1.
Spanish language
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Spanish —also called Castilian —is a Romance language that originated in the Castile region of Spain, with hundreds of millions of native speakers around the world. It is usually considered the worlds second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese and it is one of the few languages to use inverted question and exclamation marks. Spanish is a part of the Ibero-Romance group of languages, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. Beginning in the early 16th century, Spanish was taken to the colonies of the Spanish Empire, most notably to the Americas, as well as territories in Africa, Oceania, around 75% of modern Spanish is derived from Latin. Greek has also contributed substantially to Spanish vocabulary, especially through Latin, Spanish vocabulary has been in contact from an early date with Arabic, having developed during the Al-Andalus era in the Iberian Peninsula. With around 8% of its vocabulary being Arabic in origin, this language is the second most important influence after Latin and it has also been influenced by Basque as well as by neighboring Ibero-Romance languages. It also adopted words from languages such as Gothic language from the Visigoths in which many Spanish names and surnames have a Visigothic origin. Spanish is one of the six languages of the United Nations. It is the language in the world by the number of people who speak it as a mother tongue, after Mandarin Chinese. It is estimated more than 437 million people speak Spanish as a native language. Spanish is the official or national language in Spain, Equatorial Guinea, speakers in the Americas total some 418 million. In the European Union, Spanish is the tongue of 8% of the population. Spanish is the most popular second language learned in the United States, in 2011 it was estimated by the American Community Survey that of the 55 million Hispanic United States residents who are five years of age and over,38 million speak Spanish at home. The Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term castellano to define the language of the whole Spanish State in contrast to las demás lenguas españolas. Article III reads as follows, El castellano es la lengua española oficial del Estado, las demás lenguas españolas serán también oficiales en las respectivas Comunidades Autónomas. Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State, the other Spanish languages as well shall be official in their respective Autonomous Communities. The Spanish Royal Academy, on the hand, currently uses the term español in its publications. Two etymologies for español have been suggested, the Spanish Royal Academy Dictionary derives the term from the Provençal word espaignol, and that in turn from the Medieval Latin word Hispaniolus, from—or pertaining to—Hispania
2.
Whistled language
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Whistled languages use whistling to emulate speech and facilitate communication. A whistled language is a system of whistled communication which allows fluent whistlers to transmit, whistled languages are different in this respect from the restricted codes sometimes used by herders or animal trainers to transmit simple messages or instructions. Whistled language is rare compared to language, but it is found in cultures around the world. It is especially common in languages where the whistled tones transmit the tones of the syllables. This might be because in tone languages the tone melody carries more of the load of communication while non-tonal phonology carries proportionally less. The genesis of a language has never been recorded in either case and has not yet received much productive study. Whistled languages differ according to whether the language is tonal or not. Tonal languages are often stripped of articulation, leaving only suprasegmental features such as duration and tone, and when whistled retain the spoken melodic line. Thus whistled tonal languages convey phonemic information solely through tone, length, and, to an extent, stress. Certain consonants can be pronounced while whistling, so as to modify the whistled sound, different whistling styles may be used in a single language. These are used for communication over varying distances, there is also a kind of loud falsetto which functions in some ways like whistled speech. There are a few different techniques of how to produce whistle speech, each place has its favorite trend that depends on the most common use of the village and on the personal preferences of each whistler. Whistling with a leaf or a flute is often related to courtship or poetic expression, whistling techniques do not require the vibration of the vocal cords, they produce a shock effect of the compressed air stream inside the cavity of the mouth and/or of the hands. When the jaws are fixed by a finger, the size of the hole is stable, the air stream expelled makes vibrations at the edge of the mouth. The faster the air stream is expelled, the higher is the noise inside the cavities, if the hole and the cavity are well matched, the resonance is tuned, and the whistle is projected more loudly. The frequency of this phenomenon is modulated by the morphing of the resonating cavity that can be, to a certain extent. However, in languages which are tonal, and therefore convey much of their information through pitch even when spoken, such as Mazatec and Yoruba. This lack of understanding can be seen with a confusion matrix and it was tested using two speakers of Silbo
3.
La Gomera
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La Gomera is one of Spains Canary Islands, located in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa. With an area of 369.76 square kilometers, it is the second smallest of the seven islands of this group. It belongs to the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and its capital is San Sebastián de La Gomera, where the headquarters of the Cabildo are located. La Gomera is part of the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and it is divided into six municipalities, Agulo Alajeró San Sebastián de la Gomera Hermigua Valle Gran Rey Vallehermoso The island government is located in the capital, San Sebastián. The island is of volcanic origin and roughly circular, it is about 22 kilometres in diameter, the island is very mountainous and steeply sloping and rises to 1,487 metres at the islands highest peak, Alto de Garajonay. Its shape is rather like an orange that has cut in half and then split into segments. The uppermost slopes of these barrancos, in turn, are covered by the laurisilva - or laurel rain forest, the slopes are criss-crossed by paths that present varying levels of difficulty to visitors, and stunning views to seasoned hikers. The central mountains catch the moisture from the trade wind clouds and yield a dense jungle climate in the cooler air, the official symbols from nature associated with La Gomera are Columba junoniae and Persea indica. The local wine is distinctive and often accompanied with a tapa of local cheese, roasted pork, other culinary specialities include almogrote, a cheese spread, and miel de palma, a syrup extracted from palm trees. The inhabitants of La Gomera have an ancient way of communicating across deep ravines by means of a speech called Silbo Gomero. This whistled language is indigenous to the island, and its existence has been documented since Roman times, invented by the original inhabitants of the island, the Guanches, Silbo Gomero was adopted by the Spanish settlers in the 16th century and survived after the Guanches were entirely assimilated. When this means of communication was threatened with extinction at the dawn of the 21st century, marcial Morera, a linguist at the University of La Laguna has said that the study of silbo may help understand how languages are formed. In the mountains of La Gomera, its original inhabitants worshipped their god, whom they called Orahan, modern-day archaeologists have found several ceremonial stone constructions here that appear to represent sacrificial altar stones, slate hollows, or cavities. It was here that the Guanches built pyres upon which to make offerings of goats and this same god, Orahan, was known on La Palma as Abora and on Tenerife and Gran Canaria as Arocan. The Guanches also interred their dead in caves, today, saints, who are worshipped through village festivals, are principally connected with Christianity. But in some aspects, the Guanches’ god-like idealising of Gomeran uniqueness plays a role as well besides their pre-Christian and pre-colonial implication, christopher Columbus made La Gomera his last port of call before crossing the Atlantic in 1492 with his three ships. He stopped here to replenish his crews food and water supplies, beatriz de Bobadilla y Ossorio, the Countess of La Gomera and widow of Hernán Peraza the Younger, offered him vital support in preparations of the fleet, and he ended up staying one month. When he finally set sail on September 6,1492, she gave him cuttings of sugarcane, which became the first to reach the New World
4.
Canary Islands
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The Canary Islands, also known as the Canaries, are an archipelago and autonomous community of Spain located on the Atlantic Ocean,100 kilometres west of Morocco. The Canaries are among the outermost regions of the European Union proper and it is also one of the eight regions with special consideration of historical nationality recognized as such by the Spanish Government. The main islands are Tenerife, Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, La Palma, La Gomera, the archipelago also includes a number of islands and islets, La Graciosa, Alegranza, Isla de Lobos, Montaña Clara, Roque del Oeste and Roque del Este. In ancient times, the chain was often referred to as the Fortunate Isles. The Canary Islands is the most southerly region of Spain and the largest and most populated archipelago of the Macaronesia region, the islands have a subtropical climate, with long hot summers and moderately warm winters. The precipitation levels and the level of maritime moderation varies depending on location and elevation, green areas as well as desert exist on the archipelago. Due to their location above the inversion layer, the high mountains of these islands are ideal for astronomical observation. For this reason, two professional observatories, Teide Observatory on the island of Tenerife and Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the island of La Palma, have built on the islands. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria has been the largest city in the Canaries since 1768, between the 1833 territorial division of Spain and 1927 Santa Cruz de Tenerife was the sole capital of the Canary Islands. In 1927 a decree ordered that the capital of the Canary Islands be shared, the third largest city of the Canary Islands is San Cristóbal de La Laguna on Tenerife. This city is home to the Consejo Consultivo de Canarias. During the time of the Spanish Empire, the Canaries were the main stopover for Spanish galleons on their way to the Americas, who came south to catch the prevailing northeasterly trade winds. The name Islas Canarias is likely derived from the Latin name Canariae Insulae, meaning Islands of the Dogs, according to the historian Pliny the Elder, the Mauretanian king Juba II named the island Canaria because it contained vast multitudes of dogs of very large size. Another speculation is that the dogs were actually a species of monk seal, critically endangered. The dense population of seals may have been the characteristic that most struck the few ancient Romans who established contact with these islands by sea. Alternatively, it is said that the inhabitants of the island, Guanches, used to worship dogs, mummified them. The ancient Greeks also knew about a people, living far to the west, who are the dog-headed ones, who worshipped dogs on an island. Some hypothesize that the Canary Islands dog-worship and the ancient Egyptian cult of the god, Anubis are closely connected
5.
Phoneme
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A phoneme is one of the units of sound that distinguish one word from another in a particular language. The difference in meaning between the English words kill and kiss is a result of the exchange of the phoneme /l/ for the phoneme /s/, two words that differ in meaning through a contrast of a single phoneme form a minimal pair. In linguistics, phonemes are written between slashes like this, /p/, whereas when it is desired to show the exact pronunciation of any sound, linguists use square brackets. Within linguistics there are differing views as to exactly what phonemes are, however, a phoneme is generally regarded as an abstraction of a set of speech sounds which are perceived as equivalent to each other in a given language. For example, in English, the k sounds in the kit and skill are not identical. Different speech sounds that are realizations of the same phoneme are known as allophones, phonemes are conventionally placed between slashes in transcription, whereas speech sounds are placed between square brackets. Thus /pʊʃ/ represents a sequence of three phonemes /p/, /ʊ/, /ʃ/, while represents the sequence of sounds. The symbols used for particular phonemes are often taken from the International Phonetic Alphabet, however, descriptions of particular languages may use different conventional symbols to represent the phonemes of those languages. A phoneme is a sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example is the English phoneme /k/, which occurs in such as cat, kit, scat. Although most native speakers do not notice this, in most English dialects the c/k sounds in words are not identical, in kit the sound is aspirated. The words therefore contain different speech sounds, or phones, transcribed for the aspirated form, the above shows that in English, and are allophones of a single phoneme /k/. For example, in Icelandic, is the first sound of kátur meaning cheerful, Icelandic therefore has two separate phonemes /kʰ/ and /k/. A pair of words like kátur and gátur that differ only in one phone is called a pair for the two alternative phones in question. The existence of pairs is a common test to decide whether two phones represent different phonemes or are allophones of the same phoneme. In other languages, though, including Korean, even though both sounds and occur, no minimal pair exists. The lack of minimal pairs distinguishing and in Korean provides evidence that in this language they are allophones of a single phoneme /t/, the word /tata/ is pronounced, for example. Signed languages, such as American Sign Language also have minimal pairs, Sign language minimal pairs refer to one of the signs parameters, handshape, movement, location, palm orientation, and non-manual signal/marker
6.
Phonology
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Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in languages. Phonology also includes the study of equivalent organizational systems in sign languages, the word phonology can also refer to the phonological system of a given language. This is one of the systems which a language is considered to comprise, like its syntax. Phonology is often distinguished from phonetics, note that this distinction was not always made, particularly before the development of the modern concept of the phoneme in the mid 20th century. The word phonology comes from Ancient Greek φωνή, phōnḗ, voice, sound, according to Clark et al. it means the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. The history of phonology may be traced back to the Ashtadhyayi, Baudouin de Courtenays work, though often unacknowledged, is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology. He also worked on the theory of alternations, and may have had an influence on the work of Saussure according to E. F. K. Koerner. An influential school of phonology in the period was the Prague school. One of its members was Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, whose Grundzüge der Phonologie. Directly influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetzkoy is considered the founder of morphophonology, Trubetzkoy also developed the concept of the archiphoneme. Another important figure in the Prague school was Roman Jakobson, who was one of the most prominent linguists of the 20th century, in 1968 Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of English, the basis for generative phonology. In this view, phonological representations are sequences of segments made up of distinctive features and these features were an expansion of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle. The features describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from a fixed set. There are at least two levels of representation, underlying representation and surface phonetic representation, ordered phonological rules govern how underlying representation is transformed into the actual pronunciation. An important consequence of the influence SPE had on phonological theory was the downplaying of the syllable, furthermore, the generativists folded morphophonology into phonology, which both solved and created problems. Natural phonology is a based on the publications of its proponent David Stampe in 1969. In this view, phonology is based on a set of phonological processes that interact with one another, which ones are active. Rather than acting on segments, phonological processes act on distinctive features within prosodic groups, prosodic groups can be as small as a part of a syllable or as large as an entire utterance
7.
Phonemes
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A phoneme is one of the units of sound that distinguish one word from another in a particular language. The difference in meaning between the English words kill and kiss is a result of the exchange of the phoneme /l/ for the phoneme /s/, two words that differ in meaning through a contrast of a single phoneme form a minimal pair. In linguistics, phonemes are written between slashes like this, /p/, whereas when it is desired to show the exact pronunciation of any sound, linguists use square brackets. Within linguistics there are differing views as to exactly what phonemes are, however, a phoneme is generally regarded as an abstraction of a set of speech sounds which are perceived as equivalent to each other in a given language. For example, in English, the k sounds in the kit and skill are not identical. Different speech sounds that are realizations of the same phoneme are known as allophones, phonemes are conventionally placed between slashes in transcription, whereas speech sounds are placed between square brackets. Thus /pʊʃ/ represents a sequence of three phonemes /p/, /ʊ/, /ʃ/, while represents the sequence of sounds. The symbols used for particular phonemes are often taken from the International Phonetic Alphabet, however, descriptions of particular languages may use different conventional symbols to represent the phonemes of those languages. A phoneme is a sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example is the English phoneme /k/, which occurs in such as cat, kit, scat. Although most native speakers do not notice this, in most English dialects the c/k sounds in words are not identical, in kit the sound is aspirated. The words therefore contain different speech sounds, or phones, transcribed for the aspirated form, the above shows that in English, and are allophones of a single phoneme /k/. For example, in Icelandic, is the first sound of kátur meaning cheerful, Icelandic therefore has two separate phonemes /kʰ/ and /k/. A pair of words like kátur and gátur that differ only in one phone is called a pair for the two alternative phones in question. The existence of pairs is a common test to decide whether two phones represent different phonemes or are allophones of the same phoneme. In other languages, though, including Korean, even though both sounds and occur, no minimal pair exists. The lack of minimal pairs distinguishing and in Korean provides evidence that in this language they are allophones of a single phoneme /t/, the word /tata/ is pronounced, for example. Signed languages, such as American Sign Language also have minimal pairs, Sign language minimal pairs refer to one of the signs parameters, handshape, movement, location, palm orientation, and non-manual signal/marker
8.
UNESCO
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The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations based in Paris. It is the heir of the League of Nations International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, UNESCO has 195 member states and nine associate members. Most of its offices are cluster offices covering three or more countries, national and regional offices also exist. UNESCO pursues its objectives through five major programs, education, natural sciences, social/human sciences, culture and it is also a member of the United Nations Development Group. UNESCO and its mandate for international cooperation can be traced back to a League of Nations resolution on 21 September 1921, on 18 December 1925, the International Bureau of Education began work as a non-governmental organization in the service of international educational development. However, the work of predecessor organizations was largely interrupted by the onset of World War II. On 30 October 1943, the necessity for an organization was expressed in the Moscow Declaration, agreed upon by China, the United Kingdom, the United States. This was followed by the Dumbarton Oaks Conference proposals of 9 October 1944, a prominent figure in the initiative for UNESCO was Rab Butler, the Minister of Education for the United Kingdom. At the ECO/CONF, the Constitution of UNESCO was introduced and signed by 37 countries, the Preparatory Commission operated between 16 November 1945, and 4 November 1946—the date when UNESCOs Constitution came into force with the deposit of the twentieth ratification by a member state. The first General Conference took place between 19 November to 10 December 1946, and elected Dr. Julian Huxley to Director-General and this change in governance distinguished UNESCO from its predecessor, the CICI, in how member states would work together in the organizations fields of competence. In 1956, the Republic of South Africa withdrew from UNESCO claiming that some of the organizations publications amounted to interference in the racial problems. South Africa rejoined the organization in 1994 under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, UNESCOs early work in the field of education included the pilot project on fundamental education in the Marbial Valley, Haiti, started in 1947. This project was followed by missions to other countries, including, for example. In 1948, UNESCO recommended that Member States should make free primary education compulsory, in 1990, the World Conference on Education for All, in Jomtien, Thailand, launched a global movement to provide basic education for all children, youths and adults. Ten years later, the 2000 World Education Forum held in Dakar, Senegal, UNESCOs early activities in culture included, for example, the Nubia Campaign, launched in 1960. The purpose of the campaign was to move the Great Temple of Abu Simbel to keep it from being swamped by the Nile after construction of the Aswan Dam, during the 20-year campaign,22 monuments and architectural complexes were relocated. This was the first and largest in a series of campaigns including Mohenjo-daro, Fes, Kathmandu, Borobudur, the organizations work on heritage led to the adoption, in 1972, of the Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. The World Heritage Committee was established in 1976 and the first sites inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1978, since then important legal instruments on cultural heritage and diversity have been adopted by UNESCO member states in 2003 and 2005
9.
Guanches
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Guanches refer to the aboriginal Berber inhabitants of the Canary Islands. It is believed that they migrated to the archipelago around 1000 BC or perhaps earlier, the native term guanchinet literally translated means person of Tenerife. It was modified, according to Juan Núñez de la Peña, though etymologically being an ancient, Tenerife-specific, term, the word Guanche is now mostly used to refer to the pre-Hispanic aboriginal inhabitants of the entire archipelago. If this account is accurate, it may suggest that the Guanches were not the inhabitants, or the first ones. Strictly speaking, the Guanches were the peoples of Tenerife. The population seems to have lived in isolation up to the time of the Castilian conquest. The name came to be applied to the populations of all the seven Canary Islands. The first reliable account of the Guanche language was provided by the Genoese explorer Nicoloso da Recco in 1341, inscriptions, glyphs and rock paintings and carvings are quite abundant throughout the islands. Petroglyphs attributed to various Mediterranean civilizations have been found on some of the islands, in 1878 Dr. René Verneau discovered rock carvings in the ravines of Las Balos that resemble Libyan or Numidian writing dating from the time of Roman occupation or earlier. In other locations, Libyco-Berber script has been identified, the geographic accounts of Pliny the Elder and of Strabo mention the Fortunate Isles but do not report anything about their populations. Among the villagers, one did speak Arabic and asked them where they came from, then the king of the village ordered them to bring them back to the continent where they were surprised to be welcomed by Berbers. Apart from the marvelous and fanciful content of history, this account would suggest that Guanches had sporadic contacts with populations from the mainland. Al-Idrisi also described the Guanche men as tall and of a reddish-brown complexion, the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands began in 1402, with the expedition of Jean de Béthencourt and Gadifer de la Salle to the island of Lanzarote. Gadifer would invade Lanzarote and Fuerteventura with ease since many of the aboriginals, faced issues of starvation and poor agriculture. The other five islands fought back, el Hierro and the Bimbache population were the next to fall, then La Gomera, Gran Canaria, La Palma and in 1496, Tenerife. In the First Battle of Acentejo, called La Matanza, Guanches ambushed the Castilians in a valley, only one in five of the Castilians survived, including the leader of the expedition, Alonso Fernandez de Lugo. Lugo would return later to the island with the alliance of the kings of the part of the island. The northern Menceyatos or provinces fell after the Second Battle of Acentejo with the defeat of the successor of Bencomo, Bentor, Mencey of Taoro – what is now the Orotava Valley – in 1496
10.
El Hierro
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El Hierro, nicknamed Isla del Meridiano, is the smallest and farthest south and west of the Canary Islands, in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa, with a population of 10,162. At 268.71 square kilometres, it is the smallest of the seven islands of the Canaries. The name El Hierro, although spelled like the Spanish word for iron, is not related to that word, the H in the name of the metal is derived from the F of Latin ferrum. The confusion with the name of the metal had effects on the naming of the island. As early as the 16th century, maps and texts called the island after the word for iron in other languages, Portuguese Ferro, French lîle de Fer, nevertheless, the origin of the name ero or erro or yerro is not definitely known. It is thought to be derived from one of words in the Guanche language of the pre-Hispanic inhabitants. Juan de Abreu Galindo gives the name of the island as Esero. It is believed that the Bimbaches had to construct cisterns to save fresh rainwater, the Gran diccionario guanche gives the meaning of the Guanche word hero in Spanish as fuente. The ancient natives of the island, called Bimbaches, were subjected to Spanish rule by Jean de Béthencourt – more by the process of negotiation than by military action, Béthencourt had as his ally and negotiator Augeron, brother of the islands native monarch. Augeron had been captured years before by the Europeans and now served as mediator between the Europeans and the Guanches. In return for control over the island, Béthencourt promised to respect the liberty of the natives, many Frenchmen and Galicians subsequently settled on the island. There was a revolt of the natives against the treatment of the governor Lázaro Vizcaíno. There is evidence of at least three major landslides that have affected El Hierro in the last few hundred thousand years, the most recent of these was the El Golfo landslide that occurred about 15 thousand years ago, involving collapse of the northern flank of the island. The landslide formed the El Golfo valley and created an avalanche with a volume of 150–180 km3. Turbidite deposits related to this landslide have been recognized in drill cores from the Agadir Basin to the north of the Canary Islands. Detailed analysis of these suggests that the slope failure did not occur as a single event. Local tsunami are likely to have triggered by these landslides. The Instituto Vulcanológico de Canarias and National Geographic Institute’s seismic monitoring station located in Valverde detected increased seismic activity beginning on 17 July 2011, the seismic monitoring network was increased in density on July 21 to allow better detection and location of the seismic events
11.
Tenerife
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Tenerife is the largest and most populated island of the seven Canary Islands. It is also the most populated island of Spain, with an area of 2,034.38 square kilometres and 898,680 inhabitants,43 percent of the total population of the Canary Islands. Tenerife is the largest and most populous island of Macaronesia, about five million tourists visit Tenerife each year, the most of any of the Canary Islands. It is one of the most important tourist destinations in Spain, Tenerife hosts one of the worlds largest carnivals and the Carnival of Santa Cruz de Tenerife is working to be designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Served by two airports, Tenerife North Airport and Tenerife South Airport, Tenerife is the centre of the archipelago. The 1977 collision of two Boeing 747 passenger jets at Tenerife North Airport, resulting in 583 deaths, remains the deadliest aviation accident in world history, Santa Cruz de Tenerife is the capital of the island and the seat of the island council. The city is capital of the community of Canary Islands, sharing governmental institutions such as Presidency. Between the 1833 territorial division of Spain and 1927, Santa Cruz de Tenerife was the capital of the Canary Islands. In 1927 the Crown ordered that the capital of the Canary Islands be shared, Santa Cruz contains the modern Auditorio de Tenerife, the architectural symbol of the Canary Islands. The island is home to the University of La Laguna, founded in 1792 in San Cristóbal de La Laguna, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the city is the second to have been founded on the island, and is the third of the archipelago. The city of La Laguna was capital of the Canary Islands before Santa Cruz replaced it in 1833, also located on the island, Macizo de Anaga since 2015 has been designated as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. It has the largest number of species in Europe. The islands indigenous people, the Guanches, referred to the island as Achinet or Chenet in their language. According to Pliny the Younger, Berber king Juba II sent an expedition to the Canary Islands and Madeira, he named the Canary Islands for the particularly ferocious dogs on the island. Juba II and Ancient Romans referred to the island of Tenerife as Nivaria, derived from the Latin word nix, meaning snow, the Benahoaritas are said to have named the island, deriving it from the words tene and ife. After colonisation, the Hispanisation of the resulted in adding the letter r to unite both words, producing Tenerife. He ruled the island in the days before the conquest of the Canary Islands by Castilla. The formal demonym used to refer to the people of Tenerife is Tinerfeño/a, in modern society, the latter term is generally applied only to inhabitants of the capital, Santa Cruz
12.
Gran Canaria
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Located in the Atlantic Ocean about 150 kilometres off the northwestern coast of Africa and about 1,350 km from Europe. With an area of 1,560 km2 and an altitude of 1,956 m at the Pico de las Nieves, Gran Canaria was populated by the Canarii, who may have arrived as early as 500 BC. The Canarii called the island Tamarán or Land of the Brave, the capital city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria was founded on June 24,1478, under the name Real de Las Palmas, by Juan Rejón, head of the invading Castilian army. In 1492, Christopher Columbus anchored in the Port of Las Palmas on his first trip to the Americas, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria is, jointly with Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the capital of the autonomous community of the Canary Islands. Gran Canaria is located southeast of Tenerife and west of Fuerteventura, the island is of volcanic origin, mostly made of fissure vents. Gran Canarias surface area is 1,560 km² and its elevation is 1,949 meters. It has a shape, with a diameter of approximately 50 km. About 80% of the volume of the island was formed during the Miocene period and this is called the Old Cycle and is estimated to have lasted some 200,000 years and have emitted about 1000 km3, mostly of fissural alkali basalt. This cycle continued with the emission of trachytes, phonolites and peralkaline rocks and this period was followed by one of erosion, which lasted some 4 million years. A second cycle of volcanic eruptions, known as the Roque Nublo cycle and this shorter cycle emitted about 100 km3. Most of the peaks were formed by erosion from these materials. This period also started with fissural basalts, but ended with violent eruptions of pyroclastic flows, some phonolitic features, like the Risco Blanco, were also formed in its last stages. The third or recent cycle is held to have started some 2.8 million years ago and is considered to be still active, the last eruptions are held to have occurred some 3500 years ago. The changes in volume and, therefore, weight of the island have also caused the island to rise above the sea level during erosive periods. Some of these beaches can be seen in the cliff faces of the more eroded northern coast. Until the conquest, Gran Canaria had extensive forests, but then suffered extensive deforestation as a result of logging, land divisions. This caused the forest cover to be reduced to just 56,000 hectares, however, in the twentieth century reforestation of the ridge of the island was begun, recovering some of the lost forest mass. Much of the summit of the island is forested mostly due to reforestation, Gran Canaria is divided into twenty-one municipalities, The island has a population of 845,676 with 378,628 of those in the capital city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
13.
Telephone
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A telephone, or phone, is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be heard directly. In 1876, Scottish emigrant Alexander Graham Bell was the first to be granted a United States patent for a device that produced clearly intelligible replication of the human voice and this instrument was further developed by many others. The telephone was the first device in history that people to talk directly with each other across large distances. Telephones rapidly became indispensable to businesses, government, and households, the essential elements of a telephone are a microphone to speak into and an earphone which reproduces the voice in a distant location. Until approximately the 1970s most telephones used a dial, which was superseded by the modern DTMF push-button dial. The receiver and transmitter are usually built into a handset which is held up to the ear, the dial may be located either on the handset, or on a base unit to which the handset is connected. The transmitter converts the sound waves to electrical signals which are sent through the network to the receiving phone. The receiving telephone converts the signals into audible sound in the receiver, telephones permit duplex communication, meaning they allow the people on both ends to talk simultaneously. The first telephones were connected to each other from one customers office or residence to another customers location. Being impractical beyond just a few customers, these systems were replaced by manually operated centrally located switchboards. For greater mobility, various systems were developed for transmission between mobile stations on ships and automobiles in the middle 20th century. Hand-held mobile phone]s was introduced for personal service starting in 1973, by the late 1970s several mobile telephone networks operated around the world. In 1983, the Advanced Mobile Phone System was launched, offering a standardized technology providing portability for users far beyond the residence or office. These analog cellular system evolved into digital networks with better security, greater capacity, better regional coverage, the public switched telephone network, with its hierarchical system of many switching centers, interconnects telephones around the world for communication with each other. With the standardized international numbering system, E.164, each line has an identifying telephone number. Although originally designed for voice communications, convergence has enabled most modern cell phones to have many additional capabilities. Since 1999, the trend for mobile phones is smartphones that integrate all mobile communication, a traditional landline telephone system, also known as plain old telephone service, commonly carries both control and audio signals on the same twisted pair of insulated wires, the telephone line. The control and signaling equipment consists of three components, the ringer, the hookswitch, and a dial, the ringer, or beeper, light or other device, alerts the user to incoming calls
14.
Agriculture
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Agriculture is the cultivation and breeding of animals, plants and fungi for food, fiber, biofuel, medicinal plants and other products used to sustain and enhance human life. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of human civilization. The study of agriculture is known as agricultural science, the history of agriculture dates back thousands of years, and its development has been driven and defined by greatly different climates, cultures, and technologies. Industrial agriculture based on large-scale monoculture farming has become the dominant agricultural methodology, genetically modified organisms are an increasing component of agriculture, although they are banned in several countries. Agricultural food production and water management are increasingly becoming global issues that are fostering debate on a number of fronts, the major agricultural products can be broadly grouped into foods, fibers, fuels, and raw materials. Specific foods include cereals, vegetables, fruits, oils, meats, fibers include cotton, wool, hemp, silk and flax. Raw materials include lumber and bamboo, other useful materials are also produced by plants, such as resins, dyes, drugs, perfumes, biofuels and ornamental products such as cut flowers and nursery plants. The word agriculture is a late Middle English adaptation of Latin agricultūra, from ager, field, Agriculture usually refers to human activities, although it is also observed in certain species of ant, termite and ambrosia beetle. To practice agriculture means to use resources to produce commodities which maintain life, including food, fiber, forest products, horticultural crops. This definition includes arable farming or agronomy, and horticulture, all terms for the growing of plants, even then, it is acknowledged that there is a large amount of knowledge transfer and overlap between silviculture and agriculture. In traditional farming, the two are often combined even on small landholdings, leading to the term agroforestry, Agriculture began independently in different parts of the globe, and included a diverse range of taxa. At least 11 separate regions of the Old and New World were involved as independent centers of origin, wild grains were collected and eaten from at least 105,000 years ago. Pigs were domesticated in Mesopotamia around 15,000 years ago, rice was domesticated in China between 13,500 and 8,200 years ago, followed by mung, soy and azuki beans. Sheep were domesticated in Mesopotamia between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago. From around 11,500 years ago, the eight Neolithic founder crops, emmer and einkorn wheat, hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chick peas and flax were cultivated in the Levant. Cattle were domesticated from the aurochs in the areas of modern Turkey. In the Andes of South America, the potato was domesticated between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago, along with beans, coca, llamas, alpacas, sugarcane and some root vegetables were domesticated in New Guinea around 9,000 years ago. Sorghum was domesticated in the Sahel region of Africa by 7,000 years ago, cotton was domesticated in Peru by 5,600 years ago, and was independently domesticated in Eurasia at an unknown time
15.
Peasant
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A peasant is a member of a traditional class of farmers, either laborers or owners of small farms, especially in the Middle Ages under feudalism, or more generally, in any pre-industrial society. In Europe, peasants were divided into three classes according to their status, slave, serf, and free tenant. Peasants either hold title to land in fee simple, or hold land by any of several forms of tenure, among them socage, quit-rent, leasehold. The implication of the term is that the peasant is uneducated, ignorant, the word peasant is also commonly used in a non-pejorative sense as a collective noun for the rural population in the poor and under-developed countries of the world. The word peasant is derived from the 15th century French word païsant, meaning one from the pays, or countryside, ultimately from the Latin pagus, Peasants typically made up the majority of the agricultural labour force in a pre-industrial society. The majority of the people in the Middle Ages were peasants, more generally, the word peasant is sometimes used to refer pejoratively to those considered to be lower class, perhaps defined by poorer education and/or a lower income. The open field system of agriculture dominated most of northern Europe during medieval times, under this system, peasants lived on a manor presided over by a lord or a bishop of the church. Peasants paid rent or labor services to the lord in exchange for their right to cultivate the land, fallowed land, pastures, forests, and wasteland were held in common. The open field system required cooperation among the peasants of the manor and it was gradually replaced by individual ownership and management of land. This process happened in a pronounced and truncated way in Eastern Europe. Lacking any catalysts for change in the 14th century, Eastern European peasants largely continued upon the original medieval path until the 18th and 19th centuries, even before emancipation in 1861, serfdom was on the wane in Russia. The proportion of serfs within the empire had decreased from 45-50 percent at the end of the eighteenth century. In Germany, peasants continued to center their lives in the well into the 19th century. They belonged to a body and helped to manage the community resources. In the East they had the status of serfs bound permanently to parcels of land, a peasant is called a Bauer in German and Bur in Low German. In most of Germany, farming was handled by tenant farmers who paid rents, Peasant leaders supervised the fields and ditches and grazing rights, maintained public order and morals, and supported a village court which handled minor offenses. Inside the family the patriarch made all the decisions, and tried to arrange marriages for his children. Much of the communal life centered on church services and holy days
16.
Intangible cultural heritage
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Intangible cultural heritage is promoted by UNESCO as a counterpart to the World Heritage focusing mainly on intangible aspects of culture. Some of that takes the form of cultural property, formed by tangible artefacts such as buildings or works of art. Many parts of culture, however are intangible, including song, music, dance, drama, skills, cuisine, crafts and festivals. They are forms of culture that can be recorded but cannot be touched or stored in physical form, like in a museum and these cultural vehicles are called Human Treasures by the UN. The Mediterranean diet, the traditional Mexican cuisine and the Japanese dietary culture of washoku are just some examples of this booming phenomenon, digital heritage is a representation of heritage in the digital realm. Digital intangible heritage is a sub-category of Intangible Cultural Heritage, each member of the community possesses a piece of the shared knowledge. Crucial knowledge is passed on during community activities, frequently without any attention to the process. Prior to the UNESCO Convention, efforts had already made by a number of states to safeguard their intangible heritage. Other countries, including South Korea, the Philippines, the United States, Thailand, France, Romania, the Czech Republic, in 2003 UNESCO adopted the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. This went into effect on 20 April 2006, UNESCO has also created other intangible culture programs, such as a list called Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. This list began in 2001 with 19 items and a further 28 were listed in 2003 and it was superseded in 2008 by the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists. The issue still remains open in legal scholarship, document from Newfoundland, Canada Exploring a Model of Living Cultural Heritage New model of Intangible heritage
17.
Language acquisition
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Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate. Language acquisition is one of the human traits, because non-humans do not communicate by using language. Language acquisition usually refers to first-language acquisition, which studies infants acquisition of their native language and this is distinguished from second-language acquisition, which deals with the acquisition of additional languages. The capacity to use language requires one to acquire a range of tools including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics. Language can be vocalized as in speech, or manual as in sign, human language capacity is represented in the brain. Even though human language capacity is finite, one can say and understand a number of sentences. Evidence suggests that individual has three recursive mechanisms that allow sentences to go indeterminately. These three mechanisms are, relativization, complementation and coordination, some early observation-based ideas about language acquisition were proposed by Plato, who felt that word-meaning mapping in some form was innate. In a more modern context, empiricists, like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, proponents of behaviorism argued that language may be learned through a form of operant conditioning. In B. F. Skinners Verbal Behaviour, he suggested that the use of a sign, such as a word or lexical unit, given a certain stimulus. Some empiricist theories of language include the statistical learning theory. Charles F. Hockett of language acquisition, relational frame theory, functionalist linguistics, social interactionist theory, Skinners behaviourist idea was strongly attacked by Noam Chomsky in a review article in 1959, calling it largely mythology and a serious delusion. Arguments against Skinners idea of language acquisition through operant conditioning include the fact that children often ignore language corrections from adults. Instead, children follow a pattern of using an irregular form of a word correctly, making errors later on. For example, a child may learn the word gave. Eventually, the child will go back to learning the correct word. The pattern is difficult to attribute to Skinners idea of operant conditioning as the way that children acquire language. Chomsky argued that if language were solely acquired through behavioral conditioning, children would not likely learn the use of a word
18.
Garajonay National Park
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Garajonay National Park is located in the center and north of the island of La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands. It was declared a park in 1981 and a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1986. It occupies 40 km2 and it extends into each of the six municipalities on the island, the park is named after the rock formation of Garajonay, the highest point on the island at 1,487 m. It also includes a small plateau whose altitude is 790-1,400 m above sea level, the park provides the best example of Canarian laurisilva, a humid subtropical forest that in the Tertiary covered almost all of Southern Europe. It is also found on the Azores and the Madeira Islands, although named as a single type of forest, the national park englobes several varieties of forests. Most humid and protected valleys oriented to the North have the richest and most complex forests and it is known as valley laurisilva, a true subtropical rainforest where the largest laurel trees can be found. At higher altitudes, with protection from wind and sun. Here it is called slope laurisilva, at the south the forest is mainly a mix of beech and heather, species adapted to the less humid atmosphere. Other attractions of the park are the massive rocks that are found along the island. These are former volcanoes whose shapes have been carved by erosion, some, like the Fortaleza were considered sacred by the native islanders, as well as ideal refuges when attacked. The park is crossed by a network of 18 footpaths. Two species of reptile, Gallotia gomerana and Chalcides viridanus, can be found, amphibians include the stripeless tree frog, Hyla meridionalis. The park is renowned as one of the best places to observe the two Canarian endemic pigeons, laurel pigeon and Bolles pigeon, in August 2012, a forest fire burned 747 hectareas of this national park. The peak and park are named after Guanche lore, the hapless lovers Gara and their romance evokes those of Romeo and Juliet and Hero and Leander. Gara was a princess of Agulo on La Gomera, during the festival of Beñesmén, it was customary for unmarried girls of Agulo to gaze at their reflections in the waters of Chorros del Epina. If the water was clear, they would find a husband, if it was cloudy, when Gara looked at the water, she saw her reflection clearly. However, she gazed too long and the suns reflection blinded her temporarily, a wise man named Gerián told her that this meant that she needed to avoid all fire or else it would consume her. Jonay was the son of the Guanche mencey or king of Adeje on Tenerife, jonays participation in the ensuing games attracted the attention of Gara, and the two fell in love
19.
University of La Laguna
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The University of La Laguna, also known as the ULL, is situated in San Cristóbal de La Laguna, on the island of Tenerife. It is the oldest university in the Canary Islands and it has six campuses, Central, Anchieta, Guajara, Campus del Sur, Ofra and Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Meanwhile, in 2016 the University of La Laguna was recognized as the second best university in Spain in Humanities and its origins date to the year 1701 when a center for advanced studies was established by the Augustinians in the town of La Laguna. A Papal Bull of 1744 proposed that it be converted into the Ecclesiastical University of San Agustín, however, with the restoration of the House of Bourbon in the guise of Fernando VII of Spain, the university was established at La Laguna as the Universidad de San Fernando. In this role it played an important role the priest Cristóbal Bencomo y Rodríguez, confessor of King Ferdinand VII, split their units in the cities of San Cristóbal de La Laguna and Santa Cruz de Tenerife. University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria List of early modern universities in Europe La Laguna University
20.
University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle
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The New Sorbonne University is a public university in Paris, France. New Sorbonne University is one of the inheritors of the former arts, the historic University of Paris first appeared in the second half of the 12th century, but was reorganised in 1970 as 13 autonomous universities after the student protests of the French May. Following months of conflict between students and authorities at the University of Paris at Nanterre, the shut down that university on May 2,1968. Students of the Sorbonne protested the closure and the expulsion of several students at Nanterre on May 3,1968. More than 20,000 students, teachers and supporters marched towards the Sorbonne, still sealed off by the police, who charged, wielding their batons, as soon as the marchers approached. While the crowd dispersed, some began to create out of whatever was at hand, while others threw paving stones. The police then responded with tear gas and charged the crowd again, negotiations broke down and students returned to their campuses after a false report that the government had agreed to reopen them, only to discover the police still occupying the schools. The students now had a near revolutionary fervor, another protest was organized on the Rive Gauche by students on May 10. When the riot police blocked them from crossing the river, the crowd again threw up barricades. The confrontation, which produced hundreds of arrests and injuries, lasted until dawn of the following day, well over a million people marched through Paris on Monday, May 13, the police stayed largely out of sight. Prime Minister Georges Pompidou personally announced the release of the prisoners, however, the surge of strikes did not recede. Instead, the protesters got even more active, when the Sorbonne reopened, students occupied it and declared it an autonomous peoples university. After the tumultuous events of May 1968, the French Fifth Republic proposed various reforms of the French university system. In 1971, the five ancient faculties of the former University of Paris were split, four of these new universities now share the premises of the historic Sorbonne building, which, until that time, had been mainly reserved for the Faculties of Arts and Human Sciences. These four universities were given other premises in different locations throughout Paris. The University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne also wanted to keep Sorbonne for the international recognition, the Sorbonne premises also house part of the Paris Descartes University and the Chancellery, the educational authority of Paris. La Sorbonne offers courses in a range of Arts and Humanities subjects. The Sorbonne Nouvelle has sites at locations in Paris
21.
Harmonic
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A harmonic is any member of the harmonic series, the divergent infinite series. Every term of the series after the first is the mean of the neighboring terms. The phrase harmonic mean likewise derives from music, the term is employed in various disciplines, including music, physics, acoustics, electronic power transmission, radio technology, and other fields. It is typically applied to repeating signals, such as sinusoidal waves, a harmonic of such a wave is a wave with a frequency that is a positive integer multiple of the frequency of the original wave, known as the fundamental frequency. The original wave is called the 1st harmonic, the following harmonics are known as higher harmonics. As all harmonics are periodic at the frequency, the sum of harmonics is also periodic at that frequency. On strings, harmonics that are bowed have a glassy, pure tone, harmonics may also be called overtones, partials or upper partials. In some music contexts, the harmonic, overtone and partial are used fairly interchangeably. Most acoustic instruments emit complex tones containing many individual partials, rather, a musical note is perceived as one sound, the quality or timbre of that sound being a result of the relative strengths of the individual partials. Oscillators that produce harmonic partials behave somewhat like one-dimensional resonators, and are long and thin. Wind instruments whose air column is open at one end, such as trumpets and clarinets. However they only produce partials matching the odd harmonics, at least in theory, the reality of acoustic instruments is such that none of them behaves as perfectly as the somewhat simplified theoretical models would predict. Partials whose frequencies are not integer multiples of the fundamental are referred to as inharmonic partials, antique singing bowls are known for producing multiple harmonic partials or multiphonics. An overtone is any partial higher than the lowest partial in a compound tone, the relative strengths and frequency relationships of the component partials determine the timbre of an instrument. This chart demonstrates how the three types of names are counted, In many musical instruments, it is possible to play the upper harmonics without the note being present. In a simple case this has the effect of making the note go up in pitch by an octave, in some cases it also changes the timbre of the note. This is part of the method of obtaining higher notes in wind instruments. The extended technique of playing multiphonics also produces harmonics, on string instruments it is possible to produce very pure sounding notes, called harmonics or flageolets by string players, which have an eerie quality, as well as being high in pitch
22.
Formant
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A formant, as defined by James Jeans, is a harmonic of a note that is augmented by a resonance. The speech researcher Gunnar Fant defines formants as the peaks of the sound spectrum |P|. In speech science and phonetics, however, a formant is also used to mean an acoustic resonance of the human vocal tract. Thus, in phonetics, formant can mean either a resonance or the maximum that the resonance produces. A room can be said to have formants characteristic of that room, due to the way sound reflects from its walls. Room formants of this nature reinforce themselves by emphasizing specific frequencies and absorbing others, as exploited, for example, Formants are distinctive frequency components of the acoustic signal produced by speech or singing. The information that humans require to distinguish speech sounds can be represented purely quantitatively by specifying peaks in the amplitude/frequency spectrum. Most of these formants are produced by tube and chamber resonance, the formant with the lowest frequency is called F1, the second F2, and the third F3. Most often the two first formants, F1 and F2, are enough to disambiguate the vowel, an interactive demonstration of this can be found here. Nasal consonants usually have an additional formant around 2500 Hz, the liquid usually has an extra formant at 1500 Hz, whereas the English r sound is distinguished by a very low third formant. Plosives modify the placement of formants in the surrounding vowels, the time course of these changes in vowel formant frequencies are referred to as formant transitions. If the fundamental frequency of the vibration is higher than a resonance frequency of the system. This is most apparent in the example of opera singers. Spectrograms are used to visualise formants, the first two formants are important in determining the quality of vowels, and are frequently said to correspond to the open/close and front/back dimensions. As can be seen in Fig.1, vowels will almost always have four or more distinguishable formants, sometimes there are more than six. An example of how the vowels of a language or dialect may be plotted on a traditional auditory vowel chart, many writers have addressed the problem of finding an optimal alignment of the positions of vowels on formant plots with those on the conventional vowel quadrilateral. Two alternatives to the Mel scale are the Bark scale and the ERB-rate scale, a comparison of these three scales is shown by Hayward, p.141, and formant plots based on the Hertz scale and on the Bark scale are compared on p.153. Another strategy for improving formant plots that has widely adopted is to plot on the horizontal axis not the value of F2
23.
Continuant
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A continuant is a speech sound produced with an incomplete closure of the oral vocal tract. Among consonants, there are two categories of continuants, fricatives and approximants. Approximants are sometimes called frictionless continuants, compare sonorant, which includes approximants and nasals but not fricatives. Both terms technically include vowels, but are restricted to the context of consonants. List of phonetics topics Obstruent Schwa Spectromorphology
24.
Voice (phonetics)
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Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterise speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced. It can also refer to a classification of sounds that tend to be associated with vocal cord vibration. That is the primary use in phonology to describe phonemes or in phonetics to describe phones. At the articulatory level, a sound is one in which the vocal cords vibrate. For example, voicing accounts for the difference between the pair of sounds associated with the English letters s and z, the two sounds are transcribed as and to distinguish them from the English letters, which have several possible pronunciations, depending on the context. If one places the fingers on the box, one can feel a vibration while zzzz is pronounced. In most European languages, with an exception being Icelandic, vowels. When used to classify speech sounds, voiced and unvoiced are merely used to group phones and phonemes together for the purposes of classification. The International Phonetic Alphabet has distinct letters for many voiceless and voiced pairs of consonants, in addition, there is a diacritic for voicedness, ⟨◌̬⟩. Diacritics are typically used with letters for prototypically voiceless sounds, in Unicode, the symbols are encoded U+032C ◌̬ COMBINING CARON BELOW and U+0325 ◌̥ COMBINING RING BELOW. For the example, ₍s̬₎ could be an with voicing in the middle, partial voicing can also be indicated in the normal IPA with transcriptions like and. The distinction between the use of voice and the phonological use rests on the distinction between phone and phoneme. The difference is best illustrated by a rough example, the English word nods is made up of a sequence of phonemes, represented symbolically as /nɒdz/, or the sequence of /n/, /ɒ/, /d/, and /z/. Each symbol is a representation of a phoneme. That awareness is an inherent part of speakers mental grammar that allows them to recognise words, however, phonemes are not sounds in themselves. Rather, phonemes are, in a sense, converted to phones before being spoken. The /z/ phoneme, for instance, can actually be pronounced as either the phone or the phone since /z/ is frequently devoiced, even in fluent speech, the sequence of phones for nods might be transcribed as or, depending on the presence or strength of this devoicing. While the phone has articulatory voicing, the phone does not have it, what complicates the matter is that for English, consonant phonemes are classified as either voiced or voiceless even though it is not the primary distinctive feature between them
25.
Dental consonant
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A dental consonant is a consonant articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth, such as /t/, /d/, /n/, and /l/ in some languages. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the diacritic for dental consonant is U+032A ◌̪ COMBINING BRIDGE BELOW, sanskrit, Hindi and all other Indic languages have an entire set of dental stops that occur phonemically as voiced and voiceless, and with or without aspiration. The nasal /n/ also exists in languages, but is quite alveolar. To the Indian speaker, the alveolar /t/ and /d/ of English sound more like the corresponding retroflex consonants of his own language than like the dentals. Spanish /t/ and /d/ are laminal denti-alveolar, whereas /l/ and /n/ are prototypically alveolar, likewise, Italian /t/, /d/, /t͡s/, /d͡z/ are denti-alveolar and /l/ and /n/ become denti-alveolar before a following dental consonant. In the case of French, the rear-most contact is alveolar or sometimes slightly pre-alveolar, the Sounds of the Worlds Languages
26.
Palatal consonant
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Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate. Consonants with the tip of the tongue curled back against the palate are called retroflex, the most common type of palatal consonant is the extremely common approximant, which ranks as among the ten most common sounds in the worlds languages. The nasal is also common, occurring in around 35 percent of the languages, in most of which its equivalent obstruent is not the stop. Consonants with other primary articulations may be palatalized, that is, for example, English has such a palatal component, although its primary articulation involves the tip of the tongue and the upper gum. In phonology, alveolo-palatal, palatoalveolar and palatovelar consonants are commonly grouped as palatals, sometimes palatalized alveolars or dentals can be analyzed in this manner as well. Palatal consonants can be distinguished from palatalized consonants and consonant clusters of a consonant, palatal and palatalized consonants are both single phonemes, whereas a sequence of a consonant and is logically two phonemes. Irish distinguishes the palatal nasal /ɲ/ from the alveolar nasal /nʲ/. In fact, some conservative Irish dialects have two palatalized alveolar nasals, distinguished as fortis vs. lenis. Also, languages that have sequences of consonants and /j/, but no separate palatal or palatalized consonants and this is due to the principle of least effort and is an example of the general phenomenon of coarticulation. For a table of examples of palatal /ɲ ʎ/ in the Romance languages, palatal consonants are written this way in the International Phonetic Alphabet, Palatalization Palatalization Place of articulation List of phonetics topics Ladefoged, Peter, Maddieson, Ian. The Sounds of the Worlds Languages
27.
Pulmonary alveolus
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An alveolus is a hollow cavity found in the lung parenchyma, and is the basic unit of respiration. Lung alveoli are the ends of the tree, branching from either alveolar sacs or alveolar ducts. Alveoli are particular to mammalian lungs, different structures are involved in gas exchange in other vertebrates. The alveolar membrane is the gas-exchange surface, carbon dioxide rich blood is pumped from the rest of the body into the alveolar blood vessels where, through diffusion, it releases its carbon dioxide and absorbs oxygen. The alveoli are located in the zone of the lungs, at the ends of the alveolar ducts and alveolar sac. They provide total surface area of about 75 m2, a typical pair of human lungs contain about 700 million alveoli, producing 70m2 of surface area. Each alveolus is wrapped in a mesh of capillaries covering about 70% of its area. An adult alveolus has an diameter of 200 micrometres, with an increase in diameter during inhalation. The alveoli consist of a layer and an extracellular matrix surrounded by small blood vessels called capillaries. In some alveolar walls there are pores between alveoli called Pores of Kohn, the alveoli contain some collagen and elastic fibres. The elastic fibres allow the alveoli to stretch as they are filled with air during inhalation and they then spring back during exhalation in order to expel the carbon dioxide-rich air. There are three types of cell in the alveolar wall–two types of alveolar cell and a phagocyte. Surfactant is continuously released by exocytosis and it forms an underlying aqueous protein-containing hypophase and an overlying phospholipid film composed primarily of dipalmitoyl phosphatidylcholine. The phagocytes are macrophages, that destroy foreign material, such as bacteria, the wall of each alveolus, is lined by thin, flat, type I cells, contains numerous capillaries, and is the site of gas exchange, which occurs by diffusion. The relatively low solubility of oxygen necessitates the large surface area. Weaving between the capillaries and helping to support them is a fabric of elastic and collagenous fibres. The collagen fibres, being rigid, give the wall firmness. The other type II cells in the wall are granular cells, which secrete surfactant
28.
Pharyngeal consonant
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A pharyngeal consonant is a consonant that is articulated primarily in the pharynx. Stops and trills can be produced only at the epiglottis. When they are treated as distinct places of articulation, the term radical consonant may be used as a cover term, in many languages, pharyngeal consonants trigger advancement of neighboring vowels. Pharyngeals thus differ from uvulars, which nearly always trigger retraction, in addition, consonants and vowels may be secondarily pharyngealized. Also, strident vowels are defined by an accompanying epiglottal trill, pharyngeal/epiglottal consonants in the International Phonetic Alphabet, *A voiced epiglottal stop may not be possible. When an epiglottal stop becomes voiced intervocalically in Dahalo, for example, phonetically, however, voiceless vs voiced affricates or off-glides are attested. ** Although traditionally placed in the row of the IPA chart, is usually an approximant. Frication is difficult to produce or to distinguish because the voicing in the glottis, the IPA symbol is ambiguous, but no language distinguishes fricative and approximant at this place of articulation. For clarity, the diacritic may used to specify that the manner is approximant. The Hydaburg dialect of Haida has a trilled epiglottal and a trilled epiglottal affricate ~, because and occur at the same Pharyngeal/Epiglottal place of articulation, the logical phonetic distinction to make between them is in manner of articulation, trill versus fricative. Edmondson et al. distinguish several subtypes of pharyngeal consonant, pharyngeal or epiglottal stops and trills are usually produced by contracting the aryepiglottic folds of the larynx against the epiglottis. That articulation has been distinguished as aryepiglottal, in pharyngeal fricatives, the root of the tongue is retracted against the back wall of the pharynx. The IPA does not have diacritics to distinguish this articulation from standard aryepiglottals, Edmonson et al. use the ad hoc, somewhat misleading, transcriptions ⟨ʕ͡ʡ⟩, there are, however, several diacritics for subtypes of pharyngeal sound among the Voice Quality Symbols. Although upper-pharyngeal stops are not found in the languages, as far as is known. In Finnish, a weak pharyngeal fricative is the realization of /h/ after the vowels /ɑ/ or /æ/ in syllable-coda position, such as star, the approximant is more common, as it is the realization of /r/ in such European languages as Danish and Swabian German. According to the theory, Proto-Indo-European might have had pharyngeal consonants. The fricatives and trills are frequently conflated with pharyngeal fricatives in literature and that was the case for Dahalo and Northern Haida, for example, and it is likely to be true for many other languages. The distinction between these sounds was recognized by IPA only in 1989, and it was little investigated until the 1990s, pharyngealization Strident vowel Ayin Heth Guttural Ladefoged, Peter, Maddieson, Ian
29.
Labial consonant
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Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. The two common labial articulations are bilabials, articulated using both lips, and labiodentals, articulated with the lip against the upper teeth, both of which are present in English. A third labial articulation is dentolabials, articulated with the lip against the lower teeth. Generally precluded are linguolabials, in which the tip of the contacts the posterior side of the upper lip, making them coronals, though sometimes. The most common distribution between bilabials and labiodentals is the English one, in which the stops, and, are bilabial and the fricatives, bilabial fricatives and the bilabial approximant do not exist in English, but they occur in many languages. For example, the Spanish consonant written b or v is pronounced, lip rounding, or labialization, is a common approximant-like co-articulatory feature. English /w/ is a labialized velar approximant, which is far more common than the purely labial approximant. In the languages of the Caucasus, labialized dorsals like /kʷ/ and /qʷ/ are very common, very few languages, however, make a distinction purely between bilabials and labiodentals, making labial usually a sufficient specification of a languages phonemes. One exception is Ewe, which has both kinds of fricatives, but the labiodentals are produced with greater articulatory force, while most languages make use of purely labial phonemes, a few generally lack them. Examples are Tlingit, Eyak, Wichita, and the Iroquoian languages except Cherokee, all of these languages have seen labials introduced under the influence of English. Many of these languages are transcribed with /w/ and with labialized consonants, however, it is not always clear to what extent the lips are involved in such sounds. In the Iroquoian languages, for example, /w/ involved little apparent rounding of the lips, see the Tillamook language for an example of a language with rounded consonants and vowels that do not have any actual labialization. Labialization List of phonetics topics Ladefoged, Peter, Maddieson, Ian, the Sounds of the Worlds Languages. McDorman, Richard E. Labial Instability in Sound Change, Explanations for the Loss of /p/
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University of Washington
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The University of Washington, commonly referred to as simply Washington, UW, or informally U-Dub, is a public flagship research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast, the university has three campuses, the oldest and largest in the University District of Seattle and two others in Tacoma and Bothell. Washington is a member of the Association of American Universities and is ranked among the top 15 universities in the world by a variety of international publications. In athletics, the university competes in the NCAA Division I Pac-12 Conference and its athletic teams are called the Huskies. Seattle was one of several settlements in the mid to late 19th century vying for primacy in the new Washington Territory, in 1854, territorial governor Isaac Stevens recommended the establishment of a university in Washington. Several prominent Seattle-area residents, chief among them Methodist preacher Daniel Bagley and they convinced early founder of Seattle and member of the territorial legislature Arthur A. Denny of the importance of Seattle winning the school. When no site emerged, the legislature, encouraged by Denny, in 1861, scouting began for an appropriate 10 acres site in Seattle to serve as the campus for a new university. Arthur and Mary Denny donated eight acres, and fellow pioneers Edward Lander and Charlie and this tract was bounded by 4th and 6th Avenues on the west and east and Union and Seneca Streets on the north and south. UW opened on November 4,1861, as the Territorial University of Washington, the following year, the legislature passed articles incorporating the University and establishing a Board of Regents. The school struggled initially, closing three times, in 1863 for lack of students, and again in 1867 and 1876 due to shortage of funds. However, Clara Antoinette McCarty Wilt became the first graduate of UW in 1876 when she graduated from UW with a degree in science. By the time Washington entered the Union in 1889, both Seattle and the University had grown substantially, enrollment increased from 30 students to nearly 300, and the relative isolation of the campus had given way to encroaching development. A special legislative committee headed by UW graduate Edmond Meany was created to find a new campus able to serve the growing student population. The committee selected a site on Union Bay northeast of downtown, the university relocated from downtown to the new campus in 1895, moving into the newly built Denny Hall. The regents tried and failed to sell the old campus, the University still owns what is now called the Metropolitan Tract. In the heart of the city, it is among the most valuable pieces of estate in Seattle. The original Territorial University building was torn down in 1908 and its former site houses the Fairmont Olympic Hotel. The sole surviving remnants of UWs first building are four 24-foot, white, hand-fluted cedar and they were salvaged by Edmond S. Meany—one of the Universitys first graduates and the former head of the history department
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Functional magnetic resonance imaging
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Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI is a functional neuroimaging procedure using MRI technology that measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. This technique relies on the fact that blood flow and neuronal activation are coupled. When an area of the brain is in use, blood flow to that also increases. The primary form of fMRI uses the blood-oxygen-level dependent contrast, discovered by Seiji Ogawa and this measure is frequently corrupted by noise from various sources and hence statistical procedures are used to extract the underlying signal. The resulting brain activation can be presented graphically by color-coding the strength of activation across the brain or the specific region studied, the technique can localize activity to within millimeters but, using standard techniques, no better than within a window of a few seconds. Other methods of obtaining contrast are arterial spin labeling and diffusion MRI, the latter procedure is similar to BOLD fMRI but provides contrast based on the magnitude of diffusion of water molecules in the brain. FMRI is used both in the world, and to a lesser extent, in the clinical world. It can also be combined and complemented with other measures of brain physiology such as EEG, newer methods which improve both spatial and time resolution are being researched, and these largely use biomarkers other than the BOLD signal. Some companies have developed products such as lie detectors based on fMRI techniques. The fMRI concept builds on the earlier MRI scanning technology and the discovery of properties of oxygen-rich blood, MRI brain scans use a strong, permanent, static magnetic field to align nuclei in the brain region being studied. Another magnetic field, the gradient field, is applied to spatially locate different nuclei. Finally, a pulse is played to kick the nuclei to higher magnetization levels. When the RF field is removed, the nuclei go back to their states. MRI thus provides a static view of brain matter. The central thrust behind fMRI was to extend MRI to capture changes in the brain caused by neuronal activity. Differences in magnetic properties between arterial and venous blood provided this link, since the 1890s it has been known that changes in blood flow and blood oxygenation in the brain are closely linked to neural activity. When neurons become active, local blood flow to those regions increases. This rises to a peak over 4–6 seconds, before falling back to the original level, oxygen is carried by the hemoglobin molecule in red blood cells
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Documentary film
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A documentary film is a nonfictional motion picture intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education, or maintaining a historical record. Documentary has been described as a practice, a cinematic tradition. Polish writer and filmmaker Bolesław Matuszewski was among those who identified the mode of documentary film and he wrote two of the earliest texts on cinema Une nouvelle source de lhistoire and La photographie animée. Both were published in 1898 in French and among the written works to consider the historical. Matuszewski is also among the first filmmakers to propose the creation of a Film Archive to collect, the American film critic Pare Lorentz defines a documentary film as a factual film which is dramatic. Others further state that a documentary stands out from the types of non-fiction films for providing an opinion. Documentary practice is the process of creating documentary projects. Documentary filmmaking can be used as a form of journalism, advocacy, early film was dominated by the novelty of showing an event. They were single-shot moments captured on film, a train entering a station and these short films were called actuality films, the term documentary was not coined until 1926. Many of the first films, such as made by Auguste and Louis Lumière, were a minute or less in length. Films showing many people were made for commercial reasons, the people being filmed were eager to see, for payment. One notable film clocked in at over an hour and a half, using pioneering film-looping technology, Enoch J. Rector presented the entirety of a famous 1897 prize-fight on cinema screens across the United States, in May 1896, Bolesław Matuszewski recorded on film few surigical operations in Warsaw and Saint Petersburg hospitals. In 1898, French surgeon Eugène-Louis Doyen invited Bolesław Matuszewski and Clément Maurice and they started in Paris a series of surgical films sometime before July 1898. Until 1906, the year of his last film, Doyen recorded more than 60 operations, Doyen said that his first films taught him how to correct professional errors he had been unaware of. These and five other of Doyens films survive, all these short films have been preserved. I must say I forgot those works and I am thankful to you that you reminded them to me, unfortunately, not many scientists have followed your way. Travelogue films were popular in the early part of the 20th century
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Anthropology
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Anthropology is the study of various aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology and cultural anthropology study the norms and values of societies, linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the development of humans. The abstract noun anthropology is first attested in reference to history and its present use first appeared in Renaissance Germany in the works of Magnus Hundt and Otto Casmann. Their New Latin anthropologia derived from the forms of the Greek words ánthrōpos and lógos. It began to be used in English, possibly via French anthropologie, various short-lived organizations of anthropologists had already been formed. The Société Ethnologique de Paris, the first to use Ethnology, was formed in 1839 and its members were primarily anti-slavery activists. When slavery was abolished in France in 1848 the Société was abandoned and these anthropologists of the times were liberal, anti-slavery, and pro-human-rights activists. Anthropology and many other current fields are the results of the comparative methods developed in the earlier 19th century. For them, the publication of Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species was the epiphany of everything they had begun to suspect, Darwin himself arrived at his conclusions through comparison of species he had seen in agronomy and in the wild. Darwin and Wallace unveiled evolution in the late 1850s, there was an immediate rush to bring it into the social sciences. When he read Darwin he became a convert to Transformisme. His definition now became the study of the group, considered as a whole, in its details. Broca, being what today would be called a neurosurgeon, had taken an interest in the pathology of speech and he wanted to localize the difference between man and the other animals, which appeared to reside in speech. He discovered the speech center of the brain, today called Brocas area after him. The title was translated as The Anthropology of Primitive Peoples. The last two volumes were published posthumously, Waitz defined anthropology as the science of the nature of man. By nature he meant matter animated by the Divine breath, i. e. he was an animist and he stresses that the data of comparison must be empirical, gathered by experimentation
34.
Qinghai
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Qinghai, formerly known in English as Kokonur, is a province of the Peoples Republic of China located in the northwest of the country. As one of the largest province-level administrative divisions of China by area, the province is ranked fourth-largest in size, but has the third-smallest population. Located mostly on the Tibetan Plateau, the province has long been a melting pot for a number of groups including the Han, Tibetans, Hui, Tu, Mongols. Qinghai borders Gansu on the northeast, Xinjiang on the northwest, Sichuan on the southeast, Qinghai province was established in 1928 under the Republic of China period during which it was ruled by Chinese Muslim warlords known as the Ma clique. The Chinese name, Qinghai is named after Qinghai Lake, the largest lake in China, the province was known formerly as Kokonur in English, derived from the Oirat name for Qinghai Lake. During Chinas Bronze Age, Qinghai was home to the Qiang people who made a living in agriculture and husbandry. The eastern part of the area of Qinghai was under the control of the Han dynasty about 2000 years ago and it was a battleground during the Tang and subsequent Chinese dynasties when they fought against successive Tibetan tribes. In the middle of 3rd century CE, nomadic people related to the Mongolic Xianbei migrated to lands around the Qinghai Lake. In the 7th century, Tuyuhun Kingdom was attacked by both the Tibetan Empire and Tang dynasty as both of them control over trade routes. Military conflicts severely weakened the kingdom and it was incorporated into the Tibetan Empire, after the disintegration of the Tibetan Empire, small local factions emerged, some under the titular authority of China. The Song dynasty defeated the Tibetan Kokonor Kingdom in the 1070s, most of Qinghai was once also a short time under the control of early Ming dynasty, but later gradually lost to the Khoshut Khanate founded by the Oirats. The Xunhua Salar Autonomous County is where most Salar people live in Qinghai, the Salars migrated to Qinghai from Samarkand in 1370. The chief of the four upper clans around this time was Han Pao-yuan and Ming granted him office of centurion, the other chief Han Shan-pa of the four lower Salar clans got the same office from Ming, and his clans were the ones who took Ma as their surname. From 1640 to 1724, a big part of the area that is now Qinghai was under Khoshut Mongol control and it was during the 1720s when Xining Prefecture was established and its borders were roughly those of modern Qinghai province. Xining, the capital of modern Qinghai province was built in this period as the administrative center, during the rule of the Qing dynasty, the governor was a viceroy of the Qing Emperor, but the local ethnic groups enjoyed much autonomy. Many chiefs retained their authority, participating in local administrations. The Dungan revolt devastated the Hui Muslim population of Shaanxi, shifting the Hui center of population to Gansu, another Dungan revolt broke out in Qinghai in 1895 when various Muslim ethnic groups in Qinghai and Gansu rebelled against the Qing. In July–August 1912, General Ma Fuxiang was Acting Chief Executive Officer of Kokonur, in 1928, Qinghai province was created
35.
China
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China, officially the Peoples Republic of China, is a unitary sovereign state in East Asia and the worlds most populous country, with a population of over 1.381 billion. The state is governed by the Communist Party of China and its capital is Beijing, the countrys major urban areas include Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Tianjin and Hong Kong. China is a power and a major regional power within Asia. Chinas landscape is vast and diverse, ranging from forest steppes, the Himalaya, Karakoram, Pamir and Tian Shan mountain ranges separate China from much of South and Central Asia. The Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, the third and sixth longest in the world, respectively, Chinas coastline along the Pacific Ocean is 14,500 kilometers long and is bounded by the Bohai, Yellow, East China and South China seas. China emerged as one of the worlds earliest civilizations in the basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. For millennia, Chinas political system was based on hereditary monarchies known as dynasties, in 1912, the Republic of China replaced the last dynasty and ruled the Chinese mainland until 1949, when it was defeated by the communist Peoples Liberation Army in the Chinese Civil War. The Communist Party established the Peoples Republic of China in Beijing on 1 October 1949, both the ROC and PRC continue to claim to be the legitimate government of all China, though the latter has more recognition in the world and controls more territory. China had the largest economy in the world for much of the last two years, during which it has seen cycles of prosperity and decline. Since the introduction of reforms in 1978, China has become one of the worlds fastest-growing major economies. As of 2016, it is the worlds second-largest economy by nominal GDP, China is also the worlds largest exporter and second-largest importer of goods. China is a nuclear weapons state and has the worlds largest standing army. The PRC is a member of the United Nations, as it replaced the ROC as a permanent member of the U. N. Security Council in 1971. China is also a member of numerous formal and informal multilateral organizations, including the WTO, APEC, BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the BCIM, the English name China is first attested in Richard Edens 1555 translation of the 1516 journal of the Portuguese explorer Duarte Barbosa. The demonym, that is, the name for the people, Portuguese China is thought to derive from Persian Chīn, and perhaps ultimately from Sanskrit Cīna. Cīna was first used in early Hindu scripture, including the Mahābhārata, there are, however, other suggestions for the derivation of China. The official name of the state is the Peoples Republic of China. The shorter form is China Zhōngguó, from zhōng and guó and it was then applied to the area around Luoyi during the Eastern Zhou and then to Chinas Central Plain before being used as an occasional synonym for the state under the Qing
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Yoruba language
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Yoruba is a language spoken in West Africa. The number of speakers of Yoruba is approaching 30 million and it is a pluricentric language spoken principally in Benin and Nigeria, with communities in other parts of Africa, the Americas, and Europe. A variety of the language, Lucumi, is the language of the Santería religion of the Caribbean. Many Yoruba words are used in the Afro-Brazilian religion known as Candomblé, Yoruba is most closely related to the Itsekiri language and to Igala. The linguistic unity of the Niger–Congo family dates to deep prehistory, main article, Yoruboid languages The Yoruba group is assumed to have developed out of undifferentiated Volta–Niger populations by the 1st millennium BC. Settlements of early Yoruba speakers are assumed to correspond to those found in the wider Niger area from about the 4th century BC, especially at Ife. According to the Kay Williamson Scale, the following is the degree of relationship between Itsekiri and other Yoruboid dialects, using a word list of the most common words. A similarity of 100% would mean a total overlap of two dialects, while a similarity of 0 would mean two speech areas that have no relationship. The result of the wordlist analysis shows that Itsekiri bears the strongest similarity to the SEY dialects and most especially Ilaje and Ikale, at 80. 4% and 82. 3% similarity. Thus while the shows that Igala, with an overlap of 60% is a completely different language. The Yoruba dialect continuum itself consists of several dialects, the various Yoruba dialects in the Yorubaland of Nigeria can be classified into Five major dialect areas, Northwest, Northeast, Central, Southwest and Southeast. Clear boundaries cannot be drawn, peripheral areas of dialectal regions often having some similarities to adjoining dialects, north-West Yoruba Egba, Ibadan, Egbado/Yewa, Ọyọ, Western Ogun, Lagos/Eko. North-East Yoruba Yagba, Owe, Ijumu, Oworo, Gbede, Central Yoruba Igbomina, Ijesha, Ifẹ, Ekiti, Akurẹ, Ẹfọn. South-East Yoruba Ikale, Ilaje, Ondo City, Ọwọ, Idanre, Akoko, Remo, south-West Yoruba Ketu, Awori, Sakété, Ifè, Idasha, Ipokia/Anago. North-West Yoruba is historically a part of the Ọyọ Empire, ethnographically, traditional government is based on a division of power between civil and war chiefs, lineage and descent are unilineal and agnatic. South-East Yoruba was probably associated with the expansion of the Benin Empire after c, in contrast to NWY, lineage and descent are largely multilineal and cognatic, and the division of titles into war and civil is unknown. Linguistically, SEY has retained the /gh/ and /gw/ contrast, while it has lowered the nasal vowels /ịn/ and /ụn/ to /ẹn/ and /ọn/, the emergence of a plural of respect may have prevented coalescence of the two in NWY dialects. Central Yoruba forms an area in that the lexicon has much in common with NWY
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Tone (linguistics)
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Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. Languages that do have this feature are called tonal languages, the tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes /ˈtoʊniːm/. Tonal languages are common in Africa, East Asia, and Mexico. In many tonal African languages, such as most Bantu languages, tones are distinguished by their pitch relative to each other. In multisyllable words, a tone may be carried by the entire word rather than a different tone on each syllable. Often, grammatical information, such as past versus present, I versus you, many words, especially monosyllabic ones, are differentiated solely by tone. In a multisyllabic word, each syllable often carries its own tone, unlike in Bantu systems, tone plays little role in modern Chinese grammar though the tones descend from features in Old Chinese that had morphological significance. Contour systems are typical of languages of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, including Tai–Kadai, Vietic, the Afroasiatic, Khoisan, Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in Africa are dominated by register systems. Many languages use tone in a limited way. In Japanese, fewer than half of the words have a drop in pitch, such minimal systems are sometimes called pitch accent since they are reminiscent of stress accent languages, which typically allow one principal stressed syllable per word. However, there is debate over the definition of pitch accent, most languages of Sub-Saharan Africa are members of the Niger-Congo family, which is predominantly tonal, notably excepting Swahili, most languages spoken in the Senegambia, Koyra Chiini and Fulani. The Afroasiatic languages include both tonal and nontonal branches, numerous tonal languages are widely spoken in China and Mainland Southeast Asia. Sino-Tibetan and Tai-Kadai languages are tonal, including Thai, Lao. The Hmong–Mien languages are some of the most tonal languages in the world, Austroasiatic and Austronesian languages are mostly non tonal with the rare exception of Austroasiatic languages like Vietnamese, and Austronesian languages like Cèmuhî and Utsul. Tones in Vietnamese and Utsul may result from heavy Chinese influence on both languages, there were tones in Middle Korean. Other languages represented in the region, such as Mongolian, Uyghur, in Europe, Swedish, Norwegian, Serbo-Croat, Slovene, Lithuanian, Latvian and Luxemburgish have tonal characteristics. Among the Indo-European languages of Asia, three Indo-Aryan languages have tonality, Punjabi, Dogri and Lahnda, although the Austronesian language family has some tonal members such as New Caledonias Cèmuhî language, no tonal languages have been discovered in Australia. A large number of North, South and Central American languages are tonal, including many of the Athabaskan languages of Alaska and the American Southwest, among the Mayan languages, which are mostly non-tonal, Yucatec, Uspantek, and one dialect of Tzotzil have developed tone systems
