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Chuvash People
The Chuvash people (, ; , ) also called Chuvash Tatars, are a Turkic ethnic group, a branch of the Oğurs, inhabiting an area stretching from the Idel-Ural region to Siberia. Most of them live in the Russian republic of Chuvashia and the surrounding area, although Chuvash communities may be found throughout Russia as well as in Central Asia. They speak Chuvash, a Turkic language that diverged from other languages in the family more than a millennium ago. Among the Chuvash believers, the majority are Eastern Orthodox Christians although a minority follow Vattisen Yaly or Sunni Islam. Etymology There is no universally accepted etymology of the word ''Chuvash'', but there are two theories. One theory suggests that the word ''Chuvash'' may be derived from Common Turkic ''jăvaş'' ('friendly', 'peaceful'), as opposed to ''şarmăs'' ('warlike'). Another theory is that the word is derived from the '' Tabghach,'' an early medieval Xianbei clan and founders of the Northern ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chuvash Language
Chuvash ( , ; , , ) is a Turkic languages, Turkic language spoken in European Russia, primarily in the Chuvashia, Chuvash Republic and adjacent areas. It is the only surviving member of the Oghur languages, Oghur branch of Turkic languages, one of the two principal branches of the Turkic family. The writing system for the Chuvash language is based on the Cyrillic script, employing all of the letters used in the Russian alphabet and adding four letters of its own: Ӑ, Ӗ, Ҫ and Ӳ. Distribution Chuvash is the native language of the Chuvash people and an official language of Chuvashia Republic, Chuvashia. There are contradictory numbers regarding the number of people able to speak Chuvash nowadays; some sources claim it is spoken by 1,640,000 persons in Russia and another 34,000 in other countries and that 86% of ethnic Chuvash and 8% of the people of other ethnicities living in Chuvashia claimed knowledge of Chuvash language during the 2002 Russian Census, 2002 census. Ho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Turkic Language Family
The Turkic languages are a language family of more than 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia (Siberia), and West Asia. The Turkic languages originated in a region of East Asia spanning from Mongolia to Northwest China, where Proto-Turkic is thought to have been spoken, from where they expanded to Central Asia and farther west during the first millennium. They are characterized as a dialect continuum. Turkic languages are spoken by some 200 million people. The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Turkish, spoken mainly in Anatolia and the Balkans; its native speakers account for about 38% of all Turkic speakers, followed by Uzbek. Characteristic features such as vowel harmony, agglutination, subject-object-verb order, and lack of grammatical gender, are almost universal within the Turkic family. There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility, upo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gerard Clauson
Sir Gerard Leslie Makins Clauson (28 April 1891 – 1 May 1974) was an English civil servant, businessman, and Orientalist best known for his studies of the Turkic languages. He was born in Malta. The eldest son of Major Sir John Eugene Clauson, Gerard Clauson attended Eton College, where he was Captain of School, and where, at age 15 or 16, he published a critical edition of a short Pali text, "A New Kammavācā" in the ''Journal of the Pali Text Society''. In 1906, when his father was named Chief Secretary for Cyprus, he taught himself Turkish to complement his school Greek. He studied at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in classics, receiving his degree in Greats, then became Boden Scholar in Sanskrit, 1911; Hall-Houghtman Syriac Prizeman, 1913; and James Mew Arabic Scholar, 1920. During World War I, he fought in the battle of Gallipoli but spent the majority of his effort in signals intelligence, concerned with German and Ottoman army codes. These were the years in whic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Names For China
A name is a term used for identification by an external observer. They can identify a class or category of things, or a single thing, either uniquely, or within a given context. The entity identified by a name is called its referent. A personal name identifies, not necessarily uniquely, a ''specific'' individual human. The name of a specific entity is sometimes called a proper name (although that term has a philosophical meaning as well) and is, when consisting of only one word, a proper noun. Other nouns are sometimes called "common names" or (obsolete) "general names". A name can be given to a person, place, or thing; for example, parents can give their child a name or a scientist can give an element a name. Etymology The word ''name'' comes from Old English ''nama''; cognate with Old High German (OHG) ''namo'', Sanskrit (''nāman''), Latin '' nomen'', Greek (''onoma''), and Persian (''nâm''), from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) ''*h₁nómn̥''. Outside Indo-European, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inner Asia
Inner Asia refers to the northern and landlocked regions spanning North Asia, North, Central Asia, Central, and East Asia. It includes parts of Western China, western and northeast China, as well as southern Siberia. The area overlaps with some definitions of "Central Asia", mostly the historical ones, but certain regions that are often included in Inner Asia, such as Iran, are not a part of Central Asia by any of its definitions. Inner Asia may be regarded as the western and northern "frontier" of China proper and as being bounded by East Asia proper, which consists of China proper, Japan and Korea. The extent of Inner Asia has been understood differently in different periods. "Inner Asia" is sometimes contrasted to "China proper", that is, the territories originally unified under the Qin dynasty with majority identifying their ethnicity as Han Chinese, Han populations. By the year 1800, Chinese Inner Asia consisted of the Tibetan Plateau, Xinjiang and Mongolian Plateau. They wer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin ( ; zh, s=, t=, p=Guānhuà, l=Mandarin (bureaucrat), officials' speech) is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretches from Yunnan in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongjiang in the northeast. Its spread is generally attributed to the greater ease of travel and communication in the North China Plain compared to the more mountainous south, combined with the relatively recent spread of Mandarin to frontier areas. Many varieties of Mandarin, such as Southwestern Mandarin, those of the Southwest (including Sichuanese dialects, Sichuanese) and the Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the Beijing dialect (or are only partially intelligible). Nevertheless, Mandarin as a group is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers (with nearly one billion). Because Mandarin originated in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tuoba
The Tuoba (Chinese language, Chinese) or Tabgatch (, ''Tabγač''), also known by #Names, other names, was an influential Xianbei clan in early imperial China. During the Sixteen Kingdoms after the fall of Han and the Three Kingdoms, the Tuoba established and ruled the Dai (Sixteen Kingdoms), Dai state in northern China. The dynasty ruled from 310 to 376 and was restored in 386. The same year, the dynasty was renamed Wei, later distinguished in Chinese historiography as the Northern Wei. This powerful state gained control of most of northern China, supporting Buddhism in China, Buddhism while increasingly sinicization, sinicizing. As part of this process, in 496, the Xiaowen Emperor of Northern Wei, Emperor Xiaowen changed the imperial clan's surname from Tuoba to Yuan (surname 元), Yuan (). The empire split into Eastern Wei and Western Wei in 535, with the Western Wei's rulers briefly resuming use of the Tuoba name in 554. A branch of the Tangut people, Tanguts also bore a su ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old Turkic
Old Siberian Turkic, generally known as East Old Turkic and often shortened to Old Turkic, was a Siberian Turkic language spoken around East Turkistan and Mongolia. It was first discovered in inscriptions originating from the Second Turkic Khaganate, and later the Uyghur Khaganate, making it the earliest attested Common Turkic language. In terms of the datability of extant written sources, the period of Old Turkic can be dated from slightly before 720 AD to the Mongol invasions of the 13th century. Classification and dialects Old Turkic can generally be split into two dialects, the earlier Orkhon Turkic and the later Old Uyghur. There is a difference of opinion among linguists with regard to the Karakhanid language, some (among whom include Omeljan Pritsak, Sergey Malov, Osman Karatay and Marcel Erdal) classify it as another dialect of East Old Turkic, while others prefer to include Karakhanid among Middle Turkic languages; nonetheless, Karakhanid is very close t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Northern Wei Dynasty
Wei (), known in historiography as the Northern Wei ( zh, c=北魏, p=Běi Wèi), Tuoba Wei ( zh, c=拓跋魏, p=Tuòbá Wèi), Yuan Wei ( zh, c=元魏, p=Yuán Wèi) and Later Wei ( zh, t=後魏, p=Hòu Wèi), was an imperial dynasty of China ruled by the Tuoba (Tabgach) clan of the Xianbei. The first of the Northern dynasties, it ruled northern China from 386 to 535 during the period of the Northern and Southern dynasties. Described as "part of an era of political turbulence and intense social and cultural change", the Northern Wei dynasty is particularly noted for unifying northern China in 439, bringing an end to the chaotic Sixteen Kingdoms period, and strengthening imperial control over the rural landscape via reforms in 485. This was also a period of introduced foreign ideas, such as Buddhism, which became firmly established. The Northern Wei was referred to as "Plaited Barbarians" (索虜; ''suǒlǔ'') by writers of the Southern dynasties, who considered themselves th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Xianbei
The Xianbei (; ) were an ancient nomadic people that once resided in the eastern Eurasian steppes in what is today Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, and Northeastern China. The Xianbei were likely not of a single ethnicity, but rather a multilingual, multi-ethnic confederation consisting of mainly Proto-Mongols (who spoke either pre-Proto-Mongolic,, quote: "The Xianbei confederation appears to have contained speakers of Pre-Proto-Mongolic, perhaps the largest constituent linguistic group, as well as former Xiongnu subjects, who spoke other languages, Turkic almost certainly being one of them."Pulleyblank, Edwin G. (1983). "The Chinese and Their Neighbors in Prehistoric and Early Historic China," in The Origins of Chinese Civilization, University of California Pressp. 452of pp. 411–466. or Para-Mongolic languages), and, to a minor degree, Tungusic and Turkic peoples. They originated from the Donghu people who splintered into the Wuhuan and Xianbei when they were defeated by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tabghach
The Tuoba ( Chinese) or Tabgatch (, ''Tabγač''), also known by other names, was an influential Xianbei clan in early imperial China. During the Sixteen Kingdoms after the fall of Han and the Three Kingdoms, the Tuoba established and ruled the Dai state in northern China. The dynasty ruled from 310 to 376 and was restored in 386. The same year, the dynasty was renamed Wei, later distinguished in Chinese historiography as the Northern Wei. This powerful state gained control of most of northern China, supporting Buddhism while increasingly sinicizing. As part of this process, in 496, the Emperor Xiaowen changed the imperial clan's surname from Tuoba to Yuan (). The empire split into Eastern Wei and Western Wei in 535, with the Western Wei's rulers briefly resuming use of the Tuoba name in 554. A branch of the Tanguts also bore a surname transcribed as Tuoba before their chieftains were given the Chinese surnames Li () and Zhao () by the Tang and Song dynasties respectiv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cheremis
The Mari ( ), also formerly known as the Cheremis or Cheremisses, are a Finno-Ugric people in Eastern Europe, who have traditionally lived along the Volga and Kama rivers in Russia. They live mostly in the Mari El republic, with significant minorities in Bashkortostan, Perm Krai, Tatarstan and Udmurtia. Name The ethnic name ''mari'' derives from the Proto-Indo-Iranian root *''márya''-, meaning 'human', literally 'mortal', which indicates early contacts between Finno-Ugric and Indo-Iranian languages. Subgroups There are two main ethnographic subgroups of Mari people: Meadow Mari, who live on the right bank of the Volga river, and Hill (or Mountain) Mari, who live on the left bank. The ethnogenesis of these two subgroups, and formation of distinct dialects, probably took place in the 14th century. Meadow Mari comprise the majority of Mari, and their language variety is more widespread than the Hill Mari language. The 1995 Law on the Languages of the Republic and the Mar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
