title: Akuma (Street Fighter)

text: Akuma made his debut in "Super Street Fighter II Turbo", the fifth arcade iteration of the "Street Fighter II" games, where he appears as a hidden and unnamed character. After meeting certain requirements, Akuma appears prior to the player's final match with M. Bison and obliterates M. Bison before challenging the player. In the Japanese arcade version of the game, Akuma would introduce himself to the player before the match, proclaiming himself to be the . He also has two endings in the game as well: one for defeating M. Bison and another against himself. While the dialogue in these endings was omitted from the international releases of the arcade game, they were edited into one ending and included in the English localization of "Super Turbo Revival" for the Game Boy Advance. Shin Akuma is, however, an unlockable playable character in the Game Boy Advance version of the game, "Super Street Fighter II Turbo Revival", as well as the Japan-only Dreamcast version of the game, "Super Street Fighter II X for Matching Service". In the latter version, another version of Akuma referred to as "Tien Gouki" can also be selected.


title: Akuma (Street Fighter)

text: Akuma appears in "Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors' Dreams", where he was given his name, once again as a hidden opponent and unlockable character. His backstory remains the same as in "Super Turbo". Akuma was added to the immediate roster in "Street Fighter Alpha 2" and "Street Fighter Alpha 3", with a powered-up version of the character named "Shin Akuma" appearing as a hidden opponent. The character's relation with other "Street Fighter" characters begins to be fleshed out, establishing rivalries with Guy, Adon, Gen and Ryu. Shin Akuma, rather than "Final Bison", is Evil Ryu's final boss in the console versions of "Street Fighter Alpha 3".


title: Akuma (Street Fighter)

text: Akuma and Shin Akuma are featured in "Street Fighter EX" as hidden boss characters, where he is one of the few characters able to move out of the 2D playing field, during his teleport. Akuma also appears in the arcade and home video game console adaption of "" despite not appearing in the movie.


title: Akuma (Street Fighter)

text: Akuma is featured in the "Street Fighter III" sub-series beginning with "". Like in his debut in "Super Turbo", Akuma is both a secret opponent who serves as an alternate final boss and an unlockable character, with the CPU-controlled version being the "Shin Akuma" incarnation introduced in "Alpha 2". He is a regular character in "". Akuma reappears in "Street Fighter IV", being one of the main antagonists and once again a secret boss in the Arcade Mode as well as an unlockable character in both


title: Akuma (Street Fighter)

text: console versions. A new form of Akuma, known as , was confirmed in " Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition" by leaked videos. Unlike Shin Akuma, Oni is the being that would consume Akuma after transcending all of his humanity and mastering the Satsui no Hado. Akuma returns in "Street Fighter V" as a downloadable character.


title: Akuma (Street Fighter)

text: Akuma has appeared in some form or another through many Capcom games outside the "Street Fighter" franchise. The first of these appearances was in the fighting game "", where Akuma (in his "Super Turbo" incarnation) appears as a nameless hidden character. He would appear in the later Marvel-licensed fighting games (see "Marvel vs. Capcom" series). In "X-Men vs. Street Fighter", he is a regular character but–in a nod to his hidden character status in other games–his select box is hidden. In "Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter", he appears both as a selectable character and as "Cyber Akuma" ("Mech Gouki" in Japan), a mechanized version enhanced by Apocalypse acting as the horseman of Death and the final boss. He is absent from ""; in his stead, Ryu has a Hyper Combo that changes his fighting style to incorporate Akuma's moveset. He reappears as a playable character in the sequels: "", "" and "Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3".


title: Akuma (Street Fighter)

text: In the "SNK vs. Capcom" series, Akuma appears in "" as an unlockable character and in "" as a Ratio 4 character. He also appears in "Capcom vs. SNK 2" and "" as both regular Akuma and Shin Akuma. In "Capcom vs. SNK 2", a different form of Shin Akuma appears. This form of Akuma achieves a new level of power when a dying Rugal Bernstein pours his Orochi power into him. His name is spelled in Japanese as , with the "Shin" character meaning "God" instead of the usual "True". Also, various version of Akuma have appeared in the "" series.


title: Akuma (Street Fighter)

text: Akuma appears as a special guest character in "Tekken 7". In the game's story, he seeks to repay a debt to Kazumi Mishima for saving his life from an unknown critical situation, who asks him to kill her husband Heihachi and his son Kazuya for her if she dies. When Heihachi is finally dead for good at the hands of Kazuya, he is Akuma's only target left. Similar to his appearances in the "Street Fighter" series, Akuma replaces Kazumi as a secret arcade mode final boss if certain conditions are met. Akuma was originally planned to be the only guest character for "Tekken 7", due to Katsuhiro Harada and Michael Murray saying they both don't really like the guest characters because it throws off the "Tekken" world and setting. However, Murray also explained that Akuma was a great fit and that there is a chance for more guests in the future. "Tekken 7" started getting three more guest characters: Geese Howard from SNK's "Fatal Fury" fighting game series in November 2017, Noctis Lucis Caelum from "Final Fantasy XV" in March 2018, and Negan Smith from "The Walking Dead" in February 2019. Akuma also appears as an unlockable guest character on "Tekken Mobile".


title: Akuma (Street Fighter)

text: He also appears in "Namco × Capcom". He appears as both a playable character and one of the final boss characters in the crossover fighting game "Street Fighter X Tekken". Akuma also appears in the fighting video game "Street Fighter X Mega Man", as a hidden boss. Akuma also appears in "Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo" as the final boss, "Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix" (known as "Pocket Fighter" in Japan) as an unlockable character, and in the Japanese console version of "" as a mecha named "Zero Gouki". He is featured in a DLC episode of the action video game "Asura's Wrath", alongside Ryu as an opponent. In "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate", Akuma appears as a "spirit"; a type of collectible item that can be used to enhance the abilities of playable characters. Akuma also appears in Capcom's collaboration in "Monster Hunter Rise". Akuma also appears as a "crossover" character in "Brawlhalla" with mirrored abilities of Val.


title: Akuma (Street Fighter)

text: Akuma made cameo appearances in "" and in the Japanese TV series "Street Fighter II V". Actor and martial artist Joey Ansah played Akuma in the short film "". Akuma also appears in "", an online series by Capcom and the creators of "Street Fighter: Legacy" with Ansah reprised his role from "Legacy" and Gaku Space as Young Gouki. In "Assassin's Fist", both of Akuma's names are used; Akuma being the moniker Gouki had assumed after the Satsui no Hado took him over completely. Both Ansah and Space will return for the second season titled "Street Fighter: World Warrior".


title: Akuma (Street Fighter)

text: Akuma's first speaking appearance in animation was in an episode of the American "Street Fighter" animated series titled "Strange Bedfellows". He reappears in another episode, "The World's Greatest Warrior", in which he defeats Ryu and Ken's master Gouken and challenges Gouken's two students to a duel.


title: Akuma (Street Fighter)

text: Akuma also figures in the Japanese OVA "", where Ryu's encounters with Akuma triggers the "Dark Hadou" in Ryu. Akuma is also the central focus in the OVA "", which explores his past and ties the character's past with Ryu's. He appears in the beginning of the movie "Street Fighter 4: The Ties That Bind", where he enters Ryu's mind and torments him.


title: Akuma (Street Fighter)

text: UDON Entertainment's line of "Street Fighter" comics sets Akuma in his origin story on how he became a demon and murdering Goutetsu with the power of the Dark Hadou; he fights against Gouken ten years later, as they fight, Gouken eventually wins against Akuma as he falls off a cliff; Gouken tries to save him, but Akuma willingly drops himself into a river, only for him to survive the drop.


title: Akuma (Street Fighter)

text: In 2012, band MegaDriver released a song about Akuma's character, called "Wrath of the Raging Demon". In 2014, band Skelator released a song about Akuma, called "Raging Demon". In 2015, rapper Tauz released a tribute song to Akuma, called "Rap do Akuma". In 2021, band RAVENOUS E.H. released a song about Akuma, called "Die 1,000 Deaths".


title: Akuma (Street Fighter)

text: Akuma has received much critical acclaim from various gaming media outlets. Japanese magazine "Gamest" named him one of their "Top 50 Characters of 1996", in a three-way tie for 37th. He placed first in "Game Informer's" 2009 list of their "Top Ten Best Fighting Game Characters". Ryan Clements of IGN said in 2009: "Although M. Bison might be thought of as a notorious "Street Fighter" villain, Akuma is clearly the fan-favorite 'bad guy'". Elton Jones of "Complex" deemed Akuma the "most dominant fighting game character" in 2012: "Anybody that can lay out M. Bison with ease gets the number-one spot in everything." "GamesRadar" said of the character in 2013: "He differs from other villains in that his motives aren't inherently evil—but ... he has no qualms with killing his teacher or his own brother in combat." Alex Eckman-Lawn of "Topless Robot" deemed him the "most diabolical" fighting-game boss: "Few experiences from the pre-Internet video-game era made as striking an impression as the time Akuma literally just glided in, murdered M. Bison in a blink, and challenged you, the player, to a real fight." Bryan Dawson of Prima Games commented, "It's hard to imagine any new "Street Fighter" game without this man, as he adds a sense of evil that even M. Bison can't replicate."


title: Akuma (Street Fighter)

text: Robert Workman of "GameDaily" rated Akuma eleventh in his 2008 selection of the "Top 25 Capcom Characters of All Time", as he "summons some of the sickest attacks ever seen in a fighting game." "GameSpot" readers chose Akuma for the ninth spot in their 2008 selection of the ten best video game villains and the site itself deemed Akuma "the toughest fighter" in the "Street Fighter" series. Rich Knight of "Complex", in 2012, placed Akuma's "SSFII Turbo" appearance runner-up to Shao Kahn in "Mortal Kombat II" as the "coolest boss battle ever": "Akuma rushed into our lives and onto the screen ... and then demolish[ed] you in seconds." Akuma placed 43rd in IGN's selection of the top 100 video game villains, for his "always intimidating" appearance. Ben Lee of "Digital Spy" named him the sixth-best series character on the grounds that he was "truly exciting to fight against" in "Super Street Fighter II Turbo", "and his cold, emotionless personality was utterly terrifying." "Paste" rated Akuma 23rd in their 2016 ranking of "Street Fighter's" 97 total playable characters, describing him as "a great anti-hero to offset Ryu and Ken."


title: Akuma (Street Fighter)

text: Chad Hunter of "Complex" ranked Akuma's "Raging Demon" among the "25 Most Revolutionary Kill Moves in Video Games" at third: "Akuma radiates flames, grabs his opponent and the screen goes black and all you [hear] is a flurry of hits." Prima Games named it the seventh-"greatest fighting move in video game history" out of fifty in 2014, and "Arcade Sushi's" Angelo Dargenio considered it "one of the most well-known super moves in videogame history, spawning several parody moves in multiple fighting games over the years." WhatCulture has named the Raging Demon as the "Most Iconic Street Fighter Special/Super Move", stating "While the Hadouken attack is undoubtedly the most recognisable Street Fighter special move, nothing can beat the satisfaction of utterly destroying your opponent by landing the Raging Demon." Gavin Jasper of "Den of Geek", in 2016, named Akuma in "" as the top fighting-game guest character. While Jason Fanelli of "Arcade Sushi" considered it "the best guest turn he's ever done," he simultaneously criticized his cameo in "": "Akuma doesn't need to be a giant mech for extra exposure." Chris Hoadley of VentureBeat labeled Akuma one of the "best fighting game clones" in 2014: "Capcom is no stranger to reusing [character] models. Ryu has had Ken as a rival since the first "Street Fighter", and over time he would meet more 'shotos' who had an affinity for karate "gis", fireballs, and uppercuts." "GamesRadar's" David Houghton rated Akuma's "Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike" stage among the "27 most amazing fighting game backgrounds": "Gloomily ethereal, black-skied woodland setting with subliminally oppressive fisheye-lens effect? You are definitely going to die."


title: Akuma (Street Fighter)

text: However, Akuma has often been criticized for his perceived status as an excessively powerful character in the "Street Fighter" series. Scott Baird of "Screen Rant" named him the second-"most unfairly overpowered fighting game character" behind Meta Knight of "Super Smash Bros." in 2016, for the potency of his offensive attacks that resulted in Akuma being banned from "SSFII Turbo" tournaments. "GamePro" considered Akuma one of the "Most Broken Characters in Videogame History", for his "ridiculously powerful" moves that were "the bane of newbies and veterans alike," a sentiment that was echoed by Christopher Hooton of "Metro" in 2013. In 2014, Lucas Sullivan of "GamesRadar" ranked Akuma eleventh in his list of "12 unfair fighting game bosses that (almost) made us rage quit" in 2014. "Even if you ever do manage to finally defeat Akuma, it somehow doesn't feel earned. It's more like the computer felt sorry for you." Additionally, Akuma was named by CBR as the "Strongest Street Fighter Character", with comments "In 1996's "Street Fighter Alpha 2", Akuma evolved into a more powerful form, Shin Akuma, and he evolved into the even more powerful Oni in 2010's "Super Street Fighter IV". Since he's able to split mountains in that form, that version of Akuma stands as the most powerful being the Street Fighter universe."


title: Akuma (Street Fighter)

text: Akuma's Oni incarnation has received a mixed reception. Both characters shared the top spot in "Screen Rant's" rating of the "12 Most Powerful "Street Fighter" Characters" the same year. "Akuma alone has destroyed an entire island, so whoever has to stand against the unbridled destructive force of Oni, all we can say is God help them." In another "Screen Rant's" list "Street Fighter: 8 Most Powerful (And 8 Most Worthless) Characters", Akuma placed first. "Whether he is Oni, Akuma, or something in-between (Shin Akuma, for instance), the dark master easily proves that he is at the top of the SF heap in terms of both in-universe power and effectiveness among players who have mastered using him." However, Imran Khan of "Paste" rated Oni as one of the "all-time worst" series characters: "Oni strips away the few bits of Akuma that are actually interesting as a character and turns him into a castaway from a "Dragon Ball Z" movie in design and development." Randolph Ramsay of "GameSpot" considered Oni "one of the least interesting additions" to "Super Street Fighter IV", as he utilized moves similar to those of other characters.


title: Strepsils

text: Strepsils is a brand of throat lozenges manufactured by Reckitt. Strepsils throat lozenges are used to relieve discomfort caused by mouth and throat infections.


title: Strepsils

text: The primary active ingredients are dichlorobenzyl alcohol and amylmetacresol, with some formulations containing ascorbic acid (vitamin C). Inactive ingredients include menthol, tartaric acid, and propylene glycol.


title: Strepsils

text: Strepsils was originally introduced in 1950 by Boots Healthcare as a mouthwash. Strepsils throat lozenges were introduced in 1958. Strepsils was one of the Boots Healthcare brands acquired by Reckitt Benckiser in 2006.


title: Strepsils

text: Strepsils have been in production since 1958 and contain two active ingredients, namely: amylmetacresol and 2,4-dichlorobenzyl alcohol. These ingredients are mild antiseptics that can kill bacteria associated with mouth and throat infections. However, as indicated in the package, research has not demonstrated the presence of an antibacterial agent to reduce the duration or severity of an infection. Extra Strepsils contains hexylresorcinol as an active ingredient and strepsils sore throat and nose covered contains menthol 8 mg. Reckitt Benckiser also produces a higher resistance pill that used to be marketed under the Strepsils Intensive label, but is now marketed under the Strefen brand, which contains the active ingredient flurbiprofen 8.75 mg.


title: Strepsils

text: In Australia and Argentina also Reckitt Benckiser market Strepsils Plus, which contains lidocaine, as well as antiseptic agents present in original Strepsils. In Strepsils Spain they are also available with lidocaine marketed as Strepsils Lidocaine instead.


title: Strepsils

text: Vitamin C is added for Strepsils vitamin C-100. Each Strepsils Vitamin C-100 pill contains 1.2 mg of 2,4-dichlorobenzyl alcohol, Amylmetacresol 0.6 mg and 100 mg of vitamin C.


title: Philosophy of language

text: In analytic philosophy, philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, the constitution of sentences, concepts, learning, and thought.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell were pivotal figures in analytic philosophy's "linguistic turn". These writers were followed by Ludwig Wittgenstein ("Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"), the Vienna Circle, logical positivists, and Willard Van Orman Quine.


title: Philosophy of language

text: In continental philosophy, language is not studied as a separate discipline. Rather, it is an inextricable part of many other areas of thought, such as phenomenology, structural semiotics, language of mathematics, hermeneutics, existentialism, deconstruction and critical theory.


title: Philosophy of language

text: In the West, inquiry into language stretches back to the 5th century BC with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Both in India and in Greece, linguistic speculation predates the emergence of grammatical traditions of systematic description of language, which emerged around the 5th century BC in India (see Yāska), and around the 3rd century BC in Greece (see Rhianus).


title: Philosophy of language

text: In the dialogue "Cratylus", Plato considered the question of whether the names of things were determined by convention or by nature. He criticized conventionalism because it led to the bizarre consequence that anything can be conventionally denominated by any name. Hence, it cannot account for the correct or incorrect application of a name. He claimed that there was a natural correctness to names. To do this, he pointed out that compound words and phrases have a range of correctness. He also argued that primitive names had a natural correctness, because each phoneme represented basic ideas or sentiments. For example, for Plato the letter "l" and its sound represented the idea of softness. However, by the end of the "Cratylus", he had admitted that some social conventions were also involved, and that there were faults in the idea that phonemes had individual meanings. Plato is often considered a proponent of extreme realism.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Aristotle interested himself with the issues of logic, categories, and meaning creation. He separated all things into categories of species and genus. He thought that the meaning of a predicate was established through an abstraction of the similarities between various individual things. This theory later came to be called "nominalism". However, since Aristotle took these similarities to be constituted by a real commonality of form, he is more often considered a proponent of "moderate realism".


title: Philosophy of language

text: The Stoic philosophers made important contributions to the analysis of grammar, distinguishing five parts of speech: nouns, verbs, appellatives (names or epithets), conjunctions and articles. They also developed a sophisticated doctrine of the "lektón" associated with each sign of a language, but distinct from both the sign itself and the thing to which it refers. This "lektón" was the meaning (or sense) of every term. The complete "lektón" of a sentence is what we would now call its proposition. Only propositions were considered "truth-bearers" or "truth-vehicles" (i.e., they could be called true or false) while sentences were simply their vehicles of expression. Different "lektá" could also express things besides propositions, such as commands, questions and exclamations.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Medieval philosophers were greatly interested in the subtleties of language and its usage. For many scholastics, this interest was provoked by the necessity of translating Greek texts into Latin. There were several noteworthy philosophers of language in the medieval period. According to Peter J. King, (although this has been disputed), Peter Abelard anticipated the modern theories of reference. Also, William of Ockham's "Summa Logicae" brought forward one of the first serious proposals for codifying a mental language.


title: Philosophy of language

text: The scholastics of the high medieval period, such as Ockham and John Duns Scotus, considered logic to be a "scientia sermocinalis" (science of language). The result of their studies was the elaboration of linguistic-philosophical notions whose complexity and subtlety has only recently come to be appreciated. Many of the most interesting problems of modern philosophy of language were anticipated by medieval thinkers. The phenomena of vagueness and ambiguity were analyzed intensely, and this led to an increasing interest in problems related to the use of "syncategorematic" words such as "and", "or", "not", "if", and "every". The study of "categorematic" words (or "terms") and their properties was also developed greatly. One of the major developments of the scholastics in this area was the doctrine of the "suppositio". The "suppositio" of a term is the interpretation that is given of it in a specific context. It can be "proper" or "improper" (as when it is used in metaphor, metonyms and other figures of speech). A proper "suppositio", in turn, can be either formal or material accordingly when it refers to its usual non-linguistic referent (as in "Charles is a man"), or to itself as a linguistic entity (as in ""Charles" has seven letters"). Such a classification scheme is the precursor of modern distinctions between use and mention, and between language and metalanguage.


title: Philosophy of language

text: There is a tradition called speculative grammar which existed from the 11th to the 13th century. Leading scholars included Martin of Dacia and Thomas of Erfurt (see "Modistae").


title: Philosophy of language

text: Linguists of the Renaissance and Baroque periods such as Johannes Goropius Becanus, Athanasius Kircher and John Wilkins were infatuated with the idea of a philosophical language reversing the confusion of tongues, influenced by the gradual discovery of Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs ("Hieroglyphica"). This thought parallels the idea that there might be a universal language of music.


title: Philosophy of language

text: European scholarship began to absorb the Indian linguistic tradition only from the mid-18th century, pioneered by Jean François Pons and Henry Thomas Colebrooke (the "editio princeps" of Varadarāja, a 17th-century Sanskrit grammarian, dating to 1849).


title: Philosophy of language

text: In the early 19th century, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard insisted that language ought to play a larger role in Western philosophy. He argued that philosophy has not sufficiently focused on the role language plays in cognition and that future philosophy ought to proceed with a conscious focus on language:


title: Philosophy of language

text: The phrase "linguistic turn" was used to describe the noteworthy emphasis that contemporary philosophers put upon language.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Language began to play a central role in Western philosophy in the early 20th century. One of the central figures involved in this development was the German philosopher Gottlob Frege, whose work on philosophical logic and the philosophy of language in the late 19th century influenced the work of 20th-century analytic philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The philosophy of language became so pervasive that for a time, in analytic philosophy circles, philosophy as a whole was understood to be a matter of philosophy of language.


title: Philosophy of language

text: In continental philosophy, the foundational work in the field was Ferdinand de Saussure's "Cours de linguistique générale", published posthumously in 1916.


title: Philosophy of language

text: The topic that has received the most attention in the philosophy of language has been the "nature" of meaning, to explain what "meaning" is, and what we mean when we talk about meaning. Within this area, issues include: the nature of synonymy, the origins of meaning itself, our apprehension of meaning, and the nature of composition (the question of how meaningful units of language are composed of smaller meaningful parts, and how the meaning of the whole is derived from the meaning of its parts).


title: Philosophy of language

text: There have been several distinctive explanations of what a linguistic "meaning" is. Each has been associated with its own body of literature.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Investigations into how language interacts with the world are called theories of reference. Gottlob Frege was an advocate of a mediated reference theory. Frege divided the semantic content of every expression, including sentences, into two components: sense and reference. The sense of a sentence is the thought that it expresses. Such a thought is abstract, universal and objective. The sense of any sub-sentential expression consists in its contribution to the thought that its embedding sentence expresses. Senses determine reference and are also the modes of presentation of the objects to which expressions refer. Referents are the objects in the world that words pick out. The senses of sentences are thoughts, while their referents are truth values (true or false). The referents of sentences embedded in propositional attitude ascriptions and other opaque contexts are their usual senses.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Bertrand Russell, in his later writings and for reasons related to his theory of acquaintance in epistemology, held that the only directly referential expressions are, what he called, "logically proper names". Logically proper names are such terms as "I", "now", "here" and other indexicals. He viewed proper names of the sort described above as "abbreviated definite descriptions" (see "Theory of descriptions"). Hence "Joseph R. Biden" may be an abbreviation for "the current President of the United States and husband of Jill Biden". Definite descriptions are denoting phrases (see "On Denoting") which are analyzed by Russell into existentially quantified logical constructions. Such phrases denote in the sense that there is an object that satisfies the description. However, such objects are not to be considered meaningful on their own, but have meaning only in the proposition expressed by the sentences of which they are a part. Hence, they are not directly referential in the same way as logically proper names, for Russell.


title: Philosophy of language

text: On Frege's account, any referring expression has a sense as well as a referent. Such a "mediated reference" view has certain theoretical advantages over Mill's view. For example, co-referential names, such as "Samuel Clemens" and "Mark Twain", cause problems for a directly referential view because it is possible for someone to hear "Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens" and be surprised – thus, their cognitive content seems different.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Despite the differences between the views of Frege and Russell, they are generally lumped together as descriptivists about proper names. Such descriptivism was criticized in Saul Kripke's "Naming and Necessity".


title: Philosophy of language

text: Kripke put forth what has come to be known as "the modal argument" (or "argument from rigidity"). Consider the name "Aristotle" and the descriptions "the greatest student of Plato", "the founder of logic" and "the teacher of Alexander". Aristotle obviously satisfies all of the descriptions (and many of the others we commonly associate with him), but it is not necessarily true that if Aristotle existed then Aristotle was any one, or all, of these descriptions. Aristotle may well have existed without doing any single one of the things for which he is known to posterity. He may have existed and not have become known to posterity at all or he may have died in infancy. Suppose that Aristotle is associated by Mary with the description "the last great philosopher of antiquity" and (the actual) Aristotle died in infancy. Then Mary's description would seem to refer to Plato. But this is deeply counterintuitive. Hence, names are "rigid designators", according to Kripke. That is, they refer to the same individual in every possible world in which that individual exists. In the same work, Kripke articulated several other arguments against "Frege–Russell" descriptivism (see also Kripke's causal theory of reference).


title: Philosophy of language

text: The whole philosophical enterprise of studying reference has been critiqued by linguist Noam Chomsky in various works.


title: Philosophy of language

text: It has long been known that there are different parts of speech. One part of the common sentence is the lexical word, which is composed of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. A major question in the field – perhaps the single most important question for formalist and structuralist thinkers – is how the meaning of a sentence emerges from its parts.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Many aspects of the problem of the composition of sentences are addressed in the field of linguistics of syntax. Philosophical semantics tends to focus on the principle of compositionality to explain the relationship between meaningful parts and whole sentences. The principle of compositionality asserts that a sentence can be understood on the basis of the meaning of the "parts" of the sentence (i.e., words, morphemes) along with an understanding of its "structure" (i.e., syntax, logic). Further, syntactic propositions are arranged into "discourse" or "narrative" structures, which also encode meanings through pragmatics like temporal relations and pronominals.


title: Philosophy of language

text: It is possible to use the concept of "functions" to describe more than just how lexical meanings work: they can also be used to describe the meaning of a sentence. In the sentence "The horse is red", "the horse" can be considered to be the product of a "propositional function". A propositional function is an operation of language that takes an entity (in this case, the horse) as an input and outputs a "semantic fact" (i.e., the proposition that is represented by "The horse is red"). In other words, a propositional function is like an algorithm. The meaning of "red" in this case is whatever takes the entity "the horse" and turns it into the statement, "The horse is red."


title: Philosophy of language

text: Linguists have developed at least two general methods of understanding the relationship between the parts of a linguistic string and how it is put together: syntactic and semantic trees. Syntactic trees draw upon the words of a sentence with the "grammar" of the sentence in mind. While semantic trees focus upon the role of the "meaning" of the words and how those meanings combine to provide insight onto the genesis of semantic facts.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Some of the major issues at the intersection of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind are also dealt with in modern psycholinguistics. Some important questions regard the amount of innate language, if language acquisition is a special faculty in the mind, and what the connection is between thought and language.


title: Philosophy of language

text: There are three general perspectives on the issue of language learning. The first is the behaviorist perspective, which dictates that not only is the solid bulk of language learned, but it is learned via conditioning. The second is the "hypothesis testing perspective", which understands the child's learning of syntactic rules and meanings to involve the postulation and testing of hypotheses, through the use of the general faculty of intelligence. The final candidate for explanation is the innatist perspective, which states that at least some of the syntactic settings are innate and hardwired, based on certain modules of the mind.


title: Philosophy of language

text: There are varying notions of the structure of the brain when it comes to language. Connectionist models emphasize the idea that a person's lexicon and their thoughts operate in a kind of distributed, associative network. Nativist models assert that there are specialized devices in the brain that are dedicated to language acquisition. Computation models emphasize the notion of a representational language of thought and the logic-like, computational processing that the mind performs over them. Emergentist models focus on the notion that natural faculties are a complex system that emerge from simpler biological parts. Reductionist models attempt to explain higher-level mental processes in terms of the basic low-level neurophysiological activity.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Firstly, this field of study seeks to better understand what speakers and listeners do with language in communication, and how it is used socially. Specific interests include the topics of language learning, language creation, and speech acts.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Secondly, the question of how language relates to the minds of both the speaker and the interpreter is investigated. Of specific interest is the grounds for successful translation of words and concepts into their equivalents in another language.


title: Philosophy of language

text: An important problem which touches both philosophy of language and philosophy of mind is to what extent language influences thought and vice versa. There have been a number of different perspectives on this issue, each offering a number of insights and suggestions.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Linguists Sapir and Whorf suggested that language limited the extent to which members of a "linguistic community" can think about certain subjects (a hypothesis paralleled in George Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four"). In other words, language was analytically prior to thought. Philosopher Michael Dummett is also a proponent of the "language-first" viewpoint.


title: Philosophy of language

text: The stark opposite to the Sapir–Whorf position is the notion that thought (or, more broadly, mental content) has priority over language. The "knowledge-first" position can be found, for instance, in the work of Paul Grice. Further, this view is closely associated with Jerry Fodor and his language of thought hypothesis. According to his argument, spoken and written language derive their intentionality and meaning from an internal language encoded in the mind. The main argument in favor of such a view is that the structure of thoughts and the structure of language seem to share a compositional, systematic character. Another argument is that it is difficult to explain how signs and symbols on paper can represent anything meaningful unless some sort of meaning is infused into them by the contents of the mind. One of the main arguments against is that such levels of language can lead to an infinite regress. In any case, many philosophers of mind and language, such as Ruth Millikan, Fred Dretske and Fodor, have recently turned their attention to explaining the meanings of mental contents and states directly.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Another tradition of philosophers has attempted to show that language and thought are coextensive – that there is no way of explaining one without the other. Donald Davidson, in his essay "Thought and Talk", argued that the notion of belief could only arise as a product of public linguistic interaction. Daniel Dennett holds a similar "interpretationist" view of propositional attitudes. To an extent, the theoretical underpinnings to cognitive semantics (including the notion of semantic framing) suggest the influence of language upon thought. However, the same tradition views meaning and grammar as a function of conceptualization, making it difficult to assess in any straightforward way.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Some thinkers, like the ancient sophist Gorgias, have questioned whether or not language was capable of capturing thought at all.


title: Philosophy of language

text: There are studies that prove that languages shape how people understand causality. Some of them were performed by Lera Boroditsky. For example, English speakers tend to say things like "John broke the vase" even for accidents. However, Spanish or Japanese speakers would be more likely to say "the vase broke itself". In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford University speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally. Later everyone was asked whether they could remember who did what. Spanish and Japanese speakers did not remember the agents of accidental events as well as did English speakers.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blue in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue. The Piraha, a tribe in Brazil, whose language has only terms like few and many instead of numerals, are not able to keep track of exact quantities.


title: Philosophy of language

text: In one study German and Spanish speakers were asked to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a "key"—a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish—the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard", "heavy", "jagged", "metal", "serrated" and "useful" whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden", "intricate", "little", "lovely", "shiny" and "tiny". To describe a "bridge", which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said "beautiful", "elegant", "fragile", "peaceful", "pretty" and "slender", and the Spanish speakers said "big", "dangerous", "long", "strong", "sturdy" and "towering". This was the case even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender.


title: Philosophy of language

text: In a series of studies conducted by Gary Lupyan, people were asked to look at a series of images of imaginary aliens. Whether each alien was friendly or hostile was determined by certain subtle features but participants were not told what these were. They had to guess whether each alien was friendly or hostile, and after each response they were told if they were correct or not, helping them learn the subtle cues that distinguished friend from foe. A quarter of the participants were told in advance that the friendly aliens were called "leebish" and the hostile ones "grecious", while another quarter were told the opposite. For the rest, the aliens remained nameless. It was found that participants who were given names for the aliens learned to categorize the aliens far more quickly, reaching 80 per cent accuracy in less than half the time taken by those not told the names. By the end of the test, those told the names could correctly categorize 88 per cent of aliens, compared to just 80 per cent for the rest. It was concluded that naming objects helps us categorize and memorize them.


title: Philosophy of language

text: In another series of experiments, a group of people was asked to view furniture from an IKEA catalog. Half the time they were asked to label the object – whether it was a chair or lamp, for example – while the rest of the time they had to say whether or not they liked it. It was found that when asked to label items, people were later less likely to recall the specific details of products, such as whether a chair had arms or not. It was concluded that labeling objects helps our minds build a prototype of the typical object in the group at the expense of individual features.


title: Philosophy of language

text: A common claim is that language is governed by social conventions. Questions inevitably arise on surrounding topics. One question regards what a convention exactly is, and how it is studied, and second regards the extent that conventions even matter in the study of language. David Kellogg Lewis proposed a worthy reply to the first question by expounding the view that a convention is a "rationally self-perpetuating regularity in behavior". However, this view seems to compete to some extent with the Gricean view of speaker's meaning, requiring either one (or both) to be weakened if both are to be taken as true.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Some have questioned whether or not conventions are relevant to the study of meaning at all. Noam Chomsky proposed that the study of language could be done in terms of the I-Language, or internal language of persons. If this is so, then it undermines the pursuit of explanations in terms of conventions, and relegates such explanations to the domain of "metasemantics". "Metasemantics" is a term used by philosopher of language Robert Stainton to describe all those fields that attempt to explain how semantic facts arise. One fruitful source of research involves investigation into the social conditions that give rise to, or are associated with, meanings and languages. "Etymology" (the study of the origins of words) and "stylistics" (philosophical argumentation over what makes "good grammar", relative to a particular language) are two other examples of fields that are taken to be metasemantic.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Many separate (but related) fields have investigated the topic of linguistic convention within their own research paradigms. The presumptions that prop up each theoretical view are of interest to the philosopher of language. For instance, one of the major fields of sociology, symbolic interactionism, is based on the insight that human social organization is based almost entirely on the use of meanings. In consequence, any explanation of a social structure (like an institution) would need to account for the shared meanings which create and sustain the structure.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Rhetoric is the study of the particular words that people use to achieve the proper emotional and rational effect in the listener, be it to persuade, provoke, endear, or teach. Some relevant applications of the field include the examination of propaganda and didacticism, the examination of the purposes of swearing and pejoratives (especially how it influences the behaviors of others, and defines relationships), or the effects of gendered language. It can also be used to study linguistic transparency (or speaking in an accessible manner), as well as performative utterances and the various tasks that language can perform (called "speech acts"). It also has applications to the study and interpretation of law, and helps give insight to the logical concept of the domain of discourse.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Literary theory is a discipline that some literary theorists claim overlaps with the philosophy of language. It emphasizes the methods that readers and critics use in understanding a text. This field, an outgrowth of the study of how to properly interpret messages, is


title: Philosophy of language

text: Finally, philosophers of language investigate how language and meaning relate to truth and the reality being referred to. They tend to be less interested in which sentences are "actually true", and more in "what kinds of meanings can be true or false". A truth-oriented philosopher of language might wonder whether or not a meaningless sentence can be true or false, or whether or not sentences can express propositions about things that do not exist, rather than the way sentences are used.


title: Philosophy of language

text: In continental philosophy, language is not studied as a separate discipline, as it is in analytic philosophy. Rather, it is an inextricable part of many other areas of thought, such as phenomenology, structural semiotics, hermeneutics, existentialism, structuralism, deconstruction and critical theory. The idea of language is often related to that of logic in its Greek sense as "logos", meaning discourse or dialectic. Language and concepts are also seen as having been formed by history and politics, or even by historical philosophy itself.


title: Philosophy of language

text: The field of hermeneutics, and the theory of interpretation in general, has played a significant role in 20th century continental philosophy of language and ontology beginning with Martin Heidegger. Heidegger combines phenomenology with the hermeneutics of Wilhelm Dilthey. Heidegger believed language was one of the most important concepts for "Dasein". Heidegger believed that language today is worn out because of overuse of important words, and would be inadequate for in-depth study of Being ("Sein"). For example, "Sein" ("being"), the word itself, is saturated with multiple meanings. Thus, he invented new vocabulary and linguistic styles, based on Ancient Greek and Germanic etymological word relations, to disambiguate commonly used words. He avoided words like consciousness, ego, human, nature, etc. and instead talked holistically of Being-in-the-world, Dasein.


title: Philosophy of language

text: With such new concepts as "Being-in-the-world", Heidegger constructs his theory of language, centered on speech. He believed speech (talking, listening, silence) was the most essential and pure form of language. Heidegger claims writing is only a supplement to speech, because even readers construct or contribute their own "talk" while reading. The most important feature of language is its "projectivity", the idea that language is prior to human speech. This means that when one is "thrown" into the world, his existence is characterized from the beginning by a certain pre-comprehension of the world. However, only after naming, or "articulation of intelligibility", can one have primary access to "Dasein" and "Being-in-the-World".


title: Philosophy of language

text: Hans-Georg Gadamer expanded on these ideas of Heidegger and proposed a complete hermeneutic ontology. In "Truth and Method", Gadamer describes language as "the medium in which substantive understanding and agreement take place between two people." In addition, Gadamer claims that the world is linguistically constituted, and cannot exist apart from language. For example, monuments and statues cannot communicate without the aid of language. Gadamer also claims that every language constitutes a world-view, because the linguistic nature of the world frees each individual from an objective environment: "... the fact that we have a world at all depends upon [language] and presents itself in it. The world as world exists for man as for no other creature in the world."


title: Philosophy of language

text: Paul Ricœur, on the other hand, proposed a hermeneutics which, reconnecting with the original Greek sense of the term, emphasized the discovery of hidden meanings in the equivocal terms (or "symbols") of ordinary language. Other philosophers who have worked in this tradition include Luigi Pareyson and Jacques Derrida.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Semiotics is the study of the transmission, reception and meaning of signs and symbols in general. In this field, human language (both natural and artificial) is just one among many ways that humans (and other conscious beings) are able to communicate. It allows them to take advantage of and effectively manipulate the external world in order to create meaning for themselves and transmit this meaning to others. Every object, every person, every event, and every force communicates (or "signifies") continuously. The ringing of a telephone, for example, "is" the telephone. The smoke that is seen on the horizon is the sign that there is a fire. The smoke signifies. The things of the world, in this vision, seem to be "labeled" precisely for intelligent beings who only need to interpret them in the way that humans do. Everything has meaning. True communication, including the use of human language, however, requires someone (a "sender") who sends a "message", or "text", in some code to someone else (a "receiver"). Language is studied only insofar as it is one of these forms (the most sophisticated form) of communication. Some important figures in the history of semiotics, are Charles Sanders Peirce, Roland Barthes, and Roman Jakobson. In modern times, its best-known figures include Umberto Eco, A. J. Greimas, Louis Hjelmslev, and Tullio De Mauro. Investigations on signs in non-human communications are subject to biosemiotics, a field founded in the late 20th century by Thomas Sebeok and Thure von Uexküll.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Languages are thought of as sign systems in a semiotic tradition dating from John Locke and culminating in Saussure's notion of language as semiology: an interactive system of a semantic and a symbolic level. Building on Saussurian structuralism, Louis Hjelmslev saw the organisation of the levels as fully computational.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Age of Enlightenment philosopher Antoine Arnauld argued that people had created language rationally in a step-by-step process to fulfill a psychological need to communicate with others. 19th century romanticism emphasised human agency and free will in meaning construction. More lately, Eugenio Coșeriu underlined the role of intention in the processes, while others including Esa Itkonen believe that the social construction of language takes place unconsciously. In Saussure's notion, language is a social fact which arises from social interaction, but can neither be reduced to the individual acts nor to human psychology, which supports the autonomy of the study of language from other sciences.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Humanistic views are challenged by biological theories of language which consider languages as natural phenomena. Charles Darwin considered languages as species. 19th century evolutionary linguistics was furthest developed by August Schleicher who compared languages to plants, animals and crystals. In Neo-Darwinism, Richard Dawkins and other proponents of cultural replicator theories consider languages as populations of mind viruses. Noam Chomsky, on the other hand, holds the view that language is not an organism but an organ, and that linguistic structures are crystallised. This is hypothesised as having been caused by a single mutation in humans, but Steven Pinker argues it is the result of human and cultural co-evolution.


title: Philosophy of language

text: One debate that has captured the interest of many philosophers is the debate over the meaning of "universals". It might be asked, for example, why when people say the word "rocks", what it is that the word represents. Two different answers have emerged to this question. Some have said that the expression stands for some real, abstract universal out in the world called "rocks". Others have said that the word stands for some collection of particular, individual rocks that are associated with merely a nomenclature. The former position has been called "philosophical realism", and the latter "nominalism".


title: Philosophy of language

text: From the realist's perspective, the connection between S and M is a connection between two abstract entities. There is an entity, "man", and an entity, "Socrates". These two things connect in some way or overlap.


title: Philosophy of language

text: From a nominalist's perspective, the connection between S and M is the connection between a particular entity (Socrates) and a vast collection of particular things (men). To say that Socrates is a man is to say that Socrates is a part of the class of "men". Another perspective is to consider "man" to be a "property" of the entity, "Socrates".


title: Philosophy of language

text: There is a third way, between nominalism and (extreme) realism, usually called "moderate realism" and attributed to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Moderate realists hold that "man" refers to a real essence or form that is really present and identical in Socrates and all other men, but "man" does not exist as a separate and distinct entity. This is a realist position, because "man" is real, insofar as it really exists in all men; but it is a moderate realism, because "man" is not an entity separate from the men it informs.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Another of the questions that has divided philosophers of language is the extent to which formal logic can be used as an effective tool in the analysis and understanding of natural languages. While most philosophers, including Gottlob Frege, Alfred Tarski and Rudolf Carnap, have been more or less skeptical about formalizing natural languages, many of them developed formal languages for use in the sciences or formalized "parts" of natural language for investigation. Some of the most prominent members of this tradition of formal semantics include Tarski, Carnap, Richard Montague and Donald Davidson.


title: Philosophy of language

text: On the other side of the divide, and especially prominent in the 1950s and '60s, were the so-called "ordinary language philosophers". Philosophers such as P. F. Strawson, John Langshaw Austin and Gilbert Ryle stressed the importance of studying natural language without regard to the truth-conditions of sentences and the references of terms. They did not believe that the social and practical dimensions of linguistic meaning could be captured by any attempts at formalization using the tools of logic. Logic is one thing and language is something entirely different. What is important is not expressions themselves but what people use them to do in communication.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Hence, Austin developed a theory of speech acts, which described the kinds of things which can be done with a sentence (assertion, command, inquiry, exclamation) in different contexts of use on different occasions. Strawson argued that the truth-table semantics of the logical connectives (e.g., formula_1, formula_2 and formula_3) do not capture the meanings of their natural language counterparts ("and", "or" and "if-then"). While the "ordinary language" movement basically died out in the 1970s, its influence was crucial to the development of the fields of speech-act theory and the study of pragmatics. Many of its ideas have been absorbed by theorists such as Kent Bach, Robert Brandom, Paul Horwich and Stephen Neale. In recent work, the division between semantics and pragmatics has become a lively topic of discussion at the interface of philosophy and linguistics, for instance in work by Sperber and Wilson, Carston and Levinson.


title: Philosophy of language

text: While keeping these traditions in mind, the question of whether or not there is any grounds for conflict between the formal and informal approaches is far from being decided. Some theorists, like Paul Grice, have been skeptical of any claims that there is a substantial conflict between logic and natural language.


title: Philosophy of language

text: Translation and interpretation are two other problems that philosophers of language have attempted to confront. In the 1950s, W.V. Quine argued for the indeterminacy of meaning and reference based on the principle of "radical translation". In "Word and Object", Quine asks readers to imagine a situation in which they are confronted with a previously undocumented, group of indigenous people where they must attempt to make sense of the utterances and gestures that its members make. This is the situation of radical translation.


title: Philosophy of language

text: He claimed that, in such a situation, it is impossible "in principle" to be absolutely certain of the meaning or reference that a speaker of the indigenous peoples language attaches to an utterance. For example, if a speaker sees a rabbit and says "gavagai", is she referring to the whole rabbit, to the rabbit's tail, or to a temporal part of the rabbit. All that can be done is to examine the utterance as a part of the overall linguistic behaviour of the individual, and then use these observations to interpret the meaning of all other utterances. From this basis, one can form a manual of translation. But, since reference is indeterminate, there will be many such manuals, no one of which is more correct than the others. For Quine, as for Wittgenstein and Austin, meaning is not something that is associated with a single word or sentence, but is rather something that, if it can be attributed at all, can only be attributed to a whole language. The resulting view is called "semantic holism".


title: Philosophy of language

text: Inspired by Quine's discussion, Donald Davidson extended the idea of radical translation to the interpretation of utterances and behavior within a single linguistic community. He dubbed this notion "radical interpretation". He suggested that the meaning that any individual ascribed to a sentence could only be determined by attributing meanings to many, perhaps all, of the individual's assertions, as well as their mental states and attitudes.


title: Philosophy of language

text: One issue that has troubled philosophers of language and logic is the problem of the vagueness of words. The specific instances of vagueness that most interest philosophers of language are those where the existence of "borderline cases" makes it seemingly impossible to say whether a predicate is true or false. Classic examples are "is tall" or "is bald", where it cannot be said that some borderline case (some given person) is tall or not-tall. In consequence, vagueness gives rise to the paradox of the heap. Many theorists have attempted to solve the paradox by way of "n"-valued logics, such as fuzzy logic, which have radically departed from classical two-valued logics.


title: Aion (deity)

text: Aion () is a Hellenistic deity associated with time, the orb or circle encompassing the universe, and the zodiac.


title: Aion (deity)

text: The "time" which Aion represents is perpetual, unbounded, ritual, and cyclic: The future is a returning version of the past, later called "aevum" ("see" Vedic Sanskrit "Ṛtú").


title: Aion (deity)

text: This kind of time contrasts with empirical, linear, progressive, and historical time that Chronos represented, which divides into past, present, and future.


title: Aion (deity)

text: Aion is thus a god of the cyclic ages, and the cycle of the year and the zodiac. In the latter part of the Classical era he became associated with mystery religions concerned with the afterlife, such as the mysteries of Cybele, the Dionysian mysteries, Orphic religion, and the Mithraic mysteries. In Latin, the concept of the deity may appear as Aeternitas, Anna Perenna, or "Saeculum". He is typically in the company of an earth or mother goddess such as Tellus or Cybele, as on the Parabiago plate.


title: Aion (deity)

text: Aion is usually identified as the nude or mostly nude young man within a circle representing the zodiac, symbolic of eternal and cyclical time. Examples include two Roman mosaics from Sentinum (modern–day Sassoferrato) and Hippo Regius in Roman Africa, and the Parabiago plate. But because he represents time as a cycle, he may also be presented as an old man. In the "Dionysiaca", Nonnus associates Aion with the Horae and says that he:


title: Aion (deity)

text: The imagery of the twining serpent is connected to the hoop or wheel through the ouroboros, a ring formed by a snake holding the tip of its tail in its mouth. The 4th century CE Latin commentator Servius notes that the image of a snake biting its tail represents the cyclical nature of the year.


title: Aion (deity)

text: In his 5th century work on hieroglyphics, Horapollo makes a further distinction between a serpent that hides its tail under the rest of its body, which represents Aion, and the ouroboros that represents the "kosmos", which is the serpent devouring its tail.


title: Aion (deity)

text: Martianus Capella (5th century CE) identified Aion with Cronus (Latin Saturnus), whose name caused him to be theologically conflated with Chronos ("Time"), in the way that the Greek ruler of the underworld Plouton (Pluto) was conflated with Ploutos (Plutus, "Wealth"). Martianus presents Cronus-Aion as the consort of Rhea (Latin Ops) as identified with Physis.


title: Aion (deity)

text: In his highly speculative reconstruction of Mithraic cosmogony, Franz Cumont positioned Aion as Unlimited Time (sometimes represented as Saeculum, Cronus, or Saturn) as the god who emerged from primordial Chaos, and who in turn generated Heaven and Earth. Modern scholars call this deity the "leonto‑cephaline" figure – a winged, lion-headed, nude male, whose torso is entwined by a serpent. He typically holds a sceptre, keys, and / or a thunderbolt. Nobody knows for sure who he was or what he represented, but aside from the lion-head, depictions of him have Aion's icons; in rare instances, his statue appears in mithrea with the human head, and with the lion-head gone, he is indistinguishable from Aion.


title: Aion (deity)

text: Aion is identified with Dionysus in Christian and Neoplatonic writers, but there are no references to Dionysus as Aion before the Christian era. Euripides, however, does call Aion a 'son of Zeus'.


title: Aion (deity)

text: The Suda identifies Aion with Osiris. In Ptolemaic Alexandria, at the site of a dream oracle, the Hellenistic syncretic god Serapis was identified as Aion Plutonius. The epithet "Plutonius" marks functional aspects shared with Pluto, consort of Persephone and ruler of the underworld in the Eleusinian tradition. Epiphanius says that at Alexandria Aion's birth from Kore the Virgin was celebrated 6 January: "On this day and at this hour the Virgin gave birth to Aion." The date, which coincides with Epiphany, brought new year's celebrations to a close, completing the cycle of time that Aion embodies.


title: Aion (deity)

text: The Alexandrian Aion may be a form of Osiris-Dionysus, reborn annually; his image was marked with crosses on his hands, knees, and forehead. Quispel (2008) conjectured that the figure resulted from integrating the Orphic Phanes, who like Aion is associated with a coiling serpent, into Mithraic religion at Alexandria, and that he "assures the eternity of the city."


title: Aion (deity)

text: This syncretic Aion became a symbol and guarantor of the perpetuity of Roman rule, and emperors such as Antoninus Pius issued coins with the legend "Aion", whose (female) Roman counterpart was Aeternitas. Roman coins associate both Aion and Aeternitas with the phoenix as a symbol of rebirth and cyclical renewal.


title: Aion (deity)

text: Aion was among the virtues and divine personifications that were part of late Hellenic discourse, in which they figure as "creative agents in grand cosmological schemes". The significance of Aion lies in his malleability: He is a "fluid conception" through which various ideas about time and divinity converge in the Hellenistic era, in the context of syncretic and monotheistic tendencies.


title: Leah Lewis

text: Leah Lewis (born December 9, 1996) is an American actress, model and singer who began her career as a child actress. She is best known for her roles as Ellie Chu in the 2020 Netflix film "The Half of It" and as Georgia "George" Fan in The CW series adaptation of "Nancy Drew".


title: Leah Lewis

text: Lewis was adopted from an orphanage in Shanghai, China when she was eight months old and raised in Windermere, Florida. Her younger, non-biologically related sister, Lydia, was later adopted from the same orphanage. Their parents, Frederick and Lorraine Lewis, are both realtors.


title: Leah Lewis

text: Leah discovered performing arts at Crenshaw School in Orlando, Florida. She also attended Thornebrooke Elementary School in Ocoee, Florida; she also attended Southwest Middle School in Orlando, Florida as well as Gotha Middle School. She and her mother moved back and forth between Los Angeles and Orlando during her teen years. At 17, she went back to Orlando to finish high school at Olympia High School and then moved back to Los Angeles by herself at 20.


title: Leah Lewis

text: At a young age, Lewis started booking commercials. Once her family moved to Los Angeles, she acted in the 2012 Nickelodeon film, "" as the character Spoon.


title: Leah Lewis

text: In 2013, she auditioned for the fourth season of "The Voice," singing "Blown Away" by Carrie Underwood. None of the coaches turned their chairs, meaning that Leah did not make it onto the show.


title: Leah Lewis

text: In 2015 and 2016, she was featured in Disney shows "Best Friends Whenever" as well as "Gamer's Guide to Pretty Much Everything." She also was a main character on season 2 of the Michelle Trachtenberg-produced gq40 web series, "Guidance".


title: Leah Lewis

text: Once she moved back to Los Angeles after graduating from high school, she began booking roles in TV shows like "Station 19" and "The Good Doctor."


title: Leah Lewis

text: Lewis had a recurring role in The CW series "Charmed." She then later joined the main cast of another The CW show, a 2019 TV adaptation of "Nancy Drew" on which she plays Georgia "George" Fan, based on the original character George Fayne.


title: Leah Lewis

text: Her first major film role was as the lead character, Ellie Chu, in the 2020 Netflix film, "The Half of It".


title: Leah Lewis

text: Beyond acting, Lewis sings, plays guitar, and does photography. In May 2016, she began dating singer/actor Payson Lewis. The couple coincidentally share the same last name.


title: Ashley Madekwe

text: Ashley Madekwe (; born 6 December 1983) is a British actress. She is well known for her roles as call girl Bambi in the ITV2 series "Secret Diary of a Call Girl", social climber Ashley Davenport on the ABC drama series "Revenge" and the witch Tituba in the WGN America series "Salem". In 2021, Madekwe was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her role in "County Lines".


title: Ashley Madekwe

text: Madekwe was born in South London, England into an interracial family. Her father is Nigerian and her mother is English. She grew up on a south London council estate and attended The Brit School at age 14. She attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London where she gained a BA in acting. While attending the school, she appeared in numerous stage productions including "King Henry V" as Princess Katherine and "Wuthering Heights" as Catherine Earnshaw.


title: Ashley Madekwe

text: Madekwe started her acting career with a film titled "Storm Damage". In 2005, shortly after graduating from Royal Academy of Dramatic Art she played 'Jade' in Shan Khan's Prayer Room at Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Since then, she has made guest appearances on "Teachers", "Doctors", "Casualty", and "Drop Dead Gorgeous". Madekwe landed her first motion picture in the 2007 Woody Allen film "Cassandra's Dream", opposite Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor. Following that success, she played Elisha in the one-off BBC Three drama pilot "West 10 LDN", and appeared in six episodes of "Trexx and Flipside" as Ollie. In 2008, she landed the role of Bambi on the ITV2 drama series "Secret Diary of a Call Girl", appearing in series two and three. Madekwe starred in the 2008 comedy film "How to Lose Friends & Alienate People". Her theatre credits include "Little Sweet Thing" by Roy Williams and "Flight Path" by David Watson.


title: Ashley Madekwe

text: Madekwe made her official US debut in the 2009 drama series "The Beautiful Life", which only aired two episodes on The CW before being cancelled. In February 2011, she was cast as Ashley Davenport in the ABC drama series "Revenge". After being a regular for the first two seasons, it was reported in late May 2013 that Madekwe would depart the series following a guest appearance in the first episode of the third season. She starred as Tituba in the television series "Salem" from 2014 to 2016.


title: Ashley Madekwe

text: In June 2012, Madekwe married her long-time boyfriend, Israeli actor Iddo Goldberg. They have worked together on "Secret Diary of a Call Girl" and he also had a role alongside her on the TV series "Salem."


title: Khitan people

text: The Khitan people (Khitan small script: ; ) were a historical nomadic people from Northeast Asia who, from the 4th century, inhabited an area corresponding to parts of modern Mongolia, Northeast China and the Russian Far East.


title: Khitan people

text: As a people descended from the proto-Mongols through the Xianbei, Khitans spoke the Khitan language, a Para-Mongolic language related to the Mongolic languages. During the Liao dynasty, they dominated a vast area of Siberia and Northern China. After the fall of the Liao dynasty in 1125 following the Jurchen invasion, many Khitans followed Yelü Dashi's group westward to establish the Qara Khitai or Western Liao dynasty, in Central Asia, which lasted nearly a century before falling to the Mongol Empire in 1218. Other regimes founded by the Khitans included the Northern Liao, Eastern Liao and Later Liao in China, as well as the Qutlugh-Khanid dynasty in Persia.


title: Khitan people

text: There is no consensus on the etymology of the name of Khitan. There are basically three speculations. Feng Jiasheng argues that it comes from the Yuwen chieftains' names. Zhao Zhenji thinks that the term originated from Xianbei and means "a place where Xianbei had resided". Japanese scholar Otagi Matsuo believes that Khitan's original name was "Xidan", which means "the people who are similar to the Xi people" or "the people who inhabit among the Xi people".


title: Khitan people

text: In Slavic languages such as Russian and Ukrainian, "China" is called "". These names are derived from the Chinese Liao dynasty, which was established by the Khitan in northern China.


title: Khitan people

text: Due to the dominance of the Khitans during the Liao dynasty in Manchuria and Mongolia and later the Qara Khitai in Central Asia where they were seen as Chinese, the term "Khitai" came to mean "China" to people near them in Central Asia, Russia and northwestern China. The name was then introduced to medieval Europe via Islamic and Russian sources, and became "Cathay". In the modern era, words related to Khitay are still used as a name for China by Turkic peoples, such as the Uyghurs in China's Xinjiang region and the Kazakhs of Kazakhstan and areas adjoining it, and by some Slavic peoples, such as the Russians and Bulgarians. The Han Chinese consider the ethnonym derived from "Khitay" as applied to them by the Uyghurs to be pejorative and the Chinese government has tried to ban its use.


title: Khitan people

text: According to the "History of Liao" compiled in the 14th century, a "sacred man" ("shen-ren") on a white horse had eight sons with a "heavenly woman" ("tiannü") who rode in a cart pulled by a grey ox. The man came from the Tu River (Lao Ha river in modern-day Jilin, Manchuria) and the woman from the Huang River (modern day Xar Moron river in Inner Mongolia). The pair met where the two rivers join, and the eight sons born of their union became eight tribes.


title: Khitan people

text: The earliest written reference to the Khitan is from an official history of the Xianbei Northern Wei dynasty dating to the period of the Six Dynasties. Most scholars believe the Khitan tribe splintered from the Xianbei, and some scholars believe they may have been a mixed group who also included former members of the Xiongnu tribal confederation. The Khitan shaved their heads, leaving hair on their temples which grew down to the chest, in a similar fashion to the related Kumo Xi, Shiwei and Xianbei whom they are believed to be descended from.


title: Khitan people

text: During their early history the Khitan were composed of eight tribes. Their territory was between the present-day Xar Moron River and Chaoyang, Liaoning. The Khitan's territory bordered Goguryeo, China and the lands of the Eastern Turks.


title: Khitan people

text: Between the 6th and 9th centuries, they were successively dominated by the Eastern Turkic Khaganate, the Uyghur Khaganate, and the Chinese Tang dynasty. The Khitan were less politically united than the Turkic tribes, but often found themselves involved in the power games between the Turks and the Chinese dynasties of Sui and Tang. It is estimated the Khitan had only around 43,000 soldiers—a fraction of the Turkic Khaganates. In 605, the Khitan raided China, but the Emperor Yangdi of the Sui dynasty was able to convince the Turks to send 20,000 horsemen to aid China against the Khitan. In 628, under the leadership of tribal chief Dahe Moui, the Khitan submitted to the Tang dynasty, as they had earlier submitted to the Eastern Turks. The Khagan of the Eastern Turks, Jiali Khan, offered to exchange the Chinese rebel Liang Shi Du for the Khitan, but Emperor Taizong would not agree to the exchange.


title: Khitan people

text: During the reign of Empress Wu, nearly one century later, the Second Turkic Khaganate raided along the Northern China's borderlands. The Tang Empress, in what scholars consider a major strategic error, formed an ill-fated alliance with the Turkic leader Qapaghan Qaghan to punish the Khitan for raiding Hebei province. Khitan territory was much closer to Northern China than Turkic lands, and the Turks used it to launch their own raids into Hebei.


title: Khitan people

text: Like the Tuyuhun and Tangut, the Khitan remained an intermediate power along the borderlands through the 7th and 8th centuries. The Khitans rose to prominence in a power vacuum that developed in the wake of the Kyrgyz takeover of the Uyghur Khaganate, and the collapse of the Tang Dynasty.


title: Khitan people

text: Abaoji, who had been successful in uniting the Khitan tribes, founded the Liao dynasty in 907. The Liao territory included modern day northern and northeastern China, Mongolia, and parts of Central Asia and Siberia. Although transition to an imperial social and political organization was a significant change for the Khitans, the Khitan language, origin myth, shamanic religion and nomadic lifestyle endured.


title: Khitan people

text: China was in chaos after the fall of the Tang dynasty in 907. Known as the Wudai Shiguo period, Five Dynasties ruled northern China in rapid succession with only nominal support from the Ten Kingdoms of southern China. The Tang dynasty had been supported by Shatuo Turks until Zhu Wen murdered the last Tang emperor and founded the Later Liang dynasty. The Shatuo Turks, who had been allied with the Khitans since 905, defeated the Later Liang and founded the Later Tang dynasty in 923, but by 926 the former allies had grown apart. In 934 Yelü Bei, Abaoji's son, wrote to his brother Emperor Taizong of Liao from the Later Tang court: "Li Cong Ke has slain his liege-lord, why not attack him?" In 936, the Khitans supported Shi Jing Tangs rebellion against the Later Tang Emperor Li Cong Ke. Shi Jing Tang became emperor of the Later Jin dynasty and, in exchange for their support, the Khitans gained sixteen new prefectures.


title: Khitan people

text: The Later Jin dynasty remained a vassal of the Khitans until the death of Shi Jing Tang in 942, but when the new emperor ascended, he indicated that he would not honor his predecessor's arrangement. The Khitans launched a military invasion against the Later Jin in 944. In January 947, the Emperor of the Later Jin dynasty surrendered to the Khitans. The Khitan emperor left the conquered city of Kaifeng and unexpectedly died from an illness while travelling in May 947.


title: Khitan people

text: Relations between Goryeo and the Khitans were hostile after the Khitans destroyed Balhae. Goryeo would not recognize the Liao dynasty and supported the fledgling Song dynasty, which had formed south of the Khitans' territory. Though the Khitans would have preferred to attack China, they invaded Goryeo in 993. Khitan forces failed to advance beyond the Chongchon River and were persuaded to withdraw, though Khitan dissatisfaction with Goryeo's conquest of the Jurchen prompted a second invasion in 1010. This time the Khitans, led by their emperor, sacked the capital city Kaesong. A third and final invasion in 1018 was repelled by Goryeo's forces, bringing an end to 30 years of war between the rivals.


title: Khitan people

text: The Liao dynasty proved to be a significant power north of the Chinese plain, continuously moving south and west, gaining control over former Chinese and Turk-Uyghur territories. In 1005 Chanyuan Treaty was signed, and peace remained between the Liao dynasty and the Song dynasty for the next 120 years. During the reign of the Emperor Daozong of Liao, corruption was a major problem and prompted dissatisfaction among many people, including the Jurchens. The Liao dynasty eventually fell to the Jin dynasty of the Jurchen in 1125, who defeated and absorbed the Khitans to their military benefit. The Khitans considered the Khamag Mongols as their last hope when the Liao dynasty was invaded by the Jin, Song dynasty and Western Xia Empires.


title: Khitan people

text: To defend against the Jurchens and Khitans, a Long Wall was built by Goryeo in 1033–1034, along with many border forts.


title: Khitan people

text: One of the causes of the Jurchen rebellion and the fall of the Liao was the custom of raping married Jurchen women and Jurchen girls by Khitan envoys, which caused resentment from the Jurchens. The custom of having sex with unmarried girls by Khitan was itself not a problem, since the practice of guest prostitution – giving female companions, food and shelter to guests – was common among Jurchens. Unmarried daughters of Jurchen families of lower and middle classes in Jurchen villages were provided to Khitan messengers for sex, as recorded by Hong Hao. Song envoys among the Jin were similarly entertained by singing girls in Guide, Henan. There is no evidence that guest prostitution of unmarried Jurchen girls to Khitan men was resented by the Jurchens. It was only when the Khitans forced aristocratic Jurchen families to give up their beautiful wives as guest prostitutes to Khitan messengers that the Jurchens became resentful. This suggests that in Jurchen upper classes, only a husband had the right to his married wife while among lower class Jurchens, the virginity of unmarried girls and sex with Khitan men did not impede their ability to marry later. The Jurchens and their Manchu descendants had Khitan linguistic and grammatical elements in their personal names like suffixes. Many Khitan names had a "ju" suffix.


title: Khitan people

text: Following the fall of the Liao dynasty, a number of the Khitan nobility escaped the area westwards towards Western Regions, establishing the short-lived Qara Khitai or Western Liao dynasty. After its fall, a small part under Buraq Hajib established a local dynasty in the southern Persian province of Kirman. These Khitans were absorbed by the local Turkic and Iranian populations, Islamized and left no influence behind them. As the Khitan language is still almost completely unintelligible, it is difficult to create a detailed history of their movements.


title: Khitan people

text: During the 13th century, the Mongol invasions and conquests had a large impact on shifting ethnic identities in the region. Most people of the Eurasian Steppe did not retain their pre-Mongol identities after the conquests. The Khitans were scattered across Eurasia and assimilated into the Mongol Empire in the early 13th century.


title: Khitan people

text: Fleeing from the Mongols, in 1216 the Khitans invaded Goryeo and won several battles, even reaching the gates of the capital, but were defeated by Goryeo General Kim Chwi-ryeo who pushed them back north to Pyongan, where the remaining Khitans were finished off by Goryeo forces in 1219.


title: Khitan people

text: The Khitan language is now extinct. Some scholars believe that Khitan is Proto-Mongolic, while others have suggested that it is a Para-Mongolic language. Khitan has loanwords borrowed from the Turkic Old Uyghur language and Koreanic languages.


title: Khitan people

text: There were two writing systems for the Khitan language, known as the large script and the small script. These were functionally independent and appear to have been used simultaneously in the Liao dynasty. They were in use for some time after the fall of that dynasty. Examples of the scripts appeared most often on epitaphs and monuments, although other fragments sometimes surface. The Khitan scripts have not been fully deciphered and more research and discoveries will be necessary for a proficient understanding of them.


title: Khitan people

text: As nomadic Khitans originally engaged in stockbreeding, fishing, and hunting. Looting Chinese villages and towns as well as neighboring tribes was also a helpful source of slaves, Chinese handcraft, and food, especially in times of famine. Under the influence of China, and following the administrative need for a sedentary administration, the Khitans began to engage in farming, crop cultivation and the building of cities. Different from the Chinese and Balhae farmers, who cultivated wheat and sorghum millet, the Khitan farmers cultivated panicled millet. The ruling class of the Liao dynasty still undertook hunting campaigns in late summer in the tradition of their ancestors. After the fall of the Liao dynasty, the Khitans returned to a more nomadic life.


title: Khitan people

text: The Khitans practiced shamanism in which animals played an important role. Hunters would offer a sacrifice to the spirit of the animal they were hunting and wore a pelt from the same animal during the hunt. There were festivals to mark the catching of the first fish and wild goose, and annual sacrifices of animals to the sky, earth, ancestors, mountains, rivers, and others. Every male member of the Khitan would sacrifice a white horse, white sheep, and white goose during the Winter solstice.


title: Khitan people

text: When a Khitan nobleman died, burnt offerings were sacrificed at the full and new moons. The body was exposed for three years in the mountains, after which the bones would be cremated. The Khitan believed that the souls of the dead rested at a place called the Black Mountain, near Rehe Province.


title: Khitan people

text: Khitan tents always faced east, and they revered the sun, but the moon did not have a large role in their religion. They also practiced a form of divination where they went to war if the shoulder blade of a white sheep cracked while being heated (scapulimancy).


title: Khitan people

text: Khitan women hunted, rode horses and practiced archery. They did not practice foot binding, which started becoming popular among the Han during the Song dynasty. The Khitan practiced polygamy and generally preferred marriage within the tribe, but it was not unknown for an Emperor to take wives from other groups, such as Han, Korean, and Turkic.


title: Khitan people

text: A 2015 study postulated that elite Khitan males may have belonged to haplogroups C3c or N1, based on the distribution of these haplogroups in modern day Eastern and Central Asian populations.


title: Khitan people

text: A 2020 study published in Cell analyzed the DNA of 3 Khitan elite burials from Bulgan Province, located in Northern Mongolia. The Khitan burials were found to be of predominantly Northeast Asian origin, with less than 10% West Eurasian ancestry. The two male specimens belonged to the West Eurasian paternal haplogroup J2. All three specimens carried maternal haplogroups associated with Northeast Asia, including haplogroups A24, D4 and haplogroup Y1.


title: Khitan people

text: Two studies found evidence of Khitan mtDNA ancestry in modern day people of the Daur ethnicity. This was one of the most significant findings of ethnic studies in China. Another group of 100,000 descendants are found in some Blang people and Yi people in Baoshan and Ruili in southwestern Yunnan province, near Myanmar. These people with surnames of A., Mang and Jiang claim to be descendants of Khitans rather than Blang people or Yi people.


title: Afro-Arabs

text: Afro-Arabs are Arabs of full or partial Black African descent. These include populations within mainly the Sudanese, Emiratis, Yemenis, Saudis, Omanis, Sahrawis, Mauritanians, Algerians, Egyptians and Moroccans, with considerably long established communities in Arab states such as Palestine, Iraq, Syria and Jordan.


title: Afro-Arabs

text: South Arabia and Africa have been in contact commencing with the obsidian exchange networks of the 7th millennium BC. These networks were strengthened by the rise of Egyptian dynasties of the 4th millennium BC. Scientists have indicated the likely existence of settlements in Arabia from the people of the Horn of Africa as early as 3rd and 2nd millennia BC.


title: Afro-Arabs

text: The Afro-Arab Tihama culture, which originated in Africa, began in the 2nd millennium BC. This cultural complex is found in Africa in countries such as Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan, as well as in neighbouring Yemen and the Saudi coastal plains. In the 1st millennium BC, Southern Arabs gained control of the Red Sea trade routes and established the first kingdom in Yemen, Saba, at around 800 BC. As a result of Saba's influence, modern-day Ethiopia was gradually incorporated into the area of Arabian influence. In 600 BC, the formation of the Ethio-Sabean state of Daamat on the Tigrean plateau arose. “The archaeological evidence suggests that this is likely to have been the result of small-scale colonization by several Arabian groups (including Sabeans) and acculturation of the indigenous population.”


title: Afro-Arabs

text: After several centuries of isolation, the Kingdom of Aksum arose in 100 AD. This kingdom existed for 800 years and occupied southern Arabia for part of this period. Utilitarian Aksumite pottery has been found in large quantities in deposits from the 5th and 6th centuries in the Yemen Hadhramaut, suggesting that there may have been substantial immigration during that period.


title: Afro-Arabs

text: Southern Arabia was a client state of the Aksumite kingdom throughout the 6th century. Himyarite inscriptions document an invasion of Mecca by an ambitious Aksumite general named Abraha (Tigrinya: አብርሃ) in the year 570 AD. An early incident in post-Islamic Afro-Arab relations, known as the First Hijrah, (Arabic: الهجرة إلى الحبشة, al-hijra ʾilā al-habaša), was an episode in the early history of Islam, where the first companions of the Prophet Muhammad (the Sahabah) fled from the persecution of the ruling Quraysh tribe of Mecca. They sought refuge in the Christian Kingdom of Aksum, in present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea (formerly referred to as Abyssinia, an ancient name whose origin is debated), In 613 or 615 AD, the Aksumite monarch who received them is referred to as Ashama ibn Abjar or the Negus (Arabic: نجاشي, najāšī). Modern historians have alternatively identified him with King Armah and Ella Tsaham. Some of the companions later returned to Mecca and made the hijra to Medina with Muhammad, while others remained in Abyssinia until they came to Medina in 628. The mosque they established is called the Mosque of the Companions (Arabic: مَسْجِد ٱلصَّحَابَة, romanized: Masjid aṣ-Ṣaḥābah) in the city of Massawa, modern-day Eritrea. Dating to the early 7th century AD, it is believed to be the first mosque on the African continent. Many companions settled there after Islam became established in the Arabian peninsula and the descendants of these companions still reside in the region.


title: Afro-Arabs

text: By around the 1st millennium AD, Bantu fishermen established trading towns on what is now called the Swahili Coast, which between the tenth and twelfth century became Arabized. The Portuguese conquered these trading centers after the discovery of the Cape Road. From the 1700s to the early 1800s, Muslim forces of the Omani empire re-seized these market towns, especially on the islands of Pemba and Zanzibar. In these territories, Arabs from Yemen and Oman settled alongside the local "African" populations, thereby spreading Islam and establishing Afro-Arab communities. The Niger-Congo Swahili language and culture largely evolved through these contacts between Arabs and the native Bantu population.


title: Afro-Arabs

text: Afro-Arab communities were similarly founded in the Nile Valley, as Arabs intermarried with indigenous tribes of Sudan. However, many other Afro-Arabs in the Sudans are said to have little biological connection to Arab peoples, but were instead essentially of Nilotic origins, albeit influenced by the old Arabic civilization in language and culture. Similarly, in North Africa, Arabs had close connections to the native Africans; however, racial discrimination still plays a major role on segregating Afro-Arabs from mainstream Arab population, as in Tunisia, Algeria, Libya and Morocco.


title: Afro-Arabs

text: In the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, descendants of people from the Swahili Coast perform traditional Liwa and Fann at-Tanbura music and dance, and the mizmar is also played by Afro-Arabs in the Tihamah and Hejaz. The ancestors of these people were originally brought to the Persian Gulf as slaves. Today, they are fully recognised citizens of the Persian Gulf states, despite the fact that they do not have any Arab ancestry.


title: Afro-Arabs

text: In addition, Stambali of Tunisia and Gnawa music of Morocco are both ritual music and dances that in part trace their origins to West African musical styles.


title: Matt Miazga

text: Matthew Miazga (born July 19, 1995) is an American professional soccer player who plays as a center-back for Major League Soccer club FC Cincinnati and the United States national team. Having come through the academy system of the New York Red Bulls, he made his debut in the 2013 Major League Soccer season and won two MLS Supporters' Shields with the team.


title: Matt Miazga

text: From Clifton, New Jersey, Miazga attended Clifton High School for one year before he left and joined the New York Red Bulls Academy in 2009 at under-14 level. While with the under-16 side, Miazga helped the Red Bulls win the U.S. Soccer Development Academy National Championship in 2012.


title: Matt Miazga

text: In 2013, Miazga had signed a letter of intent to play for the Michigan Wolverines men's soccer program. However, after offers from Europe and the New York Red Bulls, Miazga turned down his scholarship offer to play in college and signed with the Red Bulls at the professional level.


title: Matt Miazga

text: On May 30, 2013, it was announced Miazga had signed a homegrown contract with the New York Red Bulls, becoming the eighth player to sign a homegrown contract with the club. Miazga made his first-team debut at age 18 as a substitute for Markus Holgersson in the 76th minute of a 4–1 win at Houston Dynamo on September 8, 2013.


title: Matt Miazga

text: Miazga started playing more frequently during the 2014 season. Also, in August 2014, he signed an endorsement deal with Nike and played in the Major League Soccer Homegrown Game. Miazga made his CONCACAF Champions League debut in a 1–1 draw against the Montreal Impact on October 22.


title: Matt Miazga

text: During the 2015 season, Miazga established himself as a starter for the club, forming a partnership in the backline with Damien Perrinelle. He was sent off for two bookings in a 2–1 victory against New York City FC in the first ever Hudson River Derby match on May 10. On June 28, he scored his first goal as a professional in a 3–1 derby victory over the same opponents at Yankee Stadium. He celebrated by pretending to swing a baseball bat, making fun of the fact that their rivals play in a baseball stadium. Miazga was sent off for the second time of the season on September 25 in a 5–2 loss to Orlando City SC at the Red Bull Arena.


title: Matt Miazga

text: After strong performances against New York City FC's David Villa and Toronto FC's Sebastian Giovinco, Miazga became regarded as one of the best defensive players in the league and earned MLS team of the week appearances four times throughout the season. His strong defensive play throughout the 2015 season helped New York win their second Supporters' Shield in three years by having one of the strongest defenses in the league. At the end of the season, the Red Bulls offered Miazga a designated player deal which would have made him one of the highest paid players on the team. However, Miazga turned down the offer, stating his desire to play in Europe.


title: Matt Miazga

text: On January 30, 2016, Miazga joined English Premier League club Chelsea on a four-and-a-half-year deal for a reported £3.5 million (US$5 million). Three days later, he was given the number 20 shirt for the remainder of the 2015–16 campaign.


title: Matt Miazga

text: He was first included in a Chelsea matchday squad on February 16, remaining an unused substitute in their 2–1 loss at Paris Saint-Germain in the first leg of the round of 16 of the UEFA Champions League. With both John Terry and Gary Cahill injured, Miazga made his Chelsea debut starting in a 4–0 Premier League victory away to Aston Villa on April 2, 2016. After an impressive debut, Miazga started his second match against Swansea City, but was substituted at half-time.


title: Matt Miazga

text: On August 31, 2016, Miazga was loaned to Dutch Eredivisie club Vitesse for the 2016–17 season, after a deal with Espanyol fell through due to paperwork. On September 10, Miazga made his debut for Jong Vitesse in a 2–2 draw against SV Spakenburg in the Tweede Divisie The following day, he was on the substitutes' bench for the first-team against Ajax, although he was an unused substitution as Vitesse lost 1–0. He made his Eredivisie debut on September 25, coming off the bench in the 64th minute and provided an assist to Lewis Baker in a 2–1 away defeat to Twente. On December 14, Miazga scored his first and only goal for Vitesse in a KNVB Cup tie against Jodan Boys, which finished 4–0.


title: Matt Miazga

text: He went on to win the Cup with Vitesse in his first season at the club by beating AZ Alkmaar 2–0 in the final. He played in every match of the successful cup campaign.


title: Matt Miazga

text: On August 6, 2018, Miazga joined Ligue 1 club Nantes on a season-long loan deal. Miazga made his Ligue 1 debut on August 18, 2018, starting and playing 90 minutes in a 2–0 loss to Dijon FCO.


title: Matt Miazga

text: On January 25, 2019, Miazga joined Championship club Reading until the end of the season after returning from Nantes. After a successful loan spell, Reading decided to loan him again for the 2019–20 season. On October 19, Miazga scored his first goal for Reading in a 1–0 win over Preston North End.


title: Matt Miazga

text: On August 5, 2022, it was announced that Miazga had returned to the United States, signing with MLS side FC Cincinnati on a three-and-a-half year deal.


title: Matt Miazga

text: Internationally, Miazga has represented the United States at under-14, 15, 18, 20 and 23 levels. He also played one match for the Poland under-18 team in 2012. In May 2013, Miazga played for the United States under-18 side that participated in the 19th Annual International Juniors Tournament in Portugal.


title: Matt Miazga

text: In August and September 2014, Miazga turned down two separate call-ups to the Poland under-20 team. He cited previous commitments to the United States under-20 team and maintained he had not made a final decision about which nation to represent at senior level. In October 2014, Poland U-20 coach Marcin Dorna stated he had not given up on Miazga and that the Red Bulls player might still play for his team. Miazga played for the U.S. under-20 team at the 2015 CONCACAF U-20 Championship and helped the team qualify for the 2015 FIFA U-20 World Cup in New Zealand. Miazga was a standout performer at the 2015 U-20 World Cup, in which the Americans fell in the quarter finals to eventual champions Serbia on penalties.


title: Matt Miazga

text: On November 5, 2015, Miazga was quoted as saying, "I'm totally undecided. I'll wait to see who calls me first to the main national team and see what happens then." He received his first United States call-up for the 2018 FIFA World Cup qualifiers matches. He earned his first senior cap against Saint Vincent and the Grenadines on November 13, 2015, coming on as a 63rd-minute substitute in a 6–1 win at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. On July 15, 2017, Miazga scored the Americans' third goal in a 3–0 win over Nicaragua in the 2017 CONCACAF Gold Cup


title: Matt Miazga

text: During his time at the Red Bulls, Miazga lived with his Polish immigrant parents Adam and Elżbieta in Clifton. Miazga's idols are Carles Puyol and Gerard Piqué.


title: University of Alabama in Huntsville shooting

text: On February 12, 2010, three people were killed and three others wounded in a shooting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) in Huntsville, Alabama, United States. During a routine meeting of the biology department attended by approximately twelve people, Amy Bishop, a biology professor at the university, stood up and began shooting those closest to her with a Ruger P95 handgun.