North Asia
North Asia or Northern Asia, sometimes referred to as Siberia or Eurasia, is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the Russian regions east of the Ural Mountains: Siberia and the Russian Far East. The region is sometimes known as Asian Russia. North Asia is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the west by Eastern Europe, to the south by Central and East Asia and to the east by the Pacific Ocean and North America. North Asia covers an area of 13,100,000 square kilometres or 8.8% of the earth's land area, or 1.5 times the size of Brazil. It is the largest subregion of Asia by area, but is the least populated, with an approximate total population of only 33 million people or 0.74% of Asia’s population. North Asia is administrated by Russia, makes up more than 75% of the territory of the country, but only 22% of its population, at a density of 2.5 people per km2. The region of Western Siberia and Kazakhstan is called Northwestern Asia or Northwest Asia. Topographically, the region is dominated by the Eurasian Plate, except for its eastern part, which lies on the North American and Okhotsk Plates.
It is divided by three major plains: the West Siberian Plain, Central Siberian Plateau and Verhoyansk-Chukotka collision zone. The Uralian orogeny in the west raised Ural Mountains, the informal boundary between Europe and Asia. Tectonic and volcanic activities are occurred in the eastern part of the region as part of the Ring of Fire, evidenced by the formation of island arc such as Kuril Islands and ultra-prominent peaks such as Klyuchevskaya Sopka and Koryaksky; the central part of North Asia is a large igneous province called the Siberian Traps, formed by a massive eruption occurred 250 million years ago. European influences Russian, are strong in the southwestern and central part of the region, due to its high Russian population from Eastern Europe which began to settle the area in the 18th-century CE; the southeastern part is under the influence of East Asian cultural sphere the Chinese. Indigenous cultures are strong in the eastern and southern part of the region due to concentrated population of indigenous ethnicities.
In recent years there are growing number of movements by the indigenous peoples of the region to preserve its culture from extinction. The region is the home of different peoples such as Turkic and Uralic peoples; the region was started to be populated by hominins in the Late Pleistocene 50,000 years ago, With the first humans arriving in the region having West Eurasian origins. Its Neolithic culture is characterized by a characteristic stone production techniques and presence of pottery of eastern origin. Bronze Age began during the 3rd-millennium BCE, with influences of Indo-Iranian cultures as evidenced by Andronovo culture. During the 1st-millennium BCE, polities such as the Scythians and Xiongnus emerged in the region, whom clashed with its Persian and Chinese neighbors in the south; the Turkic Khaganate dominated the southern Siberia during the 1st-millennium CE, while, in early 2nd-millennium CE, the Mongol Empire and its successor states ruled the region. The Khanate of Sibir was one of the last independent Turkic state in North Asia before its conquest by Tsardom of Russia in 16th-century CE.
Russia would gradually incorporate the region into its territory until the Convention of Peking was signed in 1860. After the October Revolution in 1917, the region was contested between the Bolsheviks and Whites until Soviet Union asserted full control in 1923; the collapse of Soviet Union in 1991 left Russia as the administrator of the region. For geographic and statistical reasons, the UN geoscheme and various other classification schemes will not subdivide countries, thus place all of Russia in the Europe or Eastern Europe subregion. There are no mountain chains in Northern Asia to prevent air currents from the Arctic flowing down over the plains of Siberia and Turkestan; the plateau and plains of Northern Asia comprise the West Siberian lowlands. Western Siberia is regarded as the Northwest Asia, Kazakhstan sometimes included there, but Northwest Asia sometimes refers to nearby provinces. The geomorphology of Asia in general is imperfectly known, although the deposits and mountain ranges are well known.
To compensate for new sea floor having been created in the Siberian basin, the whole of the Asian Plate has pivoted about a point in the New Siberian Islands, causing compression in the Verkhoyansk mountains, which were formed along the eastern margin of the Angara Shield by tectonic uplift during the Mesozoic Era. There is a southern boundary to this across the northern margin of the Alpine folds of Afghanistan, India and Bhutan, which at the east of Brahmaputra turns to run south towards the Bay of Bengal along the line of the Naga hills and the Arakan Yoma, continues around Indonesia, follows the edge of the continental shelf along the eastern seaboard of China; the Eurasian Plate and the North American Plate meet across the neck of Alaska, following the line of the Aleutian Trench, rather than meeting at the Bering Straits. Northern Asia is built around the Angara Shield, which lies between the Yenisey River and the Lena River, it developed from fragments of Laurasia, whose r
Traditional Chinese characters
Traditional Chinese characters are Chinese characters in any character set that does not contain newly created characters or character substitutions performed after 1946. They are most the characters in the standardized character sets of Taiwan, of Hong Kong and Macau, in the Kangxi Dictionary; the modern shapes of traditional Chinese characters first appeared with the emergence of the clerical script during the Han Dynasty, have been more or less stable since the 5th century. The retronym "traditional Chinese" is used to contrast traditional characters with Simplified Chinese characters, a standardized character set introduced by the government of the People's Republic of China on Mainland China in the 1950s. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau. In contrast, Simplified Chinese characters are used in mainland China and Malaysia in official publications. However, several countries – such as Australia, the US and Canada – are increasing their number of printed materials in Simplified Chinese, to better accommodate citizens from mainland China.
The debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters has been a long-running issue among Chinese communities. A large number of overseas Chinese online newspapers allow users to switch between both character sets. Although simplified characters are taught and endorsed by the government of China, there is no prohibition against the use of traditional characters. Traditional characters are used informally in regions in China in handwriting and used for inscriptions and religious text, they are retained in logos or graphics to evoke yesteryear. Nonetheless, the vast majority of media and communications in China is dominated by simplified characters. In Hong Kong and Macau, Traditional Chinese has been the legal written form since colonial times. In recent years, simplified Chinese characters in Hong Kong and Macau has appeared to accommodate Mainland Chinese tourists and immigrants; this has led to concerns by many residents to protect their local heritage. Taiwan has never adopted simplified characters.
The use of simplified characters in official documents is prohibited by the government of Taiwan. Simplified characters are understood to a certain extent by any educated Taiwanese, learning to read them takes little effort; some stroke simplifications that have been incorporated into Simplified Chinese are in common use in handwriting. For example, while the name of Taiwan is written as 臺灣, the semi-simplified name 台灣 is acceptable to write in official documents. In Southeast Asia, the Chinese Filipino community continues to be one of the most conservative regarding simplification. While major public universities are teaching simplified characters, many well-established Chinese schools still use traditional characters. Publications like the Chinese Commercial News, World News, United Daily News still use traditional characters. On the other hand, the Philippine Chinese Daily uses simplified. Aside from local newspapers, magazines from Hong Kong, such as the Yazhou Zhoukan, are found in some bookstores.
In case of film or television subtitles on DVD, the Chinese dub, used in Philippines is the same as the one used in Taiwan. This is because the DVDs belongs to DVD Region Code 3. Hence, most of the subtitles are in Traditional Characters. Overseas Chinese in the United States have long used traditional characters. A major influx of Chinese immigrants to the United States occurred during the latter half of the 19th century, before the standardization of simplified characters. Therefore, United States public notices and signage in Chinese are in Traditional Chinese. Traditional Chinese characters are called several different names within the Chinese-speaking world; the government of Taiwan calls traditional Chinese characters standard characters or orthodox characters. However, the same term is used outside Taiwan to distinguish standard and traditional characters from variant and idiomatic characters. In contrast, users of traditional characters outside Taiwan, such as those in Hong Kong and overseas Chinese communities, users of simplified Chinese characters, call them complex characters.
An informal name sometimes used by users of simplified characters is "old characters". Users of traditional characters sometimes refer them as "Full Chinese characters" to distinguish them from simplified Chinese characters; some traditional character users argue that traditional characters are the original form of the Chinese characters and cannot be called "complex". Simplified characters cannot be "standard" because they are not used in all Chinese-speaking regions. Conversely, supporters of simplified Chinese characters object to the description of traditional characters as "standard," since they view the new simplified characters as the contemporary standard used by the vast majority of Chinese speakers, they point out that traditional characters are not traditional as many Chinese characters have been made more elaborate over time. Some people refer to traditional characters as "proper characters" and modernized characters as "simplified-stroke characters" (sim
Russia
Russia the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country in Eastern Europe and North Asia. At 17,125,200 square kilometres, Russia is by far or by a considerable margin the largest country in the world by area, covering more than one-eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area, the ninth most populous, with about 146.77 million people as of 2019, including Crimea. About 77 % of the population live in the European part of the country. Russia's capital, Moscow, is one of the largest cities in the world and the second largest city in Europe. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a wide range of environments and landforms. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares land borders with Norway, Estonia, Latvia and Poland, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, China and North Korea, it shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk and the U. S. state of Alaska across the Bering Strait. However, Russia recognises two more countries that border it, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of which are internationally recognized as parts of Georgia.
The East Slavs emerged as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Founded and ruled by a Varangian warrior elite and their descendants, the medieval state of Rus arose in the 9th century. In 988 it adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Rus' disintegrated into a number of smaller states; the Grand Duchy of Moscow reunified the surrounding Russian principalities and achieved independence from the Golden Horde. By the 18th century, the nation had expanded through conquest and exploration to become the Russian Empire, the third largest empire in history, stretching from Poland on the west to Alaska on the east. Following the Russian Revolution, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic became the largest and leading constituent of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the world's first constitutionally socialist state; the Soviet Union played a decisive role in the Allied victory in World War II, emerged as a recognized superpower and rival to the United States during the Cold War.
The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century, including the world's first human-made satellite and the launching of the first humans in space. By the end of 1990, the Soviet Union had the world's second largest economy, largest standing military in the world and the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, twelve independent republics emerged from the USSR: Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and the Baltic states regained independence: Estonia, Lithuania, it is governed as a federal semi-presidential republic. Russia's economy ranks as the twelfth largest by nominal GDP and sixth largest by purchasing power parity in 2018. Russia's extensive mineral and energy resources are the largest such reserves in the world, making it one of the leading producers of oil and natural gas globally; the country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.
Russia is a great power as well as a regional power and has been characterised as a potential superpower. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and an active global partner of ASEAN, as well as a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the G20, the Council of Europe, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the World Trade Organization, as well as being the leading member of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Collective Security Treaty Organization and one of the five members of the Eurasian Economic Union, along with Armenia, Belarus and Kyrgyzstan; the name Russia is derived from Rus', a medieval state populated by the East Slavs. However, this proper name became more prominent in the history, the country was called by its inhabitants "Русская Земля", which can be translated as "Russian Land" or "Land of Rus'". In order to distinguish this state from other states derived from it, it is denoted as Kievan Rus' by modern historiography.
The name Rus itself comes from the early medieval Rus' people, Swedish merchants and warriors who relocated from across the Baltic Sea and founded a state centered on Novgorod that became Kievan Rus. An old Latin version of the name Rus' was Ruthenia applied to the western and southern regions of Rus' that were adjacent to Catholic Europe; the current name of the country, Россия, comes from the Byzantine Greek designation of the Rus', Ρωσσία Rossía—spelled Ρωσία in Modern Greek. The standard way to refer to citizens of Russia is rossiyane in Russian. There are two Russian words which are commonly
Transition from Ming to Qing
The transition from Ming to Qing or the Ming–Qing transition known as the Manchu conquest of China, was a decades-long period of conflict between the Qing dynasty, established by Manchu clan Aisin Gioro in Manchuria, the Ming dynasty of China in the south. Leading up to the Qing conquest, in 1618, Aisin Gioro leader Nurhaci commissioned a document entitled the Seven Grievances, which enumerated grievances against the Ming and began to rebel against their domination. Many of the grievances dealt with conflicts against Yehe, a major Manchu clan, Ming favoritism of Yehe. Nurhaci's demand that the Ming pay tribute to him to redress the seven grievances was a declaration of war, as the Ming were not willing to pay money to a former tributary. Shortly afterwards, Nurhaci began to rebel against the Ming in Liaoning in southern Manchuria. At the same time, the Ming dynasty was fighting for its survival against fiscal turmoil and peasant rebellions. On April 24, 1644, Beijing fell to a rebel army led by Li Zicheng, a former minor Ming official who became the leader of the peasant revolt, who proclaimed the Shun dynasty.
The last Ming emperor, the Chongzhen Emperor, hanged himself from a tree in the imperial garden outside the Forbidden City. When Li Zicheng moved against him, the Ming general Wu Sangui shifted his alliance to the Manchus. Li Zicheng was defeated at the Battle of Shanhai Pass by the joint forces of Wu Sangui and Manchu prince Dorgon. On June 6, the Manchus and Wu entered the capital and proclaimed the young Shunzhi Emperor as Emperor of China; the conquest was far from complete, it required forty more years before all of China was securely united under Qing rule. The Kangxi Emperor ascended the throne in 1661, in 1662 his regents launched the Great Clearance to defeat the resistance of Ming loyalists in South China, he fought off several rebellions, such as the Revolt of the Three Feudatories led by Wu Sangui in southern China, starting in 1673, countered by launching a series of campaigns that expanded his empire. In 1662, Zheng Chenggong drove out the Dutch colonists and founded the Kingdom of Tungning in Taiwan, a Ming loyalist state with a goal of reconquering China.
However, Tungning was defeated in 1683 at the Battle of Penghu by Han admiral Shi Lang, a former admiral under Koxinga. The fall of the Ming dynasty was caused by a combination of factors. Kenneth Swope argues that one key factor was deteriorating relations between Ming Royalty and the Ming Empire's military leadership. Other factors include repeated military expeditions to the North, inflationary pressures caused by spending too much from the imperial treasury, natural disasters and epidemics of disease. Contributing further to the chaos was a peasant rebellion in Beijing in 1644 and a series of weak emperors. Ming power would hold out in what is now southern China for years, though would be overtaken by the Manchus; the Manchus are sometimes misdescribed as a nomadic people, when in fact they were not nomads, but a sedentary agricultural people who lived in fixed villages, farmed crops, practiced hunting and mounted archery. Their main military formation was infantry wielding bows and arrows and pikes while cavalry was kept in the rear.
The Jianzhou Jurchen chief, Nurhaci, is retrospectively identified as the founder of the Qing dynasty. In 1616 he declared himself Khan, his unifying efforts gave the Jurchen the strength to assert themselves backed by an army consisting of majority Han defectors as well as Ming produced firearms. In 1618 he proclaimed Seven Grievances against the Ming and the Ming General Li Yongfang surrendered the city of Fushun in what is now Liaoning province in China's northeast, after Nurhaci gave him an Aisin Gioro princess in marriage and a noble title; the Princess was one of Nurhaci's granddaughters. In a series of successful military campaigns in Liaodong and Liaoxi, the Jurchens seized a number of Ming cities including Shenyang, which they made into the capital of their newly founded "Later Jin" dynasty, named after a Jurchen polity that had ruled over north China several centuries earlier. Under the inspirational leader Yuan Chonghuan, the Ming used western artillery to defeat the Jin forces at the Battle of Ningyuan in 1626.
Nurhaci was injured and died soon afterwards, but the Ming failed to seize the chance to counter-attack. The Jurchens' nemesis Yuan Chonghuan was soon purged in a political struggle, while under the leadership of the new khan Hong Taiji the Jurchens kept seizing Ming cities, defeated Joseon, a crucial vassal of the Ming, in 1627 and 1636, raided deep into China in 1642 and 1643; the Chahar Mongols were fought against by Dorgon in 1628 and 1635. After the Second Manchu invasion of Korea, Joseon Korea was forced to give several of their royal princesses as concubines to the Qing Manchu regent Prince Dorgon. In 1650 Dorgon married the Korean Princess Uisun; the Princess' name in Korean was Uisun and she was Prince Yi Kaeyoon's daughter. Dorgon married two Korean princesses at Lianshan. During the second invasion, many Korean women were kidnapped and raped at the hand of the Qing forces, as a result were unwelcomed by their families if they were released by the Qing after being ransomed. In their years, the Ming faced a number of famines and floods as well as economic chaos, rebellions.
Li Zicheng rebelled in the 1630s in Shaanxi in the north, while a mutiny led by Zhang Xianzhong broke out in Sichuan in the 1640s. Many people were killed in this self-proclaimed emperor's reign of terror. Just as Dorgon and his advisor
Nomadic empire
Nomadic empires, sometimes called steppe empires, Central or Inner Asian empires, are the empires erected by the bow-wielding, horse-riding, nomadic peoples in the Eurasian steppe, from classical antiquity to the early modern era. They are the most prominent example of non-sedentary polities; some nomadic empires operated by establishing a capital city inside a conquered sedentary state, by exploiting the existing bureaucrats and commercial resources of that non-nomadic society. As the pattern is repeated, the nomadic dynasty becomes culturally assimilated to the culture of the occupied nation before it is overthrown. Ibn Khaldun described a similar cycle on a smaller scale in his Asabiyyah theory. A term used for these polities in the early medieval period is khanate, after the Mongol conquests as orda as in Golden Horde; the Cimmerians were an ancient Indo-European people living north of the Caucasus and the Sea of Azov as early as 1300 BCE until they were driven southward by the Scythians into Anatolia during the 8th century BC.
Linguistically they are regarded as Iranian, or Thracian with an Iranian ruling class. The Pontic-Caspian steppe: southern Russia and Ukraine until 7th century BCE; the northern Caucasus area, including Georgia and modern day Azerbaijan Central and North Anatolia 714–626 BCE. Scythia was a region of Central Eurasia in classical antiquity, occupied by the Eastern Iranian Scythians, encompassing parts of Eastern Europe east of the Vistula River and Central Asia, with the eastern edges of the region vaguely defined by the Greeks; the Ancient Greeks gave the name Scythia to all the lands north-east of Europe and the northern coast of the Black Sea. The Scythians – the Greeks' name for this nomadic people – inhabited Scythia from at least the 11th century BC to the 2nd century AD; the Sarmatians were a large confederation of Iranian people during classical antiquity, flourishing from about the 6th century BC to the 4th century AD. They spoke an Indo-European language from the Eastern Iranian family.
According to authors Arrowsmith and Graves Hansard in their book A Grammar of Ancient Geography published in 1832, Sarmatia had two parts, Sarmatia Europea and Sarmatia Asiatica covering a combined area of 503,000 sq mi or 1,302,764 km2. Sarmatians were Scythian veterans returning to the Pontic-Caspian steppe after the siege of Nineveh. Many noble families of Polish Szlachta claim a direct descent from Sarmatians, whereby some of their earliest royals, including those of ancient pre-Roman Vindelicia, Hvalvedia and some of the Piast dynasty derive dubious descent directly from the Aryan Suryavansha Ikshvaku dynasty and also from elected Sarmatians; the Xiongnu were a confederation of nomadic tribes from Central Asia with a ruling class of unknown origin and other subjugated tribes. They lived on the Mongolian Plateau between the 3rd century BC and the 460s AD, their territories including modern day Mongolia, southern Siberia, western Manchuria, the modern Chinese provinces of Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang.
The Xiongnu was the first unified empire of nomadic peoples. Relations between early Chinese dynasties and the Xiongnu were complicated and included military conflict, exchanges of tribute and trade, marriage treaties; when Emperor Qin Shihuang drove them away from the south of the Yellow River, he built the famous Great Wall to prevent the Xiongnu from coming back. The Kushan Empire was a syncretic empire, formed by Yuezhi under the pressure of the Xiongnu), in the Bactrian territories in the early 1st century, it spread to encompass much of Afghanistan, the northern parts of the Indian subcontinent at least as far as Saketa and Sarnath near Varanasi, where inscriptions have been found dating to the era of the Kushan emperor Kanishka the Great. The Xianbei state or Xianbei confederation was a nomadic empire which existed in modern-day Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, northern Xinjiang, Northeast China, Buryatia, Zabaykalsky Krai, Irkutsk Oblast, Altai Republic and eastern Kazakhstan from 156–234 AD.
Like most ancient peoples known through Chinese historiography, the ethnic makeup of the Xianbei is unclear. The Xianbei were a northern branch of the earlier Donghu and it is at least some were proto-Mongols. After it collapsed, the tribe founded the Northern Wei Dynasty; the Hephthalites, Ephthalites, Ye-tai, White Huns, or, in Sanskrit, the Sveta Huna, were a confederation of nomadic and settled people in Central Asia who expanded their domain westward in the 5th century. At the height of its power in the first half of the 6th century, the Hephthalite Empire controlled territory in present-day Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and China; the Huns were a confederation of Eurasian tribes from the Steppes of Central Asia. Appearing from beyond the Volga River some years after the middle of the 4th century, they conquered all of eastern Europe, ending up at the border of the Roman Empire in the south, advancing far into modern day Germany in the north, their appearance in Europe brought with it great ethnic and political upheaval and may have stimulated the Great Migration.
The empire reached its largest size under Attila between 447 and 453. The Rouran, Juan Juan, or Ruru were a confederation of Mongolic speaking nomadic tribes on the
Romanization of Japanese
The romanization of Japanese is the use of Latin script to write the Japanese language. This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as rōmaji (. There are several different romanization systems; the three main ones are Hepburn romanization, Kunrei-shiki romanization, Nihon-shiki romanization. Variants of the Hepburn system are the most used. Japanese is written in a combination of logographic characters borrowed from Chinese and syllabic scripts that ultimately derive from Chinese characters. Rōmaji may be used in any context where Japanese text is targeted at non-Japanese speakers who cannot read kanji or kana, such as for names on street signs and passports, in dictionaries and textbooks for foreign learners of the language, it is used to transliterate Japanese terms in text written in English on topics related to Japan, such as linguistics, literature and culture. Rōmaji is the most common way to input Japanese into word processors and computers, may be used to display Japanese on devices that do not support the display of Japanese characters.
All Japanese who have attended elementary school since World War II have been taught to read and write romanized Japanese. Therefore all Japanese are able to read and write Japanese using rōmaji, although it is rare in Japan to use this method to write Japanese, most Japanese are more comfortable reading kanji and kana; the earliest Japanese romanization system was based on Portuguese orthography. It was developed around 1548 by a Japanese Catholic named Yajiro. Jesuit priests used the system in a series of printed Catholic books so that missionaries could preach and teach their converts without learning to read Japanese orthography; the most useful of these books for the study of early modern Japanese pronunciation and early attempts at romanization was the Nippo jisho, a Japanese–Portuguese dictionary written in 1603. In general, the early Portuguese system was similar to Nihon-shiki in its treatment of vowels; some consonants were transliterated differently: for instance, the /k/ consonant was rendered, depending on context, as either c or q, the /ɸ/ consonant as f.
The Jesuits printed some secular books in romanized Japanese, including the first printed edition of the Japanese classic The Tale of the Heike, romanized as Feiqe no monogatari, a collection of Aesop's Fables. The latter continued to be read after the suppression of Christianity in Japan. Following the expulsion of Christians from Japan in the late 1590s and early 17th century, rōmaji fell out of use and was used sporadically in foreign texts until the mid-19th century, when Japan opened up again. From the mid-19th century onward, several systems were developed, culminating in the Hepburn system, named after James Curtis Hepburn who used it in the third edition of his Japanese–English dictionary, published in 1887; the Hepburn system included representation of some sounds. For example, Lafcadio Hearn's book Kwaidan shows the older kw- pronunciation. In the Meiji era, some Japanese scholars advocated abolishing the Japanese writing system and using rōmaji instead; the Nihon-shiki romanization was an outgrowth of that movement.
Several Japanese texts were published in rōmaji during this period, but it failed to catch on. In the early 20th century, some scholars devised syllabary systems with characters derived from Latin that were less popular since they were not based on any historical use of the Latin script. Today, the use of Nihon-shiki for writing Japanese is advocated by the Oomoto sect and some independent organizations. During the Allied occupation of Japan, the government of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers made it official policy to romanize Japanese. However, that policy failed and a more moderate attempt at Japanese script reform followed. Hepburn romanization follows English phonology with Romance vowels, it is an intuitive method of showing Anglophones the pronunciation of a word in Japanese. It was standardized in the United states as American National Standard System for the Romanization of Japanese, but that status was abolished on October 6, 1994. Hepburn is the most common romanization system in use today in the English-speaking world.
The Revised Hepburn system of romanization uses a macron to indicate some long vowels and an apostrophe to note the separation of confused phonemes. For example, the name じゅんいちろう is written with the kana characters ju-n-i-chi-ro-u, romanized as Jun'ichirō in Revised Hepburn. Without the apostrophe, it would not be possible to distinguish this correct reading from the incorrect ju-ni-chi-ro-u; this system is used in Japan and among foreign students and academics. Nihon-shiki romanization, which predates the Hepburn system, was invented as a method for Japanese to write their own language in Latin characters, rather than to transcribe it for Westerners as Hepburn was, it follows the Japanese syllabary strictly, with no adjustments for changes in pronunciation. It is therefore the only major system of romanization that allows near-lossless mapping to and from kana, it has been st
William Robert Broughton
William Robert Broughton was a British naval officer in the late 18th century. As a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, he commanded HMS Chatham as part of the Vancouver Expedition, a voyage of exploration through the Pacific Ocean led by Captain George Vancouver in the early 1790s. William Robert Broughton was born on 22 March 1762, his father, Charles Broughton, was a Hamburg merchant and his mother, Anne Elizabeth, was the daughter of Baron William de Hertoghe. Broughton married his cousin, Jemima, on 26 November 1802, they had four children. On 12 March 1821, while in Florence, Broughton died two days later, he was buried in the English burial ground in Leghorn. Broughton's name was added to the muster of the yacht Catherine on 1 May 1774, as captain's servant but Broughton first went to sea on 18 November when he joined the 10-gun brig-sloop, Falcon which sailed for North America, under the command of Captain John Linzee. On 14 February 1777, Broughton, by a midshipman, transferred to Harlem under Lieutenant John Knight.
He was appointed to the 64-gun Eagle on 1 July 1778 in December he joined the seventy-four, Superb as a Master's mate and began service in the East Indies. On 12 January 1782, Broughton was promoted to Lieutenant aboard the 68-gun Burford commanded by Captain Peter Rainier; when Burford paid off on 19 July 1784, Broughton went ashore and did not serve again for four years. Broughton resumed his career on 23 June 1788, aboard the 18-gun sloop, under Manley Dixon, serving in The Channel and the Mediterranean. On 13 May 1790, he renewed his acquaintance with John Knight, her captain. Broughton's first command came on 18 December when he was given command of the brig and asked to accompany George Vancouver in his exploration of the north-west Pacific. En route to the Pacific Northwest the expedition spent some time exploring the South Pacific and whilst sailing separately from Vancouver, in November 1791, Broughton and his crew became the first Europeans to sight both The Snares and the Chatham Islands on the 23rd and 29th respectively.
The former group contains an island. Sometime after their arrival in North America, in 1792, Broughton was given the task of charting a group of islands in the Queen Charlotte Sound. In his honour, Vancouver named them the Broughton Archipelago. In October, Broughton was ordered to explore the lower stretches of the Columbia River, between present-day Oregon and Washington. With several boats from his ship and his party navigated upstream as far as the Columbia River Gorge and on 30 October, he reached his farthest point, landing in eastern Multnomah County east of Portland and northwest of Mount Hood, which he named for Viscount Samuel Hood, Admiral of the British Fleet. Late in 1792, stymied by conflicting instructions over Nootka Sound, sent Broughton back to England via Mexico and the Atlantic, bearing dispatches and requesting instructions. On 3 October 1793, Broughton was promoted to commander and given command of HMS Providence, a ship commanded by Captain William Bligh; the fitting out caused a long delay and the ship didn't sail until February 1795 and when Broughton returned to north-west America, he was unable to locate Vancouver.
Determining that Vancouver had returned to England having completed his survey, Broughton crossed the Pacific and began a four-year survey of the Asian coast between the latitudes of 35 and 52 degrees north, which would include, the Kurile Islands, Japan and Formosa. From September 1796 Broughton charted the east coast of Honshu and Hokkaidō before wintering at Macau where he purchased a small schooner to assist the Providence. Next year he returned to Japan where the Providence was wrecked on what was to become known as Providence Reef, now Yae Bishi or Yabiji, at Miyako Island; the schooner saved the crew of the wrecked ship and they continued north along the east coast of Honshu. Passing Hokkaido, the expedition sailed north into the Gulf of Tartary along the west coast of Sakhalin. Finding extensive shallows at the north end of the gulf it was falsely concluded that Sakhalin was part of the mainland. Broughton turned south along the coast of Korea and headed home by way of Trincomalee, where the crew was paid off and he was court-martialled for the loss of his ship.
Having been acquitted, he reached England in February 1799 and shortly after began to write his book, "A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean. It was published in 1804. Having been kept from the greater part of the French Revolutionary War by his book, Broughton resumed his active naval career on 23 June 1801, when he was given command of the 50-gun Batavier in The Channel, he served aboard her until the Peace of Amiens was ratified, in April 1802. In May, Broughton was given command of the 36-gun Penelope, serving in the North Sea, an appointment that lasted until two days before his next command, the seventy-four, Illustrious, on 30 May 1807. In her, Broughton continued service. After the battle, Lord Cochrane proclaimed that Admiral Gambier had not done enough to destroy the French fleet and Gambier demanded a court martial at which he was acquitted, despite Broughton speaking out against him. In November 1810, still in command of
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