title: World of Darkness

text: A large number of "World of Darkness" novels and anthologies have been published, starting with the "Werewolf: The Apocalypse" anthology "Drums Around the Fire" in 1993, and were described by "What Do I Read Next? A Reader's Guide to Current Genre Fiction" as "old-fashioned adventures" in the style of pulp fiction. The books were popular and helped White Wolf Publishing grow, and were described as leading among horror novelizations by "The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror" in 1996, but were in the end not financially successful, due to book chains closing mall stores in 1995–1996 and returning a large amount of unsold books to the publisher. By 1998, "What Do I Read Next?" considered the novelizations to have improved in quality, citing White Wolf's move to commissioning established horror and fantasy writers; in 2002, "Black Gate" considered Andrew Bates's "Year of the Scarab Trilogy" a standout compared to previous "lackluster" "World of Darkness" novels. New "World of Darkness" novelizations started to disappear around 2006, but have since resumed.


title: World of Darkness

text: The series has been adapted into comics, sometimes published in the "World of Darkness" tabletop game books, but also as comic books, including "Vampire: The Masquerade" and "Werewolf: The Apocalypse" lines published by Moonstone Books in the early 2000s, and published by Vault Comics since 2020.


title: World of Darkness

text: Video game adaptations of the series have been developed, based on "Vampire: The Masquerade", "Hunter: The Reckoning", "Mage: The Ascension", "Werewolf: The Apocalypse", and "Wraith: The Oblivion". Critical reception of the games has varied, ranging from average to positive, with 2004's "" standing out, being described by video game publications as a cult classic and a "flawed masterpiece"; when Paradox Interactive acquired the series, they had considered "Bloodlines" the "crown jewel" among the "World of Darkness" intellectual properties, and something they knew from the start that they wanted to bring back with .


title: World of Darkness

text: "World of Darkness" has been critically well received, with several of its games having won or been nominated for awards, and with "Vampire: The Masquerade" having been inducted into the Origins Award hall of fame. The series has also been highly successful financially, primarily in the United States, with over three million game books sold by the late 1990s; around 1995, new "World of Darkness" releases were frequently top sellers, making White Wolf the second biggest publisher of tabletop role-playing games at the time after TSR, Inc., and by 2001, "Vampire: The Masquerade" was the second best selling tabletop role-playing game after TSR, Inc.'s "Dungeons & Dragons". Onyx Path Publishing's crowdfunding campaigns for "World of Darkness" games and material have also been successful, particularly those for the original series, such as the anniversary editions of "Werewolf: The Apocalypse" and "Mage: The Ascension".


title: World of Darkness

text: The series' setting, plot, and art direction have been well received, with "Rue Morgue" describing the series' "fabulous artwork" as one of its major strengths, "Fenix" praising the series' mood and the quality of the writing, and "Realms of Fantasy" appreciating the broad scope and the familiarity to players due to being based on the real world. "Shadis" described the setting as "truly unique", bringing something never before seen to games. Some publications found the setting too crowded or defined, however; "Diehard GameFan" thought this took away from opportunities for horror, and "Tor.com" thought it left little room to tell new stories, often choosing to ignore the metaplot when running games. In his book series "Designers & Dragons", Shannon Appelcline considered the series' focus on metaplot to likely be what had caused sales to dwindle prior to the reboot, as players would have stopped playing the games when feeling they could not keep up with the story. Reactions to the "Chronicles of Darkness" setting have been divided, with some preferring the original series' setting for being more fantastical and grand in scale, and some the reboot's more grounded setting.


title: World of Darkness

text: The original series' rules were criticized by "Arcane" as, although generally easy to understand, often having confusing and unclear combat rules, while "Tor.com" described them as having a recurring problem with statistical anomalies. The updated gameplay rules of "Chronicles of Darkness" were however generally seen as a big improvement, and seen by critics as fluid, elegant and open-ended, to the point where "Tor.com" and "Backstab" recommended using them even when running non-"Chronicles of Darkness" games. "Fenix" appreciated the speed of creating characters and of playing, comparing the system of dice pools and dots favorably to number-based role-playing game systems.


title: Karthick Naren

text: Karthick Naren (born 23 July 1994) is an Indian filmmaker who works in Tamil cinema. Naren broke into the Tamil film industry having had directed several award-winning short films like "Pradhi" and "Nirangal Moondru" before his feature film debut. He made his big screen debut through the 2016 film Dhuruvangal Pathinaaru which went on to become a sleeper hit.


title: Karthick Naren

text: Karthick Naren was born in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu to MNG Mani and Saradha Mani. A native of Ooty, he spent most of his life in Coimbatore. Naren completed his schooling at Lisieux Matriculation Higher Secondary School. He went on to join Mechanical Engineering at Kumaraguru College of Technology. He dropped out during his third year of Mechanical engineering course to pursue a career in filmmaking.


title: Karthick Naren

text: Naren made his directorial debut at the age of 22 with the critically and commercially successful thriller "Dhuruvangal Pathinaaru". "Dhuruvangal Pathinaaru" was bankrolled by his home banner Knight Nostalgia Filmotainment. The film crossed 100-days at the box office, becoming one of the highest grossing debut films in Tamil cinema. The film made Naren one of the most promising directors in Tamil Cinema.


title: Karthick Naren

text: Naren's sophomore project "Naragasooran" has an ensemble cast. Starring Arvind Swamy, Shriya Saran, Sundeep Kishan and Indrajith, the shoot of the film has been completed in 41 days. Naragasooran is produced by Badri Kasturi of Shradda Entertainment. The film has yet to see a theatrical release.


title: Karthick Naren

text: Karthick Naren's upcoming projects include Naadaga Medai under his banner Knight Nostalgia Filmotainment and an untitled project starring S.T.R., produced by Vijaya Productions


title: Karthick Naren

text: Karthick Naren's next film is titled "Maaran", starring Dhanush and Malavika Mohanan. He has also directed the segment ‘’Project Agni’’, as part of "Navarasa", an anthology web series produced by Maniratnam and Jayendra Panchapakesan for Netflix.


title: Welcome to the Dollhouse

text: Welcome to the Dollhouse is a 1995 American coming-of-age black comedy film written and directed by Todd Solondz. An independent film, it won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival and launched the careers of Solondz and Heather Matarazzo. The story follows the unpopular middle schooler Dawn as she goes to extreme lengths trying to earn the respect of her vicious fellow students and her disinterested family. Dawn reappears in two of Solondz's other films, "Palindromes" and "Wiener-Dog".


title: Welcome to the Dollhouse

text: Eleven-year-old Dawn Wiener is a shy and unpopular seventh-grader living in a middle-class suburban community in New Jersey. Her older brother Mark is a nerdy high school student who plays clarinet in a garage band and shuns girls in order to prepare for college. Her younger sister Missy is spoiled and manipulative; she pesters Dawn and dances around the house in a tutu. Her mother Marj is a shrewish woman who dotes on Missy and sides with her in disputes with Dawn. Her father Harv is a meek man who sides with Marj over Dawn. Her only friend is a feminine sixth-grade boy named Ralphy, with whom she shares a dilapidated clubhouse in her backyard.


title: Welcome to the Dollhouse

text: At school, Dawn is ridiculed and her locker is covered in graffiti. At home, Marj punishes her for calling Missy a "lesbo" and refusing to apologize. Her teacher unfairly keeps her after school after one of her bullies Brandon McCarthy tries to copy her answers on a test. Later, Dawn gets in trouble again after accidentally hitting another teacher in the eye with a spitball in self-defense when Brandon and his friends bully her during an assembly.


title: Welcome to the Dollhouse

text: Mark's classmate Steve Rodgers, a handsome and charismatic aspiring rock musician, agrees to join the band in exchange for Mark's help in school. Dawn pursues him romantically when they spend time together, though one of Steve's former girlfriends tells her that she has no chance of being with him.


title: Welcome to the Dollhouse

text: After Dawn calls Brandon a "retard" during a confrontation, he threatens her with rape. His first attempt to assault her after school fails, but shortly afterward, he phones her, ordering her to meet him again the next day. When she complies, he takes her to a junkyard, where he starts an earnest conversation with her and kisses her instead. At dinner that evening, when she refuses to tear down her clubhouse to make room for her parents' 20th anniversary party, Marj tells Mark and Missy to destroy it anyway, and gives them Dawn's share of dessert.


title: Welcome to the Dollhouse

text: Dawn and Brandon spend time in her clubhouse, but she confesses to him her feelings for Steve, causing him to storm out. Ralphy, who was spying on them, tries to comfort Dawn, but she angrily rejects him when he insults Brandon, leaving her with no friends.


title: Welcome to the Dollhouse

text: At the anniversary party, Dawn intends to proposition Steve, but gets cold feet and is rebuffed. Steve plays with Missy, who pushes Dawn into a kiddie pool. That evening, the family watches a videotape of the party, laughing when Dawn falls into the water. Later, Dawn smashes the tape and briefly brandishes her hammer over Missy as she sleeps.


title: Welcome to the Dollhouse

text: A few days later, Brandon is arrested and expelled from school for suspected drug dealing. Meanwhile, Harv's car breaks down and Marj has to pick him up. She instructs Dawn to tell Missy to get a ride home with her ballet teacher, but she chooses not to after arguing with Missy, who is kidnapped as a result.


title: Welcome to the Dollhouse

text: Dawn visits Brandon's home and meets his mentally challenged brother and aggressive father. She tells Brandon that she wants to be his girlfriend, but he tells her that he is running away to New York City to avoid being sent to a reformatory. After they kiss, an argument about him dealing drugs ensues, with him saying that one of his friends is the real culprit. Regardless, he asks Dawn if she will come with him, but she declines and he leaves through his bedroom window.


title: Welcome to the Dollhouse

text: When Marj is informed that Missy's tutu was found in Times Square, Dawn goes to New York City to look for her. After a night of searching, she phones home and Mark tells her that Missy was found alive and unharmed by police after being abducted by a pedophilic neighbor. Dawn returns to town and her classmates ridicule her as she delivers a thank-you speech. Mark later tells her that she cannot expect school life to get any better until high school. On a bus ride to Walt Disney World for a concert tour, Dawn sits among her fellow choir members and unenthusiastically joins them in singing the school anthem.


title: Welcome to the Dollhouse

text: The film was a surprise success, considering it was a relatively low budget, independently produced film. It garnered critical praise for its view of a pre-teen outcast, and won the Grand Jury Prize for best dramatic feature at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival. Critic Roger Ebert was vocal about his love for the film, giving it four stars out of four and placing it at No. 5 on his "Best of 1996" list.


title: Welcome to the Dollhouse

text: The film holds a 90% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 51 reviews with an average rating of 7.9/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "An outstanding sophomore feature, "Welcome to the Dollhouse" sees writer-director Todd Solondz mining suburban teen angst for black, biting comedy." Metacritic gives the film a weighted average score of 83 out of 100, based on 20 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".


title: Shuma-Gorath

text: Shuma-Gorath () is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics.


title: Shuma-Gorath

text: Shuma-Gorath first appears as an adversary for Doctor Strange in "Marvel Premiere" #10 (September 1973), created by writer Steve Englehart and artist Frank Brunner. The character's name is taken from Robert E. Howard's short story "The Curse of the Golden Skull", which features a dying magician named Rotath invoking the "iron-bound books of Shuma-Gorath" in a curse against humanity.


title: Shuma-Gorath

text: Heroic Signatures holds the rights to the Shuma-Gorath name, due to its use in Howard's story, along with additional elements related to the Conan the Barbarian and Kull of Atlantis mythos, which is licensed to Marvel Comics.


title: Shuma-Gorath

text: During Earth's pre-history Shuma-Gorath ruled the world, and demanded human sacrifice until eventually banished by time-traveling sorcerer Sise-Neg. The entity eventually returns during the Hyborian Age, but is imprisoned within a mountain by the power of the god Crom. Shuma-Gorath continues to be an influence on Earth until it was returned to its home dimension by Crom.


title: Shuma-Gorath

text: When the entity tries to return to Earth via the mind of the Ancient One, his disciple Doctor Strange is forced to kill him to prevent this. Years later, Strange battles Shuma-Gorath in its home dimension, and although victorious, he gradually becomes a new version of the entity. Strange commits suicide to prevent this transformation and is resurrected by an ally. Sorcerer Nicholas Scratch summons the entity to Earth, but it is driven back by the combined efforts of Doctor Strange, the Fantastic Four, the Salem's Seven and villain Diablo.


title: Shuma-Gorath

text: Shuma-Gorath is eventually revealed to be one of the four undying extra-dimensional "multi-angled ones" guiding a metaphysical invasion from a dimension called the "cancerverse". In attempting to destroy Death itself, the entity and its allies are rendered inert by the conceptual form of Death and subsequently are trapped in the cancerverse when it is destroyed. Shuma-Gorath survives and once again attempts to invade Earth but is repelled by the superhero team the Avengers with the Spear of Destiny.


title: Shuma-Gorath

text: During the 2011 "Fear Itself" storyline, Shuma-Gorath is among the demons to meet at the Devil's Advocacy to discuss the threat of the Serpent and what this means to them.


title: Shuma-Gorath

text: During the 2013 "Infinity" storyline, Thanos' servant Ebony Maw manipulates Doctor Strange into summoning Shuma-Gorath to the streets of New York. The creature is met by Luke Cage and his new team of Avengers. Blue Marvel arrives at the scene of the battle and flies through Shuma-Gorath's head, destroying its physical manifestation. Shuma-Gorath's astral body possesses a crowd of people in New York City and attempts to recreate itself on Earth. It is weakened through mystical attacks by Power Man and White Tiger and finally banished by Monica Rambeau, who penetrates Shuma-Gorath's eye as a ray of light and disperses the entity from within.


title: Shuma-Gorath

text: The "Last Days of Magic" storyline describes Shuma-Gorath as responsible for destroying the home planet of the character Imperator, leader of the Empirikul, by sending a group of evil sorcerers after his family. This leads the Imperator to dedicate his life to destroying magic in every universe.


title: Shuma-Gorath

text: Later, during a battle, Dormammu states to Doctor Strange that he helped the Empirikul in finding Shuma-Gorath, who was defeated by the Imperator. Doctor Strange later banishes Dormammu to Shuma-Gorath itself, who was visibly wounded and seeking revenge.


title: Shuma-Gorath

text: Shuma-Gorath is an ancient force of chaos, the immortal, nigh-invincible, and godlike ruler of nearly a hundred alternate universes, capable of energy projection, shapeshifting, teleportation, levitation, altering reality, and sympathetic magic, among many other feats. He is described as being vastly more powerful than other mighty demonic enemies, such as Satannish and Mephisto, and is capable of automatically destroying multiple galaxies through aura-pressure alone.


title: Shuma-Gorath

text: In the "Venomized" event, a Poison Shuma-Gorath was present in the Poison Hive's invasion of the Prime Marvel Universe, fighting Vision and Falcon, successfully bonding a symbiote to the latter.


title: Shuma-Gorath

text: A creature based on Shuma-Gorath, renamed Gargantos after another green, one-eyed octopus monster from Marvel's "Sub-Mariner" comics due to rights issues with owner Heroic Signatures, appears in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" (2022). This version is a creation of Wanda Maximoff, with the purpose of capturing America Chavez so the former can use her powers for her own, before it is killed in battle by Doctor Strange.


title: Shuma-Gorath

text: Shuma-Gorath is described as an ancient being that predated humanity, and possibly predated the Earth, in the .


title: Packet switching

text: In telecommunications, packet switching is a method of grouping data into "packets" that are transmitted over a digital network. Packets are made of a header and a payload. Data in the header is used by networking hardware to direct the packet to its destination, where the payload is extracted and used by an operating system, application software, or higher layer protocols. Packet switching is the primary basis for data communications in computer networks worldwide.


title: Packet switching

text: In the early 1960s, American computer scientist Paul Baran developed the concept that he called "distributed adaptive message block switching", with the goal of providing a fault-tolerant, efficient routing method for telecommunication messages as part of a research program at the RAND Corporation, funded by the United States Department of Defense. His ideas contradicted then-established principles of pre-allocation of network bandwidth, exemplified by the development of telecommunications in the Bell System. The new concept found little resonance among network implementers until the independent work of British computer scientist Donald Davies at the National Physical Laboratory in 1965. Davies is credited with coining the modern term "packet switching" and inspiring numerous packet switching networks in the decade following, including the incorporation of the concept into the design of the ARPANET in the United States. The ARPANET was the primary precursor network of the modern Internet.


title: Packet switching

text: Packet switching allows delivery of variable bit rate data streams, realized as sequences of packets, over a computer network which allocates transmission resources as needed using statistical multiplexing or dynamic bandwidth allocation techniques. As they traverse networking hardware, such as switches and routers, packets are received, buffered, queued, and retransmitted (stored and forwarded), resulting in variable latency and throughput depending on the link capacity and the traffic load on the network. Packets are normally forwarded by intermediate network nodes asynchronously using first-in, first-out buffering, but may be forwarded according to some scheduling discipline for fair queuing, traffic shaping, or for differentiated or guaranteed quality of service, such as weighted fair queuing or leaky bucket. Packet-based communication may be implemented with or without intermediate forwarding nodes (switches and routers). In case of a shared physical medium (such as radio or 10BASE5), the packets may be delivered according to a multiple access scheme.


title: Packet switching

text: Packet switching contrasts with another principal networking paradigm, circuit switching, a method which pre-allocates dedicated network bandwidth specifically for each communication session, each having a constant bit rate and latency between nodes. In cases of billable services, such as cellular communication services, circuit switching is characterized by a fee per unit of connection time, even when no data is transferred, while packet switching may be characterized by a fee per unit of information transmitted, such as characters, packets, or messages.


title: Packet switching

text: A packet switch has four components: input ports, output ports, routing processor, and switching fabric.


title: Packet switching

text: The concept of switching small blocks of data was first explored independently by Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation in the early 1960s in the US and Donald Davies at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the UK in 1965.


title: Packet switching

text: In the late 1950s, the US Air Force established a wide area network for the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) radar defense system. Recognizing vulnerabilities in this network, the Air Force sought a system that might survive a nuclear attack to enable a response, thus diminishing the attractiveness of the first strike advantage by enemies (see Mutual assured destruction). Baran developed the concept of "distributed adaptive message block switching" in support of the Air Force initiative. The concept was first presented to the Air Force in the summer of 1961 as briefing B-265, later published as RAND report P-2626 in 1962, and finally in report RM 3420 in 1964. Report P-2626 described a general architecture for a large-scale, distributed, survivable communications network. The work focuses on three key ideas: use of a decentralized network with multiple paths between any two points, dividing user messages into "message blocks", and delivery of these messages by store and forward switching.


title: Packet switching

text: Davies independently developed a similar message routing concept and more detailed network design in 1965. He coined the term "packet switching", and proposed building a commercial nationwide data network in the UK. He gave a talk on the proposal in 1966, after which a person from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) told him about Baran's work. Roger Scantlebury, a member of Davies' team met Lawrence Roberts at the 1967 Symposium on Operating Systems Principles and suggested it for use in the ARPANET. Davies had chosen some of the same parameters for his original network design as did Baran, such as a packet size of 1024 bits. In 1966, Davies proposed that a network should be built at the laboratory to serve the needs of NPL and prove the feasibility of packet switching. To deal with packet permutations (due to dynamically updated route preferences) and to datagram losses (unavoidable when fast sources send to a slow destinations), he assumed that "all users of the network will provide themselves with some kind of error control", thus inventing what came to be known the end-to-end principle. After a pilot experiment in 1969, the NPL Data Communications Network entered service in 1970.


title: Packet switching

text: Leonard Kleinrock conducted research into queueing theory for his doctoral dissertation at MIT in 1961-2 and published it as a book in 1964 in the field of message switching. In 1968, Lawrence Roberts contracted with Kleinrock to carry out theoretical work at UCLA to measure and model the performance of the ARPANET, which underpinned the development of the network in the early 1970s. The NPL team also carried out simulation work on packet networks, including datagram networks.


title: Packet switching

text: The French CYCLADES network was designed by Louis Pouzin in the early 1970s to study internetworking. It was the first to implement the end-to-end principle of Davies, and make the hosts responsible for the reliable delivery of data on a packet-switched network, rather than this being a service of the network itself. His team was thus first to tackle the highly complex problem of providing user applications with a reliable virtual circuit service while using a best-effort service, an early contribution to what will be Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).


title: Packet switching

text: In May 1974, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn described the Transmission Control Program, an internetworking protocol for sharing resources using packet-switching among the nodes. The specifications of the TCP were then published in ("Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program"), written by Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine in December 1974. This monolithic protocol was later layered as the Transmission Control Protocol, "TCP", atop the Internet Protocol, "IP".


title: Packet switching

text: In the late 1970s and early 1980s, national and international public data networks emerged based on the X.25 protocol. X.25 is built on the concept of virtual circuits emulating traditional telephone connections.


title: Packet switching

text: For a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the network engineering community was polarized over the implementation of competing protocol suites, commonly known as the Protocol Wars. It was unclear which of the OSI model and the Internet protocol suite would result in the best and most robust computer networks.


title: Packet switching

text: Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) VLSI (very-large-scale integration) technology led to the development of high-speed broadband packet switching during the 1980s1990s.


title: Packet switching

text: Beginning in the mid-1990s, Leonard Kleinrock sought to be recognized as the "father of modern data networking". However, Kleinrock's claims that his work in the early 1960s originated the concept of packet switching and that this work was the source of the packet switching concepts used in the ARPANET are disputed by other Internet pioneers, including by Robert Taylor, Paul Baran, and Donald Davies. Baran and Davies are recognized by historians and the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame for independently inventing the concept of digital packet switching used in modern computer networking including the Internet.


title: Packet switching

text: Packet switching may be classified into connectionless packet switching, also known as datagram switching, and connection-oriented packet switching, also known as virtual circuit switching. Examples of connectionless systems are Ethernet, Internet Protocol (IP), and the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). Connection-oriented systems include X.25, Frame Relay, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).


title: Packet switching

text: In connectionless mode each packet is labeled with a destination address, source address, and port numbers. It may also be labeled with the sequence number of the packet. This information eliminates the need for a pre-established path to help the packet find its way to its destination, but means that more information is needed in the packet header, which is therefore larger. The packets are routed individually, sometimes taking different paths resulting in out-of-order delivery. At the destination, the original message may be reassembled in the correct order, based on the packet sequence numbers. Thus a virtual circuit carrying a byte stream is provided to the application by a transport layer protocol, although the network only provides a connectionless network layer service.


title: Packet switching

text: Connection-oriented transmission requires a setup phase to establish the parameters of communication before any packet is transferred. The signaling protocols used for setup allow the application to specify its requirements and discover link parameters. Acceptable values for service parameters may be negotiated. The packets transferred may include a connection identifier rather than address information and the packet header can be smaller, as it only needs to contain this code and any information, such as length, timestamp, or sequence number, which is different for different packets. In this case, address information is only transferred to each node during the connection setup phase, when the route to the destination is discovered and an entry is added to the switching table in each network node through which the connection passes. When a connection identifier is used, routing a packet requires the node to look up the connection identifier in a table.


title: Packet switching

text: Connection-oriented transport layer protocols such as TCP provide a connection-oriented service by using an underlying connectionless network. In this case, the end-to-end principle dictates that the end nodes, not the network itself, are responsible for the connection-oriented behavior.


title: Packet switching

text: Packet switching is used to optimize the use of the channel capacity available in digital telecommunication networks, such as computer networks, and minimize the transmission latency (the time it takes for data to pass across the network), and to increase robustness of communication.


title: Packet switching

text: Packet switching is used in the Internet and most local area networks. The Internet is implemented by the Internet Protocol Suite using a variety of link layer technologies. For example, Ethernet and Frame Relay are common. Newer mobile phone technologies (e.g., GSM, LTE) also use packet switching. Packet switching is associated with connectionless networking because, in these systems, no connection agreement needs to be established between communicating parties prior to exchanging data.


title: Packet switching

text: X.25 is a notable use of packet switching in that, despite being based on packet switching methods, it provides virtual circuits to the user. These virtual circuits carry variable-length packets. In 1978, X.25 provided the first international and commercial packet switching network, the International Packet Switched Service (IPSS). Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) also is a virtual circuit technology, which uses fixed-length cell relay connection oriented packet switching.


title: Packet switching

text: Technologies such as Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) create virtual circuits on top of datagram networks. MPLS and its predecessors, as well as ATM, have been called "fast packet" technologies. MPLS, indeed, has been called "ATM without cells". Virtual circuits are especially useful in building robust failover mechanisms and allocating bandwidth for delay-sensitive applications.


title: Packet switching

text: The history of packet-switched networks can be divided into three overlapping eras: early networks before the introduction of X.25; the X.25 era when many postal, telephone, and telegraph (PTT) companies provided public data networks with X.25 interfaces; and the Internet era which initially competed with the OSI model.


title: Packet switching

text: Research into packet switching at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) began with a proposal for a wide-area network in 1965, and a local-area network in 1966. ARPANET funding was secured in 1966 by Bob Taylor, and planning began in 1967 when he hired Larry Roberts. The NPL network, ARPANET, and SITA HLN became operational in 1969.


title: Packet switching

text: Before the introduction of X.25 in 1976, about twenty different network technologies had been developed. Two fundamental differences involved the division of functions and tasks between the hosts at the edge of the network and the network core. In the datagram system, operating according to the end-to-end principle, the hosts have the responsibility to ensure orderly delivery of packets. In the virtual call system, the network guarantees sequenced delivery of data to the host. This results in a simpler host interface but complicates the network. The X.25 protocol suite uses this network type.


title: Packet switching

text: AppleTalk is a proprietary suite of networking protocols developed by Apple in 1985 for Apple Macintosh computers. It was the primary protocol used by Apple devices through the 1980s and 1990s. AppleTalk included features that allowed local area networks to be established "ad hoc" without the requirement for a centralized router or server. The AppleTalk system automatically assigned addresses, updated the distributed namespace, and configured any required inter-network routing. It was a plug-n-play system.


title: Packet switching

text: AppleTalk implementations were also released for the IBM PC and compatibles, and the Apple IIGS. AppleTalk support was available in most networked printers, especially laser printers, some file servers and routers. AppleTalk support was terminated in 2009, replaced by TCP/IP protocols.


title: Packet switching

text: The ARPANET was a progenitor network of the Internet and one of the first networks, along with ARPA's SATNET, to run the TCP/IP suite using packet switching technologies.


title: Packet switching

text: BNRNET was a network which Bell-Northern Research developed for internal use. It initially had only one host but was designed to support many hosts. BNR later made major contributions to the CCITT X.25 project.


title: Packet switching

text: The Cambridge Ring was an experimental ring network developed at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. It operated from 1974 until the 1980s.


title: Packet switching

text: CompuServe developed its own packet switching network, implemented on DEC PDP-11 minicomputers acting as network nodes that were installed throughout the US (and later, in other countries) and interconnected. Over time, the CompuServe network evolved into a complicated multi-tiered network incorporating ATM, Frame Relay, Internet Protocol (IP) and X.25 technologies.


title: Packet switching

text: The CYCLADES packet switching network was a French research network designed and directed by Louis Pouzin. First demonstrated in 1973, it was developed to explore alternatives to the early ARPANET design and to support network research generally. It was the first network to use the end-to-end principle and make the hosts responsible for reliable delivery of data, rather than the network itself. Concepts of this network influenced later ARPANET architecture.


title: Packet switching

text: DECnet is a suite of network protocols created by Digital Equipment Corporation, originally released in 1975 in order to connect two PDP-11 minicomputers. It evolved into one of the first peer-to-peer network architectures, thus transforming DEC into a networking powerhouse in the 1980s. Initially built with three layers, it later (1982) evolved into a seven-layer OSI-compliant networking protocol. The DECnet protocols were designed entirely by Digital Equipment Corporation. However, DECnet Phase II (and later) were open standards with published specifications, and several implementations were developed outside DEC, including one for Linux.


title: Packet switching

text: DDX-1 was an experimental network from Nippon PTT. It mixed circuit switching and packet switching. It was succeeded by DDX-2.


title: Packet switching

text: The European Informatics Network (EIN), originally called COST 11, was a project beginning in 1971 to link networks in Britain, France, Italy, Switzerland and Euratom. Six other European countries also participated in the research on network protocols. Derek Barber directed the project,and Roger Scantlebury led the UK technical contribution; both were from NPL. The contract for its implementation was awarded to an Anglo French consortium led by the UK systems house Logica and Sesa and managed by Andrew Karney. Work began in 1973 and it became operational in 1976 including nodes linking the NPL network and CYCLADES. The transport protocol of the EIN was the basis of the one adopted by the International Networking Working Group. EIN was replaced by Euronet in 1979.


title: Packet switching

text: The Experimental Packet Switched Service (EPSS) was an experiment of the UK Post Office Telecommunications, based on the Coloured Book protocols defined by the UK academic community in 1975. It was the first public data network in the UK when it began operating in 1977. Ferranti supplied the hardware and software. The handling of link control messages (acknowledgements and flow control) was different from that of most other networks.


title: Packet switching

text: As General Electric Information Services (GEIS), General Electric was a major international provider of information services. The company originally designed a telephone network to serve as its internal (albeit continent-wide) voice telephone network.


title: Packet switching

text: In 1965, at the instigation of Warner Sinback, a data network based on this voice-phone network was designed to connect GE's four computer sales and service centers (Schenectady, New York, Chicago, and Phoenix) to facilitate a computer time-sharing service.


title: Packet switching

text: After going international some years later, GEIS created a network data center near Cleveland, Ohio. Very little has been published about the internal details of their network. The design was hierarchical with redundant communication links.


title: Packet switching

text: IPSANET was a semi-private network constructed by I. P. Sharp Associates to serve their time-sharing customers. It became operational in May 1976.


title: Packet switching

text: The Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX) and Sequenced Packet Exchange (SPX) are Novell networking protocols from the 1980s derived from Xerox Network Systems' IDP and SPP protocols, respectively which date back to the 1970s. IPX/SPX was used primarily on networks using the Novell NetWare operating systems.


title: Packet switching

text: Merit Network, an independent nonprofit organization governed by Michigan's public universities, was formed in 1966 as the Michigan Educational Research Information Triad to explore computer networking between three of Michigan's public universities as a means to help the state's educational and economic development. With initial support from the State of Michigan and the National Science Foundation (NSF), the packet-switched network was first demonstrated in December 1971 when an interactive host-to-host connection was made between the IBM mainframe systems at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Wayne State University in Detroit. In October 1972, connections to the CDC mainframe at Michigan State University in East Lansing completed the triad. Over the next several years, in addition to host-to-host interactive connections, the network was enhanced to support terminal-to-host connections, host-to-host batch connections (remote job submission, remote printing, batch file transfer), interactive file transfer, gateways to the Tymnet and Telenet public data networks, X.25 host attachments, gateways to X.25 data networks, Ethernet attached hosts, and eventually TCP/IP; additionally, public universities in Michigan joined the network. All of this set the stage for Merit's role in the NSFNET project starting in the mid-1980s.


title: Packet switching

text: In 1965, Donald Davies of the National Physical Laboratory (United Kingdom) designed and proposed a national commercial data network based on packet switching. The proposal was not taken up nationally but, in 1966, he designed a local network using "interface computers", today known as routers, to serve the needs of NPL and prove the feasibility of packet switching.


title: Packet switching

text: By 1968 Davies had begun building the NPL network to meet the needs of the multidisciplinary laboratory and prove the technology under operational conditions. In 1976, 12 computers and 75 terminal devices were attached, and more were added until the network was replaced in 1986. NPL and the ARPANET were the first two networks to use packet switching, and were interconnected in the early 1970s.


title: Packet switching

text: Octopus was a local network at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It connected sundry hosts at the lab to interactive terminals and various computer peripherals including a bulk storage system.


title: Packet switching

text: Philips Research Laboratories in Redhill, Surrey developed a packet switching network for internal use. It was a datagram network with a single switching node.


title: Packet switching

text: PARC Universal Packet (PUP or Pup) was one of the two earliest internetworking protocol suites; it was created by researchers at Xerox PARC in the mid-1970s. The entire suite provided routing and packet delivery, as well as higher level functions such as a reliable byte stream, along with numerous applications. Further developments led to Xerox Network Systems (XNS).


title: Packet switching

text: RCP was an experimental network created by the French PTT. It was used to gain experience with packet switching technology before the specification of TRANSPAC was frozen. RCP was a virtual-circuit network in contrast to CYCLADES which was based on datagrams. RCP emphasised terminal-to-host and terminal-to-terminal connection; CYCLADES was concerned with host-to-host communication. TRANSPAC was introduced as an X.25 network. RCP influenced the X.25 specification.


title: Packet switching

text: Red Especial de Transmisión de Datos (RETD) was a network developed by Compañía Telefónica Nacional de España. It became operational in 1972 and thus was the first public network.


title: Packet switching

text: "The experimental packet-switched Nordic telecommunication network SCANNET was implemented in Nordic technical libraries in the 1970s, and it included first Nordic electronic journal Extemplo. Libraries were also among first ones in universities to accommodate microcomputers for public use in the early 1980s."


title: Packet switching

text: SITA is a consortium of airlines. Its High Level Network (HLN) became operational in 1969 at about the same time as ARPANET. It carried interactive traffic and message-switching traffic. As with many non-academic networks, very little has been published about it.


title: Packet switching

text: A number of computer facilities serving the Science Research Council (SRC) community in the United Kingdom developed beginning in the early 1970s. Each had their own star network (ULCC London, UMRCC Manchester, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory). There were also regional networks centred on Bristol, Edinburgh and Newcastle (NUMAC - the Northern Universities Multiple Access Computer), where groups of institutions had pooled resources to provide better computing facilities than could be afforded individually. These networks were each based on one manufacturer's standards and were mutually incompatible and overlapping. In 1981, the SRC was renamed the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC). In the early 1980s a standardisation and interconnection effort started, hosted on an expansion of the SERCnet research network and based on the Coloured Book protocols. This later evolved into JANET.


title: Packet switching

text: Systems Network Architecture (SNA) is IBM's proprietary networking architecture created in 1974. An IBM customer could acquire hardware and software from IBM and lease private lines from a common carrier to construct a private network.


title: Packet switching

text: Telenet was the first FCC-licensed public data network in the United States. Telenet was incorporated in 1973 and started operations in 1975. It was founded by Bolt Beranek & Newman with Larry Roberts as CEO as a means of making packet switching technology public. Telenet initially used a proprietary virtual connection host interface, but changed the host interface to X.25 and the terminal interface to X.29. It went public in 1979 and was then sold to GTE.


title: Packet switching

text: Tymnet was an international data communications network headquartered in San Jose, CA that utilized virtual call packet switched technology and used X.25, SNA/SDLC, BSC and ASCII interfaces to connect host computers (servers) at thousands of large companies, educational institutions, and government agencies. Users typically connected via dial-up connections or dedicated asynchronous serial connections. The business consisted of a large public network that supported dial-up users and a private network business that allowed government agencies and large companies (mostly banks and airlines) to build their own dedicated networks. The private networks were often connected via gateways to the public network to reach locations not on the private network. Tymnet was also connected to dozens of other public networks in the U.S. and internationally via X.25/X.75 gateways.


title: Packet switching

text: Xerox Network Systems (XNS) was a protocol suite promulgated by Xerox, which provided routing and packet delivery, as well as higher level functions such as a reliable stream, and remote procedure calls. It was developed from PARC Universal Packet (PUP).


title: Packet switching

text: There were two kinds of X.25 networks. Some such as DATAPAC and TRANSPAC were initially implemented with an X.25 external interface. Some older networks such as TELENET and TYMNET were modified to provide a X.25 host interface in addition to older host connection schemes. DATAPAC was developed by Bell-Northern Research which was a joint venture of Bell Canada (a common carrier) and Northern Telecom (a telecommunications equipment supplier). Northern Telecom sold several DATAPAC clones to foreign PTTs including the Deutsche Bundespost. X.75 and X.121 allowed the interconnection of national X.25 networks. A user or host could call a host on a foreign network by including the DNIC of the remote network as part of the destination address.


title: Packet switching

text: AUSTPAC was an Australian public X.25 network operated by Telstra. Started by Telecom Australia in the early 1980s, AUSTPAC was Australia's first public packet-switched data network and supported applications such as on-line betting, financial applications—the Australian Tax Office made use of AUSTPAC—and remote terminal access to academic institutions, who maintained their connections to AUSTPAC up until the mid-late 1990s in some cases. Access was via a dial-up terminal to a PAD, or, by linking a permanent X.25 node to the network.


title: Packet switching

text: ConnNet was a network operated by the Southern New England Telephone Company serving the state of Connecticut. Launched on March 11, 1985, it was the first local public packet-switched network in the United States.


title: Packet switching

text: Datanet 1 was the public switched data network operated by the Dutch PTT Telecom (now known as KPN). Strictly speaking Datanet 1 only referred to the network and the connected users via leased lines (using the X.121 DNIC 2041), the name also referred to the public PAD service "Telepad" (using the DNIC 2049). And because the main Videotex service used the network and modified PAD devices as infrastructure the name Datanet 1 was used for these services as well.


title: Packet switching

text: DATAPAC was the first operational X.25 network (1976). It covered major Canadian cities and was eventually extended to smaller centers.


title: Packet switching

text: Deutsche Bundespost operated the Datex-P national network in Germany. The technology was acquired from Northern Telecom.


title: Packet switching

text: Eirpac is the Irish public switched data network supporting X.25 and X.28. It was launched in 1984, replacing Euronet. Eirpac is run by Eircom.


title: Packet switching

text: Nine member states of the European Economic Community contracted with Logica and the French company SESA to set up a joint venture in 1975 to undertake the "Euronet" development, using X.25 protocols to form virtual circuits. It was to replace EIN and established a network in 1979 linking a number of European countries until 1984 when the network was handed over to national PTTs.


title: Packet switching

text: Hitachi designed a private network system for sale as a turnkey package to multi-national organizations. In addition to providing X.25 packet switching, message switching software was also included. Messages were buffered at the nodes adjacent to the sending and receiving terminals. Switched virtual calls were not supported, but through the use of "logical ports" an originating terminal could have a menu of pre-defined destination terminals.


title: Packet switching

text: Iberpac is the Spanish public packet-switched network, providing X.25 services. It was based on RETD which was operational since 1972. Iberpac was run by Telefonica.


title: Packet switching

text: In 1978, X.25 provided the first international and commercial packet-switching network, the International Packet Switched Service (IPSS).


title: Packet switching

text: JANET was the UK academic and research network, linking all universities, higher education establishments, and publicly funded research laboratories following its launch in 1984. The X.25 network, which used the Coloured Book protocols, was based mainly on GEC 4000 series switches, and ran X.25 links at up to 8 Mbit/s in its final phase before being converted to an IP-based network in 1991. The JANET network grew out of the 1970s SRCnet, later called SERCnet.


title: Packet switching

text: Packet Switch Stream (PSS) was the Post Office Telecommunications (later to become British Telecom) national X.25 network with a DNIC of 2342. British Telecom renamed PSS Global Network Service (GNS), but the PSS name has remained better known. PSS also included public dial-up PAD access, and various InterStream gateways to other services such as Telex.


title: Packet switching

text: REXPAC was the nationwide experimental packet switching data network in Brazil, developed by the research and development center of Telebrás, the state-owned public telecommunications provider.


title: Packet switching

text: TRANSPAC was the national X.25 network in France. It was developed locally at about the same time as DATAPAC in Canada. The development was done by the French PTT and influenced by the experimental RCP network. It began operation in 1978, and served commercial users and, after Minitel began, consumers.


title: Packet switching

text: UNINETT was a wide-area Norwegian packet-switched network established through a joint effort between Norwegian universities, research institutions and the Norwegian Telecommunication administration. The original network was based on X.25; Internet protocols were adopted later.


title: Packet switching

text: VENUS-P was an international X.25 network that operated from April 1982 through March 2006. At its subscription peak in 1999, VENUS-P connected 207 networks in 87 countries.


title: Packet switching

text: Venepaq is the national X.25 public network in Venezuela. It is run by Cantv and allows direct and dial-up connections. Venepaq provides nationwide access at low cost. It provides national and international access and allows connection from 19.2 to in direct connections, and 1200, 2400 and in dial-up connections.


title: Packet switching

text: When Internet connectivity was made available to anyone who could pay for an ISP subscription, the distinctions between national networks blurred. The user no longer saw network identifiers such as the DNIC. Some older technologies such as circuit switching have resurfaced with new names such as fast packet switching. Researchers have created some experimental networks to complement the existing Internet.


title: Packet switching

text: The Computer Science Network (CSNET) was a computer network funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) that began operation in 1981. Its purpose was to extend networking benefits, for computer science departments at academic and research institutions that could not be directly connected to ARPANET, due to funding or authorization limitations. It played a significant role in spreading awareness of, and access to, national networking and was a major milestone on the path to development of the global Internet.


title: Packet switching

text: Internet2 is a not-for-profit United States computer networking consortium led by members from the research and education communities, industry, and government. The Internet2 community, in partnership with Qwest, built the first Internet2 Network, called Abilene, in 1998 and was a prime investor in the National LambdaRail (NLR) project. In 2006, Internet2 announced a partnership with Level 3 Communications to launch a brand new nationwide network, boosting its capacity from 10 Gbit/s to 100 Gbit/s. In October, 2007, Internet2 officially retired Abilene and now refers to its new, higher capacity network as the Internet2 Network.


title: Packet switching

text: The National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) was a program of coordinated, evolving projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) beginning in 1985 to promote advanced research and education networking in the United States. NSFNET was also the name given to several nationwide backbone networks operating at speeds of 56 kbit/s, 1.5 Mbit/s (T1), and 45 Mbit/s (T3) that were constructed to support NSF's networking initiatives from 1985-1995. Initially created to link researchers to the nation's NSF-funded supercomputing centers, through further public funding and private industry partnerships it developed into a major part of the Internet backbone.


title: Packet switching

text: In addition to the five NSF supercomputer centers, NSFNET provided connectivity to eleven regional networks and through these networks to many smaller regional and campus networks in the United States. The NSFNET regional networks were:


title: Packet switching

text: The National LambdaRail was launched in September 2003. It is a 12,000-mile high-speed national computer network owned and operated by the U.S. research and education community that runs over fiber-optic lines. It was the first transcontinental 10 Gigabit Ethernet network. It operates with high aggregate capacity of up to 1.6 Tbit/s and a high 40 Gbit/s bitrate, with plans for 100 Gbit/s. The upgrade never took place and NLR ceased operations in March 2014.


title: Packet switching

text: TransPAC2 and TransPAC3, continuations of the TransPAC project, a high-speed international Internet service connecting research and education networks in the Asia-Pacific region to those in the US. TransPAC is part of the NSF's International Research Network Connections (IRNC) program.


title: Packet switching

text: The Very high-speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) came on line in April 1995 as part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored project to provide high-speed interconnection between NSF-sponsored supercomputing centers and select access points in the United States. The network was engineered and operated by MCI Telecommunications under a cooperative agreement with the NSF. By 1998, the vBNS had grown to connect more than 100 universities and research and engineering institutions via 12 national points of presence with DS-3 (45 Mbit/s), OC-3c (155 Mbit/s), and OC-12c (622 Mbit/s) links on an all OC-12c backbone, a substantial engineering feat for that time. The vBNS installed one of the first ever production OC-48c (2.5 Gbit/s) IP links in February 1999 and went on to upgrade the entire backbone to OC-48c.


title: Packet switching

text: In June 1999 MCI WorldCom introduced vBNS+ which allowed attachments to the vBNS network by organizations that were not approved by or receiving support from NSF. After the expiration of the NSF agreement, the vBNS largely transitioned to providing service to the government. Most universities and research centers migrated to the Internet2 educational backbone. In January 2006, when MCI and Verizon merged, vBNS+ became a service of Verizon Business.


title: Vineeth

text: Vineeth Radhakrishnan (born 23 August 1969) is an Indian actor, classical dancer, voice artist and choreographer who primarily works in Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu language films. He has also starred in a few Kannada and Bollywood films. He has won several awards including 2 Kerala State Film Awards, Kalaimamani from Government of Tamil Nadu and Filmfare Award South.


title: Vineeth

text: Vineeth was born to K. T. Radhakrishnan and P. K. Shanthakumari on 23 August 1969 at Thalassery in Kannur district of North Kerala. He has a sister, Kavitha Dinesh. He studied at Good Shepherd International School, Ooty and St Joseph's Higher Secondary School, Thalassery. He pursued bachelors in commerce from The New College in 1991.


title: Vineeth

text: Vineeth is the nephew of Ramachandran Nair, the husband of actress Padmini of the Travancore sisters. His aunt, Padmini and her sister, Ragini convinced his parents to send him to dancing school.


title: Vineeth

text: He learned the Bharathanatyam form of dance at the age of six, and won several dance prizes while a student, including the first prize at the Kerala State Youth festival for four years in a row and winning the top prize of "Kalaprathibha" in 1986.


title: Vineeth

text: Vineeth entered films with the I. V. Sasi film "Idanilangal" in 1985, and caught the public eye with his second film, "Nakhakshathangal", in 1986. His dancing skills were prominently displayed in several films as well. He played the lead characters in "Idanazhiyil Oru Kaalocha" (1987), a story by poet Balachandran Chullikkadu and "Oru Muthassi Katha" (1988) directed by Priyadarshan. "Aavarampoo" (1992), the Tamil remake of "Thakara" changed everything for Vineeth directed by Bharathan. As soon as "Aavarampoo" ended, Hariharan called him for "Sargam" (1992), in which he played a musical genius. Suddenly Vineeth was doing multiple films in Malayalam and Tamil. "Kabooliwala" (1994) and "Manathe Vellitheru" (1994) became two turning points in his Malayalam career, one establishing him as a young romantic hero, the other proving he could handle negative shades really well. Though his films impressed both critics and front benchers, he did not become a super hero, a sought after actor. He had appeared in maximum Malayalam films. But his career did not pick up as expected.


title: Vineeth

text: His roles in successful Tamil films also include "Gentleman" (1993), "Pudhiya Mugam" (1993), "Jaathi Malli" (1993) and "May Maadham" (1994). Among other projects came "Kadhal Desam" (1996), where Vineeth and Abbas played college students in love with the same woman, played by Tabu. The movie, with its themes of friendship and romance and the music of A. R. Rahman, became very popular. He has acted in several well received films since then in all South Indian languages. In spite of his success in films, he still considers dance as his first love and is undergoing advanced training in Bharatanatyam and participates in several dance programmes all over the world as well as the Surya Dance Festival. He has worked in several Telugu films such as "Aaro Pranam" (1997), "Maa Annayya" (2000), "Ammayi Kosam" (2001), "Nee Premakai" (2002) and "Lahiri Lahiri Lahirilo" (2002). Vineeth, who disappeared from both Tamil and Malayalam cinema, made a comeback with Rajinikanth starrer "Chandramukhi" (2005). He played the same role in the Hindi version of "Bhool Bhulaiyaa" (2007) as well. He won the Kerala State Film Award for Best Choreography for "Kambhoji" in 2017. Vineeth's last film release was the G. V. Prakash Kumar starrer "Sarvam Thaala Mayam" (2019) in Tamil. It was a musical drama that was written and directed by Rajiv Menon. Actor singer Krishnachandran dubbed for Vineeth in most of his early movies. Ironically, Vineeth won the Kerala State Film Award for Best Dubbing Artist in 2020 for giving voice to Vivek Oberoi's character in "Lucifer", actor Prithviraj’s first as a director. In Malayalam, he was seen in Kavya Prakash's debut film "Vaanku" (2021), based on a story by Unni R. In "", he dubbed for the character played by Tamil star Arjun Sarja. Vineeth won the award for his dubbing.


title: Vineeth

text: Vineeth married Priscilla Menon, who hails from Telicherry on August 2004. They live in Chennai, and a daughter was born to them in 2006.


title: Louise Hay

text: Louise Lynn Hay (October 8, 1926 – August 30, 2017) was an American motivational author and the founder of Hay House. She authored several New Thought self-help books, including the 1984 book "You Can Heal Your Life".


title: Louise Hay

text: Born Helen Vera Lunney in Los Angeles to parents Henry John Lunney (1901–1998) and Veronica Chwala (1894–1985), Hay recounted her life story in an interview with Mark Oppenheimer of "The New York Times" in May 2008.


title: Louise Hay

text: In it, Hay stated that she was born in Los Angeles to a poor mother who remarried Louise's violent stepfather, Ernest Carl Wanzenreid (1903–1992), who physically abused her and her mother. When she was about 5, she was raped by a neighbor. At 15, she dropped out of University High School in Los Angeles without a diploma, became pregnant and, on her 16th birthday, gave up her newborn baby girl for adoption.


title: Louise Hay

text: She then moved to Chicago, where she worked in low-paying jobs. In 1950, she moved on again, to New York. At this point she changed her first name, and began a career as a fashion model. She achieved success, working for Bill Blass, Oleg Cassini, and Pauline Trigère. In 1954, she married the English businessman Andrew Hay (1928–2001); after 14 years of marriage, she felt devastated when he left her for another woman, Sharman Douglas (1928–1996). Hay said that about this time she found the First Church of Religious Science on 48th Street, which taught her the transformative power of thought. Hay revealed that here she studied the New Thought works of authors such as Florence Scovel Shinn who believed that positive thinking could change people's material circumstances, and the Religious Science founder Ernest Holmes who taught that positive thinking could heal the body.


title: Louise Hay

text: By Hay's account, in the early 1970s she became a Religious Science practitioner. In this role she led people in spoken affirmations, which she believed would cure their illnesses, and became popular as a workshop leader. She also recalled how she had studied Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at the Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa.


title: Louise Hay

text: Hay described how in 1977 or 1978 she was diagnosed with "incurable" cervical cancer, and how she came to the conclusion that by holding on to her resentment for her childhood abuse and rape she had contributed to its onset. She reported how she had refused conventional medical treatment, and began a regime of forgiveness, coupled with therapy, nutrition, reflexology, and occasional colonic enemas. She claimed in the interview that she rid herself of the cancer by this method, but, while swearing to its truth, admitted that she had outlived every doctor who could confirm this story.


title: Louise Hay

text: In 1976, Hay wrote and self-published her first book, "Heal Your Body", which began as a small pamphlet containing a list of different bodily ailments and their "probable" metaphysical causes. This pamphlet was later enlarged and extended into her book "You Can Heal Your Life", published in 1984. In February 2008, it was fourth on the New York Times paperback advice bestsellers list.


title: Louise Hay

text: Around the same time she began leading support groups for people living with HIV/AIDS, which she called ""Hay Rides"". These grew from a few people in her living room to hundreds of men in a large hall in West Hollywood, California. Her work with AIDS patients drew fame and she was invited to appear on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and "The Phil Donahue Show" in the same week, in March 1988. Following this, "You Can Heal Your Life" immediately landed on the New York Times bestseller list. More than 50 million copies sold around the world in over 30 languages and it also has been made into a movie. "You Can Heal Your Life" is also included in the book "50 Self-Help Classics" for being significant in its field. It is often described as a part of the New Age movement.


title: Louise Hay

text: Hay wrote, on page 225 of her book (December 2008 printing), that it has "... sold more than thirty five million copies". It was announced in 2011 that "You Can Heal your Life" had reached 40 million sales.


title: Louise Hay

text: In 1984, Hay established the Hay House publishing firm. In 1988 Reid Tracy joined the company as an accountant and would eventually become its CEO. The business flourished and attracted various writers. Hay House is the primary publisher of books and audio books by over 130 authors, including Deepak Chopra, as well as many books by Wayne Dyer. Hay House also publishes the teachings of "Abraham" as channeled through Esther Hicks.


title: Louise Hay

text: In addition to running her publishing company, Hay ran a charitable organization called the Hay Foundation, which she founded in 1985. Its mission is to build futures and support organizations that enhance the quality of life for people, animals, and our environment.


title: Louise Hay

text: In 2008, a movie about Louise Hay's life was released, titled "You Can Heal Your Life". In Hay's own words on the film's official Web site: "This movie is the story of my life, my teachings, and how I've applied the principles of my teachings to my own life." The movie also features notable speakers and authors in the field of personal development including Gregg Braden, Wayne Dyer, Gay Hendricks, Esther and Jerry Hicks, and Doreen Virtue; it was directed by Emmy Award-winning director Michael A. Goorjian. In the same year Louise Hay won a Minerva Award at The Women's Conference.


title: Louise Hay

text: In September 2011, Hay and Cheryl Richardson released their book "You Can Create An Exceptional Life".


title: Louise Hay

text: Hay's two best-known books, "Heal Your Body: The Mental Causes for Physical Illness and the Metaphysical Way to Overcome Them" and You Can Heal Your Life, directly associate physical problems such as cancer with specific negative emotional patterns and assert that healing the emotional components will also heal the physical conditions. Hay wrote in "You Can Heal Your Life" that thoughts—not just sexual behavior—could help cause AIDS:


title: Louise Hay

text: Venereal dis-ease, is almost always sexual guilt. It comes from a feeling, often subconscious, that it is not right to express ourselves sexually. A carrier with a venereal dis-ease can have many partners, but only those whose mental and physical immune systems are weak will be susceptible to it.


title: Corsican language

text: Corsican ("corsu" , ; full name: "lingua corsa" , ) is a Romance language constituted by the continuum of the Italo-Romance dialects spoken on the Mediterranean island of Corsica (France) and on the northern end of the island of Sardinia (Italy). Corsican is related to the Tuscan varieties from the Italian peninsula, and therefore also to the Florentine-based standard Italian.


title: Corsican language

text: Under the long-standing sway of Tuscany's Pisa and Republic of Genoa over Corsica, Corsican used to play the role of a vernacular in combination with Italian functioning as the island's official language. In 1859, Italian was replaced by French, owing to the French acquisition from the Republic of Genoa in 1768. Over the next two centuries, the use of French in the place of Italian grew to the extent that, by the Liberation in 1945, all the islanders had a working knowledge of French. The 20th century saw a language shift, with the islanders changing their language practices to the extent that there were no monolingual Corsican speakers left by the 1960s. By 1995, an estimated 65 percent of islanders had some degree of proficiency in Corsican, and a minority amounting to around 10 percent used Corsican as a first language.


title: Corsican language

text: As for Corsican, a bone of contention is whether it should be considered an Italian dialect or its own language, even while by French law it is a regional language. While there is near universal agreement that Corsican is typologically and traditionally Italo-Romance, its specific position therein is more controversial. Some scholars argue that Corsican belongs to the Centro-Southern Italian dialects, while others are of the opinion that it is closely related to Italy's Tuscan varieties, if not reputed to be part thereof. Mutual intelligibility between Italian and the dialects of Corsican is in fact very high, with particular reference to Northern Corsican. As for Southern Corsican, it has been noted that in spite of the geographical proximity its closest linguistic neighbour is not Sardinian, which constitutes a separate group and is not mutually intelligible at all, but rather the Extreme Southern Italian lects like Siculo-Calabrian. It has been theorised, on the other hand, that a Sardinian variety, or a variety very similar to Sardo-Romance, might have been originally spoken in Corsica prior to the island's Tuscanisation under Pisan and Genoese rule.


title: Corsican language

text: The matter is controversial in light of the historical, cultural and particularly strong linguistic bonds that Corsica had traditionally formed with the Italian Mainland from the Middle Ages until the 19th century: in contrast to the neighbouring Sardinia, Corsica's installment into a diglossic system with Italian as the island's prestige language ran so deep that both Corsican and Italian might be even, and in fact were, perceived as two sociolinguistic levels of a single language. Corsican and Italian traditionally existed on a spectrum, whose proximity line was blurred enough that the locals needed little else but a change of register to communicate in an official setting. "Tuscanising" their tongue, or as the Corsican elites would have once said, "parlà in crusca" ("speaking in "crusca"", from the name of the Academy dedicated to the standardisation of the Italian language), allowed for a practice not of code-switching, but rather of code-mixing which is quite typical of the Mainland Italian dialects. Italian was perceived as "other" from Corsican, but not more so than the two main isoglosses of Northern and Southern Corsican were between each other by their respective native speakers. When Pasquale Paoli found himself exiled in London, he replied to Samuel Johnson's query on the peculiar existence of a "rustic language" very different from Italian that such a language existed only in Sardinia; in fact, the existence of Corsican as the island's native vernacular did not take anything away from Paoli's claims that Corsica's official language was Italian.


title: Corsican language

text: Today's Corsican is the result of these historical vicissitudes, which have morphed the language to an idiom that bears a strong resemblance to the medieval Tuscan once spoken at the time of Dante and Boccaccio, and still existing in peripheral Tuscany (Lucca, Garfagnana, Elba, Capraia). The correspondence of modern Corsican to ancient Tuscan can be seen from almost any aspect of the language, ranging from the phonetics, morphology, lexicon to the syntax. One of the characteristics of standard Italian is the retention of the -"re" infinitive ending, as in Latin "mittere" "send"; such infinitival ending is lost in Tuscan as well as Corsican, resulting in the outcome "mette" / "metta", "to put". Whereas the relative pronoun in Italian for "who" is "chi" and "what" is "che"/"(che) cosa", it is an uninflected "chì" in Corsican. Perhaps the biggest difference between standard Italian and Corsican is that the latter uses the "u" termination, whereas standard Italian has switched to the "o" ending. For example, the Italian demonstrative pronouns "questo" "this" and "quello" "that" become in Corsican "questu" or "quistu" and "quellu" or "quiddu": this feature was typical of the early Italian texts during the Middle Ages.


title: Corsican language

text: Even after the acquisition of Corsica by Louis XV, Italian continued to be the island's language of education, literature, religion and local affairs. The affluent youth, such as the future Emperor of the French, still went to Italy to pursue higher studies (it has been estimated that Corsican presence in Pisa amounted to a fourth of the University's total student body in 1830), and local civil registers would not stop being written in Italian until 1855; it was on May 9, 1859 that Italian was replaced by French as the island's official language, even though the latter would start to take root among the islanders from 1882 onwards, through the Jules Ferry's laws aimed at spreading literacy across the French provinces. Even so, a specifically homegrown Corsican rather than Italian literature in Corsica would not be born but belatedly and, in its earliest phase, would not carry autonomous cultural instances; Corsican writers, such as Salvatore Viale, even prided themselves on their affiliation to the broader Italian sphere, considering Corsican «one of the least impure dialects of Italy».


title: Corsican language

text: It was the Italian Fascist aggressive claims to the island in the 20th century, followed by their invasion, that provoked a popular backlash estranging the native islanders from standard Italian and, if anything, only accelerated their shifting to the French national language even further. By the Liberation, any previously existing link between the two linguistic varieties and with Italy altogether had been severed; any promotion of Corsican, which had been politicized by the local collaborators with the regime, would be met with popular criticism and even suspicion of potentially harboring irredentist sentiments. From then on, Corsican would grow autonomously from Italian to become later in the 1970s a centerpiece of the "Riacquistu" ("reacquisition") movement for the rediscovery of Corsican culture. Nationalist calls for Corsican to be put on the same footing as French led the French National Assembly to extend the 1951 Deixonne Law, which initially recognized only a few languages (Breton, Basque, Catalan and Occitan), to including Corsican as well, among others, not as a dialect of Italian, but as one of France's full-fledged regional languages in 1974 (see governmental support).


title: Corsican language

text: The common relationship between Corsica and central Italy can be traced from as far back as the Etruscans, who asserted their presence on the island in as early as 500 BC. In 40 AD, the natives of Corsica did not reportedly speak Latin. The Roman exile, Seneca the Younger, reports that both coast and interior were occupied by natives whose language he was not able to understand. More specifically, Seneca claimed that the island's population was the result of the stratification of different ethnic groups, such as the Greeks, the Ligures (see the Ligurian hypothesis) and the Iberians, whose language had long since stopped being recognizable among the population due to the intermixing of the other two groups. The occupation of the island by the Vandals around the year 469 marked the end of authoritative influence by Latin speakers (see Medieval Corsica). If the natives of that time spoke Latin, they must have acquired it during the late empire.


title: Corsican language

text: Modern Corsican has been influenced by the languages of the major powers taking an interest in Corsican affairs; earlier by those of the medieval Italian powers, such as the Papal States (828–1077), the Republic of Pisa (1077–1282) and the Republic of Genoa (1282–1768), and finally by France which, since 1859, has promulgated the official Parisian French. The term "gallicised Corsican" refers to the evolution of Corsican starting from about the year 1950, whereas "distanciated Corsican" refers to an idealized variety of Corsican following linguistic purism, by means of removing any French-derived elements.


title: Corsican language

text: The two most widely spoken forms of the Corsican language are the groups spoken in the Bastia and Corte area (generally throughout the northern half of the island, known as Haute-Corse, "Cismonte" or "Corsica suprana"), and the groups spoken around Sartène and Porto-Vecchio (generally throughout the southern half of the island, known as Corse-du-Sud, "Pumonti" or ). The dialect of Ajaccio has been described as in transition. The dialects spoken at Calvi and Bonifacio are closer to the Genoese dialect, also known as Ligurian.


title: Corsican language

text: This division along the Girolata-Porto Vecchio line was due to the massive immigration from Tuscany which took place in Corsica during the lower Middle Ages: as a result, the northern Corsican dialects became very close to a central Italian dialect like Tuscan, while the southern Corsican varieties could keep the original characteristics of the language which make it much more similar to Sicilian and, only to some extent, Sardinian.


title: Corsican language

text: The Northern Corsican macro variety ("Supranacciu", "Supranu", "Cismuntincu" or "Cismontano") is the most widespread on the island and standardised as well, and is spoken in North-West Corsica around the districts of Bastia and Corte. The dialects of Bastia and Cap Corse belong to the Western Tuscan dialects; they being, with the exception of Florentine, the closest to standard Italian. All the dialects presenting, in addition to what has already been stated, the conditional formed in (e.g. "she would love") are generally considered "Cismontani" dialects, situated north of a line uniting the villages of Piana, Vico, Vizzavona, Ghisoni and Ghisonaccia, and also covering the subgroups from the Cap Corse (which, unlike the rest of the island and similarly to Italian, uses "lu", "li", "la", "le" as definite articles), Bastia (besides i > e and a > e, u > o: , , , ; a > o: , , ), Balagna, Niolo and Corte (which retain the general Corsican traits: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ).


title: Corsican language

text: Across the Northern and Southern borders of the line separating the Northern dialects from the Southern ones, there is a transitional area picking up linguistic phenomena associated with either of the two groups, with some local peculiarities. Along the Northern line are the dialects around Piana and Calcatoggio, from Cinarca with Vizzavona (which form the conditional tense like in the South), and Fiumorbo through Ghisonaccia and Ghisoni, which have the retroflex sound (written "-dd-") for historical ; along the Southern line, the dialects of Ajaccio (retroflex "-dd-", realized as -"ghj"-, feminine plurals ending in "i", some Northern words like "cane" and "accattà" instead of "ghjacaru" and "cumprà", as well as "ellu"/"ella" and not "eddu"/"edda"; minor variations: "sabbatu" > "sabbitu", "u li dà" > "ghi lu dà"; final syllables often stressed and truncated: "marinari" > "marinà", > "panattè", "castellu" > "castè", "cuchjari" > "cuchjà"), the Gravona area, Bastelica (which would be classified as Southern, but is also noted for its typical rhotacism: "Basterga") and Solenzara, which did not preserve the Latin short vowels: "seccu", "peru", "rossu", "croci", "pozzu").


title: Corsican language

text: The Southern Corsican macro variety ("Suttanacciu", "Suttanu", "Pumontincu" or "Oltramontano") is the most archaic and conservative group, spoken in the districts of Sartène and Porto-Vecchio. Unlike the Northern varieties and similarly to Sardinian, the group retains the distinction of the Latin short vowels "ĭ" and "ŭ" (e.g. "pilu", "bucca"). It is also strongly marked by the presence of the voiced retroflex stop, like Sicilian (e.g. "aceddu", "beddu", "quiddu", "ziteddu", "famidda"), and the conditional tense formed in "-ìa" (e.g. "(idda) amarìa" "she would love"). All the "Oltramontani" dialects are from an area located to the South of Porticcio, Bastelica, Col di Verde and Solenzara. Notable dialects are those from around Taravo (retroflex -"dd"- only for historical : "frateddu", "suredda", "beddu"; preservation of the palatal lateral approximant: "piglià", "famiglia", "figliolu", ; does not preserve the Latin short vowels: "seccu", "peru", "rossu", "croci", "pozzu"), Sartène (preserving the Latin short vowels: "siccu", "piru", "russu", "cruci", "puzzu"; changing historical "-rn-" to "-rr-": "forru", "carri", "corru"; substituting the stop for the palatal lateral approximant: "piddà", "famidda", "fiddolu", "voddu"; imperfect tense like "cantàvami", "cantàvani"; masculine plurals ending in "a": "l'ochja", "i poma"; having "eddu/edda/eddi" as personal pronouns), the Alta Rocca (the most conservative area in Corsica, being very close to the varieties spoken in Northern Sardinia), and the Southern region located between the hinterlands of Porto-Vecchio and Bonifacio (masculine singulars always ending in "u": "fiumu", "paesu", "patronu"; masculine plurals always ending in "a": "i letta", "i solda", "i ponta", "i foca", "i mura", "i loca", "i balcona"; imperfect tense like "cantàiami", "cantàiani").


title: Corsican language

text: Some Italo-Romance languages that might have originated from Southern Corsican, but are also heavily influenced by the Sardinian language, are spoken in the neighbouring island of Sardinia.


title: Corsican language

text: Gallurese is spoken in the extreme north of the island, including the region of Gallura, while Sassarese is spoken in Sassari and in its neighbourhood, in the northwest of Sardinia. Their geographical position in Sardinia has been theorised to be the result of different migration waves from the already tuscanized Corsicans and the Tuscans, who then proceeded to settle in Sardinia and slowly displace the indigenous Logudorese Sardinian varieties spoken therein (at present, Luras is the only town in the middle of Gallura that has retained the original language).


title: Corsican language

text: On the Maddalena archipelago, which was culturally Corsican but had been annexed to the Savoyard Kingdom of Sardinia a short while before Corsica was ceded by Genoa to France in 1767, the local dialect (called "isulanu" or "maddaleninu") was brought by fishermen and shepherds from Bonifacio over a long period of immigration in the 17th and 18th centuries. Though influenced by Gallurese, it has maintained the original characteristics of Southern Corsican. In the dialect of "maddalenino", as it is known in Italian, there are also numerous words of Genoese and Ponzese origin.


title: Corsican language

text: Although Gallurese and Sassarese both belong to Italo-Dalmatian, which is a group typologically different from Sardinian, it has long been a subject of debate whether the two should be included as dialects either of Corsican or of Sardinian or, in light of their historical development, even considered languages of their own. It has been argued that all these varieties should be placed in a single category, Southern Romance, but such classification has not garnered universal support among linguists.


title: Corsican language

text: On 14 October 1997, Article 2 Item 4 of Law Number 26 of the Autonomous Region of Sardinia granted "the Sassarese and Gallurese dialects" («"al dialetto sassarese e a quello gallurese"») equal legal status with the other languages indigenous to Sardinia. Thus, even though they would technically not be covered by the national law pertaining to the historical linguistic minorities, among which is Sardinian, Sassarese and Gallurese are nonetheless recognized by the Sardinian government on a regional level.


title: Corsican language

text: The situation of Corsican with regard to French as the country's national language is analogous to that of many other French regions and provinces, which have or used to have a traditional language of their own, even though the islanders' switch from their local idiom to regional French has happened relatively later and the presence of Corsican, albeit declining, is still strongly felt among the population. In 1980, about 70 percent of the island's population "had some command of the Corsican language." In 1990, out of a total population of about 254,000, the percentage had declined to 50 percent, with 10 percent of the island's residents using it as a first language. The language appeared to be in serious decline when the French government reversed its unsupportive stand and initiated some strong measures to save it.


title: Corsican language

text: The January 2007 estimated population of Corsica was 281,000, whereas the figure for the March 1999 census, when most of the studies—though not the linguistic survey work referenced in this article—were performed, was about 261,000. Only a fraction of the population at either time spoke Corsican with any fluency.


title: Corsican language

text: According to an official survey run on behalf of the "Collectivité territoriale de Corse" which took place in April 2013, in Corsica, the Corsican language had a number of speakers between 86,800 and 130,200, out of a total population amounting to 309,693 inhabitants. 28% of the overall population was able to speak Corsican well, whilst an additional 14% had a capacity to speak it "quite well." The percentage of those who had a solid oral understanding of the language varies between a minimum of 25 percent in the 25–34 age group and the maximum of 65 percent in the over-65 age group: almost a quarter of the former age group reported that they were not able to understand Corsican, while only a small minority of the older people did not understand it. While 32 percent of the population of Northern Corsica was reported to speak Corsican quite well, this percentage dropped to 22 percent for Southern Corsica. Moreover, 10 percent of the population of Corsica spoke only French, while 62 percent code-switched between French and at least some Corsican. 8 percent of the Corsicans knew how to write correctly in Corsican, while about 60 percent of the population did not know how to write in Corsican. While 90 percent of the population was in favor of a Corsican-French bilingualism, 3 percent would have liked to have only Corsican as the official language in the island, and 7 percent would have preferred French to have this role.


title: Corsican language

text: UNESCO classifies Corsican as a "definitely endangered language." The Corsican language is a key vehicle for Corsican culture, which is notably rich in proverbs and in polyphonic song.


title: Corsican language

text: When the French Assembly passed the Deixonne Law in 1951, which made it possible for regional languages to be taught at school, Alsatian, Flemish and Corsican were not included on the ground of being classified as "dialectes allogènes" of German, Dutch and Italian respectively, i.e. dialects of foreign languages and not languages in themselves. Only in 1974 were they too politically recognized as regional languages for their teaching on a voluntary basis.


title: Corsican language

text: The 1991 "Joxe Statute", in setting up the Collectivité Territoriale de Corse, also provided for the Corsican Assembly, and charged it with developing a plan for the optional teaching of Corsican. The University of Corsica Pasquale Paoli at Corte, Haute-Corse took a central role in the planning.


title: Corsican language

text: At the primary school level Corsican is taught up to a fixed number of hours per week (three in the year 2000) and is a voluntary subject at the secondary school level, but is required at the University of Corsica. It is available through adult education. It can be spoken in court or in the conduct of other government business if the officials concerned speak it. The Cultural Council of the Corsican Assembly advocates for its use, for example, on public signs.


title: Corsican language

text: According to the anthropologist Dumenica Verdoni, writing new literature in modern Corsican, known as the "Riacquistu", is an integral part of affirming Corsican identity. Some individuals have returned from careers in continental France to write in Corsican, including Dumenicu Togniotti, director of the "Teatru Paisanu", which produced polyphonic musicals, 1973–1982, followed in 1980 by Michel Raffaelli's "Teatru di a Testa Mora", and Saveriu Valentini's "Teatru Cupabbia" in 1984. Modern prose writers include Alanu di Meglio, Ghjacumu Fusina, Lucia Santucci, and Marcu Biancarelli.


title: Corsican language

text: Ferdinand Gregorovius, a 19th-century traveller and enthusiast of Corsican culture, reported that the preferred form of the literary tradition of his time was the "vocero", a type of polyphonic ballad originating from funeral obsequies. These laments were similar in form to the chorales of Greek drama except that the leader could improvise. Some performers were noted at this, such as the 1700s Mariola della Piazzole and Clorinda Franseschi. However, the trail of written popular literature of known date in Corsican currently goes no further back than the 17th century. An undated corpus of proverbs from communes may well precede it (see under "External links" below). Corsican has also left a trail of legal documents ending in the late 12th century. At that time the monasteries held considerable land on Corsica and many of the churchmen were notaries.


title: Corsican language

text: Between 1200 and 1425 the monastery of Gorgona, which belonged to the Order of Saint Benedict for much of that time and was in the territory of Pisa, acquired about 40 legal papers of various sorts related to Corsica. As the church was replacing Pisan prelates with Corsican ones there, the legal language shows a transition from entirely Latin through partially Latin and partially Corsican to entirely Corsican. The first known surviving document containing some Corsican is a bill of sale from Patrimonio dated to 1220. These documents were moved to Pisa before the monastery closed its doors and were published there. Research into earlier evidence of Corsican is ongoing.


title: Corsican language

text: Corsican is written in the standard Latin script, using 21 of the letters for native words. The letters j, k, w, x, and y are found only in foreign names and French vocabulary. The digraphs and trigraphs "chj", "ghj", "sc" and "sg" are also defined as "letters" of the alphabet in its modern scholarly form (compare the presence of "ch" or "ll" in the old Spanish alphabet) and appear respectively after "c", "g" and "s".


title: Corsican language

text: The primary diacritic used is the grave accent, indicating word stress when it is not penultimate. In scholarly contexts, disyllables may be distinguished from diphthongs by use of the diaeresis on the former vowel (as in Italian and distinct from French and English). In older writing, the acute accent is sometimes found on stressed , the circumflex on stressed , indicating respectively () and () phonemes.


title: Corsican language

text: Corsican has been regarded as a dialect of Italian historically, similar to the Romance lects developed on the Italian peninsula, and in writing, it also resembles Italian (with the generalised substitution of -"u" for final -"o" and the articles "u" and "a" for "il/lo" and "la" respectively; however, both the dialect of Cap Corse and Gallurese retain the original articles "lu" and "la"). On the other hand, the phonemes of the modern Corsican dialects have undergone complex and sometimes irregular phenomena depending on phonological context, so the pronunciation of the language for foreigners familiar with other Romance languages is not straightforward.


title: Corsican language

text: As in Italian, the grapheme appears in some digraphs and trigraphs in which it does not represent the phonemic vowel. All vowels are pronounced except in a few well-defined instances. is not pronounced between and : "sciarpa" ; or initially in some words: "istu" .


title: Corsican language

text: Vowels may be nasalized before (which is assimilated to before or ) and the palatal nasal consonant represented by . The nasal vowels are represented by the vowel plus , or . The combination is a digraph or trigraph indicating the nasalized vowel. The consonant is pronounced in weakened form. The same combination of letters might not be the digraph or trigraph but might be just the non-nasal vowel followed by the consonant at full weight. The speaker must know the difference. Example of nasal: is pronounced and not .


title: Corsican language

text: The Northern and central dialects in the vicinity of the Taravo river adopt the Italian seven-vowel system, whereas all the Southern ones around the so-called "archaic zone" with its centre being the town of Sartène (including the Gallurese dialect spoken in Northern Sardinia) resort to a five-vowel system without length differentiation, like Sardinian.


title: Corsican language

text: The vowel inventory, or collection of phonemic vowels (and the major allophones), transcribed in IPA symbols, is:


title: Languages of Taiwan

text: The languages of Taiwan consist of several varieties of languages under the families of Austronesian languages and Sino-Tibetan languages. The Formosan languages, a branch of Austronesian languages, have been spoken by the Taiwanese indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Owing to the wide internal variety of the Formosan languages, research on historical linguistics recognizes Taiwan as the Urheimat (homeland) of the whole Austronesian languages family. In the last 400 years, several waves of Han emigrations brought several different Sinitic languages into Taiwan. These languages include Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, and Mandarin, which have become the major languages spoken in present-day Taiwan.


title: Languages of Taiwan

text: Formosan languages were the dominant language of prehistorical Taiwan. Taiwan's long colonial and immigration history brought in several languages such as Dutch, Spanish, Hokkien, Hakka, Japanese, and Mandarin. Due to its colonial history, Japanese influences the language in Taiwan, for example, as many loanwords in several languages in Taiwan are derived from Japanese.


title: Languages of Taiwan

text: After World War II, a long martial law era was held in Taiwan. Policies of the government in this era suppressed languages other than Mandarin in public use. This has significantly damaged the evolution of local languages, including Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, Formosan languages, and the Matsu dialect. The situation had slightly changed since the 2000s when the government made efforts to protect and revitalize local languages. Local languages became part of elementary school education in Taiwan, laws and regulations regarding local language protection were established for Hakka and Formosan languages, and public TV and radio stations exclusively for these two languages were also established. Currently, the government of Taiwan also maintains standards of several widely spoken languages listed below, the percentage of users are from the "2010 population and household census in Taiwan."


title: Languages of Taiwan

text: The Taiwanese indigenous languages or Formosan languages are the languages of the aboriginal tribes of Taiwan. Taiwanese aborigines currently comprise about 2.3% of the island's population. However, far fewer can still speak their ancestral language, after centuries of language shift. It is common for young and middle-aged Hakka and aboriginal people to speak Mandarin and Hokkien better than, or to the exclusion of, their ethnic languages. Of the approximately 26 languages of the Taiwanese aborigines, at least ten are extinct, another five are moribund, and several others are to some degree endangered. The government recognizes 16 languages and 42 accents of the indigenous languages.


title: Languages of Taiwan

text: The governmental agency Council of Indigenous Peoples maintains the orthography of the writing systems of Formosan languages. Due to the era of Taiwan under Japanese rule, a large number of loanwords from Japanese also appear in Formosan languages. There is also Yilan Creole Japanese as a mixture of Japanese and Atayal.


title: Languages of Taiwan

text: All Formosan languages are slowly being replaced by the culturally dominant Mandarin. In recent decades the government started an aboriginal reappreciation program that included the reintroduction of Formosan mother tongue education in Taiwanese schools. However, the results of this initiative have been disappointing. The television station Taiwan Indigenous Television and radio station "Alian 96.3" were created as efforts to revive the indigenous languages. Formosan languages were made an official language in July 2017.


title: Languages of Taiwan

text: The Amis language is the most widely spoken aboriginal language, on the eastern coast of the island where Hokkien and Hakka are less present than on the western coast. The government estimates put the number of Amis people at a little over 200,000, but number of people who speak Amis as their first language as lower than 10,000. Amis has appeared in some mainstream popular music. Other significant indigenous languages include Atayal, Paiwan, and Bunun. In addition to the recognized languages, there are around 10 to 12 groups of Taiwanese Plains Indigenous Peoples with their respective languages.


title: Languages of Taiwan

text: Some indigenous people and languages are recognized by local governments, these include Siraya (and its Makatao and Taivoan varieties) to the south-west of the island. Some other language revitalization movements are going on Basay to the north, Babuza-Taokas in the most populated western plains, and Pazeh bordering it in the center west of the island.


title: Languages of Taiwan

text: Mandarin is commonly known and officially referred to as the national language () in Taiwan. In 1945, following the end of World War II, Mandarin was introduced as the de facto official language and made compulsory in schools. Before 1945, Japanese was the official language and taught in schools. Since then, Mandarin has been established as a lingua franca among the various groups in Taiwan: the majority Taiwanese-speaking Hoklo (Hokkien), the Hakka who have their own spoken language, the aboriginals who speak aboriginal languages; as well as Mainland Chinese immigrated in 1949 whose native tongue may be any Chinese variant.