Church
17.
New Zealand
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New Zealand /njuːˈziːlənd/ is an island nation in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. The country geographically comprises two main landmasses—the North Island, or Te Ika-a-Māui, and the South Island, or Te Waipounamu—and around 600 smaller islands. New Zealand is situated some 1,500 kilometres east of Australia across the Tasman Sea and roughly 1,000 kilometres south of the Pacific island areas of New Caledonia, Fiji, because of its remoteness, it was one of the last lands to be settled by humans. During its long period of isolation, New Zealand developed a distinct biodiversity of animal, fungal, the countrys varied topography and its sharp mountain peaks, such as the Southern Alps, owe much to the tectonic uplift of land and volcanic eruptions. New Zealands capital city is Wellington, while its most populous city is Auckland, sometime between 1250 and 1300 CE, Polynesians settled in the islands that later were named New Zealand and developed a distinctive Māori culture. In 1642, Dutch explorer Abel Tasman became the first European to sight New Zealand, in 1840, representatives of Britain and Māori chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi, which declared British sovereignty over the islands. In 1841, New Zealand became a colony within the British Empire, today, the majority of New Zealands population of 4.7 million is of European descent, the indigenous Māori are the largest minority, followed by Asians and Pacific Islanders. Reflecting this, New Zealands culture is derived from Māori and early British settlers. The official languages are English, Māori and New Zealand Sign Language, New Zealand is a developed country and ranks highly in international comparisons of national performance, such as health, education, economic freedom and quality of life. Since the 1980s, New Zealand has transformed from an agrarian, Queen Elizabeth II is the countrys head of state and is represented by a governor-general. In addition, New Zealand is organised into 11 regional councils and 67 territorial authorities for local government purposes, the Realm of New Zealand also includes Tokelau, the Cook Islands and Niue, and the Ross Dependency, which is New Zealands territorial claim in Antarctica. New Zealand is a member of the United Nations, Commonwealth of Nations, ANZUS, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Pacific Islands Forum, and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. Dutch explorer Abel Tasman sighted New Zealand in 1642 and called it Staten Landt, in 1645, Dutch cartographers renamed the land Nova Zeelandia after the Dutch province of Zeeland. British explorer James Cook subsequently anglicised the name to New Zealand, Aotearoa is the current Māori name for New Zealand. It is unknown whether Māori had a name for the country before the arrival of Europeans. Māori had several names for the two main islands, including Te Ika-a-Māui for the North Island and Te Waipounamu or Te Waka o Aoraki for the South Island. Early European maps labelled the islands North, Middle and South, in 1830, maps began to use North and South to distinguish the two largest islands and by 1907, this was the accepted norm. The New Zealand Geographic Board discovered in 2009 that the names of the North Island and South Island had never been formalised and this set the names as North Island or Te Ika-a-Māui, and South Island or Te Waipounamu
18.
South Africa
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South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa, is the southernmost country in Africa. South Africa is the 25th-largest country in the world by land area and it is the southernmost country on the mainland of the Old World or the Eastern Hemisphere. About 80 percent of South Africans are of Sub-Saharan African ancestry, divided among a variety of ethnic groups speaking different Bantu languages, the remaining population consists of Africas largest communities of European, Asian, and multiracial ancestry. South Africa is a multiethnic society encompassing a variety of cultures, languages. Its pluralistic makeup is reflected in the recognition of 11 official languages. The country is one of the few in Africa never to have had a coup détat, however, the vast majority of black South Africans were not enfranchised until 1994. During the 20th century, the black majority sought to recover its rights from the dominant white minority, with this struggle playing a role in the countrys recent history. The National Party imposed apartheid in 1948, institutionalising previous racial segregation, since 1994, all ethnic and linguistic groups have held political representation in the countrys democracy, which comprises a parliamentary republic and nine provinces. South Africa is often referred to as the Rainbow Nation to describe the multicultural diversity. The World Bank classifies South Africa as an economy. Its economy is the second-largest in Africa, and the 34th-largest in the world, in terms of purchasing power parity, South Africa has the seventh-highest per capita income in Africa. However, poverty and inequality remain widespread, with about a quarter of the population unemployed, nevertheless, South Africa has been identified as a middle power in international affairs, and maintains significant regional influence. The name South Africa is derived from the geographic location at the southern tip of Africa. Upon formation the country was named the Union of South Africa in English, since 1961 the long form name in English has been the Republic of South Africa. In Dutch the country was named Republiek van Zuid-Afrika, replaced in 1983 by the Afrikaans Republiek van Suid-Afrika, since 1994 the Republic has had an official name in each of its 11 official languages. Mzansi, derived from the Xhosa noun umzantsi meaning south, is a name for South Africa. South Africa contains some of the oldest archaeological and human fossil sites in the world, extensive fossil remains have been recovered from a series of caves in Gauteng Province. The area is a UNESCO World Heritage site and has termed the Cradle of Humankind
19.
Isle of Man
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The Isle of Man, also known simply as Mann, is a self-governing crown dependency in the Irish Sea between England and Northern Ireland. The head of state is Queen Elizabeth II, who holds the title of Lord of Mann, the Lord of Mann is represented by a Lieutenant Governor. Foreign relations and defence are the responsibility of the British Government, the island has been inhabited since before 6500 BC. Gaelic cultural influence began in the 5th century and the Manx language, in 627, Edwin of Northumbria conquered the Isle of Man along with most of Mercia. In the 9th century, Norsemen established the Kingdom of the Isles, magnus III, King of Norway, was also known as King of Mann and the Isles between 1099 and 1103. In 1266, the became part of Scotland under the Treaty of Perth. After a period of alternating rule by the kings of Scotland and England, the short form often used in English, Mann, is derived from the Manx Mannin, though sometimes the name is written as Man. The earliest recorded Manx form of the name is Manu or Mana, the Old Irish form of the name is Manau or Mano. Old Welsh records named it as Manaw, also reflected in Manaw Gododdin, the name for an ancient district in north Britain along the lower Firth of Forth. The oldest known reference to the calls it Mona, in Latin, in the 1st century CE, Pliny the Elder records it as Monapia or Monabia. Later Latin references have Mevania or Mænavia, and Eubonia or Eumonia by Irish writers and it is found in the Sagas of Icelanders as Mön. The name is cognate with the Welsh name of the island of Anglesey, Ynys Môn, usually derived from a Celtic word for mountain. The name was at least secondarily associated with that of Manannán mac Lir in Irish mythology, later, a Manannán is recorded as the first king of Mann in a Manx poem. The island was cut off from the islands around 8000 BC. The first residents were hunter gatherers and fishermen, examples of their tools are kept at the Manx Museum. There were also the local Ronaldsway and Bann cultures, during the Bronze Age, burial mounds became smaller. Bodies were put in stone-lined graves with ornamental containers, the Bronze Age burial mounds created long-lasting markers around the countryside. The ancient Romans knew of the island and called it Insula Manavia although it is whether they conquered the island
20.
Hong Kong
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Hong Kong, officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the Peoples Republic of China, is an autonomous territory on the Pearl River Delta of East Asia. Macau lies across the delta to the west, and the Chinese province of Guangdong borders the territory to the north. With a total area of 1,106 square kilometres. Hong Kong was later occupied by Japan during World War II until British control resumed in 1945, under the principle of one country, two systems, Hong Kong maintains a separate political and economic system from China. Except in military defence and foreign affairs, Hong Kong maintains its independent executive, legislative, in addition, Hong Kong develops relations directly with foreign states and international organisations in a broad range of appropriate fields. Hong Kong is one of the worlds most significant financial centres, with the highest Financial Development Index score and consistently ranks as the worlds most competitive and freest economic entity. As the worlds 8th largest trading entity, its legal tender, Hong Kongs tertiary sector dominated economy is characterised by simple taxation with a competitive level of corporate tax and supported by its independent judiciary system. However, while Hong Kong has one of the highest per capita incomes in the world and it has a very high Human Development Index ranking and the worlds longest life expectancy. Over 90% of the population use of well-developed public transportation. Seasonal air pollution with origins from neighbouring areas of Mainland China. Hong Kong was officially recorded in the 1842 Treaty of Nanking to encompass the entirety of the island, before 1842, the name referred to a small inlet—now Aberdeen Harbour, literally means Little Hong Kong)—between Aberdeen Island and the southern coast of Hong Kong Island. Aberdeen was a point of contact between British sailors and local fishermen. Detailed and accurate romanisation systems for Cantonese were available and in use at the time, fragrance may refer to the sweet taste of the harbours fresh water estuarine influx of the Pearl River or to the incense from factories lining the coast of northern Kowloon. The incense was stored near Aberdeen Harbour for export before Hong Kong developed Victoria Harbour, the name had often been written as the single word Hongkong until the government adopted the current form in 1926. Nevertheless, a number of century-old institutions still retain the form, such as the Hongkong Post, Hongkong Electric. As of 1997, its name is the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the Peoples Republic of China. This is the title as mentioned in the Hong Kong Basic Law. Hong Kong has carried many nicknames, the most famous among those is the Pearl of the Orient, which reflected the impressive nightscape of the citys light decorations on the skyscrapers along both sides of the Victoria Harbour
21.
Scottish English
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Scottish English refers to the varieties of English spoken in Scotland. The main, formal variety is called Scottish Standard English or Standard Scottish English, Scottish Standard English may be defined as the characteristic speech of the professional class and the accepted norm in schools. IETF language tag for Scottish Standard English is en-Scotland, Scottish Standard English is at one end of a bipolar linguistic continuum, with focused broad Scots at the other. Scottish English may be influenced to varying degrees by Scots, many Scots speakers separate Scots and Scottish English as different registers depending on social circumstances. Some speakers code switch clearly from one to the other while others style shift in a less predictable, generally there is a shift to Scottish English in formal situations or with individuals of a higher social status. Scottish English results from contact between Scots and the Standard English of England after the 17th century. Furthermore, the process was influenced by interdialectal forms, hypercorrections. Convention traces the influence of the English of England upon Scots to the 16th-century Reformation, printing arrived in London in 1476, but the first printing press was not introduced to Scotland for another 30 years. Texts such as the Geneva Bible, printed in English, were distributed in Scotland in order to spread Protestant doctrine. King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England in 1603, since England was the larger and richer of the two Kingdoms, James moved his court to London in England. The poets of the court therefore moved south and began adapting the language, to this event McClure attributes he sudden and total eclipse of Scots as a literary language. The continuing absence of a Scots translation of the Bible meant that the translation of King James into English was used in worship in both countries, the Acts of Union 1707 amalgamated the Scottish and English Parliaments. However the church, educational and legal structures remained separate and this leads to important professional distinctions in the definitions of some words and terms. There are therefore words with precise definitions in Scottish English which have no place in English English or have a different definition. The speech of the classes in Scotland tends to conform to the grammatical norms of the written standard. Highland English is slightly different from the variety spoken in the Lowlands in that it is more phonologically, grammatically, similarly, the English spoken in the North-East of Scotland tends to follow the phonology and grammar of Doric. Although other dialects have merged non-intervocalic /ɛ/, /ɪ/, /ʌ/ before /r/, many varieties contrast /o/ and /ɔ/ before /r/ so that hoarse and horse are pronounced differently. /or/ and /ur/ are contrasted so that shore and sure are pronounced differently, as are pour, an epenthetic vowel may occur between /r/ and /l/ so that girl and world are two-syllable words for some speakers
22.
Scottish Gaelic
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Scottish Gaelic or Scots Gaelic, sometimes also referred to as Gaelic, is a Celtic language native to Scotland. A member of the Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages, Scottish Gaelic, like Modern Irish and Manx, developed out of Middle Irish. The 2011 census of Scotland showed that a total of 57,375 people in Scotland could speak Gaelic at that time, the census results indicate a decline of 1,275 Gaelic speakers from 2001. A total of 87,056 people in 2011 reported having some facility with Gaelic compared to 93,282 people in 2001, only about half of speakers were fully literate in the language. Nevertheless, revival efforts exist and the number of speakers of the language under age 20 has increased, Scottish Gaelic is neither an official language of the European Union nor the United Kingdom. Outside Scotland, a group of dialects collectively known as Canadian Gaelic are spoken in parts of Atlantic Canada, mainly Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. In the 2011 census, there were 7,195 total speakers of Gaelic languages in Canada, with 1,365 in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island where the responses mainly refer to Scottish Gaelic. About 2,320 Canadians in 2011 also claimed Gaelic languages as their mother tongue, with over 300 in Nova Scotia, aside from Scottish Gaelic, the language may also be referred to simply as Gaelic. In Scotland, the word Gaelic in reference to Scottish Gaelic specifically is pronounced, outside Ireland and Great Britain, Gaelic may refer to the Irish language. Scottish Gaelic should not be confused with Scots, the Middle English-derived language varieties which had come to be spoken in most of the Lowlands of Scotland by the modern era. Prior to the 15th century, these dialects were known as Inglis by its own speakers, from the late 15th century, however, it became increasingly common for such speakers to refer to Scottish Gaelic as Erse and the Lowland vernacular as Scottis. Today, Scottish Gaelic is recognised as a language from Irish. Gaelic in Scotland was mostly confined to Dál Riata until the 8th century, when it began expanding into Pictish areas north of the Firth of Forth, by 900, Pictish appears to have become extinct, completely replaced by Gaelic. An exception might be made for the Northern Isles, however, however, though the Pictish language did not disappear suddenly, a process of Gaelicisation was clearly underway during the reigns of Caustantín and his successors. By a certain point, probably during the 11th century, all the inhabitants of Alba had become fully Gaelicised Scots, by the 10th century, Gaelic had become the dominant language throughout northern and western Scotland, the Gaelo-Pictic Kingdom of Alba. Its spread to southern Scotland, was even and totalizing. Place name analysis suggests dense usage of Gaelic in Galloway and adjoining areas to the north and west as well as in West Lothian, less dense usage is suggested for north Ayrshire, Renfrewshire, the Clyde Valley and eastern Dumfriesshire. In south-eastern Scotland, there is no evidence that Gaelic was ever widely spoken, the area shifted from Cumbric to Old English during its long incorporation into the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumbria
23.
Scots language
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Scots is the Germanic language variety spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster. It is sometimes called Lowland Scots to distinguish it from Scottish Gaelic, the Celtic language which was restricted to most of the Highlands. The language developed during the Middle English period as a distinct entity, although a number of paradigms for distinguishing between languages and dialects do exist, these often render contradictory results. Broad Scots is at one end of a linguistic continuum. Scots is often regarded as one of the ancient varieties of English, alternatively, Scots is sometimes treated as a distinct Germanic language, in the way Norwegian is closely linked to, yet distinct from, Danish. In the 2011 Scottish census, a question on Scots language ability was featured, native speakers sometimes refer to their vernacular as braid Scots or use a dialect name such as the Doric, or the Buchan Claik. The old-fashioned Scotch, an English loan, occurs occasionally, especially in Northern Ireland, the term Lallans, a variant of the Modern Scots word lawlands, is also used, though this is more often taken to mean the Lallans literary form. Scots in Ireland is known in circles as Ulster-Scots or Ullans. Scots is a contraction of Scottis, the Older Scots and northern version of late Old English Scottisc, before the end of the 15th century, English speech in Scotland was known as English, whereas Scottish referred to Gaelic. From 1495 the term Scottis was increasingly used to refer to the Lowland vernacular and Erse, meaning Irish, the Gaelic of Scotland is now usually called Scottish Gaelic. Northumbrian Old English had been established in what is now southeastern Scotland as far as the River Forth by the seventh century and it remained largely confined to this area until the thirteenth century, continuing in common use while Gaelic was the language of the Scottish court. Scots also includes loan words resulting from contact with Gaelic, Early medieval legal documents include a body of Gaelic legal and administrative loans. Contemporary Gaelic loans are mainly for geographical and cultural features, such as ceilidh, loch, from the thirteenth century Early Scots spread further into Scotland via the burghs, proto-urban institutions which were first established by King David I. The growth in prestige of Early Scots in the century. By the sixteenth century Middle Scots had established orthographic and literary norms largely independent of those developing in England, from 1610 to the 1690s during the Plantation of Ulster large numbers of Scots-speaking Lowlanders, some 200,000, settled there. In the core areas of Scots settlement, Scots outnumbered English settlers by five or six to one, Modern Scots is used to describe the language after 1700 when southern Modern English was generally adopted as the literary language though Scots remained the vernacular. In Scotland, Scots is spoken in the Scottish Lowlands, the Northern Isles, Caithness, Arran, in Ulster it is spoken in the Counties of Down, Antrim, Londonderry and Donegal. Dialects include Insular Scots, Northern Scots, Central Scots, Southern Scots, many speakers are either diglossic and/or able to code-switch along the continuum depending on the situation in which they find themselves
24.
Presbyterianism
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Presbyterianism is a part of the Reformed tradition within Protestantism which traces its origins to the British Isles, particularly Scotland. Presbyterian churches derive their name from the form of church government. Presbyterian theology typically emphasizes the sovereignty of God, the authority of the Scriptures, Presbyterian church government was ensured in Scotland by the Acts of Union in 1707 which created the Kingdom of Great Britain. In fact, most Presbyterians found in England can trace a Scottish connection, the Presbyterian denominations in Scotland hold to the theology of John Calvin and his immediate successors, although there are a range of theological views within contemporary Presbyterianism. The roots of Presbyterianism lie in the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, most Reformed churches which trace their history back to Scotland are either presbyterian or congregationalist in government. In the twentieth century, some Presbyterians played an important role in the ecumenical movement, many Presbyterian denominations have found ways of working together with other Reformed denominations and Christians of other traditions, especially in the World Communion of Reformed Churches. Some Presbyterian churches have entered into unions with other churches, such as Congregationalists, Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterian history is part of the history of Christianity, but the beginning of Presbyterianism as a distinct movement occurred during the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. As the Catholic Church resisted the reformers, several different theological movements splintered from the Church, the Presbyterian church traces its ancestry back primarily to England and Scotland. In August 1560 the Parliament of Scotland adopted the Scots Confession as the creed of the Scottish Kingdom, Presbyterians distinguish themselves from other denominations by doctrine, institutional organization and worship, often using a Book of Order to regulate common practice and order. The origins of the Presbyterian churches are in Calvinism, many branches of Presbyterianism are remnants of previous splits from larger groups. Presbyterians place great importance upon education and lifelong learning, Presbyterian government is by councils of elders. Teaching and ruling elders are ordained and convene in the lowest council known as a session or consistory responsible for the discipline, nurture, teaching elders have responsibility for teaching, worship, and performing sacraments. Pastors are called by individual congregations, a congregation issues a call for the pastors service, but this call must be ratified by the local presbytery. Ruling elders are usually laymen who are elected by the congregation and ordained to serve with the elders, assuming responsibility for nurture. Often, especially in larger congregations, the elders delegate the practicalities of buildings, finance and this group may variously be known as a Deacon Board, Board of Deacons Diaconate, or Deacons Court. These are sometimes known as presbyters to the full congregation, above the sessions exist presbyteries, which have area responsibilities. These are composed of teaching elders and ruling elders from each of the constituent congregations, the presbytery sends representatives to a broader regional or national assembly, generally known as the General Assembly, although an intermediate level of a synod sometimes exists. The Church of Scotland abolished the Synod in 1993, Presbyterian governance is practised by Presbyterian denominations and also by many other Reformed churches
25.
Roman Catholicism
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The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church or the Universal Church, is the largest Christian church, with more than 1.28 billion members worldwide. As one of the oldest religious institutions in the world, it has played a prominent role in the history, headed by the Bishop of Rome, known as the Pope, the churchs doctrines are summarised in the Nicene Creed and the Apostles Creed. Its central administration is located in Vatican City, enclaved within Rome, the Catholic Church is notable within Western Christianity for its sacred tradition and seven sacraments. It teaches that it is the one church founded by Jesus Christ, that its bishops are the successors of Christs apostles. The Catholic Church maintains that the doctrine on faith and morals that it declares as definitive is infallible. The Latin Church, the Eastern Catholic Churches, as well as such as mendicant orders and enclosed monastic orders. Among the sacraments, the one is the Eucharist, celebrated liturgically in the Mass. The church teaches that through consecration by a priest the sacrificial bread and wine become the body, the Catholic Church practises closed communion, with only baptised members in a state of grace ordinarily permitted to receive the Eucharist. The Virgin Mary is venerated in the Catholic Church as Queen of Heaven and is honoured in numerous Marian devotions. The Catholic Church has influenced Western philosophy, science, art and culture, Catholic spiritual teaching includes spreading the Gospel while Catholic social teaching emphasises support for the sick, the poor and the afflicted through the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. The Catholic Church is the largest non-government provider of education and medical services in the world, from the late 20th century, the Catholic Church has been criticised for its doctrines on sexuality, its refusal to ordain women and its handling of sexual abuse cases. Catholic was first used to describe the church in the early 2nd century, the first known use of the phrase the catholic church occurred in the letter from Saint Ignatius of Antioch to the Smyrnaeans, written about 110 AD. In the Catechetical Discourses of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, the name Catholic Church was used to distinguish it from other groups that call themselves the church. The use of the adjective Roman to describe the Church as governed especially by the Bishop of Rome became more widespread after the Fall of the Western Roman Empire and into the Early Middle Ages. Catholic Church is the name used in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church follows an episcopal polity, led by bishops who have received the sacrament of Holy Orders who are given formal jurisdictions of governance within the church. Ultimately leading the entire Catholic Church is the Bishop of Rome, commonly called the pope, in parallel to the diocesan structure are a variety of religious institutes that function autonomously, often subject only to the authority of the pope, though sometimes subject to the local bishop. Most religious institutes only have male or female members but some have both, additionally, lay members aid many liturgical functions during worship services
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Scottish Episcopal Church
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The Scottish Episcopal Church is a Christian church in Scotland, consisting of seven dioceses. Since the 18th century, it has held an identity distinct from the Church of Scotland, the current Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church is the Most Reverend David Chillingworth. According to the Mission Atlas Project,85,000 affiliates identify with the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Scottish Episcopal Church is the denomination for 350 congregations. Although the 2011 Census did not include the church by itself, scotlands third largest church is the Scottish Episcopal Church. The Scottish Episcopal Church was previously called the Episcopal Church in Scotland, the Church of Scotland claims the same continuity. The church is sometimes referred to in Scotland as the English Kirk. Saint Ninian conducted the first Christian mission to what is now southern Scotland, in 563, St Columba travelled to Scotland with twelve companions, where according to legend he first landed at the southern tip of the Kintyre peninsula, near Southend. However, being still in sight of his land he moved further north along the west coast of Scotland. He was granted land on the island of Iona off the Isle of Mull which became the centre of his mission to the Picts. However, there is a sense in which he did not leave his native people and he visited the pagan king Bridei, king of Fortriu, at his base in Inverness, winning the kings respect and Columba subsequently played a major role in the politics of that country. He was also energetic in his evangelical work, in addition to founding several churches in the Hebrides. He was a man of letters, having written several hymns. He died on Iona and was buried in the abbey he established, the Scottish Reformation was formalised in 1560, when the Church of Scotland broke with the Church of Rome during a process of Protestant reform led, among others, by John Knox. It reformed its doctrines and government, drawing on the principles of John Calvin which Knox had been exposed to living in Switzerland. The 1560 Reformation Settlement was not ratified by the crown for some years, Scottish monarchs made repeated efforts to introduce bishops and two ecclesiastical traditions competed. In 1584 James VI of Scotland had the Parliament of Scotland pass the Black Acts and this met vigorous opposition and he was forced to concede that the General Assembly should continue to run the church. Calvinists who disliked the more style of liturgy were opposed by an Episcopalian faction. Many Scottish church leaders, and their congregations, responded to the Five Articles with boycotts, James son Charles I was crowned in Holyrood Abbey, Edinburgh, in 1633 with full Anglican rites
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Scottish Canadians
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Scottish Canadians are people of Scottish descent or heritage living in Canada. As the third-largest ethnic group in Canada and amongst the first Europeans to settle in the country, Scottish people have made a large impact on Canadian culture since colonial times. According to the 2011 Census of Canada, the number of Canadians claiming full or partial Scottish descent is 4,714,970, the Scots-Irish are a similar ethnic group. They descended from Lowland Scots and Northern English people via Ulster, Scottish people have a long history in Canada, dating back several centuries. Many towns, rivers and mountains have been named in honour of Scottish explorers and traders such as Mackenzie Bay in the Yukon, most notably, the Atlantic province of Nova Scotia is Latin for New Scotland. Once Scots formed the vanguard of the movement of Europeans across the continent, in more modern times, immigrants from Scotland have played a leading role in the social, political and economic history of Canada, being prominent in banking, labour unions, and politics. The Viking prince Thorfinn Karlsefni took two Scottish slaves to Vinland, when the longships moored along the coast, they sent the slaves ashore to run along the waterfront to gauge whether it was safe for the rest of the crew to follow. After the Scots survived a day without being attacked, by human or animal. The expedition was abandoned three years later, the sagas were passed on in an oral tradition and then written down 250 years later. An apocryphal voyage in 1398 by a captain named Zichmni, believed to be Henry I Sinclair, however, only a small number of Scottish families settled in Canada, prior to the conquest of New France in 1759. Those who did make a home on Canadian soil were Gaels who sought political, most of these Scots settled in what is now the Atlantic coast. Bumsted notes that between 1760 and 1860, millions of people emigrated from Great Britain, most of the emigrants were unskilled Gaelic farmers, who gathered in isolated communities. The Maritimes attracted them because of the opportunity there to be alone to pursue the traditional way of life. A large group of Ulster Scots, many of whom had first settled in New Hampshire, moved to Truro, at the end of the 18th century, Cape Breton Island had become a centre of Scottish Gaelic settlement, where only Scottish Gaelic was spoken. A number of Scottish Loyalists who had fled the United States in 1783 arrived in Glengarry County, in 1803, Lord Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk, who was sympathetic to the plight of the dispossessed crofters, brought 800 colonists to Prince Edward Island. Prince Edward Island was also influenced by Scottish Gaelic settlers. One prominent settler in PEI was John MacDonald of Glenaladale, who conceived the idea of sending Gaels to Nova Scotia on a grand scale after Culloden. The name Macdonald still dominates on the island, which received an influx of settlers, predominantly Catholics from the Highlands
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Ulster Scots people
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The Ulster Scots, commonly known as Scots-Irish outside of Ireland, are an ethnic group in Ireland, found mostly in the Ulster region and to a lesser extent in the rest of Ireland. Scotch-Irish is a term for Ulster Scots who emigrated to North America. The first major influx of border English and Lowland Scots into Ulster came in the first two decades of the 17th century, first, before the Plantations of Ireland and even before the Flight of the Earls, there was the 1606 independent Scottish settlement in east Down and Antrim. It was led by adventurers James Hamilton and Sir Hugh Montgomery, Montgomery was granted half of Conn ONeills land as a reward for helping him escape from prison. Hamilton forced himself in on this deal when he discovered it and, starting in 1609, Scots began arriving into state-sponsored settlements as part of the Plantation of Ulster. This scheme was intended to confiscate all the lands of the Gaelic Irish nobility in Ulster, under this scheme, a substantial number of Scots were settled, mostly in the south and west of Ulster, on confiscated land. Native Irish civilians were massacred in return, by 1642, native Irish were in de facto control of much of the island under a Confederate Ireland, with about a third under the control of the opposition. However, many Ulster-Scots Presbyterians joined with the Irish in rebellion, the war itself, part of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, ended in the 1650s, with the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. At the head of the army, Oliver Cromwell conquered all of Ireland, after the Cromwellian war in Ireland was over, many of their soldiers settled permanently in eastern Ulster. Under the Act of Settlement 1652, all Catholic-owned land was confiscated and the British Plantations in Ireland, which had been destroyed by the rebellion of 1641, were restored. However, due to the Scots enmity to the English Parliament in the stages of the English Civil War. There was a generation of calm in Ireland until another war broke out in 1689, again due to political conflict closely aligned with ethnic, the majority of the Protestant colonists throughout Ireland but particularly in Ulster, fought on the Williamite side in the war against the Jacobites. Their victories at Derry, the Boyne and Aughrim are still commemorated by the Orange Order into the 21st century. Finally, another influx of Scots into northern Ireland occurred in the late 1690s. It was only after the 1690s that Scottish settlers and their descendants, for this reason, up until the 19th century, there was considerable disharmony between Dissenters and the ruling Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. Just a few generations after arriving in Ulster, considerable numbers of Ulster-Scots emigrated to the North American colonies of Great Britain, between 1717 and 1775, an estimated 200,000 migrated to what became the United States of America. In the United States Census of 2000,4.3 million Americans claimed Scotch-Irish ancestry, over the centuries, Ulster Scots culture has contributed to the unique character of the counties in Northern Ireland. The Ulster Scots Agency points to industry, language, music, sport, religion, in particular, the origin of country and Western music was extensively from Ulster Scots folk music
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Ethnic group
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An ethnic group or ethnicity is a category of people who identify with each other based on similarities, such as common ancestral, language, social, cultural or national experiences. Unlike other social groups, ethnicity is often an inherited status based on the society in which one lives, in some cases, it can be adopted if a person moves into another society. Ethnic groups, derived from the historical founder population, often continue to speak related languages. By way of language shift, acculturation, adoption and religious conversion, it is possible for individuals or groups to leave one ethnic group. Ethnicity is often used synonymously with terms such as nation or people. In English, it can also have the connotation of something exotic, generally related to cultures of more recent immigrants, the largest ethnic groups in modern times comprise hundreds of millions of individuals, while the smallest are limited to a few dozen individuals. Conversely, formerly separate ethnicities can merge to form a pan-ethnicity, whether through division or amalgamation, the formation of a separate ethnic identity is referred to as ethnogenesis. The term ethnic is derived from the Greek word ἔθνος ethnos, the inherited English language term for this concept is folk, used alongside the latinate people since the late Middle English period. In Early Modern English and until the mid-19th century, ethnic was used to mean heathen or pagan, as the Septuagint used ta ethne to translate the Hebrew goyim the nations, non-Hebrews, non-Jews. The Greek term in antiquity could refer to any large group, a host of men. In the 19th century, the term came to be used in the sense of peculiar to a race, people or nation, the abstract ethnicity had been used for paganism in the 18th century, but now came to express the meaning of an ethnic character. The term ethnic group was first recorded in 1935 and entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1972, depending on the context that is used, the term nationality may either be used synonymously with ethnicity, or synonymously with citizenship. The process that results in the emergence of an ethnicity is called ethnogenesis, the Greeks at this time did not describe foreign nations but had also developed a concept of their own ethnicity, which they grouped under the name of Hellenes. Herodotus gave an account of what defined Greek ethnic identity in his day, enumerating shared descent. Whether ethnicity qualifies as a universal is to some extent dependent on the exact definition used. Many social scientists, such as anthropologists Fredrik Barth and Eric Wolf and they regard ethnicity as a product of specific kinds of inter-group interactions, rather than an essential quality inherent to human groups. According to Thomas Hylland Eriksen, the study of ethnicity was dominated by two distinct debates until recently, one is between primordialism and instrumentalism. In the primordialist view, the participant perceives ethnic ties collectively, as a given, even coercive
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Celtic languages
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The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or Common Celtic, a branch of the greater Indo-European language family. Modern Celtic languages are spoken on the north-western edge of Europe, notably in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall. There are also a number of Welsh speakers in the Patagonia area of Argentina. Some people speak Celtic languages in the other Celtic diaspora areas of the United States, Canada, Australia, in all these areas, the Celtic languages are now only spoken by minorities though there are continuing efforts at revitalisation. Welsh is the only Celtic language not classified as endangered by UNESCO, the spread to Cape Breton and Patagonia occurred in modern times. SIL Ethnologue lists six living Celtic languages, of four have retained a substantial number of native speakers. These are the Goidelic languages and the Brittonic languages, the other two, Cornish and Manx, died in modern times with their presumed last native speakers in 1777 and 1974 respectively. For both these languages, however, revitalisation movements have led to the adoption of these languages by adults and children, taken together, there were roughly one million native speakers of Celtic languages as of the 2000s. In 2010, there were more than 1.4 million speakers of Celtic languages, shelta, based largely on Irish with influence from an undocumented source. Some forms of Welsh-Romani or Kååle also combined Romany itself with Welsh language, beurla-reagaird, Highland travellers language Celtic divided into various branches, Lepontic, the oldest attested Celtic language. Anciently spoken in Switzerland and in Northern-Central Italy, from the Alps to Umbria, coins with Lepontic inscriptions have been found in Noricum and Gallia Narbonensis. Celtiberian, anciently spoken in the Iberian peninsula, in parts of modern Galicia, Asturias, La Rioja, Aragón, Cantabria, Old Castile, the relationship of Celtiberian with Gallaecian, in the northwest of the peninsula, is uncertain. Gallaecian, anciently spoken in the former Gallaecia, northwest of the peninsula, Gaulish languages, including Galatian and possibly Noric. These languages were spoken in a wide arc from Belgium to Turkey. Brittonic, including the living languages Breton, Cornish, and Welsh, before the arrival of Scotti on the Isle of Man in the 9th century, there may have been a Brittonic language in the Isle of Man. Goidelic, including the living languages Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic, scholarly handling of the Celtic languages has been rather argumentative owing to scarceness of primary source data. Other scholars distinguish between P-Celtic and Q-Celtic, putting most of the Gaulish and Brittonic languages in the former group, the P-Celtic languages are sometimes seen as a central innovating area as opposed to the more conservative peripheral Q-Celtic languages. In the P/Q classification schema, the first language to split off from Proto-Celtic was Gaelic and it has characteristics that some scholars see as archaic, but others see as also being in the Brittonic languages
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Picts
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The Picts were a tribal confederation of peoples who lived in what is today eastern and northern Scotland during the Late Iron Age and Early Medieval periods. They are thought to have been ethnolinguistically Celtic, where they lived and what their culture was like can be inferred from the geographical distribution of brochs, Brittonic place name elements, and Pictish stones. Picts are attested to in records from before the Roman conquest of Britain to the 10th century. Picts are assumed to have been the descendants of the Caledonii, Pictland, also called Pictavia by some sources, gradually merged with the Gaelic kingdom of Dál Riata to form the Kingdom of Alba. Alba then expanded, absorbing the Brittonic kingdom of Strathclyde and Northumbrian Lothian, Pictish society was typical of many Iron Age societies in northern Europe, having wide connections and parallels with neighbouring groups. Archaeology gives some impression of the society of the Picts, what the Picts called themselves is unknown. The Latin word Picti first occurs in a written by Eumenius in AD297 and is taken to mean painted or tattooed people. Their Old English name gave the modern Scots form Pechts and the Welsh word Fichti and it is generally accepted that this is derived from *Qritani, which is the Goidelic/Q-Celtic version of the Britonnic/P-Celtic *Pritani. From this came Britanni, the Roman name for those now called the Britons and it has been suggested that Cruthin referred to all Britons not conquered by the Romans—those who lived outside Roman Britannia, north of Hadrians Wall. A Pictish confederation was formed in Late Antiquity from a number of tribes—how, some scholars have speculated that it was partly in response to the growth of the Roman Empire. Pictland had previously described by Roman writers and geographers as the home of the Caledonii. These Romans also used names to refer to tribes living in that area, including Verturiones, Taexali. But they may have heard these other names only second- or third-hand, from speakers of Brittonic or Gaulish languages, Pictish recorded history begins in the Dark Ages. It appears that Picts were not the dominant power in Northern Britain for that entire period, the Gaels of Dál Riata controlled what is present day Argyll for a time, although they suffered a series of defeats in the first third of the 7th century. The Angles of Bernicia overwhelmed the adjacent British kingdoms, one of which, the Picts were probably tributary to Northumbria until the reign of Bridei mac Beli, when, in 685, the Anglians suffered a defeat at the Battle of Dun Nechtain that halted their northward expansion. The Northumbrians continued to dominate southern Scotland for the remainder of the Pictish period, a later Pictish king, Caustantín mac Fergusa, placed his son Domnall on the throne of Dál Riata. Pictish attempts to achieve a dominance over the Britons of Alt Clut were not successful. The Viking Age brought great changes in Britain and Ireland, no less in Scotland than elsewhere, in a major battle in 839, the Vikings killed the king of Fortriu, Eógan mac Óengusa, the king of Dál Riata Áed mac Boanta, and many others
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Gaels
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The Gaels are an ethnolinguistic group native to northwestern Europe. They are associated with the Gaelic languages, a branch of the Celtic languages comprising Irish, Manx, historically, the ethnonyms Irish and Scots referred to the Gaels in general, but the scope of those nationalities is today more complex. Gaelic language and culture originated in Ireland, extending to Dál Riata in western Scotland, in antiquity the Gaels traded with the Roman Empire and also raided Roman Britain. In the Middle Ages, Gaelic culture became dominant throughout the rest of Scotland, there was also some Gaelic settlement in Wales and Cornwall. In the Viking Age, small numbers of Vikings raided and settled in Gaelic lands, in the 9th century, Dál Riata and Pictland merged to form the Gaelic Kingdom of Alba. Meanwhile, Gaelic Ireland was made up of several kingdoms, with a High King often claiming lordship over them, in the 12th century, Anglo-Normans conquered parts of Ireland, while parts of Scotland became Anglo-Normanized. However, Gaelic culture remained strong throughout Ireland, the Scottish Highlands, in the early 17th century, the last Gaelic kingdoms in Ireland fell under English control. In the following centuries most Gaels were gradually anglicized and Gaelic language mostly supplanted by English, however, it continues to be the main language in Irelands Gaeltacht and Scotlands Outer Hebrides. The modern descendants of the Gaels have spread throughout Britain, the Americas, Gaelic society traditionally centered around the clan, each with its own territory and chieftain, elected through tanistry. The Gaels were originally pagans who worshipped the Tuatha Dé Danann, venerated the ancestors and their four yearly festivals – Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasa – continued to be celebrated into modern times. The Gaels have an oral tradition, traditionally maintained by shanachies. Inscription in the Gaelic ogham alphabet began in the 1st century and their conversion to Christianity accompanied the introduction of writing, and Irish Gaelic has the oldest vernacular literature in western Europe. Irish mythology and Brehon law were preserved, albeit Christianized, Gaelic monasteries were renowned centres of learning and played a key role in developing Insular art, while Gaelic missionaries and scholars were highly influential in western Europe. In the Middle Ages, most Gaels lived in roundhouses and ringforts, the Gaels had their own style of dress, which became the belted plaid and kilt. They also have music, dance, and sports. Gaelic culture continues to be a component of Irish, Scottish. Throughout the centuries, Gaels and Gaelic-speakers have been known by a number of names, the most consistent of these have been Gael, Irish and Scots. The latter two have developed more ambiguous meanings, due to the modern concept of the nation state
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Kingdom of Scotland
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The Kingdom of Scotland was a state in northwest Europe traditionally said to have been founded in 843, which joined with the Kingdom of England to form a unified Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. Its territories expanded and shrank, but it came to occupy the third of the island of Great Britain. It suffered many invasions by the English, but under Robert I it fought a war of independence. In 1603, James VI of Scotland became King of England, in 1707, the two kingdoms were united to form the Kingdom of Great Britain under the terms of the Acts of Union. The Crown was the most important element of government, the Scottish monarchy in the Middle Ages was a largely itinerant institution, before Edinburgh developed as a capital city in the second half of the 15th century. The Scottish Crown adopted the conventional offices of western European courts, Parliament also emerged as a major legal institution, gaining an oversight of taxation and policy, but was never as central to the national life as its counterpart in England. In the 17th century, the creation of Justices of Peace, the continued existence of courts baron and the introduction of kirk sessions helped consolidate the power of local lairds. Scots law developed into a system in the Middle Ages and was reformed and codified in the 16th and 17th centuries. Under James IV the legal functions of the council were rationalised, in 1532, the College of Justice was founded, leading to the training and professionalisation of lawyers. David I is the first Scottish king known to have produced his own coinage, Early Scottish coins were virtually identical in silver content to English ones, but from about 1300 their silver content began to depreciate more rapidly than the English coins. At the union of the Crowns in 1603 the Scottish pound was fixed at only one-twelfth the value of the English pound, the Bank of Scotland issued pound notes from 1704. Scottish currency was abolished by the Act of Union, Scotland is half the size of England and Wales in area, but has roughly the same length of coastline. Geographically Scotland is divided between the Highlands and Islands and the Lowlands, the Highlands had a relatively short growing season, which was further shortened during the Little Ice Age. From Scotlands foundation to the inception of the Black Death, the population had grown to a million, following the plague and it expanded in the first half of the 16th century, reaching roughly 1.2 million by the 1690s. Significant languages in the kingdom included Gaelic, Old English, Norse and French. Christianity was introduced into Scotland from the 6th century, in the Norman period the Scottish church underwent a series of changes that led to new monastic orders and organisation. During the 16th century, Scotland underwent a Protestant Reformation that created a predominately Calvinist national kirk, there were a series of religious controversies that resulted in divisions and persecutions. The Scottish Crown developed naval forces at various points in its history, Land forces centred around the large common army, but adopted European innovations from the 16th century, and many Scots took service as mercenaries and as soldiers for the English Crown
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Kingdom of Alba
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The Kingdom of Alba refers to the Kingdom of Scotland between the deaths of Donald II in 900, and of Alexander III in 1286 which then led indirectly to the Scottish Wars of Independence. There is no precise Gaelic equivalent for the English terminology Kingdom of Alba as the Gaelic term Rìoghachd na h-Alba means Kingdom of Scotland, English speaking scholars adapted the Gaelic name for Scotland to apply to a particular political period in Scottish history during the High Middle Ages. Little is known about the structure of the Scottish royal court in the period before the coming of the Normans to Scotland, a little more is known about the court of the later 12th and 13th centuries. In the words of Geoffrey Barrow, this court was emphatically feudal, Frankish, non-Celtic in character. Some of the offices were Gaelic in origin, such as the Hostarius, the man in charge of the bodyguard, and the rannaire. The Seneschal or dapifer, had been hereditary since the reign of David I, the Steward had responsibility for the royal household and its management. The Chancellor was in charge of the royal chapel, the latter was the kings place of worship, but as it happened, was associated with the royal scribes, responsible for keeping records. Usually, the chancellor was a clergyman, and usually he held office before being promoted to a bishopric. The Chamberlain had control and responsibility over royal finances The Constable was also hereditary since the reign of David I and was in charge of the military resources. The Butler The Marshal or marischal, the royal household of course came with numerous other offices. The most important was probably the aforementioned hostarius, but there were such as the royal hunters, the royal foresters. King Donald II was the first man to have been called rí Alban and this meant king of Caledonia or Scotland. All his predecessors bore the style of either King of the Picts or King of Fortriu, such an apparent innovation in the Gaelic chronicles is occasionally taken to spell the birth of Scotland, but there is nothing special about his reign that might confirm this. This simply meant a madman, or in early Irish law, the reason was possibly the restlessness of his reign, continually spent fighting battles against Vikings. It is possible he gained his unpopularity by violating the rights of the church or through high taxes, however, his extremely negative nickname makes him an unlikely founder of Scotland. Donalds successor Constantine II is more regarded as a key figure in the formation of Alba. Constantine reigned for half a century, fighting many battles. When he lost at Brunanburh, he was discredited and retired as a Culdee monk at St. Andrews
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Celtic Britons
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They spoke the Common Brittonic language, the ancestor to the modern Brittonic languages. The earliest evidence for the Britons and their language in historical sources dates to the Iron Age, after the Roman conquest of Britain in the 1st century, a Romano-British culture emerged, and Latin and British Vulgar Latin coexisted with Brittonic. During and after the Roman era, the Britons lived throughout Britain south of the Firth of Forth, with the beginning of Anglo-Saxon settlement in the 5th century, the culture and language of the Britons fragmented and much of their territory was taken over by the Anglo-Saxons. The extent to which cultural and linguistic change was accompanied by wholesale changes in the population is still a matter of discussion. During this period some Britons migrated to mainland Europe and established significant settlements in Brittany as well as Britonia in modern Galicia, Common Brittonic developed into the distinct Brittonic languages, Welsh, Cumbric, Cornish and Breton. Although none of his own writings remain, writers during the time of the Roman Empire made much reference to them, the group included Ireland, which was referred to as Ierne inhabited by the race of Hiberni, and Britain as insula Albionum, island of the Albions. The term Pritani may have reached Pytheas from the Gauls, who used it as their term for the inhabitants of the islands. The first inhabitants were the Britons, who came from Armenia, the Latin name in the early Roman Empire period was Britanni or Brittanni, following the Roman conquest in AD43. Brittonic languages is a recent coinage intended to refer to the ancient Britons specifically. In English, the term Briton originally denoted the ancient Britons and their descendants, most particularly the Welsh, who were seen as heirs to the ancient British people. After the Acts of Union 1707, the terms British and Briton came to be applied not just to the remaining Brittonic peoples themselves, the Britons spoke an Insular Celtic language known as Common Brittonic. Brittonic was spoken throughout the island of Britain, as well as islands such as the Isle of Man, Scilly Isles, Orkneys, Hebrides. Thus the area today is called Brittany, Common Brittonic developed from the Insular branch of the Proto-Celtic language that developed in the British Isles after arriving from the continent in the 7th century BC. The language eventually began to diverge, some linguists have grouped subsequent developments as Western and Southwestern Brittonic languages, Pictish is now generally accepted to descend from Common Brittonic, rather than being a separate Celtic language. Welsh and Breton survive today, Cumbric became extinct in the 12th century, Cornish had become extinct by the 19th century but has been the subject of language revitalization since the 20th century. Ideas about the development of British Iron Age culture changed greatly in the 20th century, by this time Celtic styles seem to have been in decline in continental Europe, even before Roman invasions. Throughout their existence, the inhabited by the Britons was composed of numerous ever-changing areas controlled by Brittonic tribes. Part of the Pictish territory was absorbed into the Gaelic kingdoms of Dál Riata and Alba
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Germanic languages
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It is the third most spoken Indo-European subdivision, behind Italic and Indo-Iranian, and ahead of Balto-Slavic languages. Limburgish varieties have roughly 1.3 million speakers along the Dutch–Belgian–German border, the main North Germanic languages are Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese, which have a combined total of about 20 million speakers. The East Germanic branch included Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic, the last to die off was Crimean Gothic, spoken in the late 18th century in some isolated areas of Crimea. The total number of Germanic languages throughout history is unknown, as some of them—especially East Germanic languages—disappeared during or after the Migration Period. Proto-Germanic, along all of its descendants, is characterized by a number of unique linguistic features. Early varieties of Germanic enter history with the Germanic tribes moving south from Scandinavia in the 2nd century BC, to settle in the area of todays northern Germany, furthermore, it is the de facto language of the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. It is also a language in Nicaragua and Malaysia. German is a language of Austria, Belgium, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Switzerland and has regional status in Italy, Poland, Namibia. German also continues to be spoken as a minority language by immigrant communities in North America, South America, Central America, Mexico, a German dialect, Pennsylvania Dutch, is still present amongst Anabaptist populations in Pennsylvania in the United States. Dutch is a language of Aruba, Belgium, Curaçao. The Netherlands also colonised Indonesia, but Dutch was scrapped as a language after Indonesian independence. Dutch was until 1925 an official language in South Africa, but evolved in and was replaced by Afrikaans, Afrikaans is one of the 11 official languages in South Africa and is a lingua franca of Namibia. It is used in other Southern African nations as well, low German is a collection of sometimes very diverse dialects spoken in the northeast of the Netherlands and northern Germany. Scots is spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster, frisian is spoken among half a million people who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. Luxembourgish is mainly spoken in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, though it extends into small parts of Belgium, France. Limburgish varieties are spoken in the Limburg and Rhineland regions, along the Dutch–Belgian–German border, Swedish is also one of the two official languages in Finland, along with Finnish, and the only official language in the Åland Islands. Danish is also spoken natively by the Danish minority in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, Norwegian is the official language of Norway. Icelandic is the language of Iceland, and is spoken by a significant minority in the Faroe Islands
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Anglo-Saxons
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The Anglo-Saxons are a people who have inhabited Great Britain from the 5th century. Historically, the Anglo-Saxon period denotes the period in Britain between about 450 and 1066, after their settlement and up until the Norman conquest. The early Anglo-Saxon period includes the creation of an English nation, with many of the aspects that survive today, including government of shires. During this period, Christianity was re-established and there was a flowering of literature, charters and law were also established. The term Anglo-Saxon is popularly used for the language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons in England, in scholarly use, it is more commonly called Old English. The history of the Anglo-Saxons is the history of a cultural identity and it developed from divergent groups in association with the peoples adoption of Christianity, and was integral to the establishment of various kingdoms. Threatened by extended Danish invasions and occupation of eastern England, this identity was re-established, the visible Anglo-Saxon culture can be seen in the material culture of buildings, dress styles, illuminated texts and grave goods. Behind the symbolic nature of these emblems, there are strong elements of tribal. The elite declared themselves as kings who developed burhs, and identified their roles and peoples in Biblical terms, above all, as Helena Hamerow has observed, local and extended kin groups remained. the essential unit of production throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. Use of the term Anglo-Saxon assumes that the words Angles, Saxons or Anglo-Saxon have the meaning in all the sources. Assigning ethnic labels such as Anglo-Saxon is fraught with difficulties and this term began to be used only in the 8th century to distinguish the Germanic groups in Britain from those on the continent. The Old English ethnonym Angul-Seaxan comes from the Latin Angli-Saxones and became the name of the peoples Bede calls Anglorum, Anglo-Saxon is a term that was rarely used by Anglo-Saxons themselves, it is not an autonym. It is likely they identified as ængli, Seaxe or, more probably, also, the use of Anglo-Saxon disguises the extent to which people identified as Anglo-Scandinavian after the Viking age or the conquest of 1016, or as Anglo-Norman after the Norman conquest. The earliest historical references using this term are from outside Britain, referring to piratical Germanic raiders, Saxones who attacked the shores of Britain, procopius states that Britain was settled by three races, the Angiloi, Frisones, and Britons. The term Angli Saxones seems to have first been used in writing of the 8th century. The name therefore seemed to mean English Saxons, the Christian church seems to have used the word Angli, for example in the story of Pope Gregory I and his remark, Non Angli sed angeli. The terms ænglisc and Angelcynn were also used by West Saxon King Alfred to refer to the people, at other times he uses the term rex Anglorum, which presumably meant both Anglo-Saxons and Danes. Alfred the Great used Anglosaxonum Rex, the term Engla cyningc is used by Æthelred
38.
Norsemen
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Norsemen are the group of people who spoke what is now called the Old Norse language between the 8th and 11th centuries. The language belongs to the North Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages, Norseman means man from the North and applied primarily to Old Norse-speaking tribes living in southern and central Scandinavia. In history, Norse or Norseman could be any person from Scandinavia, even though Norway, Denmark, in some other historical references, the term may also refer to the East Norse, meaning mainly Danes and Swedes, for instance, Cnuts Empire and Swedes adventures East. In the early Medieval period, as today, Vikings was a term for attacking Norsemen, especially in connection with raids and monastic plundering by Norsemen in the British Isles. The Norse were also known as Ascomanni, ashmen, by the Germans, Lochlanach by the Gaels, the Gaelic terms Finn-Gall, Dubh-Gall and Gall Goidel were used for the people of Norse descent in Ireland and Scotland, who assimilated into the Gaelic culture. Dubliners called them Ostmen, or East-people, and the name Oxmanstown comes from one of their settlements, they were known as Lochlannaigh. However, British conceptions of the Vikings origins were not quite correct and those who plundered Britain lived in what is today Denmark, Scania, the western coast of Sweden and Norway and along the Swedish Baltic coast up to around the 60th latitude and Lake Mälaren. They also settled on the island of Gotland, the border between the Norsemen and more southerly Germanic tribes, the Danevirke, today is located about 50 kilometres south of the Danish-German border. The southernmost living Vikings lived no further north than Newcastle upon Tyne, archaeologists and historians of today believe that these Scandinavian settlements in the Slavic lands formed the names of the countries of Russia and Belarus. The Slavs and the Byzantines also called them Varangians, and the Scandinavian bodyguards of the Byzantine emperors were known as the Varangian Guard. In the Old Norse language, the term norrœnir menn, was used correspondingly to the modern English name Norsemen, referring to Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, Faroe Islanders, Icelanders, etc. The modern people of Norway, Sweden and Denmark never identify themselves as skandinaver, as they are Norwegians, Swedes, the Vikings were simply people partaking in the raid. On occasions Finland is also mentioned as a Scandinavian country, Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands are also geographically separate from the Scandinavian peninsula. The term Nordic countries is used to encompass the Scandinavian countries, Iceland, Greenland
39.
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
40.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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John Kenneth Ken Galbraith, OC was a Canadian-born economist, public official, and diplomat, and a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s, as an economist, he leaned toward Post-Keynesian economics from an institutionalist perspective. Galbraith was a long-time Harvard faculty member and stayed with Harvard University for half a century as a professor of economics and he was a prolific author and wrote four dozen books, including several novels, and published more than a thousand articles and essays on various subjects. Among his works was a trilogy on economics, American Capitalism, The Affluent Society, Galbraith was active in Democratic Party politics, serving in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. He served as United States Ambassador to India under the Kennedy administration and his political activism, literary output and outspokenness brought him wide fame during his lifetime. Galbraith was one of the few to both the Medal of Freedom and the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his public service and contributions to science. The government of France made him a Commandeur de la Légion dhonneur, Galbraith was born to Canadians of Scottish descent, Sarah Catherine Kendall and Archibald Archie Galbraith, in Iona Station, Ontario, Canada, and was raised in Dunwich Township, Ontario. He had three siblings, Alice, Catherine, and Archibald William, by the time he was a teenager, he had adopted the name Ken, and later disliked being called John. Galbraith grew to be a tall man, attaining a height of 6 feet 9 inches. His father was a farmer and school teacher, a homemaker and a community activist, his mother died when he was fourteen years old. The family farm was located on Thomson Line, both of his parents were supporters of the United Farmers of Ontario in the 1920s. His early years were spent at a school which is still standing. Later, he went to Dutton High School and St. Thomas High School, in 1931, Galbraith graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture from the Ontario Agricultural College, which was then an associate agricultural college of the University of Toronto. After graduation in 1934, he started to work as an instructor at Harvard University, Galbraith taught intermittently at Harvard in the period 1934 to 1939. From 1939 to 1940, he taught at Princeton University, in 1937, he became a United States citizen and was no longer a British subject. In the same year, he took a fellowship at the University of Cambridge, England. He then traveled in Europe for several months in 1938, attending an international economic conference and his public service started in the era of New Deal when he joined the United States Department of Agriculture. From 1943 until 1948, he served as an editor of Fortune magazine, in 1949, he was appointed professor of economics at Harvard
41.
Southwestern Ontario
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Southwestern Ontario is a secondary region of Southern Ontario in the Canadian province of Ontario, centered on the city of London. To the east, on land, Southwestern Ontario is bounded by Central Ontario, the region had a population of 2,504,878 in 2011. Apart from London, other towns and cities in the area of Southwestern Ontario include Chatham, Ingersoll, Sarnia, St. Thomas, Tillsonburg, Windsor. Outside the core of Southwestern Ontario, cities located on or near the Grand River are also considered to be part of the extended Golden Horseshoe region that surrounds western Lake Ontario and they include Brantford, Cambridge, Guelph, Kitchener, and Waterloo. Two subregions are recognisable with Southwestern Ontario, the Bruce Peninsula and Georgian Bay shoreline, including Owen Sound and the Blue Mountains, are also part of the Georgian Triangle. Cities and towns located more immediately north of London, including Stratford, Goderich, Wingham, Mount Forest, Southwestern Ontario was first settled by Europeans in the early 18th century, when it was part of the Royal Province of New France. One of the oldest continuous settlements in the region is Windsor, late in the 20th century the Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo area became the populous metropolitan area in southwestern Ontario. Southwestern Ontario is an agricultural region whose chief crops are tobacco, sweet corn, soybean, winter wheat, canola. Dairy and beef farming, breeding and training of standardbred horses and wine growing and its climate is among the mildest in Canada. Although brief periods of winter can be severe, summers are hot, a large section of Southwestern Ontario was part of the Talbot Settlement, and the region has benefited from the settlement’s facilitation of agriculture and of trade in general. Its economy is tied in with that of the midwestern United States. Auto manufacturing and parts, agriculture and hi-tech industries are key components of the region’s economy, like other parts of southern Canada, the region brings warm or hot summers with normal thunderstorm occurrences. Some of these storms are severe, with damaging winds, hail and tornadoes all possible during peak season, the most likely areas for these kinds of weather events is within the Windsor - London corridor and north up to about Huron County. Winters are cold with snowfall in the south towards Essex County. London receives approximately 30% more snowfall than Windsor, owing to its position to Lake Huron. Under the Köppen climate classification, much of this area has a continental climate. Brant County Chatham–Kent Haldimand County Norfolk County City of Brantford City of Guelph City of London Town of St. Marys City of St
42.
Highland Clearances
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The Highland Clearances was the eviction, mostly during the 18th and 19th centuries, of a significant number of tenants in the Scottish Highlands. It resulted from enclosures of common lands and a change from farming to sheep raising, the Clearances were a complex series of events occurring over more than a hundred years. A Highland Clearance has been defined as an enforced simultaneous eviction of all living in a given area such as an entire glen. The Clearances relied on the insecurity of tenure of most tenants under the Scottish legal system, there was no equivalent of the English system of copyhold, which provided a heritable tenancy for many English counterparts of the Scots who were cleared from their farms. The Clearances resulted in significant emigration of Highlanders to the coast, the Scottish Lowlands, in the early 21st century, many times more descendants of Highlanders are found in these diaspora destinations than in Scotland. The enclosures in rural England in the British Agricultural Revolution started much earlier, similar developments in Scotland have lately been called the Lowland Clearances by historians such as Tom Devine. But in the Highlands, the impact on a Goidelic -speaking semi-feudal culture, there has been a lingering bitterness among the descendants of those forced to emigrate or to remain in crofting townships on very small areas of poor farming land. From the late 16th century, laws required clan leaders to appear in Edinburgh regularly to provide bonds for the conduct of anyone in their territory and this created a tendency among chiefs to identify as landlords, rather than leaders of men. The lesser clan-gentry increasingly took up droving, taking cattle along the old unpaved drove roads to sell in the Lowlands and this brought wealth and land ownership within the clan, though the Highlands continued to be overpopulated and poor. The Jacobite Risings brought repeated government efforts to curb those clans who supported James VII of Scotland and II of England and James Francis Edward Stuart and Charles Edward Stuart. The government of the day responded with repression after the 1746 Battle of Culloden, the 1746 Act of Proscription, incorporating the Dress Act, required all swords to be surrendered to the government, it prohibited the traditional wearing of clan tartans and kilts. The Heritable Jurisdictions Act 1746 removed the virtually sovereign power which the chiefs held over their clans, the governments enforcement of the prohibitions varied and often related to the degree of a clans support during the rebellion. But, overall these actions led to the destruction of the clan system. From about 1725, in the aftermath of the first Jacobite Rising, under the Disarming Act of 1746 and the Clan Act of 1715, the Crown made ineffectual attempts to subdue the Scottish Highlands, and eventually sent in troops. These had the effect of limiting organisational travel and choking off news, but, social conditions remained unsettled for the whole decade. What became known as the Clearances were regarded by the landlords as necessary improvements to make agriculture viable and they are thought to have been begun by Admiral John Ross of Balnagowan Castle in 1762. MacLeod of MacLeod began experimental work on Skye in 1732, chiefs hired Lowland, or sometimes English, factors with expertise in more profitable sheep farming. They encouraged, sometimes forcibly, the population to move off land judged suitable for raising sheep, to landlords, improvement and clearance did not initially mean depopulation
43.
Lowland Clearances
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As farmland became more commercialised in Scotland during the 18th century, land was often rented through auctions. This led to an inflation of rents that priced many tenants out of the market and this led many contemporary writers and modern historians to associate the Agricultural Revolution with the disappearance of cottars and their way of life from many parts of the southern Scotland. Many small settlements were torn down, their occupants moved to new, john Cockburn of Ormiston, for example, displaced cottars to the outskirts of his new ranch. Other displaced farmers moved to the new centres of Glasgow, Edinburgh. In other areas, such as the southwest, landowners offered low rents, most chose to remain, by choice, some out of an inability to secure transatlantic passage, or because of obligations in Scotland. New research about the destruction of Lowland culture has led historians such as Tom Devine to dub this period of time the Lowland Clearances, highland Clearances Aitchison, Pete and Cassell, Andrew. The Lowland Clearances, Scotlands Silent Revolution, 1760–1830,2003 Devine, T. M. Scottish Nation, 1700–2000,2001 Gibson, the Transition to Full-Time Labour on a Scottish Estate, 1723–1787’. ‘Farm Servants and Farm Labour in the Forth Valley and South-East Lowlands’, in Farm Servants and Labour in Lowland Scotland, 1770–1914. BBC Radio Scotland series Scotlands Forgotten Clearances
2011 Australia[29][30]
2011 England[31]
2010 United States ACS[32]
2011 Canada[33]
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