The Sogdian language was an Eastern Iranian language spoken in the Central Asian region of Sogdia, located in modern-day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, as well as some Sogdian immigrant communities in ancient China. Sogdian is one of the most important Middle Iranian languages, along with Bactrian, Khotanese Saka, Middle Persian, Parthian, it possesses a large literary corpus. The Sogdian language is assigned to a Northeastern group of the Iranian languages. No direct evidence of an earlier version of the language has been found, although mention of the area in the Old Persian inscriptions means that a separate and recognisable Sogdia existed at least since the Achaemenid Empire. Like Khotanese, Sogdian possesses a more conservative morphology than Middle Persian; the modern Eastern Iranian language Yaghnobi is the descendant of a dialect of Sogdian spoken around the 8th century in Osrushana, a region to the south of Sogdia. During Tang China, the Silk Road's lingua franca in Central Asia was Sogdian, along which it amassed a rich vocabulary by loanwords such as tym from the Middle Chinese /tem/.

The economic and political importance of Sogdian guaranteed its survival in the first few centuries after the Muslim conquest of Sogdia in the early eighth century. A dialect of Sogdian spoken around the 8th century in Osrushana, a region to the south of Sogdia, developed into Yaghnobi language and has survived into the 21st century, it is spoken by the Yaghnobi people. The finding of manuscript fragments of the Sogdian language in China's Xinjiang region sparked the study of the Sogdian language. Robert Gauthiot, Paul Pelliot, began investigating the Sogdian material that Pelliot had discovered. Gauthiot published many articles based on his work with Pelliot's material, but died during the First World War. One of Gauthiot's most impressive articles was a glossary to the Sogdian text, which he was in the process of completing when he died; this work was continued by Émile Benveniste after Gauthiot's death. Various Sogdian pieces have been found in the Turfan text corpus by the German Turfan expeditions.

These expeditions were controlled by the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. These pieces consist entirely of religious works by Manichaean and Christian writers, including translations of the Bible. Most of the Sogdian religious works are from the 10th centuries. Dunhuang and Turfan were the two most plentiful sites of Manichean and Christian Sogdian texts. Sogdiana itself contained a much smaller collection of texts; these texts were business related, belonging to Divashtich. These business texts dated back to the time of the Muslim conquest, about 700. Like all the writing systems employed for Middle Iranian languages, the Sogdian alphabet derives from the Aramaic alphabet. Like its close relatives, the Pahlavi scripts, written Sogdian contains many logograms or ideograms, which were Aramaic words written to represent native spoken ones; the Sogdian script is the direct ancestor of the Old Uyghur alphabet, itself the forerunner of the Traditional Mongolian alphabet. As in other writing systems descended from the Proto-Sinaitic script, there are no special signs for vowels.

As in the parent Aramaic system, the consonantal signs ’ y w can be used as matres lectionis for the long vowels respectively. However, unlike it, these consonant signs would sometimes serve to express the short vowels. To distinguish long vowels from short ones, an additional aleph could be written before the sign denoting the long vowel; the Sogdian language used the Manichaean alphabet, which consisted of 29 letters. In transcribing Sogdian script into Roman letters, Aramaic ideograms are noted by means of capitals

Katsuji Matsumoto was a Japanese illustrator and shōjo manga artist. Matsumoto's 16-page The Mysterious Clover is recognized as a pioneering work in the field of manga, but he is best known for his shōjo manga Kurukuru Kurumi-chan, serialized from 1938 to 1940, again from 1949 to 1954, his illustrations were popular from the 1930s through the 1950s, he contributed illustrations to numerous popular girls' novels by some of the period's most famous authors, including Yasunari Kawabata and Nobuko Yoshiya. He was a prolific illustrator of children's books and created merchandise for babies, small children, girls; the Gallery Katsuji Matsumoto in Tokyo is managed by his surviving children. Matsumoto was born in Kobe, the son of Toraji and Ishi Matsumoto, but moved with his family to Tokyo at the age of eight. At the age of 13, he began attending what was called Rikkyō Middle School. Through the introduction of a teacher at Rikkyō, Matsumoto began drawing illustrations for the magazine Shinseinen at the age of 17.

Matsumoto withdrew from Rikkyō at the age of 18 and began attending the Kawabata ga gakkō. During this time he contributed drawings to such magazines as Shōjo Shōnen sekai, it was during this period that Matsumoto was inspired by illustrator Kōji Fukiya to become an illustrator in the field of girls' media. Following the devastation of Tokyo, including its publishing industry, in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, Matsumoto decided to try his fortunes overseas, managed to obtain free passage to Shanghai, his hope was to make his way to Paris. In Shanghai, he earned money by contributing illustrations and articles to the Shanhai nichinichi shinbun, but when he turned twenty years of age, he was forced to return to Japan to report for the draft, he was rejected for military service. Matsumoto's first forum for steady work was the magazine Shōjo Gahō, to which he contributed from 1928 to 1938. Matsumoto first ventured into manga in Shōjo Gahō, creating a series of illustrated narratives featuring a lively Chinese girl named Poku-chan, irregularly published between November 1930 and March 1934.

The Poku-chan strips were drawn in a stylized abstract, Art Deco manner. At around this time, Matsumoto took on Toshiko Ueda as an apprentice. Matsumoto could draw in a wide range of styles, from the realistic to the near-abstract, but all of his work was distinguished by clean geometrical lines and a Modern sensibility. While he illustrated numerous dramatic girls' novels, his style was better suited to sunny, playful, or humorous work. In 1935, Matsumoto began to work for the magazine that would become his primary forum, Shōjo no tomo. Shōjo no tomo, with its modern, stylish image, was the ideal magazine for Matsumoto. In 1932, at the age of 28, Matsumoto was wed to Ayako Nimori, they went on to have seven children together. Because Ayako was an only child, the decision was made to have the firstborn male child adopted by her parents in order to carry on the Nimori name. On official records, therefore, Ki Nimori is listed as the younger brother of Ayako, therefore the brother-in-law of Matsumoto.

In 1934, Matsumoto drew a 16-page story titled Nazo no kurōbaa. Printed as an over-sized pamphlet with a sturdy cardboard cover, included as a premium in the April issue of Shōjo no tomo, The Mysterious Clover was a variation on The Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro; the protagonist of The Mysterious Clover is a young girl who protects the poor peasants from the cruel and greedy nobles. This work is remarkable for its use of varying angles, including bird's-eye views, variation in the size of panels. Sakō Shishido, influenced by American newspaper strips, had used similar techniques in his 1930 Supiido Tarō, but in a far cruder drawing style than Matsumoto's; the Mysterious Clover had been neglected for decades by manga scholars until it was displayed at a 2006 exhibition at the Yayoi Art Museum, where it caught the eye of Fusanosuke Natsume, who wrote about it on his blog and in a newspaper column. Matsumoto's most famous work is his manga Kurukuru Kurumi-chan, serialized in Shōjo no tomo from January 1938 until December 1940.

Featuring the daily antics of a little girl named Kurumi, each episode was a self-contained story running 4 pages and 22 panels. The strip ventured far from everyday reality, was characterized by a building absurdity that descended to simple slapstick. In the earliest episodes, Kurumi-chan is four heads tall, would seem to be nine or ten years old. Over the years, Kurumi's proportions changed, until by the 1950s she had become an stylized character no more than two heads high, of unknown age; the strip was revived after the war in the magazine Shōjo under the title Kurumi-chan and ran from November 1949 to February 1954. While working on Kurukuru Kurumi-chan, Matsumoto continued to do freestanding illustrations, in both color and black and white, to illustrate girls' fiction and poetry. Matsumoto was one of the most popular and influential illustrators working in girls' media, he continued to be a popular illustrator through the early 1950s, he worked with such prominent Japanese authors and poets as Nobuko Yoshiya and Yaso Saijō, adapted many works by non-Japanese

Wyanett Township is a township in Isanti County, United States. The population was 1,698 at the 2000 census. Wyanett Township derives its name from a place in Illinois. According to the United States Census Bureau, the township has a total area of 35.7 square miles, of which 33.2 square miles of it is land and 2.5 square miles of it is water. As of the census of 2000, there were 1,698 people, 620 households, 497 families residing in the township; the population density was 51.1 people per square mile. There were 767 housing units at an average density of 23.1/sq mi. The racial makeup of the township was 97.94% White, 0.24% African American, 0.29% Native American, 0.35% Asian, 0.18% from other races, 1.00% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 1.59% of the population. There were 620 households out of which 32.4% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 71.6% were married couples living together, 4.4% had a female householder with no husband present, 19.7% were non-families.

15.6% of all households were made up of individuals and 5.5% had someone living alone, 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.74 and the average family size was 3.02. In the township the population was spread out with 25.6% under the age of 18, 6.8% from 18 to 24, 27.8% from 25 to 44, 27.4% from 45 to 64, 12.5% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 40 years. For every 100 females, there were 105.3 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 105.9 males. The median income for a household in the township was $53,309, the median income for a family was $61,806. Males had a median income of $41,612 versus $29,922 for females; the per capita income for the township was $22,481. About 3.3% of families and 4.9% of the population were below the poverty line, including 3.5% of those under age 18 and 5.7% of those age 65 or over