1.
Earth
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Earth, otherwise known as the World, or the Globe, is the third planet from the Sun and the only object in the Universe known to harbor life. It is the densest planet in the Solar System and the largest of the four terrestrial planets, according to radiometric dating and other sources of evidence, Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago. Earths gravity interacts with objects in space, especially the Sun. During one orbit around the Sun, Earth rotates about its axis over 365 times, thus, Earths axis of rotation is tilted, producing seasonal variations on the planets surface. The gravitational interaction between the Earth and Moon causes ocean tides, stabilizes the Earths orientation on its axis, Earths lithosphere is divided into several rigid tectonic plates that migrate across the surface over periods of many millions of years. About 71% of Earths surface is covered with water, mostly by its oceans, the remaining 29% is land consisting of continents and islands that together have many lakes, rivers and other sources of water that contribute to the hydrosphere. The majority of Earths polar regions are covered in ice, including the Antarctic ice sheet, Earths interior remains active with a solid iron inner core, a liquid outer core that generates the Earths magnetic field, and a convecting mantle that drives plate tectonics. Within the first billion years of Earths history, life appeared in the oceans and began to affect the Earths atmosphere and surface, some geological evidence indicates that life may have arisen as much as 4.1 billion years ago. Since then, the combination of Earths distance from the Sun, physical properties, in the history of the Earth, biodiversity has gone through long periods of expansion, occasionally punctuated by mass extinction events. Over 99% of all species that lived on Earth are extinct. Estimates of the number of species on Earth today vary widely, over 7.4 billion humans live on Earth and depend on its biosphere and minerals for their survival. Humans have developed diverse societies and cultures, politically, the world has about 200 sovereign states, the modern English word Earth developed from a wide variety of Middle English forms, which derived from an Old English noun most often spelled eorðe. It has cognates in every Germanic language, and their proto-Germanic root has been reconstructed as *erþō, originally, earth was written in lowercase, and from early Middle English, its definite sense as the globe was expressed as the earth. By early Modern English, many nouns were capitalized, and the became the Earth. More recently, the name is simply given as Earth. House styles now vary, Oxford spelling recognizes the lowercase form as the most common, another convention capitalizes Earth when appearing as a name but writes it in lowercase when preceded by the. It almost always appears in lowercase in colloquial expressions such as what on earth are you doing, the oldest material found in the Solar System is dated to 4. 5672±0.0006 billion years ago. By 4. 54±0.04 Gya the primordial Earth had formed, the formation and evolution of Solar System bodies occurred along with the Sun
2.
The Blue Marble
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The Blue Marble is an image of the Earth made on December 7,1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft at a distance of about 45,000 kilometers. It is one of the most reproduced images in human history, the image with the official NASA designation AS17-148-22727 reproduces the view of the Earth as seen by the Apollo crew traveling toward the Moon. The translunar coast photograph extends from the Mediterranean Sea to Antarctica and this was the first time the Apollo trajectory made it possible to photograph the south polar ice cap, despite the Southern Hemisphere being heavily covered in clouds. In addition to the Arabian Peninsula and Madagascar, almost the entire coastline of Africa is clearly visible, the Asian mainland is on the horizon. The photograph, taken by astronauts on December 7,1972, EST, is one of the most widely distributed photographic images in existence. The image is one of the few to show an almost fully illuminated Earth disk, to the astronauts, the slightly gibbous Earth had the appearance and size of a glass marble, hence the name. The time of Apollo 17s launch,12,33 a. m, EST, meant that Africa was in daylight during the early hours of the spacecrafts flight. With the December solstice approaching, Antarctica was also illuminated, the 1972 Tamil Nadu cyclone can be seen in the top right of the image. This storm had brought flooding and high winds to the Indian state of Tamil Nadu on December 5, the photographs official NASA designation is AS17-148-22727. NASA photograph AS17-148-22726, taken just before and nearly identical to 22727, is used as a full-Earth image. The photographer used a 70-millimeter Hasselblad camera with an 80-millimeter Zeiss lens, Apollo 17 was the last manned lunar mission. No human since has been far enough from Earth to photograph an image such as The Blue Marble. The Blue Marble was not the first clear image taken of a face of the Earth. NASA archivist Mike Gentry has speculated that The Blue Marble is among the most widely distributed images in human history, there has also been a childrens television program called Big Blue Marble. The data also included a similarly manually assembled cloud-cover and night-lights image sets, a subsequent release was made in 2005, named Blue Marble Next Generation. A number of viewers for these data have also been released. On 25 January 2012, NASA released an image of the western hemisphere of Earth entitled Blue Marble 2012. The picture logged over 3.1 million views on the Flickr image hosting website within the first week of release
3.
Apollo 17
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Apollo 17 was the final mission of NASAs Apollo program, the enterprise that landed the first humans on the Moon. Apollo 17 was the first night launch of a U. S. human spaceflight and it was a J-type mission which included three days on the lunar surface, extended scientific capability, and the third Lunar Roving Vehicle. Evans took scientific measurements and photographs from orbit using a Scientific Instruments Module mounted in the Service Module, Cernan, Evans and Schmitt returned to Earth on December 19 after a 12-day mission. Apollo 17 is the most recent manned Moon landing and was the last time humans travelled beyond low Earth orbit, the mission broke several records, the longest moon landing, longest total extravehicular activities, largest lunar sample, and longest time in lunar orbit. Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and former X-15 pilot Joe Engle were assigned to the crew of Apollo 14. Engle flew sixteen X-15 flights, three of which exceeded the 50 mi border of space, following the rotation pattern that a backup crew would fly as the prime crew three missions later, Cernan, Evans, and Engle would have flown Apollo 17. Harrison Schmitt served on the crew of Apollo 15 and. However, Apollo 18 was cancelled in September 1970, following this decision, the scientific community pressured NASA to assign a geologist to an Apollo landing, as opposed to a pilot trained in geology. In light of pressure, Harrison Schmitt, a professional geologist, was assigned the Lunar Module Pilot position on Apollo 17. Scientist-astronaut Curt Michel believed that it was his own decision to resign, after it became clear that he would not be given a flight assignment, that mobilized this action. Subsequent to the decision to assign Schmitt to Apollo 17, there remained the question of which crew would become prime crew of the mission. NASA Director of Flight Crew Operations Deke Slayton ultimately assigned the crew of Apollo 14, along with Schmitt. The Apollo 15 prime crew received the backup assignment since this was to be the last lunar mission, however, when the Apollo 15 postage stamp incident became public in early 1972 the crew was reprimanded by NASA and the United States Air Force. Robert F. Overmyer Robert A. Parker C, three white stars above the red bars represent the three crewmen of the mission. The background includes the Moon, the planet Saturn and a galaxy or nebula, the wing of the eagle partially overlays the Moon, suggesting mans established presence there. The gaze of Apollo and the direction of the eagles motion embody mans intention to further destinations in space. The patch includes, along with the colors of the U. S. flag, the image of Apollo in the mission insignia is a rendering of the Apollo Belvedere sculpture. The insignia was designed by Robert McCall, with input from the crew, since Apollo 17 was to be the final lunar landing of the Apollo program, high-priority landing sites that had not been visited previously were given consideration for potential exploration
4.
Geopolitics
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Geopolitics is the study of the effects of geography on international politics and international relations. Geopolitics is a method of studying foreign policy to understand, explain and these include area studies, climate, topography, demography, natural resources, and applied science of the region being evaluated. Geopolitics focuses on power in relation to geographic space. In particular, territorial waters and land territory in correlation with diplomatic history, academically, geopolitics analyses history and social science with reference to geography in relation to politics. Outside of academia, a variety of groups offer a geopolitical prognosis, including non-profit groups, critical geopolitics deconstructs classical geopolitical theories, by showing their political/ideological functions for great powers during and after the age of imperialism. Mahan distinguished a key region of the world in the Eurasian context, namely, in this zone independent countries still survived – Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, China, and Japan. Mahan regarded those countries, located between Britain and Russia, as if between Scylla and Charybdis, of the two monsters – Britain and Russia – it was the later that Mahan considered more threatening to the fate of Central Asia. Mahan was impressed by Russias transcontinental size and strategically favorable position for southward expansion, therefore, he found it necessary for the Anglo-Saxon sea power to resist Russia. The Austro-Hungarian historian Emil Reich is considered to be the first having coined the acceptance in English as early as 1902, lea believed that while Japan moved against Far East and Russia against India, the Germans would strike at England, the center of the British Empire. He thought the Anglo-Saxons faced certain disaster from their militant opponents, sir Halford Mackinders Heartland Theory initially received little attention outside geography, but some thinkers would claim that it subsequently influenced the foreign policies of world powers. His formulation of the Heartland Theory was set out in his article entitled The Geographical Pivot of History, Mackinders doctrine of geopolitics involved concepts diametrically opposed to the notion of Alfred Thayer Mahan about the significance of navies in world conflict. He saw navy as a basis of Colombian era empire, the Heartland theory hypothesized a huge empire being brought into existence in the Heartland—which wouldnt need to use coastal or transoceanic transport to remain coherent. Mackinder posited that the centers of the Periphery were necessarily located in widely separated locations. The World Island could send its navy to destroy one of them in turn. Mackinder called this region the Heartland and it essentially comprised Central and Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Western Russia, and Mitteleuropa. The Heartland contained the grain reserves of Ukraine, and many natural resources. Mackinders notion of geopolitics was summed up when he said, Who rules Central, who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island. Who rules the World-Island commands the World, nicholas J. Spykman is both a follower and critic of geostrategists Alfred Mahan, and Halford Mackinder
5.
Robinson projection
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The Robinson projection is a map projection of a world map which shows the entire world at once. It was specifically created in an attempt to find a compromise to the problem of readily showing the whole globe as a flat image. The Robinson projection was devised by Arthur H. Robinson in 1963 in response to an appeal from the Rand McNally company, Robinson published details of the projections construction in 1974. The National Geographic Society began using the Robinson projection for general world maps in 1988. In 1998 NGS abandoned the Robinson projection for that use in favor of the Winkel tripel projection, the Robinson projection is neither equal-area nor conformal, abandoning both for a compromise. The creator felt this produced an overall view than could be achieved by adhering to either. The meridians curve gently, avoiding extremes, but thereby stretch the poles into long lines instead of leaving them as points, hence, distortion close to the poles is severe, but quickly declines to moderate levels moving away from them. The straight parallels imply severe angular distortion at the high latitudes toward the edges of the map. However, at the time it was developed, the projection effectively met Rand McNallys goal to produce appealing depictions of the entire world, I decided to go about it backwards. … I started with a kind of artistic approach, I visualized the best-looking shapes and sizes. I worked with the variables until it got to the point where, if I changed one of them, then I figured out the mathematical formula to produce that effect. Most mapmakers start with the mathematics, the projection is defined by the table, The table is indexed by latitude at 5 degree intervals, intermediate values are calculated using interpolation. Robinson did not specify any particular method, but it is reported that he used Aitken interpolation himself. The PLEN column is the length of the parallel of latitude, meridians of longitude are equally spaced on each parallel of latitude. List of map projections Winkel Tripel — projection currently used by the National Geographic, a New Map Projection, Its Development and Characteristics. In, National Geographic, December 1988, pp. 911–913, flattening The Earth—2000 Years of Map Projections, The University of Chicago Press. Table of examples and properties of all projections, from radicalcartography. net An interactive Java Applet to study the metric deformations of the Robinson Projection. Numerical evaluation of the Robinson projection, from Cartography and Geographic Information Science, April,2004 by Cengizhan Ipbuker
6.
Life
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Various forms of life exist, such as plants, animals, fungi, protists, archaea, and bacteria. The criteria can at times be ambiguous and may or may not define viruses, viroids, biology is the primary science concerned with the study of life, although many other sciences are involved. The definition of life is controversial, the current definition is that organisms maintain homeostasis, are composed of cells, undergo metabolism, can grow, adapt to their environment, respond to stimuli, and reproduce. However, many other definitions have been proposed, and there are some borderline cases. Modern definitions are more complex, with input from a diversity of scientific disciplines, biophysicists have proposed many definitions based on chemical systems, there are also some living systems theories, such as the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that the Earth itself is alive. Another theory is that life is the property of systems, and yet another is elaborated in complex systems biology. Abiogenesis describes the process of life arising from non-living matter. Properties common to all organisms include the need for certain chemical elements to sustain biochemical functions. Life on Earth first appeared as early as 4.28 billion years ago, soon after ocean formation 4.41 billion years ago, Earths current life may have descended from an RNA world, although RNA-based life may not have been the first. The mechanism by which began on Earth is unknown, though many hypotheses have been formulated and are often based on the Miller–Urey experiment. The earliest known forms are microfossils of bacteria. In July 2016, scientists reported identifying a set of 355 genes believed to be present in the last universal ancestor of all living organisms. Since its primordial beginnings, life on Earth has changed its environment on a time scale. To survive in most ecosystems, life must often adapt to a range of conditions. Some microorganisms, called extremophiles, thrive in physically or geochemically extreme environments that are detrimental to most other life on Earth, Aristotle was the first person to classify organisms. Later, Carl Linnaeus introduced his system of nomenclature for the classification of species. Eventually new groups and categories of life were discovered, such as cells and microorganisms, cells are sometimes considered the smallest units and building blocks of life. There are two kinds of cells, prokaryotic and eukaryotic, both of which consist of cytoplasm enclosed within a membrane and contain many such as proteins
7.
Civilization
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Historically, a civilization was a so-called advanced culture in contrast to more supposedly primitive cultures. As an uncountable noun, civilization also refers to the process of a society developing into a centralized, urbanized, stratified structure, Civilization concentrates power, extending human control over the rest of nature, including over other human beings. The earlier neolithic technology and lifestyle was established first in the Middle East, and later in the Yangtze and Yellow River basins in China, similar pre-civilized neolithic revolutions also began independently from 7,000 BCE in such places as northwestern South America and Mesoamerica. These were among the six civilizations worldwide that arose independently, Mesopotamia is the site of the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution from around 10,000 BCE, with civilizations developing from 6,500 years ago. Towards the end of the Neolithic period, various elitist Chalcolithic civilizations began to rise in various cradles from around 3300 BCE. Chalcolithic civilizations, as defined above, also developed in Pre-Columbian Americas and, despite an early start in Egypt, Axum and Kush, the English word civilization comes from the 16th-century French civilisé, from Latin civilis, related to civis and civitas. The fundamental treatise is Norbert Eliass The Civilizing Process, which traces social mores from medieval courtly society to the Early Modern period, in The Philosophy of Civilization, Albert Schweitzer outlines two opinions, one purely material and the other material and ethical. Adjectives like civility developed in the mid-16th century, the abstract noun civilization, meaning civilized condition, came in the 1760s, again from French. The word was therefore opposed to barbarism or rudeness, in the pursuit of progress characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, during the French revolution, civilization was used in the singular, never in the plural and this is still the case in French. The use of civilizations as a noun was in occasional use in the 19th century. Only in this sense does it become possible to speak of a medieval civilization. Already in the 18th century, civilization was not always seen as an improvement, one historically important distinction between culture and civilization is from the writings of Rousseau, particularly his work about education, Emile. From this, a new approach was developed, especially in Germany, first by Johann Gottfried Herder and this sees cultures as natural organisms, not defined by conscious, rational, deliberative acts, but a kind of pre-rational folk spirit. Civilization, in contrast, though more rational and more successful in material progress, is unnatural and leads to vices of social life such as guile, hypocrisy, envy and avarice. In World War II, Leo Strauss, having fled Germany, argued in New York that this opinion of civilization was behind Nazism, Social scientists such as V. Gordon Childe have named a number of traits that distinguish a civilization from other kinds of society. Andrew Nikiforuk argues that civilizations relied on shackled human muscle and it took the energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperors, and build cities and considers slavery to be a common feature of pre-modern civilizations. All civilizations have depended on agriculture for subsistence, grain farms can result in accumulated storage and a surplus of food, particularly when people use intensive agricultural techniques such as artificial fertilization, irrigation and crop rotation
8.
Universe
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The Universe is all of time and space and its contents. It includes planets, moons, minor planets, stars, galaxies, the contents of intergalactic space, the size of the entire Universe is unknown. The earliest scientific models of the Universe were developed by ancient Greek and Indian philosophers and were geocentric, over the centuries, more precise astronomical observations led Nicolaus Copernicus to develop the heliocentric model with the Sun at the center of the Solar System. In developing the law of gravitation, Sir Isaac Newton built upon Copernicuss work as well as observations by Tycho Brahe. Further observational improvements led to the realization that our Solar System is located in the Milky Way galaxy and it is assumed that galaxies are distributed uniformly and the same in all directions, meaning that the Universe has neither an edge nor a center. Discoveries in the early 20th century have suggested that the Universe had a beginning, the majority of mass in the Universe appears to exist in an unknown form called dark matter. The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological description of the development of the Universe, under this theory, space and time emerged together 13. 799±0.021 billion years ago with a fixed amount of energy and matter that has become less dense as the Universe has expanded. After the initial expansion, the Universe cooled, allowing the first subatomic particles to form, giant clouds later merged through gravity to form galaxies, stars, and everything else seen today. Some physicists have suggested various multiverse hypotheses, in which the Universe might be one among many universes that likewise exist, the Universe can be defined as everything that exists, everything that has existed, and everything that will exist. According to our current understanding, the Universe consists of spacetime, forms of energy, the Universe encompasses all of life, all of history, and some philosophers and scientists suggest that it even encompasses ideas such as mathematics and logic. The word universe derives from the Old French word univers, which in turn derives from the Latin word universum, the Latin word was used by Cicero and later Latin authors in many of the same senses as the modern English word is used. Another synonym was ὁ κόσμος ho kósmos, synonyms are also found in Latin authors and survive in modern languages, e. g. the German words Das All, Weltall, and Natur for Universe. The same synonyms are found in English, such as everything, the cosmos, the world, the prevailing model for the evolution of the Universe is the Big Bang theory. The Big Bang model states that the earliest state of the Universe was extremely hot and dense, the model is based on general relativity and on simplifying assumptions such as homogeneity and isotropy of space. The Big Bang model accounts for such as the correlation of distance and redshift of galaxies, the ratio of the number of hydrogen to helium atoms. The initial hot, dense state is called the Planck epoch, after the Planck epoch and inflation came the quark, hadron, and lepton epochs. Together, these epochs encompassed less than 10 seconds of time following the Big Bang, the observed abundance of the elements can be explained by combining the overall expansion of space with nuclear and atomic physics. As the Universe expands, the density of electromagnetic radiation decreases more quickly than does that of matter because the energy of a photon decreases with its wavelength
9.
Ontology
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Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence or reality as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Although ontology as an enterprise is highly hypothetical, it also has practical application in information science and technology. Some philosophers, notably of the Platonic school, contend that all refer to existent entities. Other philosophers contend that nouns do not always name entities, between these poles of realism and nominalism, stand a variety of other positions. An ontology may give an account of which refer to entities, which do not, why. Principal questions of ontology include, What can be said to exist, into what categories, if any, can we sort existing things. What are the meanings of being, what are the various modes of being of entities. Various philosophers have provided different answers to these questions, one common approach involves dividing the extant subjects and predicates into groups called categories. Such an understanding of ontological categories, however, is merely taxonomic, what does it mean for a being to be. Is existence a genus or general class that is divided up by specific differences. Which entities, if any, are fundamental, how do the properties of an object relate to the object itself. What features are the essential, as opposed to merely accidental attributes of a given object, how many levels of existence or ontological levels are there. Can one give an account of what it means to say that an object exists. Can one give an account of what it means to say that an entity exists. What constitutes the identity of an object, when does an object go out of existence, as opposed to merely changing. Do beings exist other than in the modes of objectivity and subjectivity, i. e. is the subject/object split of modern philosophy inevitable. e. Being, that which is, which is the present participle of the verb εἰμί, eimí, i. e. to be, I am, and -λογία, -logia, i. e. logical discourse. The first occurrence in English of ontology as recorded by the OED came in a work by Gideon Harvey, Archelogia philosophica nova, or, New principles of Philosophy
10.
Eschatology
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Eschatology /ˌɛskəˈtɒlədʒi/ is a part of theology concerned with the final events of history, or the ultimate destiny of humanity. This concept is referred to as the end of the world or end time. The word arises from the Greek ἔσχατος eschatos meaning last and -logy meaning the study of, the Oxford English Dictionary defines eschatology as The part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind. In the context of mysticism, the phrase refers metaphorically to the end of ordinary reality, in many religions it is taught as an existing future event prophesied in sacred texts or folklore. More broadly, eschatology may encompass related concepts such as the Messiah or Messianic Age, the end time, history is often divided into ages, which are time periods each with certain commonalities. One age comes to an end and a new age or world to come, where different realities are present, begins. When such transitions from one age to another are the subject of eschatological discussion, the phrase, end of the world, is replaced by end of the age, end of an era, or end of life as we know it. Much apocalyptic fiction does not deal with the end of time but rather with the end of a period of time, the end of life as it is now. It is usually a crisis that brings an end to current reality and ushers in a new way of living, thinking, or being. This crisis may take the form of the intervention of a deity in history, a war, eschatologies vary as to their degree of optimism or pessimism about the future. In some eschatologies, conditions are better for some and worse for others, e. g. heaven, in Baháí belief, creation has neither a beginning nor an end. Instead, the eschatology of other religions is viewed as symbolic, in Baháí belief, human time is marked by a series of progressive revelations in which successive messengers or prophets come from God. In this view, the heaven and hell are seen as symbolic terms for the persons spiritual progress. In Baháí belief, the coming of Baháulláh, the founder of the Baháí Faith, signals the fulfilment of previous eschatological expectations of Islam, Christianity and other major religions. Christian eschatology is concerned with death, a state, Heaven, hell, the return of Jesus. Eschatological passages are found in places, esp. Isaiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Matthew 24, The Sheep and the Goats, and the Book of Revelation, the Second Coming of Christ is the central event in Christian eschatology. Most Christians believe that death and suffering will continue to exist until Christs return, there are, however, various views concerning the order and significance of other eschatological events
11.
History of the world
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The history of the world describes the history of humanity as determined by the study of archaeological and written records, beginning with the invention of writing. The latter period marked a change in history, as humans began the systematic husbandry of plants. Agriculture advanced, and most humans transitioned from a nomadic to a lifestyle as farmers in permanent settlements. As farming developed, grain agriculture became more sophisticated and prompted a division of labour to store food between growing seasons, labour divisions then led to the rise of a leisured upper class and the development of cities. The growing complexity of human societies necessitated systems of writing and accounting, in the mid-15th century, the invention of modern printing, employing movable type, revolutionized communication, helping end the Middle Ages and ushering in the Scientific Revolution. By the 18th century, the accumulation of knowledge and technology, outside the Old World, including ancient China and ancient India, historical timelines unfolded differently. However, by the 18th century, due to world trade and colonization. Genetic measurements indicate that the ape lineage which would lead to Homo sapiens diverged from the lineage that would lead to chimpanzees around six years ago. It is thought that the Australopithecine genus, which were likely the first apes to walk upright, anatomically modern humans arose in Africa about 200,000 years ago, and reached behavioural modernity about 50,000 years ago. Modern humans spread rapidly from Africa into the frost-free zones of Europe, the rapid expansion of humankind to North America and Oceania took place at the climax of the most recent ice age, when temperate regions of today were extremely inhospitable. Yet, humans had colonized nearly all the parts of the globe by the end of the Ice Age. Other hominids such as Homo erectus had been using simple wood and stone tools for millennia, at some point, humans began using fire for heat and cooking. They also developed language in the Palaeolithic period and a repertoire that included systematic burial of the dead. Early artistic expression can be found in the form of paintings and sculptures made from wood and bone, showing a spirituality generally interpreted as animism. During this period, all lived as hunter-gatherers, and were generally nomadic. The Neolithic Revolution, beginning about 8,000 BCE, saw the development of agriculture, Mesopotamia is the site of the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution. Farming permitted far denser populations, which in time organized into states, agriculture also created food surpluses that could support people not directly engaged in food production. The development of agriculture permitted the creation of the first cities and these were centres of trade, manufacturing and political power with nearly no agricultural production of their own
12.
Cradle of civilization
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The cradle of civilization is a term referring to locations where, according to current archaeological data, civilization is understood to have emerged. Current thinking is that there was no single cradle, but several civilizations that developed independently, other civilizations arose in Asia among cultures situated along large river valleys, notably the Indus River in the Indian Subcontinent and the Yellow River in China. The extent to which there was significant influence between the early civilizations of the Near East and those of East Asia is disputed, scholars accept that the civilizations of Mesoamerica, mainly in modern Mexico, and Norte Chico in present-day Peru emerged independently from those in Eurasia. The concept cradle of civilization is the subject of much debate, the figurative use of cradle to mean the place or region in which anything is nurtured or sheltered in its earlier stage is traced by the OED to Spenser. Charles Rollins Ancient History has Egypt that served at first as the cradle of the holy nation, the phrase cradle of civilization plays a certain role in national mysticism. It has been used in Eastern as well as Western cultures, for instance, in Hindu nationalism, the terms also appear in esoteric pseudohistory, such as the Urantia Book, claiming the title for the second Eden, or the pseudoarchaeology related to Megalithic Britain. The earliest proto-urban settlements with several thousand inhabitants emerged in the Neolithic, the first cities to house several tens of thousands were Memphis and Uruk, by the 31st century BCE. Historic times are marked apart from times when records of the past begin to be kept for the benefit of future generations. A civilized way of life is linked to conditions coming almost exclusively from intensive agriculture. A traditional theory of the spread of civilization is that it began in the Fertile Crescent, scholars more generally now believe that civilizations arose independently at several locations in both hemispheres. They have observed that sociocultural developments occurred along different timeframes, sedentary and nomadic communities continued to interact considerably, they were not strictly divided among widely different cultural groups. Current scholarship generally identifies six sites where civilization emerged independently, Mesopotamia, the Nile River, the Indus River, the Yellow River, the Central Andes, one of the most notable PPNA settlements is Jericho in the Levant region, thought to be the worlds first town. In Mesopotamia, the convergence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers produced rich fertile soil, the civilizations that emerged around these rivers are among the earliest known non-nomadic agrarian societies. It is because of this that the fertile crescent region, the period known as the Ubaid period is the earliest known period on the alluvial plain although it is likely earlier periods exist obscured under the alluvium. It was during the Ubaid period that the movement towards urbanization began, eridu is the oldest Sumerian site settled during this period, around 5300 BCE, and the city of Ur also first dates to the end of this period. In the south, the Ubaid period had a long duration from around 6500 to 3800 BCE. Named after the Sumerian city of Uruk, this saw the emergence of urban life in Mesopotamia and, during its later phase. Proto-writing in the dates to around 3500 BCE, with the earliest texts dating to 3300 BCE
13.
Major religious groups
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The worlds principal religions and spiritual traditions may be classified into a small number of major groups, although this is by no means a uniform practice. This theory began in the 18th century with the goal of recognizing the relative levels of civility in societies, in world cultures, there have traditionally been many different groupings of religious belief. In Indian culture, different religious philosophies were traditionally respected as academic differences in pursuit of the same truth, in Islam, the Quran mentions three different categories, Muslims, the People of the Book, and idol worshipers. Initially, Christians had a dichotomy of world beliefs, Christian civility versus foreign heresy or barbarity. Daniel Defoe described the definition as follows, Religion is properly the Worship given to God. Therefore, Hannah Adamss early encyclopedia, for example, had its name changed from An Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects. to A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations. The modern meaning of the world religion, putting non-Christians at the same level as Christians. T. Suzuki, and Alan Watts, who influenced the public conception of world religions. Even history professors have now taken note of these complications and advise against teaching world religions in schools, others see the shaping of religions in the context of the nation-state as the invention of traditions. Religious traditions fall into super-groups in comparative religion, arranged by historical origin, Abrahamic religions originate in West Asia, Indian religions in the Indian subcontinent and East Asian religions in East Asia. Another group with supra-regional influence are Afro-American religion, which have their origins in Central, middle Eastern religions, Abrahamic religions are the largest group, and these consist mainly of Christianity, Islam, Judaism and the Baháí Faith. They are named for the patriarch Abraham, and are unified by the practice of monotheism, today, around 3.4 billion people are followers of Abrahamic religions and are spread widely around the world apart from the regions around East and Southeast Asia. Several Abrahamic organizations are vigorous proselytizers, iranian religions, partly of Indo-European origins, include Zoroastrianism, Yazdânism, Ætsæg Din, Ahl-e Haqq and historical traditions of Gnosticism. It has significant overlaps with Abrahamic traditions, e. g. in Sufism and in recent movements such as Bábism and the Baháí Faith. Indian religions, originated in Greater India and partly of Indo-European origins, they tend to share a number of key concepts, such as dharma, karma, reincarnation among others. They are of the most influence across the Indian subcontinent, East Asia, Southeast Asia, the main Indian religions are Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism. East Asian religions consist of several East Asian religions which use of the concept of Tao or Dō. They include many Chinese folk religions, Taoism and Confucianism, as well as Korean, indigenous ethnic religions, found on every continent, now marginalized by the major organized faiths in many parts of the world or persisting as undercurrents of major religions
14.
World language
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A world language is a language that is spoken internationally and is learned and spoken by a large number of people as a second language. A world language is characterized not only by the number of speakers. One of the most widely spoken and fastest spreading world languages today is English, German served as a lingua franca in large portions of Europe for centuries, mainly the Holy Roman Empire and later the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It remains an important second language in much of Central and Eastern Europe and it is also widely taught as a second language internationally. Turkish was similarly important as the language of the Ottoman Empire. The distribution of the Arabic and Turkic languages, in turn, are a legacy of the Caliphates, just as all the living world languages owe their status to linguistic imperialism, the suggestion of a given language as a world language or universal language has strong political implications. Many natural languages have been proffered as candidates for a global lingua franca, Japanese, although considered to be one of the most significant languages internationally, along with the listed world languages, it is not considered a world language per se. Japan as a region is nearly homogeneous from ethnic, cultural, thus Japanese has little history as a lingua franca amongst communities who do not share a mother tongue or first language, their overseas communities are strongly tied to ethnicity. Summing up Standard German as well as all undisputed German dialects/varieties that are not listed under Standard German results in ca.90 M native speakers, furthermore, Ammon points out that Ethnologue overestimates L2 speakers, thus underestimating L1 speakers, in Germany by 5M --> 95M L1 speakers. Christian Mair, The Politics of English As a World Language, mario Pei, One Language for the World, ISBN 978-0-8196-0218-3. Anne-Marie De Mejía, Power, Prestige, and Bilingualism, International Perspectives on Elite Bilingual Education, david Crystal, English as a Global Language, ISBN 978-0-521-53032-3. Clare Mar-Molinero, The Politics of Language in the Spanish-speaking World, george Weber, The Worlds 10 most influential Languages World language on Facebook English world language forecast World Language Maps 1903 article - Are We To Have An International Language
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World government
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World government is the notion of a common political authority for all of humanity, yielding a global government and a single state that exercises authority over the entire Earth. Such a government could come into existence either through violent and compulsory world domination, or through peaceful, There has never been nor is there currently a worldwide executive, legislature, judiciary, military, or constitution with global jurisdiction. The United Nations is limited to an advisory role. The idea and aspiration of world government is known since the dawn of history, Bronze Age Egyptian Kings aimed to rule All That the Sun Encircles, Mesopotamian Kings All from the Sunrise to the Sunset, and ancient Chinese and Japanese Emperors All under Heaven. These four civilizations developed impressive cultures of Great Unity, or Da Yitong as the Chinese put it, in 113 BC, the Han Dynasty in China erected an Altar of the Great Unity. The Greek Stoic School preached one monarch over all mankind, polybius expressed one Government over the Mediterranean world as the marvelous achievement of Fortune and the main task of Historian is to explain how she did it. The ideal of world government outlived the fall of the Pax Romana for a millennium. What tempests must need toss thee, what treasure be thrown into the sea, what shipwrecks must be endured, so long as thou, like a beast of many heads, thou art sick in either intellect, and sick likewise in thy affection. Thou healest not thy high understanding by argument irrefutable, nor thy lower by the countenance of experience, early father of international law, Spanish philosopher Francisco de Vitoria is considered the founder of global political philosophy. De Vitoria conceived of the res publica totius orbis, or the republic of the whole world, de jure belli ac pacis is a 1625 book in Latin, written by Hugo Grotius and published in Paris, on the legal status of war. It is now regarded as a work in international law. Grotius was a philosopher, theologian, playwright, and poet and he is known for coming up with the idea of having an international law, and is still acknowledged today by the American Society of International Law. Immanuel Kant wrote the essay Perpetual Peace, A Philosophical Sketch, specifically, Kant described his proposed peace program as containing two steps. Has shown itself successively in several States which could make pretensions to such a dominion, whether clearly or not—it may be obscurely—yet has this tendency lain at the root of the undertakings of many States in Modern Times. Although no individual Epoch may have contemplated this purpose, yet is this the spirit which runs through all these individual Epochs, in early 19th century Mormon theology, Joseph Smith taught that a theodemocracy would guide and direct the Kingdom of God on the earth during the end times. On March 11,1844, Smith organized a Council of Fifty and this group of three organizations was expected to rule as a world government just prior to the Millennium. / Till the war-drum throbbd no longer / and the battle-flags were furled / In the Parliament of man, / There the common sense of most shall hold / a fretful realm in awe / And the kindly earth shall slumber / lapt in universal law. The first thinker to anticipate a kind of unity under the American primacy seems to be British politician William Gladstone
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World war
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A world war is a war involving many of the countries of the world or many of the most powerful and populous ones. World wars span multiple countries on multiple continents, with battles fought in multiple theaters. The Oxford English Dictionary cited the first known usage in the English language to a Scottish newspaper, the term World War I was coined by Time magazine in its issue of June 12,1939. In the same article, the term World War II was first used speculatively to describe the upcoming war, the first use for the actual war came in its issue of September 11,1939. m. Speculative fiction authors had been noting the concept of a Second World War in 1919 and 1920, due to this fact, a very minute conflict between two countries had the potential to set off a domino effect of alliances, triggering a world war. The fact that the powers involved had large overseas empires virtually guaranteed that such a war would be worldwide, the same strategic considerations also ensured that the combatants would strike at each others colonies, thus spreading the wars far more widely than those of pre-Colombian times. Both world wars had also seen war crimes, the First World War had seen major use of chemical weapons despite the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 outlawing the use of such weapons in warfare. The Ottoman Empire had been considered responsible for the death of one million Armenians during the First World War. The Second World War was the first conflict in which atomic bombs had been used, nazi Germany had been responsible for multiple genocides, most notably the Holocaust, killing six million Jews. The outcome of the wars had a profound effect on the course of world history. The old European empires had collapsed or been dismantled as a result of the wars crushing costs. The United States of America had been established as the dominant global superpower, along with its ideological foe. These two superpowers exerted political influence over most of the worlds nation-states for decades after the end of the Second World War, the modern international security, economic and diplomatic system had been created in the aftermath of the wars. Institutions such as the United Nations were established to collectivize international affairs, the wars had also greatly changed the course of daily life. Technologies developed during wartime had an effect on peace-time life as well, for instance, advances in, jet aircraft, penicillin, nuclear energy. Since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War, there has been a widespread and this war has been anticipated and planned for by military and civil authorities, and explored in fiction in many countries. Concepts have ranged from purely conventional scenarios, to limited use of nuclear weapons, among these are former American, French, and Mexican government officials, military leaders, politicians, and authors, Despite their efforts, none of these wars are commonly deemed world wars. The Second Congo War involved nine nations and led to ongoing low-level warfare despite an official peace and it has often been referred to as Africas World War
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World population
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In demographics, the world population is the total number of humans currently living. As of March 2017, it was estimated at 7.49 billion, the United Nations estimates it will further increase to 11.2 billion in the year 2100. World population has experienced growth since the end of the Great Famine of 1315–17 and the Black Death in 1350. The highest population growth rates – global population increases above 1. 8% per year – occurred between 1955-1975 peaking to 2. 06% between 1965-1970, the growth rate has declined to 1. 18% between 2010-2015 and is projected to decline to 0. 13% by the year 2100. World population reached 7 billion on October 31,2011 according to the United Nations Population Fund, and on March 12,2012 according to the United States Census Bureau. The median age of the population was estimated to be 30.1 years in 2016, with the male median age estimated to be 29.4 years. 2003 UN Population Division population projections for the year 2150 range between 3.2 and 24.8 billion. One of many independent mathematical models supports the estimate, while a 2014 estimate forecasts between 9.3 and 12.6 billion in 2100, and continued growth thereafter. Some analysts have questioned the sustainability of further population growth, highlighting the growing pressures on the environment, global food supplies. Estimates on the number of humans who have ever lived range in the order of 106 to 108 billion. Six of the Earths seven continents are permanently inhabited on a large scale, Asia is the most populous continent, with its 4.3 billion inhabitants accounting for 60% of the world population. The worlds two most populated countries alone, China and India, together constitute about 37% of the worlds population, Africa is the second most populated continent, with around 1 billion people, or 15% of the worlds population. Europes 733 million people make up 12% of the population as of 2012. Northern America, primarily consisting of the United States, Mexico, and Canada, has a population of around 352 million, and Oceania, the least-populated region, has about 35 million inhabitants. Though it is not permanently inhabited by any fixed population, Antarctica has a small, fluctuating international population and this population tends to rise in the summer months and decrease significantly in winter, as visiting researchers return to their home countries. Estimates of world population by their nature are an aspect of modernity, more refined estimates, broken down by continents, were published in the first half of the 19th century, at 600 to 1000 million in the early 1800s and at 800 to 1000 million in the 1840s. Estimates of the population of the world at the time agriculture emerged in around 10,000 BCE have ranged between 1 million and 15 million. Even earlier, genetic evidence suggests humans may have gone through a bottleneck of between 1,000 and 10,000 people about 70,000 BCE, according to the Toba catastrophe theory
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World economy
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The world economy or global economy is the economy of the world, considered as the international exchange of goods and services that is expressed in monetary units of account. Beyond the minimum standard concerning value in production, use, and exchange the definitions, representations, models and it is inseparable from the geography and ecology of Earth. Typical examples are illegal drugs and other market goods, which by any standard are a part of the world economy. Rather, market valuations in a local currency are typically translated to a monetary unit using the idea of purchasing power. This is the method used below, which is used for estimating worldwide economic activity in terms of real US dollars or euros, however, the world economy can be evaluated and expressed in many more ways. It is unclear, for example, how many of the worlds 7.13 billion people have most of their economic activity reflected in these valuations, the following two tables list the Country Groups with individual countries designated by the IMF. Members of the G-20 major economies are in bold, the following two tables list the twenty largest economies by GDP, twenty largest economies by GDP, and the twenty economies with the largest shares of global economic growth from 2014 to 2015. Members of the G-20 major economies are in bold, the following is a list of the twenty largest economies by nominal GDP at a specific year according to International Monetary Fund. The following is a list of twenty largest economies by GDP at a year according to the CIA World Factbook. €320 billion, $319 billion, €250 trillion Unemployment rate,8. 7%, World military expenditure in 2012, estimated to $1.756 trillion Military expenditures – percent of GDP, roughly 2% of gross world product. To promote exports, many government agencies publish on the web economic studies by sector and country. Among these agencies include the USCS and FAS in the United States, EDC and AAFC in Canada, Ubifrance in France, UKTI in the UK, HKTDC and JETRO in Asia, Austrade and NZTE in Oceania. net
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Globalization
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Globalization or globalisation is the action or procedure of international integration arising from the interchange of world views, products, ideas, and other aspects of culture. Advances in transportation and in telecommunications infrastructure have been factors in globalization, generating further interdependence of economic. Large-scale globalization began in the 1820s, in the late 19th century and early 20th century, the connectivity of the worlds economies and cultures grew very quickly. The term globalization is recent, only establishing its current meaning in the 1970s, further, environmental challenges such as global warming, cross-boundary water and air pollution, and overfishing of the ocean are linked with globalization. Globalizing processes affect and are affected by business and work organization, economics, socio-cultural resources, academic literature commonly subdivides globalization into three major areas, economic globalization, cultural globalization, and political globalization. The term globalization is derived from the word globalize, which refers to the emergence of a network of economic systems. One of the earliest known usages of the term as a noun was in a 1930 publication entitled Towards New Education, a related term, corporate giants, was coined by Charles Taze Russell in 1897 to refer to the largely national trusts and other large enterprises of the time. By the 1960s, both began to be used as synonyms by economists and other social scientists. Economist Theodore Levitt is widely credited with coining the term in an article entitled Globalization of Markets, However, the term globalization was in use well before this and had been used by other scholars as early as 1981. Levitt can be credited with popularizing the term and bringing it into the mainstream audience in the later half of the 1980s. Due to the complexity of the concept, research projects, articles, sociologists Martin Albrow and Elizabeth King define globalization as all those processes by which the people of the world are incorporated into a single world society. Globalization can be located on a continuum with the local, national and regional, without reference to such expansive spatial connections, there can be no clear or coherent formulation of this term. A satisfactory definition of globalization must capture each of these elements, extensity, intensity, velocity and it pertains to the increasing ease with which somebody on one side of the world can interact, to mutual benefit, with somebody on the other side of the world. The ideological dimension, according to Steger, is filled with a range of norms, claims, beliefs and they have also argued that four different forms of globalization can be distinguished that complement and cut across the solely empirical dimensions. According to James, the oldest dominant form of globalization is embodied globalization, a second form is agency-extended globalization, the circulation of agents of different institutions, organizations, and polities, including imperial agents. Object-extended globalization, a form, is the movement of commodities. He calls the transmission of ideas, images, knowledge, and information across world-space disembodied globalization and he asserted that the pace of globalization was quickening and that its impact on business organization and practice would continue to grow. Economist Takis Fotopoulos defined economic globalization as the opening and deregulation of commodity, capital and he used political globalization to refer to the emergence of a transnational elite and a phasing out of the nation-state
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Gross world product
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The gross world product is the combined gross national product of all the countries in the world. Because imports and exports balance exactly when considering the whole world, in 2014, according to the CIAs World Factbook, the GWP totalled approximately US$107.5 trillion in terms of purchasing power parity, and around US$78.28 trillion in nominal terms. The per capita PPP GWP in 2014 was approximately US$16,100 according to the World Factbook, according to the World Bank, the 2013 nominal GWP was approximately US$75.59 trillion. Data is given in terms of constant year-on-year prices, in 1998, J. Bradford DeLong of the Department of Economics, U. C. Berkeley, estimated the total GWP in 1990 U. S. dollars for years between one million years BC and 2000 AD, as shown below. Nominal GWP estimates from 2005 onwards are shown in contemporary U. S. dollars, according to estimates from the CIA World Factbook. Billion in the table refers to the short scale usage of the term
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Sovereign state
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A sovereign state is, in international law, a nonphysical juridical entity that is represented by one centralized government that has sovereignty over a geographic area. International law defines sovereign states as having a permanent population, defined territory, one government, and it is also normally understood that a sovereign state is neither dependent on nor subjected to any other power or state. The existence or disappearance of a state is a question of fact, States came into existence as people gradually transferred their allegiance from an individual sovereign to an intangible but territorial political entity, of the state. States are but one of political orders that emerged from feudal Europe, others being city states, leagues. Westphalian sovereignty is the concept of sovereignty based on territoriality. It is a system of states, multinational corporations. Sovereignty is a term that is frequently misused and that position was reflected and constituted in the notion that their sovereignty was either completely lacking, or at least of an inferior character when compared to that of civilised people. Lassa Oppenheim said There exists perhaps no conception the meaning of which is more controversial than that of sovereignty. It is a fact that this conception, from the moment when it was introduced into political science until the present day, has never had a meaning which was universally agreed upon. In the opinion of H. V. Evatt of the High Court of Australia, sovereignty is neither a question of fact, nor a question of law, but a question that does not arise at all. The right of nations to determine their own status and exercise permanent sovereignty within the limits of their territorial jurisdictions is widely recognized. The Westphalian model of sovereignty has increasingly come under fire from the non-west as a system imposed solely by Western Colonialism. What this model did was make religion a subordinate to politics and this system does not fit in the Islamic world because concepts such as separation of church and state and individual conscience are not recognised in the Islamic religion as social systems. Nation denotes a people who are believed to or deemed to share common customs, religion, language, origins, however, the adjectives national and international are frequently used to refer to matters pertaining to what are strictly sovereign states, as in national capital, international law. State refers to the set of governing and supportive institutions that have sovereignty over a definite territory, State recognition signifies the decision of a sovereign state to treat another entity as also being a sovereign state. Recognition can be expressed or implied and is usually retroactive in its effects. It does not necessarily signify a desire to establish or maintain diplomatic relations, There is no definition that is binding on all the members of the community of nations on the criteria for statehood. In actual practice, the criteria are mainly political, not legal, in international law, however, there are several theories of when a state should be recognised as sovereign
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Old English
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Old English or Anglo-Saxon is the earliest historical form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers probably in the mid 5th century, Old English developed from a set of Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic dialects originally spoken by Germanic tribes traditionally known as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. As the Anglo-Saxons became dominant in England, their language replaced the languages of Roman Britain, Common Brittonic, a Celtic language, Old English had four main dialects, associated with particular Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish and West Saxon. It was West Saxon that formed the basis for the standard of the later Old English period, although the dominant forms of Middle. The speech of eastern and northern parts of England was subject to strong Old Norse influence due to Scandinavian rule, Old English is one of the West Germanic languages, and its closest relatives are Old Frisian and Old Saxon. Like other old Germanic languages, it is different from Modern English. Old English grammar is similar to that of modern German, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs have many inflectional endings and forms. The oldest Old English inscriptions were using a runic system. Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of 700 years, from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain in the 5th century to the late 11th century, some time after the Norman invasion. While indicating that the establishment of dates is a process, Albert Baugh dates Old English from 450 to 1150, a period of full inflections. Perhaps around 85 per cent of Old English words are no longer in use, Old English is a West Germanic language, developing out of Ingvaeonic dialects from the 5th century. It came to be spoken over most of the territory of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms which became the Kingdom of England and this included most of present-day England, as well as part of what is now southeastern Scotland, which for several centuries belonged to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Other parts of the island – Wales and most of Scotland – continued to use Celtic languages, Norse was also widely spoken in the parts of England which fell under Danish law. Anglo-Saxon literacy developed after Christianisation in the late 7th century, the oldest surviving text of Old English literature is Cædmons Hymn, composed between 658 and 680. There is a corpus of runic inscriptions from the 5th to 7th centuries. The Old English Latin alphabet was introduced around the 9th century, with the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms by Alfred the Great in the later 9th century, the language of government and literature became standardised around the West Saxon dialect. In Old English, typical of the development of literature, poetry arose before prose, a later literary standard, dating from the later 10th century, arose under the influence of Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester, and was followed by such writers as the prolific Ælfric of Eynsham. This form of the language is known as the Winchester standard and it is considered to represent the classical form of Old English
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Common Germanic
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Proto-Germanic is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. The end of the Common Germanic period is reached with the beginning of the Migration Period in the fourth century, the Proto-Germanic language is not directly attested by any coherent surviving texts, it has been reconstructed using the comparative method. Fragmentary direct attestation exists of Common Germanic in early runic inscriptions, the Proto-Germanic language developed in southern Scandinavia, the Urheimat of the Germanic tribes. Proto-Germanic developed out of pre-Proto-Germanic during the Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe, Proto-Germanic itself was likely spoken after c. Early Germanic expansion in the Pre-Roman Iron Age placed Proto-Germanic speakers in contact with the Continental Celtic La Tène horizon, a number of Celtic loanwords in Proto-Germanic have been identified. By the 1st century AD, Germanic expansion reaches the Danube and the Upper Rhine in the south, at about the same time, extending east of the Vistula, Germanic speakers come into contact with early Slavic cultures, as reflected in early Germanic loans in Proto-Slavic. By the 3rd century, LPGmc speakers had expanded over significant distance, the period marks the breakup of Late Proto-Germanic and the beginning of the Germanic migrations. The earliest coherent text in Proto-Norse become available c.400 in runic inscriptions, the delineation of Late Common Germanic from Proto-Norse about then is largely a matter of convention. Early West Germanic becomes available in the 5th century with the Frankish Bergakker inscription, between the two points, many sound changes occurred. Phylogeny as applied to historical linguistics involves the descent of languages. The Germanic languages form a tree with Proto-Germanic at its root that is a branch of the Indo-European tree, borrowing of lexical items from contact languages makes the relative position of the Germanic branch within Indo-European less clear than the positions of the other branches of Indo-European. In the course of the development of linguistics, various solutions have been proposed, none certain. In the evolutionary history of a family, philologists consider a genetic tree model appropriate only if communities do not remain in effective contact as their languages diverge. The internal diversification of West Germanic developed in an especially non-treelike manner, Proto-Germanic is generally agreed to have begun about 500 BC. Its hypothetical ancestor between the end of Proto-Indo-European and 500 BC is termed Pre-Proto-Germanic, whether it is to be included under a wider meaning of Proto-Germanic is a matter of usage. The fixation of the led to sound changes in unstressed syllables. For Lehmann, the boundary was the dropping of final -a or -e in unstressed syllables, for example, post-PIE *wóyd-e > Gothic wait. Antonsen agreed with Lehmann about the boundary but later found runic evidence that the -a was not dropped, ékwakraz … wraita, I, Wakraz
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Old Saxon
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Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German, is a Germanic language and the earliest recorded form of Low German. It belongs to the West Germanic branch and is most closely related to the Anglo-Frisian languages and it is documented from the 8th century until the 12th century, when it evolved into Middle Low German. It was spoken on the north-west coast of Germany and in the Netherlands by Saxon peoples and it is close enough to Old Anglo-Frisian that it partially participates in the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law, it is also closely related to Old Dutch. The grammar of Old Saxon was fully inflected with five grammatical cases, the dual forms occurred in the first and second persons only and referred to groups of two. For a long time, Old Saxon and Old Dutch were not distinguished, there are also various differences in their phonological evolutions, Old Saxon being considered as an Ingvaeonic language whereas Old Dutch is an Istvaeonic language. Old Saxon probably evolved primarily from Ingvaeonic dialects in the West Germanic branch of Proto-Germanic in the 5th century. However, it seems that some Middle Dutch took the Old Saxon a-stem ending from some Middle Low German dialects, however,1150 marks the inceptive period of profuse Low German writing wherein the language is patently different from Old Saxon. One of the most striking differences between Middle Low German and Old Saxon is in a feature of speech known as vowel reduction, while round vowels in word-final syllables were rather frequent in Old Saxon, in Middle Low German, such are leveled to a schwa. Thus, such Old Saxon words like gisprekan or dagô became gespreken and daghe, Old Saxon did not participate in the High German consonant shift, and thus preserves stop consonants p, t, k that have been shifted in Old High German to various fricatives and affricates. The Germanic diphthongs ai, au consistently develop into long vowels ē, ō, whereas in Old High German they appear either as ei, ou or ē, ō depending on the following consonant. Old Saxon, alone of the West Germanic languages except for Frisian, consistently preserves Germanic -j- after a consonant, Germanic umlaut, when it occurs with short a, is inconsistent, e. g. hebbean or habbian to have. This feature was carried over into the descendant-language of Old Saxon, Middle Low German, apart from the e, however, the umlaut is not marked in writing. The table below lists the consonants of Old Saxon, phonemes written in parentheses represent allophones and are not independent phonemes. Notes, The voiceless spirants /f/, /θ/, and /s/ gain voiced allophones when between vowels and this change is only faithfully reflected in writing for. The other two continued to be written as before. Beginning in the later Old Saxon period, stops became devoiced word-finally as well, notably, geminated /v/ gave /bb/, and geminated /ɣ/ probably gave /ɡɡ/. Germanic *h is retained as in these positions and thus merges with devoiced /ɣ/, notes, Long vowels were rare in unstressed syllables and mostly occurred due to suffixation or compounding. Notes, The closing diphthongs /ei/ and /ou/ sometimes occur in texts, probably under the influence of Franconian or High German dialects, the situation for the front opening diphthongs is somewhat unclear in some texts
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Old Dutch
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In linguistics, Old Dutch or Old Low Franconian is the set of Franconian dialects spoken in the Low Countries during the Early Middle Ages, from around the 5th to the 12th century. Old Dutch is mostly recorded on fragmentary relics, and words have been reconstructed from Middle Dutch and it evolved into Middle Dutch around the 12th century. Before the advent of Old Dutch or any of the Germanic languages, the North Sea Germanic dialects were spoken in the whole of the coastal parts of the Netherlands and Belgium. It was largely replaced by Weser-Rhine Germanic dialects, spoken by the Salian Franks and it spread from northern Belgium and the southern Netherlands to the coast and evolved into Old Low Franconian or Old Dutch. It has, however, a North sea Germanic substrate, which is why some philologists put the language in that branch, linguists typically date this transition to around the 5th century. Old Dutch is divided in Old West Low Franconian and Old East Low Franconian, however, the divergence being that the latter shares more traits with neighboring historical forms of Central Franconian dialects such as Ripuarian and Moselle Franconian. Old English, Old Frisian, Old Saxon and Old Dutch share the subsumption of the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law, much of the grammatical variation between Old Dutch and Old Saxon is similar to that between Old Dutch and Old High German. Old Dutch naturally evolved into Middle Dutch with some distinctions that approximate those found in most medieval West Germanic languages. The year 1150 CE is often cited as the time of the discontinuity, the most notable difference between Old and Middle Dutch is in a feature of speech known as vowel reduction. Round vowels in word-final syllables are rather frequent in Old Dutch, in Modern Dutch, recasting is necessary to form a coherent sentence. Old Dutch texts are rare and much more limited when compared to related languages like Old English. Most of the earliest texts written in the Netherlands were written in Latin rather than Old Dutch, some of these Latin texts, however, contained Old Dutch words interspersed with the Latin text. Also, it is hard to determine whether a text actually was written in Old Dutch, wad Several words that are known to have developed in the Netherlands before Old Dutch was spoken have been found, and are sometimes called Oudnederlands in a geographic sense. The oldest known example, wad, was mentioned in 108 AD by Tacitus. The word exclusively referred to the region and ground type that is now known as the Wadden Sea, however, since this word existed long before Old Dutch did, it cannot be considered part of its vocabulary, but rather of Proto-Germanic. Haþuþuwas ann kusjam loguns This sentence has been interpreted as of Haþuþewaz, I bestow upon the choosers of the swords. It was discovered on a sword sheath, excavated in 1996 in the Dutch village of Bergakker and is better described as Frankish than Old Dutch. The text however, does show the beginning of Old Dutch morphology, the word ann, found in the partially translated inscription is coined as the oldest Dutch by linguists Nicoline van der Sijs and Tanneke Schoonheim from Genootschap Onze Taal
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Old High German
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Old High German is the earliest stage of the German language, conventionally covering the period from around 700 to 1050. Coherent written texts do not appear until the half of the 8th century. There are, however, a number of Elder Futhark inscriptions dating to the 6th century, as well as single words, during the migration period, the Elbe Germanic tribes settled in what became Alamannia, the Duchy of Bavaria and the Kingdom of Lombardy. Old High German comprises the dialects of these groups which underwent the Second Sound Shift during the 6th Century, namely all of Elbe Germanic, in the south, the Langobards, who had settled in Northern Italy, maintained their dialect until their conquest by Charlemagne in 774. This area did not become German-speaking again until the German eastward expansion of the early 12th century, though there was some attempt at conquest, Old High German literacy is a product of the monasteries, notably at St. Gallen, Reichenau and Fulda. Its origins lie in the establishment of the German church by Boniface in the mid 8th century, einhard tells how Charlemagne himself ordered that the epic lays should be collected for posterity. It was the neglect or religious zeal of later generations that led to the loss of these records, thus, it was Charlemagnes weak successor, Louis the Pious, who destroyed his fathers collection of epic poetry on account of its pagan content. Hrabanus Maurus, a student of Alcuins and abbot at Fulda from 822, was an important advocate of the cultivation of German literacy, among his students were Walafrid Strabo and Otfrid of Weissenburg. Notker Labeo towards the end of the Old High German period was among the greatest stylists in the language, the main difference between Old High German and the West Germanic dialects from which it developed is that it underwent the High German consonant shift. This is generally dated approximately to the late 5th and early 6th centuries—hence dating its start to around 500, the result of this sound change is that the consonantal system of German remains different from all other West Germanic languages, including English and Low German. Grammatically, however, Old High German remained very similar to Old English, Old Dutch, by the mid 11th century the many different vowels found in unstressed syllables had all been reduced to /ə/. Since these vowels were part of the endings in the nouns and verbs. For these reasons,1050 is seen as the start of the Middle High German period, for this reason the dialects may be termed monastery dialects. It declined after the conquest of the Lombard Kingdom by the Franks in 774 and it is classified as Upper German on the basis of evidence of the Second Sound Shift. The continued existence of a West Frankish dialect in the Western, claims that this might have been the language of the Carolingian court or that it is attested in the Ludwigslied, whose presence in a French manuscript suggests bilingualism, are controversial. The charts show the vowel and consonant systems of the East Franconian dialect in the 9th century and this is the dialect of the monastery of Fulda, and specifically of the Old High German Tatian. Old High German had five long vowels and six phonemic short vowels. Both occurred in stressed and unstressed syllables, notes, All back vowels likely had front-vowel allophones as a result of Umlaut
27.
Old Frisian
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Old Frisian is a West Germanic language spoken between the 8th and 16th centuries in the area between the Rhine and Weser on the European North Sea coast. The Frisian settlers on the coast of South Jutland also spoke Old Frisian, the language of the earlier inhabitants of the region between the Zuiderzee and Ems River is attested in only a few personal names and place-names. Old Frisian evolved into Middle Frisian, spoken from the 16th to the 19th century, in the early Middle Ages, Frisia stretched from the area around Bruges, in what is now Belgium, to the Weser River in northern Germany. At the time, the Frisian language was spoken along the entire southern North Sea coast and this region is referred to as Greater Frisia or Frisia Magna, and many of the areas within it still treasure their Frisian heritage. However, by 1300, their territory had been pushed back to the Zuiderzee, hence, a close relationship exists between Old Frisian and Old English. Generally, Old Frisian phonologically resembles Old English, in particular, it shares the palatalisation of velar consonants also found in Old English. For example, whereas the closely related Old Saxon and Old Dutch retain the velar in dag, Old Frisian has dei, when followed by front vowels the Germanic /k/ changed to a /tʃ/ sound. The Old Frisian for church was tzirke or tzerke, in Old English it was ċiriċe, while Old Saxon, another feature shared between the two is Anglo-Frisian brightening, which fronted a to e under some circumstances. In unstressed syllables, o merges into a, and i into e as in Old English, the old Germanic diphthongs *ai and *au become ē/ā and ā, respectively, in Old Frisian, as in ēn/ān from Proto-Germanic *ainaz, and brād from *braudą. In comparison, these diphthongs become ā and ēa in Old English, the diphthong *eu generally becomes ia, and Germanic *iu is retained. These diphthongs initially began with a i, but the stress later shifts to the second component, giving to iā. For example, thiād and liūde from Proto-Germanic *þeudō and *liudīz, between vowels, h generally disappears, as in Old English and Old Dutch. Word-initial h- on the hand is retained. Some of the texts that are preserved from this period are from the 12th or 13th centuries, generally, all these texts are restricted to legal writings. These runic writings however usually consist of no more than inscriptions of a single or few words, amsterdam and Philadelphia, John Benjamins,2009. They show a degree of linguistic uniformity. Westeremden yew-stick Fon Alra Fresena Fridome Hunsigo MSS H1, H2, Ten Commandements,17 petitiones Londriucht Thet Freske Riim Skeltana Riucht law code
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Old Norse
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Old Norse was a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during about the 9th to 13th centuries. These dates, however, are not absolute, since written Old Norse is found well into the 15th century, Old Norse was divided into three dialects, Old West Norse, Old East Norse and Old Gutnish. Old West and East Norse formed a continuum, with no clear geographical boundary between them. For example, Old East Norse traits were found in eastern Norway, although Old Norwegian is classified as Old West Norse, most speakers spoke Old East Norse in what is present day Denmark and Sweden. Old Gutnish, the more obscure dialectal branch, is included in the Old East Norse dialect due to geographical associations. It developed its own features and shared in changes to both other branches. The 12th century Icelandic Gray Goose Laws state that Swedes, Norwegians, Icelanders and Danes spoke the same language, another term used, used especially commonly with reference to West Norse, was norrœnt mál. In some instances the term Old Norse refers specifically to Old West Norse, the Old East Norse dialect was spoken in Denmark, Sweden, settlements in Kievan Rus, eastern England, and Danish settlements in Normandy. The Old Gutnish dialect was spoken in Gotland and in settlements in the East. In the 11th century, Old Norse was the most widely spoken European language, in Kievan Rus, it survived the longest in Veliky Novgorod, probably lasting into the 13th century there. Norwegian is descended from Old West Norse, but over the centuries it has heavily influenced by East Norse. Old Norse also had an influence on English dialects and Lowland Scots and it also influenced the development of the Norman language, and through it and to a smaller extent, that of modern French. Various other languages, which are not closely related, have heavily influenced by Norse, particularly the Norman dialects, Scottish Gaelic. The current Finnish and Estonian words for Sweden are Ruotsi and Rootsi, of the modern languages, Icelandic is the closest to Old Norse. Written modern Icelandic derives from the Old Norse phonemic writing system, contemporary Icelandic-speakers can read Old Norse, which varies slightly in spelling as well as semantics and word order. However, pronunciation, particularly of the phonemes, has changed at least as much as in the other North Germanic languages. Faroese retains many similarities but is influenced by Danish, Norwegian, although Swedish, Danish and the Norwegian languages have diverged the most, they still retain asymmetric mutual intelligibility. Speakers of modern Swedish, Norwegian and Danish can mostly understand each other without studying their neighboring languages, the languages are also sufficiently similar in writing that they can mostly be understood across borders
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Icelandic language
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Icelandic /aɪsˈlændɪk/ is a North Germanic language, the language of Iceland. It is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages, historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the colonisation of the Americas. Icelandic, Faroese, Norn, and Western Norwegian formerly constituted West Nordic, Danish, Eastern Norwegian, modern Norwegian Bokmål is influenced by both groups, leading the Nordic languages to be divided into mainland Scandinavian languages and Insular Nordic. Most Western European languages have reduced levels of inflection, particularly noun declension. In contrast, Icelandic retains a four-case synthetic grammar comparable to, Icelandic is distinguished by a wide assortment of irregular declensions. Icelandic also has many instances of oblique cases without any governing word, for example, many of the various Latin ablatives have a corresponding Icelandic dative. The vast majority of Icelandic speakers—about 320, 000—live in Iceland, more than 8,000 Icelandic speakers live in Denmark, of whom approximately 3,000 are students. The language is spoken by some 5,000 people in the United States. Notably in the province of Manitoba, while 97% of the population of Iceland consider Icelandic their mother tongue, the language is in decline in some communities outside Iceland, particularly in Canada. Icelandic speakers outside Iceland represent recent emigration in almost all cases except Gimli, Manitoba, the state-funded Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies serves as a centre for preserving the medieval Icelandic manuscripts and studying the language and its literature. Since 1995, on 16 November each year, the birthday of 19th-century poet Jónas Hallgrímsson is celebrated as Icelandic Language Day, the oldest preserved texts in Icelandic were written around 1100 AD. Much of the texts are based on poetry and laws traditionally preserved orally, the most famous of the texts, which were written in Iceland from the 12th century onward, are the Icelandic Sagas. They comprise the historical works and the eddaic poems, the language of the sagas is Old Icelandic, a western dialect of Old Norse. Danish rule of Iceland from 1380 to 1918 had little effect on the evolution of Icelandic, though more archaic than the other living Germanic languages, Icelandic changed markedly in pronunciation from the 12th to the 16th century, especially in vowels. The modern Icelandic alphabet has developed from an established in the 19th century. The later Rasmus Rask standard was a re-creation of the old treatise, with changes to fit concurrent Germanic conventions. Various archaic features, as the letter ð, had not been used much in later centuries, rasks standard constituted a major change in practice. Later 20th-century changes include the use of é instead of je, apart from the addition of new vocabulary, written Icelandic has not changed substantially since the 11th century, when the first texts were written on vellum
30.
Latin
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Latin is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. The Latin alphabet is derived from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, Latin was originally spoken in Latium, in the Italian Peninsula. Through the power of the Roman Republic, it became the dominant language, Vulgar Latin developed into the Romance languages, such as Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Romanian. Latin, Italian and French have contributed many words to the English language, Latin and Ancient Greek roots are used in theology, biology, and medicine. By the late Roman Republic, Old Latin had been standardised into Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin was the colloquial form spoken during the same time and attested in inscriptions and the works of comic playwrights like Plautus and Terence. Late Latin is the language from the 3rd century. Later, Early Modern Latin and Modern Latin evolved, Latin was used as the language of international communication, scholarship, and science until well into the 18th century, when it began to be supplanted by vernaculars. Ecclesiastical Latin remains the language of the Holy See and the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church. Today, many students, scholars and members of the Catholic clergy speak Latin fluently and it is taught in primary, secondary and postsecondary educational institutions around the world. The language has been passed down through various forms, some inscriptions have been published in an internationally agreed, monumental, multivolume series, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Authors and publishers vary, but the format is about the same, volumes detailing inscriptions with a critical apparatus stating the provenance, the reading and interpretation of these inscriptions is the subject matter of the field of epigraphy. The works of several hundred ancient authors who wrote in Latin have survived in whole or in part and they are in part the subject matter of the field of classics. The Cat in the Hat, and a book of fairy tales, additional resources include phrasebooks and resources for rendering everyday phrases and concepts into Latin, such as Meissners Latin Phrasebook. The Latin influence in English has been significant at all stages of its insular development. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, English writers cobbled together huge numbers of new words from Latin and Greek words, dubbed inkhorn terms, as if they had spilled from a pot of ink. Many of these words were used once by the author and then forgotten, many of the most common polysyllabic English words are of Latin origin through the medium of Old French. Romance words make respectively 59%, 20% and 14% of English, German and those figures can rise dramatically when only non-compound and non-derived words are included. Accordingly, Romance words make roughly 35% of the vocabulary of Dutch, Roman engineering had the same effect on scientific terminology as a whole
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Cosmos
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The cosmos is the universe regarded as a complex and orderly system, the opposite of chaos. Cosmology is the study of the cosmos in several of the above meanings, all cosmologies have in common an attempt to understand the implicit order within the whole of being. In this way, most religions and philosophical systems have a cosmology, Cosmology is a branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of the universe, a theory or doctrine describing the natural order of the universe. The basic definition of Cosmology is the science of the origin, in modern astronomy the Big Bang theory is the dominant postulation. In physical cosmology, the cosmos is often used in a technical way. Our particular cosmos, the universe, is generally capitalized as the Cosmos. According to Charles Peter Mason in Sir William Smith Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, Pythagoreans described the universe. It appears, in fact, from this, as well as from the extant fragments, the second book appears to have been an exposition of the nature of numbers, which in the Pythagorean theory are the essence and source of all things. In theology, the cosmos is the heavenly bodies. In Christian theology, the word is used synonymously with aion to refer to worldly life or this world or this age as opposed to the afterlife or World to Come. The book The works of Aristotle mentioned Aristotle says the poet Orpheus never existed, bertrand Russel noted The Orphics were an ascetic sect, wine, to them, was only a symbol, as, later, in the Christian sacrament. The intoxication that they sought was that of enthusiasm, of union with the god and they believed themselves, in this way, to acquire mystic knowledge not obtainable by ordinary means. This mystical element entered into Greek philosophy with Pythagoras, who was a reformer of Orphism as Orpheus was a reformer of the religion of Dionysus, from Pythagoras Orphic elements entered into the philosophy of Plato, and from Plato into most later philosophy that was in any degree religious. Cosmos – Illustrated Encyclopedia of Cosmos and Cosmic Law Greene, B, the Elegant Universe, Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. Norton, New York Hawking, S. W, yulsman, T. Origins, The Quest for our Cosmic Roots
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Midgard
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Midgard is the name for Earth inhabited by and known to humans in early Germanic cosmology, and specifically one of the Nine Worlds in Norse mythology. This name occurs in Old Norse literature as Miðgarðr, in Old Saxon Heliand it appears as Middilgard and in Old High German poem Muspilli it appears as Mittilagart. The Gothic form Midjungards is attested in the Gospel of Luke as a translation of the Greek word οἰκουμένη, the word is present in Old English epic and poetry as Middangeard, later transformed to Middellærd or Mittelerde in Middle English literature. All these forms are from a Common Germanic *midja-gardaz, a compound of *midja- middle and *gardaz yard, in early Germanic cosmology, the term stands alongside world, from a Common Germanic compound *wira-alđiz literally the age of men. Midgard is a realm in Norse mythology and it is one of the Nine Worlds of North Mythology—the only one that is completely visible to mankind. Pictured as placed somewhere in the middle of Yggdrasil, Midgard is between the land of Niflheim—the land of ice—to the north and Muspelheim—the land of fire—to the south, Midgard is surrounded by a world of water, or ocean, that is impassable. The ocean is inhabited by the sea serpent Jörmungandr, who is so huge that he encircles the world entirely. The concept is similar to that of the Ouroboros, Midgard was also connected to Asgard, the home of the gods, by the Bifröst, the rainbow bridge, guarded by Heimdallr. Aurgelmirs skull was held by four dwarfs, Nordri, Sudri, Austri, and Vestri, the sun, moon, and stars were said to be scattered sparks in the skull. According to the Eddas, Midgard will be destroyed at Ragnarök, Jörmungandr will arise from the ocean, poisoning the land and sea with his venom and causing the sea to rear up and lash against the land. The name middangeard occurs half a dozen times in the Old English epic poem Beowulf, the term is equivalent in meaning to the Greek term Oikoumene, as referring to the known and inhabited world. The concept of Midgard occurs many times in Middle English, the association with earth in Middle English middellærd, middelerde is by popular etymology, the continuation of geard enclosure is yard. An early example of transformation is from the Ormulum, þatt ure Drihhtin wollde / ben borenn i þiss middellærd that our Lord wanted / be born in this middle-earth
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Chthonic
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The translation of meaning discusses deities or spirits of the underworld, especially in Greek religion. The Greek word khthon is one of several for earth, it refers to the interior of the soil, rather than the living surface of the land. These include, but are not strictly limited to, Demeter. Nocturnal ritual sacrifice was a practice in many chthonic cults. When the sacrifice was a creature, the animal was placed in a bothros or megaron. In some Greek chthonic cults, the animal was sacrificed on a raised bomos, offerings were usually burned whole or buried rather than being cooked and shared among the worshippers. C. He does, however, note that this may be somewhat of an overgeneralization, the myths associating the underworld chthonic deities and fertility were not exclusive. Myths about the later Olympian deities also described an association with the fertility, thus Demeter and Persephone both watched over aspects of the fertility of land, yet Demeter had a typically Olympian cult while Persephone had a chthonic one. Also, Demeter was worshiped alongside Persephone with identical rites, and yet occasionally was classified as an Olympian in late poetry, the absorption of some earlier cults into the newer pantheon versus those that resisted being absorbed is suggested as providing the later myths. The categories Olympian and chthonic were not, however, completely separate, some Olympian deities, such as Hermes and Zeus, also received chthonic sacrifices and tithes in certain locations. The deified heroes Heracles and Asclepius might be worshipped as gods or chthonic heroes, depending on the site, moreover, a few deities are not easily classifiable under these terms. Hecate, for instance, was typically offered puppies at crossroads—a practice neither typical of an Olympian sacrifice nor of a sacrifice to Persephone or the heroes. Because of her roles, Hecate is generally classed as chthonic. As well, the chthonic has connotations with regard to gender, in cultural anthropology, men associated with the above, the sky, and women associated with the below, with the earth, water of the underground, and the chthonic deities. This was by no means universal, in Ancient Egypt the main deity of the earth was the male god Geb, his consort was Nut. The term allochthon in structural geology is used to describe a large block of rock which has moved from its original site of formation. From the Greek allo meaning other and chthon designating the process of the mass being moved under the earth. Chthonic law Earth mother Geomancy Life-death-rebirth deities Sky father The dictionary definition of chthonic at Wiktionary
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Creation myth
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A creation myth is a symbolic narrative of how the world began and how people first came to inhabit it. While in popular usage the term often refers to false or fanciful stories, formally. Cultures generally regard their creation myths as true, in the society in which it is told, a creation myth is usually regarded as conveying profound truths, metaphorically, symbolically and sometimes in a historical or literal sense. They are commonly, although not always, considered cosmogonical myths – that is, Creation myths often share a number of features. They often are considered sacred accounts and can be found in all known religious traditions. They are all stories with a plot and characters who are either deities, human-like figures, or animals and they are often set in a dim and nonspecific past that historian of religion Mircea Eliade termed in illo tempore. Creation myths develop in oral traditions and therefore typically have multiple versions, found throughout human culture, Creation myth definitions from modern references, A symbolic narrative of the beginning of the world as understood in a particular tradition and community. Creation myths are of importance for the valuation of the world, for the orientation of humans in the universe. Creation myths tell us how things began, all cultures have creation myths, they are our primary myths, the first stage in what might be called the psychic life of the species. As cultures, we identify ourselves through the collective dreams we call creation myths, … Creation myths explain in metaphorical terms our sense of who we are in the context of the world, and in so doing they reveal our real priorities, as well as our real prejudices. Our images of creation say a deal about who we are. A philosophical and theological elaboration of the myth of creation within a religious community. Religion professor Mircea Eliade defined the word myth in terms of creation, Myth narrates a history, it relates an event that took place in primordial Time. All creation myths are in one sense etiological because they attempt to explain how the world was formed, in the past historians of religion and other students of myth thought of them as forms of primitive or early-stage science or religion and analyzed them in a literal or logical sense. However they are seen as symbolic narratives which must be understood in terms of their own cultural context. Charles Long writes, The beings referred to in the myth – gods, animals, the myths should not be understood as attempts to work out a rational explanation of deity. While creation myths are not literal explications they do serve to define an orientation of humanity in the world in terms of a birth story. They are the basis of a worldview that reaffirms and guides how people relate to the world, to any assumed spiritual world
35.
Chaos (cosmogony)
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Chaos refers to the formless or void state preceding the creation of the universe or cosmos in the Greek creation myths, or to the initial gap created by the original separation of heaven and earth. Greek χάος means emptiness, vast void, chasm, abyss, from the verb χαίνω, gape, be open, etc. from Proto-Indo-European *ǵheh2n, cognate to Old English geanian, to gape. It may also mean space, the expanse of air, pherecydes of Syros interpretes chaos as water, like something formless which can be differentiated. Hesiod and the Pre-Socratics use the Greek term in the context of cosmogony, Hesiods chaos has been interpreted as a moving, formless mass from which the cosmos and the gods originated. In Hesiods opinion the origin should be indefinite and indeterminate, and it represents disorder, Chaos has been linked with the term tohu wa-bohu of Genesis 1,2. The term may refer to a state of non-being prior to creation or to a formless state, in the Book of Genesis, the spirit of God is moving upon the face of the waters, and the earliest state of the universe is like a watery chaos. The Septuagint makes no use of χάος in the context of creation, instead using the term for גיא, chasm, cleft, in Micah 1,6, a parallel can be found in the Genesis. In the beginning God creates the earth and the sky, the earth is formless and void, and later God divides the waters under the firmament from the waters over the firmament, and calls the firmament heaven. In both cases, chaos referring to a notion of a primordial state contains the cosmos in potentia and this model of a primordial state of matter has been opposed by the Church Fathers from the 2nd century, who posited a creation ex nihilo by an omnipotent God. In modern biblical studies, the chaos is commonly used in the context of the Torah. Parallels between the Hebrew Genesis and the Babylonian Enuma Elish were established by Hermann Gunkel in 1910, besides Genesis, other books of the Old Testament, especially a number of Psalms, some passages in Isaiah and Jeremiah and the Book of Job are relevant. Use of chaos in the sense of complete disorder or confusion first appears in Elizabethan Early Modern English. The motif of Chaoskampf is ubiquitous in myth and legend, depicting a battle of a culture hero deity with a chaos monster, often in the shape of a serpent or dragon. The same term has also extended to parallel concepts in the religions of the Ancient Near East, such as the abstract conflict of ideas in the Egyptian duality of Maat. Early work by German academics such as Gunkel and Bousset in comparative mythology popularized translating the mythological sea serpent as a dragon. Indo-European examples of this mythic trope include Thor vs. Jörmungandr, Tarhunt vs. Illuyanka, Indra vs. Vritra, Fereydun vs. Aži Dahāka, and Zeus vs. Typhon among others. In the Theogony of Hesiod, Chaos is a divine primordial condition, which is the origin of the gods and it seems that in Hesiods opinion, the origin should be indefinite and indeterminate, and it may represent infinite space, or formless matter. The notion of the temporal infinity was familiar to the Greek mind from remote antiquity in the conception of immortality
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Planet
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The term planet is ancient, with ties to history, astrology, science, mythology, and religion. Several planets in the Solar System can be seen with the naked eye and these were regarded by many early cultures as divine, or as emissaries of deities. As scientific knowledge advanced, human perception of the planets changed, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union officially adopted a resolution defining planets within the Solar System. This definition is controversial because it excludes many objects of mass based on where or what they orbit. The planets were thought by Ptolemy to orbit Earth in deferent, at about the same time, by careful analysis of pre-telescopic observation data collected by Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler found the planets orbits were not circular but elliptical. As observational tools improved, astronomers saw that, like Earth, the planets rotated around tilted axes, and some shared such features as ice caps and seasons. Since the dawn of the Space Age, close observation by space probes has found that Earth and the planets share characteristics such as volcanism, hurricanes, tectonics. Planets are generally divided into two types, large low-density giant planets, and smaller rocky terrestrials. Under IAU definitions, there are eight planets in the Solar System, in order of increasing distance from the Sun, they are the four terrestrials, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, then the four giant planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Six of the planets are orbited by one or more natural satellites, several thousands of planets around other stars have been discovered in the Milky Way. e. in the habitable zone. On December 20,2011, the Kepler Space Telescope team reported the discovery of the first Earth-sized extrasolar planets, Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, orbiting a Sun-like star, Kepler-20. A2012 study, analyzing gravitational microlensing data, estimates an average of at least 1.6 bound planets for every star in the Milky Way, around one in five Sun-like stars is thought to have an Earth-sized planet in its habitable zone. The idea of planets has evolved over its history, from the lights of antiquity to the earthly objects of the scientific age. The concept has expanded to include not only in the Solar System. The ambiguities inherent in defining planets have led to much scientific controversy, the five classical planets, being visible to the naked eye, have been known since ancient times and have had a significant impact on mythology, religious cosmology, and ancient astronomy. In ancient times, astronomers noted how certain lights moved across the sky, as opposed to the fixed stars, ancient Greeks called these lights πλάνητες ἀστέρες or simply πλανῆται, from which todays word planet was derived. In ancient Greece, China, Babylon, and indeed all pre-modern civilizations, it was almost universally believed that Earth was the center of the Universe and that all the planets circled Earth. The first civilization known to have a theory of the planets were the Babylonians
37.
Population
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A population is the number of all the organisms of the same group or species, which live in a particular geographical area, and have the capability of interbreeding. In sociology, population refers to a collection of humans, Demography is a social science which entails the statistical study of human populations. This article refers mainly to human population, in population genetics a sexual population is a set of organisms in which any pair of members can breed together. This means that they can regularly exchange gametes to produce normally-fertile offspring and this also implies that all members belong to the same species. If the gamodeme is very large, and all gene alleles are uniformly distributed by the gametes within it, however, there may be low frequencies of exchange with these neighbours. This may be viewed as the breaking up of a sexual population into smaller overlapping sexual populations. The overall rise in homozygosity is quantified by the inbreeding coefficient, note that all homozygotes are increased in frequency – both the deleterious and the desirable. The mean phenotype of the collection is lower than that of the panmictic original – which is known as inbreeding depression. It is most important to note, however, that some lines will be superior to the panmictic original, while some will be about the same. The probabilities of each can be estimated from those binomial equations, in plant and animal breeding, procedures have been developed which deliberately utilise the effects of dispersion. It can be shown that dispersion-assisted selection leads to the greatest genetic advance and this is so for both allogamous and autogamous gamodemes. In ecology, the population of a species in a certain area can be estimated using the Lincoln Index. As of todays date, the population is estimated by the United States Census Bureau to be 7.496 billion. The US Census Bureau estimates the 7 billion number was surpassed on 12 March 2012, according to papers published by the United States Census Bureau, the world population hit 6.5 billion on 24 February 2006. The United Nations Population Fund designated 12 October 1999 as the day on which world population reached 6 billion. This was about 12 years after world population reached 5 billion in 1987, the population of countries such as Nigeria, is not even known to the nearest million, so there is a considerable margin of error in such estimates. Researcher Carl Haub calculated that a total of over 100 billion people have probably been born in the last 2000 years, Population growth increased significantly as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace from 1700 onwards. In 2007 the United Nations Population Division projected that the population will likely surpass 10 billion in 2055
38.
Country
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A country is a region that is identified as a distinct national entity in political geography. Sometimes the word countries is used to both to sovereign states and to other political entities, while other times it refers only to states. The word country comes from Old French contrée, itself derived from Vulgar Latin contrata and it most likely entered the English language after the Franco-Norman invasion during the 11th century. Areas much smaller than a state may be called by names such as the West Country in England, the Black Country, Constable Country. In many European countries the words are used for sub-divisions of the territory, as in the German Bundesländer. The modern Italian contrada is a word with its meaning varying locally, the term country is frequently used to refer to sovereign states. There is no agreement on the number of countries in the world. There are 206 sovereign states, of which 193 states are members of the United Nations, all are defined as states by declarative theory of statehood and constitutive theory of statehood. The latest proclaimed state is South Sudan in 2011, the Kingdom of Denmark, a sovereign state, comprises Metropolitan Denmark and two nominally separate countries—the Faroe Islands, and Greenland—which are almost fully internally self-governing. The Kingdom of the Netherlands, a state, comprises four separate countries, Netherlands, Aruba, Curaçao. The degree of autonomy of non-sovereign countries varies widely, some are possessions of sovereign states, as several states have overseas territories, with citizenry at times identical and at times distinct from their own
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Region
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In geography, regions are areas that are broadly divided by physical characteristics, human impact characteristics, and the interaction of humanity and the environment. Apart from the continental regions, there are also hydrospheric and atmospheric regions that cover the oceans. The land and water global regions are divided into subregions geographically bounded by large geological features that influence large-scale ecologies, such as plains and features. As a way of describing spatial areas, the concept of regions is important and widely used among the branches of geography. For example, ecoregion is a used in environmental geography, cultural region in cultural geography, bioregion in biogeography. The field of geography that studies regions themselves is called regional geography, where human geography is concerned, the regions and subregions are described by the discipline of ethnography. A region has its own nature that could not be moved, the first nature is its natural environment. The second nature is its physical elements complex that were built by people in the past, the third nature is its socio-cultural context that could not be replaced by new immigrants. Global regions distinguishable from space, and are clearly distinguished by the two basic terrestrial environments, land and water. However, they have generally recognised as such much earlier by terrestrial cartography because of their impact on human geography. They are divided into largest of land regions, known as continents, there are also significant regions that do not belong to either classification, such as archipelago regions that are littoral regions, or earthquake regions that are defined in geology. Continental regions are based on broad experiences in human history. As such they are conceptual constructs, usually lacking distinct boundaries, oceanic division into maritime regions are used in conjunction with the relationship to the central area of the continent, using directions of the compass. To a large extent, major continental regions are mental constructs created by considering an efficient way to large areas of the continents. For the most part, the images of the world are derived as much from academic studies and they are a matter of collective human knowledge of its own planet and are attempts to better understand their environments. Regional geography is a branch of geography that studies regions of all sizes across the Earth and it has a prevailing descriptive character. The main aim is to understand or define the uniqueness or character of a particular region, attention is paid also to regionalization, which covers the proper techniques of space delimitation into regions. Regional geography is considered as a certain approach to study in geographical sciences
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History
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History is the study of the past as it is described in written documents. Events occurring before written record are considered prehistory and it is an umbrella term that relates to past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of information about these events. Scholars who write about history are called historians and their works continue to be read today, and the gap between the culture-focused Herodotus and the military-focused Thucydides remains a point of contention or approach in modern historical writing. In Asia, a chronicle, the Spring and Autumn Annals was known to be compiled from as early as 722 BC although only 2nd-century BC texts survived. Ancient influences have helped spawn variant interpretations of the nature of history which have evolved over the centuries, the modern study of history is wide-ranging, and includes the study of specific regions and the study of certain topical or thematical elements of historical investigation. Often history is taught as part of primary and secondary education, the word history comes ultimately from Ancient Greek ἱστορία, meaning inquiry, knowledge from inquiry, or judge. It was in that sense that Aristotle used the word in his Περὶ Τὰ Ζῷα Ἱστορίαι, the ancestor word ἵστωρ is attested early on in Homeric Hymns, Heraclitus, the Athenian ephebes oath, and in Boiotic inscriptions. History was borrowed from Latin into Old English as stær, and it was from Anglo-Norman that history was borrowed into Middle English, and this time the loan stuck. In Middle English, the meaning of history was story in general, the restriction to the meaning the branch of knowledge that deals with past events, the formal record or study of past events, esp. human affairs arose in the mid-fifteenth century. With the Renaissance, older senses of the word were revived, and it was in the Greek sense that Francis Bacon used the term in the sixteenth century. For him, historia was the knowledge of objects determined by space and time, in an expression of the linguistic synthetic vs. analytic/isolating dichotomy, English like Chinese now designates separate words for human history and storytelling in general. In modern German, French, and most Germanic and Romance languages, which are synthetic and highly inflected. The adjective historical is attested from 1661, and historic from 1669, Historian in the sense of a researcher of history is attested from 1531. Historians write in the context of their own time, and with due regard to the current dominant ideas of how to interpret the past, in the words of Benedetto Croce, All history is contemporary history. History is facilitated by the formation of a discourse of past through the production of narrative. The modern discipline of history is dedicated to the production of this discourse. All events that are remembered and preserved in some authentic form constitute the historical record, the task of historical discourse is to identify the sources which can most usefully contribute to the production of accurate accounts of past. Therefore, the constitution of the archive is a result of circumscribing a more general archive by invalidating the usage of certain texts and documents
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Astronomical object
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An astronomical object or celestial object is a naturally occurring physical entity, association, or structure that current astronomy has demonstrated to exist in the observable universe. In astronomy, the object and body are often used interchangeably. Examples for astronomical objects include planetary systems, star clusters, nebulae and galaxies, while asteroids, moons, planets, and stars are astronomical bodies. A comet may be identified as both body and object, It is a body when referring to the nucleus of ice and dust. The universe can be viewed as having a hierarchical structure, at the largest scales, the fundamental component of assembly is the galaxy. Galaxies are organized groups and clusters, often within larger superclusters. Disc galaxies encompass lenticular and spiral galaxies with features, such as spiral arms, at the core, most galaxies have a supermassive black hole, which may result in an active galactic nucleus. Galaxies can also have satellites in the form of dwarf galaxies, the constituents of a galaxy are formed out of gaseous matter that assembles through gravitational self-attraction in a hierarchical manner. At this level, the fundamental components are the stars. The great variety of forms are determined almost entirely by the mass, composition. Stars may be found in systems that orbit about each other in a hierarchical organization. A planetary system and various objects such as asteroids, comets and debris. The various distinctive types of stars are shown by the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram —a plot of stellar luminosity versus surface temperature. Each star follows a track across this diagram. If this track takes the star through a region containing a variable type. An example of this is the instability strip, a region of the H-R diagram that includes Delta Scuti, RR Lyrae, the table below lists the general categories of bodies and objects by their location or structure. International Astronomical Naming Commission List of light sources List of Solar System objects Lists of astronomical objects SkyChart, Sky & Telescope Monthly skymaps for every location on Earth
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Science fiction
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Science fiction often explores the potential consequences of scientific and other innovations, and has been called a literature of ideas. Science fiction is difficult to define, as it includes a range of subgenres and themes. Author and editor Damon Knight summed up the difficulty, saying science fiction is what we point to when we say it, a definition echoed by author Mark C. Glassy, who argues that the definition of science fiction is like the definition of pornography, you do not know what it is, in 1970 or 1971William Atheling Jr. According to science fiction writer Robert A, rod Serlings definition is fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science fiction is the improbable made possible, Science fiction is largely based on writing rationally about alternative possible worlds or futures. Science fiction elements include, A time setting in the future, in alternative timelines, a spatial setting or scenes in outer space, on other worlds, or on subterranean earth. Characters that include aliens, mutants, androids, or humanoid robots, futuristic or plausible technology such as ray guns, teleportation machines, and humanoid computers. Scientific principles that are new or that contradict accepted physical laws, for time travel, wormholes. New and different political or social systems, e. g. utopian, dystopian, post-scarcity, paranormal abilities such as mind control, telepathy, telekinesis Other universes or dimensions and travel between them. A product of the budding Age of Reason and the development of science itself. Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan considered Keplers work the first science fiction story and it depicts a journey to the Moon and how the Earths motion is seen from there. Later, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story about a flight to the moon, more examples appeared throughout the 19th century. Wells The War of the Worlds describes an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians using tripod fighting machines equipped with advanced weaponry and it is a seminal depiction of an alien invasion of Earth. In the late 19th century, the scientific romance was used in Britain to describe much of this fiction. This produced additional offshoots, such as the 1884 novella Flatland, the term would continue to be used into the early 20th century for writers such as Olaf Stapledon. In the early 20th century, pulp magazines helped develop a new generation of mainly American SF writers, influenced by Hugo Gernsback, the founder of Amazing Stories magazine. In 1912 Edgar Rice Burroughs published A Princess of Mars, the first of his series of Barsoom novels, situated on Mars
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