A History of the Months

 

The original Roman year had 10 named months Martius "March", Aprilis "April", Maius "May", Junius "June", Quintilis "July", Sextilis "August", September "September", October "October", November "November", December "December", and probably two unnamed months in the dead of winter when not much happened in agriculture. The year began with Martius "March". Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome circa 700 BC, added the two months Januarius "January" and Februarius "February". He also moved the beginning of the year from Marius to Januarius and changed the number of days in several months to be odd, a lucky number. After Februarius there was occasionally an additional month of Intercalaris "intercalendar". This is the origin of the leap-year day being in February. In 46 BC, Julius Caesar reformed the Roman calendar (hence the Julian calendar) changing the number of days in many months and removing Intercalaris.

 

January -- Janus's month, Middle English Januarie, Latin Januarius "of Janus", Latin Janu(s), "Janus" + -arius "ary (pertaining to)", Latin Januarius mensis "month of Janus"

Janus is the Roman god of gates and doorways, depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions. His festival month is January.

Januarius had 29 days, until Julius when it became 31 days long.

 

February -- month of Februa, Middle English Februarius, Latin Februarius "of Februa", Latin Februa(s) "Februa" + -arius "ary (pertaining to)", Latin Februarius mensis "month of Februa", Latin dies februatus "day of purification"

Februarius had 28 days, until circa 450 BC when it had 23 or 24 days on some of every second year, until Julius when it had 29 days on every fourth year and 28 days otherwise.

Februa is the Roman festival of purification, held on February fifteenth. It is possibly of Sabine origin.

 

Intercalaris -- inter-calendar month, Latin Intercalaris "inter-calendar", Latin Mercedonius (popular name) "?" Intercalaris had 27 days until the month was abolished by Julius.

 

March -- Mars' month, Middle English March(e), Anglo-French March(e), Old English Martius, Latin Martius "of Mars", Latin Marti(s) "Mars" + -us (adj. suffix), Latin Martius mensis "month of Mars", Martius has always had 31 days.

March was the original beginning of the year, and the time for the resumption of war.

Mars is the Roman god of war. He is identified with the Greek god Ares.

 

April -- Aphrodite's month, Old English April(is), Latin Aprilis, Etruscan Apru, Greek Aphro, short for Aphrodite.

Aprilis had 30 days, until Numa when it had 29 days, until Julius when it became 30 days long.

Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love and beauty. She is identified with the Roman goddess Venus.

 

May -- Maia's month, Old French Mai, Old English Maius, Latin Maius "of Maia", Latin Maius mensis "month of Maia"

Maius has always had 31 days.

Maia (meaning "the great one") is the Italic goddess of spring, the daughter of Faunus, and wife of Vulcan.

 

June -- Juno's month, Middle English jun(e), Old French juin, Old English junius, Latin Junius "of Juno", Latin Junius mensis "month of Juno". Junius had 30 days, until Numa when it had 29 days, until Julius when it became 30 days long.

Juno is the principle goddess of the Roman Pantheon. She is the goddess of marriage and the well-being of women. She is the wife and sister of Jupiter. She is identified with the Greek goddess Hera.

 

July -- Julius Caesar's month, Middle English Julie, Latin Julius "Julius", Latin Julius mensis "month of Julius", Latin quintilis mensis "fifth month". Quintilis (and later Julius) has always had 31 days.

Julius Caesar reformed the Roman calendar (hence the Julian calendar) in 46 BC. In the process, he renamed this month after himself.

 

August -- Augustus Caesar's month, Latin Augustus "Augustus", Latin Augustus mensis "month of Augustus", Latin sextilis mensis "sixth month". Sextilis had 30 days, until Numa when it had 29 days, until Julius when it became 31 days long.

Augustus Caesar clarified and completed the calendar reform of Julius Caesar. In the process, he also renamed this month after himself.

 

September -- the seventh month, Middle English septembre, Latin September, Latin septem "seven" + -ber (adj. suffix), Latin september mensis "seventh month"

September had 30 days, until Numa when it had 29 days, until Julius when it became 30 days long.

 

October -- the eighth month, Middle English octobre, Latin October, Latin octo "eight" + -ber (adj. suffix)
Latin october mensis "eighth month". October has always had 31 days.

 

November -- the nineth month. Middle English Novembre, Latin November, Latin Novembris mensis "nineth month"

Novembris had 30 days, until Numa when it had 29 days, until Julius when it became 30 days long.

 

December -- the tenth month, Middle English decembre, Old French decembre, Latin december "tenth month", Latin decem "ten" + -ber (adj. suffix). December had 30 days, until Numa when it had 29 days, until Julius when it became 31 days long.

Advent marks the start of the Christmas season.

 It begins on the Sunday nearest November 30, the feast day of St. Andrew the Apostle, and covers four Sundays. Because the day it begins changes from year to year, so does the length of each Advent season. In the year 2003, Advent begins on November 30 and lasts 25 days. The word advent, from Latin, means "the coming." For centuries, Advent has been a time of spiritual reflection as well as cheer and anticipation. Even as the Christmas season has become more secular—with advertisers urging holiday gift-givers to buy and buy some more—Advent still brings joy and the observance of ancient customs. Christian families find quiet moments lighting candles in the Advent wreath, and children use Advent calendars to count the days until Christmas.
Advent has probably been observed since the fourth century. Originally, it was a time when converts to Christianity readied themselves for baptism. During the Middle Ages, Advent became associated with preparation for the Second Coming. In early days Advent lasted from November 11, the feast of St. Martin, until Christmas Day. Advent was considered a pre-Christmas season of Lent when Christians devoted themselves to prayer and fasting. The Orthodox Eastern Church observes a similar Lenten season, from November 15 until Christmas, rather than Advent.
Many Christians still view Advent as a season to prepare for the Second Coming of Jesus. In the last fifty years, however, it has also come to be thought of as a time of anticipating the Nativity, on Christmas Day. Advent wreaths have their origins in the folk traditions of northern Europe, where in the deep of winter people lit candles on wheel-shaped bundles of evergreen. Both the evergreen and the circular shape symbolized ongoing life. The candlelight gave comfort at this darkest time of the year, as people looked forward to the longer days of spring.

Later, Eastern European Christians adopted this practice. By the sixteenth century, they were making Advent wreaths much as we know them today. An advent wreath traditionally contains four candles—three purple and one rose. Purple dyes were one so rare and costly that they were associated with royalty; the Roman Catholic Church has long used this color around Christmas and Easter to honor Jesus. The three purple candles in the Advent wreath symbolize hope, peace, and love. These candles are lit on the first, second, and fourth Sundays of Advent. The rose candle, which symbolizes joy, is usually lit on the third Sunday. Sometimes a fifth candle is placed inside the Advent wreath. This candle is lit on Christmas Day. It is white, the color associated with angels and the birth of Jesus. Because Advent wreaths are an informal celebration, not all are the same. Instead of purple candles, some people use blue, which recalls the color of the night sky before daylight returns. Others use all white candles. An advent calendar is a card or poster with twenty-four small doors, one to be opened each day from December 1 until Christmas Eve. Each door conceals a picture. This popular tradition arose in Germany in the late 1800s and soon spread throughout Europe and North America. Originally, the images in Advent calendars were derived from the Hebrew Bible. Considered a fun way of counting down the days until Christmas, many Advent calendars today have no religious content. Now, alongside traditional Advent calendars depicting angels and biblical figures are those whose doors open to display teddy bears, pieces of chocolate, or photos of pop stars.

Christmas in Estonia

Christmas time is still the most important holiday celebrated in Estonia. For Estonians, Christmas is a mixture of the traditional, the modern, the secular, and the religious. Like in other Nordic states, Estonia's celebration of Christmas mostly falls on Christmas Eve, however, Christmas season starts from Advent with people buying Advent calendars or lighting Advent candles. Each year on December 24, the President of Estonia declares Christmas Peace, which is a 350-year-old tradition in Estonia.
Folk traditions
In Estonian folk-tradition, Christmas has a double meaning: on the one hand, it is marking Christ's birth, on the other, it marks the whole period of mid-winter holidays. In Estonia, Christmas with its simple and pagan character of the festivities, the magic and mysticism combined with the sacred and spiritual. In the traditional folk calendar, Christmas tide began with St. Thomas's Day on December 21, and lasted until Epiphany on January 6. On the islands and on the coast, the holiday continued for another day until St. Canute's Day on January 7.
Christmas Holidays were celebrated between December 25 and 27, the most important event being the festive Christmas Eve on December 24. There were three culminations of the Christmas season in the Estonian folk-calendar:

Christmas Eve (December 24), the First, the Second and the Third

Christmas Holidays (December 25 to 27);

New Year's Eve and New Year's Day

Epiphany

The Estonian word jõulud (Christmas) is of ancient Scandinavian origin and comes directly from the word Jul and has no real connection with Christianity. It is interesting to note that Scandinavia, along with Estonia, form the only area in present Europe where the birthday of Jesus Christ is still marked by the pre-Christian word of jul - jõulud. Despite this, in some places in South Estonia, talvistepüha (winter holiday) is also used to mark the Christmas holidays and it is considered to be a direct influence from the neighbouring Latvia where Christmas is known as Ziemas svetki (winter fest).
For thousands of years, nations have celebrated winter and summer solstices, which in Estonian folk-tradition are known as Christmas and Midsummer Night (June 23/24). The word näärid, also used to mark winter holidays, is of German origin and was the only official seasonal holiday in the atheistic Soviet Union. To some extent, the words jõulud and näärid, marking the festive events of the turn of the year, had the same meaning.
Jõulud as the winter solstice, when the day is the shortest and the night the longest, is celebrated between December 21 and 25. According to folk-tradition, "the sun was laying in the nest" and the day was celebrated as the Sun's birthday. From that day on, the Sun started to rise and move slowly to the north again.
At the same time, Christmas was the culmination of the late autumn celebrations, which began with the harvest bees and continued with All Souls', St. Martin's and St. Catherine's Day celebrations. The connection with Jesus Christ, compared to the ancient local pagan Christmas traditions, is relatively recent and had not gained prominence until the last few centuries. At the same time, according to the local Christmas traditions, these celebrations, especially Christmas Eve, reflect everything connected with the habits and most necessary needs of the local peasantry.
The Christmas season, in connection with its special tasks and bans for different work, began on St. Thomas's Day (the first day of the winter solstice), following the three to four week preparation period. During winter, the peasantry had enough time to celebrate long holidays. Pigs were slaughtered and ale was brewed in preparation for St. Thomas's Day. Some activities like grindering in the mill, spinning, quilling, and horse-driving were banned because they were noisy and could disturb the good ghosts.
Christmas Eve and Christmas Night were the most sacred times of the season, often characterised by fortune telling. With the help of the stars and the frost, the weather for the coming year was predicted. Christmas food had to remain on the table (as part of the cult of the ancestors) and the fire burning in the fireplace (probably as sun worship) for the whole night. It was believed that both good and bad forces were on the move on Christmas Night and that ancestors would visit the house. The next year's harvest was also predicted.
In terms of Christmas and New Year's Eve traditions, the habit of taking a bath in the sauna is a very old and important tradition. It was a custom to go to the sauna on Christmas Eve after preparing the house for the festive evening celebrations. Going to a steam bath was widespread all over the country and was similar to the same habit on Midsummer's Eve. The sauna was traditionally visited before the Christmas Eve service in the local village church. As the first Christmas surprise, the children were offered festive new clothes and shoes to dress in for the evening church service.
Christmas symbols
One of the most important and widespread Estonian peasant traditions, as in other Northern and Central European countries, was the habit of bringing home Christmas straw. Although connected with the biblical legend of Jesus Christ's birth-story, the tradition of Christmas straw might even be of pre-Christian pagan origin. In Estonia, straw (in South Estonia sometimes also hay) was taken to the house for the whole festive season. It became a playground for the children.
Besides bringing straw to the house, the tradition of making special Christmas crowns, imitating church chandeliers, was widespread among the Estonians and their neighbours. The habit came to Estonia probably from Western and Southern Finland and was at first popular mostly among the local Swedish-speaking population, especially on the island of Vormsi where the inhabitants maintained close contact with their kinsmen in Sweden and Finland. The tradition of making Christmas crowns and bringing straw into the house disappeared around the turn of the century and was replaced by other Christmas symbols. There was a revival of the old tradition in 1970s when it became very popular to make Christmas crowns again.
As compared to other Estonian Christmas symbols, the Christmas tree tradition is rather recent and came here from German culture in the middle of the 19th century. In towns, the habit of having a Christmas tree at home was adopted by Estonians from the local German population. The tradition was spread to the countryside by the local Baltic-German aristocracy. They organised special Christmas parties with presents for their servants and children in their manor-houses. Soon the habit of having Christmas trees in schools, churches and farmhouses (together with Christmas straw) became very popular. The Christmas tree was always an evergreen fir-tree and only in a few places, where there was lack of woods (e.g. on the island of Kihnu), the fir-tree was replaced by a pine. The Christmas tree was decorated in a simple manner with primitive small toys and sweets and later candles were lit on the tree. The tradition of Santa Claus bringing Christmas presents is also relatively new, but has become customary.
Christmas food
It was customary to eat large meals on Christmas Eve and Christmas Night. To have plenty of Christmas food at home symbolically meant enough food for the whole coming year. According to an old tradition, seven to twelve different meals were served on Christmas Night. Traditional Estonian Christmas food was pork with sauerkraut, white and blood sausage. A special Christmas bread called Christmas barrow was baked. On the holy night, the domestic animals in the barn were also offered Christmas bread. Home-brewed ale and mead were the most popular Christmas drinks. The Christmas feast often differed between inland agricultural areas and fishing communities on the coast.
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were traditionally domestic holidays. From December 26 on, relatives, friends and neighbours were visited. On the night of December 27, "Christmas was sent off." It was also popular to visit the local tavern and have fun on that day. The last days of the year till New Year's Eve were known as "half-holidays," when hard work was still avoided. People visited each other and mostly had fun.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT

 

ALEXANDER III., known as THE GREAT (356-323 B.C.), king of Macedon, was the son of Philip II. of Macedon, and Olympias, an Epirote princess. His father was pre-eminent for practical genius, his mother a woman of half-wild blood, weird, visionary and terrible; and Alexander himself is singular among men of action for the imaginative splendours which guided him, and among romantic dreamers for the things he achieved. He was born in 356 B.C., probably about October (Hogarth, pp.284 if.). The court at which he grew up was the focus of great activities, for Philip, by war and diplomacy, was raising Macedon to the headship of the Greek states, and the air was charged with great ideas. To unite the Greek race in a war against the Persian empire was set up as the ultimate mark for ambition, the theme of idealists. The great literary achievements of the Greeks in the 5th century lay already far enough behind to have become invested with a classical dignity; the meaning of Hellenic civilization had been made concrete in a way which might sustain enthusiasm for a body of ideal values, authoritative by tradition. And upon Alexander in his fourteenth year this sum of tradition was brought to bear through the person of the man who beyond all others had gathered it up into an organic whole: in 343-342 Aristotle (q.v.) came to Pella at Philip's bidding to direct the education of his son. We do not know what faculty the master-thinker may have had fair captivating this ardent spirit; at any rate Alexander carried with him through life a passion for Homer, however he may have been disposed to greater philosophic theory. But his education was not all from books. The coming and going of envoys from many states, Greek and Oriental, taught him something of the actual conditions of the world. He was early schooled in war. At the age of sixteen he commanded in Macedonia during Philip's absence and quelled a rising of the hill-tribes on the northern border; in the following year (338) he headed the charge which broke the Sacred Band at Chaeronea. Then came family dissensions such as usually vex the polygamous courts of the East. In 337 Philip repudiated Olympias for another wife, Cleopatra, Alexander went with his mother to her home in Epirus, and, though he soon returned and an outward reconciliation between father and son was contrived, their hearts were estranged. The king's new wife was with chlld; her kinsmen were in the ascendant; the succession of Alexander was imperilled. Some negotiations which Pixodarus, the satrap of Catia, opened with the Macedonian court with a view to effecting a marriage alliance between his house and Philip's, brought Alexander into fresh broils. In 336 Philip was suddenly assassinated whilst celebrating at Aegae the marriage of his daughter to Alexander I. of Epirus in the presence of a great concourse from all the Greek world. It is certain that the hand of the assassin was prompted by some one in the background; suspicion could not fail to fall upon Alexander among others. But gnilt of that sort would hardly be consistent with his character as it appears in those early days.

Alexander was not the only claimant to the vacant throne: but, recognized by the army, he soon swept all rivals from his path. The newly born son of Philip by Cleopatra, and Alexander's cousin Amyntas, were put to death, and Alexander took up the interrupted work of his father. That work was on the point of opening its most brilliant chapter by an invasion of the great king's dominions; the army was concentrated and certain forces had already been sent on to occupy the opposite shore of the Hellespont. The assassination of Philip delayed the blow, for it immediately made the base, Macedonia, insecure, and in such an enterprise, plunging into the vast territories of the Persian empire, a secure base was every thing. Philip's removal had made all the hill-peoples of the north and west raise their heads and set the Greek states free from their fears. A demonstration in Greece, led by the new king of Macedonia, momentarily checked the agitation, and at the diet at Corinth Alexander was recognized as captain-general of the Hellenes against the barbarians, in the place of his father Philip. In the spring of 335 he went out from Macedonia northwards, struck across the Balkans, probably by the Shipka Pass, frustrating the mountain warfare of its tribes by a precision of discipline which, probably, no other army of the time could have approached, and traversed the land of the Triballians (Rumelia) to the Danube. To gratify his own imagination or strike the imagination of the world he took his army over the Danube and burnt a settlement of the Getae upon the other side. Meanwhile the Illyrians had seized Pelion (Pliassa), which commanded the passes on the west of Macedonia, and from the Danube Alexander marched straight thither over the hills. He had hardly restored Macedonian prestige in this quarter when he heard that Greece was aflame. Thebes had taken up arms. By a forced march he took the Thebans completely by surprise, and in a few days the city, which a generation before had won the headship of Greece, was taken. There were to be no half-measures now; the city was wiped out of existence with the exception of its temples and the house which had been Pindar's. Greece might now be trusted to lie quiet for some time to come. The Panhellenic alliance (from which Sparta still stood aloof) against the barbarians was renewed. Athens, although known to be hostile at heart to the cities of Macedonian power, Alexander treated all through with eager courtesy. In the spring of 334, Alexander crossed with an army of between 30,000 and 40,000 men, Macedonians, Illyrians, Thracians and the contingents of the Greek states, into Asia. The place of concentration was Arisbe on the Hellespont.

Alexander himself first visited the site of Troy and there went through those dramatic acts of sacrifice to the Ilian Athena, assumption of the shield believed to be that of Achilles and offerings to the great Homeric dead, which are of significant of the poetic glamour shed, in the young king's mind, over the whole enterprise, and which men will estimate differently according to the part they assign to imagination in human affairs. To meet the invader the great king had in Asia Minor an army slightly larger, it would seem, than Alexander's, gathered under the satraps of the western provinces at Zeleia. He had also, what was more serious, command of the Aegean. Alexander could communicate with his base only by the narrow line of the Hellespont, and ran the risk, if he went far from it, of being cut off altogether. To draw him after them, while avoiding a conilict, was sound strategy for the Persian generals. It was urged upon them by their colleagne the Rhodian Memnon. But strategic considerations were cancelled by the Persian barons' code of chivalry, and Alexander found them waiting for him on the banks of the Granicus. It was a cavalry melee, in which the common code of honour caused Macedonian and Persian chieftains to engage hand to hand, and at the end of the day the relics of the Persian army were in flight, leaving the high-roads of Asia Minor clear for the invader. Alexander could now accomplish the first part of the task belonging to. him as captain-general to the Hellenes, that liberation of the Greek cities of Asia Minor, for which Panhellenic enthusiasts had cried out so long. He first went to take possession of the old Lydian capital Sardis, the headquarters of the Persian government on this side of the Taurus, and the strong city surrendered without a blow. And now in all the Greek cities of Aeolis and Ionia the oligarchies or tyrants friendly to Persia fell, and democracies were established under the eye of Alexander's officers. Only where the cities were held by garrisons in the Persian service, garrisons composed mainly of Greek mercenaries, was the liberator likely to meet with any resistance. From Ephesus indeed the garrison fled upon the news of Granicus, but Miletus required a siege. The Persian fleet in vain endeavoured to relieve it, and Miletus did not long hold out against Alexander's attack. It was at Halicarnassus that Alexander first encountered stuhborn resistance, at Halicarnassus where Memnon and the satraps of Caria had rallied what land-forces yet belonged to Persia in the west. When winter fell, Alexander had captured indeed the city itself, but the two citadels still held out against his blockade.

Meanwhile Alexander was making it plain that he had come not merely as captain-general for a war of reprisals, but to take the Persian's place as king of the land. The conquered provinces were organized under Macedonian governors and in Caria a dethroned princess of the native dynasty, Ada, was restored to power. In the winter, whilst Parmenio advanced upon the central plateau to make the occupation of Phrygia effective, Alexander himself passed along the coast to receive the submission of the Lycians and the adherence of the Greek cities of the Pamphylian sea-board. The hills inland were the domain of fighting tribes which the Persian government had never been able to subdue. To conquer them, indeed, Alexander had no time, but he stormed some of their fortresses to hold them in check, and marched through their territory when he turned north from Pamphylia into the interior. The point of concentration for next year's campaign had been fixed at Gordium, a meeting-place of roads in Northern Phrygia. The story of Alexander's cutting the fatal "Gordian knot" on the chariot of the ancient Phrygian king Gordius is connected with his stay in this place.

Whilst Alexander had been grounding his power in Asia Minor, he had run a narrow risk of losing his base in Europe. He had after the siege of Miletus disbanded the Graeco- Macedonian fleet, surrendering for the time all attempts to challenge the command of the Aegean. Memnon the Rhodian, now in supreme command of the Persian fleet, saw the European coasts exposed and set out to raise Greece, where discontent always smouldered in Alexander's rear. But Memnon died at the critical moment whilst laying siege to Mytilene and the great plan collapsed. A Persian fleet still held the sea, but it effected little, and presently fresh Graeco-Macedonian squadrons began to hold it in check. It was, however, the need to ensure command of the sea and free all lines of communication behind him that determined Alexander's plan for the next campaign. If he mastered the whole coast-line of the Levant, the enemy's fleet would find itself left in the air. The Syrian coast was accordingly his immediate objective when he broke up from Gordium for the campaign of 333. He was through the Cicilian Gates before the Persian king, Darius III., had sent up a force adequate to hold them. His passage through Cilicia was marked by a violent fever that arrested him for a while in Tarsus, and meantime a great Persian army was waiting for him in northern Syria under the command of Darius himself. In the knot of mountains which close in about the head of the Gulf of Alexandretta, Alexander, following hard by the coast, marched past the Persian army encamped on the plains to the east. To cut Alexander's communications with the rear, Darius now com mitted the error of entangling his large force in the mountain defiles. Alexander turned, and near the town of Issus fought his second pitched battle, sending Darius and the relic of his army in wild flight back to the east.¹ It was an incident which did not modify Alexander's plan. He did not press the pursuit far, although the great king's camp with his harem fell into his hands. The chivalrous courtesy which he showed to the captive princesses was a favourite theme for later rhetoricians. He went on his way to occupy Syria and Phoenicia. It is now that we get definite evidence as to the reach of Alexander's designs; for Darius opened negotiations in which he ultimately went so far as to offer a partition of the empire, all west of the Euphrates, to be Alexander's. Alexander refused the bargain and definitely claimed the whole.² The conquest of the Phoenician coast was not to be altogether easy, for Tyre shut its gates and for seven months Alexander had to sit before it--one of those obstinate sieges which mark the history of the Semitic races. When it fell, Alexander had the old Tyrian people scattered to the winds, 30,000 sold as slaves. Gaza offered a resistance equally heroic, lasting two months, and here too the old population was dispersed. The occupation of the rest of Syria and Palestine proceeded smoothly, and after the fall of Gaza Alexander's way lay open into Egypt.³ Egypt was the last of the Mediterranean provinces to be won, and here no defence was made. To the native Egyptians Alexander appeared as a (deliverer from the Persian tyranny, and he sacrificed piously to the gods of Memphis. The winter (332-331) which Alexander spent in Egypt saw two memorable actions on his part. One was the expedition (problematic in its motive and details) to the oracle of Zeus Ammon (Oasis of Siwa), where Alexander was hailed by the priest as son of the god, a belief which the circle of Alexander, and perhaps Alexander himself, seem hereafter to have liked to play with in that sort of semi-serious vein which still allowed him in the moments of every-day commonplace to be the son of Philip. The other action was the foundation of Alexandria at the Canopic mouth of the Nile, the place destined to be a new commercial centre for the eastern Mediterranean world which Alexander had now taken in possession, to rise to an importance which the founder, although obviously acting with intention, can hardly have foreseen.

Calendars

A calendar is a system of organizing units of time for the purpose of reckoning time over extended periods. By convention, the day is the smallest calendrical unit of time; the measurement of fractions of a day is classified as timekeeping. The generality of this definition is due to the diversity of methods that have been used in creating calendars. Although some calendars replicate astronomical cycles according to fixed rules, others are based on abstract, perpetually repeating cycles of no astronomical significance. Some calendars are regulated by astronomical observations, some carefully and redundantly enumerate every unit, and some contain ambiguities and discontinuities. Some calendars are codified in written laws; others are transmitted by oral tradition.

The common theme of calendar making is the desire to organize units of time to satisfy the needs and preoccupations of society. In addition to serving practical purposes, the process of organization provides a sense, however illusory, of understanding and controlling time itself. Thus calendars serve as a link between mankind and the cosmos. It is little wonder that calendars have held a sacred status and have served as a source of social order and cultural identity. Calendars have provided the basis for planning agricultural, hunting, and migration cycles, for divination and prognostication, and for maintaining cycles of religious and civil events. Whatever their scientific sophistication, calendars must ultimately be judged as social contracts, not as scientific treatises.

According to a recent estimate (Fraser, 1987), there are about forty calendars used in the world today. This chapter is limited to the half-dozen principal calendars in current use. Furthermore, the emphasis of the chapter is on function and calculation rather than on culture. The fundamental bases of the calendars are given, along with brief historical summaries. Although algorithms are given for correlating these systems, close examination reveals that even the standard calendars are subject to local variation. With the exception of the Julian calendar, this chapter does not deal with extinct systems. Inclusion of the Julian calendar is justified by its everyday use in historical studies.

Despite a vast literature on calendars, truly authoritative references, particularly in English, are difficult to find. Aveni (1989) surveys a broad variety of calendrical systems, stressing their cultural contexts rather than their operational details. Parise (1982) provides useful, though not infallible, tables for date conversion. Fotheringham (1935) and the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (1910), in its section on "Calendars," offer basic information on historical calendars. The sections on "Calendars" and "Chronology" in all editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica provide useful historical surveys. Ginzel (1906) remains an authoritative, if dated, standard of calendrical scholarship. References on individual calendars are given in the relevant sections.

Historical Eras and Chronology

The calendars treated in this chapter, except for the Chinese calendar, have counts of years from initial epochs. In the case of the Chinese calendar and some calendars not included here, years are counted in cycles, with no particular cycle specified as the first cycle. Some cultures eschew year counts altogether but name each year after an event that characterized the year. However, a count of years from an initial epoch is the most successful way of maintaining a consistent chronology. Whether this epoch is associated with an historical or legendary event, it must be tied to a sequence of recorded historical events.

This is illustrated by the adoption of the birth of Christ as the initial epoch of the Christian calendar. This epoch was established by the sixth-century scholar Dionysius Exiguus, who was compiling a table of dates of Easter. An existing table covered the nineteen-year period denoted 228-247, where years were counted from the beginning of the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian. Dionysius continued the table for a nineteen-year period, which he designated Anni Domini Nostri Jesu Christi 532-550. Thus, Dionysius' Anno Domini 532 is equivalent to Anno Diocletian 248. In this way a correspondence was established between the new Christian Era and an existing system associated with historical records. What Dionysius did not do is establish an accurate date for the birth of Christ. Although scholars generally believe that Christ was born some years before A.D. 1, the historical evidence is too sketchy to allow a definitive dating.

Given an initial epoch, one must consider how to record preceding dates. Bede, the eighth-century English historian, began the practice of counting years backward from A.D. 1 (see Colgrave and Mynors, 1969). In this system, the year A.D. 1 is preceded by the year 1 B.C., without an intervening year 0. Because of the numerical discontinuity, this "historical" system is cumbersome for comparing ancient and modern dates. Today, astronomers use +1 to designate A.D. 1. Then +1 is naturally preceded by year 0, which is preceded by year -1. Since the use of negative numbers developed slowly in Europe, this "astronomical" system of dating was delayed until the eighteenth century, when it was introduced by the astronomer Jacques Cassini (Cassini, 1740).

Even as use of Dionysius' Christian Era became common in ecclesiastical writings of the Middle Ages, traditional dating from regnal years continued in civil use. In the sixteenth century, Joseph Justus Scaliger tried to resolve the patchwork of historical eras by placing everything on a single system (Scaliger, 1583). Instead of introducing negative year counts, he sought an initial epoch in advance of any historical record. His numerological approach utilized three calendrical cycles: the 28-year solar cycle, the nineteen-year cycle of Golden Numbers, and the fifteen-year indiction cycle. The solar cycle is the period after which weekdays and calendar dates repeat in the Julian calendar. The cycle of Golden Numbers is the period after which moon phases repeat (approximately) on the same calendar dates. The indiction cycle was a Roman tax cycle. Scaliger could therefore characterize a year by the combination of numbers (S,G,I), where S runs from 1 through 28, G from 1 through 19, and I from 1 through 15. Scaliger noted that a given combination would recur after 7980 (= 28*19*15) years. He called this a Julian Period, because it was based on the Julian calendar year. For his initial epoch Scaliger chose the year in which S, G, and I were all equal to 1. He knew that the year 1 B.C. was characterized by the number 9 of the solar cycle, by the Golden Number 1, and by the number 3 of the indiction cycle, i.e., (9,1,3). He found that the combination (1,1,1) occurred in 4713 B.C. or, as astronomers now say, -4712. This serves as year 1 of Scaliger's Julian Period. It was later adopted as the initial epoch for the Julian day numbers.

The Gregorian Calendar

The Gregorian calendar today serves as an international standard for civil use. In addition, it regulates the ceremonial cycle of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. In fact, its original purpose was ecclesiastical. Although a variety of other calendars are in use today, they are restricted to particular religions or cultures.

Rules for Civil Use

Years are counted from the initial epoch defined by Dionysius Exiguus, and are divided into two classes: common years and leap years. A common year is 365 days in length; a leap year is 366 days, with an intercalary day, designated February 29, preceding March 1. Leap years are determined according to the following rule:

Every year that is exactly divisible by 4 is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100;
these centurial years are leap years only if they are exactly divisible by 400.

As a result the year 2000 is a leap year, whereas 1900 and 2100 are not leap years. These rules can be applied to times prior to the Gregorian reform to create a proleptic Gregorian calendar. In this case, year 0 (1 B.C.) is considered to be exactly divisible by 4, 100, and 400; hence it is a leap year.

The Gregorian calendar is thus based on a cycle of 400 years, which comprises 146097 days. Since 146097 is evenly divisible by 7, the Gregorian civil calendar exactly repeats after 400 years. Dividing 146097 by 400 yields an average length of 365.2425 days per calendar year, which is a close approximation to the length of the tropical year. Comparison with Equation 1.1-1 reveals that the Gregorian calendar accumulates an error of one day in about 2500 years. Although various adjustments to the leap-year system have been proposed, none has been instituted.

Within each year, dates are specified according to the count of days from the beginning of the month. The order of months and number of days per month were adopted from the Julian calendar.

* In a leap year, February has 29 days.

Ecclesiastical Rules

The ecclesiastical calendars of Christian churches are based on cycles of movable and immovable feasts. Christmas is the principal immovable feast, with its date set at December 25. Easter is the principal movable feast, and dates of most other movable feasts are determined with respect to Easter. However, the movable feasts of the Advent and Epiphany seasons are Sundays reckoned from Christmas and the Feast of the Epiphany, respectively.

In the Gregorian calendar, the date of Easter is defined to occur on the Sunday following the ecclesiastical Full Moon that falls on or next after March 21. This should not be confused with the popular notion that Easter is the first Sunday after the first Full Moon following the vernal equinox. In the first place, the vernal equinox does not necessarily occur on March 21. In addition, the ecclesiastical Full Moon is not the astronomical Full Moon -- it is based on tables that do not take into account the full complexity of lunar motion. As a result, the date of an ecclesiastical Full Moon may differ from that of the true Full Moon. However, the Gregorian system of leap years and lunar tables does prevent progressive departure of the tabulated data from the astronomical phenomena.

The ecclesiastical Full Moon is defined as the fourteenth day of a tabular lunation, where day 1 corresponds to the ecclesiastical New Moon. The tables are based on the Metonic cycle, in which 235 mean synodic months occur in 6939.688 days. Since nineteen Gregorian years is 6939.6075 days, the dates of Moon phases in a given year will recur on nearly the same dates nineteen years laters. To prevent the 0.08 day difference between the cycles from accumulating, the tables incorporate adjustments to synchronize the system over longer periods of time. Additional complications arise because the tabular lunations are of 29 or 30 integral days. The entire system comprises a period of 5700000 years of 2081882250 days, which is equated to 70499183 lunations. After this period, the dates of Easter repeat themselves.

The following algorithm for computing the date of Easter is based on the algorithm of Oudin (1940). It is valid for any Gregorian year, Y. All variables are integers and the remainders of all divisions are dropped. The final date is given by M, the month, and D, the day of the month.

History of the Gregorian Calendar

The Gregorian calendar resulted from a perceived need to reform the method of calculating dates of Easter. Under the Julian calendar the dating of Easter had become standardized, using March 21 as the date of the equinox and the Metonic cycle as the basis for calculating lunar phases. By the thirteenth century it was realized that the true equinox had regressed from March 21 (its supposed date at the time of the Council of Nicea, +325) to a date earlier in the month. As a result, Easter was drifting away from its springtime position and was losing its relation with the Jewish Passover. Over the next four centuries, scholars debated the "correct" time for celebrating Easter and the means of regulating this time calendrically. The Church made intermittent attempts to solve the Easter question, without reaching a consensus.

By the sixteenth century the equinox had shifted by ten days, and astronomical New Moons were occurring four days before ecclesiastical New Moons. At the behest of the Council of Trent, Pope Pius V introduced a new Breviary in 1568 and Missal in 1570, both of which included adjustments to the lunar tables and the leap-year system. Pope Gregory XIII, who succeeded Pope Pius in 1572, soon convened a commission to consider reform of the calendar, since he considered his predecessor's measures inadequate.

The recommendations of Pope Gregory's calendar commission were instituted by the papal bill "Inter Gravissimus," signed on 1582 February 24. Ten days were deleted from the calendar, so that 1582 October 4 was followed by 1582 October 15, thereby causing the vernal equinox of 1583 and subsequent years to occur about March 21. And a new table of New Moons and Full Moons was introduced for determining the date of Easter.

Subject to the logistical problems of communication and governance in the sixteenth century, the new calendar was promulgated through the Roman-Catholic world. Protestant states initially rejected the calendar, but gradually accepted it over the coming centuries. The Eastern Orthodox churches rejected the new calendar and continued to use the Julian calendar with traditional lunar tables for calculating Easter. Because the purpose of the Gregorian calendar was to regulate the cycle of Christian holidays, its acceptance in the non-Christian world was initially not at issue. But as international communications developed, the civil rules of the Gregorian calendar were gradually adopted around the world.

Anyone seriously interested in the Gregorian calendar should study the collection of papers resulting from a conference sponsored by the Vatican to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of the Gregorian Reform (Coyne et al., 1983).

The Julian Calendar

The Julian calendar, introduced by Juliius Caesar in -45, was a solar calendar with months of fixed lengths. Every fourth year an intercalary day was added to maintain synchrony between the calendar year and the tropical year. It served as a standard for European civilization until the Gregorian Reform of +1582.

Today the principles of the Julian calendar continue to be used by chronologists. The Julian proleptic calendar is formed by applying the rules of the Julian calendar to times before Caesar's reform. This provides a simple chronological system for correlating other calendars and serves as the basis for the Julian day numbers.

Rules

Years are classified as normal years of 365 days and leap years of 366 days. Leap years occur in years that are evenly divisible by 4. For this purpose, year 0 (or 1 B.C.) is considered evenly divisible by 4. The year is divided into twelve formalized months that were eventually adopted for the Gregorian calendar.

History of the Julian Calendar

The year -45 has been called the "year of confusion," because in that year Julius Caesar inserted 90 days to bring the months of the Roman calendar back to their traditional place with respect to the seasons. This was Caesar's first step in replacing a calendar that had gone badly awry. Although the pre-Julian calendar was lunisolar in inspiration, its months no longer followed the lunar phases and its year had lost step with the cycle of seasons (see Michels, 1967; Bickerman, 1974). Following the advice of Sosigenes, an Alexandrine astronomer, Caesar created a solar calendar with twelve months of fixed lengths and a provision for an intercalary day to be added every fourth year. As a result, the average length of the Julian calendar year was 365.25 days. This is consistent with the length of the tropical year as it was known at the time.

Following Caesar's death, the Roman calendrical authorities misapplied the leap-year rule, with the result that every third, rather than every fourth, year was intercalary. Although detailed evidence is lacking, it is generally believed that Emperor Augustus corrected the situation by omitting intercalation from the Julian years -8 through +4. After this the Julian calendar finally began to function as planned.

Through the Middle Ages the use of the Julian calendar evolved and acquired local peculiarities that continue to snare the unwary historian. There were variations in the initial epoch for counting years, the date for beginning the year, and the method of specifying the day of the month. Not only did these vary with time and place, but also with purpose. Different conventions were sometimes used for dating ecclesiastical records, fiscal transactions, and personal correspondence.

Caesar designated January 1 as the beginning of the year. However, other conventions flourished at different times and places. The most popular alternatives were March 1, March 25, and December 25. This continues to cause problems for historians, since, for example, +998 February 28 as recorded in a city that began its year on March 1, would be the same day as +999 February 28 of a city that began the year on January 1. Days within the month were originally counted from designated division points within the month: Kalends, Nones, and Ides. The Kalends is the first day of the month. The Ides is the thirteenth of the month, except in March, May, July, and October, when it is the fifteenth day. The Nones is always eight days before the Ides (see Table 8.2.1). Dates falling between these division points are designated by counting inclusively backward from the upcoming division point. Intercalation was performed by repeating the day VI Kalends March, i.e., inserting a day between VI Kalends March (February 24) and VII Kalends March (February 23).

By the eleventh century, consecutive counting of days from the beginning of the month came into use. Local variations continued, however, including counts of days from dates that commemorated local saints. The inauguration and spread of the Gregorian calendar resulted in the adoption of a uniform standard for recording dates.

Cappelli (1930), Grotefend and Grotefend (1941), and Cheney (1945) offer guidance through the maze of medieval dating.

CHARACTER

 

Personal magnetism makes a person stand out and

propels him/her up the ladder of success.
But is charisma -- that powerful personal magic that attracts people and promotions like a magnet -- something you are born with or something you can learn?
It's common knowledge, for example, that the late president John F. Kennedy exuded charisma. Yet historians say his style was so carefully rehearsed that before running for president he even commissioned a study to determine the most effective handshake!
Those who study the phenomenon of charisma say while some people are innately more charismatic than others, there are certain things everyone can do to boost their charisma quotient.

Expect acceptance.
Regardless of rank, expect to be treated as an equal. If you expect acceptance, you just might get it. If you don't expect it, you definitely won't get it.
Control your attitude.  
Success in business is based more on mental attitude than on mental capabilities. Be optimistic toward yourself, others and life. Walk in to a room with a spring in your step and a smile on your face.
Perfect your posture.
Pull your ribcage away from your pelvis, roll your shoulders back and down, pull your stomach in and tuck your bottom toward your spine. Breathe deeply. You'll not only look better, but feel more energized, alert and in control.
Think before you talk.
Think fast, pause, then speak purposefully. One CEO practices saying everything to himself before he says it out loud so that he will hear how it sounds and can change it if he needs to.

Slow down.
Speed in speaking, moving, gesturing and walking looks nervous and scared. Scared people get passed over, not hired or promoted. Learn to speak in a comfortable, easygoing and welcoming way. Don't waste time, but do speak as if you have all the time in the world for those you are speaking to.
Shoot straight.
Everything you say or write can be done in a simple, straightforward manner. Just do it.
Be a good storyteller.
People understand you better, remember what you say longer, and find you smarter and more interesting if you use anecdotes to make your points.
Be aware of your style.
Clothes don't make the man but they do make a difference. Wear well-tailored, good quality clothes that make you look like you are in charge. But remember, it isn't as much about your look as how you look at things and what people see when they look at you.
Admit your mistakes.
If you are error-free, you're likely effort-free.
Don't be bullied.
If you are unjustly criticized, don't take the bait and get into an argument. Instead calmly ask: "Why do you think that?" "What do you mean?" or "What's that based on?"
Be flexible.
Be able to stand out while still fitting in with the crowd.
Be at ease with yourself and others.
Look others straight in the eye, eliminate any defensiveness and take the edge off your voice. Never let them see you sweat!

 

Dealing with difficult colleagues

 

As well as doing a good job at work, you are expected to deal with all manner of personalities in a businesslike and courteous manner. But what happens when your company lands you with a difficult, prickly colleague who makes your life hell?

Tackling difficult people

 

Working with difficult people is a common problem; there are so many personality types and egos kicking around in a working environment. Brian Salter and Naomi Langford-Wood, authors of Successfully dealing with difficult people in a week, suggest taking action to deal with tricky colleagues.
'It is better to tackle the problem and talk to the person. Stick to facts, not opinion, and encourage the problematic person to come up with a solution. From what they say, you can look for common ground and start negotiating,' says Brian. Try to understand what makes them behave the way they do and, when tackling the situation, keep things unemotional.

Behaviour that causes problems

Insecure people - who boost their own self-image by criticising others or throwing tantrums.

How to handle them - reassurance is needed to help build up their self-esteem. Try not to snap back, but be assertive in attempting to find out what the problem is from their point of view. Ignore temper tantrums by remaining silent.

Negative people are very damaging in the workplace because they affect those around them. Such people may be trying to protect themselves from future failure. Negative people can be also be aggressive bullying types who demand things done their way and always know best.

How to handle them - try to get them to explain why they feel as they do, but don't waste time arguing. If the person is a bullying type, and you can avoid dealing with them, you may find it worthwhile keeping out of their way, as such a person is unlikely to change.

Selfish people - bulldoze their way through their working life concentrating on their own needs and aims with no regard for others. They may never have grown out of the childhood 'I want this, I want that... ' attitude to life.

How to handle them - talk to the person who is being selfish and quietly explain what they are doing and how it affects you.

Keep your tone neutral and avoid getting into an argument. Body language should be assertive, so maintain eye contact, but be relaxed, smile and nod to encourage the other person.

Pleasant people - pleasant people with problematic behaviour, such as unreliability, can be hard to deal with because you don't want to hurt their feelings. Maybe they have trouble saying 'no' to people.

How to handle them - reassure them that you value their opinions and encourage them to come up with suggestions and solutions. In the case of someone who can't say 'no' look at narrowing down their area of responsibilities, so they are not put in the position where they promise the world, but can't deliver.

Take a look at yourself
With so many different personalities and egos at play, it is worth remembering that all communication is a two-way process. It's always hard to assume that the culprit could be yourself, but if you are finding someone difficult, it may be worth double-checking that you always deal with him or her in a courteous manner. It is possible that this person is reflecting the way they are being treated back at you.

English

 

English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family that is closely related to Frisian, German, and Netherlandic languages. English originated in England and is now widely spoken on six continents. It is the primary language of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and various small island nations in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. It is also an official language of India, the Philippines, and many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa.

English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and is therefore related to most other languages spoken in Europe and western Asia from Iceland to India. The parent tongue, called Proto-Indo-European, was spoken about 5,000 years ago by nomads believed to have roamed the southeast European plains. Germanic, one of the language groups descended from this ancestral speech, is usually divided by scholars into three regional groups: East (Burgundian, Vandal, and Gothic, all extinct), North (Icelandic, Faeroese, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish), and West (German, Netherlandic [Dutch and Flemish], Frisian, English). Though closely related to English, German remains far more conservative than English in its retention of a fairly elaborate system of inflections. Frisian, spoken by the inhabitants of the Dutch province of Friesland and the islands off the west coast of Schleswig, is the language most nearly related to Modern English. Icelandic, which has changed little over the last thousand years, is the living language most nearly resembling Old English in grammatical structure.

Modern English is analytic (i.e., relatively uninflected), whereas Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral tongue of most of the modern European languages (e.g., German, French, Russian, Greek), was synthetic, or inflected. During the course of thousands of years, English words have been slowly simplified from the inflected variable forms found in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Russian, and German, toward invariable forms, as in Chinese and Vietnamese. The German and Chinese words for "man" are exemplary. German has five forms: Mann, Mannes, Manne, Männer, Männern. Chinese has one form: jen. English stands in between, with four forms: man, man's, men, men's. In English only nouns, pronouns, and verbs are inflected. Adjectives have no inflections aside from the determiners "this, these" and "that, those." (The endings -er, -est, denoting degrees of comparison, are better regarded as noninflectional suffixes.) English is the only European language to employ uninflected adjectives; e.g., "the tall man," "the tall woman," compared to Spanish el hombre alto and la mujer alta. As for verbs, if the Modern English word ride is compared with the corresponding words in Old English and Modern German, it will be found that English now has only five forms (ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden), whereas Old English ridan had 13, and Modern German reiten has 16 forms. In addition to this simplicity of inflections, English has two other basic characteristics: flexibility of function and openness of vocabulary.

Flexibility of function has grown over the last five centuries as a consequence of the loss of inflections. Words formerly distinguished as nouns or verbs by differences in their forms are now often used as both nouns and verbs. One can speak, for example, of "planning a table" or "tabling a plan," "booking a place" or "placing a book," "lifting a thumb" or "thumbing a lift." In the other Indo-European languages, apart from rare exceptions in Scandinavian, nouns and verbs are never identical because of the necessity of separate noun and verb endings. In English, forms for traditional pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs can also function as nouns; adjectives and adverbs as verbs; and nouns, pronouns, and adverbs as adjectives. One speaks in English of the Frankfurt Book Fair, but in German one must add the suffix -er to the place-name and put attributive and noun together as a compound, Frankfurter Buchmesse. In French one has no choice but to construct a phrase involving the use of two prepositions: Foire du Livre de Francfort. In English it is now possible to employ a plural noun as adjunct (modifier), as in "wages board" and "sports editor"; or even a conjunctional group, as in "prices and incomes policy" and "parks and gardens committee."

Openness of vocabulary implies both free admission of words from other languages and the ready creation of compounds and derivatives. English adopts (without change) or adapts (with slight change) any word really needed to name some new object or to denote some new process. Like French, Spanish, and Russian, English frequently forms scientific terms from Classical Greek word elements. English possesses a system of orthography that does not always accurately reflect the pronunciation of words.

 

Among highlights in the history of the English language, the following stand out most clearly: the settlement in Britain of Jutes, Saxons, and Angles in the 5th and 6th centuries; the arrival of St. Augustine in 597 and the subsequent conversion of England to Latin Christianity; the Viking invasions of the 9th century; the Norman Conquest of 1066; the Statute of Pleading in 1362 (this required that court proceedings be conducted in English); the setting up of Caxton's printing press at Westminster in 1476; the full flowering of the Renaissance in the 16th century; the publishing of the King James Bible in 1611; the completion of Johnson's Dictionary of 1755; and the expansion to North America and South Africa in the 17th century and to India, Australia, and New Zealand in the 18th.

 

The vocabulary of Modern English is approximately half Germanic (Old English and Scandinavian) and half Italic or Romance (French and Latin), with copious and increasing importations from Greek in science and technology and with considerable borrowings from Dutch, Low German, Italian, Spanish, German, Arabic, and many other languages. Names of basic concepts and things come from Old English or Anglo-Saxon: heaven and earth, love and hate, life and death, beginning and end, day and night, month and year, heat and cold, way and path, meadow and stream. Cardinal numerals come from Old English, as do all the ordinal numerals except "second" (Old English other, which still retains its older meaning in "every other day"). "Second" comes from Latin secundus "following," through French second, related to Latin sequi "to follow," as in English "sequence." From Old English come all the personal pronouns (except "they," "their," and "them," which are from Scandinavian), the auxiliary verbs (except the marginal "used," which is from French), most simple prepositions, and all conjunctions.

Numerous nouns would be identical whether they came from Old English or Scandinavian: father, mother, brother (but not sister); man, wife; ground, land, tree, grass; summer, winter; cliff, dale. Many verbs would also be identical, especially monosyllabic verbs--bring, come, get, hear, meet, see, set, sit, spin, stand, think. The same is true of the adjectives full and wise; the colour names gray, green, and white; the disjunctive possessives mine and thine (but not ours and yours); the terms north and west (but not south and east); and the prepositions over and under. Just a few English and Scandinavian doublets coexist in current speech: no and nay, yea and ay, from and fro, rear (i.e., to bring up) and raise, shirt and skirt (both related to the adjective short), less and loose. From Scandinavian, "law" was borrowed early, whence "bylaw," meaning "village law," and "outlaw," meaning "man outside the law." "Husband" (hus-bondi) meant "householder," whether single or married, whereas "fellow" (fe-lagi) meant one who "lays fee" or shares property with another, and so "partner, shareholder." From Scandinavian come the common nouns axle (tree), band, birth, bloom, crook, dirt, egg, gait, gap, girth, knife, loan, race, rift, root, score, seat, skill, sky, snare, thrift, and window; the adjectives awkward, flat, happy, ill, loose, rotten, rugged, sly, tight, ugly, weak, and wrong; and many verbs, including call, cast, clasp, clip, crave, die, droop, drown, flit, gape, gasp, glitter, life, rake, rid, scare, scowl, skulk, snub, sprint, thrive, thrust, and want.

The debt of the English language to French is large. The terms president, representative, legislature, congress, constitution, and parliament are all French. So, too, are duke, marquis, viscount, and baron; but king, queen, lord, lady, earl, and knight are English. City, village, court, palace, manor, mansion, residence, and domicile are French; but town, borough, hall, house, bower, room, and home are English. Comparison between English and French synonyms shows that the former are more human and concrete, the latter more intellectual and abstract; e.g., the terms freedom and liberty, friendship and amity, hatred and enmity, love and affection, likelihood and probability, truth and veracity, lying and mendacity. The superiority of French cooking is duly recognized by the adoption of such culinary terms as boil, broil, fry, grill, roast, souse, and toast. "Breakfast" is English, but "dinner" and "supper" are French. "Hunt" is English, but "chase," "quarry," "scent," and "track" are French. Craftsmen bear names of English origin: baker, builder, fisher (man), hedger, miller, shepherd, shoemaker, wainwright, and weaver, or webber. Names of skilled artisans, however, are French: carpenter, draper, haberdasher, joiner, mason, painter, plumber, and tailor. Many terms relating to dress and fashion, cuisine and viniculture, politics and diplomacy, drama and literature, art and ballet come from French.

In the spheres of science and technology many terms come from Classical Greek through French or directly from Greek. Pioneers in research and development now regard Greek as a kind of inexhaustible quarry from which they can draw linguistic material at will. By prefixing the Greek adverb tele "far away, distant" to the existing compound photography, "light writing," they create the precise term "telephotography" to denote the photographing of distant objects by means of a special lens. By inserting the prefix micro- "small" into this same compound, they make the new term "photomicrography," denoting the electronic photographing of bacteria and viruses. Such neo-Hellenic derivatives would probably have been unintelligible to Plato and Aristotle. Many Greek compounds and derivatives have Latin equivalents with slight or considerable differentiations in meaning.

At first sight it might appear that some of these equivalents, such as "metamorphosis" and "transformation," are sufficiently synonymous to make one or the other redundant. In fact, however, "metamorphosis" is more technical and therefore more restricted than "transformation." In mythology it signifies a magical shape changing; in nature it denotes a postembryonic development such as that of a tadpole into a frog, a cocoon into a silkworm, or a chrysalis into a butterfly. Transformation, on the other hand, means any kind of change from one state to another.

Ever since the 12th century, when merchants from the Netherlands made homes in East Anglia, Dutch words have infiltrated into Midland speech. For centuries a form of Low German was used by seafaring men in North Sea ports.

Old nautical terms still in use include buoy, deck, dock, freebooter, hoist, leak, pump, skipper, and yacht. The Dutch in New Amsterdam (later New York) and adjacent settlements gave the words boss, cookie, dope, snoop, and waffle to American speech. The Dutch in Cape Province gave the terms apartheid, commandeer, commando, spoor, and trek to South African speech.

The contribution of High German has been on a different level. In the 18th and 19th centuries it lay in technicalities of geology and mineralogy and in abstractions relating to literature, philosophy, and psychology. In the 20th century this contribution has sometimes been indirect. "Unclear" and "meaningful" echoed German unklar and bedeutungsvoll, or sinnvoll. "Ring road" (a British term applied to roads encircling cities or parts of cities) translated Ringstrasse; "round trip," Rundfahrt; and "the turn of the century," die Jahrhundertwende. The terms "classless society," "inferiority complex," and "wishful thinking" echoed die klassenlöse Gesellschaft, der Minderwertigkeitskomplex, and das Wunschdenken.

Along with the rest of the Western world, English has accepted Italian as the language of music. The names of voices, parts, performers, instruments, forms of composition, and technical directions are all Italian. Many of the latter--allegro, andante, cantabile, crescendo, diminuendo, legato, maestoso, obbligato, pizzicato, staccato, and vibrato--are also used metaphorically. In architecture, the terms belvedere, corridor, cupola, grotto, pedestal, pergola, piazza, pilaster, and rotunda are accepted; in literature, burlesque, canto, extravaganza, stanza, and many more are used.

From Spanish, English has acquired the words armada, cannibal, cigar, galleon, guerrilla, matador, mosquito, quadroon, tornado, and vanilla, some of these loanwords going back to the 16th century, when sea dogs encountered hidalgos on the high seas. Many names of animals and plants have entered English from indigenous languages through Spanish: "potato" through Spanish patata from Taino batata, and "tomato" through Spanish tomate from Nahuatl tomatl. Other words have entered from Latin America by way of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California; e.g., such words as canyon, cigar, estancia, lasso, mustang, pueblo, and rodeo. Some have gathered new connotations: bonanza, originally denoting "goodness," came through miners' slang to mean "spectacular windfall, prosperity"; mañana, "tomorrow," acquired an undertone of mysterious unpredictability.

From Arabic through European Spanish, through French from Spanish, through Latin, or occasionally through Greek, English has obtained the terms alchemy, alcohol, alembic, algebra, alkali, almanac, arsenal, assassin, attar, azimuth, cipher, elixir, mosque, nadir, naphtha, sugar, syrup, zenith, and zero. From Egyptian Arabic, English has recently borrowed the term loofah (also spelled luffa). From Hebrew, directly or by way of Vulgate Latin, come the terms amen, cherub, hallelujah, manna, messiah, pharisee, rabbi, sabbath, and seraph; jubilee, leviathan, and shibboleth; and, more recently, kosher, and kibbutz.

English has freely adopted and adapted words from many other languages, acquiring them sometimes directly and sometimes by devious routes. Each word has its own history. The following lists indicate the origins of a number of English words: Welsh--flannel, coracle, cromlech, penguin, eisteddfod; Cornish--gull, brill, dolmen; Gaelic and Irish--shamrock, brogue, leprechaun, ogham, Tory, galore, blarney, hooligan, clan, claymore, bog, plaid, slogan, sporran, cairn, whisky, pibroch; Breton--menhir; Norwegian--ski, ombudsman; Finnish--sauna; Russian--kvass, ruble, tsar, verst, mammoth, ukase, astrakhan, vodka, samovar, tundra (from Sami), troika, pogrom, duma, soviet, bolshevik, intelligentsia (from Latin through Polish), borscht, balalaika, sputnik, soyuz, salyut, lunokhod; Polish--mazurka; Czech--robot; Hungarian--goulash, paprika; Portuguese--marmalade, flamingo, molasses, veranda, port (wine), dodo; Basque--bizarre; Turkish--janissary, turban, coffee, kiosk, caviar, pasha, odalisque, fez, bosh; Hindi--nabob, guru, sahib, maharajah, mahatma, pundit, punch (drink), juggernaut, cushy, jungle, thug, cheetah, shampoo, chit, dungaree, pucka, gymkhana, mantra, loot, pajamas, dinghy, polo; Persian--paradise, divan, purdah, lilac, bazaar, shah, caravan, chess, salamander, taffeta, shawl, khaki; Tamil--pariah, curry, catamaran, mulligatawny; Chinese--tea (Amoy), sampan; Japanese--shogun, kimono, mikado, tycoon, hara-kiri, gobang, judo, jujitsu, bushido, samurai, banzai, tsunami, satsuma, No (the dance drama), karate, Kabuki; Malay--ketchup, sago, bamboo, junk, amuck, orangutan, compound (fenced area), raffia; Polynesian--taboo, tattoo; Hawaiian--ukulele; African languages--chimpanzee, goober, mumbo jumbo, voodoo; Inuit--kayak, igloo, anorak; Yupik--mukluk; Algonquian--totem; Nahuatl--mescal; languages of the Caribbean--hammock, hurricane, tobacco, maize, iguana; Aboriginal Australian--kangaroo, corroboree, wallaby, wombat, boomerang, paramatta, budgerigar.

 

 

Language

 

Language, the principal means used by human beings to communicate with one another. Language is primarily spoken, although it can be transferred to other media, such as writing. If the spoken means of communication is unavailable, as may be the case among the deaf, visual means such as sign language can be used. A prominent characteristic of language is that the relation between a linguistic sign and its meaning is arbitrary: There is no reason other than convention among speakers of English that a dog should be called dog, and indeed other languages have different names (for example, Spanish perro, Russian sobaka, Japanese inu). Language can be used to discuss a wide range of topics, a characteristic that distinguishes it from animal communication. The dances of honey bees, for example, can be used only to communicate the location of food sources (see Honey Bee: Communication). While the language-learning abilities of apes have surprised many—and there continues to be controversy over the precise limits of these abilities—scientists and scholars generally agree that apes do not progress beyond the linguistic abilities of a two-year-old child (see Communication: Communication Among Animals).

 

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Several of the subfields of linguistics that will be discussed here are concerned with the major components of language: Phonetics is concerned with the sounds of languages, phonology with the way sounds are used in individual languages, morphology with the structure of words, syntax with the structure of phrases and sentences, and semantics with the study of meaning. Another major subfield of linguistics, pragmatics, studies the interaction between language and the contexts in which it is used. Synchronic linguistics studies a language's form at a fixed time in history, past or present. Diachronic, or historical, linguistics, on the other hand, investigates the way a language changes over time. A number of linguistic fields study the relations between language and the subject matter of related academic disciplines, such as sociolinguistics (sociology and language) and psycholinguistics (psychology and language). In principle, applied linguistics is any application of linguistic methods or results to solve problems related to language, but in practice it tends to be restricted to second-language instruction.

Spoken human language is composed of sounds that do not in themselves have meaning, but that can be combined with other sounds to create entities that do have meaning. Thus p, e, and n do not in themselves have any meaning, but the combination pen does have a meaning. Language also is characterized by complex syntax whereby elements, usually words, are combined into more complex constructions, called phrases, and these constructions in turn play a major role in the structures of sentences.

Because most languages are primarily spoken, an important part of the overall understanding of language involves the study of the sounds of language. Most sounds in the world's languages—and all sounds in some languages, such as English—are produced by expelling air from the lungs and modifying the vocal tract between the larynx and the lips. For instance, the sound p requires complete closure of the lips, so that air coming from the lungs builds up pressure in the mouth, giving rise to the characteristic popping sound when the lip closure is released. For the sound s, air from the lungs passes continuously through the mouth, but the tongue is raised sufficiently close to the alveolar ridge (the section of the upper jaw containing the tooth sockets) to cause friction as it partially blocks the air that passes. Sounds also can be produced by means other than expelling air from the lungs, and some languages use these sounds in regular speech. The sound used by English speakers to express annoyance, often spelled tsk or tut, uses air trapped in the space between the front of the tongue, the back of the tongue, and the palate. Such sounds, called clicks, function as regular speech sounds in the Khoisan languages of southwestern Africa and in the Bantu languages of neighboring African peoples (see African Languages).

Phonetics is the field of language study concerned with the physical properties of sounds, and it has three subfields. Articulatory phonetics explores how the human vocal apparatus produces sounds. Acoustic phonetics studies the sound waves produced by the human vocal apparatus. Auditory phonetics examines how speech sounds are perceived by the human ear. Phonology, in contrast, is concerned not with the physical properties of sounds, but rather with how they function in a particular language. The following example illustrates the difference between phonetics and phonology. In the English language, when the sound k (usually spelled c) occurs at the beginning of a word, as in the word cut, it is pronounced with aspiration (a puff of breath). However, when this sound occurs at the end of a word, as in tuck, there is no aspiration. Phonetically, the aspirated k and unaspirated k are different sounds, but in English these different sounds never distinguish one word from another, and English speakers are usually unaware of the phonetic difference until it is pointed out to them. Thus English makes no phonological distinction between the aspirated and unaspirated k. The Hindi language, on the other hand, uses this sound difference to distinguish words such as kal (time), which has an unaspirated k, and khal (skin), in which kh represents the aspirated k. Therefore, in Hindi the distinction between the aspirated and unaspirated k is both phonetic and phonological.

While many people, influenced by writing, tend to think of words as the basic units of grammatical structure, linguists recognize a smaller unit, the morpheme.

The word cats, for instance, consists of two elements, or morphemes: cat, the meaning of which can be roughly characterized as “feline animal,” and -s, the meaning of which can be roughly characterized as “more than one.”

Antimicrobial, meaning “capable of destroying microorganisms,” can be divided into the morphemes anti- (against), microbe (microorganism), and -ial, a suffix that makes the word an adjective. The study of these smallest grammatical units, and the ways in which they combine into words, is called morphology.

Syntax is the study of how words combine to make sentences. The order of words in sentences varies from language to language. English-language syntax, for instance, generally follows a subject-verb-object order, as in the sentence “The dog (subject) bit (verb) the man (object).” The sentence “The dog the man bit” is not a correct construction in English, and the sentence “The man bit the dog” has a very different meaning. In contrast, Japanese has a basic word order of subject-object-verb, as in “watakushi-wa hon-o kau,” which literally translates to “I book buy.” Hixkaryana, spoken by about 400 people on a tributary of the Amazon River in Brazil, has a basic word order of object-verb-subject. The sentence “toto yahosïye kamara,” which literally translates to “Man grabbed jaguar,” actually means that the jaguar grabbed the man, not that the man grabbed the jaguar.

A general characteristic of language is that words are not directly combined into sentences, but rather into intermediate units, called phrases, which then are combined into sentences. The sentence “The shepherd found the lost sheep” contains at least three phrases: “the shepherd,” “found,” and “the lost sheep.” This hierarchical structure that groups words into phrases, and phrases into sentences, serves an important role in establishing relations within sentences. For instance, the phrases “the shepherd” and “the lost sheep” behave as units, so that when the sentence is rearranged to be in the passive voice, these units stay intact: “The lost sheep was found by the shepherd.”

While the fields of language study mentioned above deal primarily with the form of linguistic elements, semantics is the field of study that deals with the meaning of these elements. A prominent part of semantics deals with the meaning of individual morphemes. Semantics also involves studying the meaning of the constructions that link morphemes to form phrases and sentences. For instance, the sentences “The dog bit the man” and “The man bit the dog” contain exactly the same morphemes, but they have different meanings. This is because the morphemes enter into different constructions in each sentence, reflected in the different word orders of the two sentences.

 

Language acquisition, the process by which children and adults learn a language or languages, is a major field of linguistic study. First-language acquisition is a complex process that linguists only partially understand. Young children have certain innate characteristics that predispose them to learn language. These characteristics include the structure of the vocal tract, which enables children to make the sounds used in language, and the ability to understand a number of general grammatical principles, such as the hierarchical nature of syntax. These characteristics, however, do not predispose children to learn only one particular language. Children acquire whatever language is spoken around them, even if their parents speak a different language. An interesting feature of early language acquisition is that children seem to rely more on semantics than on syntax when speaking. The point at which they shift to using syntax seems to be a crucial point at which human children surpass apes in linguistic ability.

Although second-language acquisition literally refers to learning a language after having acquired a first language, the term is frequently used to refer to the acquisition of a second language after a person has reached puberty. Whereas children experience little difficulty in acquiring more than one language, after puberty people generally must expend greater effort to learn a second language and they often achieve lower levels of competence in that language. People learn second languages more successfully when they become immersed in the cultures of the communities that speak those languages. People also learn second languages more successfully in cultures in which acquiring a second language is expected, as in most African countries, than they do in cultures in which second-language proficiency is considered unusual, as in most English-speaking countries.

Bilingualism is the ability to master the use of two languages, and multilingualism is the ability to master the use of more than two languages. Although bilingualism is relatively rare among native speakers of English, in many parts of the world it is the standard rather than the exception. For example, more than half the population of Papua New Guinea is functionally competent in both an indigenous language and Tok Pisin. People in many parts of the country have mastered two or more indigenous languages. Bilingualism and multilingualism often involve different degrees of competence in the languages involved. A person may control one language better than another, or a person might have mastered the different languages better for different purposes, using one language for speaking, for example, and another for writing.

Language Varieties. Languages constantly undergo changes, resulting in the development of different varieties of the languages. A dialect is a variety of a language spoken by an identifiable subgroup of people.

Traditionally, linguists have applied the term dialect to geographically distinct language varieties, but in current usage the term can include speech varieties characteristic of other socially definable groups. Determining whether two speech varieties are dialects of the same language, or whether they have changed enough to be considered distinct languages, has often proved a difficult and controversial decision. Linguists usually cite mutual intelligibility as the major criterion in making this decision.

 If two speech varieties are not mutually intelligible, then the speech varieties are different languages; if they are mutually intelligible but differ systematically from one another, then they are dialects of the same language. There are problems with this definition, however, because many levels of mutual intelligibility exist, and linguists must decide at what level speech varieties should no longer be considered mutually intelligible. This is difficult to establish in practice. Intelligibility has a large psychological component: If a speaker of one speech variety wants to understand a speaker of another speech variety, understanding is more likely than if this were not the case. In addition, chains of speech varieties exist in which adjacent speech varieties are mutually intelligible, but speech varieties farther apart in the chain are not. Furthermore, sociopolitical factors almost inevitably intervene in the process of distinguishing between dialects and languages. Such factors, for example, led to the traditional characterization of Chinese as a single language with a number of mutually unintelligible dialects.

Dialects develop primarily as a result of limited communication between different parts of a community that share one language. Under such circumstances, changes that take place in the language of one part of the community do not spread elsewhere. As a result, the speech varieties become more distinct from one another. If contact continues to be limited for a long enough period, sufficient changes will accumulate to make the speech varieties mutually unintelligible. When this occurs, and especially if it is accompanied by the sociopolitical separation of a group of speakers from the larger community, it usually leads to the recognition of separate languages. The different changes that took place in spoken Latin in different parts of the Roman Empire, for example, eventually gave rise to the distinct modern Romance languages, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian.

In ordinary usage, the term dialect can also signify a variety of a language that is distinct from what is considered the standard form of that language. Linguists, however, consider the standard language to be simply one dialect of a language. For example, the dialect of French spoken in Paris became the standard language of France not because of any linguistic features of this dialect but because Paris was the political and cultural center of the country.

Sociolects are dialects determined by social factors rather than by geography. Sociolects often develop due to social divisions within a society, such as those of socioeconomic class and religion. In New York City, for example, the probability that someone will pronounce the letter r when it occurs at the end of a syllable, as in the word fourth, varies with socioeconomic class. The pronunciation of a final r in general is associated with members of higher socioeconomic classes. The same is true in England of the pronunciation of h, as in hat.

Members of certain social groups often adopt a particular pronunciation as a way of distinguishing themselves from other social groups. The inhabitants of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, for example, have adopted particular vowel pronunciations to distinguish themselves from people vacationing on the island.

Slang, argot, and jargon are more specialized terms for certain social language varieties usually defined by their specialized vocabularies. Slang refers to informal vocabulary, especially short-lived coinages, that do not belong to a language's standard vocabulary. Argot refers to a nonstandard vocabulary used by secret groups, particularly criminal organizations, usually intended to render communications incomprehensible to outsiders. A jargon comprises the specialized vocabulary of a particular trade or profession, especially when it is incomprehensible to outsiders, as with legal jargon.

In addition to language varieties defined in terms of social groups, there are language varieties called registers that are defined by social situation. In a formal situation, for example, a person might say, “You are requested to leave,” whereas in an informal situation the same person might say, “Get out!” Register differences can affect pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary.

A pidgin is an auxiliary language (a language used for communication by groups that have different native tongues) that develops when people speaking different languages are brought together and forced to develop a common means of communication without sufficient time to learn each other's native languages properly. Typically, a pidgin language derives most of its vocabulary from one of the languages. Its grammatical structure, however, will either be highly variable, reflecting the grammatical structures of each speaker's native language, or it may in time become stabilized in a manner very different from the grammar of the language that contributed most of its vocabulary. Historically, plantation societies in the Caribbean and the South Pacific have originated many pidgin languages. Tok Pisin is the major pidgin language of Papua New Guinea. Both its similarities to and its differences from English can be seen in the sentence “Pik bilong dispela man i kam pinis,” meaning “This man's pig has come,” or, more literally, “Pig belong this-fellow man he come finish.” Since a pidgin is an auxiliary language, it has no native speakers. A creole language, on the other hand, arises in a contact situation similar to that which produces pidgin languages and perhaps goes through a stage in which it is a pidgin, but a creole becomes the native language of its community. As with pidgin languages, creoles usually take most of their vocabulary from a single language.

Also as with pidgins, the grammatical structure of a creole language reflects the structures of the languages that were originally spoken in the community. A characteristic of creole languages is their simple morphology. In the Jamaican Creole sentence “A fain Jan fain di kluoz,” meaning “John found the clothes,” the vocabulary is of English origin, while the grammatical structure, which doubles the verb for emphasis, reflects West African language patterns. Because the vocabularies of Tok Pisin and Jamaican Creole are largely of English origin, they are called English-based.

 

Languages of the World

Estimates of the number of languages spoken in the world today vary depending on where the dividing line between language and dialect is drawn. For instance, linguists disagree over whether Chinese should be considered a single language because of its speakers' shared cultural and literary tradition, or whether it should be considered several different languages because of the mutual unintelligibility of, for example, the Mandarin spoken in Beijing and the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong (see Chinese Language). If mutual intelligibility is the basic criterion, current estimates indicate that there are about 6000 languages spoken in the world today. However, many languages with a smaller number of speakers are in danger of being replaced by languages with large numbers of speakers. In fact, some scholars believe that perhaps 90 percent of the languages spoken in the 1990s will be extinct or doomed to extinction by the end of the 21st century. The 10 most widely spoken languages, with approximate numbers of native speakers, are as follows: Chinese, 1.2 billion; Arabic, 422 million; Hindi, 366 million; English, 341 million; Spanish, 322 to 358 million; Bengali, 207 million; Portuguese, 176 million; Russian, 167 million; Japanese, 125 million; German, 100 million. If second-language speakers are included in these figures, English is the second most widely spoken language, with 418 million speakers.

Linguists classify languages using two main classification systems: typological and genetic. A typological classification system organizes languages according to the similarities and differences in their structures. Languages that share the same structure belong to the same type, while languages with different structures belong to different types. For example, despite the great differences between the two languages in other respects, Mandarin Chinese and English belong to the same type, grouped by word-order typology. Both languages have a basic word order of subject-verb-object.

A genetic classification of languages divides them into families on the basis of their historical development: A group of languages that descend historically from the same common ancestor form a language family. For example, the Romance languages form a language family because they all descended from the Latin language. Latin, in turn, belongs to a larger language family, Indo-European, the ancestor language of which is called Proto-Indo-European. Some genetic groupings are universally accepted. However, because documents attesting to the form of most ancestor languages, including Proto-Indo-European, have not survived, much controversy surrounds the more wide-ranging genetic groupings. A conservative survey of the world's language families follows.

 

The Indo-European languages are the most widely spoken languages in Europe, and they also extend into western and southern Asia. The family consists of a number of subfamilies or branches (groups of languages that descended from a common ancestor, which in turn is a member of a larger group of languages that descended from a common ancestor). Most of the people in northwestern Europe speak Germanic languages, which include English, German, and Dutch as well as the Scandinavian languages, such as Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. The Celtic languages, such as Welsh and Gaelic, once covered a large part of Europe but are now restricted to its western fringes. The Romance languages, all descended from Latin, are the only survivors of a somewhat more extensive family, Italic, which includes, in addition to Latin, a number of now extinct languages of Italy (see Italic Languages). Languages of the Baltic and Slavic (Slavonic) branches are closely related. Only two of the Baltic languages survive: Lithuanian and Latvian. The Slavic languages, which cover much of eastern and central Europe, include Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian. In the Balkan Peninsula, two branches of Indo-European exist that each consist of a single language—namely the Greek language and the Albanian language. Farther east, in Caucasia, the Armenian language constitutes another single-language branch of Indo-European.

The other main surviving branch of the Indo-European family is Indo-Iranian (see Indo-Iranian Languages). It has two subbranches, Iranian and Indo-Aryan (Indic).

Iranian languages are spoken mainly in southwestern Asia and include Persian, Pashto (spoken in Afghanistan), and Kurdish. Indo-Aryan languages are spoken in the northern part of South Asia (Pakistan, northern India, Nepal, and Bangladesh) and also in most of Sri Lanka (see Indian Languages). This branch includes Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Nepali, and Sinhalese (the language spoken by the majority of people in Sri Lanka). Historical documents attest to other, now extinct, branches of Indo-European, such as the Anatolian languages, which were once spoken in what is now Turkey and include the ancient Hittite language.

 

Other European Language Families. The Uralic languages constitute the other main language family of Europe. They are spoken mostly in the northeastern part of the continent, spilling over into northwestern Asia; one language, Hungarian, is spoken in central Europe. Most Uralic languages belong to the family's Finno-Ugric branch (see Finno-Ugric Languages). This branch includes (in addition to Hungarian) Finnish, Estonian, and Saami.

Europe also has one language isolate (a language not known to be related to any other language): Basque, which is spoken in the Pyrenees. At the boundary between southeastern Europe and Asia lie the Caucasus Mountains. Since ancient times the region has contained a large number of languages, including two groups of languages that have not been definitively related to any other language families. The South Caucasian, or Kartvelian, languages are spoken in Georgia and include the Georgian language. The North Caucasian languages fall into North-West Caucasian, North-Central Caucasian, and North-East Caucasian subgroups. The genetic relation of North-West Caucasian to the other subgroups is not universally agreed upon.

The North-West Caucasian languages include Abkhaz, the North-Central Caucasian languages include Chechen, and the North-East Caucasian languages include the Avar language (see Caucasian Languages).

 

Asian and Pacific Language Families. South Asia contains, in addition to the Indo-Aryan branch of Indo-European, two other large language families. The Dravidian family is dominant in southern India and includes Tamil and Telugu. The Munda languages represent the Austro-Asiatic language family in India and contain many languages, each with relatively small numbers of speakers. The Austro-Asiatic family also spreads into Southeast Asia, where it includes the Khmer (Cambodian) and Vietnamese languages (see Austro-Asiatic Languages). South Asia contains at least one language isolate, Burushaski, spoken in a remote part of northern Pakistan. See also Indian Languages.

A number of linguists believe that many of the languages of central, northern, and eastern Asia form a single Altaic language family, although others consider Turkic, Tungusic, and Mongolic to be separate, unrelated language families (see Altaic Languages). The Turkic languages include Turkish and a number of languages of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), such as Uzbek and Tatar. The Tungusic languages are spoken mainly by small population groups in Siberia and Northeast China. This family includes the nearly extinct Manchu language. The main language of the Mongolic family is Mongolian. Some linguists also assign Korean and Japanese to the Altaic family, although others regard these languages as isolates. In northern Asia there are a number of languages that appear either to form small, independent families or to be language isolates, such as the Chukotko-Kamchatkan language family of the Chukchi and Kamchatka peninsulas in the far east of Russia. These languages are often referred to collectively as Paleo-Siberian (Paleo-Asiatic), but this is a geographic, not a genetic, grouping.

The Sino-Tibetan language family covers not only most of China, but also much of the Himalayas and parts of Southeast Asia (see Sino-Tibetan Languages). The family's major languages are Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese. The Tai languages constitute another important language family of Southeast Asia. They are spoken in Thailand, Laos, and southern China and include the Thai language. The Miao-Yao, or Hmong-Mien, languages are spoken in isolated areas of southern China and northern Southeast Asia. The Austronesian languages, formerly called Malayo-Polynesian, cover the Malay Peninsula and most islands to the southeast of Asia and are spoken as far west as Madagascar and throughout the Pacific islands as far east as Easter Island. The Austronesian languages include Malay (called Bahasa Malaysia in Malaysia, and Bahasa Indonesia in Indonesia), Javanese, Hawaiian, and Maori (the language of the aboriginal people of New Zealand).

Although the inhabitants of some of the coastal areas and offshore islands of New Guinea speak Austronesian languages, most of the main island's inhabitants, as well as some inhabitants of nearby islands, speak languages unrelated to Austronesian. Linguists collectively refer to these languages as Papuan languages, although this is a geographical term covering about 60 different language families. The languages of Aboriginal Australians constitute another unrelated group, and it is debatable whether all Australian languages form a single family (see Australia).

 

African Language Families. The languages of Africa may belong to as few as four families: Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, and Khoisan, although the genetic unity of Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan is still disputed (see African Languages). Afro-Asiatic languages occupy most of North Africa and also large parts of southwestern Asia. The family consists of several branches. The Semitic branch includes Arabic, Hebrew, and many languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, including Amharic, the dominant language of Ethiopia (see Semitic Languages). The Chadic branch, spoken mainly in northern Nigeria and adjacent areas, includes Hausa, one of the two most widely spoken languages of sub-Saharan Africa (the other being Swahili). Other subfamilies of Afro-Asiatic are Berber, Cushitic, and the single-language branch Egyptian, which contains the now-extinct language of the ancient Egyptians (see Egyptian Language; Coptic Language).

The Niger-Congo family covers most of sub-Saharan Africa and includes such widely spoken West African languages as Yoruba and Fulfulde, as well as the Bantu languages of eastern and southern Africa, which include Swahili and Zulu. The Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken mainly in eastern Africa, in an area between those covered by the Afro-Asiatic and the Niger-Congo languages. The best-known Nilo-Saharan language is Masai, spoken by the Masai people in Kenya and Tanzania. The Khoisan languages are spoken in the southwestern corner of Africa and include the Nama language (formerly called Hottentot).

 

Language Families of the Americas. Most linguists separate the indigenous languages of the Americas into a large number of families and isolates, while one linguist has proposed grouping these languages into just three superfamilies. Nearly all specialists reject this proposal. Well-established families include Inuit-Aleut (Eskimaleut). The family stretches from the eastern edge of Siberia to the Aleutian Islands, and across Alaska and northern Canada to Greenland, where one variety of the Inuit language, Greenlandic, is an official language.

The Na-Dené languages, the main branch of which comprises the Athapaskan languages, occupies much of northwestern North America. The Athapaskan languages also include, however, a group of languages in the southwestern United States, one of which is Navajo.

 Languages of the Algonquian and Iroquoian families constitute the major indigenous languages of northeastern North America, while the Siouan family is one of the main families of central North America.

The Uto-Aztecan family extends from the southwestern United States into Central America and includes Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec civilization and its modern descendants (see Aztec Empire). The Mayan languages are spoken mainly in southern Mexico and Guatemala (see Maya). Major language families of South America include Carib and Arawak in the north, and Macro-Gê and Tupian in the east. Guaraní, recognized as a national language in Paraguay alongside the official language, Spanish, is an important member of the Tupian family. In the Andes Mountains region, the dominant indigenous languages are Quechua and Aymara; the genetic relation of these languages to each other and to other languages remains controversial. See also Native American Languages.

 

Pidgin and Creole Languages. Individual pidgin and creole languages pose a particular problem for genetic classification because the vocabulary and grammar of each comes from different sources. Consequently, many linguists do not try to classify them genetically. Pidgin and creole languages are found in many parts of the world, but there are particular concentrations in the Caribbean, West Africa, and the islands of the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific. English-based creoles such as Jamaican Creole and Guyanese Creole, and French-based creoles such as Haitian Creole, can be found in the Caribbean. English-based creoles are widespread in West Africa. About 10 percent of the population of Sierra Leone speaks Krio as a native language, and an additional 85 percent speaks it as a second language. The creoles of the Indian Ocean islands, such as Mauritius, are French-based. An English-based pidgin, Tok Pisin, is spoken by more than 2 million people in Papua New Guinea, making it the most widely spoken auxiliary language of that country. The inhabitants of Solomon Islands and Vanuatu speak similar varieties of Tok Pisin, called Pijin and Bislama, respectively.

 

International Languages. International languages include both existing languages that have become international means of communication and languages artificially constructed to serve this purpose. The most famous and widespread artificial international language is Esperanto; however, the most widespread international languages are not artificial. In medieval Europe, Latin was the principal international language. Today, English is used in more countries as an official language or as the main means of international communication than any other language. French is the second most widely used language, largely due to the substantial number of African countries with French as their official language. Other languages have more restricted regional use, such as Spanish in Spain and Latin America, Arabic in the Middle East, and Russian in the republics of the former USSR.

 

How Languages Change. American English has an ongoing change whereby the pronunciation difference between the words cot and caught is being lost. The changes become more dramatic after longer periods of time. Modern English readers may require notes to understand fully the writings of English playwright William Shakespeare, who wrote during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The English of 14th-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer differs so greatly from the modern language that many readers prefer a translation into modern English. Learning to read the writings of Alfred the Great, the 9th-century Saxon king, is comparable to acquiring a reading knowledge of German.

Historical change can affect all components of language. Sound change is the area of language change that has received the most study. One of the major sound changes in the history of the English language is the so-called Great Vowel Shift. This shift, which occurred during the 15th and 16th centuries, affected the pronunciation of all English long vowels (vowels that have a comparatively long sound duration). In Middle English, spoken from 1100 to 1500, the word house was pronounced with the vowel sound of the modern English word boot, while boot was pronounced with the vowel sound of the modern English boat. The change that affected the pronunciation of house also affected the vowels of mouse, louse, and mouth. This illustrates an important principle of sound change: It tends to be regular—that is, a particular sound change in a language tends to occur in the same way in all words.

The principle of the regularity of sound change has been particularly important to linguists when comparing different languages for genetic relatedness. Linguists compare root words from the different languages to see if they are similar enough to have once been the same word in a common ancestor language. By establishing that the sound differences between similar root words are the result of regular sound changes that occurred in the languages, linguists can support the conclusion that the different languages descended from the same original language.

For example, by comparing the Latin word pater with its English translation, father, linguists might claim that the two languages are genetically related because of certain similarities between the two words. Linguists could then hypothesize that the Latin p had changed to f in English, and that the two words descended from the same original word. They could search for other examples to strengthen this hypothesis, such as the Latin word piscis and its English translation, fish, and the Latin pes and the English translation, foot. The sound change that relates f in the Germanic languages to p in most other branches of Indo-European is a famous sound change called Grimm's Law, named for German grammarian Jacob Grimm (see Grimm Brothers). The morphology of a language can also change. An ongoing morphological change in English is the loss of the distinction between the nominative, or subject, form who and the accusative, or object, form whom. English speakers use both the who and whom forms for the object of a sentence, saying both “Who did you see?” and “Whom did you see?”

However, English speakers use only the form who for a sentence's subject, as in “Who saw you?” Old English, the historical form of English spoken from about 700 to about 1100, had a much more complex morphology than modern English. The modern English word stone has only three additional forms: the genitive singular stone's, the plural stones, and the genitive plural stones'. All three of these additional forms have the same pronunciation. In Old English these forms were all different from one another: stan, stanes, stanas, and stana, respectively. In addition, there was a dative singular form stane and a dative plural form stanum, used, for instance, after certain prepositions, as in under stanum (under stones).

Change can also affect syntax. In modern English, the basic word order is subject-verb-object, as in the sentence “I know John.” The only other possible word order is object-subject-verb, as in “John I know (but Mary I don't).”

Old English, by contrast, allowed all possible word order permutations, including subject-object-verb, as in Gif hie ænigne feld secan wolden, meaning “If they wished to seek any field,” or literally “If they any field to seek wished.” The loss of word-order freedom is one of the main syntactic changes that separates the modern English language from Old English.

The meanings of words can also change. In Middle English, the word nice usually had the meaning “foolish,” and sometimes “shy,” but never the modern meaning “pleasant.” Change in the meanings of words is known as semantic change and can be viewed as part of the more general phenomenon of lexical change, or change in a language's vocabulary. Words not only can change their meaning but also can become obsolete. For example, modern readers require a note to explain Shakespeare's word hent (take hold of), which is no longer in use. In addition, new words can be created, such as feedback.

While much change takes place in a given language without outside interference, many changes can result from contact with other languages. Linguists use the terms borrowing and loan to refer to instances in which one language takes something from another language. The most obvious cases of borrowing are in vocabulary. English, for example, has borrowed a large part of its vocabulary from French and Latin. Most of these borrowed words are somewhat more scholarly, as in the word human (Latin humanus), because the commonly used words of any language are less likely to be lost or replaced. However, some of the words borrowed into English are common, such as the French word very, which replaced the native English word sore in such phrases as sore afraid, meaning “very frightened.” The borrowing of such common words reflects the close contact that existed between the English and the French in the period after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.

Borrowing can affect not only vocabulary but also, in principle, all components of a language's grammar. The English suffix -er, which is added to verbs to form nouns, as in the formation of baker from bake, is ultimately a borrowing from the Latin suffix -arius. The suffix has been incorporated to such an extent, however, that it is used with indigenous words, such as bake, as well as with Latin words. Syntax also can be borrowed. For example, Amharic, a Semitic language of Ethiopia, has abandoned the usual Semitic word-order pattern, verb-subject-object, and replaced it with the word order subject-object-verb, borrowed from neighboring non-Semitic languages. Although in principle any component of language can be borrowed, some components are much more susceptible to borrowing than others. Cultural vocabulary is the most susceptible to borrowing, while morphology is the least susceptible.

 

Linguistic reconstruction is the recovery of the stages of a language that existed prior to those found in written documents. Using a number of languages that are genetically related, linguists try to reconstruct at least certain aspects of the languages' common ancestor, called the protolanguage. Linguists theorize that those features that are the same among the protolanguage's descendant languages, or those features that differ but can be traced to a common origin, can be considered features of the ancestor language. Nineteenth-century linguistic science made significant progress in reconstructing the Proto-Indo-European language. While many details of this reconstruction remain controversial, in general linguists have gained a good conception of Proto-Indo-European's phonology, morphology, and vocabulary. However, due to the range of syntactic variation among Proto-Indo-European's descendant languages, linguists have found syntactic reconstruction more problematic.

 

Nonoral Language. Language, although primarily oral, can also be represented in other media, such as writing. Under certain circumstances, spoken language can be supplanted by other media, as in sign language among the deaf.

Writing can be viewed in one sense as a more permanent physical record of the spoken language. However, written and spoken languages tend to diverge from one another, partly because of the difference in medium. In spoken language, the structure of a message cannot be too complex because of the risk that the listener will misunderstand the message. Since the communication is face-to-face, however, the speaker has the opportunity to receive feedback from the listener and to clarify what the listener does not understand. Sentence structures in written communication can be more complex because readers can return to an earlier part of the text to clarify their understanding. However, the writer usually does not have the opportunity to receive feedback from the reader and to rework the text, so texts must be written with greater clarity. An example of this difference between written and spoken language is found in languages that have only recently developed written variants. In the written variants there is a rapid increase in the use of words such as because and however in order to make explicit links between sentences—links that are normally left implicit in spoken language.

Sign languages, which differ from signed versions of spoken languages, are the native languages of most members of deaf communities. Linguists have only recently begun to appreciate the levels of complexity and expressiveness found in sign languages. In particular, as in oral languages, sign languages are generally arbitrary in their use of signs: In general, no reason exists, other than convention, for a certain sign to have a particular meaning. Sign languages also exhibit dual patterning, in which a small number of components combine to produce the total range of signs, similar to the way in which letters combine to make words in English. In addition, sign languages use complex syntax and can discuss the same wide range of topics possible in spoken languages.

Body language refers to the conveying of messages through body movements other than those movements that form a part of sign or spoken languages. Some gestures can have quite specific meanings, such as those for saying good-bye or for asking someone to approach. Other gestures more generally accompany speech, such as those used to emphasize a particular point. Although there are cross-cultural similarities in body language, substantial differences also exist both in the extent to which body language is used and in the interpretations given to particular instances of body language. For example, the head gestures for “yes” and “no” used in the Balkans seem inverted to other Europeans. Also, the physical distance kept between participants in a conversation varies from culture to culture: A distance considered normal in one culture can strike someone from another culture as aggressively close.

In certain circumstances, other media can be used to convey linguistic messages, particularly when normal media are unavailable. For example, Morse code directly encodes a written message, letter by letter, so that it can be transmitted by a medium that allows only two values—traditionally, short and long signals or dots and dashes (see Morse Code, International). Drums can be used to convey messages over distances beyond the human voice's reach—a method known as drum talk. In some cases, such communication methods serve the function of keeping a message secret from the uninitiated. This is often the case with whistle speech, a form of communication in which whistling substitutes for regular speech, usually used for communication over distances.

 

 

                                                                           

                                                                               National Symbols

                                             State flag

The state flag, which is also the national flag, is rectangular in shape, divided into three horizontal bands of equal size. The upper band is blue, the middle one is black and the lowest band is white. The proportions of the flag are 11:7 and its normal size is 165x105 cm.

The blue-black-white flag was first consecrated at Otepää on the 4th of June, 1884, as the flag of the Estonian University Student Association. During the following years the blue-black-white flag became a national symbol.
The Provisional Government of Estonia adopted a resolution on the 21st of November, 1918, proclaiming the blue-black-white flag the state flag. The Law on State Flag was adopted by the Parliament (Riigikogu) on the 27th of June, 1922.After the forcible annexation of Estonia by the Soviet Union in June, 1940, this flag was banned.
In 1987/88, during the days of the "singing revolution", or the process of regaining independence, the blue-black-white flag was used openly as a national symbol. On the 24th of February, 1989, the blue-black-white national flag of Estonia was flown from the tower of Pikk Hermann.
The blue-black-white flag was re-adopted as the state flag on the 7th of August, 1990 and the Law on State Flag was passed on the 6th of April, 1993.


State coat of arms

The Estonian coat of arms comes in two formats, a large one which shows three blue lions, passant gardant, on a golden shield framed on each side by gilded branch of the oak tree with the stems of the branches crossing at the base of the shield. The small shield is identical except for the gilded branches.

The design of the shield originates from the XII century, when the Danish King Valdemar II presented the City of Tallinn (Reval) with a coat of arms similar to that of the state of Denmark, showing three lions. A similar motif was transposed to the coat of arms of the Province of Estonia, which was adopted by Catherine II, Empress of Russia, on the 4th of October, 1788.
The Parliament (Riigikogu) of the Republic of Estonia adopted the state coat of arms on the 19th of June, 1925. After the forcible annexation of Estonia by the Soviet Union in 1940, this coat of arms was banned.
The use of the historic coat of arms as the state coat of arms of the Republic of Estonia was re-adopted on the 7th of August, 1990. The Law on State Coat of Arms was passed on the 6th of April, 1993.

                                        National anthem

My Native Land, My Joy, Delight

The Estonian national anthem "My Native Land..." is a choral-like melody arranged by a Finnish composer of German origin Fredrik Pacius in 1843. In Estonia, Johann Voldemar Jannsen's lyrics were set to this melody and sung at the first Estonian Song Festival in 1869. It gained in popularity during the growing national movement. In Finland, it first became popular only as a students' song , but soon also became more widely accepted. When both Estonia and Finland became independent after the First World War this identical melody with different words was recognized as the national anthem by both nations. Officially, Estonia adopted it in 1920, after the War of Independence. During the decades of the Soviet occupation of Estonia, the melody was strictly forbidden and people were sent to Siberia for singing it. However, even during the worst years the familiar tune could be heard over Finnish radio, every day at the beginning and end of the program. Thus, the melody could never be forgotten. With the restoration of Estonian independence, the national anthem has, of course, been restored too.

 

                                                        ESTONIA

 

The ancestors of present-day Estonians lived in the area since pre-Christian times. Vikings passed through the region on their explorations and trade missions to the Slavic lands to the East, and in the 11^th and 12^th centuries A.D., Danes, Swedes, and Russians tried unsuccessfully to Christianize and conquer the area. The Germans entered Estonian lands next, and their missionary military orders finally prevailed. By 1227 southern Estonia and most of its islands were controlled by the Teutonic Order; northern Estonia became a part of Denmark.

By the end of the Middle Ages, the land that forms present-day Estonia belonged to Sweden, but in 1721 the Russians-led by Peter 1 (the Great)-wrested all the Baltic provinces from the Swedish Crown and placed them under Russian rule.

 

The Estonian national awakening took place in the 19^th century, culminating in two decades of independence - from February 1918 to June 1940. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, Estonia was occupied by Germany, but in September 1944, the Soviet Red Army took Tallinn, and Soviet rule was again imposed on the country. To break the resistance to Soviet rule, large numbers of Estonians (about 60,000 people) were deported in the late 1940s. During the following decades, Estonia was controlled by the Soviet Union and its ideology.

 

Estonia proclaimed its sovereignty in November 1989. In a referendum in March 1991, almost 80 percent of the voters favored gradual independence. On August 20, 1991, Estonia declared itself independent. In early September the State Council of the Soviet Union recognized this declaration of freedom.

Estonia’s first year of independence was devoted to the formulation of new directions. The pace of change quickened with the introduction of a new currency, the kroon, in mid-1992, and by late 1994 Estonia could claim solid progress on its way to a democratic, prosperous society.

 

The highest legislative body in Estonia is the 105-member parliament (the riigikogu). Its president is the formal head of the country. Estonia is the most northerly of the Baltic republics. Its squarish shape gives it four borders: the Gulf of Finland to the north, Russia to the east, Latvia to the south, and the Baltic Sea to the west. Estonian territory also includes some 800 islands and islets, the largest of which are Saaremaa and Hiiuma. The landscape is mostly flat, with low moraine hills, numerous short rivers, and about 1,500 lakes.

The climate of Estonia is pleasant, with cool summers and moderate winters. Precipitation levels are usually high, sometimes resulting in flooding. Because of its northern latitude, summer days and winter nights in Estonia are long.

 

About 60 percent of the inhabitants of Estonia are Estonians, while 30 percent are Russians. The remaining 10 percent consist of Ukrainians and other peoples. Estonians are ethnic cousins to all Finno-Ugric peoples who migrated to Europe from the Ural hinterlands. These include Finns, Laps, and Hungarians. Strongly influenced throughout the centuries by the Germans as well as their Finnish and Baltic neighbors, Estonians began to assume their modern identity in the 19^th century.

 

Estonians are cultured, well-educated people who have developed modern literary forms since the 19^th century. As early as the 1870s and 1880s, virtually all Estonians were literate, and many were bilingual, fluent in German and later Russian, under Czar Alexander III in the 1880s and 1890s. Tallinn, the Estonian capital, boasts numerous theaters, orchestras, and regular music and songs festivals.

There are a good number of higher education institutions in Estonia. These universities and technical schools have lead to a well educated population that has increased the interest of foreign investors. Tuition for these schools used to be paid by the State but many universities have found it necessary to begin charging educational fees. Tartu University (founded in 1632) is one of the oldest universities in Europe. Tartu students study a variety of subjects ranging from science to the humanities with the medicine being one of the most popular subjects. In fact, Tartu University’s medical program is known around Europe. During the last few years many new private and foreign universities, colleges, and other higher education establishments have been founded.

 

Estonia is an industrial country, specializing in the manufacture of  precision instruments, textiles, and food processing. The land contains mineral deposits of oil shale, phosphate rock, and peat, along with small deposits of uranium. Industrial development has caused serious pollution in Estonia. 

The Estonian economy has undergone a massive change in recent years, mostly due to the strong banking system and extensive privatization. The effective use of the income from tourists has also helped the inflow of money into Estonian entrepreneurship. The abandonment of the centrally planned economy has provided opportunities for Estonian and foreign entrepreneurs to “make their million”. The inflow of foreign investment into Estonia has allowed the country to grow at a far quicker rate than most of its Baltic and central European neighbors. On the streets one can see lovely Estonian-owned shops and service enterprises that keep pace with foreign ones.

 

Tallinn. With a population of roughly 500,000, Tallinn is both a medieval Hanseatic town, full of picturesque winding streets and old buildings, and a modern, smart city with lively cafes, numerous galleries, and western Scandinavian spirit. Every summer the city hosts a number of music and dramatic festivals. Tallinn is also an industrial center and an important grain-handling port.

 

Tartu. The country’s second-largest city, Tartu (known in Germany as Dorpat) is a major manufacturing and intellectual center. Tartu is the seat of well-known university. The 19^th -century Estonian nationalist revival was centered in this city.

 

Pärnu, a town on the Gulf of Riga, is a favorite resort that prides itself on new and refurbished hotels full of visiting tourists.

 

European Union

 

Initially, the EU consisted of just six countries: Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom joined in 1973, Greece in 1981, Spain and Portugal in 1986, Austria, Finland and Sweden in 1995. In May, 2004 ten new countries joined: Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.

 

European Union (EU), organization of European countries dedicated to increasing economic integration and strengthening cooperation among its members. The European Union headquarters is in Brussels, Belgium.

The European Union was formally established on November 1, 1993. The EU has a number of objectives. Its principal goal is to promote and expand cooperation among member states in economics and trade, social issues, foreign policy, security and defense, and judicial matters. Another major goal has been to implement Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), which established a single currency for EU members. With the exception of EMU, which went into effect in 1999, progress toward these goals has been erratic. Various factors have limited the EU’s ability to achieve its goals, including disagreements among member states, external political and economic problems, and pressure for membership from the new democracies of Eastern Europe.

 

The dream of a united Europe is almost as old as Europe itself. The early 9th-century empire of Charlemagne covered much of western Europe. In the early 1800s the French empire of Napoleon I encompassed most of the European continent. During World War II (1939-1945), German leader Adolf Hitler nearly succeeded in uniting Europe under Nazi domination. All these efforts failed because they relied on forcibly subjugating other nations rather than fostering cooperation among them.

 

Postwar aspirations for a European supranational organization had both political and economic motives. The political motive was based on the conviction that only a supranational organization could eliminate the threat of war between European countries. Some supporters of European political unity, such as the French statesman Jean Monnet, further believed that if the nations of Europe were to resume a dominant role in world affairs, they had to speak with one voice and command resources comparable to those of the United States.

The economic motive rested on the belief that larger markets would promote competition and thus lead to greater productivity and higher standards of living. Economic and political viewpoints merged in the assumptions that economic strength was the basis of political and military power, and that a fully integrated European economy would reduce conflict among European nations. Because countries were hesitant to surrender any control over national affairs, most of the practical proposals for supranational organizations assumed that economic integration would precede political unification.

 

In July 1967 the three organizations (the EEC, the ECSC, and Euratom) fully merged as the European Community (EC). The basic economic features of the EEC treaty were gradually implemented, and in 1968 all tariffs between member states were eliminated. No progress was made on enlargement of the EC or on any other new proposals, however, until after de Gaulle resigned as president of France in May 1969. The next French president, Georges Pompidou, was more open to new initiatives within the EC.

 

The Treaty on European Union (often called the Maastricht Treaty) founded the EU and was intended to expand political, economic, and social integration among the member states. After lengthy negotiations, it was accepted by the European Council at Maastricht, The Netherlands, in December 1991. Of particular significance, the treaty committed the EU to Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Under EMU the member nations would unify their economies and adopt a single currency by 1999. The Maastricht Treaty also set strict criteria that member states had to meet before they could join EMU. In addition, the treaty created new structures designed to promote a more integrated foreign and security policy and to encourage greater cooperation on judicial and police matters. The member states granted the EU governing bodies more authority in several policy areas, including the environment, education, health, and consumer protection.

 

The Amsterdam Treaty called on member nations to cooperate to create jobs throughout Europe, protect the environment, improve public health, and safeguard consumer rights. In addition, the treaty provided for the removal of barriers to travel and immigration among the EU member states except for the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Denmark, all of which retained their original border controls. The treaty included the potential for cooperation and integration with the Western European Union (WEU), an organization of Western European powers focused on defense. It also allowed the possibility of admitting countries from Eastern Europe to the EU. The Amsterdam Treaty was signed by EU members on October 2, 1997.

 

The EU’s attempts to establish a single European currency, as set out in the Maastricht Treaty, were controversial from the start. Some EU countries, including the United Kingdom, worried that a shared European currency would threaten their national identity and governmental authority. Despite such concerns, many EU member countries struggled to meet the economic requirements for participating in EMU and adopting a shared currency, which was named the euro.

These requirements were stringent: (1) a country’s rate of inflation could not be more than 1.5 percent higher than an average of the rate in the three countries with the lowest inflation; (2) a country’s budget deficit could not exceed 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), and its national debt could not exceed 60 percent of GDP; (3) a country’s long-term interest rate could not be more than 2 percent higher than an average of the rate in the three countries with the lowest interest rates; (4) a country could not have devalued its currency against any other member nation’s for at least two years prior to monetary union. EMU participants also agreed to abide by the Stability and Growth Pact, a budgetary agreement designed to underpin the euro after its planned launch in 1999. The pact required countries to keep their annual budget deficits below 3 percent of GDP or else risk fines, and it directed countries to take measures to eliminate their budget deficits altogether.

 

Most countries found it difficult to meet the EMU requirements. Measures to reduce inflation and high interest rates contributed to increasing unemployment, while efforts to control government deficits often led to higher taxes. These consequences compounded the problems of economic recession that most countries were already experiencing.

As the deadline for EMU approached, misgivings arose from many quarters that the economic climate was not right, that levels of economic performance across the countries were still too disparate, and that several countries had not strictly met the Maastricht criteria. Despite these concerns, the EU officially agreed in May 1998 to adopt the euro for 11 of the 15 member countries beginning on January 1, 1999. This agreement also created the European Central Bank (ECB) to oversee the new currency and to take charge of the monetary policies of the EU. The countries to adopt the euro were Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain.

The United Kingdom, Sweden, and Denmark met the EMU criteria but decided not to participate. Greece had hoped to be included in the first wave of countries to adopt the euro but failed to meet the criteria.

 

On January 1, 1999, the 11 nations participating in the so-called euro zone began to use the euro for accounting purposes and electronic money transfers; their national currencies remained in circulation for other uses. Greece adopted the euro in January 2001, becoming the 12th member of the euro zone. In 2002 the ECB began issuing euro-denominated coins and banknotes, and the currencies of countries within the euro zone ceased to be legal tender. After some initial teething troubles, the euro established itself as a viable currency in international money markets. Concern now shifted to the enforcement of a common monetary policy, under strict direction from the European Central Bank. Slowing growth and rising unemployment across the euro zone after 2000, however, led to higher budget deficits, and the European Commission soon had to warn Ireland and Germany to reduce their budgetary expenditures to conform to limits required by the Stability and Growth Pact. By 2002 there had emerged within the EU a broader concern about the continued feasibility of the Stability and Growth Pact. Many more countries seemed to be nearing, or in breach of, permissible budget deficits. At the same time, efforts to enforce the pact’s deficit ceiling were seen as inhibiting expenditures needed by national governments to promote social welfare and economic recovery.

 

The introduction of EMU led to unprecedented integration and cooperation among EU members. One consequence was a growing concern among European citizens and some EU member governments that the major EU institutions were not sufficiently democratic or accountable. Much of this concern centered on the European Commission. As the power of the EU grew, so did worries that the commission exercised too much control with too little oversight. At the same time, there were also concerns that the one democratically elected institution of the EU, the European Parliament, had little real power.

 

The members of the EU cooperate in three distinct areas, often called pillars. At the heart of this system is the European Community (EC) pillar with its supranational functions and its governing institutions. The EC pillar is flanked by two pillars based on intergovernmental cooperation: Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and Justice and Home Affairs (JHA). These two pillars are a result of the Maastricht agreement to develop closer cooperation in these areas. However, because the members were unwilling to cede authority to new supranational institutions, policy decisions in these pillars are made by unanimous cooperation between members and cannot be enforced. For the most part, the governing institutions of the EC pillar have little or no input in the other two. he CFSP and JHA pillars are based entirely on intergovernmental cooperation, and decisions must be made unanimously. CFSP is a forum for foreign policy discussions, common declarations, and common actions that work toward developing a security and defense policy. It has successfully developed positions on a range of issues and has established some common policy actions; however, the CFSP has failed to agree on a common security and defense.

 

Some countries, led by France, want an integrated European military force, while others, especially the United Kingdom, insist that United States involvement through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is vital for European security.  This second argument was reinforced when the EU failed to resolve the crisis in Yugoslavia that began in 1991. Between 1991 and 1992 four of Yugoslavia’s six republics declared independence, resulting in a series of violent wars (see Yugoslav Succession, Wars of). EU attempts to find a settlement for these conflicts were ineffective because member states could not agree on how they should be involved, and they feared being dragged into military intervention. The Yugoslav crisis underlined the difficulties in achieving a common foreign policy for the EU. Effective international intervention in Yugoslavia ultimately came only with U.S. and NATO involvement, acting under the auspices of the United Nations.

 

As a result of lessons learned in Yugoslavia, clauses were included in the Amsterdam Treaty for improving cooperation on security and defense. Since the late 1990s the EU has developed the Common European Security and Defense Policy as an interim step toward the ultimate goal of a common defense policy.

The EU has expressed its determination to take on a greater international role and more responsibility for humanitarian operations and peacekeeping activities. The EU also began to develop a rapid-reaction military force to enable it to respond to crises quickly with combat troops. The EU has been more successful in JHA, which formalized and extended earlier intergovernmental cooperation in combating crime, especially drug trafficking, and in setting immigration and asylum policies. Under the Amsterdam Treaty, some aspects of JHA were moved to the supranational EC pillar. These related to asylum and visa issues, immigration policy, and external border controls. The JHA pillar is now primarily concerned with police cooperation and combating international crime. Standing above the three pillars and in a position to coordinate activities across all of them is the European Council. The council is in strict legal terms not an EU institution. It is the meeting place of the leaders of the national governments. Its decisions are almost always unanimous but usually require intense bargaining. The council shapes the integration process and has been responsible for almost all EU developments, including the SEA and the Maastricht, Amsterdam, and Nice treaties. The European Council has provided the EU with initiatives for further development, agendas in various policy fields, and decisions that it expects the EU to accept. The council’s actions illustrate one of the major dilemmas within the EU: how to promote further unity and integration while permitting national governments to retain as much influence as possible over decisions.

 

The European Community (EC) pillar contains all the governing institutions of the EU. The major ones are the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, the European Parliament, the European Court of Justice, and the Court of Auditors. In addition, there are many smaller bodies in the EC pillar, such as the Economic and Social Committee, and the Committee of the Regions.

 

The European Commission is the highest administrative body in the EU. Unlike the European Council, which oversees all three pillars of the EU, the commission concentrates almost solely on the EC pillar. It initiates, implements, and supervises policy. It is also responsible for the general financial management of the EU and for ensuring that member states adhere to EU decisions. The commission is meant to be the engine of European integration, and it spearheaded preparations for the single market and moves toward establishing the euro. urrently there are 20 commissioners, who are appointed by the member governments and are supported by a large administrative staff. France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom each appoint two commissioners; the other countries appoint one each. The policy of each member state selecting a commissioner became the subject of debate as preparations for EU enlargement progressed. If each country in an enlarged EU were allowed to appoint at least one commissioner, the commission would be much larger, making it too unwieldy to be an effective executive and decision-making authority. In addition, the fact that the commission is appointed by member governments and not elected by the people has raised questions about how much power it should be allowed to exercise.

 

The Treaty of Nice clarified details about the future structure of the commission in an enlarged EU. After 2005 each member state would have only one commissioner. However, when the EU reached 27 member states, the European Council would be obliged to determine how large the commission should be. The treaty also altered the selection procedures for commissioners, giving the European Council and the European Parliament a role in the confirmation process.

 

The Council of the European Union (formerly called the Council of Ministers) represents the national governments. It is the primary decision-making authority of the EU and is the most important and powerful EU body. Although its name is similar to that of the European Council, the Council of the European Union’s powers are essentially limited to the EC pillar, whereas the European Council oversees all three pillars of EU cooperation.

When the Council of the European Union meets, one government minister from each member state is present. However, the minister for each state is not the same for every meeting. Each member state sends its government minister who is most familiar with the topic at hand. For example, a council of defense ministers might discuss foreign policy, whereas a council of agriculture ministers would meet to discuss crop prices. The Council of the European Union adopts proposals and issues instructions to the European Commission. The council is expected to accomplish two goals that are not always compatible: further EU integration on one hand and protection of the interests of the member states on the other. This contradiction could become more difficult to reconcile as the EU continues to expand.

 

Decision-making in the council is complex. A few minor questions can be decided by a simple majority. Many issues, however, require what is called qualified majority voting, or QMV. In QMV each country has an indivisible bloc of votes that is roughly proportional to its population. It takes two-thirds of the total number of votes to make a qualified majority. QMV was introduced in some policy areas to replace the need for a unanimous vote. This has made the decision-making process faster and easier because it prevents any one state from exercising a veto. Since the Single European Act, QMV has been steadily extended to more areas. Many important decisions, however, still require unanimous support.

 

The European Parliament (EP) is made up of 626 members who are directly elected by the citizens of the EU. Direct elections to the EP were implemented in 1979. Before that time, members were appointed by the legislatures of the member governments.

The European Parliament was originally designed merely as an advisory body; however, its right to participate in some EU decisions was extended by the later treaties. It must be consulted about matters relating to the EU budget, which it can reject; it can remove the European Commission as a body through a vote of no confidence; and it can veto the accession of potential member states.

 

The European Parliament’s influence is essentially negative: It can block but rarely initiate legislation, its consultative opinions can be ignored, and it has no power over the Council of the European Union. Its effectiveness is limited by two structural problems: It conducts its business in 11 official languages, with consequent huge translation costs, and it is nomadic, using three sites in different countries for its meetings. Unless changes are made, these weaknesses will most likely intensify as the union grows larger. At the same time, there have been frequent calls for expanding the powers of the European Parliament, which would increase the democratic accountability of the EU. The weaknesses of the European Parliament can be remedied, however, only by the national governments. To cope with an increase in the number of member states due to EU enlargement, the Treaty of Nice allowed for a limit to the size of the EP by providing for a reallocation of seats among the members.

 

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) is the judicial arm of the EU. Each member country appoints one judge to the court. The ECJ is responsible for the law that the EU establishes for itself and its member states. It also ensures that other EU institutions and the member states conform with the provisions of EU treaties and legislation. The court has no direct links with national courts and no control over how they apply and interpret national law, but it has established that EU law supersedes national law. The ECJ’s assertion that EU law takes precedence over national law, and the fact that there is no appeal against it, have given the ECJ a powerful role in the EU. This role has, on occasion, drawn criticism from both national governments and national courts. The ECJ has declared both for and against EU institutions and member states.

 

The ECJ’s historically high caseload was eased in 1989 when the Court of First Instance was created. This court hears certain categories of cases, including those brought by EU officials and cases seeking damages. Rulings by the Court of First Instance may be appealed to the ECJ, but only on points of law. Despite the establishment of this court, the ECJ’s caseload has continued to rise. As a result, the Treaty of Nice introduced further reforms to reduce the accumulated backlog of cases.

 

The European Central Bank (ECB) began operations in 1998. It is overseen by a six-member executive board that is chosen by agreement of EU member governments and includes the ECB president and vice president. The ECB has exclusive authority for EU monetary policy, including such things as setting interest rates and regulating the money supply. In addition, the ECB played and continues to play a major role in overseeing the inauguration and consolidation of the euro as the single EU currency. Its authority over monetary policy and its independence from other EU institutions make the ECB a powerful body. There are misgivings in some quarters that the ECB is too independent, leading to a debate over whether it should be subject to political direction.

 

Other important bodies in the EU include the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions. The Economic and Social Committee is a 222-member advisory body drawn from national interest groups of employers, trade unions, and other occupational groups. It must be consulted by the European Commission and the Council of the European Union on issues dealing with economic and social welfare. The Committee of the Regions, also with 222 members, was formed in 1994 as a forum for representatives of regional and local governments. It was intended to strengthen the democratic credentials of the EU, but it has only a consultative and advisory role.

European Union.

 

A major goal of the EU has been to establish a single market in which the economies of all the EU member states are unified. The EU has sought to meet this objective in three ways: by defining a common commercial policy, by reducing economic differences among its richer and poorer members, and by stabilizing the currencies of its members.

The 1957 Rome treaties obliged the EU to adopt a Common Commercial Policy (CCP) and a Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). By 1968 the EU had also created a customs union in which all tariffs and duties among members were eliminated. Finally, members had defined uniform commercial practices for trade with nonmember states. In the 1980s the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) was adopted to regulate fishing in EU waters.

 

The EU has attempted to address regional economic differences through agencies such as the European Social Fund, the European Regional Development Fund, the Cohesion Fund, and the European Investment Bank (EIB). These agencies provide money through loans or grants to promote development in the economically disadvantaged areas of the EU. However, apart from activities of the EIB, this funding is limited by the size of the EU’s overall budget, which is equivalent to about 1 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) of all the member states.

Finally, the EU attempted to stabilize the currencies of its members with the European Monetary System (EMS). The EMS was prompted not only by the desire for a single market, but also by international economic problems and fluctuations in exchange rates. These problems also convinced the EU of the importance of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), in which both the economies and the currencies of the members would be unified.

 

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was established by the 1957 Rome treaty that created the European Economic Community. The policy reflected a belief in the economic value of agriculture. Memories of the economic hardships that followed the two world wars led the EEC founders to believe that member states should be able to feed their populations from their own resources.

The CAP was intended to stabilize agricultural markets, improve productivity, and ensure a fair deal for both farmers and consumers. It has three major elements: a single market for agricultural products with a system of common prices to producers across the EU; preference for EU producers through a common levy on all agricultural imports from abroad; and shared financial responsibility for guaranteeing prices.

From the beginning, the common prices set were based on political pressure from farmers and governments rather than market considerations. This led to massive overproduction. Prices remained artificially high, and all surpluses were bought by the EU and either stored, destroyed, or sold at very low prices on international markets. The costs became a huge burden. Even so, there were few internal critics, although the CAP consumed two-thirds of the EU budget in the early 1980s. The CAP was, however, unpopular overseas. Developing countries believed it hurt their own export agriculture, while the United States and other major food producers attacked the CAP’s protectionism, distortion of prices, and dumping of surplus produce on world markets.

 

Despite complaints, EU member states with strong farming interests were initially unwilling to accept the need for reform. The CAP was almost the only major common policy possessed by the EU, and consequently it was an important symbol of integration. Nonetheless, the EU did agree to reforms to the CAP in 1984 and 1988. These agreements, which imposed production quotas on some types of agriculture and reduced agricultural spending, were driven by a combination of external pressure and estimates that CAP costs would soon outstrip EU resources. A more radical revision was finalized in 1992. This revision switched EU spending from supporting artificially high agricultural prices to directly subsidizing farmers’ incomes. This involved cutting guaranteed prices to farmers, and the effect was a significant reduction in CAP costs and in the level of support given to farmers. By 2001 CAP expenditure had been reduced to 46 percent of the EU budget.

 

Still, the CAP remained the largest item in the EU budget and continued to provoke resentment among many EU citizens and other world producers. The commitment to the CAP as a symbol of integration may not guarantee its future, however, especially given the EU’s decision to accept members from Eastern Europe. The economies of these countries are more agricultural and less efficient than EU states. Without major reform, almost all CAP expenditure would have to be redirected to these states, which would be politically and economically impossible.

The European Commission attempted to address the future of CAP funding in Agenda 2000, a document detailing a strategy for enlargement. A wide-ranging reform program proposed by the commission sought to reduce payments to larger farms and to scale back market supports and export subsidies. But strong differences of opinion remained between the member states. In 2002 the commission’s reform plans were largely abandoned, and a group of member states led by France effectively deferred a more radical overhaul. Instead, limits were placed on how much assistance new EU members could expect from the CAP, suggesting that for the foreseeable future there would be a two-tier pattern of funding favoring the older member states.

 

The other major common policy is the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) of 1982. It imposed controls on access to fish stocks and attempted to preserve the fisheries. The CFP set up a structure of price and compensation systems modeled on the CAP. The policy successfully limited overfishing in EU waters. However, national fishing industries have objected to its system of fixing prices and allocating to each country strict quotas on the amount of each fish species that can be caught. Controversy over the CFP has been persistent, with frequent disputes between the EU and national fishing industries and among member states.

 

Under the 1957 Rome treaty that created the EEC, the signatories pledged to standardize policies regarding working conditions, social insurance, and similar matters. However, little progress was made until an increase in oil prices brought about the worldwide economic depression of the 1970s. At that time, the European Regional Development Fund was created and the moribund European Social Fund, which had originally been established by the Rome treaty, was reactivated. In 1994 the EU established the more comprehensive Cohesion Fund for reducing the economic gap between its richest and poorest areas.

 

The European Regional Development Fund is concerned with infrastructure developments proposed by member governments. Since 1989 it has focused on regions with weak economies, severe industrial decline, or problems of rural development. Each member country is eligible to receive a percentage of the fund’s budget, determined roughly by its population size and economic wealth. The fund normally covers only 50 percent of the proposed costs; the remainder has to come from national sources. The European Social Fund is organized in much the same way, but it focuses mainly on the training and retraining of workers. Since 1988 it has concentrated more on long-term and youth unemployment, especially in the economically disadvantaged regions of the EU. All countries have benefited from the funds, but the vast bulk of grants have gone to poorer areas.  Another instrument for reducing economic differences between EU member states is the Cohesion Fund. The fund was established to transfer money to the poorer EU states to assist them in meeting the criteria for Economic and Monetary Union. As with the Regional Development Fund and the Social Fund, the majority of grants from the Cohesion Fund have gone to the poorer member states.

 

The European Investment Bank (EIB) was established in 1957 under the Rome treaty that created the EEC. Its primary objective is to fund projects that promote European integration. It focuses mainly on industry, energy, and infrastructure. The member states contribute to its finances, but it raises most of its funds on international markets. Some 8 percent of its budget goes to projects outside the EU. The bank only offers loans, not grants, and its contribution must be matched by an equivalent outlay from other sources. The EIB is an autonomous body able to make its own decisions free of political direction, within the general legal framework of the EU. It has been one of the most successful EU bodies. Since 1993 its annual lending volume has exceeded that of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank).

 

The European Monetary System (EMS) is the exchange rate structure of the EU. It was established in 1979 to stabilize exchange rates among members at a time when currencies were fluctuating dramatically because of the economic recession of the 1970s. The promotion of stable currencies, it was hoped, would provide the foundations for a future monetary union and a single currency among member states.

The core of the EMS and the engine of stabilization is the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). This system was designed to reduce the amount that the currencies of member states could fluctuate against each other. By evening out exchange rate fluctuations and stabilizing currencies, the ERM was intended to stimulate trade and investment among EU members, and to help prevent inflation by linking weaker national currencies to the strong and stable German national currency, the deutsche mark.

In addition to the ERM, the EMS introduced the European Currency Unit (ECU), which was used for accounting and for administrative purposes. The ECU was replaced by the euro when EMU went into effect on January 1, 1999.

 

The EMS was highly successful in the 1980s. It helped promote a sense of collective responsibility and discipline that contributed to a reduction of inflation and, after 1987, to a period of exchange rate stability. Its success led to the further push in the Maastricht Treaty toward full economic and monetary integration. However, once currency realignments under the ERM had been largely completed, the EMS became more rigid, and currencies were allowed to fluctuate against each other only by very small amounts. This rigidity prevented countries experiencing economic difficulties from simply adjusting their exchange rates as they might have done otherwise.

Exchange rate rigidity, coupled with differing economic and monetary conditions in the member states, made it difficult for the EMS to hold stronger and weaker currencies together when currency traders began to have doubts about the value of certain members’ currencies. Feeding such doubts were Germany’s reunification in 1990, which generated huge costs, followed by difficulties in ratifying the Maastricht Treaty. Waves of currency speculation in 1992 and 1993 forced several countries to devalue their currencies, and the United Kingdom and Italy had to leave the ERM. The EMS survived by increasing the amount that currencies could fluctuate against one another, but the increase was so great that members’ currencies could fluctuate almost at will. The EMS was held together only by the EU’s political will to create monetary union and a single currency.

The role of the EMS has remained essentially unchanged with the introduction of the euro. It regulates exchange rates between the euro and those EU states that did not join the single currency.

 

Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is a step beyond a single market toward further integration. EMU requires an intense degree of economic coordination among its members. Participating nations must integrate their budgetary policies, establish common interest rates, and use a single currency. It is a logical step forward from the European Community’s customs union of 1968 and the decision in the 1987 Single European Act to move to a single market.

EMU first appeared on the EC agenda in the late 1960s, following the community’s economic success. At that time, concerns were growing that the post-World War II fixed exchange rate system was beginning to crumble. This system linked the major world currencies to the U.S. dollar, which was tied to the price of gold. However, in the mid-1960s the dollar began to weaken, and confidence in the system waned. What the EC wanted was a fixed exchange rate system that was less susceptible to the influence of the dollar. In 1969 EC leaders asked Pierre Werner, the premier of Luxembourg, to head a committee to devise a new system for the EC. In 1970 they accepted Werner’s recommendation for a movement to full EMU by 1980. Poor economic conditions in the 1970s, however, forced postponement of the Werner Plan.

 

In 1971 the United States uncoupled the U.S. dollar from gold, and subsequently, currencies that had been tied to the dollar became floating currencies with no fixed exchange rates. Then in 1973 oil prices quadrupled, producing a tumultuous economic climate in which governments were faced with both rising inflation and rising unemployment. EMU was more or less forgotten as the EC instead concentrated on trying to achieve a more modest structure of currency stability. After some initial difficulties, the result was the successful European Monetary System of 1979.

The seemingly positive effects of the EMS and the 1987 decision to form a single market led to a resurrection of the Werner Plan, with EMU to be implemented in three stages after 1990. In Madrid in June 1989 the European Council set up an intergovernmental conference (IGC) to flesh out the proposal. The IGC report was incorporated into the Maastricht Treaty in 1991. It was accepted that the first stage of EMU, the elimination of exchange controls and restrictions on the flow of capital, had already begun.

 

The second stage was set for 1994, when member states would begin to coordinate their economies to reduce inflation and budget deficits. Full EMU, with the inauguration of a single currency under the direction of an EU central bank, would begin in 1999 at the latest.

After pressure from Germany, which wanted the single currency to be as strong as the deutsche mark, the EU decided that countries entering the third stage would have to meet strict economic criteria on the size of government deficit, interest rate levels, inflation, and currency stability. However, the currency speculation problems in 1992 and 1993 that caused Italy and the United Kingdom to leave the ERM, along with a general slide into economic recession, raised doubts about how many countries would meet the EMU criteria. Many governments struggled to control inflation and budget deficits through cuts in government spending and other austerity measures, but their efforts often led to higher unemployment and popular discontent. By 1998 many people within the EU believed that the qualification criteria would have to be relaxed for EMU to occur. Despite these worries, only Greece failed to meet the criteria. On January 1, 1999, the single currency, the euro, went into use. Greece was permitted to adopt the euro two years later, on January 1, 2001, after the Greek government succeeded in lowering inflation and budget deficits.

 

The economic success of EMU would depend on whether the euro was accepted in the international markets as a stable and strong currency and the extent to which it led to a greater convergence of national economies and greater mobility of production, goods, and services within the EU. There is still debate over whether EMU has a sufficiently firm foundation for these goals to be achieved. However, many EMU supporters find disagreements about the economic costs and benefits less important than the conviction that EMU, even if economically flawed, is an important step toward political integration.

 

EMU therefore supports the views of Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet that political union is best achieved through economic union. It has also reinforced the central role of France and Germany in the EU. The reunification of Germany reawakened French concerns of German dominance in Europe and energized France’s desire to influence German economic policy. At the same time, Germany wanted to allay fears of an ascendant militaristic German nationalism. Much the same as in 1950, when the European Coal and Steel Community was created, both governments believed that these political issues could be resolved through economic integration. These concerns underpinned a more widespread belief that long-term economic and political benefits outweighed the initial costs of switching to a single currency.

European Union.

 

One of the major objectives of the European Union is to speak with one voice and to have a unified policy position on world issues. This has been easier to achieve in economics and trade than on political problems. Bilateral and multilateral trade agreements have been signed between the EU and most developing countries. Common political positions, however, have been hindered by conflicts between national interests, despite close collaboration among EU member states and the development of common foreign policy statements.

Such collaboration has not always resulted in common action. EU countries were divided over the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the post-1991 crises in the former Yugoslavia, and future relations with Russia and Eastern Europe. In each instance, differences arose between members over how and to what extent the EU should become involved in foreign policy problems, and what the results of any EU action would be for members’ economies and political relationships.

 

By 1995 all the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe had applied for EU membership. The countries of Eastern Europe had less-developed economies than those of Western Europe, raising questions about their ability to cope with the competitive pressures of the EU’s internal market. In addition, the EU was concerned about the stability of democratic institutions in these countries and their commitment to human rights and the protection of minorities. Expansion would require a significant reevaluation of EU programs—especially the CAP—and distribution of EU resources. The richer member states worried that they would have to pay more into EU funds, while poorer member states feared that their share of EU funding for agriculture and regional development would be drastically reduced. Equally, it was argued that enlargement without significant institutional reform would reduce the effectiveness of the EU. Despite these worries, trade between Eastern and Western Europe substantially increased after 1990. Western nations began to make commercial investments in Eastern Europe; at the same time, the EU provided economic aid, formed joint ventures, and signed formal agreements of political and cultural cooperation. In 1997 the EU agreed to open membership talks with Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia, with EU membership coming sometime after 2000. Then, in 2000, the EU opened accession negotiations with Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Romania, and Slovakia. (At the same time the EU declined to pursue in detail the long-standing application of membership from Turkey, noting concerns about the country’s human rights record.) In 2002 the EU agreed to formally admit 10 of these European nations—all except Bulgaria and Romania—as member states in 2004.

 

Relations between the EU and the non-European industrialized countries, especially the United States and Japan, have been both rewarding and frustrating. The EU follows a protectionist policy, especially with respect to agriculture, which on occasion has led the United States in particular to adopt retaliatory measures. In general, however, relations have been positive. The United States and Japan are the largest markets outside Europe for EU products and are also the largest non-European suppliers. he EU has been less protectionist when dealing with developing countries, which receive more than one-third of its exports. By the mid-1990s all underdeveloped countries could export industrial products to EU nations duty free; many agricultural products that competed directly with those of the EU could also enter duty free. In addition, the EU has reached special agreements with many countries in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific (the so-called ACP countries). In 1963 it signed a convention in Yaoundé, Cameroon, offering commercial, technical, and financial cooperation to 18 African countries, mostly former French and Belgian colonies.

In 1975 it signed a convention in Lomé, Togo, with 46 ACP countries, granting them free access to the EU for virtually all of their products, as well as providing industrial and financial aid. The Lomé convention was renewed and extended to a total of 58 countries in 1979; to 65 in 1984; and to 69 in 1989. In 2000 the Lomé convention was superseded by the Cotonou Agreement, which provides a more wide-ranging and longer-term basis for the EU’s relationship with ACP countries. The EU has concluded similar agreements with all the Mediterranean states except Libya, as well as other countries in Latin America and Asia.

European Union.

 

The EU has come a long way since 1951. Its membership has grown to include most of Western Europe and it is poised to absorb much of Eastern Europe as well. It has developed a common body of law, common policies and practices, and a great deal of cooperation among its members. Its progress, however, has been uneven, with spurts of activity separated by dormant periods. After vigorous activity in the 1960s, it was not until the mid-1980s that the EU moved decisively to greater integration. In the 1990s concerns about the economic climate and evidence of popular disenchantment with the EU led to a slowdown in innovation. Both the Amsterdam and Nice treaties emphasized consolidation rather than addressing outstanding issues.

 

This erratic progress is in part due to two unresolved conflicts within the EU. The first is whether to give priority to “deepening” or “widening,” that is, whether to concentrate upon integrating the existing members further, or to welcome new members so that all can have an input into the kind of Europe they want. The second is the conflict between supranationalism and intergovernmentalism. Despite broad acceptance of the supranational principle, national governments have been reluctant to cede control over all policy areas to EU institutions. The development of three distinct EU pillars reflects this reality: Member states have declined to yield national control to supranational institutions over politically sensitive areas such as foreign policy and judicial affairs. The most immediate challenge facing the EU is to secure the long-term success of the euro, an outcome that rests in part upon how acceptable it proves to world financial institutions and markets. Enlarging the EU by including Eastern Europe should, over time, improve economic prospects by extending the single market and stimulating economic growth and trade. The EU hopes that enlargement will raise the EU’s standing as the major European voice in world affairs and contribute to security and stability throughout Europe.

 

It has proven difficult, however, for the EU and its member states to forge a united position on the future of EU finances and structures after enlargement. Under existing criteria, the bulk of funds dispersed under the CAP to support agriculture—by far the largest element of EU spending—will have to be transferred to the new member states. This has alarmed poorer member states accustomed to receiving these funds, while richer members are reluctant to provide more CAP funding.

 

The budget issue and enlargement also present problems for the structure of the EU. They raise questions about the nature of the European Commission, how nations should be represented on the commission, and the extent of the commission’s authority and responsibility. As the power of the EU has grown, the organization has drawn criticism for being undemocratic, since the European Parliament has no real powers or control over decisions. Furthermore, the decision-making bodies, especially the commission, are not subject to any democratic check.

Uncertainties about the future of the EU are underlined by concerns among member states over the potential loss of their ability to act independently. A reluctance to cede national authority has been most pronounced in security policy. The EU failed to present a coherent front in either the Persian Gulf War or the former Yugoslavia when required to move from a common policy position to a common action.

 

The desire of some countries to build a common defense policy is resisted by others that insist that at best a European defense force can only be supportive of and subordinated to NATO.

All this raises further questions about what the EU is and what it wants to achieve. For almost all its life span, European integration has resulted from elite initiatives and agreements that did not involve national electorates. In the 1990s, however, the picture changed because of the single market, demands for more harmonization, and the Maastricht Treaty. Popular discontent with elite decisions increased, indicating that electorates could no longer be taken for granted. Almost all EU activity has focused on building the equivalent of a state encompassing much of Europe. Yet little effort has focused on how to create a European nation with a strong bond of identity across national borders, making European citizens feel they have much, including a future, in common. The effort to forge a European identity will be a major challenge of the 21st century.

 

Despite these challenges, the EU is unlikely to disappear. It has become a fact of life, with the countries enmeshed together in a host of cooperative practices. The EU has had great success in developing a culture of collaboration, and it occupies a place at the center of Europe. What is at issue is not its survival, but what kind of EU will lead Europe in the 21st century.

Halloween

 

America is a melting pot of cultures from all over the world. Because we are a nation of people from many different cultures, our holidays tend to blend bits and pieces from different cultures into one American celebration. Halloween is one of the best examples of a holiday with a rich tradition of "blending."
 
October 31. Halloween. Costumes and Jack O'Lanterns. Trick or Treat and bonfires. We generally see it as a harmless children's celebration. And it is. Now. The history of Halloween, however, dates back before Christianity and involves death and evil spirits and fears of all sorts.
 
Let's start with the date, October 31. When mankind first started to settle down into villages, there were two sources of food. You farmed and you raised cattle. Cattle were easy. On May first, you drove the cattle out into your field. On November first, you brought them back into the barn for the winter. Your entire year was two seasons - growing season and winter. Life and Death. Beltane and Samhain. Since November first was the start of the season of death, when food grew scarce and the plants all died, it was also the night to honor the Lord of the Dead, Anwinn. The belief was that spirits of those who had died during that year also gathered that night, driven out of the bare woods and empty fields. The spirits returned to their homes and needed the help of their kin to cross over to the land of the dead. Relatives would hollow out turnips and gourds and use them to carry the spirits to the proper location.
 
Not just good spirits were loose on Samhain - evil spirits, witches and goblins also roamed the earth. To protect your relative's spirit, you'd paint a scary face on the gourd to chase the evil spirits away. And to play it safe, you'd also disguise yourself by painting your face with hideous paints and donning a wild costume.
 
This just left the problem of the faeries. Faeries also ran free on the Eve of Samhain. Faeries weren't evil, they weren't good. They were faeries. They liked rewarding good deeds and did not like to be crossed. And on Samhain, the faeries would disguise themselves as beggars and go door to door asking for handouts. Those who gave them food were rewarded. Those who slammed the door tended to experience some unpleasantness.
 
Bonfires were very popular part of the ceremony in the Celtic countries. In Ireland, the fires were all allowed to go out. A large bonfire was lit in the center of town and sacrifices were thrown in. From this one central bonfire in each town, all the hearths and fireplaces were re lit. The same ceremony took place in Scotland, but the Scots also believed that you could tell the future by staring into the bonfire.
 
In 43 AD, the Roman Empire conquered the Celts and Celts and Romans found themselves living in the same villages. The Celtic festival of Samhain was celebrated at the same time as Pomona, a Roman celebration of the harvest. As the two cultures lived together, their cultures began to merge and suddenly apples and harvests became part of the celebration.
 
Readers will notice that until now we haven't actually said the word Halloween. This is because it still didn't exist. Over the next 500 years, the Catholic Church grew in power until, under Pope Gregory, it had converted most of Europe and the British Islands to Christianity. Pope Gregory's successor, Pope Boniface 4th, desperately wanted to eliminate pagan ceremonies. Pope Boniface felt that as long as the old festivals were still celebrated, the church's control wasn't complete. He also knew that if he banned the festivals, he'd have a full blown riot on his hands. So he decided to replace the old festival with a new festival and the church created All Saints' Day, a holy day to honor all the saints.
 
The problem with All Saints' Day was it was a holy day, not a festival. The people simply celebrated both of them. Two hundred years later the church had still not succeeded in getting rid of the pagan holiday. Pope Gregory the 3rd, however, had a new idea. He changed the rules so that All Saints' day always fell on the exact day as Samhain. And to celebrate All Saints' Day, young men were to go door to door begging for food for the town poor. Villagers were allowed to dress up in costume to represent a saint. Now, instead of dressing up to chase away evil spirits, you dressed up to honor the saints.
 
For the next 700 years, the Church felt it had won the battle because the Celts celebrated All Saints' Day. The Celts, on the other hand, thought they had won because they still had their holiday with the original ceremonies. Neither realized that Samhain and All Saints' Day were blurring into one holiday. By the 1500's, you couldn't separate the two anymore. Of course, by this time, no one called it All Saints' Day. Now it was All Hallows' Day. The night before All Hallows' Day was of course, All Hallows' Evening, or in the slang of the villagers, Hallow Evening or simply Halloween.
 
This may have been the end of it except for one significant development. On Halloween, 1517, Martin Luthor began trying to reform the Catholic Church. His reformation ended up as the Protestant Church, the followers of which didn't believe in saints. No saints meant no All Hallows' Day. No All Hallows' Day meant no Halloween. The Celts have never given up a party without a fight, so the Halloween festivities were moved to November 5 - Guy Fawkes Day. Guy Fawkes was a minor player in a Catholic plot to blow up the English Parliament, which was Protestant. So, although technically, the celebration was to commemorate the failure of the plot, it was Halloween. Bonfires were lit across the country. People made lanterns from carved out turnips and children went begging for money.
 
Meanwhile, in the new world, the settlers were all Protestant and Halloween was technically a Catholic holiday. The original colonists in this country found ANY celebration immoral, never mind a Catholic one. In fact, celebrating Christmas in the Massachusetts colony was illegal, punishable by banishment or death.
 
After the American Revolution, Halloween still never really caught on in America. Most of the country was farmland, and the people too far spread out to share different celebrations from Europe. Any chance to get together was looked forward to - barn raisings, quilting bees, taffy pulls. Eventually, a fall holiday called the Autumn Play Party developed. People would gather and tell ghost stories, dance and sing and feast and light bonfires. The children would stage a school pageant where they paraded in costumes. Sound familiar?
 
The Autumn Play Parties lasted until the Industrial revolution. After that, the majority of Americans lived in cities and had no need for such get togethers. By the end of the Civil War, only Episcopalians and Catholics celebrated All Saints' Day and Halloween, and the two religions combined made up less than 5% of the population. Concerned about letting a part of their heritage fade away, the the two religions began an aggressive campaign to put those two holidays on all public calendars. The first year All Saints' Day and Halloween showed up on the calendars, the newspapers and magazines made a big deal about it. Suddenly, everyone knew about Halloween and began celebrating it by lighting bonfires and having masquerade parties.
 
In the late 1800's, nearly 7.4 million immigrants came to America, bringing their European customs with them. Seven hundred thousand Irish Catholics came over during the seven-year potato famine alone. These immigrants may have brought their customs with them, but once they saw how plentiful pumpkins were in the New World, it didn't take them long to start hollowing out jack O'lanterns instead of turnips.
 
In 1921, Anoka, Minnesota celebrated the first official city wide observation of Halloween with a pumpkin bowl, a costumed square dance and two parades. After that, it didn't take Halloween long to go nationwide. New York started celebrating in 1923 and LA in 1925. By then, not only had Jack O'Lanterns replaced the hollowed out turnips, but the disguised fairies begging door to door had become trick or treat. Bonfires remained popular, but not for relighting fires and telling the future.
 
So if it appears on October 31 that the wind sounds a little too mournful as it whistles through the skeletal fingers of the bare trees, it's only your imagination. And if the nip in the air seems to bear the chilling touch of the grave on it, it's only fall foreshadowing the arrival of winter. It has nothing to do with the ghosts and goblins that once called this night their own. And as you peer out into the stygian blackness of this night, if something should rustle through the dead leaves, just remember that the faeries dance no more in the realms of man. - It is only Halloween.

HUMAN BRAINS

 

 

     Brains are organic hardware systems composed of nerve cells (called neurons) which particularly distinguish themselves from other cells because they have an outspoken ability to store information. They are grouped in clusters that are interconnected by pathways (called axons and dendrites). The human brain system is composed of some 100 billion neurons interconnected by some 70 trillion pathways. Out of this micro cosmos miraculously "emerges" one single software system which is the human mind.

     The human mind partly develops through learning of which one very important form is called conditioning. This is a form of learning where an organic memory system (which could be a single proto plasmatic cell, (but also a human brain) stores memory traces of ("pleasant") stimuli which it wants to approach and memory traces of ("unpleasant") stimuli which it wants to avoid. In "healthy" systems the resulting approach /avoidance "behavior" almost certainly forms the basis of homeostasis, the mechanism which ensures system integrity (survival) in time.

     The human brain hardware system has a remarkable functional resemblance to the Internet hardware system that now spans our globe. They believe that this resemblance is such that it can be logically defended that an independent software system, a global mind, will equally miraculously emerge from it in a way which may be comparable with the miraculous emergence of the individual human mind from the individual human brain. When considering the global mind we may contemplate that similar processes as we have described here under learning may play a role in its development.

     One thing to consider is that "memory trace complexity" in a single human nerve cell is altogether of a different order then memory trace complexity in the human mind and that a comparable quantum leap must probably apply to memory trace complexity in the global mind. The global mind could perhaps routinely partly operate on advanced strategic game programs of which e.g. the software in the computer in the movie "war games" would in comparison be a primitive example.

     Your brain and spinal cord make up your central nervous system. Together, they control your body -- but it's the brain which is Commander-in-chief. Your brain is wrinkled, soft and a little wet. It doesn't look like much. But it's made of more than 10 billion nerve cells and over 50 billion other cells and weighs less than 3 pounds! And it's the most extraordinary thing that you could possibly imagine! It monitors and regulates unconscious bodily processes like breathing and heart rate, and coordinates most voluntary movement. It's the site of consciousness, thought and creativity!

How does my brain communicate with my body?

     Different parts of your brain do different things. Some areas receive messages from sense organs, others control balance and muscle coordination, still others handle speech, or emotion, memories, or basic motor skills, or complex calculations. You may think your heart is where you feel emotion, but it's really your brain. You may think your legs take you down the street, but it's your brain instructing the muscles in your legs to move. Your eyes may take in light and an image may be projected onto the pupil, but it's your brain that interprets what you see...you get the picture.

Are human brains different than other animal's brains?

     Be glad you're a human. Because human brains are more complex than the brains of any animal on Earth! Why? It's not that they're the biggest. But human brains are larger and heavier in comparison to the human body, than any other animal. Underneath your scalp, sits a brain that, as it has grown, has continued to fold in on itself and develop deeper and deeper folds and crags. Spread out it would be the size of a pillowcase. Folded in on itself it becomes the place to think, dream, and create beautiful poetry!

     A newborn baby's brain grows almost 3 times in course of first year! Humans have the most complex brain of any critter on earth!

 

     Your brain is divided into two sides. The left side of your brain controls the right side of your body; and, surprise, the right side of your brain controls the left side of your body.

JAZZ

 

   As a musical language of communication, jazz is the first indigenous American style to affect music in the rest of the World. From the beat of ragtime syncopation and driving brass bands to soaring gospel choirs mixed with field hollers and the deep down growl of the blues, jazz's many roots are celebrated almost everywhere in the United States.

   The city of New Orleans features prominently in early development of jazz. A port city with doors to the spicy sounds of the Caribbean and Mexico and a large, well-established black population, the Crescent City was ripe for the development of new music at the turn of the century. Brass bands marched in numerous parades and played to comfort families during funerals. Also, numerous society dances required skilled musical ensembles. New Orleans was home to great early clarinetists Johnny Dodds, Jim