Home About us Products Services Contact us Bookmark
:: wikimiki.org ::
Kashkaval

Kashkaval

Caciocavallo (Albanian: Kaçkavall; Bulgarian and Macedonian Кашкавал (Kashkaval); Romanian: Caşcaval; Serbian: Kačkavalj; Sicilian: Cascavaddu; Turkish: Kaşar) is a type of cottage cheese made out of sheep's or cow's milk, originally produced in Sicily, Italy, but now spread all across the Balkans. The Italian name of the cheese Caciocavallo means "Cheese on horseback" and it is thought that it was originally made out of mare's milk. This cheese is shaped like a tear-drop and is similar in taste to aged provolone, with a hard edible rind. Category:Sicilian cuisine Category:Italian cheeses Category:Romanian cheeses Category:Bulgarian cheeses Category:Serbian cuisine Category:Cuisine of Republic of Macedonia

Albanian language

Albanian (gjuha shqipe //) is a language spoken by over 6 million people primarily in Albania, but also by smaller numbers of ethnic Albanians in other parts of the Balkans, along the eastern coast of Italy and in Sicily, as well as by emigrant groups in Scandinavia, Germany, Greece the UK and the USA. The language forms its own distinct branch of the Indo-European language family.

Classification

Albanian was proven to be an Indo-European language 1854 by the German philologist Franz Bopp. The Albanian language is its own independent branch of the Indo-European language family with no living close relatives. There is no scholarly consensus over its origin. Some scholars maintain that it derives from the Illyrian language, and others claim that it derives from Thracian. The former group doesn't exclude a relationship with Thracian, however it should be added that this question is often loaded with political implications.

Albanology

Some eminent scholars in the field of Albanian language have been Johann Georg von Hahn, Franz Bopp, Gustav Meyer, Norbert Jokl, Eqrem Çabej, Stuart Edward Mann, Carlo Tagliavini, Wacław Cimochowski, Eric Pratt Hamp, Agnija Desnickaja, Martin Camaj and Gjovalin Shkurtaj. Gjovalin Shkurtaj is probably the most distinguished socio-linguist in Albania today, and he is the head of the Department of Linguistics at Tirana University.

How Albanian compares with other languages

Geographic distribution

Gjovalin Shkurtaj Albanian is spoken by about 6 million people mainly in Albania and Kosovo but also in many other countries, including the Republic of Macedonia, Belgium, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Italy, Sweden, Turkey (Europe), Ukraine, the UK and USA.

Official status

Albanian in the Tosk dialect is the official language of the Republic of Albania. Albanian is also one of the official languages of Kosovo, and the Republic of Macedonia.

Dialects

There are two principal dialects, Tosk (Toskërishte) and Gheg (Gegërishte), which have been diverging for at least a millennium, and their less extreme forms are mutually intelligible. The geographical border of the two dialects has traditionally been the Shkumbin River in Albania, with Gheg being spoken north of the river, and Tosk south of the river. The two dialects have phonological as well as lexicological differences. Tosk is furthermore divided into many mutually intelligible sub-dialects, which either belong to the Labërishte sub-group or the Çamërishte sub-group, including north-western Greece, but not to be confused with the Arvanites or the Greek-Albanians. This dialect is spoken by most members of the large Albanian immigrant communities that have recently arrived in these two countries, and in smaller Albanian communities in Ukraine, Turkey, Egypt, and United States. Gheg (or Geg) is divided into many mutually intelligible sub-dialects, which either belong to the Northern Gheg sub-group or the Southern-Gheg sub-group, the traditional border between the two being the Mati River in northern Albania. This dialect is spoken in northern Albania and by the Albanians of Serbia and Montenegro (Southern Montenegro and Southern Serbia), the UN protectorate of Kosovo, as well as those of the Republic of Macedonia. Since after World War II there have been efforts to create a Standard or Literary Albanian that borrows most heavily from the Tosk dialect (at the behest of the dictator Enver Hoxha, himself a Tosk speaker). The Congress on the Orthography of Albanian, held in 1972 with the additional participation of delegates from the Yugoslav territories of Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro and Calabria (Italy), established a unified literary language. The resulting orthographic rules were codified in such tomes as Drejtshkrimi i gjuhës shqipe (1973) (The Orthography of the Albanian Language) and Fjalori drejtshkrimor i gjuhës shqipe (1976) (The Orthographic Dictionary of the Albanian Language).

Notable lexicological differences between Tosk and Gheg

(ˆ) denotes nasal vowels, which are a common feature of Gheg.

Sounds

Albanian has 7 vowels and 29 consonants. Gheg has a set of nasal vowels which are absent in Tosk. Another peculiarity is the mid-central vowel "ë" reduced at the end of the word. Two dental fricatives exist (// and //) and the sounds r and l can be weak or strong. The original Indo-European phonetic system was destroyed in Albanian after diphthongs disappeared, and unstressed vowels were dropped. The stress is fixed mainly on the penultimate syllable.

Consonants

Notes:
- The affricates are pronounced as one sound (a stop and a fricative at the same point).
- The palatal stops q and gj are completely unknown to English, so the pronunciation guide is approximate. Palatal stops can be found in other European languages, for example, in Hungarian (where these sounds are spelt ty and gy respectively).
- The palatal nasal nj corresponds to the sound of the Spanish ñ or the French or Italian digraph gn (as in gnocchi). It is pronounced as one sound, not a nasal plus a glide.
- The ll sound is a velarised lateral, close to English "dark L".
- The contrast between flapped r and trilled rr is the same as in Spanish. English does not have any of the two sounds phonemically (but tt in butter is pronounced as a flap r in most American dialects).
- (1) The letter ç can be spelt ch on American English keyboards, both due to its English sound, but more importantly, due to analogy with Albanian xh, sh, zh. (Usually, however, it's spelt simply c, which may cause confusion; however, meanings are usually understood).

Vowels

Grammar

Albanian nouns are inflected by gender (masculine, feminine and neuter) and number (singular and plural). There are 4 declensions with 5 cases (nominative, dative, accusative, ablative and vocative), although the vocative only occurs with a limited number of words. The cases apply to both definite and indefinite nouns and there are numerous cases of syncretism. The equivalent of a genitive is formed by using the prepositions i/e/të/së with the dative. The following shows the declension of the masculine noun mal (mountain): The following table shows the declension of the feminine noun vajzë (girl) The article can be posited either before or after the noun as in many other Balkan languages, for example Romanian and Bulgarian.
- The definite article can be in the form of noun suffixes, which vary with gender and case.
  - For example in singular nominative, masculine nouns add -i or -u:
    - mal (mountain) / mali (the mountain);
    - libër (book) / libri (the book);
    - zog (bird) / zogu (the bird).
  - Feminine nouns take the suffix -(j)a:
    - veturë (car) / vetura (the car);
    - shtëpi (house) / shtëpia (the house);
    - lule (flower) / lulja (the flower).
- Neuter nouns take -t. Albanian develops an analytical structure of the verb. Its complex system of moods (6 types) and tenses (3 simple and 5 complex constructions) is distinguishing among other Balkan languages. There are two general types of conjugation. In Albanian the Constituent Order is Subject Verb Object and negation is expressed by the particles nuk or s in front of the verb, for example:
- Goni nuk flet anglisht "Goni doesn't speak English";
- s'di "don't know". In imperative sentences, the particle mos is used:
- mos harro "don't forget".

Vocabulary

Albanian split from the Proto-Indo-European language about 4000 years ago and most of the basic words are derived directly from it. Some of these words have cognates (of non-Latin origin) in Romanian and there is a theory that the language spoken by the Dacians before the Romanization was a language related to proto-Albanian. It is not certain whether ancient Greek influenced the early Albanian language (there are a few somewhat uncertain examples of possible loanwords). With the expansion of the Roman Empire, Latin, more specifically, the Balkan Latin (which was the ancestor of Romanian and other Balkan Romance languages), would exert a great influence on Albanian. Examples of words borrowed from Latin: qytet < civitas (city), qiell < caelum (sky), mik < amicus (friend). After the Slavs arrived in the Balkans, another source of Albanian vocabulary were the Slavic languages, especially Bulgarian. As in all other Balkan languages, the rise of the Ottoman Empire meant an influx of Turkish words; this also entailed the borrowing of Persian and Arabic words through Turkish. Some loanwords from Modern Greek also exist.

Writing system

Albanian has been written with many different alphabets since the 15th century. Originally, the Tosk dialect was written with the Greek alphabet and the Gheg dialect was written with the Latin alphabet. They have both also been written with the Ottoman Turkish version of the Arabic alphabet. The modern Albanian alphabet was standardised in 1909, and is based on the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the letters ë, ç, and nine digraphs. Albanian has also been written with two other local alphabets: The [http://www.omniglot.com/writing/albanian.htm#elbasan Elbasan] and the [http://www.omniglot.com/writing/albanian.htm#beitha Beitha Kukju] scripts, local inventions of the 18th and 19th centuries which were never widely used.

History

The place where the ancestors of today's Albanians lived in ancient Balkans is still uncertain, but they are usually identified with the ancient Illyrians or Thracians. The common vocabulary with Romanian suggests that the ancestors of the Albanians and Romanians lived close to each other in ancient times. Some scholars support a "theory of continuity", which says that the Albanians lived in the territory of current Albania. However, the low number of Doric Greek words and the high number of Latin borrowings suggests that the Albanians have lived well north of the Jirecek Line, which divided the spheres of influence of Latin and Greek languages. The oldest surviving document written in Albanian is "Formula e Pagëzimit" (Baptismal formula), written in 1462 in the Gheg dialect, and some New Testament verses from that period. However, Guiliam Adae in 1332 states that "Albanians, even though they have a different language from Latin, they use the Latin letters in their writings." The oldest known Albanian printed book, Meshari [http://www.albanianliterature.com/html/authors/prose/buzuku.html] or missal, was written by Gjon Buzuku, a Catholic cleric, in 1555. The first Albanian school is believed to have been opened by Franciscans in 1638 in Pdhanë. In 1635, Frang Bardhi wrote the first Latin-Albanian dictionary.

Examples

Note: All the sounds above are in the Ogg Vorbis format. The Islamic shahadah in Albanian is Nuk ka Zot përveç Allahut, dhe Muhamedi është profet i Tij.

References


- Encyclopædia Britannica, edition 15 (1985). Article: Albanian language

External links


- [http://www.argjiro.net/fjalor English - Albanian Dictionary]
- [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/Albanian-english/ Albanian - English Dictionary]: from [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org Webster's Online Dictionary] - the Rosetta Edition.
- [http://www.albanianoverview.com/ An overview of the Albanian language and culture]
- [http://www.single-serving.com/Albanian/ Albanian phrase guide]
- [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90071 Ethnologue report on Albanian]
- [http://www.sprachprofi.de.vu/english/al.htm List of free online resources for learners]
- [http://language-directory.50webs.com/languages/albanian.htm List of online Albanian-related resources]
- [http://www.geocities.com/cezarkurti/ Albanian World] Learn Albanian here Samples of various Albanian dialects:
- [http://www.language-museum.com/a/albanian-gheg.php Albanian (Gheg)]
- [http://www.language-museum.com/a/albanian-tosk.php Albanian (Tosk)]
- [http://www.language-museum.com/a/albanian-arbereshe.php Albanian (Arbëreshë)] Category:Languages of Albania Category:Languages of Kosovo Category:Languages of the Republic of Macedonia Category:Languages of Italy Category:Languages of Serbia and Montenegro Category:Languages of Greece Category:Languages of Turkey Category:Albanian language Category:Indo-European languages ja:アルバニア語 th:ภาษาแอลเบเนีย

Macedonian language

:This article is about the Slavic language. For the language spoken in the ancient world, see Ancient Macedonian language. The Macedonian language (Македонски, Makedonski) is a language in the Eastern group of South Slavic languages and is the official language of the Republic of Macedonia. Macedonian is also spoken in Australia, Canada, USA, Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia and Montenegro, Turkey and some countries of the European Union. The total number of native Macedonian speakers is estimated around 2 million. The Macedonian language is most closely related to the Bulgarian language. Macedonian also has similarities with Serbian, particularly Old Serbian. Bulgarian and Macedonian share typological similarities with Romanian, Greek, and Albanian. These five languages make up the Balkan language league, even though they are all from different language families (Romanian is a Romance language, while Greek and Albanian comprise their own branches in the Indo-European family). Macedonian is the official language in the Republic of Macedonia, and officially recognized in the District of Korçë in Albania. Native speakers are also found in Serbia and Montenegro, Greece, and Albania. Along with Bulgarian, Macedonian is the only Slavic language not to generally use noun cases in quite the same respect as the others. The only case used is vocative, however three different definite articles are used (as suffixes). It should also be noted that only Macedonian contains the three definite articles pertaining to position of the object; all other languages have the basic form. One unique characteristic of Macedonian speech is the permanent short stress falling on the syllable third from last, and gradually moving along each time the word lengthens. Example: ZAmina (vozot) - (The train) departed; zaMInuvaj - Go from here! (imperative); zamiNUvanje - Departure ; ZaminuVAnjeto - The departure. Even so, this tends not to be the case when the word has entered the language more recently and from a foreign source (chiefly English). Menadžment (Management) is pronounced Me-naj-MENT. A modified Cyrillic script, Macedonian Cyrillic with 31 letters, is used for writing. Cyrillic, with Glagolitic, was an old Slavic script, used for the original Old Slavonic language. Only Cyrillic is used today, probably because the letters are simpler and more easily learnt when scholars like Saint Cyril introduced Christian writings to the Slavic people. While the transliteration to Latin script is easy in principle, there is currently a lot of confusion about which standard to use. When Macedonia was part of former Yugoslavia, Macedonian was typically written using the Latin script used for, e.g., Croatian. For example, the Cyrillic letter ж was written as ž. Since then, the use of "zh" or simply "z" has gained currency. Especially problematic is the Cyrillic letter џ, which can be found transliterated into Latin as "dž", "dzh", "dz" or even "x". Macedonian language is taught as a subject in several of the university centres of the world, and is currently taught in all universities of the former Yugoslavia.

History

The 19th century, accompanied by pan-Slavic nationalism, saw the first attempts to resolve the question of linguistic norms in the Bulgarian-Macedonian diasystem. Writers from Macedonia advocated a common Bulgarian language based on the Slavic dialects in Macedonia or on a compromise between the upper-Bulgarian (northeastern Bulgarian) and the western Macedonian dialects. Writers from northern Bulgaria, however, insisted on the adoption of the northeastern Bulgarian dialect only. The establishment of an autonomous Bulgarian principality north of the Stara Planina led eventually to the adoption of the Eastern literary variant although the preservation of the letters and even after the codification of the Bulgarian language in 1899 maintained some differences between eastern Bulgarian and western Bulgarian and Macedonian dialects.

Bulgarian view on the Macedonian language

Although it was the first country to recognize the independence of the Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria has refused to recognize the existence of a separate Macedonian nation and a separate Macedonian language. It is argued that the language of the Macedonians should be regarded as a Bulgarian dialect. According to the Bulgarians, the contemporary literary language of Macedonia was created after 1945 by Yugoslav linguists who wanted to create a separate Macedonian nationality within the federal republic and thus divide Macedonian Bulgarians from those in Bulgaria. After almost a century of futile attempts to Serbianize Macedonia, they had apparently decided to apply the tried Roman maxim "divide and conquer" instead. In codifying the new language, the Yugoslav communists introduced their own alphabet and a huge load of Serbian lexis; they also did everything possible to create grammatical differences from literary Bulgarian. In a continuation of that trend, contemporary Macedonian linguists, indoctrinated in the teachings of the Yugoslav (i.e. Serboman) school, resort to falsifications of history and documents in order to further the opinion that there was a consciousness of a separate Macedonian language before that time. The publication in the Republic of Macedonia of the folk song collections Bulgarian Folk Songs by the Miladinov Brothers and Songs of the Macedonian Bulgarians by Serbian archaelogist Verkovic under the "politically correct" titles Collection and Macedonian Folk Songs are some of the examples quoted by the Bulgarians. Apart from this historical argument, the supporters of the Bulgarian view often state that the differences between Bulgarian and Macedonian, from an everyday and/or linguistical point of view, are insufficient to justify the recognition of the latter as a separate language. They also argue over about half a million refugees from the region of Macedonia that emigrated to free Bulgaria in the period 1879 to 1944 have integrated fully in Bulgarian society and are indistinguishable from other Bulgarians; in fact, many Bulgarians take pride in having a Macedonian ancestor, the number of people with Macedonian lineage is especially great in the capital (Sofia). To assess the validity of these arguments in a broader perspective, see dialect and the history of Bulgaria.

Greek view on the Macedonian language

The name of the language is considered offensive by Greece and many Greeks, who assert that the Ancient Macedonian language spoken by Alexander the Great in ancient Macedon is the only "Macedonian language". They further argue that since Slavic immigration to the region did not begin until well after the decline of the Macedonian Empire, it is historically inaccurate to refer to a Slavic language as Macedonian. Quite often the arguments are similar to the Bulgarian view, mainly that Macedonian was created artificially by Tito for political reasons. Moderate Greeks would refer to the langage as Slavomacedonian. However, most non-Greek parties such as international news organizations and language scholars refer to the language as "Macedonian". See Republic of Macedonia for more on the related naming dispute.

Alphabet

The Macedonian alphabet, as any Slavic Cyrillic alphabet, is ultimately based on the Cyrillic alphabet of Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius; it is an adaptation of Vuk Karadžić's phonetic alphabet.

Some Macedonian phrases


- Здраво! - Hello! (Zdra - vo)
- Добро утро - Good morning (Dobro u-tro)
- Добар ден - Good day to you (Dobar d-en)
- Добро вечер - Good evening (Dobro ve-cher)
- Довидување - Farewell (Dovi - du - van ye)
- Благодарам / Фала - Thank you / Thanks (Bla -go- daram, Fa la)
- Дали зборувате англиски? - Do you speak English? (Dali zbo-ruvate an-gliski?
- Немаме леб. Ќе одите ли да купите? - We don't have any bread left. Will you go and buy some? (Ne-mame leb, kye od-ite li da ku-pite?)
- Можете ли да ми помогнете? - Can you help me? (Mozhete li da mi po-mognete?)
- Се извинувам - Pardon me (Se iz-vin-uvam)
- Извини - Sorry (iz-vini)
- Се снаоѓате добро? - Do you manage well? (Se sna-odyate dobro?)
- Како си? - How are you? (ka-ko si?)
- Добар сум, фала. - I'm fine, thank you.
- Каде ќе одите вечерва? - Where are you going tonight?
- Ќе излезам со моите пријатели. - I'm going out with my friends. (moi-te pri at eli)
- Имам многу роднини и пријатели во САД - I have many relatives and friends in the USA. (rod-nini)

Similarities to other languages

The Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Slovenian and Bulgarian languages are related to Macedonian, but they are significantly different, except for Bulgarian which is mutually intelligible, with some difficulties, with Macedonian. They all compose the South Slavic dialect continuum for the Southern branch of the Slavic languages. With Serbia's standard language being based a good distance from Macedonia's border, the transitional language linking Macedonian and Bulgarian on the one hand with Serbo-Croat and Slovenian on the other is the Torlakian which is spoken in Northern Macedonia and North-Western Bulgaria and Southern Serbia. A lexicological comparison between Macedonian and Bulgarian reveals that roughly 15% of the whole vocabulary of both languages is different, although most words usually exist in the other language with a different or slightly modified meaning. 65% of the words are only differently accented, and 20% are identical. Lexical differences are owing to a great extent to loanwords borrowed by Bulgarian from Russian and by Macedonian from Serbian in the middle and the end of the 20th century. Compared to other languages the statistical differences between Bulgarian and Macedonian are similar to those between the Afrikaans and the Dutch languages.

External links


- [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=mkd Ethnologue report for Macedonian]
- [http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/european_languages/countries/macedonia.shtml BBC Education - Languages: Macedonian, Makedonski]
- [http://www.makedonija.info/language.html The Macedonian Language]
- [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/Macedonian-english/ Macedonian - English Dictionary]
- [http://www.unc.edu/~bbiljana/MKDtutorial.html Reading and Pronouncing Macedonian: An Interactive Tutorial]
- [http://www.macedoniainfo.com/books/kronsteiner/ik_3_eng.html Otto Kronsteiner. THE COLLAPSE OF YUGOSLAVIA AND THE FUTURE PROSPECTS OF THE MACEDONIAN LITERARY LANGUAGE] Category:South Slavic languages Category:Languages of the Republic of Macedonia Category:Languages of Greece Category:Languages of Bulgaria Category:Languages of Serbia and Montenegro Category:Languages of Albania ja:マケドニア語

Serbian language

The Serbian language is one of the standard versions of the Štokavian dialect (former standard was known as Serbo-Croatian language). Serbian is used primarily in Serbia and Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and by Serbs everywhere. The Serbian alphabet is very consistent: one letter per sound with an insignificant number of exceptions. This phonetic principle is represented in the saying: "Write as you speak and read as it is written", the principle used (though not invented) by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić when reforming the Cyrillic spelling of Serbian in the 19th century. Another rare feature of Serbian language is the presence of two alphabets: Cyrillic and Latin. The two alphabets are almost equivalent; the only difference is in the glyphs used. This is due to historical reasons; Serbian once being a part of the Serbo-Croat unification brought Latinic usage into Serbia.

Alphabets

glyph, 1841]] The following compares Српска Ћирилица (Serbian Cyrillic script) or Aзбука (Azbuka) with Srpska Latinica (Serbian Latin script) or Abeceda.

Notes


- The letters Lj, Nj and Dž are represented by two characters in the Latin alphabet. Also, the letter Đ is sometimes written as Dj.
- The sort order of the two alphabets is different. Azbuka: А Б В Г Д Ђ Е Ж З И Ј К Л Љ М Н Њ О П Р С Т Ћ У Ф Х Ц Ч Џ Ш Abeceda: A B C Č Ć D Dž Đ E F G H I J K L Lj M N Nj O P R S Š T U V Z Ž
- Many e-mail and even web documents written in Serbian use basic ASCII, where Serbian Latin letters that use diacritics (Ž Ć Č Š) are replaced with the base, undiacritised forms (Z C C S). The original words are then "recognized" from the context. This is not an official alphabet, and is considered a bad practice, but there are some documents in Serbian that use this simplified alphabet. This is common practice in other languages that use letters with diacritics.

Phonology

Vowels

The Serbian vowel system is simple, with only five vowels. All vowels are monophthongs. The oral vowels are as follows:

Consonants

The consonant system is more complicated, and its characteristic features are series of affricate and palatal consonants. As in English, voicedness is phonemic, but aspiration is not. In consonant clusters all consonants are either voiced or voiceless. All the consonants are voiced (if the last consonant is normally voiced) or voiceless (if the last consonant is normally voiceless). This rule does not apply to approximants — a consonant cluster may contain voiced approximants and voiceless consonants; as well as to foreign words (Washington would be transcribed as VašinGton/ВашинГтон), personal names and when consonants are not inside of one syllable. R can be syllabic, playing the role of a vowel in certain words (occasionally, it can even have a long accent). For example, the tongue-twister na vrh brda vrba mrda involves four words with syllabic r. A similar feature exists in Czech, Slovak and Macedonian. Very rare, l can be syllabic (in the name for the river "Vltava", 'l' is syllabic) as well as lj, m, n and nj in jargon.

Serbian literature

jargon]] Main article: Serbian literature Serbian literature emerged in the Middle Ages, and included such works as Miroslavljevo jevandjelje (The Gospel of Miroslav) in 1192 and Dušanov zakonik (Dušan's Code) in 1349. Little secular mediæval literature has been preserved, but what there is shows that it was in accord with its time; for example, Serbian Alexandride, a book about Alexander the Great, and a translation of Tristan and Isolde into Serbian. In the mid-15th century, Serbia was conquered by the Ottoman Empire and, for the next 400 years there was no opportunity for the creation of secular written literature. However, some of the greatest literary works in Serbian come from this time, in the form of oral literature, the most notable form being Serbian epic poetry. It is known that Goethe learned the Serbian language in order to read Serbian epic poetry in the original. Written literature was produced only for religious use in churches and monasteries, and held to Old Church Slavonic. By the end of the 18th century, the written literature had become estranged from the spoken language. In the second half of the 18th century, the new language appeared, called Slavonic-Serbian. In the early 19th century, Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, following the work of Sava Mrkalj, reformed the Cyrillic alphabet by introducing the phonetic principle, as well as promoting the spoken language of the people as a literary norm. The first printed book in Serbian, Oktoih was produced in Cetinje in 1494, only 40 years after Gutenberg's invention of movable type.

Demographics

Figures of speakers according to countries:
- Serbia-Montenegro: 7,170,000
  - Serbia: 6,770,000
    - Vojvodina: 1,557,020 (2002)
    - Central Serbia: 5,063,679 (2002)
    - Kosovo: 150,000
  - Montenegro: 401,382 (2003)
- Bosnia-Herzegovina: 1,500,000
- USA: around 500,000
- Canada: 55,545 ([http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census01/products/highlight/ETO/Table1.cfm?Lang=E&T=501&GV=1&GID=0 2001 census], 40,580 of that in Ontario)
- Croatia: 44,629 (2001)
- Republic of Macedonia: 33,315 (2001)
- Romania: 20,377 (2001)
- Australia: 50,000 (2001)

Trivia

Two Serbian words that are used in many of the world's languages are vampire and slivovitz (though the etymology and origin of the word vampire is disputed [http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=vampire&searchmode=none]).

See also


- Serbo-Croatian language
- Differences in official languages in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia
- Common phrases in Serbian
- Serbian proverbs
- Serbian tongue-twisters
- Famous non-Serbs who were speaking or learning the language
- Šatrovački (slang form)
- Romano-Serbian language (mix with Romany)

External links


- [http://www.rastko.org.yu/isk/pivic-standard_language.html Standard language as an instrument of culture and the product of national history] — an article by pre-eminent linguist Pavle Ivić
- [http://www.serbianschool.com Serbian School] Learn Serbian online for free. Category:South Slavic languages Category:Languages of Serbia and Montenegro Category:Languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina Category:Languages of Vojvodina Category:Languages of Serbia Category:Languages of Montenegro Category:Languages of Kosovo Category:Languages of Hungary Category:Languages of the Republic of Macedonia ko:세르비아어 ja:セルビア語 th:ภาษาเซอร์เบีย

Turkish language

Turkish (Türkçe) is a Turkic language spoken natively in Turkey, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Bulgaria, as well as by several million immigrants in the European Union. The number of native speakers is uncertain, primarily due to a lack of minority language data from Turkey. The figure of 60 million used here assumes that Turkish is the mother tongue of 80% of the Turkish population, with making up most of the remainder. (Linguistic minorities in Turkey are, however, bilingual in Turkish.) There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Turkish and other Oghuz languages such as Azeri, , and . If these are counted together as "Turkish", the number of native speakers is 100 million, and the total number including second-language speakers is around 125 million.

Classification

Turkish is a member of the Turkish family of languages, which includes Balkan Gagauz Turkish, Gagauz, and Khorasani Turkish in addition to Osmanli Turkish. The Turkish family is a subgroup of the Oghuz languages, themselves a subgroup of the Turkic languages, which most linguists believe to be member of an Altaic language family. Like Finnish and Hungarian, Turkish has vowel harmony, is agglutinative and has no grammatical gender. Word order is usually Subject Object Verb. Turkish has a T-V distinction: second-person plural forms can be used for individuals as a sign of respect.

Geographic distribution

Turkish is spoken in Turkey and by minorities in 35 other countries. In particular, Turkish is used in countries that formerly (in whole or part) belonged to the Ottoman Empire, such as Bulgaria, Romania, the former Yugoslavia (specifically in the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija on a local level), and the Republic of Macedonia.

Official status

Turkish is the official language of Turkey, and is one-although today it is less spoken- of the official languages of Cyprus. It is also an official or national language in Bulgaria. In Turkey, the Turkish Language Society (Türk Dil Kurumu) was founded by Kemal Atatürk in 1932 as the Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti ("Society for the Investigation of the Turkish Language"), an independent body. In August, 1983, when Turkey was under martial law as a result of the military coup of 1980, the Turkish Language Society was brought under the control of the prime ministry.

Dialects

Dialects of Turkish include Danubian, Eskişehir (spoken in Eskişehir Province), Razgrad, Dinler, Rumelian, Karamanlı (spoken in Karaman Province), Edirne (spoken in Edirne), Gaziantep (spoken in Gaziantep Province), Urfa (spoken in Şanlıurfa Province), and Goynuk (a village in Bolu).

Sounds

One characteristic feature of Turkish is vowel harmony. For example, if the first vowel of a Turkish word is a front vowel, the second and other vowels of the same word are usually the same vowel or another front vowel: vişne "sour cherry": i is close unround front, e is open unround front. Stress is usually on the last syllable, with the exception of some suffix combinations and words like masa ['masa].

Consonants

The phoneme usually refered to as "soft g", "ğ" in Turkish orthography, actually represents a rather weak front-velar or palatal approximant between front vowels. When it is word-final or preceding another consonant it lengthens the preceding vowel. In all other positions, it is not pronounced at all.

Vowels

Grammar

Turkish has an abundance of suffixes, but no prefixes (apart from the reduplicating intensifier prefix as in beyaz="white", bembeyaz="very white", sıcak="hot", sımsıcak="very hot"). (Some Arabic loan words have their own prefixes, but those are the common prefixes of Arabic.) One word can have many suffixes. Suffixes can be used to create new words (see #Vocabulary) or to indicate the grammatical function of a word. Turkish nouns can take endings indicating the person of a possessor. They can take case-endings, as in Latin. (The series of case-endings is the same for every noun, except for spelling changes owing to vowel harmony, and variation between voiced and unvoiced consonants.) Finally, they can take endings that give them a person and make them into sentences: ev "house", eviniz "your house", evinizde "at your house", Evinizdeyiz "We are at your house." Turkish adjectives as such are not declined (though they can generally be used as nouns, in which case they are declined). Used attributively, they precede the nouns they modify. Turkish verbs exhibit person. They can be made negative or impotential; they can also be made potential. Finally, Turkish verbs exhibit various distinctions of tense, mood, and aspect: a verb can be progressive, necessitative, aorist, future, inferential, present, past, conditional, imperative, or optative. gel- "(to) come", gelme- "not (to) come", geleme- "not (to) be able to come", gelebil- "(to) be able to come", Gelememiş "She [or he] was apparently unable to come." Gelememişti "She had not been able to come." Gelememiştiniz "You (pl) had not been able to come." Gelememiş miydiniz? "Was it the case that you (pl) were not able to come?" All Turkish verbs are conjugated the same way, except for the irregular and defective verb i- (see Turkish copula), which can be used in compound forms: Gelememişti = Gelememiş idi = Gelememiş + i- + -di Word order in Turkish is generally Subject Object Verb, as in Japanese and Latin, but not English. This can be seen in the following sentence from a newspaper (Cumhuriyet, 16 August 2005, p. 1). The sentence uses all noun cases except the genitive: Türkiye'de modayı gazete sayfalarına taşıyan, gazetemiz yazarlarından N. S. yaşamını yitirdi: Türkiye'de "in Turkey" (locative) modayı "fashion" (accusative of moda) gazete "newspaper" (nominative) sayfalarına "to its pages" (dative; sayfa "page", sayfalar "pages", sayfaları "its pages") taşıyan, "carrying" (present participle of taşı-) gazetemiz "our newspaper" (nominative) yazarlarından "from its writers" (ablative; yazar "writer") N. S. [person's name] (nominative) yaşamını "her life" (accusative; yaşam "life") yitirdi. "lost" (past tense of yitir- "lose" from yit- "be lost") "One of the writers of our newspaper, N. S., who brought fashion to newspaper pages in Turkey, lost her life."

Vocabulary

Turkish has the resources for building up many new words from old: from nouns: göz "eye", gözlük "eyeglasses" gözlükçü "someone who sells glasses" gözlükçülük "the business of selling glasses" and from verbs: yat- "lie down" yatır- "lay down [that is, cause to lie down]" yatırım "instance of laying down: deposit, investment" yatırımcı "depositor, investor". Turkish vocabulary has gone through drastic changes in the history of the language. In the last sixty years, Turkish vocabulary has gone through changes that might take three centuries in another language.

Replaced old words

When the Turks came from middle Asia to Anatolia about a thousand years ago, they came in contact with Islam and the Arabic societies. Since the Turks accepted Islam, Arabic words (and fewer, Persian words) started infiltrating the language. During the course of over six hundred years of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish kept borrowing loan words from these two languages. Towards the end of the 19th century, this got to a point where the language was rather called the Ottoman language. This is because Turkish had been inundated with so many loan words that the language became a mix of Turkish, Arabic and Persian. In contemporary Turkey, the Ottoman language is almost incomprehensible. After Atatürk founded the Republic of Turkey, he established the "Turkish Language Foundation" (Türk Dil Kurumu, TDK), whose task was to replace Arabic and Persian origin words with their new Turkish counterparts. The foundation succeeded in removing several hundred Arabic words from the language. While most of the words introduced to the language by TDK are new, TDK also suggested using old Turkish words which had not been used in the language for centuries. Older and younger people in Turkey tend to express themselves with different vocabulary. While the generations born up to the 1940s tend to use the old Arabic origin words (even the obsolete ones), the younger generations favor using the new expressions. Some new words are not used as often as their old counterparts or have failed to convey the intrinsic meanings of their old equivalents. Among some of the old words that were replaced are terms in geometry, directions (north, south, east, west), some of the months and many nouns and adjectives. Many new words have also been derived from verbs. Some examples of new and their old counterparts are: Please see List of replaced loan words in Turkish for an extensive list of replaced old words and current loan words

Writing system

Turkish is written using a modified version of the Latin alphabet, which was introduced in 1928 by Kemal Atatürk as part of his efforts to modernize Turkey. Until 1928, Turkish was written using a modified version of the Arabic alphabet (see Ottoman Turkish language), but use of the Arabic alphabet was outlawed after the Latin alphabet was introduced. See Turkish alphabet.

The language in daily life

Turkish has many formulaic expressions for various social situations. Several of them feature Arabic verbal nouns together with the Turkish verb et- ("make, do"). A famous quotation and motto of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk:
- Yurtta sulh, cihanda sulh "Peace at home, peace in the world." In the current language, this is
- Yurtta barış, dünyada barış.

References


- International Phonetic Association (1999) Handbook of the International Phonetic Association ISBN 0-521-63751-1
-
-
-

External links


- [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/turkishlearner/ A discussion list for the learners of Turkish]
- [http://www.langtolang.com/ Langtolang Turkish, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Swedish, Danish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Finnish, Esperanto, Swahili, Serbo_Croat Multilingual Dictionary]
- [http://www.turkce-ingilizce.com/ Turkish-English and English-Turkish Online Dictionary]
- [http://www.123lasvegas.info Free turkish dictionary.]
- [http://www.tdk.org.tr/TDKSOZLUK/SOZBUL.ASP Turkish to Turkish Dictionary.]
- [http://turkisaretdili.ku.edu.tr Turkish to Turkish Sign Language (TID) Visual Dictionary]
- [http://www.turkishclass.com Learn Turkish language online.]
- [http://www.fdicts.com/dictlist1.php?k1=97 All free Turkish dictionaries]
- [http://www.ethnologue.org/show_language.asp?code=TRK Ethnologue report for Turkish]
- [http://www.onlineturkish.com onlineturkish.com]
- [http://www.weberberg.de/infoport/tuerkisch Free online Turkish course written in German ]
- [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/translation/Turkish/ Dictionary] with Turkish - English Translations from [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org Webster's Online Dictionary] - the Rosetta Edition
- [http://www.zargan.com.tr/ Online Turkish-English/English-Turkish dictionary]
- [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/Turkish-english/ Turkish - English Dictionary]
- [http://www.langtolang.com/ A comprehensive and accurate Turkish-(English/French/Italian/and various other languages) dictionary]
- [http://aton.ttu.edu Texas Tech University, Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative]
- [http://www.turkcebilgi.com/T%FCrk%E7e An Information site in Turkish Language]
- [http://www.ipb.nu/winmekmak/ WinMekMak - Turkish Verb Conjugator]
- [http://www.turkishlanguage.co.uk/pf.htm The best site for learning Turkish with detailed explanations]
- [http://www.turkishdictionary.net/ Turkish dictionary available for use in various forms]
- [http://miejipang.homestead.com/untitled18.html Let's try to learn Hungarian(Magyar) and Turkish!] Category:Languages of Turkey Category:Languages of Cyprus Category:Languages of the Republic of Macedonia Category:Agglutinative languages Category:Vowel harmony languages category:Turkic languages ja:トルコ語 th:ภาษาตุรกี

Sheep

:This article refers to the sheep genus. For the domesticated species which is used for wool and meat production in farming enterprises, see Domestic sheep. For other uses, see Sheep (disambiguation).
See text A Sheep is a mammal, one of several woolly ruminant quadrupeds in the genus Ovis. The domestic sheep is thought to be descended from the wild moufflon of south-central and south-west Asia. A male sheep is a ram, a female a ewe, and a young sheep a lamb. Sheep meat is called mutton or simply lamb. Sheep are usually stockier than their goat relatives, and some have horns which are more more divergent than those of goats. Sheep have scent glands on the face and hind feet. Communication through the scent glands is not well understood but is thought to be important for sexual signaling. Males can smell females which are fertile and ready to mate, and rams mark their territories by rubbing scent on to rocks. Sheep are highly gregarious bovids (members of the family Bovidae) and ruminants, meaning they chew cud. They have a four chambered stomach which plays a vital role in digesting, reguritating and re-digesting food. For related species, see goat antelope.

Sheep species

There are at least eight species of sheep:

Domestic sheep

Main article: Domestic sheep The domestic sheep (Ovis aries) is the most common species of sheep. As such it is a woolly ruminant quadruped which probably descends from the wild moufflon of south-central and south-west Asia. Sheep are principally husbanded for their wool, meat and milk. There are many breeds of sheep and these are generally sub-classable as: wool breeds, meat breeds, and dual-use breeds. Farmers develop wool breeds for superior wool quantity and quality and meat breeds for their fast growth, multiple births, ease of lambing, and hardiness.

Hybrids with goats

Although sheep and goats seem similar and can be mated together they belong to different genera. Goats are caprinae and have 60 chromosomes while sheep are ovinae and have 54v chromosomes. This mismatch of chromosomes means any offspring of a sheep-goat pairing is generally stillborn (the famous geep is a chimera, not a hybrid). At Botswana Ministry of Agriculture, a ram that was kept with a nanny goat impregnated the goat resulting in a live offspring that had 57 chromosomes. This was called "The Toast of Batswana". The hybrid is intermediate between the two parent species in type. It has a coarse outer coat, awoolly inner coat, long goat-like legs and a heavy sheep-like body. Although infertile, the Toast of Batswana was castrated to prevent unwanted sexual behaviour because it continually mounted the sheep and goats sharing its enclosure. In 1969, Australian farmer Dick Lanyon, who farmed near Melbourne, Australia, kept a billy-goat among his sheep to scare off foxes during the lambing season. In September of the same year, he claimed to have dozens of ‘lambs’ which were sheep-goat hybrids. The goat was locked up while scientists examined the supposed hybrids. As no more was heard of this case, it is believed that the lambs were pure-bred sheep. There is a long-standing belief in sheep/goat hybrids which is due to the animals' resemblance to each other. Some primitive varieties of sheep may be misidentified as goats. In "Darwinism An Exposition Of The Theory Of Natural Selection With Some Of Its Applications" (1889), Alfred Russel Wallace wrote: :[...] the following statement of Mr. Low: "It has been long known to shepherds, though questioned by naturalists, that the progeny of the cross between the sheep and goat is fertile. Breeds of this mixed race are numerous in the north of Europe." Nothing appears to be known of such hybrids either in Scandinavia or in Italy; but Professor Giglioli of Florence has kindly given me some useful references to works in which they are described. The following extract from his letter is very interesting: "I need not tell you that there being such hybrids is now generally accepted as a fact. Buffon (Supplements, tom. iii. p. 7, 1756) obtained one such hybrid in 1751 and eight in 1752. Sanson (La Culture, vol. vi. p. 372, 1865) mentions a case observed in the Vosges, France. Geoff. St. Hilaire (Hist. Nat. Gén. des reg. org., vol. iii. p. 163) was the first to mention, I believe, that in different parts of South America the ram is more usually crossed with the she-goat than the sheep with the he-goat. The well-known 'pellones' of Chile are produced by the second an third generation of such hybrids (Gay, 'Hist, de Chile,' vol. i. p. 466, Agriculture, 1862). Hybrids bred from goat and sheep are called 'chabin' in French, and 'cabruno' in Spanish. In Chile such hybrids are called 'carneros lanudos'; their breeding inter se appears to be not always successful, and often the original cross has to be recommenced to obtain the proportion of three-eighths of he-goat and five-eighths of sheep, or of three-eighths of ram and five-eighths of she-goat; such being the reputed best hybrids."

See also


- Aries (astrological sign)
- Barbary Sheep (Ammotragus lervia)
- Blue tongue disease
- Dolly the sheep
- Domestic sheep
- List of domestic sheep breeds
- Scrapie
- Sheep husbandry
- Wool Category:Sheep ja:ヒツジ ko:양 simple:Sheep

Sicily

:Sicilian disambiguates here; see also Sicilian language or Sicilian Defence. Sicily (Sicilia in Italian) is an autonomous region of Italy and the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, with an area of 25,700 sq. km and 5 million inhabitants.

Towns and Cities

Sicily's principal cities include the regional capital Palermo, together with the other provincial capitals Catania, Messina, Syracuse (Siracusa in Italian), Trapani, Enna, Caltanissetta, Agrigento, Ragusa. Other famous Sicilian towns include Cefalù, Taormina, Bronte, Marsala, Corleone, Castellammare del Golfo Francavilla di Sicilia, and Abacaenum (now Tripi).

Flag

For more information, see Flag of Sicily. The regional flag of Sicily, recognized since January 2000, is also the historical one of the island, since 1282. It is divided diagonally yellow over red, with the trinacria symbol in the center. The trinacria symbol is used also by the Isle of Man.

Geography

Isle of Man This region is faced to Calabria over the Strait of Messina, and that's the only conterminous region. The volcano Etna, is situated close to Catania. Etna is 3,320 m (10,900 ft) high, making it the tallest volcano in Europe. It is also one of the world's most active volcanos. The Aeolian islands to the north are administratively a part of Sicily, as are the Aegadian Islands and Pantelleria Island to the west, Ustica Island to the north-west, and the Pelagian Islands to the south-west. Sicily has been noted for two millennia as a grain-producing territory: olives and wine are among its other agricultural products. The mines of the Caltanissetta district became a leading sulphur-producing area in the 19th century, but have declined since the 1950s.

Transport

Vehicles Most of Sicily's motorways (autostrade) run through the north of the region - the most important ones being A19 Palermo - Catania, A20 Palermo - Messina, A29 Palermo - Mazara del Vallo and the paid-for A18 Messina - Catania. Much of the motorway network is raised on columns due to the mountainous terrain. The road network in the south of the country consists of well maintained, yet not motorway-class roads. Train Sicily is connected to the Italian peninsula by the national railway company, Trenitalia, though trains are loaded onto ferries for the crossing from the mainland. Officially, the Stretto di Messina, S.p.A. schedules to the second half of 2006 the beginning of construction on the world's longest suspension bridge, The Strait of Messina Bridge Project. If and when completed, it will mark the first time in history that Sicily has been connected by a land link to Italy. Air Sicily is served by national and international flights (mainly European) from to Palermo International Airport and Catania-Fontanarossa Airport. There are also minor national airports in Trapani and small islands of Pantelleria and Lampedusa.

Arts

Lampedusa Sicily is well known as a country of art: many poets and writers were born on this region, starting from the Sicilian School in the early 13th century, which inspired much subsequent Italian poetry and created the first Italian standard. The most famous, however, are Luigi Pirandello, Giovanni Verga, Salvatore Quasimodo, Gesualdo Bufalino and the dialectal poet Ignazio Buttitta. Other Sicilian artists include the composers Sigismondo d'India (from Palermo), Vincenzo Bellini (from Catania), as well as the sculptor Tommaso Geraci. Noto and Ragusa contain some of Italy's best examples of Baroque architecture, carved in the local red sandstone. Caltagirone is renowned for its decorative ceramics. Palermo is also a major center of Italian opera. Its Teatro Massimo is the largest opera house in Italy and the third largest in the world, seating 1400. Sicily is also home to two prominent folk art traditions, both of which draw heavily on the island's Norman influence. Donkey carts are painted with intricate decorations of scenes from the Norman romantic poems, such as The Song of Roland. The same tales are told in traditional puppet theatres which feature hand-made wooden marionettes. The 1988 movie Nuovo Cinema Paradiso was about life in a Sicilian town following the Second World War.

History

The autochthonous peoples of Sicily, long absorbed into the population, were tribes known to Greek writers as the Elymians, the Sicani and the Siculi or Siceli. Of these, the last were clearly the latest to arrive on this land and were related to other tribes of southern Italy, such as the Italoi of Calabria, the Oenotrians, Chones, and Leuterni (or Leutarni), the Opicans, and the Ausones. Sicily was colonized by Phoenicians and Punic settlers from Carthage and by Greeks, starting in the 8th century BC. The most important colony was established at Syracuse in 734 BC. Other important Greek colonies were Gela, Acragas, Selinunte, Himera, and Zancle or Messene (modern-day Messina, not to be confused with the ancient city of Messene in Messenia, Greece). These city states were an important part of classical Greek civilization, which included Sicily as part of Magna Graecia - both Empedocles and Archimedes were from Sicily. Sicilian politics was intertwined with politics in Greece itself, leading Athens, for example, to mount the disastrous Sicilian Expedition during the Peloponnesian War. The Greeks came into conflict with the Punic trading communities with ties to Carthage, which was on the African mainland not far from the southwest corner of the region, and had its own colonies on Sicily. Palermo was a Carthaginian city, founded in the 8th century BC, named Zis or Sis ("Panormos" to the Greeks). Hundreds of Phoenician and Carthaginian grave sites have been found in necropoli over a large area of Palermo, now built over, south of the Norman palace, where the Norman kings had a vast park. In the far west, Lilybaeum (now Marsala) never was thoroughly Hellenized. In the First and Second Sicilian Wars, Carthage was in control of all but the eastern part of Sicily, which was dominated by Syracuse. In the 3rd century BC the Messanan Crisis motivated the intervention of the Roman Republic into Sicilian affairs, and led to the First Punic War between Rome and Carthage. By the end of war (242 BC) all Sicily was in Roman hands, becoming Rome's first province outside of the Italian peninsula. The initial success of the Carthaginians during the Second Punic War encouraged many of the Sicilian cities to revolt against Roman rule. Rome sent troops to put down the rebellions (it was during the siege of Syracuse that Archimedes was killed). Carthage briefly took control of parts of Sicily, but in the end was driven off. Many Carthaginian sympathizers were killed-- in 210 BC the Roman consul M. Valerian told the Roman Senate that "no Carthaginian remains in Sicily". For the next 6 centuries Sicily was a province of the Roman Empire. It was something of a rural backwater, important chiefly for its grainfields which were a mainstay of the food supply of the city of Rome. The empire did not make much effort to Romanize the region, which remained largely Greek. The most notable event of this period was the notorious misgovernment of Verres. In AD 440 Sicily fell to the Vandal king Geiseric. A few decades later it came into Ostrogothic hands, where it remained until it was conquered by the Byzantine general Belisarius in 535. But a new Ostrogoth king, Totila, drove down the Italian peninsula and then plundered and conquered Sicily in 550. He in turn was defeated and killed by the Byzantine general Narses in 552. Sicily was then ruled by the Byzantine Empire until the Arab conquest of AD 827-902. For a brief period (662 - 668) during Byzantine rule Syracuse was the imperial capital, until Constans II was assassinated. The cultural diversity and religious tolerance of the period of Muslim rule under the Kalbid dynasty, that made Palermo the capital city of Sicily, continued under the Normans who conquered Sicily in 1060-1090 (raising its status to that of a kingdom in 1130), and the south German Hohenstaufen dynasty which ruled from 1194, adopting as well Palermo as its principal seat from 1220. Conflict between the Hohenstaufen house and the Papacy led in 1266 to Sicily's conquest by Charles I, duke of Anjou: opposition to French officialdom and taxation led in 1282 to insurrection (the Sicilian Vespers) and successful invasion by king Peter III of Aragón. Ruled from 1479 by the kings of Spain, Sicily suffered a ferocious outbreak of plague (1656), followed by a damaging earthquake in the east of the region (1693). Periods of rule by the crown of Savoy (1713-20) and then the Austrian Habsburgs gave way to union (1734) with the Bourbon-ruled kingdom of Naples as the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The scene in 1820 and 1848 of abortive revolutionary movements against Bourbon denial of constitutional government, Sicily was joined with the kingdom of Italy in 1860 following the expedition of Giuseppe Garibaldi. Before the unification Sicily was one of the most rich and developed regions of Italy, then its national treasure and its facilities were exploited to create the new industrial growth which transformed the poor urban areas of northern Italy into the large economic heart of the nation. In 1866 Palermo insurged against Italy. The city was soon bombed by the Italian navy, which disembarked on September 22, under the command of Raffaele Cadorna. Italian soldiers summarily executed the civilian insurgents, and took possession once again of the island. A long extensive guerrilla campaign against the unionists (1861-1871) took place throughout southern Italy, and in Sicily, inducing the Italian governments to a ferocious military repression. Ruled under martial law for many years Sicily (and southern Italy) was ravaged by the Italian army that summarily executed hundred thousands people, made tens of thousands prisoners, destroyed villages, and deported people. The Sicilian economy collapsed, leading to an unprecedented wave of emigration. In 1894 labour agitation through the radical Fasci dei lavoratori led once again to the imposition of martial law. The organised crime networks commonly known as the mafia extended their influence in the late 19th century (and many of its operatives also emigrated to other countries, particularly the United States); partly suppressed under the Fascist regime beginning in the 1920s, they recovered following the World War II Allied invasion of Sicily. An autonomous region from 1946, Sicily benefited to some extent from the partial Italian land reform of 1950-62 and special funding from the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, the Italian government's indemnification Fund for the South (1950-84). Sicily returned to the headlines in 1992, however, when the assassination of two anti-mafia magistrates, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino triggered a general upheaval in Italian political life.

Sicilian people

In the broadest sense of the term, Sicilians are those people who live in or whose ancestors lived in Sicily. Sicily has been long known as a "melting pot" of ancient cultures and peoples, and highly valued for its location. The inhabitants of this region are therefore descended from numerous peoples, mainly Greeks, peninsular Italians, Phoenicians, Saracen Arabs and the pre-colonial indigenous peoples known as Sicans/Sicani (generally residing in the west of Sicily and possibly an Iberian tribe), the Elymi, and the Sicels/Siculi (residing mostly in the eastern portion of the Sicilian territory and probably an Italic tribe). There is also the presence of Norman, Lombard, Provençal, Aragonese and Castilian blood in some Sicilians, due to either conquest of, or migration here. A common presumption about the peopling of Sicily has been as follows: ::Sicilians residing in the east, southeast, and northeast portions of the region are primarily of Greek (and probably Sicel) descent. Cities such as Syracuse (Sirakousa), Messina (Zankle), Agrigento (Akragas), and Taormina/Giardini-Naxos, were originally Greek settlements. In the southwest, west, and northwest of the region, the inhabitants are primarily of Phoenician/Arab and Sican descent. Cities such as Trapani and Palermo were Phoenician settlements. However, a recent genetic study (Department of Biology, University of Rome, Tor Vergata, Italy) rejects the above assertions: ::The genetic distance matrix used for identifying the main genetic barriers revealed no east-west differences within the region's population, at least at the provincial level. FST estimates proved that the population subdivision did not affect the pattern of gene frequency variation; this implies that Sicily is effectively one panmictic unit. The bulk of our results confirm the absence of genetic differentiation between eastern and western Sicilians, and thus we reject the hypothesis of the subdivision of an ancient population in two areas. The few Sicilians with Norman or Spanish blood are found mostly in the large northern cities such as Palermo and Cefalu. Sicilians of Lombard descent are to be found primarily in the centre and central-east of Sicily, in towns such as Piazza Amerina, Nicosia and Aidone, where a Gallic-Italic dialect is spoken to this day. There were also significant Lombard settlements in Randazzo and Paternó in the middle ages. San Fratello, in the Province of Messina, was the destination of a large contingent of mercenaries from Provence in the middle ages, and to this day, the San Fratellans speak a unique Provençal-Sicilian dialect. Sicilians are noted for having very dark and expressive eyes; "the eyes of Sicily".

Sicilian language

Main article: Sicilian language Many Sicilians are bilingual in both Italian and Sicilian, a separate Romance language, descended from Vulgar Latin, with Greek, Arabic, French, Provençal, German, Catalan and Spanish influences. It is important to note that Sicilian is not a derivative of Italian. Although thought by some to be a dialect, Sicilianu is a distinct language, with a rich history and a sizeable vocabulary (at least 250,000 words), due to the influence of the different conquerors of, and settlers to, this land. Sicilian dialects are also spoken in the southern and central sections of the Italian regions Calabria (Calabrese) and Puglia (Salentino); and had a significant influence on the Maltese Language, which was a part of the Kingdom of Sicily (in its various forms) until the late 18th century. With the predominance of Italian in Italian schools, the media, etc., Sicilian is no longer the first language of many Sicilians. Indeed, in urban centers in particular, one is more likely to hear standard Italian spoken rather than Sicilian, especially among the young. Sicilian generally uses the word ending for singular masculine nouns and adjectives, and for feminine. The plural is usually for both masculine and feminine. By contrast, in Italian masculine nouns and adjectives that end in in the singular pass to in the plural, while the feminine counterparts pass from to . The "-LL-" sound (in words of Latin origin, for example) manifests itself in Sicilian as a voiced retroflex plosive with the tip of the tongue curled up and back, a sound which is not part of Standard Italian. In Sicilian, this sound is written simply as "-dd-" although the sound itself is not but rather . For example, the Italian word bello is beddu in Sicilian. In numerous villages, the Arbëreshë dialect of the Albanian language has been spoken since a wave of refugees settled there in the 15th century. While it is spoken within the household, Italian is the official language and modern Greek is chanted in the local Byzantine liturgy. There are also several areas where dialects of the Lombard language of the Gallo-Italic family are spoken. Much of this population is also tri-lingual, being able to also speak one of the Sicilian dialects as well.

List of Sicilians


- Empedocles (c. 490 BC – 430 BC), scientist and philosopher
- Diodorus (1st century BC), historian
- Gorgias (c. 483 BC – 375 BC), sophist, philosopher, and rhetorician
- Archimedes (c. 287 BC – 212 BC), scientist
- Pope Leo II, Pope from 682 to 683
- Roger II of Sicily, King of Sicily 1130 – 1154
- William I of Sicily, King of Sicily 1154 – 1166
- William II of Sicily, King of Sicily 1166 – 1189
- Frederick II (1194 – 1250), Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily (Frederick I of Sicily)
- Vincenzo Bellini (1801 – 1835), opera composer
- Francesco Crispi (1819 – 1901), politician
- Giovanni Verga (1840 – 1922), novelist
- Vito Cascio Ferro (1862 – 1943), mafioso
- Luigi Pirandello (1867 – 1936), dramatist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
- Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896 – 1957), writer, poet
- Ignazio Buttitta (1901 – 2000), poet
- Salvatore Quasimodo (1901 – 1968), poet, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
- Andrea Camilleri (born 1925), novelist
- Giovanni Falcone (1939 – 1992), judge
- Paolo Borsellino (1940 – 1992), judge
- Salvatore Schillaci (born 1964), football player
- Maria Grazia Cucinotta (born 1969), actress
- Giovanni Meli, poet
- Nino Martoglio, poet

List of Sicilian-Americans


- Frank Capra (1897 – 1991), film director
- Vincent R. Impellitteri (1900 – 1987), politican
- Anthony T. Rossi (1900 – 1993), businessman
- Giuseppe Bonanno (1905 – 2002), mafioso
- Joe DiMaggio (1914 – 1999), professional baseball player
- Frank Sinatra (1915 – 1998), singer, actor
- Mario Puzo (1920 – 1999), writer
- Jack Valenti (born 1921), lobbyist
- Philip Zimbardo (born 1933), psychologist
- Salvatore Bono (1935 – 1998), entertainer, politician
- Antonin Scalia (born 1936), U.S Supreme Court Justice
- Sal Mineo (1939 – 1976), actor
- Al Pacino (born 1940), actor
- Frank Vincent Zappa (1940 – 1993), composer, guitarist, singer and satirist
- Martin Scorcese (born 1942), film director
- Cyndi Lauper (born 1953), pop singer
- Dan Frisa (born 1955), Congressman
- Mike Piazza (born 1963), professional baseball player

See also


- Sicilian language
- Sicilian School
- Cuisine of Sicily
- Category:People of Sicilian heritage
- Monarchs of Naples and Sicily
- Two Sicilies
- Normans
- Triskelion
- Sicilian music

Notes

# Category:Regions of Italy
- Category:Former countries in Europe Category:NUTS 2 Statistical Regions of Europe zh-min-nan:Sicilia ko:시칠리아 ja:シチリア島

Balkans

: Balkan redirects here. For the Turkmen province, see: Balkan Province The Balkans is the historic and geographic name used to describe a region of south-eastern Europe. The region has a combined area of 728,000 km² and a population of around 53 million. The region takes its name from the Balkan mountains which run through the centre of Bulgaria into eastern Serbia. Serbia

Definitions and boundaries

Balkan Peninsula

The Balkans are sometimes referred to as the "Balkan Peninsula" as they are surrounded by water on three sides: the Black Sea to the east and branches of the Mediterranean Sea to the south and west (including the Adriatic, Ionian, Aegean and Marmara seas). While it is not geographically a peninsula as it has no isthmus to connect it to the mainland of Europe, this name is nonetheless commonly used to denote the wider region.

The Balkans

The identity of the Balkans owes as much to its fragmented and often violent common history as to its mountainous geography. The region was perennially on the edge of great empires, its history dominated by wars, rebellions, invasions and clashes between empires, from the times of the Roman Empire to the latter-day Yugoslav wars. Its fractiousness and tendency to splinter into rival political entities led to the coining of the term Balkanization (or balkanizing). The term Balkan commonly connotes a connection with violence, religious strife, ethnic clannishness and a sense of hinterland. The Balkans, as they are known today, have changed dramatically over the course of history.

Etymology and evolving meaning

The region takes its name from the "Balkan" mountain range in Bulgaria (from a Turkish word meaning "a chain of wooded mountains"). On a larger scale, one long continuous chain of mountains crosses the region in the form of a reversed letter S, from the Carpathians south to the Balkan range proper, before it marches away east into Anatolian Turkey. On the west coast, an offshoot of the Dinaric Alps follows the coast south through Dalmatia and Albania, crosses Greece and continues into the sea in the form of various islands. . The word was based on Turkish balakan 'stone, cliff', which confirms the pure 'technical' meaning of the term. Actually the mountain range that runs across Bulgaria from west to east (Stara Planina) is still commonly known as the Balkan Mountains. As time passed the term gradually obtained political connotations far from its initial geographic meaning, arising from political changes from the late 1800s to the creation of post-WW1 Yugoslavia (initially the Kingdom of Serbs, Croatians and Slovenians). Zeune's goal was to have a geographical parallel term to the Italic and Iberian Peninsula, and seemingly nothing more. The gradually acquired political connotations are newer, and - to a large extentdue to oscillating political circumstances. After the split of Yugoslavia beginning with June 1991, the term 'Balkans' got again a negative meaning, even if this is casual again. For example, Romania is also labelled a 'Balkanic country' even if this is not compliant with either its initial meaning or later evolutions of the term. Over the last decade, in the wake of the former Yugoslav split, Croatians and especially Slovenians have rejected their former label as 'Balkan nations'. This is in part due to the pejorative connotation of the term 'Balkans' in the 1990s, and continuation of this meaning until now. Today the term Southeast Europe is preferred or, in the case of Slovenia and sometimes Croatia, Central Europe. Even if incorrect, both historically and politically, it is probable that "Balkans" will continue to have a wider, and pejorative, meaning. Quite often this is rather a cliché covering ignorance or ill intentions.

Southeastern Europe

Due to the aforementioned connotations of the term "Balkan", many people prefer the term Southeastern Europe instead. The use of this term is slowly growing; a European Union initiative of 1999 is called the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe, and the online newspaper Balkan Times renamed itself Southeast European Times in 2003. The use of this term to mean the Balkan peninsula (and only that) technically ignores the geographical presence of northern Romania and Ukraine, which are also located in the southeastern part of the European continent.

Ambiguities and controversies

The northern border of the Balkan peninsula is usually considered be the line formed by the Danube, Sava and Kupa rivers and a segment connecting the spring of the Kupa with the Kvarner Bay. Some other definitions of the northern border of the Balkans has been proposed:
- the line Danube - Sava - Krka (river in Slovenia) - Postojnska Vrata - Vipava River - Isonzo River (also known as Soča river)
- the line Danube - Sava - Ljubljansko polje - Idrijca river - Soča river.
- the line Dniester - Timişoara - Zagreb - Triglav (mountain). Triglav The most commonly used Danube-Sava-Kupa northern boundary is arbitrarily set as to the physiographical characteristics, however it can be easily recognized on the map. It has a historical and cultural substantiation. The region so defined (together with Romania and excluding Montenegro, Dalmatia, and the Ionian Islands) constituted most of the European territory of the Ottoman Empire from the late 15th to the 19th century. The Kupa forms a natural boundary between south-eastern Slovenia and Croatia and has been a political frontier since the 12th century, separating Carniola (belonging to Austria) from Croatia (belonging to Hungary). The Danube-Sava-Krka-Postojnska Vrata-Vipava-Isonzo line ignores some historical and cultural characteristics, but can be seen as a rational delimitation of the Balkan peninsula from a geographical point of view. It assigns all the Karstic and Dinaric area to the Balkan region. The Sava bisects Croatia and Serbia and the Danube, which is the second largest European river (after Volga), forms a natural boundary between both Bulgaria and Serbia and Romania. North of that line lies the Pannonian plain and (in the case of Romania) the Carpathian mountains. Although Romania (with the exception of Dobrudja) is not geographically part of the Balkans, it is conventionally included as a successor state to the old Ottoman Empire. According to the most commonly used border, Slovenia lies to the north of the Balkans and is considered a part of Central Europe. Historically and culturally, it is also more related to Central Europe, although the Slovenian culture also incorporates some elements of culture of Balkanic peoples. However, as already stated, the northern boundary of the Balkan peninsula can also be drawn otherwise, in which case at least a part of Slovenia and a small part of Italy (Province of Trieste) may be included in the Balkans. Slovenia is also sometimes regarded as a Balkan country due to its association with the former Yugoslavia. When the Balkans are described as a twentieth-century geopolitical region, the whole Yugoslavia is included (so, Slovenia, Istria, islands of Dalmatia, northern Croatia and Vojvodina too). The aforementioned historical justification for the Sava-Kupa northern boundary would preclude including a big part of Croatia (whose territories were by and large part of the Habsburg Monarchy and Venetian Republic during the Ottoman conquest). Other factors such as prior history and culture also bind Croatia to Central Europe and the Mediterranean region more than they bind it to the Balkans. Nevertheless, its peculiar geographic shape inherently associates it with the region Bosnia and Herzegovina is part of, as well as the recent history with Yugoslavia etc.

Current common definition

Venetian Republic In most of the English-speaking, western world, the countries commonly included in the Balkan region are:
-
-
-
-
-
-