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Witch (word)
The word ''witch'' derives from the Old English nouns ('male witch, warlock') and ('female witch'). The word's further origins in Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European are unclear. History Throughout history there has not been a consistent definition of the term ''witch''. Johannes Nider and other 15th century writers used the Latin term to mean witch—a person who performed , harmful acts of sorcery, against others. The witch hunts of medieval Europe differed from pre-Christian practices in condemning the witch as a moral corruption, rather than focusing on whether the act of sorcery was harmful, expanding the customary understanding of the concept. The introduction of the idea of demonic forces empowering the acts of gave the term ''witch'' new connotations of idolatry and apostasy that were adopted by , but these remained disputed despite papal injunctions to take action against witches. Germanic etymology The Old English verb has a cognate in Middle Low German ...
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John William Waterhouse - Magic Circle
John is a common English name and surname: * John (given name) * John (surname) John may also refer to: New Testament Works * Gospel of John, a title often shortened to John * First Epistle of John, often shortened to 1 John * Second Epistle of John, often shortened to 2 John * Third Epistle of John, often shortened to 3 John People * John the Baptist (died c. AD 30), regarded as a prophet and the forerunner of Jesus Christ * John the Apostle (lived c. AD 30), one of the twelve apostles of Jesus * John the Evangelist, assigned author of the Fourth Gospel, once identified with the Apostle * John of Patmos, also known as John the Divine or John the Revelator, the author of the Book of Revelation, once identified with the Apostle * John the Presbyter, a figure either identified with or distinguished from the Apostle, the Evangelist and John of Patmos Other people with the given name Religious figures * John, father of Andrew the Apostle and Saint Peter * Pope John ...
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Proto-Indo European
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists. Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other proto-language, and it is the best understood of all proto-languages of its age. The majority of linguistic work during the 19th century was devoted to the reconstruction of PIE or its daughter languages, and many of the modern techniques of linguistic reconstruction (such as the comparative method) were developed as a result. PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single language from 4500 BC to 2500 BC during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, though estimates vary by more than a thousand years. According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis, the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been in the Pontic–Caspian steppe of ...
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Endor (village)
Endor ( ''ʽÊndōr'', ''En Dor'' in the NKJV) was a Canaanite city, which is listed in the Book of Joshua () as one of the cities the Israelites didn't manage to dispossess, neither the city nor its dependencies.Schmidt, 1994, p. 208. It was located between the Hill of Moreh and Mount Tabor in the Jezreel Valley. It is mentioned twice more in the Hebrew Bible, in 1 Samuel and in Psalm 83. Etymology The original meaning of "Endor" is unknown and its spelling in Hebrew varies.Freedman, et al., 2000, p. 406. It may be connected with the words ''ein'' meaning "spring" and ''dor'', meaning "generation". In the Bible Endor was first mentioned in , when Endor fell within the tribal allotments of Manasseh. In , Saul consulted a medium or witch at Endor (),Walton, et al., 2000, p. 318. who lived in the village, on the evening before the Battle of Gilboa, in which he perished. According to , it was the scene of the rout of Jabin and Sisera after being defeated by Barak and De ...
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Samuel Richardson
Samuel Richardson (baptised 19 August 1689 – 4 July 1761) was an English writer and printer known for three epistolary novels: ''Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded'' (1740), '' Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady'' (1748) and ''The History of Sir Charles Grandison'' (1753). He printed almost 500 works, including journals and magazines, working periodically with the London bookseller Andrew Millar. Richardson had been apprenticed to a printer, whose daughter he eventually married. He lost her along with their six children, but remarried and had six more children, of which four daughters reached adulthood, leaving no male heirs to continue the print shop. As it ran down, he wrote his first novel at the age of 51 and joined the admired writers of his day. Leading acquaintances included Samuel Johnson and Sarah Fielding, the physician and Behmenist George Cheyne, and the theologian and writer William Law, whose books he printed. At Law's request, Richardson printed some poems by ...
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Standard English
In an English-speaking country, Standard English (SE) is the variety of English that has undergone substantial regularisation and is associated with formal schooling, language assessment, and official print publications, such as public service announcements and newspapers of record, etc. All linguistic features are subject to the effects of standardisation, including morphology, phonology, syntax, lexicon, register, discourse markers, pragmatics, as well as written features such as spelling conventions, punctuation, capitalisation and abbreviation practices. SE is local to nowhere: its grammatical and lexical components are no longer regionally marked, although many of them originated in different, non-adjacent dialects, and it has very little of the variation found in spoken or earlier written varieties of English. According to Peter Trudgill, Standard English is a social dialect pre-eminently used in writing that is distinguishable from other English dialects larg ...
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Middle English
Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English period. Scholarly opinion varies, but the '' Oxford English Dictionary'' specifies the period when Middle English was spoken as being from 1150 to 1500. This stage of the development of the English language roughly followed the High to the Late Middle Ages. Middle English saw significant changes to its vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and orthography. Writing conventions during the Middle English period varied widely. Examples of writing from this period that have survived show extensive regional variation. The more standardized Old English language became fragmented, localized, and was, for the most part, being improvised. By the end of the period (about 1470) and aided by the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg ...
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The American Heritage Dictionary Of The English Language
''The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language'' (''AHD'') is an American dictionary of English published by Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin, the first edition of which appeared in 1969. Its creation was spurred by the controversy over the perceived permissiveness of the ''Webster's Third New International Dictionary''. The third edition included over 350,000 entries and meanings. History James Parton (1912–2001) was a grandson of the English-born American biographer James Parton (1822–1891). He was the founder, publisher and co-owner of the magazines ''American Heritage'' and ''Horizon'', and was appalled by the permissiveness of ''Webster's Third'', published in 1961. (Webster's Third presented all entries without labeling them correct or incorrect.) Parton tried to buy the G. and C. Merriam Company so that he could undo the changes. When that failed, he contracted with Houghton to publish a new dictionary. The ''AHD'' was edited by William Morris and relie ...
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Kluge's Law
Kluge's law is a controversial Proto-Germanic sound law formulated by Friedrich Kluge. It purports to explain the origin of the Proto-Germanic long consonants ''*kk'', ''*tt'', and ''*pp'' (Proto-Indo-European lacked a phonemic length distinction for consonants) as originating in the assimilation of ''*n'' to a preceding voiced plosive consonant, under the condition that the ''*n'' was part of a suffix which was stressed in the ancestral Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The name "Kluge's law" was coined by Kauffmann (1887) and revived by Frederik Kortlandt (1991). As of 2006, this law has not been generally accepted by historical linguists. The resulting long consonants would subsequently have been shortened, except when they followed a short vowel; this is uncontroversial for ''*ss'' (which has a different origin). Proponents of Kluge's law use this to explain why so many Proto-Germanic roots (especially of strong verbs) end in short ''*p'', ''*t'', or ''*k'' even though their lik ...
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Geminated
In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from ''gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from stress. Gemination is represented in many writing systems by a doubled letter and is often perceived as a doubling of the consonant.William Ham, ''Phonetic and Phonological Aspects of Geminate Timing'', p. 1-18 Some phonological theories use "doubling" as a synonym for gemination, others describe two distinct phenomena. Consonant length is a distinctive feature in certain languages, such as Arabic, Berber, Danish, Estonian, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Punjabi, Polish and Turkish. Other languages, such as English, do not have word-internal phonemic consonant geminates. Consonant gemination and vowel length are independent in languages like Arabic, Japanese, Finnish and Estonian; however, in languages like Italian, No ...
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Fortune-telling
Fortune telling is the practice of predicting information about a person's life. Melton, J. Gordon. (2008). ''The Encyclopedia of Religious Phenomena''. Visible Ink Press. pp. 115-116. The scope of fortune telling is in principle identical with the practice of divination. The difference is that divination is the term used for predictions considered part of a religious ritual, invoking deities or spirits, while the term fortune telling implies a less serious or formal setting, even one of popular culture, where belief in occult workings behind the prediction is less prominent than the concept of suggestion, spiritual or practical advisory or affirmation. Historically, Pliny the Elder describes use of the crystal ball in the 1st century CE by soothsayers (''"crystallum orbis"'', later written in Medieval Latin by scribes as ''orbuculum''). Contemporary Western images of fortune telling grow out of folkloristic reception of Renaissance magic, specifically associated with Ro ...
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