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Qilin
The qilin ( ; ) is a legendary hooved chimerical creature that appears in Chinese mythology, and is said to appear with the imminent arrival or death of a sage or illustrious ruler. Qilin are a specific type of the mythological family of one-horned beasts. The qilin also appears in the mythologies of other Chinese-influenced cultures. Origins The earliest mention of the mythical qilin is in the poem included in the Classic of Poetry (11th – 7th c. BCE). '' Spring and Autumn Annals'' mentioned that a ''lin'' () was captured in the 14th year of Duke Ai of Lu () (481 CE); ''Zuo Zhuan'' credited Confucius with identifying the ''lin'' as such. The bisyllabic form ''qilin'' ( ~ ), which carries the same generic meaning as ''lin'' alone, is attested in works dated to the Warring States period (475–221 BCE). ''Qi'' denotes the male and ''lin'' denotes the female according to ''Shuowen Jiezi''.''SWJZ'Radical 鹿 quote: "" translation: "''Lín'' (): a large female deer. ..'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Treasure Voyages
The Ming treasure voyages were maritime expeditions undertaken by Ming China's treasure fleet between 1405 and 1433. The Yongle Emperor ordered the construction of the fleet in 1403. The grand project resulted in seven far-reaching ocean voyages to the coastal territories and islands of the South China Sea and Indian Ocean. Admiral Zheng He was commissioned to command the fleet for the expeditions. Six of the voyages occurred during the Yongle Emperor's reign () and the seventh voyage occurred during the Xuande Emperor's reign (). The first three voyages reached up to Calicut on India's Malabar Coast, while the fourth voyage went as far as Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. In the last three voyages, the fleet traveled up to the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa. The Chinese expeditionary fleet was heavily militarized and carried great amounts of treasures, which served to project Chinese power and wealth to the known world. They brought back many foreign ambassadors whose king ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zheng He
Zheng He (also romanized Cheng Ho; 1371–1433/1435) was a Chinese eunuch, admiral and diplomat from the early Ming dynasty, who is often regarded as the greatest admiral in History of China, Chinese history. Born into a Muslims, Muslim family as Ma He, he later adopted the surname Zheng conferred onto him by the Yongle Emperor (). Between 1405 and 1433, Zheng commanded seven Ming treasure voyages, treasure voyages across Asia under the commission of the Yongle Emperor and the succeeding Xuande Emperor (). According to legend, Zheng's largest ships were almost twice as long as any wooden ship ever recorded, and carried hundreds of sailors on four decks. A favorite of the Yongle Emperor, whom Zheng assisted in the Jingnan campaign that overthrew the previous Jianwen Emperor in 1402, Zheng He rose to the top of the Ming Government of the Ming Empire, imperial hierarchy and served as commander of the southern capital Nanjing. Early life and family Zheng was born Ma He to a Musl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chimera (mythology)
According to Greek mythology, the Chimera, Chimaera, Chimæra, or Khimaira ( ; ) was a monstrous fire-breathing hybrid creature from Lycia, Asia Minor, composed of different animal parts. Typically, it is depicted as a lion with a goat's head protruding from its back and a tail ending with a snake's head. Some representations also include dragon's wings. It was an offspring of Typhon and Echidna and a sibling of monsters like Cerberus and the Lernaean Hydra. The term "chimera" has come to describe any mythical or fictional creature with parts taken from various animals, to describe anything composed of disparate parts or perceived as wildly imaginative, implausible, or dazzling. In other words, a chimera can be any hybrid creature. In figurative use, derived from the mythological meaning, "chimera" refers to an unrealistic, or unrealisable, wild, foolish or vain dream, notion or objective. Family According to Hesiod, the Chimera's mother was a certain ambiguous "she", wh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Qing Dynasty
The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing, was a Manchu-led Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China and an early modern empire in East Asia. The last imperial dynasty in Chinese history, the Qing dynasty was preceded by the Ming dynasty and succeeded by the Republic of China (1912–1949), Republic of China. At its height of power, the empire stretched from the Sea of Japan in the east to the Pamir Mountains in the west, and from the Mongolian Plateau in the north to the South China Sea in the south. Originally emerging from the Later Jin (1616–1636), Later Jin dynasty founded in 1616 and proclaimed in Shenyang in 1636, the dynasty seized control of the Ming capital Beijing and North China in 1644, traditionally considered the start of the dynasty's rule. The dynasty lasted until the Xinhai Revolution of October 1911 led to the abdication of the last emperor in February 1912. The multi-ethnic Qing dynasty Legacy of the Qing dynasty, assembled the territoria ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samoyedic Languages
The Samoyedic () or Samoyed languages () are spoken around the Ural Mountains, in northernmost Eurasia, by approximately 25,000 people altogether, accordingly called the Samoyedic peoples. They derive from a common ancestral language called Proto-Samoyedic, and form a branch of the Uralic languages. Having separated perhaps in the last centuries BC, they are not a diverse group of languages, and are traditionally considered to be an outgroup, branching off first from the other Uralic languages. Etymology The term ''Samoyedic'' is derived from the Russian term ''samoyed'' () originally applied only to the Nenets people and later extended to other related peoples. One of the theories supposes that the term is interpreted by some ethnologists as originating somewhat derogatorily from Russian ''samo-yed'', literally meaning "self-eater" (the word has been interpreted by foreign travelers as an allegation of cannibalism). Another suggestion for the term's origin is a corrup ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Turkic Languages
The Turkic languages are a language family of more than 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia (Siberia), and West Asia. The Turkic languages originated in a region of East Asia spanning from Mongolia to Northwest China, where Proto-Turkic language, Proto-Turkic is thought to have been spoken, from where they Turkic migration, expanded to Central Asia and farther west during the first millennium. They are characterized as a dialect continuum. Turkic languages are spoken by some 200 million people. The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Turkish language, Turkish, spoken mainly in Anatolia and the Balkans; its native speakers account for about 38% of all Turkic speakers, followed by Uzbek language, Uzbek. Characteristic features such as vowel harmony, agglutination, subject-object-verb order, and lack of grammatical gender, are almost universal within the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mongolic Languages
The Mongolic languages are a language family spoken by the Mongolic peoples in North Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe mostly in Mongolia and surrounding areas and in Kalmykia and Buryatia. The best-known member of this language family, Mongolian, is the primary language of most of the residents of Mongolia and the Mongol residents of Inner Mongolia, with an estimated 5.7+ million speakers. History The possible precursor to Mongolic is the Xianbei language, heavily influenced by the Proto-Turkic (later, the Lir-Turkic) language. The stages of historical Mongolic are: * Pre-Proto-Mongolic, from approximately the 4th century AD until the 12th century AD, influenced by Shaz-Turkic. * Proto-Mongolic, from approximately the 13th century, spoken around the time of Chinggis Khan. * Middle Mongol, from the 13th century until the early 15th century or late 16th century, depending on classification spoken. (Given the almost entire lack of written sources for th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tungusic Languages
The Tungusic languages (also known as Manchu–Tungus and Tungus) form a language family spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria by Tungusic peoples. Many Tungusic languages are endangered. There are approximately 75,000 native speakers of the dozen living languages of the Tungusic language family. The term "Tungusic" is from an exonym for the Evenk people (Ewenki) used by the Yakuts ("tongus"). Classification Linguists working on Tungusic have proposed a number of different classifications based on different criteria, including morphological, lexical, and phonological characteristics. Some scholars have criticized the tree-based model of Tungusic classification and argue that the long history of contact among the Tungusic languages makes them better treated as a dialect continuum. The main classification is into a northern branch and a southern branch (Georg 2004) although the two branches have no clear division, and the classification of intermediate groups is debatable. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nivkh Language
Nivkh ( ; occasionally also Nivkhic; self-designation: Нивхгу диф, ''Nivhgu dif'', ), Gilyak ( ), or Amuric, is a small language family, often portrayed as a language isolate, of two or three mutually unintelligible languages spoken by the Nivkh people in Outer Manchuria, in the basin of the Amgun (a tributary of the Amur), along the lower reaches of the Amur itself, and on the northern half of Sakhalin. "Gilyak" is the Russian rendering of terms derived from the Tungusic "Gileke" and Manchu-Chinese "Gilemi" (Gilimi, Gilyami) for culturally similar peoples of the Amur River region, and was applied principally to the Nivkh in Western literature. The population of ethnic Nivkhs has been reasonably stable over the past century, with 4,549 Nivkhs counted in 1897 and 4,673 in 1989. However, the number of native speakers of the Nivkh language among these dropped from 100% to 23.3% in the same period, so by the 1989 census there were only 1,079 first-language speakers left. Tha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Whale
Whales are a widely distributed and diverse group of fully Aquatic animal, aquatic placental mammal, placental marine mammals. As an informal and Colloquialism, colloquial grouping, they correspond to large members of the infraorder Cetacea, i.e. all cetaceans apart from dolphins and porpoises. Dolphins and porpoises may be considered whales from a formal, Cladistics, cladistic perspective. Whales, dolphins and porpoises belong to the order Cetartiodactyla, which consists of even-toed ungulates. Their closest non-cetacean living relatives are the hippopotamuses, from which they and other cetaceans diverged about 54 million years ago. The two parvorders of whales, baleen whales (Mysticeti) and toothed whales (Odontoceti), are thought to have had their Most recent common ancestor, last common ancestor around 34 million years ago. Mysticetes include four Neontology, extant (living) Family (biology), families: Balaenopteridae (the rorquals), Balaenidae (right whales), Cetotheriid ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Juha Janhunen
Juha Antero Janhunen (born 12 February 1952) is a Finnish linguist whose wide interests include Uralic and Mongolic languages. Since 1994, he has been Professor in East Asian studies at the University of Helsinki. He has done fieldwork on Samoyedic languages and on Khamnigan Mongol Khamnigan (Khamnigan: ) is a Mongolic language spoken by the Hamnigan people east of Lake Baikal. Usage The Hamnigan, Khamnigan people, called the ''Horse Tungusic peoples, Tungus'' or ''Steppe Tungus'', are natively bilingual, speaking both a M .... More recently, he has collaborated with Chinese scholar Wu Yingzhe to produce a critical edition of two newly discovered Liao Dynasty epitaphs written in the Khitan small script. Janhunen has also worked along with Ekaterina Gruzdeva on revitalizing the Nivkh language. He is a critic of the Altaic hypothesis. Notable works * * * * * References External links Janhunen and Altaic studies profiled 1952 births Living people People from ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old Chinese
Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese language, Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BC, in the Late Shang period. Chinese bronze inscriptions, Bronze inscriptions became plentiful during the following Zhou dynasty. The latter part of the Zhou period saw a flowering of literature, including Four Books and Five Classics, classical works such as the ''Analects'', the ''Mencius (book), Mencius'', and the ''Zuo Zhuan''. These works served as models for Literary Chinese (or Classical Chinese), which remained the written standard until the early twentieth century, thus preserving the vocabulary and grammar of late Old Chinese. Old Chinese was written with several early forms of Chinese characters, including Oracle bone script, oracle bone, Chinese bronze inscriptions, bronze, and seal scripts. Throughout t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
