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Island

Island

in New York, USA]] An island or isle is any piece of land that is completely surrounded by water. Very small islands are called islets. Although seldom adhered to, it is also proper to call an emergent land feature on an atoll an islet, since an atoll is a type of island. A key or cay is also another name for a relatively small island. Groups of related islands are called archipelagos. There are three main types of islands: continental islands, river islands, and volcanic islands. There are also some artificial islands. The word island derives ultimately from the Old English word igland. It was originally spelled phonetically: iland. The letter "s" was added out of the mistaken belief that it derived from isle (< Old French < Latin insula) + land, where no such etymological relationship existed.

Continental islands

Continental islands are bodies of land that are connected by the continental shelf to a continent. That is, these islands are part of an adjacent continent and are located on the continental shelf of that continent. Examples include Greenland and Sable Island off North America, Barbados and Trinidad off South America, Sicily off Europe, Sumatra and Java off Asia, New Guinea and Tasmania off Australia. A special type of continental island is the microcontinental island, which results when a continent is rifted. The best example is Madagascar off Africa. The Kerguelen Islands and some of the Seychelles are also examples. Another subtype is the barrier island: accumulations of sand on the continental shelf.

River islands

River islands occur in river deltas and in large rivers. They are caused by deposition of sediment at points in the flow where the current loses some of its carrying capacity. In essence, they are river bars, isolated in the stream. While some are ephemeral, and may disappear if the river's water volume or speed changes, others are stable and long-lived.

Volcanic islands

Volcanic islands are built by volcanoes. Mid-ocean examples are not geologically part of any continent. One type of volcanic island is found in a volcanic island arc. These islands arise from volcanoes where the subduction of one plate under another is occurring. Examples include the Mariana Islands, the Aleutian Islands, and most of Tonga in the Pacific Ocean. Some of the Lesser Antilles and the South Sandwich Islands are the only Atlantic Ocean examples. Another type of volcanic island occurs where an oceanic rift reaches the surface. There are two examples: Iceland, which is the world's largest volcanic island, and Jan Mayen—both are in the Atlantic. The last type of volcanic island are those formed over volcanic hotspots. A hot spot is more or less stationary relative to the moving tectonic plate above it, so a chain of islands results as the plate drifts. Over long periods of time, this type of island is eventually eroded down and "drowned" by isostatic adjustment, becoming a seamount. Plate movement across a hot-spot produces a line of islands oriented in the direction of the plate movement. An example is the Hawaiian Islands, from Hawaii to Kure, which then extends beneath the sea surface in a more northerly direction as the Emperor Seamounts. Another chain with similar orientation is the Tuamotu Archipelago; its older, northerly trend is the Line Islands. The southernmost chain is the Austral Islands, with its northerly trending part the atolls in the nation of Tuvalu. Tristan da Cunha is an example of a hotspot volcano in the Atlantic Ocean. An atoll is an island formed from a coral reef that has grown on an eroded and submerged volcanic island. The reef rises above the surface of the water and forms a new island. Atolls are typically ring-shaped with a central, shallow lagoon. Examples include the Maldives in the Indian Ocean and Bora Bora in the Pacific.

External links

- [http://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/part8.htm Definition of island] from United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea Category:Islands Category:Landforms zh-min-nan:Tó-sū ko:섬 ms:Pulau ja:島 simple:Island th:เกาะ

Islet

, 2.2 km off North Beach, MCBH]] An islet is a small island. A rock, a sometime synonym for a type of "islet", is a landform comprised of rock, lying offshore, having no or minimal vegetation, and uninhabited (see Mōkōlea Rock at left). An exposed sandbar would be another type of islet. A more technical application is to small land features, isolated by water, laying off the shore of a larger island. And in related fashion, any emergent land on an atoll (a type of island) would also be called an islet. As with many of these terms, the actual size limits of islets are subjective, and vary from area to area, and person to person.
- Islets are often called cays and keys in the Caribbean and West Atlantic. Rum Cay in the Bahamas and the Florida Keys off Florida are examples of islets.
- In Scotland and Ireland, they are often called inches, from the Gaelic innis, which originally meant island, but has been supplanted to refer to smaller islands. In Ireland they are often termed skerries.
- In the Channel Islands, they are often identified by the suffix -hou from the Norse -holmr. Holm is a common suffix too in Nordic and northern European lands. Category:Landforms Category:Islands zh-min-nan:Hái-ta

Archipelago

An archipelago is a landform which consists of a chain or cluster of islands. Archipelagoes usually occur in the open sea; less commonly a large land mass may neighbour them. Archipelagos are often volcanic, forming along ocean ridges or hotspots, but there are many other processes involved in their construction, including erosion and deposition. The word comes from the Aegean Sea (Greek αρχιπέλαγος, Italian Arcipelago), which literally means "chief sea", from Greek arkhi (leader) and pelagos (sea). The Aegean Sea is located between Greece in the west and Turkey in the east. In the Aegean, the Venetian Dukes of the Archipelago ruled from Naxos, 1210–1566. "Archipelago" is also the name of a popular videogame from the early 1990s. The Archipelago Exchange is a fully electronic stock exchange that agreed to merge with the New York Stock Exchange in April 2005 to form the for-profit NYSE Group. "Archipelago" is also the name of an improvisational free-folk group of musicians from New Orleans, and records on the Backporch Revolution label.

List of archipelagoes

- ABC islands
- Aegean islands
- Cyclades
- Dodecanese
- Aleutian Islands
- Alexander Archipelago
- Andaman Islands
- Antilles (West Indies)
- Greater Antilles
- Puerto Rican Islands
- Lesser Antilles
- Leeward Islands
- Windward Islands
- Azores
- Bahama Islands
- Turks and Caicos Islands
- Balearic Islands
- Baltic Sea archipelagoes
- Stockholm archipelago
- Turku archipelago
- Åland Islands
- Bight of Bonny islands
- British Isles
- Channel Islands
- Hebrides
- Isles of Scilly
- Orkney Islands
- Shetland Islands
- Canadian Arctic islands
- Belcher Islands
- Chagos Archipelago
- Channel Islands of California
- Chausey
- Chonos Archipelago
- Comoro Islands
- Diego Ramírez Islands
- Falkland Islands (Malvinas)
- Faroe Islands
- Florida Keys
- Fox Islands
- Frisian Islands (or Wadden Islands)
- East Frisian Islands
- North Frisian Islands
- West Frisian Islands
- Furneaux Group
- Galápagos Islands (Colón
- Gothenburg archipelago
- Guayaneco Archipelago
- Japanese Archipelago
- Juan Fernández Islands
- Kerguelen Islands
- Kermadec Islands
- Kornati
- Lakshadweep (Laccadives)
- Lofoten
- Los Roques
- Macaronesia
- Canary Islands
- Cape Verde Islands
- Barlavento
- Sotavento
- Madeira Islands
- Magdalen Islands
- Malay archipelago (the world's largest)
- Maluku Islands
- Philippine Islands
- Sunda Islands
- Greater Sunda Islands
- Lesser Sunda Islands
- Maldives
- Maltese islands
- Mascarene Islands
- Seychelles Islands
- Aldabra Group
- Amirante Islands
- Farquhar Group
- Melanesia
- Bismarck Archipelago
- Fiji Islands
- New Caledonia (Kanaky)
- Loyalty Islands
- Solomon Islands
- Vanuatu (New Hebrides)
- Micronesia
- Caroline Islands
- Gilbert Islands (Kiribati)
- Line Islands
- Mariana Islands
- Marshall Islands
- Ralik Chain
- Ratak Chain
- Palau
- Phoenix Islands
- New Siberian Islands
- Nicobar Islands
- New England and New York islands (Manhattan, City Island, Long Island, Rikers Island, Roosevelt Island, Staten Island, Block Island, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, Liberty Island, Ellis Island, Long Beach Island, Elizabeth Islands)
- Novaya Zemlya islands
- Polynesia
- Cook Islands (Hervey Islands)
- French Polynesia
- Austral Islands
- Gambier Islands
- Marquesas
- Society Islands
- Îles du vent (Windward Islands)
- Îles sous le vent (Leeward Islands)
- Tuamotus
- Hawaiian Islands (Sandwich Islands)
- New Zealand islands (Aotearoa)
- Pitcairn Islands
- Samoan Islands (Navigators' Islands)
- American Samoa (Eastern Samoa)
- Samoa (Western Samoa)
- Tonga Islands (Friendly Islands)
- Tokelau (Union Islands)
- Tuvalu (Ellice Islands)
- Wallis and Futuna Islands
- Horne Islands
- Pontine Islands
- Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwaii)
- Saint Helena islands
- San Juan Islands
- Solentiname Islands
- South China Sea Islands
- Paracel Islands
- Spratly Islands
- South Orkney Islands
- South Sandwich Islands
- South Shetland Islands
- Svalbard
- Thousand Islands
- Tierra del Fuego
- "The World", an archipelago of artificial islands being constructed off Dubai
- Tuscan Archipelago
- Venice islands

Old English

Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) is an early form of the English language that was spoken in parts of what is now England and southern Scotland between the mid-fifth century and the mid-twelfth century. It is a West Germanic language and therefore is similar to Old Frisian and Old Saxon. It is also quite similar to Old Norse (and by extension, to modern Icelandic). Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of approximately 700 years – from the Anglo-Saxon migrations which created England in the fifth century to some time after the Norman invasion of 1066, after which the language underwent a major and dramatic transition. During this early period it assimilated some aspects of the languages that it came in contact with, such as the Celtic languages and the two dialects of Old Norse from the invading Norsemen who were occupying and controlling the Danelaw in northern and eastern England. The term Old English does not refer to older varieties of Modern English such as are found in Shakespeare or the King James Bible, which are called Early Modern English by linguists. In some older works (such as the 1913 edition of Webster's Dictionary), Old English refers to Middle English, or also more specifically Middle English as used from 1150 to 1350, with the older form of the language referred to exclusively as Anglo-Saxon. [http://machaut.uchicago.edu/?resource=Webster%27s&word=English]. Middle English developed from 1150 to 1500, and was the form of English which was used by Chaucer.

Germanic origins

The most important shaping force on Old English was its Germanic heritage in vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar that it shared with its sister languages in continental Europe. Some of these features were specific to the West Germanic language family to which Old English belongs, while some other features were inherited from the Proto-Germanic language from which all Germanic languages are believed to have been derived. Though many of these links with the other Germanic languages have since been obscured by later linguistic influences, particularly Norman French, many remain even in modern English. Compare modern English 'Good day' with the Old English Gōdne dæg, modern Dutch Goedendag, or modern German Guten Tag. Today the European language most similar to Old English is Frisian, a language spoken by several hundred thousand people in the northern Netherlands and northern Germany. Like other West Germanic languages of the period, Old English was fully inflected with five grammatical cases, which had dual plural forms for referring to groups of two objects, in addition to the usual singular and plural forms. It also assigned gender to all nouns, even to those that describe inanimate objects: for example, sēo sunne (the Sun) was feminine, while se mōna (the Moon) was masculine. In terms of morphology modern German is more similar to Old English than modern English itself is, because it still has complex gender, case, and verb conjugation systems similar to those of Old English, as well as many similar words of Germanic stock which have been displaced by French or Latin words in modern English.

Latin influence

A large percentage of the educated and literate population (monks, clerics, etc.) were competent in Latin, which was then the prevalent lingua franca of Europe. It is sometimes possible to give approximate dates for the entry of individual Latin words into Old English based on which patterns of linguistic change they have undergone, though this is not always reliable. There were at least three notable periods of Latin influence. The first occurred before the ancestral Saxons left continental Europe for England. The second began when the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity and Latin-speaking priests became widespread. However, the largest single transfer of Latin-based words occurred following the Norman invasion of 1066, after which an enormous number of Norman French words entered the language. Most of these Oïl language words were themselves derived ultimately from classical Latin, although a notable stock of Norse words were introduced, or re-introduced in Norman form. The Norman Conquest approximately marks the end of Old English and the advent of Middle English. The language was further altered by the transition away from the runic alphabet (also known as futhorc) to the Latin alphabet, which was also a significant factor in the developmental pressures brought to bear on the language. Old English words were spelt as they were pronounced; the silent letters of Modern English therefore did not often exist in Old English. For example, the 'hard-c' sound in cniht, the Old English equivalent of 'knight' was pronounced. Another side-effect of spelling words phonetically was that spelling was extremely variable – the spelling of a word would reflect differences in the phonetics of the writer's regional dialect and also idiosyncratic spelling choices which varied from author to author. Thus, for example, the word "and" could be spelt either and or ond. Therefore, Old English spelling can be regarded as even more jumbled than modern English spelling, although it can at least claim to reflect some existing pronunciation, while modern English in many cases cannot. Most students of Old English in the present day learn the language using normalised versions and are only introduced to variant spellings after they have mastered the basics of the language.

Viking influence

modern English spelling and the green area is the extent of the other Germanic languages with which Old Norse still retained some mutual intelligibility]] The second major source of loanwords to Old English were the Scandinavian words introduced during the Viking raids of the ninth and tenth centuries. In addition to a great many place names, these consist mainly of items of basic vocabulary, and words concerned with particular administrative aspects of the Danelaw (that is, the area of land under Viking control, which included extensive holdings all along the eastern coast of England and Scotland). The Vikings spoke Old Norse, a language related to Old English in that they both derive from the same ancestral Germanic language. It is very common for the intermixing of speakers of different dialects, such as occurs during times of political unrest, to result in a mixed language, and one theory holds that exactly such a mixture of Old Norse and Old English helped accelerate the decline of case endings in Old English. Apparent confirmation of this is the fact that simplification of the case endings occurred earliest in the North and latest in the Southwest, the area farthest away from Viking influence. Regardless of the truth of this theory, the influence of Old Norse on the English language has been profound: responsible for such basic vocabulary items as sky and the modern pronoun they.

Celtic influence

The number of Celtic loanwords is of a remarkably lower order than either Latin or Scandinavian. Only twelve loanwords have been identified as being entirely secure. Out of all the known and suspected Celtic loanwords, most are names of geographical features, and especially rivers.

Dialects

To further complicate matters, Old English was rich in dialect forms. The four main dialect forms of Old English were Mercian, Northumbrian (the latter two known collectively as Anglian), Kentish, and West Saxon. Each of these dialects were associated with an independent kingdom on the island. Of these, all of Northumbria and most of Mercia were overrun by the Vikings during the 9th century. The portion of Mercia and all of Kent that were both successfully defended, were then integrated into Wessex. After the process of unification of the diverse Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in 878 by Alfred the Great, there is a marked decline in the importance of regional dialects. This is not because they stopped existing: regional dialects continued even after that time to this day, as evidenced both by the existence of middle and modern English dialects later on, and by common sense – people do not spontaneously develop new accents when there is a sudden change of political power. However, the bulk of the surviving documents from the Anglo-Saxon period are written in the dialect of Wessex, Alfred's kingdom. It seems likely that with consolidation of power, it became necessary to standardise the language of government to reduce the difficulty of administering the remoter areas of the kingdom. As a result, paperwork was written in the West Saxon dialect. Not only this, but Alfred was passionate about the spread of the vernacular, and brought many scribes to his region from Mercia in order that previously unwritten texts were recorded. The Church was likewise affected, especially since Alfred initiated an ambitious programme to translate religious materials into English. In order to retain his patronage and ensure the widest circulation of the translated materials, the monks and priests engaged in the programme worked in his dialect. Alfred himself seems to have translated books out of Latin and into English, notably Pope Gregory I's treatise on administration, "Pastoral Care". Due at least partially to the centralisation of power and to the Viking invasions, there is little or no written evidence for the development of non-Wessex dialects after Alfred's unification.

Phonology

The inventory of Old English surface phones, as usually reconstructed, is as follows. The sounds marked in parentheses are allophones:
- is an allophone of occurring after and when geminated
- is an allophone of occurring before and
- are allophones of respectively, occurring between vowels or voiced consonants.
- are allophones of occurring in coda position after front and back vowels respectively
- is an allophone of occurring after a vowel The front mid rounded vowels occur in some dialects of Old English, but not in the best attested Late West Saxon dialect. 2. It is uncertain whether the diphthongs spelt ie/īe were pronounced or . The fact that this diphthong was merged with in many dialects suggests the former.

Standardised orthography

Old English was at first written in runes (futhorc), but shifted to the Latin alphabet with some additions: the letter yogh, adopted from Irish; the letter eth and the runic letters thorn and wynn. Also used was a symbol for the conjunction 'and', a character similar to the number seven ('7'), and a symbol for the relative pronoun 'þæt', a thorn with a crossbar through the ascender (' '). Also used occasionally were macrons over vowels, abbreviations for following 'm's or 'n's. All of the sound descriptions below are given using IPA symbols.

The alphabet

- a: (spelling variations like land/lond "land" suggest it may have had a rounded allophone before in some cases)
- ā:
- æ:
- :
- b:
- c (except in the digraphs sc and cg): either or . The pronunciation is sometimes written with a diacritic by modern editors: most commonly ċ, sometimes č or ç. Before a consonant letter the pronunciation is always ; word-finally after i it is always . Otherwise a knowledge of the historical linguistics of the word in question is needed to predict which pronunciation is needed. (See Old English phonology#The distribution of velars and palatals for details.)
- cg: (the surface pronunciation of geminate ); occasionally also for
- d:
- ð/þ: and its allophone . Both symbols were used more or less interchangeably (to the extent that there was a rule, it was to avoid using ð word-initially, but this was by no means universally followed). Many modern editions preserve the use of these two symbols as found in the original manuscripts, but some attempt to regularise them in some fashion, for example using only the þ. See also Pronunciation of English th.
- e:
- ē:
- ea: ; after ċ and ġ, sometimes or
- ēa: ; after ċ and ġ, sometimes
- eo: ; after ċ and ġ, sometimes
- ēo:
- f: and its allophone
- g: and its allophone ; and its allophone (when after n). The and pronunciations are sometimes written ġ or by modern editors. Before a consonant letter the pronunciation is always (word-initially) or (after a vowel). Word-finally after i it is always . Otherwise a knowledge of the historical linguistics of the word in question is needed to predict which pronunciation is needed. (See Old English phonology#The distribution of velars and palatals for details.)
- h: and its allophones . In the combinations hl, hr, hn and hw, the second consonant was certainly voiceless.
- i:
- ī:
- ie: ; after ċ and ġ, sometimes
- īe: ; after ċ and ġ, sometimes
- k: (rarely used)
- l: ; probably velarised (as in Modern English) when in coda position.
- m:
- n: and its allophone
- o:
- ō:
- oe: (in dialects with this sound)
- ōe: (in dialects with this sound)
- p:
- q: – Used before u representing the consonant , but rarely used, being rather a feature of Middle English. Old English preferred or in modern print cw.
- r: ; the exact nature of r is not known. It may have been an alveolar approximant , as in most Modern English accents, an alveolar flap , or an alveolar trill .
- s: and its allophone
- sc: or occasionally
- t:
- u:
- ū:
- (wynn): , replaced in modern print by w to prevent confusion with p.
- x: (but according to some authors, )
- y:
- :
- z: . Rarely used as ts was usually used instead, for example bezt vs betst "best", pronounced . Doubled consonants are geminated; the geminate fricatives ðð/þþ, ff and ss cannot be voiced.

Syntax

As a West Germanic language, Old English syntax has a great deal of common ground with Dutch and German. Old English is not dependent upon S (subject), V (verb), O (object) or "SVO" word order in the way that Modern English is. The syntax of an Old English sentence can be in any of these shapes: SVO order, VSO order, and OVS order. The only constant rule, as in German and Dutch, is that the verb must come as the second concept. That is, in the sentence 'in the town, we ate some food', it could appear as 'in the town, ate we some food', or 'in the town, ate some food we'. This variable word order is especially common in poetry. Prose, while still displaying variable word order, is much more likely to use SVO ordering. Similarly, word order became less flexible as time went on: the older a text is, the less likely it is to have a fixed word order. To further complicate the matter, prepositions may appear after their object, though they are not postpositions, as they may occur in front of the noun too, and usually do, for example: God cwæð him þus tō (lit.) God said him thus to that is God said thus to him

Morphology

Unlike modern English, Old English is a language rich with morphological diversity and is spelled essentially as it is pronounced. It maintains several distinct cases: the nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and (vestigially) instrumental, remnants of which survive only in a few pronouns in modern English.

Sample text

This text is from the epic poem Beowulf.

External links

- [http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/research/rawl/IOE/index.html The Electronic Introduction to Old English]
- [http://www.kami.demon.co.uk/gesithas/OEsteps/ First steps in Old English - a course for absolute beginners]
- [http://www.omniglot.com/writing/oldenglish.htm Old English (Anglo-Saxon) alphabet]
- [http://home.comcast.net/~modean52/oeme_dictionaries.htm Old English - Modern English dictionary]
- [http://lonestar.texas.net/~jebbo/learn-as/origins.htm The Origins of Old English]
- [http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/bylanguage/oegermanic.html Guide to using Old English computer characters] (Unicode, HTML entities, etc.)
- [http://www.doe.utoronto.ca Dictionary of Old English Project at the University of Toronto]
- [http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/germanic/language_resources.html The Germanic Lexicon Project]
- [http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/oe/oe-texts.html Text Collections - Texts and Translations]
- [http://wandership.ca/collect/links/oe.php Links relating to Old English, including learning resources]

References

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- English, Old ja:古英語 simple:Old English language

Old French

Old French is a term sometimes used to refer to the langue d'oïl, the continuum of varieties of Romance language spoken in territories corresponding roughly to the northern half of modern France and parts of Belgium and Switzerland during the period roughly from 1000 to 1300 A.D. It was known at the time as the langue d'oïl to distinguish it from the langue d'oc, (also then called Provençal) which bordered these areas to the south. Provençal to Charlemagne; from a manuscript of a chanson de geste.]]

Grammar and phonology

Historical influences

Gaulish

The Gaulish language, a Celtic language, slowly became extinct during the long centuries of Roman domination. A handful of Gaulish words survive in contemporary French: words like chêne, "oak tree", and charrue, "plough", mon, "my", are Gaulish survivals, but fewer than two hundred words of modern French have a Gaulish etymology; Delamarre (2003 pp.389-90) lists 167. Latin was the common language of the western Roman world, and opened up a wider world to its speakers than Gaulish did, so it grew at the expense of Gaulish.

Latin

In one sense, Old French began when the Roman Empire conquered the territory it called Gaul during the conquests of Julius Caesar, which were substantially completed by 51 BC. The Romans introduced the Latin language into southern France starting in around 120 BC, when they occupied southern Gaul during the Punic Wars. Starting during the period when Plautus was writing, the common Latin of the Roman world, the phonological structure of classical Latin began to change, yielding the vulgar Latin that was the common spoken language of the western Roman world. This vulgar Latin began to vary strongly from the classical language in its phonology; spoken Latin, rather than the somewhat artificial literary language of classical Latin, was the ancestor of the Romance languages including Old French. Some Gaulish words influenced Vulgar Latin and thus, not only Old French but also other Romance languages. For example classical latin equus was replaced in comon parlance by vulgar Latin caballus, derived from Gaulish caballos (Delamare 2003 p.96) thus giving Modern French cheval, Italian cavallo and (borrowed from French) English cavalry.

Frankish

The Frankish language had a much larger impact on the vocabulary of Old French as a result of the Frankish conquest of much of the territory of modern France by the Franks during the Migration Period. The current and older names of the language, français, derives from the name of the Franks. A number of other Germanic peoples, including the Burgundians, were active in the territory at that time; the Germanic languages spoken by the Franks, Burgundians, and others were not written languages, and at this remove it is often difficult to identify from which specific Germanic source a given Germanic word in French is derived. Philologists such as Pope (1934) estimate that perhaps fifteen percent of the vocabulary of modern French derives from Germanic sources; this vocabulary includes a large number of common words like haïr, "to hate"; bateau, "boat", and hache, "axe", all derive from Germanic sources. It has been suggested that the passé composé and other compound verbs used in French conjugation are also the result of Germanic influences. It is important to distinguish however words which came from Germanic initially, via Frankish, and those that were introduced later, via the Normans in the 10th century.

Earliest written Old French

The earliest documents said to be in French are the Oaths of Strasbourg, which are treaties and charters entered by king Charles the Bald in 842. These documents are written in a mixture of vulgar Latin and early Romance, and it is hard to determine from the text we have how they were pronounced: :Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d’ist di en avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo, et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa. . . ::(For the love of God and for the christian people, and our common salvation, from this day forward, as God will give me the knowledge and the power, I will defend my brother Charles with my help in everything. . .) Beginning with the Capetian dynasty, which was begun by Hugh Capet in 987, the culture of northern France began to develop, and its political ascendency over the southern areas of Aquitaine and Toulouse was slowly but firmly asserted. The current French language, however, did not begin to become the common speech of the entire nation of France until after the French revolution.

From Vulgar Latin to Old French

One profound change that affected French, and every other Romance language, reordered the vowel system of classical Latin. Latin had ten distinct vowels: long and short versions of A, E, I, O, U, and three (or four) diphthongs, AE, OE, AU, and according to some, UI.¹ What happened to Vulgar Latin is set forth in the table. Both the diphthongs AE and OE also fell in with /e/. AU was initially retained, and turned into /O/ after the original /O/ fell victim to further changes. Thus, the ten vowel system of Classical Latin, which relied on phonemic vowel length was new-modelled into a system in which vowel length distinctions were suppressed and alterations of vowel quality became phonemic. Because of this change, the stress on accented syllables became much more pronounced in Vulgar Latin than in Classical Latin. This tended to cause unaccented syllables to become less distinct, while working further changes on the sounds of the accented syllables. Old French underwent more thorough alterations of its sound system than did the other Romance languages. Vowel breaking was something that occurred generally in Proto-Western-Romance (here, Proto-Romance), although with different results in each of the daughter languages; Latin FOCU(M) (originally "hearth") becomes Italian fuoco, Spanish fuego, French feu (all meaning "fire"). But in Old French the phenomenon went further than in any other Romance language; of the seven vowels inherited from Latin, only remained essentially unchanged. In stressed syllables:
- The sound of Latin E (short), turning to in Proto-Romance, became ie in Old French: Latin MEL, "honey" > OF miel
- The sound of Latin O (short) > Proto-Romance > OF uo: COR > cuor, "heart"
- Latin Ê > Proto-Romance > OF ei: HABÊRE > aveir, "to have"; this later becomes /oi/ in many words, as in avoir
- Latin Ô > Proto-Romance > OF ou: FLÔRE(M) > flour, "flower"
- Latin > OF , probably through an intervening stage of ; MARE > mer, "sea" This change is found in no other Romance language. Note that Latin AU did not share the fate of or ; Latin AURUM > OF or, "gold": not
- oeur nor
- our. Latin AU must have been retained at the time these changes were affecting Proto-Romance. Changes affecting the consonants were also quite pervasive in Old French. Old French shared with the rest of the Vulgar Latin world the loss of final -M. Since this sound was basic to the Latin noun case system, its loss levelled the distinctions upon which the synthetic Latin syntax relied, and forced the Romance languages to adapt a more analytic syntax based on word order. Old French also dropped many internal consonants when they followed the strongly stressed syllable; Latin PETRA

Latin

Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. It gained great importance as the formal language of the Roman Empire. All Romance languages, those being most notably Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian, are descended from Latin, and many words based on Latin are found in other modern languages such as English. The Latin alphabet, derived from the Greek, remains the most widely-used alphabet in the world. It is said that 80 percent of scholarly English words are derived from Latin (in a large number of cases by way of French). Moreover, in the Western world, Latin was a lingua franca, the learned language for scientific and political affairs, for more than a thousand years, being eventually replaced by French in the 18th century and English in the late 19th. Ecclesiastical Latin remains the formal language of the Roman Catholic Church to this day, and thus the official national language of the Vatican. The Church used Latin as its primary liturgical language until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Latin is also still used (drawing heavily on Greek roots) to furnish the names used in the scientific classification of living things. The modern study of Latin, along with Greek, is known as Classics.

Main features

Latin is a synthetic inflectional language: affixes (which usually encode more than one grammatical category) are attached to fixed stems to express gender, number, and case in adjectives, nouns, and pronouns, which is called declension; and person, number, tense, voice, mood, and aspect in verbs, which is called conjugation. There are five declensions (declinationes) of nouns and four conjugations of verbs. There are six noun cases: #nominative (used as the subject of the verb or the predicate nominative), #genitive (used to indicate relation or possession, often represented by the English of or the addition of s to a noun), #dative (used of the indirect object of the verb, often represented by the English to or for), #accusative (used of the direct object of the verb, or object of the preposition in some cases), #ablative (separation, source, cause, or instrument, often represented by the English by, with, from), #vocative (used of the person or thing being addressed). In addition, some nouns have a locative case used to express location (otherwise expressed by the ablative with a preposition such as in), but this survival from Proto-Indo-European is found only in the names of lakes, cities, towns, small islands, and a few other words related to locations, such as "house", "ground", and "countryside". Latin itself, being a very old language, is far closer to Proto-Indo-European than are most modern Western European languages; it has, in fact, about the same relationship with PIE as modern Italian or French has to Latin. There are six general tenses in Latin (technically they are tense/aspect/mood complexes). The indicative mood can be used with all of them. The subjunctive mood, however, has only present, imperfect, perfect, and pluperfect tenses. These tenses in the subjunctive mood do not completely correlate in meaning to the tenses in the indicative. The following examples are of the first conjugation verb "laudare" ("to praise") in the indicative mood and the active voice:
Primary sequence tenses
# present (laudo, "I praise") # imperfect (laudabam, "I was praising") # future (laudabo, "I shall praise," "I will praise")
Secondary sequence tenses
# perfect (laudavi, "I praised", "I have praised") # pluperfect (laudaveram, "I had praised") # future perfect (laudavero, "I shall have praised," "I will have praised") The future perfect tense can also imply a normal future idea (like in "When I will have run...") and so may also sometimes be included in the primary sequence.
Latin and Romance
After the collapse of the Roman Empire, Latin evolved into the various Romance languages. These were for many centuries only spoken languages, Latin still being used for writing. For example, Latin was the official language of Portugal until 1296 when it was replaced by Portuguese. The Romance languages evolved from Vulgar Latin, the spoken language of common usage, which in turn evolved from an older speech which also produced the formal classical standard. Latin and Romance differ (for example) in that Romance had distinctive stress, whereas Latin had distinctive length of vowels. In Italian and Sardo logudorese, there is distinctive length of consonants and stress, in Spanish only distinctive stress, and in French even stress is no longer distinctive. Another major distinction between Romance and Latin is that all Romance languages, excluding Romanian, have lost their case endings in most words except for some pronouns. Romanian retains a direct case (nominative/accusative), an indirect case (dative/genitive), and vocative. In Italy, Latin is still compulsory in secondary schools as Liceo Classico and Liceo Scientifico which are usually attended by people who aim to the highest level of education. In Liceo Classico Ancient Greek is a compulsory subject.
Latin and English
See Latin influence in English for a more complete exposition. English grammar is independent of Latin grammar, though prescriptive grammarians in English have been heavily influenced by Latin. Attempts to make English grammar follow Latin rules — such as the prohibition against the split infinitive — have not worked successfully in regular usage. However, as many as half the words in English were derived from Latin, including many words of Greek origin first adopted by the Romans, not to mention the thousands of French, hundreds of Spanish, Portuguese and Italian words of Latin origin that have also enriched English. During the 16th and on through the 18th century English writers created huge numbers of new words from Latin and Greek roots. These words were dubbed "inkhorn" or "inkpot" words (as if they had spilled from a pot of ink). Many of these words were used once by the author and then forgotten, but some remain. Imbibe, extrapolate, dormant and inebriation are all inkhorn terms carved from Latin words. In fact, the word etymology is derived from the Greek word etymologia, meaning "true sense of the word." Latin was once taught in many of the schools in Britain with academic leanings - perhaps 25% of the total [http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/T/teachem2/thennow/]. However, the requirement for it was gradually abandoned in the professions such as the law and medicine, and then, from around the late 1960s, for admission to university. After the introduction of the Modern Language GCSE in the 1980s, it was gradually replaced by other languages, although it is now being taught by more schools along with other classical languages.
Latin education
The linguistic element of Latin courses offered in high schools or secondary schools, and in universities, is primarily geared toward an ability to translate Latin texts into modern languages, rather than using it in oral communication. As such, the skill of reading is heavily emphasized, whereas speaking and listening skills are barely touched upon. However, there is a growing movement, sometimes known as the Living Latin movement, whose supporters believe that Latin can, or should, be taught in the same way that modern "living" languages are taught, that is, as a means of both spoken and written communication. One of the most interesting aspects of such an approach is that it assists speculative insight into how many of the ancient authors spoke and incorporated sounds of the language stylistically; without understanding how the language is meant to be heard it is very difficult to identify patterns in Latin poetry. Institutions offering Living Latin instruction include the Vatican and the University of Kentucky. In Britain the Classical Association encourages this approach, and there has been something of a vogue for books describing the adventures of a mouse called Minimus. In the United States there is a thriving competitive organization for high school Latin students, the National Junior Classical League (the second-largest youth organization in the world after the Boy Scouts), backed up by the Senior Classical League for college students. Many would-be international auxiliary languages have been heavily influenced by Latin, and the moderately successful Interlingua considers itself to be the modernized and simplified version of the language (le latino moderne international e simplificate). Latin translations of modern literature such as Paddington Bear, Winnie the Pooh, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Le Petit Prince, Max und Moritz, and The Cat in the Hat have also helped boost interest in the language.
See also

About the Latin language

- Latin grammar
- Latin spelling and pronunciation
- Latin declension
- Latin conjugation
- Latin alphabet
- List of Latin words with English derivatives
- Latin verbs with English derivatives
- Latin nouns with English derivatives
- ablative absolute
- Word order in Latin
About the Latin literary heritage

- Latin literature
- Romance languages
- Loeb Classical Library
- List of Latin phrases
- List of Latin proverbs
- Brocard
- List of Latin and Greek words commonly used in systematic names
- List of Latin place names in Europe
- Carmen Possum
Other related topics

- Roman Empire
- Internationalism
References

- Bennett, Charles E. Latin Grammar (Allyn and Bacon, Chicago, 1908)
- N. Vincent: "Latin", in The Romance Languages, M. Harris and N. Vincent, eds., (Oxford Univ. Press. 1990), ISBN 0195208293
- Waquet, Françoise, Latin, or the Empire of a Sign: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (Verso, 2003) ISBN 1859844022; translated from the French by John Howe.
- Wheelock, Frederic. Latin: An Introduction (Collins, 6th ed., 2005) ISBN 0060784237
External links

- [http://www.jambell.com/latin.html Latin Phrases for after dinner conversation (Thanks to Elaine Poole)]
- [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=lat Ethnologue report for Latin]
- [http://forumromanum.org/literature/index.html Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum] is a comprehensive webography of Latin texts and their translations.
- [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ The Perseus Project] has many useful pages for the study of classical languages and literatures, including [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/resolveform?lang=Latin an interactive Latin dictionary].
- [http://lysy2.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/words.exe words by William whitaker] is a dictionary program online capable of looking up various word forms.
- [http://retiarius.org/ Retiarius.Org] includes a Latin text search engine.
- [http://www.nd.edu/~archives/latgramm.htm Latin-English dictionary and Latin grammar from U of Notre Dame]
- [http://latin-language.co.uk/ Latin language] History of Latin language, Latin texts with English translation and a collection of dictionaries.
- [http://augustinus.eresmas.net/scl/ Societas Circulorum Latinorum] gathers together Latin Circles all over the world.
- [http://www.learnlatin.tk LearnLatin.tk] - Free online course in Latin
- [http://www.latintests.net/ LatinTests.net] - Lets Latin learners test their grammar and vocabulary with self-checking quizzes.
- [http://thelatinlibrary.com/ The Latin Library] contains many Latin etexts
- [http://www.textkit.com/ Textkit] has Latin textbooks and etexts.
- [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/Latin-english/ Latin–English Dictionary]: from Webster's Rosetta Edition.
- [http://www.language-reference.com/ Language reference] Cross-foreign-language lexicon powered by its own search engine. All cross combinations between Latin and French, German, Italian, Spanish.
- [http://comp.uark.edu/~mreynold/rhetor.html Rhetor by Gabriel Harvey] was originally published in 1577 and never again reprinted.
- [http://freewebs.com/omniamundamundis omniamundamundis] Latin hypertexts from fourteen ancient Roman authors.
- [http://www.saltspring.com/capewest/pron.htm Pronunciation of Biological Latin, Including Taxonomic Names of Plants and Animals]
- [http://www.yleradio1.fi/nuntii Nuntii Latini (News in Latin)], written and spoken (RealAudio) news in latin. Weekly review of world news in Classical Latin, the only international broadcast of its kind in the world, produced by YLE, the Finnish Broadcasting Company.
- [http://www.tranexp.com:2000/InterTran?url=http%3A%2F%2F&type=text&text=Replace%20Me&from=eng&to=ltt InterTran Latin], Translate from Latin to ENGLISH or vice versa.
- [http://www.latinvulgate.com Latin Vulgate] The Latin and English of the Old & New Testaments in parallel, along with the Complete Sayings of Jesus in parallel Latin and English. Category:Classical languages Category:Ancient languages Category:Fusional languages Category:Languages of Italy Category:Languages of Vatican City als:Latein zh-min-nan:Latin-gí ko:라틴어 ja:ラテン語 simple:Latin language th:ภาษาละติน

Continental shelf

The continental shelf is the extended perimeter of each continent, which is covered during interglacial periods such as the current epoch by relatively shallow seas (known as shelf seas) and gulfs. The shelf usually ends at a gradual slope (called the shelf break). The sea bottom below the break is the continental slope. The slope merges into the deep ocean floor, the abyssal plain. The width of the continental shelf varies significantly. It is common for an area to have virtually no shelf at all, especially where the forward edge of an advancing oceanic plate dives beneath continental crust in an offshore subduction zone such as off the coasts of Chile or the west coast of Sumatra. The largest shelf—the Siberian shelf in the Arctic Ocean—stretches to 1500 kilometers in width. The South China Sea lies over another extensive area of continental shelf, the Sunda shelf, which joins Borneo, Sumatra, and Java to the Asian mainland. Other familiar bodies of water that overlie continental shelves are the North Sea and the Persian Gulf. The average width of continental shelves is about 80 kilometers. The depth of the shelf also varies. It may be as shallow as 30 m or as deep as 600 m. Along the continental shelves sediment is carried from erosion of the land. Combined with the sunlight available in shallow waters, the continental shelves teem with life compared to the biotic desert of the oceans' abyssal plain. If anoxic conditions in the sedimentary deposits prevail, the shelves may in geologic time become sources of fossil fuels. The relatively accessible continental shelf is by far the best understood part of the ocean floor. Most commercial exploitation, such as oil and gas extraction, from the sea takes place on the continental shelf. Sovereign rights over their continental shelves were claimed by the marine nations that signed the Convention on the Continental Shelf drawn up by the UN's International Law Commission in 1958,[http://www.un.org/law/ilc/texts/contsh.htm] partly superseded by the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

External links

- [http://www.onr.navy.mil/focus/ocean/regions/oceanfloor2.htm Office of Naval Research: Ocean Regions]Continental Margin & Rise Category:Physical oceanography Category:Aquatic biomes ja:大陸棚

Sable Island

Sable Island is a small Canadian island situated 180 km southeast of Nova Scotia in the Atlantic Ocean at .

Geography

Sable Island is a narrow crescent-shaped sandbar no more than 2 km across at it widest point, despite being nearly 38 km long. It emerges from vast shoals and shallows on the continental shelf which, in tandem with the area's frequent fog and sudden strong storms including hurricanes and nor'easters, have caused over 300 recorded shipwrecks. It is often referred to as "The Graveyard of the Atlantic" as it sits astride the Great Circle Route between the Eastern Seaboard of North America and Europe. Sable Island was named for its sand—sable is French for 'sand'. It is covered with grass and other low-growing vegetation. Sable Island is believed to have formed from large quantities of sand and gravel deposited on the continental shelf near the end of the last ice age. The island is continually changing its shape with the effects of strong winds and violent ocean storms. There are frequent heavy fogs in the area due to the contrasting effects of the cold Labrador Current and the warm Gulf Stream. During winter months, the moderating influence of the Gulf Stream can sometimes give Sable Island the warmest temperatures in Canada. Sable Island should not be confused with Cape Sable Island in southwestern Nova Scotia.

Wildlife

The island is home to over 250 wild horses who are protected by law from human interference. One theory regarding the origin of the wild horse population is that they are descended from horses confiscated from Acadians during the Great Expulsion and left on the island by Boston merchant Thomas Hancock, uncle of John Hancock. In the past, excess wild horses have been rounded up and shipped off the island for use in coal mines on Cape Breton Island, or to be sold and/or euthanized. Although the wild horse colonies have not been disturbed in recent decades, there have been several cases where the federal government has air-dropped hay during the winter months. This has now stopped in an attempt to allow the horse population to stabilize naturally, although there is frequent debate among biologists and ecologists who advocate removal of the horses in favour of returning the island to its natural state. Several large bird colonies are also resident; Arctic terns, and Ipswich sparrows (Passerculus sandwichensis princeps), a subspecies of the Savannah Sparrow that breed in no other location. Harbour and Grey seals also breed on the island's shores. There is also a species of freshwater sponge (Heteromeyenia macouni) found only in ponds on the island.

History

The Portuguese explorer João Álvares Fagundes and his expedition, who explored this region in 1520–1521, may have been among the first humans to have encountered the island. A lighthouse was established on Sable Island by the British government in the 1790s and its life-saving crew became the first inhabitants of the island, a brief attempt at colonization at the end of the 16th century by France having failed. Until the advent of modern ship navigation, Sable Island's two light stations (one each at the western tip and eastern tip) were home to permanent lighthouse keepers and their families, as well as the crewmembers of the life-saving station. In the early 20th century, the Marconi Company established a wireless station on the island and the Canadian government similarly established a weather station. Although the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG) has now automated the light stations, Environment Canada and DFO conduct routine meteorological and atmospheric studies from a permanently occupied station on Sable Island because of its unique isolated geographic position down-wind from the North American mainland. Sable Island is specifically mentioned in the Constitution of Canada as being the special responsibility of the federal government. Out of concern for preserving the island's frail ecology, as well as sovereignty purposes, recreational boaters require specific permission from CCG to set foot on the island. The Canadian Armed Forces continuously patrol the area using aircraft and naval vessels, partly due to the nearby presence of natural gas and oil drilling rigs and an undersea pipeline. Sable Island's heliport also contains emergency aviation fuel for search and rescue helicopters which use the island to stage further offshore into the Atlantic. Should the need arise, the island also serves as an emergency evacuation point for crews aboard nearby drilling rigs of the Sable Offshore Energy Project. The island is considered administratively a part of the Halifax Regional Municipality and the federal electoral district of Halifax, although the urban area of Halifax proper is some 300 km away on the Nova Scotian mainland.

Trivia

- In 1901, the federal government planted over 80,000 trees on the island in an attempt to stablize the soil; all died.
- Sable Island is mentioned in the book "The Perfect Storm" and a staged version of the island appears in the movie by the same name.

Bibliography

- "Sable Island Shipwrecks: Disaster and Survival at the North Atlantic Graveyard" by Lyall Campbell, Nimbus pub., ISBN 1551090961, December 2001
- " Ethos of Voice in the Journal of James Rainstorpe Morris from the Sable Island Humane Station, 1801-1802", by Rosalee Stilwell, ISBN 0773476636, Edwin Mellen Press, January 2001
- "Sable Island", by Bruce Armstrong, ISBN 0385131135, Doubleday, July 1981
- "Wild Horses of Sable Island", by Zoe Lucas, ISBN 0919872735, Firefly Books Ltd., August 1992
- "Wild and Beautiful Sable Island", Pat Keough et al., ISBN 096925573X, Green Publishing,September 1993
- "Sable Island Journals 1801-1804", by James Rainstorpe Morris, ISBN 0968924506
- "A Dune Adrift: The Strange Origins and Curious History of Sable Island", by Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle, ISBN 0771026420, McClelland & Stewart, August 2004

External links

- Ships of War lost on the Coast of Nova Scotia and Sable Island, during the Eighteenth Century [http://personal.nbnet.nb.ca/halew/Wrecks.html]
- [http://www.greenhorsesociety.com/ Sable Island Green Horse Society]
- [http://www.sabletrust.ns.ca/ Sable Island Preservation Trust]
- [http://collections.ic.gc.ca/sableisland/english_en/index_en.htm Sable Island: A Story of Survival] Category:Islands of Nova Scotia

Barbados

Barbados is an island nation located towards the east of the Caribbean Sea and in the west of the Atlantic Ocean, part of the eastern islands of the Lesser Antilles, with the nations of Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines being its closest neighbors. The island is 430 km² (166 square miles), and is primarily low-lying, with some higher areas in the island's interior. It is located 13º north of the Equator and 59º west of the Prime Meridian, about 434.5 km (270 miles) northeast of Venezuela. Barbados is predominantly composed of coral and limestone. It is tropical with constant tradewinds and contains of some marshes and mangrove swamps. Some parts of the island's interior are also dotted with large sugarcane estates and wide pastures with many good views to the sea. Barbados has one of the highest standards of living and literacy rates in the world and is currently according to the UN's UNDP, the #1 developing country in the world. The island is a major tourist destination.

History

The earliest inhabitants of Barbados were Amerindian nomads. Three waves of migrants moved north toward North America. The first wave was of the Saladoid-Barrancoid group, who were farmers, fishermen, and ceramists that arrived by canoe from South America (Venezuela's Orinoco Valley) around 350 CE. The Arawak people were the second wave of migrants, arriving from South America around 800 CE. Arawak settlements on the island include Stroud Point, Chandler Bay, Saint Luke's Gully, and Mapp's Cave. According to accounts by descendants of the aboriginal Arawak tribes on other local islands, the original name for Barbados was Ichirouganaim. In the 13th century, the Caribs arrived from South America in the third wave, displacing both the Arawak and the Salodoid-Barrancoid. For the next few centuries, the Caribs—like the Arawak and the Salodoid-Barrancoid—lived in isolation on the island. The name "Barbados" comes from a Portuguese explorer named Pedro Campos in 1536, who originally called the island Los Barbados ("The Bearded Ones"), upon seeing the appearance of the island's fig trees, whose long hanging aerial roots he thought resembled beards. Between Campos' sighting in 1536 and 1550, Spanish conquistadors seized many Caribs on Barbados and used them as slave labor on plantations. Other Caribs fled the island, moving elsewhere. British sailors who landed on Barbados in the 1620s at the site of present-day Holetown on the Caribbean coast found the island uninhabited. From the arrival of the first British settlers in 1627–1628 until independence in 1966, Barbados was under uninterrupted British control. Nevertheless, Barbados always enjoyed a large measure of local autonomy. Its House of Assembly began meeting in 1639. Among the initial important British figures was Sir William Courten. Large numbers of Celtic people, mainly from Ireland and Scotland, were sold into slavery in Barbados as the British Empire consolidated its control of all three nations and used mass transportation of populations in rebellion as a way to undermine local nationalist movements. The earliest of these mass transportations occurred in 1649 at the conclusion of Oliver Cromwell's successful invasion of Ireland and included an estimated 1/3 of the indigenous Celtic population of Ulster. Over the next several centuries the Celtic population was used as a buffer between the Anglo-Saxon plantation owners and the larger African population, variously serving as members of the Colonial militia and playing a strong role as allies of the larger African slave population in a long string of colonial rebellions. The modern descendants of this original slave population are sometimes derisively referred to as Red Legs and are some of the poorest inhabitants of modern Barbados. There has also been large scale intermarriage between the African and Celtic populations on the islands. As the sugar industry developed into the main commercial enterprise, Barbados was divided into large plantation estates that replaced the small holdings of the early British settlers. Some of the displaced farmers relocated to British colonies in North America, most notably South Carolina. To work the plantations, West Africans were transported and enslaved on Barbados and other Caribbean islands. The slave trade ceased in 1804. Thirty years later slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1834. In Barbados and the rest of the British West Indian colonies, full emancipation from slavery was preceded by an apprenticeship period that lasted six years. Plantation owners and merchants of British descent dominated local politics. It was not until the 1930s that the descendants of emancipated slaves began a movement for political rights. One of the leaders of this movement, Sir Grantley Adams, founded the Barbados Labour Party in 1938. Progress toward more democratic government for Barbados was made in 1951, when universal adult suffrage was introduced, followed by steps toward increased self-government, and in 1961, Barbados achieved internal autonomy. From 1958 to 1962, Barbados was one of 10 members of the West Indies Federation, and Sir Grantley Adams served as its first and only prime minister. When the federation was terminated, Barbados reverted to its former status as a self-governing colony. Following several attempts to form another federation composed of Barbados and the Leeward and Windward Islands, Barbados negotiated its own independence at a constitutional conference with the United Kingdom in June 1966. After years of peaceful and democratic progress, Barbados became an independent state within the Commonwealth of Nations on November 30, 1966.

Politics

Queen Elizabeth II is recognized as Queen of Barbados, and thus head of state, and is represented by a Governor General. In Barbados the Queen is styled "By the Grace of God, Queen of Barbados and of Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth." The present government is proposing that Barbados become a republic within the Commonwealth, with a ceremonial president replacing the Queen. Executive power however is in the hands of the prime minister and his cabinet. The prime minister is usually the leader of the winning party in the elections for the House of Assembly, the lower house of parliament, which has 30 seats. Its members are elected every five years. The Senate has 21 members, and its members are appointed by the governor general. Barbados is a full and participating member of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM).

Geography

Caribbean Community Barbados is a relatively flat island, rising gently to central highland region, the highest point being Mount Hillaby at 336 m (1,100 feet) above sea level. The island is located in a slightly eccentric position in the Atlantic Ocean compared to other Caribbean islands. The climate is tropical, with a rainy season from June to October. Though one might assume the island deals with severe tropical storms and hurricanes during the rainy season it actually does not. The island gets brushed or hit every 3.09 years and the average number of years between direct hurricane hits is once every 26.6 years. In the parish of Saint Michael lies Barbados' chief city Bridgetown, which is the nation's capital. Locally Bridgetown is sometimes referred to as "The City" or "B-town", and the most common reference is simply "'Town". Other towns include Holetown, in the parish of Saint James and Speightstown, in the parish of Saint Peter. The island is 23 km (14 miles) at its widest point, and about 34 km (21 miles) long.

Parishes

Barbados is divided into eleven parishes: Christ Church, Saint Andrew, Saint George, Saint James, Saint John, Saint Joseph, Saint Lucy, Saint Michael, Saint Peter, Saint Philip, and Saint Thomas.

Economy

Historically, the economy of Barbados had been dependent on sugarcane cultivation and related activities, but production in recent years has been diversified into the manufacturing and tourism sectors. Offshore finance and information services have become increasingly important foreign exchange earners, and there is also a healthy interest into the island's light manufacturing sector. In the last ten years the Government has been seen as business-friendly and economically sound. Since the late 1990's the island has seen an increasing construction boom, the island began to see new hotels, redevelopments, new homes, office complexes, condos, and mansions being developed across the island. The government continues its efforts to reduce unemployment, encourage direct foreign investment, and privatize remaining state-owned enterprises. Unemployment has been reduced from high levels of around 14 percent in the past to under 10%. The economy contracted in 2001 and 2002 due to slowdowns in tourism, consumer spending and the impact of the September 11, 2001 attacks, but the economy rebounded in 2003 and showed growth for 2004. Traditional trading partners include Canada, the Caribbean Community (especially Trinidad and Tobago), the United Kingdom, and the United States. Business links and investment flows have become substantial, as of 2003 the island saw from Canada CAN$25 Billion in investment holdings, placing it as one of Canada's top five destinations of Canadian Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Businessman Eugene Melnyk of Toronto in Ontario, Canada is said to be Barbados' richest permanent resident. In 2004 it was announced that Barbados' Kensington Oval will be one of the final venues hosting the 2007 Cricket World Cup.

Characteristics and tourist information

The island of Barbados has a single major airport, the Sir Grantley Adams International Airport (GAIA) (IATA identifier BGI). The Grantley Adams Airport receives daily flights by several major airlines, from points around the globe, as well as several smaller regional commercial airlines and charters. The airport serves as the main air-transportation hub for the Eastern Caribbean. The airport is currently under-going a US$100 Million upgrade and expansion. The island is well developed and there are many local quality-hotels known internationally which offer world-class accommodations. Timeshares are available, and many of the smaller local hotels and private villas which dot the island have space available if booked months in advance. The southern and western coasts of Barbados are popular, with its calm light blue Caribbean sea and fine white and pinkish sandy beaches. Along the island's east coast the Atlantic Ocean side are tumbling waves which are perfect for light surfing, but a little bit risky due to under-tow currents. Shopping districts are another treat in Barbados, with ample duty-free shopping. There is also a festive nightlife available in mainly tourist areas like the Saint Lawrence Gap. Other attractions include wildlife reserves, jewelry stores, scuba diving, helicopter rides, golf, festivals, sight seeing, cave exploration, exotic drinks and fine clothes shopping.

Attractions, Landmarks and Points of Interest

Name / Parish Location: List of: Cities, Towns and Villages in Barbados.

Transportation

Transportation on the island is good, with 'route taxis', called "ZR's" (pronounced "Zed-Rs"), traveling to most points on the island. These small buses can at times be crowded, but will usually take the more scenic routes to destinations. These buses generally depart from the capital Bridgetown or from Speightstown in the northern part of the island. Buses are abundant in Barbados. There are three bus systems running seven days a week (though less frequently on Sundays), and a ride on any of them costs $1.50 BDS. The smaller buses from the two privately owned systems ("ZR's" and "minibuses") can make change; the larger blue buses from the government-operated Barbados Transport Board system cannot. Most routes require a connection in Bridgetown. However, if you wait long enough, you might find a bus that bypasses the capital and takes you right to your destination. Drivers are generally happy to help you get where you're going; however, some drivers within the competitive privately owned systems are reluctant to instruct you to use competing services, even if those would be preferable. Competition for patrons extends to the bus terminals (sometimes just a parking lot full of buses); it is normal for the 'ZR' bus conductors to attempt to escort you to his vehicle and engage in loud altercations with other drivers and conductors, in competition for your patronage. These altercations, though sometimes dramatic, are less problematic than they usually seem to the unaccustomed. Some hotels also provide visitors with shuttles to points of interest on the island. Hotel shuttles generally leave right outside of the hotel's lobby. The island also has an abundance of taxis-for-hire, although visitors staying on the island may find this an expensive option. Visitors also have the option of transport by car, presuming that they have a valid driver's license (issued in their native country.) There are several locally owned and operated vehicle rental agencies in Barbados.

Demographics

Close to 90 percent of all Barbadians (also known colloquially as Bajan) are of African descent ("Afro-Bajans"), mostly descendants of the slave labourers on the sugar plantations. The remainder of the population includes groups of Europeans ("Anglo-Bajans" / "Euro-Bajans"), Asians, Bajan Hindus and Muslims, and an influential Middle Eastern ("Arab-Bajans") group mainly of Syrian and Lebanese descent. Other groups in Barbados include people from the United States, Canada, and expatriates from Latin America. Barbadians who return from America after years of residence in the US are called "Bajan Yankees"; this term is considered derogatory by some. The official language of Barbados is English and while most Barbadians are Protestant Christians, chiefly of the Anglican Church, there are other Protestant, Roman Catholic, Hindu and Muslim minorities. Barbados is currently a chief emigration location from the South American nation of Guyana.

Culture

The influence of the English on Barbados is more noticeable than on other islands in the West Indies. A good example of this is the island's national sport: cricket. Barbados has brought forth several great cricket players, including Garfield Sobers and Frank Worrell. Citizens are officially called Barbadian, however residents of Barbados colloquially refer to themselves or the products of the country as "Bajan". The term "Bajan", may have come from a localized pronunciation of the word Barbadian which at times can sound more like "Bar-bajan". The term Barbadian, is used less frequently than is "Bajan". The largest Carnival cultural events which take place in Barbados are the Congaline Festival and Crop Over Festival as known internationally. As is the case in many of the other Caribbean and Latin American countries, Carnival is an important event for many people on the island, as well as the thousands of tourists that flock to the island to participate in the annual events. The smaller of the two events is the Congaline Festival, which takes place during the last week of March. The Crop Over Carnival which includes various musical competitions, and other traditional activities usually kicks into high gear from the beginning of July, and ends in its entirety during the first week of August. The Crop Over festival closes with Grand Kadooment a large parade on the final day of fetivities. :See also: Music of Barbados

National symbols

Music of Barbados The national flower is the Poinciana (Caesalpinia pulcherrima (L.) Sw. , Pride of Barbados), which grows across the island of Barbados. Poinciana

Golden Shield

The Golden Shield in the Coat of Arms carries two "Pride of Barbados" orchids and the "bearded" fig tree (Ficus citrifolia or Ficus barbata) which was common on the island at the time of its settlement by the British and contributed to Barbados being so named.

Coat of Arms

The coat of arms depicts two animals which are supporting the shield. On the left is a dolphin (dexter); symbolic of the fishing industry and sea-going past of Barbados. On the right is a pelican (sinister); symbolic of a small island named Pelican Island that once existed off the coast of Bridgetown. Above the shield is the helmet of Barbados with an extended arm clutching two sugar-cane stalks. The "cross" formation made by the cane stalks represents the cross which Saint Andrew was crucified. On the base of the Coat of Arms reads "Pride and Industry" in reference to the motto of the country.

National Heroes

The