title: ARM architecture family

text: Arm SystemReady, formerly named Arm ServerReady, is a certification program that helps land the generic off-the-shelf operating systems and hypervisors on to the Arm-based systems from datacenter servers to industrial edge and IoT devices. The key building blocks of the program are the specifications for minimum hardware and firmware requirements that the operating systems and hypervisors can rely upon. These specifications are:


title: ARM architecture family

text: These specifications are co-developed by Arm and its partners in the System Architecture Advisory Committee (SystemArchAC).


title: ARM architecture family

text: Architecture Compliance Suite (ACS) is the test tools that help to check the compliance of these specifications. The Arm SystemReady Requirements Specification documents the requirements of the certifications.


title: ARM architecture family

text: This program was introduced by Arm in 2020 at the first DevSummit event. Its predecessor Arm ServerReady was introduced in 2018 at the Arm TechCon event. This program currently includes four bands:


title: ARM architecture family

text: PSA Certified, formerly named Platform Security Architecture, is an architecture-agnostic security framework and evaluation scheme. It is intended to help secure Internet of Things (IoT) devices built on system-on-a-chip (SoC) processors. It was introduced to increase security where a full trusted execution environment is too large or complex.


title: ARM architecture family

text: The architecture was introduced by Arm in 2017 at the annual TechCon event. Although the scheme is architecture agnostic, it was first implemented on Arm Cortex-M processor cores intended for microcontroller use. PSA Certified includes freely available threat models and security analyses that demonstrate the process for deciding on security features in common IoT products. It also provides freely downloadable application programming interface (API) packages, architectural specifications, open-source firmware implementations, and related test suites.


title: ARM architecture family

text: Following the development of the architecture security framework in 2017, the PSA Certified assurance scheme launched two years later at Embedded World in 2019. PSA Certified offers a multi-level security evaluation scheme for chip vendors, OS providers and IoT device makers. The Embedded World presentation introduced chip vendors to Level 1 Certification. A draft of Level 2 protection was presented at the same time. Level 2 certification became a usable standard in February 2020.


title: ARM architecture family

text: The certification was created by PSA Joint Stakeholders to enable a security-by-design approach for a diverse set of IoT products. PSA Certified specifications are implementation and architecture agnostic, as a result they can be applied to any chip, software or device. The certification also removes industry fragmentation for IoT product manufacturers and developers.


title: ARM architecture family

text: The first 32-bit ARM-based personal computer, the Acorn Archimedes, was originally intended to run an ambitious operating system called ARX. The machines shipped with RISC OS which was also used on later ARM-based systems from Acorn and other vendors. Some early Acorn machines were also able to run a Unix port called RISC iX. (Neither is to be confused with RISC/os, a contemporary Unix variant for the MIPS architecture.)


title: ARM architecture family

text: The 32-bit ARM architecture is supported by a large number of embedded and real-time operating systems, including:


title: ARM architecture family

text: The 32-bit ARM architecture is the primary hardware environment for most mobile device operating systems such as:


title: ARM architecture family

text: The 32-bit ARM architecture is supported by RISC OS and by multiple Unix-like operating systems including:


title: ARM architecture family

text: Windows applications recompiled for ARM and linked with Winelib, from the Wine project, can run on 32-bit or 64-bit ARM in Linux, FreeBSD, or other compatible operating systems. x86 binaries, e.g. when not specially compiled for ARM, have been demonstrated on ARM using QEMU with Wine (on Linux and more), but do not work at full speed or same capability as with Winelib.


title: Jason Oppenheim

text: Jason Oppenheim (born April 12, 1977) is an American real estate broker, attorney, influencer and reality TV personality. He is the president and founder of The Oppenheim Group, a real estate brokerage representing buyers and sellers of luxury properties in Los Angeles and Orange County. Jason Oppenheim, together with his twin brother Brett, and their team of real estate agents at The Oppenheim Group are the subject of the Netflix Original Series, "Selling Sunset", which premiered on March 22, 2019. The show features Oppenheim and his team as they sell the 'luxe' life to affluent and celebrity buyers in LA. In May 2022, it was announced that The Opphenheim Group’s Orange County office will be subject to a spin-off of Selling Sunset called Selling the OC, produced by Netflix.


title: Jason Oppenheim

text: Jason Oppenheim was born on April 12, 1977. Oppenheim's great-great-grandfather Jacob Stern moved to Hollywood in 1889, where he became a real estate entrepreneur of early Los Angeles, after founding The Stern Realty Co. The Oppenheim Group represents five generations of real estate development, management, and brokerage services in Los Angeles. Their family is of Jewish descent.


title: Jason Oppenheim

text: Oppenheim grew up in Northern California, where he attended Mission San Jose High School in Fremont, California. He received his undergraduate and J.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.


title: Jason Oppenheim

text: Oppenheim worked as an attorney at the international law firm O’Melveny & Myers from 2003–2007, where he represented a broad range of corporate clients.


title: Jason Oppenheim

text: For many years, Oppenheim has been identified as a Top Agent in Los Angeles by The Hollywood Reporter, and Showbiz Real Estate Elite by Variety.


title: Jason Oppenheim

text: His clientele includes many high-profile celebrities, professional athletes, and businesspeople, including Kris Humphries, Chloë Grace Moretz, Orlando Bloom, Joel Kinnaman, Chris McGurk, Taye Diggs. He has also sold properties to Nicole Scherzinger, Jessica Alba, Dakota Johnson, among others.


title: Jason Oppenheim

text: In early 2021, Oppenheim opened a second office in the seaside neighborhood of Corona Del Mar, in the city of Newport Beach, California.


title: Jason Oppenheim

text: In July 2021, he confirmed he had been in a relationship with "Selling Sunset" co-star Chrishell Stause, which ended in December 2021.


title: Utrecht

text: Utrecht ( , , ) is the fourth-largest city and a municipality of the Netherlands, capital and most populous city of the province of Utrecht. It is located in the eastern corner of the Randstad conurbation, in the very centre of mainland Netherlands, about 35 km south east of the capital Amsterdam and 45 km north east of Rotterdam. It has a population of 361,966 as of 1 December 2021.


title: Utrecht

text: Utrecht's ancient city centre features many buildings and structures, several dating as far back as the High Middle Ages. It has been the religious centre of the Netherlands since the 8th century. It was the most important city in the Netherlands until the Dutch Golden Age, when it was surpassed by Amsterdam as the country's cultural centre and most populous city.


title: Utrecht

text: Utrecht is home to Utrecht University, the largest university in the Netherlands, as well as several other institutions of higher education. Due to its central position within the country, it is an important hub for both rail and road transport; it contains the busiest train station in the Netherlands, Utrecht Centraal. It has the second-highest number of cultural events in the Netherlands, after Amsterdam. In 2012, Lonely Planet included Utrecht in the top 10 of the world's unsung places.


title: Utrecht

text: Although there is some evidence of earlier inhabitation in the region of Utrecht, dating back to the Stone Age (app. 2200 BCE) and settling in the Bronze Age (app. 1800–800 BCE), the founding date of the city is usually related to the construction of a Roman fortification ("castellum"), probably built in around 50 CE. A series of such fortresses were built after the Roman emperor Claudius decided the empire should not expand further north. To consolidate the border, the Limes Germanicus defense line was constructed along the main branch of the river Rhine, which at that time traversed a more northern route (now known as the Kromme Rijn) compared to today's Rhine flow. These fortresses were designed to house a cohort of about 500 Roman soldiers. Near the fort, settlements grew that housed artisans, traders and soldiers' wives and children.


title: Utrecht

text: In Roman times, the name of the Utrecht fortress was simply "Traiectum", denoting its location at a possible Rhine crossing. Traiectum became Dutch Trecht; with the U from Old Dutch "uut" (downriver) added to distinguish U-trecht from Maas-tricht, on the river Meuse. In 11th-century official documents, it was Latinized as Ultra Traiectum. Around the year 200, the wooden walls of the fortification were replaced by sturdier tuff stone walls, remnants of which are still to be found below the buildings around Dom Square.


title: Utrecht

text: From the middle of the 3rd century, Germanic tribes regularly invaded the Roman territories. After around 275 the Romans could no longer maintain the northern border, and Utrecht was abandoned. Little is known about the period from 270 to 650. Utrecht is first spoken of again several centuries after the Romans left. Under the influence of the growing realms of the Franks, during Dagobert I's reign in the 7th century, a church was built within the walls of the Roman fortress. In ongoing border conflicts with the Frisians, this first church was destroyed.


title: Utrecht

text: By the mid-7th century, British, English and Irish missionaries set out to convert the Frisians. Pope Sergius I appointed their leader, Saint Willibrordus, as bishop of the Frisians. The tenure of Willibrordus is generally considered to be the beginning of the Bishopric of Utrecht. In 723, the Frankish leader Charles Martel bestowed the fortress in Utrecht and the surrounding lands as the base of the bishops. From then on Utrecht became one of the most influential seats of power for the Catholic Church in the Netherlands. The archbishops of Utrecht were based at the uneasy northern border of the Carolingian Empire. In addition, the city of Utrecht had competition from the nearby trading centre Dorestad. After the fall of Dorestad around 850, Utrecht became one of the most important cities in the Netherlands. The importance of Utrecht as a centre of Christianity is illustrated by the election of the Utrecht-born Adriaan Florenszoon Boeyens as pope in 1522 (the last non-Italian pope before John Paul II).


title: Utrecht

text: When the Frankish rulers established the system of feudalism, the Bishops of Utrecht came to exercise worldly power as prince-bishops. The territory of the bishopric not only included the modern province of Utrecht (Nedersticht, 'lower Sticht'), but also extended to the northeast. The feudal conflict of the Middle Ages heavily affected Utrecht. The prince-bishopric was involved in almost continuous conflicts with the Counts of Holland and the Dukes of Guelders. The Veluwe region was seized by Guelders, but large areas in the modern province of Overijssel remained as the Oversticht.


title: Utrecht

text: Several churches and monasteries were built inside, or close to, the city of Utrecht. The most dominant of these was the Cathedral of Saint Martin, inside the old Roman fortress. The construction of the present Gothic building was begun in 1254 after an earlier romanesque construction had been badly damaged by fire. The choir and transept were finished from 1320 and were followed then by the ambitious Dom tower. The last part to be constructed was the central nave, from 1420. By that time, however, the age of the great cathedrals had come to an end and declining finances prevented the ambitious project from being finished, the construction of the central nave being suspended before the planned flying buttresses could be finished.


title: Utrecht

text: Besides the cathedral there were four collegiate churches in Utrecht: St. Salvator's Church (demolished in the 16th century), on the Dom square, dating back to the early 8th century. Saint John (Janskerk), originating in 1040; Saint Peter, building started in 1039 and Saint Mary's church building started around 1090 (demolished in the early 19th century, cloister survives).


title: Utrecht

text: Besides these churches, the city housed St. Paul's Abbey, the 15th-century beguinage of St. Nicholas, and a 14th-century chapter house of the Teutonic Knights.


title: Utrecht

text: Besides these buildings which belonged to the bishopric, an additional four parish churches were constructed in the city: the Jacobikerk (dedicated to Saint James), founded in the 11th century, with the current Gothic church dating back to the 14th century; the Buurkerk (Neighbourhood-church) of the 11th-century parish in the centre of the city; Nicolaichurch (dedicated to Saint Nicholas), from the 12th century, and the 13th-century Geertekerk (dedicated to Saint Gertrude of Nivelles).


title: Utrecht

text: Its location on the banks of the river Rhine allowed Utrecht to become an important trade centre in the Northern Netherlands. The growing town was granted city rights by Henry V at Utrecht on 2 June 1122. When the main flow of the Rhine moved south, the old bed which still flowed through the heart of the town became ever more canalized; and the wharf system was built as an inner city harbour system. On the wharfs, storage facilities ("werfkelders") were built, on top of which the main street, including houses, was constructed. The wharfs and the cellars are accessible from a platform at water level with stairs descending from the street level to form a unique structure. The relations between the bishop, who controlled many lands outside of the city, and the citizens of Utrecht was not always easy. The bishop, for example dammed the Kromme Rijn at Wijk bij Duurstede to protect his estates from flooding. This threatened shipping for the city and led the city of Utrecht to commission a canal to ensure access to the town for shipping trade: the Vaartse Rijn, connecting Utrecht to the Hollandse IJssel at IJsselstein.


title: Utrecht

text: In 1528 the bishop lost secular power over both Neder- and Oversticht—which included the city of Utrecht—to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. Charles V combined the Seventeen Provinces (the current Benelux and the northern parts of France) as a personal union. This ended the prince-bishopric of Utrecht, as the secular rule was now the lordship of Utrecht, with the religious power remaining with the bishop, although Charles V had gained the right to appoint new bishops. In 1559 the bishopric of Utrecht was raised to archbishopric to make it the religious centre of the Northern ecclesiastical province in the Seventeen Provinces.


title: Utrecht

text: The transition from independence to a relatively minor part of a larger union was not easily accepted. To quell uprisings, Charles V struggled to exert his power over the city's citizens who had struggled to gain a certain level of independence from the bishops and were not willing to cede this to their new lord. The heavily fortified castle Vredenburg was built to house a large garrison whose main task was to maintain control over the city. The castle would last less than 50 years before it was demolished in an uprising in the early stages of the Dutch Revolt.


title: Utrecht

text: In 1579 the northern seven provinces signed the Union of Utrecht, in which they decided to join forces against Spanish rule. The Union of Utrecht is seen as the beginning of the Dutch Republic. In 1580, the new and predominantly Protestant state abolished the bishoprics, including the archbishopric of Utrecht. The stadtholders disapproved of the independent course of the Utrecht bourgeoisie and brought the city under much more direct control of the republic, shifting the power towards its dominant province Holland. This was the start of a long period of stagnation of trade and development in Utrecht. Utrecht remained an atypical city in the new republic being about 40% Catholic in the mid-17th century, and even more so among the elite groups, who included many rural nobility and gentry with town houses there.


title: Utrecht

text: The fortified city temporarily fell to the French invasion in 1672 (the Disaster Year); where the French invasion was stopped just west of Utrecht at the Old Hollandic Waterline. In 1674, only two years after the French left, the centre of Utrecht was struck by a tornado. The halt to building before construction of flying buttresses in the 15th century now proved to be the undoing of the cathedral of St Martin church's central section which collapsed, creating the current Dom square between the tower and choir. In 1713, Utrecht hosted one of the first international peace negotiations when the Treaty of Utrecht settled the War of the Spanish Succession. Beginning in 1723, Utrecht became the centre of the non-Roman Old Catholic Churches in the world.


title: Utrecht

text: In the early 19th century, the role of Utrecht as a fortified town had become obsolete. The fortifications of the Nieuwe Hollandse Waterlinie were moved east of Utrecht. The town walls could now be demolished to allow for expansion. The moats remained intact and formed an important feature of the Zocher plantsoen, an English style landscape park that remains largely intact today. Growth of the city increased when, in 1843, a railway connecting Utrecht to Amsterdam was opened. After that, Utrecht gradually became the main hub of the Dutch railway network. With the industrial revolution finally gathering speed in the Netherlands and the ramparts taken down, Utrecht began to grow far beyond its medieval centre. When the Dutch government allowed the bishopric of Utrecht to be reinstated by Rome in 1853, Utrecht became the centre of Dutch Catholicism once more. From the 1880s onward, neighbourhoods such as Oudwijk, Wittevrouwen, Vogelenbuurt to the East, and Lombok to the West were developed. New middle-class residential areas, such as Tuindorp and Oog in Al, were built in the 1920s and 1930s. During this period, several Jugendstil houses and office buildings were built, followed by Rietveld who built the Rietveld Schröder House (1924), and Dudok's construction of the city theater (1941).


title: Utrecht

text: During World War II, Utrecht was held by German forces until the general German surrender of the Netherlands on 5 May 1945. British and Canadian troops that had surrounded the city entered it after that surrender, on 7 May 1945. Following the end of World War II, the city grew considerably when new neighbourhoods such as Overvecht, Kanaleneiland, and Lunetten were built. Around 2000, the Leidsche Rijn housing area was developed as an extension of the city to the west.


title: Utrecht

text: The area surrounding Utrecht Centraal railway station and the station itself were developed following modernist ideas of the 1960s, in a brutalist style. This development led to the construction of the shopping mall , the music centre Vredenburg (Hertzberger, 1979), and conversion of part of the ancient canal structure into a highway (Catherijnebaan). Protest against further modernisation of the city centre followed even before the last buildings were finalised. In the early 21st century, the whole area is undergoing change again. The redeveloped music centre TivoliVredenburg opened in 2014 with the original Vredenburg and Tivoli concert and rock and jazz halls brought together in a single building.


title: Utrecht

text: Utrecht city had a population of 361,924 in 2022. It is a growing municipality and projections are that the population will surpass 392,000 by 2025. As of November 2019, the city of Utrecht has a population of 357,179.


title: Utrecht

text: Utrecht has a young population, with many inhabitants in the age category from 20 and 30 years, due to the presence of a large university. About 52% of the population is female, 48% is male. The majority of households (52.5%) in Utrecht are single-person households. About 29% of people living in Utrecht are either married, or have another legal partnership. About 3% of the population of Utrecht is divorced.


title: Utrecht

text: For 62,8% of the population of Utrecht both parents were born in the Netherlands. Approximately 12.4% of the population consists of people with a recent migration background from Western countries, while 24.8% of the population has at least one parent who is of 'non-Western origin' (8.8% from Morocco, 4% Turkey, 3% Surinam and Dutch Caribbean and 9.1% of other countries). Some of the city's boroughs have a relatively high percentage of originally people with a migration background—i.e. Kanaleneiland (83%) and Overvecht (60%). Like Rotterdam, Amsterdam, The Hague and other large Dutch cities, Utrecht faces some socio-economic problems. About 38% of its population either earns a minimum income or is dependent on social welfare (17% of all households). Boroughs such as Kanaleneiland, Overvecht and Hoograven consist primarily of high-rise housing developments, and are known for relatively high poverty and crime rate.


title: Utrecht

text: Utrecht has been the religious centre of the Netherlands since the 8th century. Currently it is the see of the Metropolitan Archbishop of Utrecht, the most senior Dutch Roman Catholic leader. His ecclesiastical province covers the whole kingdom.


title: Utrecht

text: Utrecht is also the see of the archbishop of the Old Catholic Church, titular head of the Union of Utrecht, and the location of the offices of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, the main Dutch Protestant church.


title: Utrecht

text: As of 2013, the largest religion is Christianity with 28% of the population being Christian, followed by Islam with 9.9% in 2016 and Hinduism with 0.8%.


title: Utrecht

text: The city of Utrecht is subdivided into 10 city quarters, all of which have their own neighbourhood council and service centre for civil affairs.


title: Utrecht

text: Utrecht is the centre of a densely populated area, a fact which makes concise definitions of its agglomeration difficult, and somewhat arbitrary. The smaller Utrecht agglomeration of continuously built-up areas counts some 420,000 inhabitants and includes Nieuwegein, IJsselstein and Maarssen. It is sometimes argued that the close by municipalities De Bilt, Zeist, Houten, Vianen, Driebergen-Rijsenburg (Utrechtse Heuvelrug), and Bunnik should also be counted towards the Utrecht agglomeration, bringing the total to 640,000 inhabitants. The larger region, including slightly more remote cities such as Woerden and Amersfoort, counts up to 820,000 inhabitants.


title: Utrecht

text: Utrecht's cityscape is dominated by the Dom Tower, the tallest belfry in the Netherlands and originally part of the Cathedral of Saint Martin. An ongoing debate is over whether any building in or near the centre of town should surpass the Dom Tower in height (). Nevertheless, some tall buildings are now being constructed that will become part of the skyline of Utrecht. The second-tallest building of the city, the Rabobank-tower, was completed in 2010 and stands tall. Two antennas will increase that height to . Two other buildings were constructed around the Nieuw Galgenwaard stadium (2007). These buildings, the 'Kantoortoren Galghenwert' and 'Apollo Residence', stand and high, respectively.


title: Utrecht

text: Another landmark is the old centre and the canal structure in the inner city. The Oudegracht is a curved canal, partly following the ancient main branch of the Rhine. It is lined with the unique wharf-basement structures that create a two-level street along the canals. The inner city has largely retained its medieval structure, and the moat ringing the old town is largely intact. In the 1970s part of the moat was converted into a motorway. It was then converted back into a waterway, the work being finished in 2020.


title: Utrecht

text: Because of the role of Utrecht as a fortified city, construction outside the medieval centre and its city walls was restricted until the 19th century. Surrounding the medieval core there is a ring of late-19th- and early-20th-century neighbourhoods, with newer neighbourhoods positioned farther out. The eastern part of Utrecht remains fairly open. The Dutch Water Line, moved east of the city in the early 19th century, required open lines of fire, thus prohibiting all permanent constructions until the middle of the 20th century on the east side of the city.


title: Utrecht

text: Due to the past importance of Utrecht as a religious centre, several monumental churches were erected, many of which have survived. Most prominent is the Dom Church. Other notable churches include the romanesque St Peter's and St John's churches; the gothic churches of St James and St Nicholas; and the Buurkerk, now converted into a museum for automatically playing musical instruments.


title: Utrecht

text: Because of its central location, Utrecht is well connected to the rest of the Netherlands and has a well-developed public transport network.


title: Utrecht

text: Utrecht Centraal is the main railway station of Utrecht and is the largest in the country. There are regular intercity services to all major Dutch cities; direct services to Schiphol Airport. Utrecht Centraal is a station on the night service, providing 7 days a week an all-night service to (among others) Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam and Rotterdam. International InterCityExpress (ICE) services to Germany (and further) through Arnhem call at Utrecht Centraal. Regular local trains to all areas surrounding Utrecht also depart from Utrecht Centraal; and service several smaller stations: Utrecht Lunetten; Utrecht Vaartsche Rijn; Utrecht Overvecht; Utrecht Leidsche Rijn; Utrecht Terwijde; Utrecht Zuilen and Vleuten. A former station Utrecht Maliebaan closed in 1939 and has since been converted into the Dutch Railway Museum.


title: Utrecht

text: Utrecht is the location of the headquarters of Nederlandse Spoorwegen (English: "Dutch Railways"), the largest rail operator in the Netherlands, and ProRail, the state-owned company responsible for the construction and maintenance of the country's rail infrastructure.


title: Utrecht

text: The Utrecht sneltram is a light rail scheme running southwards from Utrecht Centraal to the suburbs of IJsselstein, Kanaleneiland, Lombok and Nieuwegein. The sneltram began operations in 1983 and is currently operated by the private transport company Qbuzz. On 16 December 2019 the new tram line to the Uithof started operating, creating a direct mass transit connection from the central station to the main Utrecht university campus.


title: Utrecht

text: The main local and regional bus station of Utrecht is located adjacent to Utrecht Centraal railway station, at the East and West entrances. Due to large-scale renovation and construction works at the railway station, the station's bus stops are changing frequently. As a general rule, westbound buses depart from the bus station on the west entrance, other buses from the east side station. Local buses in Utrecht are operated by Qbuzz; its services include a high-frequency service to the Uithof university district. The local bus fleet is one of Europe's cleanest, using only buses compliant with the Euro-VI standard as well as electric buses for inner-city transport. Regional buses from the city are operated by Arriva and Connexxion.


title: Utrecht

text: The Utrecht Centraal railway station is also served by the pan-European services of Eurolines. Furthermore, it acts as departure and arrival place of many coach companies serving holiday resorts in Spain and France—and during winter in Austria and Switzerland.


title: Utrecht

text: Like most Dutch cities, Utrecht has an extensive network of cycle paths, making cycling safe and popular. Thirty-three percent of journeys within the city are by bicycle, more than any other mode of transport. (Cars, for example, account for 30% of trips). Bicycles are used by young and old people, and by individuals and families. They are mostly traditional, upright, steel-framed bicycles, with few gears. There are also barrow bikes, for carrying groceries or small children. In 2014, the City Council decided to build the world's largest bicycle parking station, near the Central Railway Station. This three-floor construction will cost an estimated €48 million and will hold 12,500 bicycles. The bicycle parking station was finally opened on 19 August 2019.


title: Utrecht

text: Utrecht is well-connected to the Dutch road network. Two of the most important major roads serve the city of Utrecht: the A12 and A2 motorways connect Amsterdam, Arnhem, The Hague and Maastricht, as well as Belgium and Germany. Other major motorways in the area are the Almere–Breda A27 and the Utrecht–Groningen A28. Due to the increasing traffic and the ancient city plan, traffic congestion is a common phenomenon in and around Utrecht, causing elevated levels of air pollutants. This has led to a passionate debate in the city about the best way to improve the city's air quality.


title: Utrecht

text: Utrecht has an industrial port located on the Amsterdam-Rijnkanaal. The container terminal has a capacity of 80,000 containers a year. In 2003, the port facilitated the transport of four million tons of cargo; mostly sand, gravel, fertiliser and fodder. Additionally, some tourist boat trips are organised from various places on the Oudegracht; and the city is connected to touristic shipping routes through sluices.


title: Utrecht

text: The economy of Utrecht depends for a large part on the several large institutions located in the city. It is the centre of the Dutch railroad network and the location of the head office of Nederlandse Spoorwegen. ProRail is headquartered in "" (The Inkwell), the largest brick building in the Netherlands (the "UFO" featured on its façade stems from an art program in 2000). Rabobank, a large bank, has its headquarters in Utrecht.


title: Utrecht

text: Utrecht hosts several large institutions of higher education. The most prominent of these is Utrecht University (est. 1636), the largest university of the Netherlands with 30,449 students (). The university is partially based in the inner city as well as in the Uithof campus area, to the east of the city. According to Shanghai Jiaotong University's university ranking in 2014, it is the 57th-best university in the world. Utrecht also houses the much smaller University of Humanistic Studies, which houses about 400 students.


title: Utrecht

text: Utrecht is home of one of the locations of TIAS School for Business and Society, focused on post-experience management education and the largest management school of its kind in the Netherlands. In 2008, its executive MBA program was rated the 24th best program in the world by the "Financial Times".


title: Utrecht

text: Utrecht is also home to two other large institutions of higher education: the vocational university Hogeschool Utrecht (37,000 students), with locations in the city and the Uithof campus; and the HKU Utrecht School of the Arts (3,000 students).


title: Utrecht

text: There are many schools for primary and secondary education, allowing parents to select from different philosophies and religions in the school as is inherent in the Dutch school system.


title: Utrecht

text: Utrecht city has an active cultural life, and in the Netherlands is second only to Amsterdam. There are several theatres and theatre companies. The 1941 main city theatre was built by Dudok. In addition to theatres, there is a large number of cinemas including three arthouse cinemas. Utrecht is host to the international Early Music Festival (Festival Oude Muziek, for music before 1800) and the Netherlands Film Festival. The city has an important classical music hall Vredenburg (1979 by Herman Hertzberger). Its acoustics are considered among the best of the 20th-century original music halls. The original Vredenburg music hall has been redeveloped as part of the larger station area redevelopment plan and in 2014 gained additional halls that allowed its merger with the rock club Tivoli and the SJU jazzpodium. There are several other venues for music throughout the city. Young musicians are educated in the conservatory, a department of the Utrecht School of the Arts. There is a specialised museum of automatically playing musical instruments.


title: Utrecht

text: There are many art galleries in Utrecht. There are also several foundations to support art and artists. Training of artists is done at the Utrecht School of the Arts. The Centraal Museum has many exhibitions on the arts, including a permanent exhibition on the works of Utrecht resident illustrator Dick Bruna, who is best known for creating Miffy ("Nijntje", in Dutch). BAK, basis voor actuele kunst offers contemporary art exhibitions and public events, as well as a Fellowship program for practitioners involved in contemporary arts, theory and activisms. Although street art is illegal in Utrecht, the Utrechtse Kabouter, a picture of a gnome with a red hat, became a common sight in 2004. Utrecht also houses one of the landmarks of modern architecture, the 1924 Rietveld Schröder House, which is listed on UNESCO's World Heritage Sites.


title: Utrecht

text: Every Saturday, a paviour adds another letter to "The Letters of Utrecht", an endless poem in the cobblestones of the Oude Gracht in Utrecht. With the "Letters", Utrecht has a social sculpture as a growing monument created for the benefit of future people.


title: Utrecht

text: To promote culture, Utrecht city organizes cultural Sundays. During a thematic Sunday, several organisations create a program which is open to everyone without, or with a very much reduced, admission fee. There are also initiatives for amateur artists. The city subsidises an organisation for amateur education in arts aimed at all inhabitants (Utrechts Centrum voor de Kunsten), as does the university for its staff and students. Additionally there are also several private initiatives. The city council provides coupons for discounts to inhabitants who receive welfare to be used with many of the initiatives.


title: Utrecht

text: Utrecht is home to the premier league (professional) football club FC Utrecht, which plays in Stadium Nieuw Galgenwaard. It is also the home of Kampong, the largest (amateur) sportsclub in the Netherlands (4,500 members), SV Kampong. Kampong features field hockey, association football, cricket, tennis, squash and boules. Kampong's men and women top hockey squads play in the highest Dutch hockey league, the Rabohoofdklasse. Utrecht is also home to baseball and softball club UVV, which plays in the highest Dutch baseball league: de Hoofdklasse. Utrecht's waterways are used by several rowing clubs. Viking is a large club open to the general public, and the student clubs Orca and Triton compete in the Varsity each year.


title: Utrecht

text: In July 2013, Utrecht hosted the European Youth Olympic Festival, in which more than 2,000 young athletes competed in nine different olympic sports. In July 2015, Utrecht hosted the Grand Départ and first stage of the Tour de France.


title: Utrecht

text: Utrecht has several smaller and larger museums. Many of those are located in the southern part of the old town, the Museumkwartier.


title: Utrecht

text: The city has several music venues such as TivoliVredenburg, Tivoli De Helling, ACU, Moira, EKKO, DB's and RASA. Utrecht hosts the yearly Utrecht Early Music Festival (Festival Oude Muziek). Several Editions of the famous Thunderdome, a large Gabber music event, have been held in Jaarbeurs Utrecht. The city also hosts Trance Energy there. Every summer there used to be the "Summer Darkness" festival, which celebrated goth culture and music. In November the Le Guess Who? festival, focused on indie rock, art rock and experimental rock, takes place in many of the city's venues.


title: Utrecht

text: There are two main theaters in the city, the and the . De parade, a travelling theatre festival, performs in Utrecht in summer. The city also hosts the yearly Festival a/d Werf which offers a selection of contemporary international theatre, together with visual arts, public art and music.


title: Khmer language

text: Khmer (; , ) is an Austroasiatic language spoken by the Khmer people, and the official and national language of Cambodia. Khmer has been influenced considerably by Sanskrit and Pali, especially in the royal and religious registers, through Hinduism and Buddhism. It is also the earliest recorded and earliest written language of the Mon–Khmer family, predating Mon and Vietnamese, due to Old Khmer being the language of the historical empires of Chenla, Angkor and, presumably, their earlier predecessor state, Funan.


title: Khmer language

text: The vast majority of Khmer speakers speak Central Khmer, the dialect of the central plain where the Khmer are most heavily concentrated. Within Cambodia, regional accents exist in remote areas but these are regarded as varieties of Central Khmer. Two exceptions are the speech of the capital, Phnom Penh, and that of the Khmer Khe in Stung Treng province, both of which differ sufficiently enough from Central Khmer to be considered separate dialects of Khmer.


title: Khmer language

text: Outside of Cambodia, three distinct dialects are spoken by ethnic Khmers native to areas that were historically part of the Khmer Empire. The Northern Khmer dialect is spoken by over a million Khmers in the southern regions of Northeast Thailand and is treated by some linguists as a separate language. Khmer Krom, or Southern Khmer, is the first language of the Khmer of Vietnam, while the Khmer living in the remote Cardamom Mountains speak a very conservative dialect that still displays features of the Middle Khmer language.


title: Khmer language

text: Khmer is primarily an analytic, isolating language. There are no inflections, conjugations or case endings. Instead, particles and auxiliary words are used to indicate grammatical relationships. General word order is subject–verb–object, and modifiers follow the word they modify. Classifiers appear after numbers when used to count nouns, though not always so consistently as in languages like Chinese. In spoken Khmer, topic-comment structure is common, and the perceived social relation between participants determines which sets of vocabulary, such as pronouns and honorifics, are proper.


title: Khmer language

text: Khmer differs from neighboring languages such as Burmese, Thai, Lao, and Vietnamese in that it is not a tonal language. Words are stressed on the final syllable, hence many words conform to the typical Mon–Khmer pattern of a stressed syllable preceded by a minor syllable. The language has been written in the Khmer script, an abugida descended from the Brahmi script via the southern Indian Pallava script, since at least the 7th century. The script's form and use has evolved over the centuries; its modern features include subscripted versions of consonants used to write clusters and a division of consonants into two series with different inherent vowels.


title: Khmer language

text: Khmer is a member of the Austroasiatic language family, the autochthonous family in an area that stretches from the Malay Peninsula through Southeast Asia to East India. Austroasiatic, which also includes Mon, Vietnamese and Munda, has been studied since 1856 and was first proposed as a language family in 1907. Despite the amount of research, there is still doubt about the internal relationship of the languages of Austroasiatic.


title: Khmer language

text: Diffloth places Khmer in an eastern branch of the Mon-Khmer languages. In these classification schemes Khmer's closest genetic relatives are the Bahnaric and Pearic languages. More recent classifications doubt the validity of the Mon-Khmer sub-grouping and place the Khmer language as its own branch of Austroasiatic equidistant from the other 12 branches of the family.


title: Khmer language

text: Khmer is spoken by some 13 million people in Cambodia, where it is the official language. It is also a second language for most of the minority groups and indigenous hill tribes there. Additionally there are a million speakers of Khmer native to southern Vietnam (1999 census) and 1.4 million in northeast Thailand (2006).


title: Khmer language

text: Khmer dialects, although mutually intelligible, are sometimes quite marked. Notable variations are found in speakers from Phnom Penh (Cambodia's capital city), the rural Battambang area, the areas of Northeast Thailand adjacent to Cambodia such as Surin province, the Cardamom Mountains, and southern Vietnam. The dialects form a continuum running roughly north to south. Standard Cambodian Khmer is mutually intelligible with the others but a Khmer Krom speaker from Vietnam, for instance, may have great difficulty communicating with a Khmer native of Sisaket Province in Thailand.


title: Khmer language

text: Standard Khmer, or Central Khmer, the language as taught in Cambodian schools and used by the media, is based on the dialect spoken throughout the Central Plain, a region encompassed by the northwest and central provinces.


title: Khmer language

text: Northern Khmer (called in Khmer) refers to the dialects spoken by many in several border provinces of present-day northeast Thailand. After the fall of the Khmer Empire in the early 15th century, the Dongrek Mountains served as a natural border leaving the Khmer north of the mountains under the sphere of influence of the Kingdom of Lan Xang. The conquests of Cambodia by Naresuan the Great for Ayutthaya furthered their political and economic isolation from Cambodia proper, leading to a dialect that developed relatively independently from the midpoint of the Middle Khmer period.


title: Khmer language

text: This has resulted in a distinct accent influenced by the surrounding tonal languages Lao and Thai, lexical differences, and phonemic differences in both vowels and distribution of consonants. Syllable-final , which has become silent in other dialects of Khmer, is still pronounced in Northern Khmer. Some linguists classify Northern Khmer as a separate but closely related language rather than a dialect.


title: Khmer language

text: Western Khmer, also called Cardamom Khmer or Chanthaburi Khmer, is spoken by a very small, isolated population in the Cardamom mountain range extending from western Cambodia into eastern Central Thailand. Although little studied, this variety is unique in that it maintains a definite system of vocal register that has all but disappeared in other dialects of modern Khmer.


title: Khmer language

text: Phnom Penh Khmer is spoken in the capital and surrounding areas. This dialect is characterized by merging or complete elision of syllables, which speakers from other regions consider a "relaxed" pronunciation. For instance, "Phnom Penh" is sometimes shortened to "m'Penh". Another characteristic of Phnom Penh speech is observed in words with an "r" either as an initial consonant or as the second member of a consonant cluster (as in the English word "bread"). The "r", trilled or flapped in other dialects, is either pronounced as a uvular trill or not pronounced at all.


title: Khmer language

text: This alters the quality of any preceding consonant, causing a harder, more emphasized pronunciation. Another unique result is that the syllable is spoken with a low-rising or "dipping" tone much like the "hỏi" tone in Vietnamese. For example, some people pronounce ('fish') as : the is dropped and the vowel begins by dipping much lower in tone than standard speech and then rises, effectively doubling its length. Another example is the word ('study'), which is pronounced , with the uvular "r" and the same intonation described above.


title: Khmer language

text: Khmer Krom or Southern Khmer is spoken by the indigenous Khmer population of the Mekong Delta, formerly controlled by the Khmer Empire but part of Vietnam since 1698. Khmers are persecuted by the Vietnamese government for using their native language and, since the 1950s, have been forced to take Vietnamese names. Consequently, very little research has been published regarding this dialect. It has been generally influenced by Vietnamese for three centuries and accordingly displays a pronounced accent, tendency toward monosyllabic words and lexical differences from Standard Khmer.


title: Khmer language

text: Khmer Khe is spoken in the Se San, Srepok and Sekong river valleys of Sesan and Siem Pang districts in Stung Treng Province. Following the decline of Angkor, the Khmer abandoned their northern territories, which the Lao then settled. In the 17th century, Chey Chetha XI led a Khmer force into Stung Treng to retake the area. The Khmer Khe living in this area of Stung Treng in modern times are presumed to be the descendants of this group. Their dialect is thought to resemble that of pre-modern Siem Reap.


title: Khmer language

text: Linguistic study of the Khmer language divides its history into four periods one of which, the Old Khmer period, is subdivided into pre-Angkorian and Angkorian. Pre-Angkorian Khmer is the Old Khmer language from 600 CE through 800. Angkorian Khmer is the language as it was spoken in the Khmer Empire from the 9th century until the 13th century.


title: Khmer language

text: The following centuries saw changes in morphology, phonology and lexicon. The language of this transition period, from about the 14th to 18th centuries, is referred to as Middle Khmer and saw borrowings from Thai in the literary register. Modern Khmer is dated from the 19th century to today.


title: Khmer language

text: Just as modern Khmer was emerging from the transitional period represented by Middle Khmer, Cambodia fell under the influence of French colonialism. Thailand, which had for centuries claimed suzerainty over Cambodia and controlled succession to the Cambodian throne, began losing its influence on the language. In 1887 Cambodia was fully integrated into French Indochina, which brought in a French-speaking aristocracy. This led to French becoming the language of higher education and the intellectual class. By 1907, the French had wrested over half of modern-day Cambodia, including the north and northwest where Thai had been the prestige language, back from Thai control and reintegrated it into the country.


title: Khmer language

text: Many native scholars in the early 20th century, led by a monk named Chuon Nath, resisted the French and Thai influences on their language. Forming the government sponsored Cultural Committee to define and standardize the modern language, they championed Khmerization, purging of foreign elements, reviving affixation, and the use of Old Khmer roots and historical Pali and Sanskrit to coin new words for modern ideas. Opponents, led by Keng Vannsak, who embraced "total Khmerization" by denouncing the reversion to classical languages and favoring the use of contemporary colloquial Khmer for neologisms, and Ieu Koeus, who favored borrowing from Thai, were also influential.


title: Khmer language

text: Koeus later joined the Cultural Committee and supported Nath. Nath's views and prolific work won out and he is credited with cultivating modern Khmer-language identity and culture, overseeing the translation of the entire Pali Buddhist canon into Khmer. He also created the modern Khmer language dictionary that is still in use today, helping preserve Khmer during the French colonial period.


title: Khmer language

text: The phonological system described here is the inventory of sounds of the standard spoken language, represented using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).


title: Khmer language

text: The voiceless plosives may occur with or without aspiration (as vs. , etc.); this difference is contrastive before a vowel. However, the aspirated sounds in that position may be analyzed as sequences of two phonemes: . This analysis is supported by the fact that infixes can be inserted between the stop and the aspiration; for example ('big') becomes ('size') with a nominalizing infix. When one of these plosives occurs initially before another consonant, aspiration is no longer contrastive and can be regarded as mere phonetic detail: slight aspiration is expected when the following consonant is not one of (or if the initial plosive is ).


title: Khmer language

text: The voiced plosives are pronounced as implosives by most speakers, but this feature is weak in educated speech, where they become .


title: Khmer language

text: In syllable-final position, and approach and respectively. The stops are unaspirated and have no audible release when occurring as syllable finals.


title: Khmer language

text: In addition, the consonants , , and occur occasionally in recent loan words in the speech of Cambodians familiar with French and other languages.


title: Khmer language

text: Various authors have proposed slightly different analyses of the Khmer vowel system. This may be in part because of the wide degree of variation in pronunciation between individual speakers, even within a dialectal region. The description below follows Huffman (1970). The number of vowel nuclei and their values vary between dialects; differences exist even between the Standard Khmer system and that of the Battambang dialect on which the standard is based.


title: Khmer language

text: In addition, some diphthongs and triphthongs are analyzed as a vowel nucleus plus a semivowel ( or ) coda because they cannot be followed by a final consonant. These include: (with short monophthongs) , , , , ; (with long monophthongs) , ; (with long diphthongs) , , , , and .


title: Khmer language

text: A Khmer syllable begins with a single consonant, or else with a cluster of two, or rarely three, consonants. The only possible clusters of three consonants at the start of a syllable are , and (with aspirated consonants analyzed as two-consonant sequences) . There are 85 possible two-consonant clusters (including [pʰ] etc. analyzed as /ph/ etc.). All the clusters are shown in the following table, phonetically, i.e. superscript ʰ can mark either contrastive or non-contrastive aspiration (see above).


title: Khmer language

text: Slight vowel epenthesis occurs in the clusters consisting of a plosive followed by , in those beginning , and in the cluster .


title: Khmer language

text: After the initial consonant or consonant cluster comes the syllabic nucleus, which is one of the vowels listed above. This vowel may end the syllable or may be followed by a coda, which is a single consonant. If the syllable is stressed and the vowel is short, there must be a final consonant. All consonant sounds except and the aspirates can appear as the coda (although final /r/ is heard in some dialects, most notably in Northern Khmer).


title: Khmer language

text: A minor syllable (unstressed syllable preceding the main syllable of a word) has a structure of CV-, CrV-, CVN- or CrVN- (where C is a consonant, V a vowel, and N a nasal consonant). The vowels in such syllables are usually short; in conversation they may be reduced to , although in careful or formal speech, including on television and radio, they are clearly articulated. An example of such a word is "mɔnuh, mɔnɨh, mĕəʾnuh" ('person'), pronounced , or more casually .


title: Khmer language

text: Stress in Khmer falls on the final syllable of a word. Because of this predictable pattern, stress is non-phonemic in Khmer (it does not distinguish different meanings).


title: Khmer language

text: Most Khmer words consist of either one or two syllables. In most native disyllabic words, the first syllable is a minor (fully unstressed) syllable. Such words have been described as "sesquisyllabic" (i.e. as having one-and-a-half syllables). There are also some disyllabic words in which the first syllable does not behave as a minor syllable, but takes secondary stress. Most such words are compounds, but some are single morphemes (generally loanwords). An example is ('language'), pronounced .


title: Khmer language

text: Words with three or more syllables, if they are not compounds, are mostly loanwords, usually derived from Pali, Sanskrit, or more recently, French. They are nonetheless adapted to Khmer stress patterns. Primary stress falls on the final syllable, with secondary stress on every second syllable from the end. Thus in a three-syllable word, the first syllable has secondary stress; in a four-syllable word, the second syllable has secondary stress; in a five-syllable word, the first and third syllables have secondary stress, and so on. Long polysyllables are not often used in conversation.


title: Khmer language

text: Compounds, however, preserve the stress patterns of the constituent words. Thus , the name of a kind of cookie (literally 'bird's nest'), is pronounced , with secondary stress on the second rather than the first syllable, because it is composed of the words ('nest') and ('bird').


title: Khmer language

text: Khmer once had a phonation distinction in its vowels, but this now survives only in the most archaic dialect (Western Khmer). The distinction arose historically when vowels after Old Khmer voiced consonants became breathy voiced and diphthongized; for example became . When consonant voicing was lost, the distinction was maintained by the vowel (); later the phonation disappeared as well (). These processes explain the origin of what are now called a-series and o-series consonants in the Khmer script.


title: Khmer language

text: Although most Cambodian dialects are not tonal, the colloquial Phnom Penh dialect has developed a tonal contrast (level versus peaking tone) as a by-product of the elision of .


title: Khmer language

text: Intonation often conveys semantic context in Khmer, as in distinguishing declarative statements, questions and exclamations. The available grammatical means of making such distinctions are not always used, or may be ambiguous; for example, the final interrogative particle can also serve as an emphasizing (or in some cases negating) particle.


title: Khmer language

text: The intonation pattern of a typical Khmer declarative phrase is a steady rise throughout followed by an abrupt drop on the last syllable.


title: Khmer language

text: Other intonation contours signify a different type of phrase such as the "full doubt" interrogative, similar to yes-no questions in English. Full doubt interrogatives remain fairly even in tone throughout, but rise sharply towards the end.


title: Khmer language

text: Exclamatory phrases follow the typical steadily rising pattern, but rise sharply on the last syllable instead of falling.


title: Khmer language

text: Khmer is primarily an analytic language with no inflection. Syntactic relations are mainly determined by word order. Old and Middle Khmer used particles to mark grammatical categories and many of these have survived in Modern Khmer but are used sparingly, mostly in literary or formal language. Khmer makes extensive use of auxiliary verbs, "directionals" and serial verb construction. Colloquial Khmer is a zero copula language, instead preferring predicative adjectives (and even predicative nouns) unless using a copula for emphasis or to avoid ambiguity in more complex sentences. Basic word order is subject–verb–object (SVO), although subjects are often dropped; prepositions are used rather than postpositions.


title: Khmer language

text: Topic-Comment constructions are common and the language is generally head-initial (modifiers follow the words they modify). Some grammatical processes are still not fully understood by western scholars. For example, it is not clear if certain features of Khmer grammar, such as actor nominalization, should be treated as a morphological process or a purely syntactic device, and some derivational morphology seems "purely decorative" and performs no known syntactic work.


title: Khmer language

text: Lexical categories have been hard to define in Khmer. Henri Maspero, an early scholar of Khmer, claimed the language had no parts of speech, while a later scholar, Judith Jacob, posited four parts of speech and innumerable particles. John Haiman, on the other hand, identifies "a couple dozen" parts of speech in Khmer with the caveat that Khmer words have the freedom to perform a variety of syntactic functions depending on such factors as word order, relevant particles, location within a clause, intonation and context. Some of the more important lexical categories and their function are demonstrated in the following example sentence taken from a hospital brochure:


title: Khmer language

text: Modern Khmer is an isolating language, which means that it uses little productive morphology. There is some derivation by means of prefixes and infixes, but this is a remnant of Old Khmer and not always productive in the modern language. Khmer morphology is evidence of a historical process through which the language was, at some point in the past, changed from being an agglutinative language to adopting an isolating typology. Affixed forms are lexicalized and cannot be used productively to form new words. Below are some of the most common affixes with examples as given by Huffman.


title: Khmer language

text: Compounding in Khmer is a common derivational process that takes two forms, coordinate compounds and repetitive compounds. Coordinate compounds join two unbound morphemes (independent words) of similar meaning to form a compound signifying a concept more general than either word alone. Coordinate compounds join either two nouns or two verbs. Repetitive compounds, one of the most productive derivational features of Khmer, use reduplication of an entire word to derive words whose meaning depends on the class of the reduplicated word. A repetitive compound of a noun indicates plurality or generality while that of an adjectival verb could mean either an intensification or plurality.


title: Khmer language

text: Khmer nouns do not inflect for grammatical gender or singular/plural. There are no articles, but indefiniteness is often expressed by the word for "one" ( ) following the noun as in ( "a dog"). Plurality can be marked by postnominal particles, numerals, or reduplication of a following adjective, which, although similar to intensification, is usually not ambiguous due to context.


title: Khmer language

text: Classifying particles are used after numerals, but are not always obligatory as they are in Thai or Chinese, for example, and are often dropped in colloquial speech. Khmer nouns are divided into two groups: mass nouns, which take classifiers; and specific, nouns, which do not. The overwhelming majority are mass nouns.


title: Khmer language

text: Possession is colloquially expressed by word order. The possessor is placed after the thing that is possessed. Alternatively, in more complex sentences or when emphasis is required, a possessive construction using the word (, "property, object") may be employed. In formal and literary contexts, the possessive particle () is used:


title: Khmer language

text: Pronouns are subject to a complicated system of social register, the choice of pronoun depending on the perceived relationships between speaker, audience and referent (see Social registers below). Khmer exhibits pronoun avoidance, so kinship terms, nicknames and proper names are often used instead of pronouns (including for the first person) among intimates. Subject pronouns are frequently dropped in colloquial conversation.


title: Khmer language

text: Adjectives, verbs and verb phrases may be made into nouns by the use of nominalization particles. Three of the more common particles used to create nouns are , , and . These particles are prefixed most often to verbs to form abstract nouns. The latter, derived from Sanskrit, also occurs as a suffix in fixed forms borrowed from Sanskrit and Pali such as ("health") from ("to be healthy").


title: Khmer language

text: Adjectives, demonstratives and numerals follow the noun they modify. Adverbs likewise follow the verb. Morphologically, adjectives and adverbs are not distinguished, with many words often serving either function. Adjectives are also employed as verbs as Khmer sentences rarely use a copula.


title: Khmer language

text: Degrees of comparison are constructed syntactically. Comparatives are expressed using the word : "A X [B]" (A is more X [than B]). The most common way to express superlatives is with : "A X " (A is the most X). Intensity is also expressed syntactically, similar to other languages of the region, by reduplication or with the use of intensifiers.


title: Khmer language

text: As is typical of most East Asian languages, Khmer verbs do not inflect at all; tense, aspect and mood can be expressed using auxiliary verbs, particles (such as , placed before a verb to express continuous aspect) and adverbs (such as "yesterday", "earlier", "tomorrow"), or may be understood from context. Serial verb construction is quite common.


title: Khmer language

text: Khmer verbs are a relatively open class and can be divided into two types, main verbs and auxiliary verbs. Huffman defined a Khmer verb as "any word that can be (negated)", and further divided main verbs into three classes.


title: Khmer language

text: Adjectival verbs are a word class that has no equivalent in English. When modifying a noun or verb, they function as adjectives or adverbs, respectively, but they may also be used as main verbs equivalent to English "be + "adjective"".


title: Khmer language

text: Syntax is the rules and processes that describe how sentences are formed in a particular language, how words relate to each other within clauses or phrases and how those phrases relate to each other within a sentence to convey meaning. Khmer syntax is very analytic. Relationships between words and phrases are signified primarily by word order supplemented with auxiliary verbs and, particularly in formal and literary registers, grammatical marking particles. Grammatical phenomena such as negation and aspect are marked by particles while interrogative sentences are marked either by particles or interrogative words equivalent to English "wh-words".


title: Khmer language

text: A complete Khmer sentence consists of four basic elements—an optional topic, an optional subject, an obligatory predicate, and various adverbials and particles. The topic and subject are noun phrases, predicates are verb phrases and another noun phrase acting as an object or verbal attribute often follows the predicate.


title: Khmer language

text: When both a direct object and indirect object are present without any grammatical markers, the preferred order is SV(DO)(IO). In such a case, if the direct object phrase contains multiple components, the indirect object immediately follows the noun of the direct object phrase and the direct object's modifiers follow the indirect object:


title: Khmer language

text: This ordering of objects can be changed and the meaning clarified with the inclusion of particles. The word , which normally means "to arrive" or "towards", can be used as a preposition meaning "to":


title: Khmer language

text: Alternatively, the indirect object could precede the direct object if the object-marking preposition were used:


title: Khmer language

text: However, in spoken discourse OSV is possible when emphasizing the object in a topic–comment-like structure.


title: Khmer language

text: The elements in parentheses are optional. Honorifics are a class of words that serve to index the social status of the referent. Honorifics can be kinship terms or personal names, both of which are often used as first and second person pronouns, or specialized words such as ('god') before royal and religious objects. The most common demonstratives are ('this, these') and ('that, those'). The word ('those over there') has a more distal or vague connotation.


title: Khmer language

text: If the noun phrase contains a possessive adjective, it follows the noun and precedes the numeral. If a descriptive attribute co-occurs with a possessive, the possessive construction () is expected.


title: Khmer language

text: The Khmer particle marked attributes in Old Khmer noun phrases and is used in formal and literary language to signify that what precedes is the noun and what follows is the attribute. Modern usage may carry the connotation of mild intensity.


title: Khmer language

text: Khmer verbs are completely uninflected, and once a subject or topic has been introduced or is clear from context the noun phrase may be dropped. Thus, the simplest possible sentence in Khmer consists of a single verb. For example, 'to go' on its own can mean "I'm going.", "He went.", "They've gone.", "Let's go.", etc. This also results in long strings of verbs such as:


title: Khmer language

text: Khmer uses three verbs for what translates into English as the copula. The general copula is ; it is used to convey identity with nominal predicates. For locative predicates, the copula is . The verb is the "existential" copula meaning "there is" or "there exists".


title: Khmer language

text: Negation is achieved by putting before the verb and the particle at the end of the sentence or clause. In colloquial speech, verbs can also be negated without the need for a final particle, by placing before them.


title: Khmer language

text: Past tense can be conveyed by adverbs, such as "yesterday" or by the use of perfective particles such as


title: Khmer language

text: Different senses of future action can also be expressed by the use of adverbs like "tomorrow" or by the future tense marker , which is placed immediately before the verb, or both:


title: Khmer language

text: Imperatives are often unmarked. For example, in addition to the meanings given above, the "sentence" can also mean "Go!". Various words and particles may be added to the verb to soften the command to varying degrees, including to the point of politeness (jussives):


title: Khmer language

text: Prohibitives take the form " + " and also are often softened by the addition of the particle to the end of the phrase.


title: Khmer language

text: There are three basic types of questions in Khmer. Questions requesting specific information use question words. Polar questions are indicated with interrogative particles, most commonly , a homonym of the negation particle. Tag questions are indicated with various particles and rising inflection. The SVO word order is generally not inverted for questions.


title: Khmer language

text: In more formal contexts and in polite speech, questions are also marked at their beginning by the particle .


title: Khmer language

text: Khmer does not have a passive voice, but there is a construction utilizing the main verb ("to hit", "to be correct", "to affect") as an auxiliary verb meaning "to be subject to" or "to undergo"—which results in sentences that are translated to English using the passive voice.


title: Khmer language

text: Complex sentences are formed in Khmer by the addition of one or more clauses to the main clause. The various types of clauses in Khmer include the coordinate clause, the relative clause and the subordinate clause. Word order in clauses is the same for that of the basic sentences described above. Coordinate clauses do not necessarily have to be marked; they can simply follow one another. When explicitly marked, they are joined by words similar to English conjunctions such as ("and") and ("and then") or by clause-final conjunction-like adverbs and , both of which can mean "also" or "and also"; disjunction is indicated by ("or").


title: Khmer language

text: Relative clauses can be introduced by ("that") but, similar to coordinate clauses, often simply follow the main clause. For example, both phrases below can mean "the hospital bed that has wheels".


title: Khmer language

text: Relative clauses are more likely to be introduced with if they do not immediately follow the head noun. Khmer subordinate conjunctions always precede a subordinate clause. Subordinate conjunctions include words such as ("because"), ("seems as if") and ("in order to").


title: Khmer language

text: Counting in Khmer is based on a biquinary system: the numbers from 6 to 9 have the form "five one", "five two", etc. The words for multiples of ten from 30 to 90 are not related to the basic Khmer numbers, but are Chinese in origin, and probably came to Khmer via Thai. Khmer numerals, which were inherited from Indian numerals, are used more widely than Western Arabic numerals.


title: Khmer language

text: The principal number words are listed in the following table, which gives Western and Khmer digits, Khmer spelling and IPA transcription.


title: Khmer language

text: Intermediate numbers are formed by compounding the above elements. Powers of ten are denoted by loan words: (100), (1,000), (10,000), (100,000) and (1,000,000) from Thai and (10,000,000) from Sanskrit.


title: Khmer language

text: Khmer employs a system of registers in which the speaker must always be conscious of the social status of the person spoken to. The different registers, which include those used for common speech, polite speech, speaking to or about royals and speaking to or about monks, employ alternate verbs, names of body parts and pronouns. As an example, the word for "to eat" used between intimates or in reference to animals is . Used in polite reference to commoners, it is . When used of those of higher social status, it is or . For monks the word is and for royals, . Another result is that the pronominal system is complex and full of honorific variations, just a few of which are shown in the table below.


title: Khmer language

text: Khmer is written with the Khmer script, an abugida developed from the Pallava script of India before the 7th century when the first known inscription appeared. Written left-to-right with vowel signs that can be placed after, before, above or below the consonant they follow, the Khmer script is similar in appearance and usage to Thai and Lao, both of which were based on the Khmer system. The Khmer script is also distantly related to the Mon–Burmese script. Within Cambodia, literacy in the Khmer alphabet is estimated at 77.6%.


title: Khmer language

text: Consonant symbols in Khmer are divided into two groups, or series. The first series carries the inherent vowel while the second series carries the inherent vowel . The Khmer names of the series, ('voiceless') and ('voiced'), respectively, indicate that the second series consonants were used to represent the voiced phonemes of Old Khmer. As the voicing of stops was lost, however, the contrast shifted to the phonation of the attached vowels, which, in turn, evolved into a simple difference of vowel quality, often by diphthongization. This process has resulted in the Khmer alphabet having two symbols for most consonant phonemes and each vowel symbol having two possible readings, depending on the series of the initial consonant:


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: The "America" class (formerly the LHA(R) class) is a ship class of landing helicopter assault (LHA) type amphibious assault ships of the United States Navy (USN). The class is designed to put ashore a Marine Expeditionary Unit using helicopters and MV-22B Osprey V/STOL transport aircraft, supported by AV-8B Harrier II or F-35 Lightning II V/STOL aircraft and various attack helicopters. The first of these warships was commissioned by the U.S. Navy in 2014 to replace of the ; as many as eleven will be built. The design of the "America" class is based on that of , the last ship of the "Wasp" class, but the "Flight 0" ships of the "America" class will not have well decks, and have smaller on-board hospitals to provide more space for aviation uses.


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: Although they only carry helicopters and V/STOL aircraft, the "America" class, with a displacement of about , is similar in size to the French and the Indian fixed-wing aircraft carriers. Also, while more than shorter, "America" class ships are of comparable displacement to the former US Navy s.


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: Ships of the "America" class can be used as a small aircraft carrier with a squadron of jet fighters plus several multipurpose helicopters, such as the MH-60 Seahawk. They can carry about 20 to 25 AV-8B, F-35Bs, or a mixture of the two, but the future ships of this class, starting with , will have smaller aircraft hangars to leave room for larger amphibious warfare well decks.


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: "America" is based on the design of , itself an improved version of the s with gas turbine power. About 45 percent of the "Flight 0" design of this class is based on that of "Makin Island", but with its well deck omitted to allow more room for aircraft, their spare parts and weapons, and their fuel. The gas turbines of "Makin Island", "America", and its successors use JP-5 fuel which is the same fuel used by their helicopters, the jet engines of their AV-8B Harrier and MV-22 Osprey aircraft and, in future ships, the gas turbines of the Landing Craft Air Cushions (LCACs) that they could carry in their well decks. This commonality greatly simplifies the storage, distribution, and use of the fuels.


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: The typical aircraft complement for the first two vessels is expected to be twelve MV-22B Osprey transports, six F-35B Lightning II STOVL multi-role jet aircraft, four CH-53K heavy transport helicopters, seven AH-1Z/UH-1Y attack/utility helicopters, and two Navy MH-60S Knighthawks for air-sea rescue. The exact make-up of the ship's aircraft complements may vary according to their missions. They can carry about 20 AV-8Bs or F-35Bs, and 2 MH-60Ss, to serve as a small aircraft carrier as demonstrated by landing helicopter dock (LHD) operations in Operation Iraqi Freedom.


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: The U.S. Marine Corps is now more concerned about anti-ship missile attacks from fast attack craft and long-range precision fires from land. To counter such attacks the Marine Corps wants to keep amphibious ships farther offshore. For this Marines will be transported ashore in larger and longer range MV-22 V/STOL aircraft. To accommodate these requirements, "America" has twice the displacement of the retired s.


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: The "America"-class amphibious assault ships are engineered with a (CODLOG) hybrid-electric propulsion system derived from the one used on "Makin Island". The ships can use gas-turbines for high speeds and the diesel-electric engines when required. Setting the beam of "America" at was dictated by the need for these ships to pass through the Panama Canal. The Congressional Budget Office found that if before 2040 the price of oil reached and remained above $140 per barrel then the use of nuclear propulsion for LHX-class ships would be more cost-effective.


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: The LHX or LH(X) was a warship that was proposed in the late 1990s to replace the s, but with a dry deck for hovercraft rather than a floodable "well deck". After 2000, the LHX, the "Amphibious Assault Ship Future Replacement", was put forward to replace all of the LHDs. The new LHX could be a Flight 2 design of the "America" class built with a well deck and a smaller island superstructure, which would give it 20 percent more capacity on the flight deck. This would remove the current restriction on MV-22s to land on spots 5 and 6, and also giving room for four MV-22B, three F-35B Lightning IIs, or three CH-53Ks to use the flight deck. In 2008, the procurement of Flight 2 ships was tentatively planned for 2024, but that might not be practical or affordable by then.


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: A modified version of the design of "America", designated the MPF(F), LHA(R), or T-LHA(R), was proposed for two ships of the Maritime Prepositioning Force (Future). The MPF(F) is the Navy's concept for a "sea base" to support operations ashore starting in about 2025. These two ships would hypothetically be manned by a civilian crew from the Military Sealift Command and not armed with weapons. Funding for the MPF(F) and the LHA(R) was tabled by the Senate Armed Services Committee in the fiscal year 2008 budget. The U.S. Navy now intends to buy more ships of the "America" class for its fleet of amphibious warfare ships.


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: In January 2014, the U.S. Navy began taking measures on "America" in order to reduce damage from excessive heat given off by the F-35B and MV-22 to prolong the life of the flight deck. The F-35B engine gives off much more heat than the previous AV-8B Harrier STOVL fighter and the MV-22 Osprey's heat exhaust has been known to damage flight decks. Plans include 14 different modifications to the ship and limiting the number of flight operations that are conducted off the deck. The U.S. Navy is looking for cost-effective solutions that will not affect the combat effectiveness of "America". Restricting the number of flight operations is not expected to decrease its usefulness as amphibious assault ships are made to support quick assaults, while full-sized aircraft carriers have the mission of conducting sustained air operations. Lessons learned from these measures will be applied to and under construction, which will allow them to perform "complete unrestricted operations." Minor modifications to "America" are as small as putting covers over life rafts and refueling stations and moving antennas.


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: Further warships in this class will have a well deck for amphibious warfare in their sterns to contain landing craft, such as the LCAC, as in "Tarawa"-class LHAs and "Wasp"-class amphibious assault ships.


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: The addition of a well deck will leave less space for aircraft on board the ships, but the "Early Operational Assessment" of 2005 criticized the "Flight 0" design because the expanded aviation facilities gave no space for a well deck. Also, USS "America" has reduced stowage space for military vehicles, and the size of its hospital was reduced by two-thirds with respect to the "Wasp"-class ships.


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: Before he became the Under Secretary of the Navy, Robert O. Work also brought into question the usefulness of an amphibious warfare ship without a well deck. The concept of the landing platform helicopter (LPH) had failed when their helicopters met enemy anti-aircraft systems off the coast of Lebanon during the late 1970s. In that case, Marines first had to be moved onto ships that had well decks.


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: The third ship of the class (USS "Bougainville") will be the first in its class with a well deck for deploying amphibious vehicles. While there was emphasis on lighter ground vehicles in the late 1990s, up-armored and heavier vehicles were used during operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Future counterinsurgency operations require ships that can carry and deliver those vehicles, including through use of shore connectors; cargo lift requirements are met more expensively by aircraft airlifting equipment. Adding the well deck will require the ship's island to be slightly smaller compared to its two predecessors. Early design work with funds will begin in 2015, detailed design work and construction will start in 2017, and the LHA-8 will enter service in 2024.


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: The program started in July 2001, with development beginning in October 2005, the production decision was made in January 2006, and construction of LHA-6 began in December 2008.


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding was awarded $48.1M for "additional planning and advanced engineering services in support of the LHA replacement (LHA[R]) Flight 0 amphibious assault ship (LHA 7)" on 28 October 2010, to run until May 2012. It was scheduled for delivery in 2017. In January 2011, development problems led to the F-35B program being delayed two years, and plans for LHA-7 could change if the F-35B were to be canceled.


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: In April 2012, Contract N00024-10-C-2229 was issued to Huntington Ingalls Industries, in which funding for steel plate purchases for LHA-7 was planned, and announced the requirement for an additional four ships (to LHA-10).


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: On 4 May 2012, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced the selection of USS "Tripoli" as the name for the Navy's next large-deck amphibious assault ship (LHA-7). On 20 June 2014, Ingalls Shipyards, authenticated "Tripoli"s keel in ceremony by the ship's sponsor, Lynne Mabus, wife of Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus. "Tripoli" was officially delivered to the U.S. Navy on 28 February 2020.


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: On 13 June 2014, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that it had awarded a contract worth for $23.5 million to General Dynamics National Steel and Shipbuilding Co., San Diego, California for design and development work on LHA-8.


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: On 14 December 2021, a $70.8 million U.S. Navy contract was awarded to Huntington Ingalls as its latest installment toward acquiring long-lead-time materials for LHA 9. The award was offered by the Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, D.C.


title: America-class amphibious assault ship

text: On 27 October 2022, the U.S. Navy awarded Ingalls Shipbuilding a $2.4 billion contract modification for detail, design, and construction of LHA-9


title: Fine art

text: In European academic traditions, fine art is developed primarily for aesthetics or creative expression, distinguishing it from decorative art or applied art, which also has to serve some practical function, such as pottery or most metalwork. In the aesthetic theories developed in the Italian Renaissance, the highest art was that which allowed the full expression and display of the artist's imagination, unrestricted by any of the practical considerations involved in, say, making and decorating a teapot. It was also considered important that making the artwork did not involve dividing the work between different individuals with specialized skills, as might be necessary with a piece of furniture, for example. Even within the fine arts, there was a hierarchy of genres based on the amount of creative imagination required, with history painting placed higher than still life.


title: Fine art

text: Historically, the five main fine arts were painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry, with performing arts including theatre and dance. In practice, outside education, the concept is typically only applied to the visual arts. The old master print and drawing were included as related forms to painting, just as prose forms of literature were to poetry. Today, the range of what would be considered fine arts (in so far as the term remains in use) commonly includes additional modern forms, such as film, photography, video production/editing, design, and conceptual art.


title: Fine art

text: One definition of "fine art" is "a visual art considered to have been created primarily for aesthetic and intellectual purposes and judged for its beauty and meaningfulness, specifically, painting, sculpture, drawing, watercolor, graphics, and architecture." In that sense, there are conceptual differences between the fine arts and the decorative arts or applied arts (these two terms covering largely the same media). As far as the consumer of the art was concerned, the perception of aesthetic qualities required a refined judgment usually referred to as having good taste, which differentiated fine art from popular art and entertainment.


title: Fine art

text: The word "fine" does not so much denote the quality of the artwork in question, but the purity of the discipline according to traditional Western European canons. Except in the case of architecture, where a practical utility was accepted, this definition originally excluded the "useful" applied or decorative arts, and the products of what were regarded as crafts. In contemporary practice, these distinctions and restrictions have become essentially meaningless, as the concept or intention of the artist is given primacy, regardless of the means through which this is expressed.


title: Fine art

text: The term is typically only used for Western art from the Renaissance onwards, although similar genre distinctions can apply to the art of other cultures, especially those of East Asia. The set of "fine arts" are sometimes also called the "major arts", with "minor arts" equating to the decorative arts. This would typically be for medieval and ancient art.


title: Fine art

text: According to some writers, the concept of a distinct category of fine art is an invention of the early modern period in the West. Larry Shiner in his "" (2003) locates the invention in the 18th century:


title: Fine art

text: "There was a traditional "system of the arts" in the West before the eighteenth century. (Other traditional cultures still have a similar system.) In that system, an artist or artisan was a skilled maker or practitioner, a work of art was the useful product of skilled work, and the appreciation of the arts was integrally connected with their role in the rest of life. "Art", in other words, meant approximately the same thing as the Greek word "techne", or in English "skill", a sense that has survived in phrases like "the art of war", "the art of love", and "the art of medicine."


title: Fine art

text: Similar ideas have been expressed by Paul Oskar Kristeller, Pierre Bourdieu, and Terry Eagleton (e.g. "The Ideology of the Aesthetic"), though the point of invention is often placed earlier, in the Italian Renaissance; Anthony Blunt notes that the term "arti di disegno", a similar concept, emerged in Italy in the mid-16th century.


title: Fine art

text: But it can be argued that the classical world, from which very little theoretical writing on art survives, in practice had similar distinctions. The names of artists preserved in literary sources are Greek painters and sculptors, and to a lesser extent the carvers of engraved gems. Several individuals in these groups were very famous, and copied and remembered for centuries after their deaths. The cult of the individual artistic genius, which was an important part of the Renaissance theoretical basis for the distinction between "fine" and other art, drew on classical precedent, especially as recorded by Pliny the Elder. Some other types of object, in particular Ancient Greek pottery, are often signed by their makers or the owner of the workshop, probably partly to advertise their products.


title: Fine art

text: The decline of the concept of "fine art" is dated by George Kubler and others to around 1880. When it "fell out of fashion" as, by about 1900, folk art was also coming to be regarded as significant. Finally, at least in circles interested in art theory, ""fine art" was driven out of use by about 1920 by the exponents of industrial design ... who opposed a double standard of judgment for works of art and for useful objects". This was among theoreticians; it has taken far longer for the art trade and popular opinion to catch up. However, over the same period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the movement of prices in the art market was in the opposite direction, with works from the fine arts drawing much further ahead of those from the decorative arts.


title: Fine art

text: In the art trade the term retains some currency for objects from before roughly 1900 and may be used to define the scope of auctions or auction house departments and the like. The term also remains in use in tertiary education, appearing in the names of colleges, faculties, and courses. In the English-speaking world this is mostly in North America, but the same is true of the equivalent terms in other European languages, such as "beaux-arts" in French or "bellas artes" in Spanish.


title: Fine art

text: The conceptual separation of arts and decorative arts or crafts that have often dominated in Europe and the US is not shared by all other cultures. But traditional Chinese art had comparable distinctions, distinguishing within Chinese painting between the mostly landscape literati painting of scholar gentlemen and the artisans of the schools of court painting and sculpture. Although high status was also given to many things that would be seen as craft objects in the West, in particular ceramics, jade carving, weaving, and embroidery, this by no means extended to the workers who created these objects, who typically remained even more anonymous than in the West. Similar distinctions were made in Japanese and Korean art. In Islamic art, the highest status was generally given to calligraphy, architects and the painters of Persian miniatures and related traditions, but these were still very often court employees. Typically they also supplied designs for the best Persian carpets, architectural tiling and other decorative media, more consistently than happened in the West.


title: Fine art

text: Latin American art was dominated by European colonialism until the 20th-century, when indigenous art began to reassert itself inspired by the Constructivist Movement, which reunited arts with crafts based upon socialist principles. In Africa, Yoruba art often has a political and spiritual function. As with the art of the Chinese, the art of the Yoruba is also often composed of what would ordinarily be considered in the West to be craft production. Some of its most admired manifestations, such as textiles, fall in this category.


title: Fine art

text: Painting as a fine art means applying paint to a flat surface (as opposed for example to painting a sculpture, or a piece of pottery), typically using several colours. Prehistoric painting that has survived was applied to natural rock surfaces, and wall painting, especially on wet plaster in the fresco technique was a major form until recently. Portable paintings on wood panel or canvas have been the most important in the Western world for several centuries, mostly in tempera or oil painting. Asian painting has more often used paper, with the monochrome ink and wash painting tradition dominant in East Asia. Paintings that are intended to go in a book or album are called "miniatures", whether for a Western illuminated manuscript or in Persian miniature and its Turkish equivalent, or Indian paintings of various types. Watercolour is the western version of painting in paper; forms using gouache, chalk, and similar mediums without brushes are really forms of drawing.


title: Fine art

text: Drawing is one of the major forms of the visual arts, and painters need drawing skills as well. Common instruments include: graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoals, chalk, pastels, markers, stylus, or various metals like silverpoint. There are a number of subcategories of drawing, including cartooning and creating comics.


title: Fine art

text: Mosaics are images formed with small pieces of stone or glass, called "tesserae". They can be decorative or functional. An artist who designs and makes mosaics is called a mosaic artist or a mosaicist. Ancient Greeks and Romans created realistic mosaics. Mythological subjects, or scenes of hunting or other pursuits of the wealthy, were popular as the centrepieces of a larger geometric design, with strongly emphasized borders. Early Christian basilicas from the 4th century onwards were decorated with wall and ceiling mosaics. The most famous Byzantine basilicas decorated with mosaics are the Basilica of San Vitale from Ravenna (Italy) and Hagia Sophia from Istanbul (Turkey).


title: Fine art

text: Printmaking covers the making of images on paper that can be reproduced multiple times by a printing process. It has been an important artistic medium for several centuries, in the West and East Asia. Major historic techniques include engraving, woodcut and etching in the West, and woodblock printing in East Asia, where the Japanese ukiyo-e style is the most important. The 19th-century invention of lithography and then photographic techniques have partly replaced the historic techniques. Older prints can be divided into the fine art Old Master print and popular prints, with book illustrations and other practical images such as maps somewhere in the middle.


title: Fine art

text: Except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable of producing multiples of the same piece, which is called a print. Each print is considered an original, as opposed to a copy. The reasoning behind this is that the print is not a reproduction of another work of art in a different medium – for instance, a painting – but rather an image designed from inception as a print. An individual print is also referred to as an impression. Prints are created from a single original surface, known technically as a matrix. Common types of matrices include: plates of metal, usually copper or zinc for engraving or etching; stone, used for lithography; blocks of wood for woodcuts, linoleum for linocuts and fabric in the case of screen-printing. But there are many other kinds. Multiple nearly identical prints can be called an edition. In modern times each print is often signed and numbered forming a "limited edition." Prints may also be published in book form, as artist's books. A single print could be the product of one or multiple techniques.


title: Fine art

text: Calligraphy is a type of visual art. A contemporary definition of calligraphic practice is "the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious and skillful manner". Modern calligraphy ranges from functional hand-lettered inscriptions and designs to fine-art pieces where the abstract expression of the handwritten mark may or may not compromise the legibility of the letters. Classical calligraphy differs from typography and non-classical hand-lettering, though a calligrapher may create all of these; characters are historically disciplined yet fluid and spontaneous, improvised at the moment of writing.


title: Fine art

text: "Fine art photography" refers to photographs that are created to fulfill the creative vision of the artist. Fine art photography stands in contrast to photojournalism and commercial photography. Photojournalism visually communicates stories and ideas, mainly in print and digital media. Fine art photography is created primarily as an expression of the artist's vision, but has also been important in advancing certain causes.


title: Fine art

text: Architecture is frequently considered a fine art, especially if its aesthetic components are spotlighted – in contrast to structural-engineering or construction-management components. Architectural works are perceived as cultural and political symbols and works of art. Historical civilizations often are known primarily through their architectural achievements. Such buildings as the pyramids of Egypt and the Roman Colosseum are cultural symbols, and are important links in public consciousness, even when scholars have discovered much about past civilizations through other means. Cities, regions, and cultures continue to identify themselves with, and are known by, their architectural monuments.


title: Fine art

text: With some modern exceptions, pottery is not considered as fine art, but "fine pottery" remains a valid technical term, especially in archaeology. "Fine wares" are high-quality pottery, often painted, moulded or otherwise decorated, and in many periods distinguished from "coarse wares", which are basic utilitarian pots used by the mass of the population, or in the kitchen rather than for more formal purposes.


title: Fine art

text: Even when, as with porcelain figurines, a piece of pottery has no practical purpose, the making of it is typically a collaborative and semi-industrial one, involving many participants with different skills.


title: Fine art

text: Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping hard or plastic material, commonly stone (either rock or marble), metal, or wood. Some sculptures are created directly by carving; others are assembled, built up and fired, welded, molded, or cast. Because sculpture involves the use of materials that can be moulded or modulated, it is considered one of the plastic arts. The majority of public art is sculpture. Many sculptures together in a garden setting may be referred to as a sculpture garden.


title: Fine art

text: Sculpture in stone survives far better than works of art in perishable materials, and often represents the majority of the surviving works (other than pottery) from ancient cultures; conversely, traditions of sculpture in wood may have vanished almost entirely. However, most ancient sculpture was brightly painted, and this has been lost.


title: Fine art

text: Conceptual art is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns.


title: Fine art

text: The inception of the term in the 1960s referred to a strict and focused practice of "idea-based art" that often defied traditional visual criteria associated with the visual arts in its presentation as text. However, through its association with the Young British Artists and the Turner Prize during the 1990s, its popular usage, particularly in the UK, developed as a synonym for all contemporary art that does not practice the traditional skills of painting and sculpture.


title: Fine art

text: Music is an art form and cultural activity whose medium is sound organized in time. The common elements of music are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics (loudness and softness), and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture (which are sometimes termed the "color" of a musical sound). Different styles or types of music may emphasize, de-emphasize or omit some of these elements.