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Hunnic Language
The Hunnic language, or Hunnish, was the language spoken by Huns in the Hunnic Empire, a heterogeneous, multi-ethnic tribal confederation which invaded Eastern and Central Europe, and ruled most of Pannonian Central Europe, during the 4th and 5th centuries CE. A variety of languages were spoken within the Hun Empire. A contemporary report by Priscus has that Hunnish was spoken alongside Gothic and the languages of other tribes subjugated by the Huns. As no inscriptions or whole sentences in the Hunnic language have been preserved, the attested corpus is very limited, consisting almost entirely of proper names in Greek and Latin sources. There is no consensus on the classification of the Hunnish language, but due to the origin of these proper names it has been compared with Turkic, Mongolic, Iranian, and Yeniseian languages, and with various Indo-European languages. Other scholars consider the available evidence inconclusive and the Hunnish language therefore unclassifiabl ...
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Eurasian Steppe
The Eurasian Steppe, also called the Great Steppe or The Steppes, is the vast steppe ecoregion of Eurasia in the temperate grasslands, savannas and shrublands biome. It stretches through Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Kazakhstan, Siberia, European Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia. Since the Paleolithic, Paleolithic age, the Steppe Route has been the main overland route between Eastern Europe, North Asia, Central Asia and East Asia economically, politically, and culturally. The Steppe route is a predecessor not only of the Silk Road, which developed during Classical antiquity, antiquity and the Middle Ages, but also of the Eurasian Land Bridge in the modern era. It has been home to nomadic empires and many large tribal confederations and ancient states throughout history, such as the Xiongnu, Scythia, Cimmerians, Cimmeria, Sarmatians, Sarmatia, Hunnic Empire, Sogdia, Xianbei, Mongol Empire, Magyar tribes, and Göktürk Khaganate. Geography Divisi ...
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Funeral
A funeral is a ceremony connected with the final disposition of a corpse, such as a burial or cremation, with the attendant observances. Funerary customs comprise the complex of beliefs and practices used by a culture to remember and respect the dead, from interment, to various monuments, prayers, and rituals undertaken in their honour. Customs vary between cultures and religious groups. Funerals have both normative and legal components. Common secular motivations for funerals include mourning the deceased, celebrating their life, and offering support and sympathy to the bereaved; additionally, funerals may have religious aspects that are intended to help the soul of the deceased reach the afterlife, resurrection or reincarnation. The funeral usually includes a ritual through which the corpse receives a final disposition. Depending on culture and religion, these can involve either the destruction of the body (for example, by cremation, sky burial, decomposition, disintegr ...
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Bulgar Language
Bulgar (also known as Bulghar, Bolgar, or Bolghar) is the extinct Oghur Turkic language spoken by the Bulgars. The name is derived from the Bulgars, a tribal association that established the Bulgar state known as Old Great Bulgaria in the mid-7th century, giving rise to the Danubian Bulgaria by the 680s.Encyclopædia Britannica Online �''Bolgar Turkic''Campbell, George L. ''Compendium of the World's Languages''. Routledge, 2000''page 274''/ref>Marcantonio, Angela. ''The Uralic Language Family: Facts, Myths and Statistics''. Blackwell Publishing Limited, 2002''page 25''/ref> While the language initially went extinct in Danubian Bulgaria (in favour of Old Bulgarian), it persisted in Volga Bulgaria, but even there it was eventually replaced by the modern Chuvash language. Other than Chuvash, Bulgar is the only language to be definitively classified as an Oghur Turkic language. The inclusion of other languages such as Hunnish, Khazar and Sabir within Oghur Turkic remains sp ...
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Mongolian Language
Mongolian is the Prestige (sociolinguistics), principal language of the Mongolic languages, Mongolic language family that originated in the Mongolian Plateau. It is spoken by ethnic Mongols and other closely related Mongolic peoples who are native to modern Mongolia and surrounding parts of East Asia, East, Central Asia, Central and North Asia. Mongolian is the official language of Mongolia and Inner Mongolia and a recognized language of Xinjiang and Qinghai. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 5–6 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the Mongols in China, ethnic Mongol residents of the Inner Mongolia of China. In Mongolia, Khalkha Mongolian is predominant, and is currently written in both Cyrillic script, Cyrillic and the traditional Mongolian script. In Inner Mongolia, it is dialectally more diverse and written in the traditional Mongolian script. However, Mongols in both countries often use the Latin script for conve ...
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Tungusic Languages
The Tungusic languages (also known as Manchu–Tungus and Tungus) form a language family spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria by Tungusic peoples. Many Tungusic languages are endangered. There are approximately 75,000 native speakers of the dozen living languages of the Tungusic language family. The term "Tungusic" is from an exonym for the Evenk people (Ewenki) used by the Yakuts ("tongus"). Classification Linguists working on Tungusic have proposed a number of different classifications based on different criteria, including morphological, lexical, and phonological characteristics. Some scholars have criticized the tree-based model of Tungusic classification and argue that the long history of contact among the Tungusic languages makes them better treated as a dialect continuum. The main classification is into a northern branch and a southern branch (Georg 2004) although the two branches have no clear division, and the classification of intermediate groups is debatable. ...
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Mongolian Languages
The Mongolic languages are a language family spoken by the Mongolic peoples in North Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe mostly in Mongolia and surrounding areas and in Kalmykia and Buryatia. The best-known member of this language family, Mongolian, is the primary language of most of the residents of Mongolia and the Mongol residents of Inner Mongolia, with an estimated 5.7+ million speakers. History The possible precursor to Mongolic is the Xianbei language, heavily influenced by the Proto-Turkic (later, the Lir-Turkic) language. The stages of historical Mongolic are: * Pre-Proto-Mongolic, from approximately the 4th century AD until the 12th century AD, influenced by Shaz-Turkic. * Proto-Mongolic, from approximately the 13th century, spoken around the time of Chinggis Khan. * Middle Mongol, from the 13th century until the early 15th century or late 16th century, depending on classification spoken. (Given the almost entire lack of written sources for the peri ...
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Ethnology
Ethnology (from the , meaning 'nation') is an academic field and discipline that compares and analyzes the characteristics of different peoples and the relationships between them (compare cultural, social, or sociocultural anthropology). Scientific discipline Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct contact with the culture, ethnology takes the research that ethnographers have compiled and then compares and contrasts different cultures. The term ''ethnologia'' (''ethnology'') is credited to Adam Franz Kollár (1718–1783) who used and defined it in his ''Historiae ivrisqve pvblici Regni Vngariae amoenitates'' published in Vienna in 1783. as: "the science of nations and peoples, or, that study of learned men in which they inquire into the origins, languages, customs, and institutions of various nations, and finally into the fatherland and ancient seats, in order to be able better to judge the nations and peoples in their own times." Kollár's int ...
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Altaic Languages
The Altaic () languages are a group of languages comprising the Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic and Tungusic languages, Tungusic language families, with some linguists including the Koreanic languages, Koreanic and Japonic languages, Japonic families. These languages share agglutinative language, agglutinative morphology, head-final word order and some vocabulary. The once-popular theory attributing these similarities to a common ancestry has long been rejected by most Comparative linguistics, comparative linguists in favor of language contact, although it continues to be supported by a small but stable scholarly minority. Like the Uralic languages, Uralic language family, which is named after the Ural Mountains, the group is named after the Altai Mountains, Altai mountain range in the center of Asia. The core grouping of Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic is sometimes called "Micro-Altaic", with the expanded group including Koreanic and Japonic labelled as "Ma ...
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Omeljan Pritsak
Omeljan Yosypovych Pritsak (; 7 April 1919 – 29 May 2006) was the first Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of History of Ukraine, Ukrainian History at Harvard University and the founder and first director (1973–1989) of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Career From 1921 to 1936 he lived in Ternopil, where he graduated the state Polish gymnasium. Pritsak began his academic career at the University of Lviv in History of Poland (1918–1939), interwar Poland where he studied Middle Eastern languages under local orientalists and became associated with the Shevchenko Scientific Society and attended its seminar on Ukrainian history led by Ivan Krypiakevych. After the Soviet Union, Soviet annexation of Galicia, he moved to Kyiv where he briefly studied with the premier Ukraine, Ukrainian orientalist, Ahatanhel Krymsky. During World War II, Pritsak was taken to the west as a Ostarbeiter. Following the war, he studied at the universities in Berlin and University of Göttingen, Gö ...
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Karl Heinrich Menges
Karl Heinrich Menges (April 22, 1908 – September 20, 1999) was a German linguist known for his advocacy of the Altaic hypothesis. He was a faculty member at Columbia University in New York and subsequently at the University of Vienna. Biography Menges was born in Frankfurt, where he was educated at the Lessing Gymnasium. He studied in Frankfurt and Munich and earned his doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1932. William H. Honan"Karl H. Menges, 91, and Expert On Central Asian Languages" ''The New York Times'', September 25, 1999. Politically identifying as a Catholic centrist, he resisted the Nazi regime, distributing leaflets. In 1936 he was arrested by the Gestapo and interrogated for five hours; on a tip-off from a classmate, after being released pending trial he fled to Czechoslovakia, after the annexation of the Sudetenland moving on to Turkey. Menges taught at Columbia University in New York for 36 years, from 1940 to 1976. He had been invited to teach Slavic ...
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András Róna-Tas
András Róna-Tas (born 30 December 1931) is a Hungarian historian and linguist. Biography He was born in 1931 in Budapest. Róna-Tas studied under such preeminent professors as Gyula Ortutay and Lajos Ligeti, and received a degree in folklore and eastern linguistics ( Tibetan, Mongol, and Turkic.) From 1956, he worked at the Faculty of Humanities of the Eötvös Loránd University. In 1957–1958, Róna-Tas conducted anthropological fieldwork in Mongolia, studying the culture, language, and folklore of the nomadic tribes in that country. During the mid-1960s, Róna-Tas focused his fieldwork on the Chuvash people of the middle Volga River basin. In 1964, Róna-Tas defended his candidates (CSc) degree, and finally in 1971, he earned a doctorate from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (DSc) with his thesis "The Theory of Linguistic Affinity and the Linguistic Relations between the Chuvash and Mongol Languages", published as ''Linguistic Affinity'' in 1978. From 1968 to 2002, R ...
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Nomad
Nomads are communities without fixed habitation who regularly move to and from areas. Such groups include hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads (owning livestock), tinkers and trader nomads. In the twentieth century, the population of nomadic pastoral tribes slowly decreased, reaching an estimated 30–40 million nomads in the world . Nomadic hunting and gathering—following seasonally available wild plants and game—is by far the oldest human subsistence method known. Pastoralists raise herds of domesticated livestock, driving or accompanying them in patterns that normally avoid depleting pastures beyond their ability to recover. Nomadism is also a lifestyle adapted to infertile regions such as steppe, tundra, or ice and sand, where mobility is the most efficient strategy for exploiting scarce resources. For example, many groups living in the tundra are reindeer herders and are semi-nomadic, following forage for their animals. Sometimes also described as "nomadic" are vari ...
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