title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Single and double (geminated) consonants were distinguished from each other in Ancient Greek: for instance, contrasted with (also written ). In Ancient Greek poetry, a vowel followed by a double consonant counts as a heavy syllable in meter. Doubled consonants usually only occur between vowels, not at the beginning or the end of a word, except in the case of , for which see above.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Gemination was lost in Standard Modern Greek, so that all consonants that used to be geminated are pronounced as singletons. Cypriot Greek, the Modern Greek dialect of Cyprus, however, preserves geminate consonants.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: A doubled in Attic corresponds to a in Ionic and other dialects. This sound arose from historic palatalization (see below).


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Archaic and Classical Greek vowels and diphthongs varied by dialect. The tables below show the vowels of Classical Attic in the IPA, paired with the vowel letters that represent them in the standard Ionic alphabet. The earlier Old Attic alphabet had certain differences. Attic Greek of the 5th century BC likely had 5 short and 7 long vowels: and . Vowel length was phonemic: some words are distinguished from each other by vowel length. In addition, Classical Attic had many diphthongs, all ending in or ; these are discussed below.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In standard Ancient Greek spelling, the long vowels (spelled ) are distinguished from the short vowels (spelled ), but the long–short pairs , , and are each written with a single letter, . This is the reason for the terms for vowel letters described below. In grammars, textbooks, or dictionaries, are sometimes marked with macrons () to indicate that they are long, or breves () to indicate that they are short.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: For the purposes of accent, vowel length is measured in morae: long vowels and most diphthongs count as two morae; short vowels, and the diphthongs in certain endings, count as one mora. A one-mora vowel could be accented with high pitch, but two-mora vowels could be accented with falling or rising pitch.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Proto-Greek close back rounded shifted to front early in Attic and Ionic, around the 6th or 7th century BC (see below). remained only in diphthongs; it did not shift in Boeotian, so when Boeotians adopted the Attic alphabet, they wrote their unshifted using .


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The situation with the mid vowels was more complex. In the early Classical period, there were two short mid vowels , but four long mid vowels: close-mid and open-mid . Since the short mid vowels changed to long close-mid rather than long open-mid by compensatory lengthening in Attic, E.H. Sturtevant suggests that the short mid vowels were close-mid, but Allen says this is not necessarily true.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: By the mid-4th century BC, the close-mid back shifted to , partly because had shifted to . Similarly, the close-mid front changed to . These changes triggered a shift of the open-mid vowels to become mid or close-mid , and this is the pronunciation they had in early Koine Greek.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In Latin, on the other hand, all short vowels except for were much more open than the corresponding long vowels. This made long similar in quality to short , and for this reason the letters and were frequently confused with each other in Roman inscriptions. This also explains the vocalism of New Testament Greek words such as λεγεών ('legion'; < Lat. "legio") or λέντιον ('towel'; < Lat. "linteum"), where Latin was perceived to be similar to Greek .


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In Attic, the open-mid and close-mid each have three main origins. Some cases of the open-mid vowels developed from Proto-Greek . In other cases they developed from contraction. Finally, some cases of , only in Attic and Ionic, developed from earlier by the Attic–Ionic vowel shift.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In a few cases, the long close-mid vowels developed from monophthongization of the pre-Classical falling diphthongs . In most cases, they arose through compensatory lengthening of the short vowels or through contraction.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In both Aeolic and Doric, Proto-Greek did not shift to . In some dialects of Doric, such as Laconian and Cretan, contraction and compensatory lengthening resulted in open-mid vowels , and in others they resulted in the close-mid . Sometimes the Doric dialects using the open-mid vowels are called Severer, and the ones using the close-mid vowels are called Milder.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Attic had many diphthongs, all falling diphthongs with as the second semivocalic element, and either with a short or long first element. Diphthongs with a short first element are sometimes called "proper diphthongs", while diphthongs with a long first element are sometimes called "improper diphthongs." Whether they have a long or a short first element, all diphthongs count as two morae when applying the accent rules, like long vowels, except for in certain cases. Overall Attic and Koine show a pattern of monophthongization: they tend to change diphthongs to single vowels.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The most common diphthongs were and . The long diphthongs occurred rarely. The diphthongs changed to in the early Classical period in most cases, but remained before vowels.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In the tables below, the diphthongs that were monophthongized in most cases are preceded by an asterisk, and the rarer diphthongs are in parentheses.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The second element of a diphthong was often pronounced as a doubled semivowel or before vowels, and in other cases it was often lost:


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The diphthong merged with the long close front rounded vowel in Koine. It likely first became . Change to would be assimilation: the back vowel becoming front because of the following front vowel . This may have been the pronunciation in Classical Attic. Later it must have become , parallel to the monophthongization of , and then , but when words with were borrowed into Latin, the Greek digraph was represented with the Latin digraph , representing the diphthong .


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In the diphthongs , the offglide became a consonant in Koine Greek, and they became Modern Greek . The long diphthongs lost their offglide and merged with the long vowels by the time of Koine Greek.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Many different forms of the Greek alphabet were used for the regional dialects of the Greek language during the Archaic and early Classical periods. The Attic dialect, however, used two forms. The first was the Old Attic alphabet, and the second is the Ionic alphabet, introduced to Athens around the end of the 5th century BC during the archonship of Eucleides. The last is the standard alphabet in modern editions of Ancient Greek texts, and the one used for Classical Attic, standard Koine, and Medieval Greek, finally developing into the alphabet used for Modern Greek.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Most double consonants are written using double letters: represent or . The geminate versions of the aspirated stops are written with the digraphs , and geminate is written as , since represents in the standard orthography of Ancient Greek.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Voiceless is usually written with the "spiritus asper" as and transcribed as "rh" in Latin. The same orthography is sometimes encountered when is geminated, as in , sometimes written , giving rise to the transliteration "rrh".


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The close front rounded vowels and (an evolution of and respectively) are both represented in writing by the letter upsilon () irrespective of length.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In Classical Attic, the spellings and represented respectively the vowels and (the latter being an evolution of ), from original diphthongs, compensatory lengthening, or contraction.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The above information about the usage of the vowel letters applies to the classical orthography of Attic, after Athens took over the orthographic conventions of the Ionic alphabet in 403 BC. In the earlier, traditional Attic orthography there was only a smaller repertoire of vowel symbols: , , , , and . The letters and were still missing. All five vowel symbols could at that stage denote either a long or a short vowel. Moreover, the letters and could respectively denote the long open-mid , the long close-mid and the short mid phonemes . The Ionic alphabet brought the new letters and for the one set of long vowels, and the convention of using the digraph spellings and for the other, leaving simple and to be used only for the short vowels. However, the remaining vowel letters , and continued to be ambiguous between long and short phonemes.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In the Old Attic alphabet, was written with the letterform of eta . In the Ionic dialect of Asia Minor, was lost early on, and the letter in the Ionic alphabet represented . In 403 BC, when the Ionic alphabet was adopted in Athens, the sound ceased to be represented in writing.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In some inscriptions was represented by a symbol formed from the left-hand half of the original letter: (). Later grammarians, during the time of the Hellenistic Koine, developed that symbol further into a diacritic, the rough breathing (; ; for short), which was written on the top of the initial vowel. Correspondingly, they introduced the mirror image diacritic called smooth breathing (; ; for short), which indicated the absence of . These marks were not used consistently until the time of the Byzantine Empire.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Ancient Greek words were divided into syllables. A word has one syllable for every short vowel, long vowel, or diphthong. In addition, syllables began with a consonant if possible, and sometimes ended with a consonant. Consonants at the beginning of the syllable are the syllable onset, the vowel in the middle is a nucleus, and the consonant at the end is a coda.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In dividing words into syllables, each vowel or diphthong belongs to one syllable. A consonant between vowels goes with the following vowel. In the following transcriptions, a period separates syllables.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Any remaining consonants are added at the end of a syllable. And when a double consonant occurs between vowels, it is divided between syllables. One half of the double consonant goes to the previous syllable, forming a coda, and one goes to the next, forming an onset. Clusters of two or three consonants are also usually divided between syllables, with at least one consonant joining the previous vowel and forming the syllable coda of its syllable, but see below.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Syllables in Ancient Greek were either light or heavy. This distinction is important in Ancient Greek poetry, which was made up of patterns of heavy and light syllables. Syllable weight is based on both consonants and vowels. Ancient Greek accent, by contrast, is only based on vowels.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: A syllable ending in a short vowel, or the diphthongs and in certain noun and verb endings, was light. All other syllables were heavy: that is, syllables ending in a long vowel or diphthong, a short vowel and consonant, or a long vowel or diphthong and consonant.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Greek grammarians called heavy syllables ('long', singular ), and placed them in two categories. They called a syllable with a long vowel or diphthong ('long by nature'), and a syllable ending in a consonant ('long by position'). These terms were translated into Latin as ' and '. However, Indian grammarians distinguished vowel length and syllable weight by using the terms "heavy" and "light" for syllable quantity and the terms "long" and "short" only for vowel length. This article adopts their terminology, since not all metrically heavy syllables have long vowels; e.g.:


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Poetic meter shows which syllables in a word counted as heavy, and knowing syllable weight allows us to determine how consonant clusters were divided between syllables. Syllables before double consonants, and most syllables before consonant clusters, count as heavy. Here the letters count as consonant clusters. This indicates that double consonants and most consonant clusters were divided between syllables, with at least the first consonant belonging to the preceding syllable.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In Attic poetry, syllables before a cluster of a stop and a liquid or nasal are commonly light rather than heavy. This was called " ('Attic shortening'), since here an ordinarily "long" syllable became "short".


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In Attic Greek, any single consonant and many consonant clusters can occur as a syllable onset (the beginning of a syllable). Certain consonant clusters occur as onsets, while others do not occur.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Six stop clusters occur. All of them agree in voice-onset time, and begin with a labial or velar and end with a dental. Thus, the clusters are allowed. Certain stop clusters do not occur as onsets: clusters beginning with a dental and ending with a labial or velar, and clusters of stops that disagree in voice onset time.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In Ancient Greek, any vowel may end a word, but the only consonants that may normally end a word are . If a stop ended a word in Proto-Indo-European, this was dropped in Ancient Greek, as in (from ; compare the genitive singular ποιήματος). Other consonants may end a word, however, when a final vowel is elided before a word beginning in a vowel, as in (from ).


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Ancient Greek had a pitch accent, unlike the stress accent of Modern Greek and English. One mora of a word was accented with high pitch. A mora is a unit of vowel length; in Ancient Greek, short vowels have one mora and long vowels and diphthongs have two morae. Thus, a one-mora vowel could have accent on its one mora, and a two-mora vowel could have accent on either of its two morae. The position of accent was free, with certain limitations. In a given word, it could appear in several different positions, depending on the lengths of the vowels in the word.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In the examples below, long vowels and diphthongs are represented with two vowel symbols, one for each mora. This does not mean that the long vowel has two separate vowels in different syllables. Syllables are separated by periods ; any sound between two periods is pronounced in one syllable.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The accented mora is marked with acute accent . A vowel with rising pitch contour is marked with a caron , and a vowel with a falling pitch contour is marked with a circumflex .


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The position of the accent in Ancient Greek was phonemic and distinctive: certain words are distinguished by which mora in them is accented. The position of the accent was also distinctive on long vowels and diphthongs: either the first or the second mora could be accented. Phonetically, a two-mora vowel had a rising or falling pitch contour, depending on which of its two morae was accented:


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Accent marks were never used until around 200 BC. They were first used in Alexandria, and Aristophanes of Byzantium is said to have invented them. There are three: the acute, circumflex, and grave . The shape of the circumflex is a merging of the acute and grave.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The acute represented high or rising pitch, the circumflex represented falling pitch, but what the grave represented is uncertain. Early on, the grave was used on every syllable without an acute or circumflex. Here the grave marked all unaccented syllables, which had lower pitch than the accented syllable.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Later on, a grave was only used to replace a final acute before another full word; the acute was kept before an enclitic or at the end of a phrase. This usage was standardized in the Byzantine era, and is used in modern editions of Ancient Greek texts. Here it might mark a lowered version of a high-pitched syllable.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Greek underwent many sound changes. Some occurred between Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and Proto-Greek (PGr), some between the Mycenaean Greek and Ancient Greek periods, which are separated by about 300 years (the Greek Dark Ages), and some during the Koine Greek period. Some sound changes occurred only in particular Ancient Greek dialects, not in others, and certain dialects, such as Boeotian and Laconian, underwent sound changes similar to the ones that occurred later in Koine. This section primarily describes sound changes that occurred between the Mycenaean and Ancient Greek periods and during the Ancient Greek period.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Clusters of and a sonorant (liquid or nasal) at the beginning of a word became a voiceless resonant in some forms of Archaic Greek. Voiceless remained in Attic at the beginning of words, and became the regular allophone of in this position; voiceless merged with ; and the rest of the voiceless resonants merged with the voiced resonants.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The PIE semivowel , IPA , was sometimes debuccalized and sometimes strengthened initially. How this development was conditioned is unclear; the involvement of the laryngeals has been suggested. In certain other positions, it was kept, and frequently underwent other sound changes:


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Between vowels, became . Intervocalic probably occurred in Mycenaean. In most cases it was lost by the time of Ancient Greek. In a few cases, it was transposed to the beginning of the word. Later, initial was lost by psilosis.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: By morphological leveling, intervocalic was kept in certain noun and verb forms: for instance, the marking the stems for the future and aorist tenses.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Through Grassmann's law, an aspirated consonant loses its aspiration when followed by another aspirated consonant in the next syllable; this law also affects resulting from debuccalization of ; for example:


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In some cases, the sound in Attic corresponds to the sound in other dialects. These sounds developed from palatalization of , and sometimes , , and before the pre-Greek semivowel . This sound was likely pronounced as an affricate or earlier in the history of Greek, but inscriptions do not show the spelling , which suggests that an affricate pronunciation did not occur in the Classical period.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Mycenaean Greek had three labialized velar stops , aspirated, tenuis, and voiced. These derived from PIE labiovelars and from sequences of a velar and , and were similar to the three regular velars of Ancient Greek , except with added lip-rounding. They were written all using the same symbols in Linear B, and are transcribed as "q".


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In Ancient Greek, all labialized velars merged with other stops: labials , dentals , and velars . Which one they became depended on dialect and phonological environment. Because of this, certain words that originally had labialized velars have different stops depending on dialect, and certain words from the same root have different stops even in the same Ancient Greek dialect.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Through "psilosis" ('stripping'), from the term for lack of (see below), the was lost even at the beginnings of words. This sound change did not occur in Attic until the Koine period, but occurred in East Ionic and Lesbian Aeolic, and therefore can be seen in certain Homeric forms. These dialects are called "psilotic".


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Even later, during the Koine Greek period, disappeared totally from Greek and never reappeared, resulting in Modern Greek not possessing this phoneme at all.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The Classical Greek aspirated and voiced stops changed to voiceless and voiced fricatives during the period of Koine Greek (spirantization, a form of lenition).


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Spirantization of occurred earlier in Laconian Greek. Some examples are transcribed by Aristophanes and Thucydides, such as for ('Yes, by the two gods!') and for ("virgin goddess!') ("Lysistrata" 142 and 1263), for ('sacrificial victim') ("Histories" book 5, chapter 77). These spellings indicate that was pronounced as a dental fricative or a sibilant , the same change that occurred later in Koine. Greek spelling, however, does not have a letter for a labial or velar fricative, so it is impossible to tell whether also changed to .


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In Attic, Ionic, and Doric, vowels were usually lengthened when a following consonant was lost. The syllable before the consonant was originally heavy, but loss of the consonant would cause it to be light. Therefore, the vowel before the consonant was lengthened, so that the syllable would continue to be heavy. This sound change is called compensatory lengthening, because the vowel length compensates for the loss of the consonant. The result of lengthening depended on dialect and time period. The table below shows all possible results:


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Wherever the digraphs correspond to original diphthongs they are called "genuine diphthongs", in all other cases, they are called "spurious diphthongs".


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In Attic, some cases of long vowels arose through contraction of adjacent short vowels where a consonant had been lost between them. came from contraction of , and from contraction of , , or . arose from and , from , and from and . Contractions involving diphthongs ending in resulted in the long diphthongs .


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In Archaic Greek, upsilon represented the back vowel . In Attic and Ionic, this vowel was fronted around the 6th or 7th century BC. It likely first became central , and then the front . For example, the onomatopoietic verb μῡκάομαι ("to moo") was archaically pronounced /muːkáomai̯/, but had become /myːkáomai̯/ in 5th century Attic.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: During the Classical period, – classically spelled – was raised to , and thus took up the empty space of the earlier phoneme. The fact that was never confused with indicates that was fronted before was raised.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In Attic and Ionic, the Proto-Greek long shifted to . This shift did not happen in the other dialects. Thus, some cases of Attic and Ionic correspond to Doric and Aeolic , and other cases correspond to Doric and Aeolic .


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The vowel first shifted to , at which point it was distinct from Proto-Greek long , and then later and merged as . This is indicated by inscriptions in the Cyclades, which write Proto-Greek as , but the shifted as and new from compensatory lengthening as .


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In Attic, both and Proto-Greek were written as , but they merged to at the end of the 5th century BC. At this point, nouns in the masculine first declension were confused with third-declension nouns with stems in. The first-declension nouns had resulting from original , while the third-declension nouns had resulting from contraction of .


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In addition, words that had original in both Attic and Doric were given false Doric forms with in the choral passages of Athenian plays, indicating that Athenians could not distinguish the Attic-Ionic shifted from original Proto-Greek .


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In Attic, rather than is found immediately after , except in certain cases where the sound formerly came between the and the (see above).


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The fact that is found instead of may indicate that earlier, the vowel shifted to in all cases, but then shifted back to after (reversion), or that the vowel never shifted at all in these cases. Sihler says that Attic is from reversion.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: This shift did not affect cases of long that developed from the contraction of certain sequences of vowels that contain . Thus, the vowels and are common in verbs with "a"-contracted present and imperfect forms, such as "see". The examples below are shown with the hypothetical original forms from which they were contracted.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Also unaffected was long that arose by compensatory lengthening of short . Thus, Attic and Ionic had a contrast between the feminine genitive singular and feminine accusative plural , forms of the adjective and pronoun "this, that". The first derived from an original "*tautās" with shifting of "ā" to "ē", the other from "*tautans" with compensatory lengthening of "ans" to "ās".


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: When one consonant comes next to another in verb or noun conjugation or word derivation, various sandhi rules apply. When these rules affect the forms of nouns and adjectives or of compound words, they are reflected in spelling. Between words, the same rules also applied, but they are not reflected in standard spelling, only in inscriptions.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The alveolar nasal assimilates in place of articulation, changing to a labial or velar nasal before labials or velars:


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: When precedes or , the first consonant assimilates to the second, gemination takes place, and the combination is pronounced , as in from underlying , or , as in from underlying .


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The sound of zeta develops from original in some cases, and in other cases from . In the second case, it was likely first pronounced or , and this cluster underwent metathesis early in the Ancient Greek period. Metathesis is likely in this case; clusters of a voiced stop and , like , do not occur in Ancient Greek, since they change to by assimilation (see below), while clusters with the opposite order, like , pronounced , do occur.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Ancient grammarians, such as Aristotle in his "Poetics" and Dionysius Thrax in his Art of Grammar, categorized letters () according to what speech sounds ( 'elements') they represented. They called the letters for vowels ('pronounceable', singular ); the letters for the nasals, liquids, and , and the letters for the consonant clusters ('half-sounding', singular ); and the letters for the stops ('not-sounding', singular ). Dionysius also called consonants in general ('pronounced with [a vowel]', ).


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: All the Greek terms for letters or sounds are nominalized adjectives in the neuter gender, to agree with the neuter nouns and , since they were used to modify the nouns, as in ('pronounceable element') or ('unpronounceable letters'). Many also use the root of the deverbal noun ('voice, sound').


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The words were loan-translated into Latin as '. The Latin words are feminine because the Latin noun ' ('letter') is feminine. They were later borrowed into English as "vowel", "consonant", "semivowel", "mute".


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The categories of vowel letters were ('two-time, short, long'). These adjectives describe whether the vowel letters represented both long and short vowels, only short vowels or only long vowels. Additionally, vowels that ordinarily functioned as the first and second elements of diphthongs were called ('prefixable') and ('suffixable'). The category of included both diphthongs and the spurious diphthongs , which were pronounced as long vowels in the Classical period.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The categories and roughly correspond to the modern terms "continuant" and "stop". Greek grammarians placed the letters in the category of stops, not of continuants, indicating that they represented stops in Ancient Greek, rather than fricatives, as in Modern Greek.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Stops were divided into three categories using the adjectives ('thick'), ('thin'), and ('middle'), as shown in the table below. The first two terms indicate a binary opposition typical of Greek thought: they referred to stops with and without aspiration. The voiced stops did not fit in either category and so they were called "middle". The concepts of voice and voicelessness (presence or absence of vibration of the vocal folds) were unknown to the Greeks and were not developed in the Western grammatical tradition until the 19th century, when the Sanskrit grammatical tradition began to be studied by Westerners.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The glottal fricative was originally called ('breath'), and it was classified as a , the category to which the acute, grave, and circumflex accents also belong. Later, a diacritic for the sound was created, and it was called pleonastically ('rough breathing'). Finally, a diacritic representing the absence of was created, and it was called ('smooth breathing'). The diacritics were also called and ('thick accent' and 'thin accent'), from which come the Modern Greek nouns and .


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The above information is based on a large body of evidence which was discussed extensively by linguists and philologists of the 19th and 20th centuries. The following section provides a short summary of the kinds of evidence and arguments that have been used in this debate, and gives some hints as to the sources of uncertainty that still prevails with respect to some details.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Whenever a new set of written symbols, such as an alphabet, is created for a language, the written symbols typically correspond to the spoken sounds, and the spelling or orthography is therefore phonemic or "transparent": It is easy to pronounce a word by seeing how it is spelled, and conversely to spell a word by knowing how it is pronounced. Until the pronunciation of the language changes, spelling mistakes do not occur since spelling and pronunciation match each other.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: When the pronunciation changes, there are two options. The first is spelling reform: The spelling of words is changed to reflect the new pronunciation. In this case, the date of a spelling reform generally indicates the approximate time when the pronunciation changed.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The second option is that the spelling remains the same despite the changes in pronunciation. In this case, the spelling system is called "conservative" or "historical" since it reflects the pronunciation in an earlier period of the language. It is also called "opaque" because there is not a simple correspondence between written symbols and spoken sounds: The spelling of words becomes an increasingly unreliable indication of their contemporary pronunciation, and knowing how to pronounce a word provides increasingly insufficient and misleading information on how to spell it.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In a language with a historical spelling system, spelling mistakes indicate changes in pronunciation. Writers with incomplete knowledge of the spelling system misspell words, and in general their misspellings reflect the way they pronounce the words.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Spelling mistakes provide limited evidence: they only indicate the pronunciation of the scribe who made the spelling mistake, not the pronunciation of all speakers of the language at the time. Ancient Greek was a language with many regional variants and social registers. Many of the pronunciation changes of Koine Greek probably occurred earlier in some regional pronunciations and sociolects of Attic even in the Classical Age, but the older pronunciations were preserved in more learned speech.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Greek literature sometimes contains representations of animal cries in Greek letters. The most often quoted example is , used to render the cry of sheep, and is used as evidence that beta had a voiced bilabial plosive pronunciation and eta was a long open-mid front vowel. Onomatopoeic verbs such as for the lowing of cattle (cf. Latin '), for the roaring of lions (cf. Latin ') and as the name of the cuckoo (cf. Latin "") suggest an archaic pronunciation of long upsilon, before this vowel was fronted to .


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Sounds undergo regular changes, such as assimilation or dissimilation, in certain environments within words, which are sometimes indicated in writing. These can be used to reconstruct the nature of the sounds involved.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Morphophonological alternations like the above are often treated differently in non-standard spellings than in standardised literary spelling. This may lead to doubts about the representativeness of the literary dialect and may in some cases force slightly different reconstructions than if one were only to take the literary texts of the high standard language into account. Thus, e.g.:


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The metres used in Classical Greek poetry are based on the patterns of light and heavy syllables, and can thus sometimes provide evidence as to the length of vowels where this is not evident from the orthography. By the 4th century AD poetry was normally written using stress-based metres, suggesting that the distinctions between long and short vowels had been lost by then, and the pitch accent had been replaced by a stress accent.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Some ancient grammarians attempt to give systematic descriptions of the sounds of the language. In other authors one can sometimes find occasional remarks about correct pronunciation of certain sounds. However, both types of evidence are often difficult to interpret, because the phonetic terminology of the time was often vague, and it is often not clear in what relation the described forms of the language stand to those which were actually spoken by different groups of the population.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Sometimes the comparison of standard Attic Greek with the written forms of other Greek dialects, or the humorous renderings of dialectal speech in Attic theatrical works, can provide hints as to the phonetic value of certain spellings. An example of this treatment with Spartan Greek is given above.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The spelling of Greek loanwords in other languages and vice versa can provide important hints about pronunciation. However, the evidence is often difficult to interpret or indecisive. The sounds of loanwords are often not taken over identically into the receiving language. Where the receiving language lacks a sound that corresponds exactly to that of the source language, sounds are usually mapped to some other, similar sound.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In this regard, Latin is of great value to the reconstruction of ancient Greek phonology because of its close proximity to the Greek world which caused numerous Greek words to be borrowed by the Romans. At first, Greek loanwords denoting technical terms or proper names which contained the letter were imported in Latin with the spelling ' or ', indicating an effort to imitate, albeit imperfectly, a sound that Latin lacked. Later on, in the 1st centuries AD, spellings with ' start to appear in such loanwords, signaling the onset of the fricative pronunciation of . Thus, in the 2nd century AD, ' replaces '. At about the same time, the letter ' also begins to be used as a substitute for the letter , for lack of a better choice, indicating that the sound of Greek theta had become a fricative as well.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: For the purpose of borrowing certain other Greek words, the Romans added the letters ' and ' to the Latin alphabet, taken directly from the Greek one. These additions are important as they show that the Romans had no symbols to represent the sounds of the letters and in Greek, which means that in these cases no known sound of Latin can be used to reconstruct the Greek sounds.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Latin often wrote for Greek . This can be explained by the fact that Latin were pronounced as near-close , and therefore were as similar to the Ancient Greek mid vowels as to the Ancient Greek close vowels .


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The quality of short is shown by some transcriptions between Ancient Greek and Sanskrit. Greek short was transcribed with Sanskrit long , not with Sanskrit short , which had a closer pronunciation: . Conversely, Sanskrit short was transcribed with Greek .


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The Greek alphabet developed from the older Phoenician alphabet. It may be assumed that the Greeks tended to assign to each Phoenician letter that Greek sound which most closely resembled the Phoenician sound. But, as with loanwords, the interpretation is not straightforward.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The Greek alphabet was in turn the basis of other alphabets, notably the Etruscan and Coptic and later the Armenian, Gothic, and Cyrillic. Similar arguments can be derived in these cases as in the Phoenician-Greek case.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: For example, in Cyrillic, the letter ("ve") stands for , confirming that beta was pronounced as a fricative by the 9th century AD, while the new letter ("be") was invented to note the sound . Conversely, in Gothic, the letter derived from beta stands for , so in the 4th century AD, beta may have still been a plosive in Greek although according to evidence from the Greek papyri of Egypt, beta as a stop had been generally replaced by beta as a voiced bilabial fricative by the first century AD.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Any reconstruction of Ancient Greek needs to take into account how the sounds later developed towards Modern Greek, and how these changes could have occurred. In general, the changes between the reconstructed Ancient Greek and Modern Greek are assumed to be unproblematic in this respect by historical linguists, because all the relevant changes (spirantization, chain-shifts of long vowels towards , loss of initial , restructuring of vowel-length and accentuation systems, etc.) are of types that are cross-linguistically frequently attested and relatively easy to explain.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Systematic relationships between sounds in Greek and sounds in other Indo-European languages are taken as strong evidence for reconstruction by historical linguists, because such relationships indicate that these sounds may go back to an inherited sound in the proto-language.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Until the 15th century (during the time of the Byzantine Greek Empire) ancient Greek texts were pronounced exactly like contemporary Greek when they were read aloud. From about 1486, various scholars (notably Antonio of Lebrixa, Girolamo Aleandro, and Aldus Manutius) judged that this pronunciation appeared to be inconsistent with the descriptions handed down by ancient grammarians, and suggested alternative pronunciations.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Johann Reuchlin, the leading Greek scholar in the West around 1500, had taken his Greek learning from Byzantine émigré scholars, and continued to use the modern pronunciation. This pronunciation system was called into question by Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) who in 1528 published ", a philological treatise clothed in the form of a philosophical dialogue, in which he developed the idea of a historical reconstruction of ancient Latin and Greek pronunciation. The two models of pronunciation became soon known, after their principal proponents, as the "Reuchlinian" and the "Erasmian" system, or, after the characteristic vowel pronunciations, as the "iotacist" (or "itacist" ) and the "etacist" system, respectively.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Erasmus' reconstruction was based on a wide range of arguments, derived from the philological knowledge available at his time. In the main, he strove for a more regular correspondence of letters to sounds, assuming that different letters must have stood for different sounds, and same letters for same sounds. That led him, for instance, to posit that the various letters which in the iotacist system all denoted must have had different values, and that , , , , , were all diphthongs with a closing offglide. He also insisted on taking the accounts of ancient grammarians literally, for instance where they described vowels as being distinctively long and short, or the acute and circumflex accents as being clearly distinguished by pitch contours. In addition, he drew on evidence from word correspondences between Greek and Latin as well as some other European languages. Some of his arguments in this direction are, in hindsight, mistaken, because he naturally lacked much of the knowledge developed through later linguistic work. Thus, he could not distinguish between Latin-Greek word relations based on loans (e.g. — ') on the one hand, and those based on common descent from Indo-European (e.g. — ') on the other. He also fell victim to a few spurious relations due to mere accidental similarity (e.g. Greek 'to sacrifice' — French ", 'to kill'). In other areas, his arguments are of quite the same kind as those used by modern linguistics, e.g. where he argues on the basis of cross-dialectal correspondences within Greek that must have been a rather open "e"-sound, close to .


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Erasmus also took great pains to assign to the members in his reconstructed system plausible phonetic values. This was no easy task, as contemporary grammatical theory lacked the rich and precise terminology to describe such values. In order to overcome that problem, Erasmus drew upon his knowledge of the sound repertoires of contemporary living languages, for instance likening his reconstructed to Scots "a" (), his reconstructed to Dutch ' (), and his reconstructed to French ' (at that time pronounced ).


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Erasmus assigned to the Greek consonant letters , , the sounds of voiced plosives , , , while for the consonant letters , , and he advocated the use of fricatives , , as in Modern Greek (arguing, however, that this type of must have been different from that denoted by Latin ).


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The reception of Erasmus' idea among his contemporaries was mixed. Most prominent among those scholars who resisted his move was Philipp Melanchthon, a student of Reuchlin's. Debate in humanist circles continued up into the 17th century, but the situation remained undecided for several centuries. (See Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in teaching.)


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: A renewed interest in the issues of reconstructed pronunciation arose during the 19th century. On the one hand, the new science of historical linguistics, based on the method of comparative reconstruction, took a vivid interest in Greek. It soon established beyond any doubt that Greek was descended in parallel with many other languages from the common source of the Indo-European proto-language. This had important consequences for how its phonological system must be reconstructed. At the same time, continued work in philology and archeology was bringing to light an ever-growing corpus of non-standard, non-literary and non-classical Greek writings, e.g. inscriptions and later also papyri. These added considerably to what could be known about the development of the language. On the other hand, there was a revival of academic life in Greece after the establishment of the Greek state in 1830, and scholars in Greece were at first reluctant to accept the seemingly foreign idea that Greek should have been pronounced so differently from what they knew.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Comparative linguistics led to a picture of ancient Greek that more or less corroborated Erasmus' view, though with some modifications. It soon became clear, for instance, that the pattern of long and short vowels observed in Greek was mirrored in similar oppositions in other languages and thus had to be a common inheritance (see Ablaut); that Greek had to have been at some stage because it regularly corresponded to in all other Indo-European languages (cf. Gr. : Lat. '); that many instances of had earlier been (cf. Gr. : Lat. '); that Greek sometimes stood in words that had been lengthened from and therefore must have been pronounced at some stage (the same holds analogically for and , which must have been ), and so on. For the consonants, historical linguistics established the originally plosive nature of both the aspirates and the mediae , which were recognised to be a direct continuation of similar sounds in Indo-European (reconstructed and ). It was also recognised that the word-initial "spiritus asper" was most often a reflex of earlier (cf. Gr. : Lat. ""), which was believed to have been weakened to in pronunciation. Work was also done reconstructing the linguistic background to the rules of ancient Greek versification, especially in Homer, which shed important light on the phonology regarding syllable structure and accent. Scholars also described and explained the regularities in the development of consonants and vowels under processes of assimilation, reduplication, compensatory lengthening etc.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: While comparative linguistics could in this way firmly establish that a certain source state, roughly along the Erasmian model, had once obtained, and that significant changes had to have occurred later, during the development towards Modern Greek, the comparative method had less to say about the question "when" these changes took place. Erasmus had been eager to find a pronunciation system that corresponded most closely to the written letters, and it was now natural to assume that the reconstructed sound system was that which obtained at the time when Greek orthography was in its formative period. For a time, it was taken for granted that this would also have been the pronunciation valid for all the period of classical literature. However, it was perfectly possible that the pronunciation of the living language had begun to move on from that reconstructed system towards that of Modern Greek, possibly already quite early during antiquity.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In this context, the freshly emerging evidence from the non-standard inscriptions became of decisive importance. Critics of the Erasmian reconstruction drew attention to the systematic patterns of spelling mistakes made by scribes. These mistakes showed that scribes had trouble distinguishing between the orthographically correct spellings for certain words, for instance involving , , and . This provided evidence that these vowels had already begun to merge in the living speech of the period. While some scholars in Greece were quick to emphasise these findings in order to cast doubt on the Erasmian system as a whole, some western European scholars tended to downplay them, explaining early instances of such orthographical aberrations as either isolated exceptions or influences from non-Attic, non-standard dialects. The resulting debate, as it was conducted during the 19th century, finds its expression in, for instance, the works of and on the anti-Erasmian side, and of Friedrich Blass (1870) on the pro-Erasmian side.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: It was not until the early 20th century and the work of G. Chatzidakis, a linguist often credited with having first introduced the methods of modern historical linguistics into the Greek academic establishment, that the validity of the comparative method and its reconstructions for Greek began to be widely accepted among Greek scholars too. The international consensus view that had been reached by the early and mid-20th century is represented in the works of and .


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Since the 1970s and 1980s, several scholars have attempted a systematic re-evaluation of the inscriptional and papyrological evidence (Smith 1972, Teodorsson 1974, 1977, 1978; Gignac 1976; Threatte 1980, summary in Horrocks 1999). According to their results, many of the relevant phonological changes can be dated fairly early, reaching well into the classical period, and the period of the Koiné can be characterised as one of very rapid phonological change. Many of the changes in vowel quality are now dated to some time between the 5th and the 1st centuries BC, while those in the consonants are assumed to have been completed by the 4th century AD. However, there is still considerable debate over precise dating, and it is still not clear to what degree, and for how long, different pronunciation systems would have persisted side by side within the Greek speech community. The resulting majority view today is that a phonological system roughly along Erasmian lines can still be assumed to have been valid for the period of classical Attic literature, but biblical and other post-classical Koine Greek is likely to have been spoken with a pronunciation that already approached that of Modern Greek in many crucial respects.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: All speech consists of these categories: element [letter], syllable, conjunction, noun, verb, inflection, phrase.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: A letter is an indivisible sound — not any sound, but a sound from which a compound sound [syllable] can naturally be made, since the sounds of animals are also indivisible, and I call none of them a letter. The categories of sound are sounding [vowels], half-sounding [semivowels: fricatives and sonorants], and unsounded [silent or mute: stop].


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: These categories are the vowel, which has audible sound but no contact [between lips or between tongue and the inside of the mouth]; the semivowel, which has audible sound and contact (for example "s" and "r"); and the mute, which has contact and no sound by itself, becoming audible only with [letters] that have a sound (for example "g" and "d").


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: [Letters] differ in the shape of the mouth and place [in the mouth], in thickness and thinness [aspiration and unaspiration], in length and shortness — and still more in sharpness and depth and middle [high and low pitch, and pitch between the two]: but theorizing about them in detail is the job of those who study [poetic] meter.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: There are 24 letters, from "a" to "ō"... Letters are also called elements [of speech] because they have an order and classification.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Of these, seven are vowels: "a, e, ē, i, o, y, ō". They are called vowels because they form a complete sound by themselves.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Two of the vowels are long ("ē" and "ō"), two are short ("e" and "o"), and three are two-timed ("a i y"). They are called two-timed since they can be lengthened and shortened.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Five are prefixable vowels: "a, e, ē, o, ō". They are called prefixable because they form a complete syllable when prefixed before "i" and "y": for instance, "ai au". Two are suffixable: "i" and "y". And "y" is sometimes prefixable before "i", as in "myia" and "harpyia".


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The remaining seventeen letters are consonants [pronounced-with]: "b, g, d, z, th, k, l, m, n, x, p, r, s, t, ph, kh, ps". They are called consonants because they do not have a sound on their own, but they form a complete sound when arranged with vowels.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Of these, eight are semivowels: "z, x, ps, l, m, n, r, s". They are called semivowels, because, though a little weaker than the vowels, they still sound pleasant in hummings and hissings.


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: Nine are mutes: "b, g, d, k, p, t, th, ph, kh". They are called mute, because, more than the others, they sound bad, just as we call a performer of tragedy who sounds bad "voiceless". Three of these are thin ("k, p, t"), three are thick ("th, ph, kh"), and three of them are middle [intermediate] ("b, g, d"). They are called middle, because they are thicker than the thin [mutes], but thinner than the thick [mutes]. And "b" is [the mute] between "p" and "ph", "g" between "k" and "kh", and "d" between "th" and "t".


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: The thick [mutes] alternate with the thin ones, "ph" with "p", as in [an example from the Odyssey]; "kh" with "k": [another example from the Odyssey]; "th" with "t": [an example from the Iliad].


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: In addition, three consonants are double: "z, x, ps". They are called double because each one of them is made up of two consonants: "z" from "s" and "d", "x" from "k" and "s", and "ps" from "p" and "s".


title: Ancient Greek phonology

text: There are four unchangeable [consonants]: "l, m, n, r". They are called unchangeable because they do not change in the future [tense]s of verbs and in the declensions of nouns. They are also called liquids.


title: First Impressions of Earth

text: First Impressions of Earth is the third studio album by American rock band the Strokes. It was released through RCA Records first on December 30, 2005, in Germany, and January 3, 2006, elsewhere. Three singles were released from the album: "Juicebox", "Heart in a Cage", and "You Only Live Once".


title: First Impressions of Earth

text: The album was recorded over a ten-month period. The Strokes initially set out to record it with Gordon Raphael, the producer of their first two albums. Later on, guitarist Albert Hammond, Jr. introduced them to Grammy Award-winning producer David Kahne (Paul McCartney, Tony Bennett, Sublime), who stepped in to collaborate with Raphael. However, the collaboration was not working out and so Raphael stepped down. As a result, the majority of the album was produced by Kahne.


title: First Impressions of Earth

text: The album has a score of 69 out of 100 from Metacritic based on 38 reviews indicating "generally favorable reviews". Some of the reviews were among the harshest the Strokes had received up to this point in the band's recording career. For instance, Heather Phares of AllMusic called the album the Strokes' "weakest album yet." At the same time, the album also received positive reviews from the likes of Will Hermes of "Entertainment Weekly" who praised the album and thought it was a marked improvement over the Strokes' previous album "Room on Fire". In his "Consumer Guide", Robert Christgau gave the album a three-star honorable mention () while picking out two songs from the album ("You Only Live Once" and "Ask Me Anything") and stating, "You know how it is--the gym does more for your wind than for your jump shot."


title: First Impressions of Earth

text: Other reviews were positive. Playlouder gave it four-and-a-half stars out of five and said, "Turns out what the world was waiting for really was those that saved guitars finally making a record that truly reaped the rewards of their efforts." Punknews.org gave it a score of three-and-a-half stars out of five and said, "What exactly it is the Strokes ultimately hope to achieve with their music remains to be seen. However, so long as they continue to put out quality discs with high replay value, they will remain that rare breed of band where hype did not spoil the goods." "MusicOMH" gave it a score of three-and-a-half stars out of five and stated, "For the first six songs, the whole thing is as exhilarating as Is This It, it's in a different way, undoubtedly, but there's the same giddy rush of excitement." "Stylus Magazine" gave it a B− and called it "the first pretty good album of the year." "Tiny Mix Tapes" also gave the album a score of three-and-a-half stars out of five and said, "There is indeed more good than bad. Unfortunately, there is also more bad than there should be."


title: First Impressions of Earth

text: Some of the reviews are mixed or negative. "Drowned in Sound" gave it a score of six out of ten and stated, "Cast away the politics and the last twenty minutes and you'll still be left with two or three top tunes to add to your daily playlists, but it was never going to be ground-breaking or innovative." "Uncut" gave it three stars out of five and said, "The ambition's hampered by Julian Casablancas' sad-sack singing." "Paste" also gave it a score of six out of ten and stated, "By the time they're through brandishing quotations, The Strokes don't have much of their own to say here." "Slant Magazine" gave it two-and-a-half stars out of five and said it "introduces some subtle new colors to the band's musical palette... but the pervasive sense of inert boredom, which has been noted as a strength in the past, is difficult to shake." "PopMatters" gave it a score of five stars out of ten and said, "While it might be easy to point to the industry guy behind the boards, the album speaks for itself, and the Strokes managed to write a flop all by themselves."


title: First Impressions of Earth

text: "Heart in a Cage" was the album's second single, followed by "You Only Live Once". "NME" rated "First Impressions of Earth" at #8 in its Albums of the Year 2006 list.


title: First Impressions of Earth

text: "First Impressions of Earth" entered the UK Albums Chart at number one, the Strokes' first album at the top spot. The album peaked at #4 in the US, with an entry sales week of 88,000 units, somewhat below the performance of its predecessors. In Canada, the album debuted at #3, selling just under 10,000 copies. As of October 2006, the album had sold 271,000 units in the US, and has received gold certification for sold over 500.000 units by RIAA in June 2021. Although the album was the band's first release to reach #1 on any chart worldwide, it is the only one not to reach UK platinum status, and spent much less time on the charts than the previous albums. However, it has still achieved gold sales in Australia. and UK. Total the album sold over 1 million units worldwide.


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: Lê Đức Thọ (; 14 October 1911 – 13 October 1990), born Phan Đình Khải in Nam Dinh Province, was a Vietnamese revolutionary, general, diplomat, and politician. He was the first Asian to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, jointly with United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1973, but refused the award.


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: Lê Đức Thọ became active in Vietnamese nationalism as a teenager and spent much of his adolescence in French prisons, an experience that hardened him. Thọ's nickname was "the Hammer" on the account of his severity. In 1930, Lê Đức Thọ helped found the Indochinese Communist Party. French colonial authorities imprisoned him from 1930 to 1936 and again from 1939 to 1944. The French imprisoned him in one of the "tiger cage" cells on the prison located on the island of Poulo Condore (modern Côn Sơn Island) in the South China Sea. Poulo Condore with its "tiger cage" cells was regarded as the harshest prison in all of French Indochina. During his time in the "tiger cage", Thọ suffered from hunger, heat, and humiliation. Together with other Vietnamese Communist prisoners, Thọ studied literature, science, foreign languages and acted in Molière plays. Despite being imprisoned by the French, France was still regarded as the "land of culture", and the prisoners paid a "peculiar tribute" to French culture by putting on Molière plays.


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: After his release in 1945, he helped lead the Viet Minh, the Vietnamese independence movement, against the French, until the Geneva Accords were signed in 1954. In 1948, he was in South Vietnam as Deputy Secretary, Head of the Organization Department of Cochinchina Committee Party. He then joined the Lao Dong Politburo of the Vietnam Workers' Party in 1955, now the Communist Party of Vietnam. Thọ oversaw the Communist insurgency that began in 1956 against the South Vietnamese government. In 1963 Thọ supported the purges of the Party surrounding Resolution 9.


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: The United States actively joined the Vietnam War during the early 1960s. Several rounds of Paris Peace Talks (some public, some secret) were held between 1968 and 1973. Xuân Thuỷ was the official head of the North Vietnamese delegation, but Thọ arrived in Paris in June 1968 to take effective control. On his way to Paris, Thọ stopped in Moscow to meet the Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin. On Thọ's behalf, Kosygin sent President Lyndon B. Johnson a letter reading: "My colleagues and I believe and have grounds to believe that an end to the bombing [of North Vietnam] would lead to a breakthrough in the peace talks".


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: On 26 June 1968, Thọ first met Cyrus Vance and Philip Habib of the American delegation at a "safe house" in the Paris suburb of Sceaux. On 8 September 1968, Thọ first met W. Averell Harriman, the head of the American delegation, in a villa in the town of Vitry-sur-Seine. At the meeting, Harriman conceded that in "serious talks" the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) might take part in the talks provided that the South Vietnamese were also allowed to join. At another meeting with Harriman on 12 September, Thọ made the concession that South Vietnam could continue as an independent state provided the National Liberation Front could join the government, but demanded that the United States had to unconditionally cease bombing all of North Vietnam first. After the meeting, Harriman thanked Thọ for his "straight talk", but disputed a number of Thọ's claims, saying that the Vietnam war was not the most costly war in American history. Thọ was unhappy when Hanoi demanded that the National Liberation Front take part in the peace talks as the lead negotiating team above the North Vietnamese, which he knew would cause complications. He flew back to Hanoi in an attempt to change the instructions, in which he was successful, but was also told to tell Harriman that an expanded four-party talks involving the Americans, the South Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong would began "as early as possible" without settling a firm date. However, the four party talks did not take place as planned as South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu decided to stall talks after receiving messages from Anna Chennault that the Republican candidate Richard Nixon would be more supportive. On 18 January 1969, Thọ told Harriman that he regretted his departure, saying: "If you had stopped bombing after two or three months of talks, the situation would have been different now".


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: While Xuân Thuỷ led the official negotiating team representing the Democratic Republic of Vietnam at the talks in Paris, Thọ and U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger since February 1970 engaged in secret talks that eventually led to a cease-fire in the Paris Peace Accords of 23 January 1973.


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: In February 1969, Kissinger asked the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, to set up a meeting with Thọ in Paris. On 4 August 1969, Kissinger had a secret meeting at the house of Jean Sainteny, a former French colonial official who served in Vietnam and was sympathetic towards Vietnamese nationalism. However, Thọ did not appear as expected and instead Thuỷ represented North Vietnam. Thọ first met Kissinger in a secret meeting in a modest house in Paris on the night of 21 February 1970, marking the beginning of a test of wills that was to last three years. Kissinger was later to say of Thọ: "I don't look back on our meetings with any great joy, yet he was a person of substance and discipline who defended the position he represented with dedication". Thọ told Kissinger at their first meeting that "Vietnamization" was doomed, dismissively saying in French: "Previously, with over one million U.S and Saigon troops, you have failed. Now how can you win if you let the South Vietnamese Army fight alone and if you only give them military support?". Kissinger took the fact that Thọ began his activism working for Vietnamese independence at the age of 16 as a proof that he was a "fanatic", portraying Thọ to Nixon as an unreasonable, uncompromising man, but one was also a well mannered, cultured and polite. Kissinger found Thọ's air of superiority exasperating as Thọ took the viewpoint that North Vietnam was the real Vietnam, and regarded the Americans as "barbarians" who were merely trying to delay the inevitable by supporting South Vietnam. In April 1970, Thọ broke off his meetings with Kissinger, saying that there was nothing to discuss. An attempt by Kissinger to talk to Thọ again in May 1970 was rejected with a note reading "The U.S. words of peace are just empty ones".


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: By May 1971, Thọ started to change tactics in the talks, insisting that the main issue now was removing President Thiệu after the Americans departed. In July 1971, Kissinger taunted Thọ with the news that President Nixon would be visiting China soon to meet Mao Zedong, telling him that the days when the North Vietnamese could count of the supply of Chinese arms were coming to close. Thọ showed no emotion, saying: "That is your affair. Our fighting is our preoccupation, and that will decide the outcome for our country. What you have told us will have no influence on our fighting". In March 1972, the North Vietnamese launched the Easter Offensive that was initially successful, and led to warnings that the United States would start bombing North Vietnam again. Thọ sent a message saying if the bombing was resumed, it would be "a very serious step of escalation, aimed at stopping the collapse of the situation in South Vietnam and putting pressure on us". On 2 May 1972, Thọ had his 13th meeting with Kissinger in Paris. The meeting was hostile as the North Vietnamese had just taken Quang Tri City in South Vietnam, which led Nixon to tell Kissinger "No nonsense. No niceness. No accommodations". During the meeting, Thọ mentioned that Senator William Fulbright was criticizing the Nixon administration, leading Kissinger to say: "Our domestic discussions are no concern of yours". Thọ snapped back: "I'm giving an example to prove that Americans share our views". When Kissinger asked Thọ why North Vietnam had not responded on a proposal he sent via the Soviet Union, Thọ replied: "We have on many occasions said that if you have any question, you should talk to directly to us, and we shall talk directly to you. We don't speak through a third person".


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: Thọ next met Kissinger on 19 July 1972. Kissinger asked: "If the United States can accept governments in large that are not pro-American, why should it insist on a pro-U.S government in Saigon?" Thọ stated that Kissinger were not offering anything new. By August 1972, Kissinger was promising Thọ that he would pressure Thieu to resign if only Thọ would agree to make a peace deal before the presidential elections of that year. Thọ told Kissinger that the timetable for Thieu's departure was no longer an immediate concern, and instead he wanted some $8 billion in reparations for the war damage. Kissinger also told Thọ that he wanted to tell the world about their secret meetings since 1970 in order to give the impression that Nixon was making progress on peace in Vietnam, a suggestion that Thọ rejected, saying it was not his job to assist Nixon's reelection campaign. On 15 September 1972, Kissinger told Thọ: "We wish to end before October 15-if sooner, all the better". Thọ told Hanoi that Kissinger wanted a peace agreement before the election and now was the best time to settle.


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: On 7 October 1972, Kissinger and Thọ agreed to a government of national reconciliation in Saigon that was to include the National Liberation Front. Kissinger told Thọ that he expected a peace agreement to be signed in Paris on 25 or 26 October 1972, saying that all was needed now as the approval of Thieu and Nixon. However, when Kissinger arrived in Saigon, Thieu refused to sign the peace agreement. Nixon had initially agreed to the peace agreement, but upon hearing of Thieu's claims of betrayal started to change his mind. On 20 November 1972, Kissinger met Thọ again in Paris. Kissinger no longer aimed at secrecy and was followed by paparazzi as he went to a house owned by the French Communist Party where Thọ was waiting for him. Kissinger announced that the Americans wanted major changes to the peace agreement made in October to accommodate Thieu, which led Thọ to accuse him of negotiating in bad faith. Thọ stated: "We have been deceived by the French, the Japanese and the Americans. But the deception has never been so flagrant as of now". Kissinger insisted the changes he wanted were only minor, but in effect he wanted to renegotiate almost the entire agreement. Thọ rejected Kissinger's terms, saying he would abide by the terms agreed to on 8 October. Putting more pressure, Nixon told Kissinger to break off the talks if Thọ would not agree to the changes he wanted. Kissinger told Nixon: "While we have a moral case for bombing North Vietnam when it does not accept our terms, it seems to be really stretching the point to bomb North Vietnam when it has accepted our terms and when South Vietnam has not". By December 1972, the talks had broken, and Nixon decided to resume bombing North Vietnam. On 17 December 1972, the Christmas bombings began. On 26 December 1972, North Vietnam announced a willingness to resume peace talks in Paris again in January. Though Nixon had decided after all to accept the peace terms of 8 October, the bombings allowed him to portray himself as having forced North Vietnam to the table. The American historian A.J. Langguth wrote the Christmas bombings were "pointless" as the final peace agreement of 23 January 1973 was essentially the same as that of 8 October 1972 as Thọ refused to make any substantial concessions.


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: The relationship between Kissinger and Thọ was antagonistic with Thọ taking the airs of a Vietnamese mandarin lecturing a dim-witted student, which especially enraged the Harvard professor Kissinger. After one meeting, Kissinger asked "Allow me to ask you one question: do you scold your colleagues in the Central Committee the way you scold us?" After the Christmas bombings of 1972, Thọ was in particularly savage mood to Kissinger. At their meeting on 8 January 1973 in a house in the French town of Gif-sur-Yvette, Kissinger arrived to find nobody at the door to greet him. When Kissinger entered the conference room, nobody spoke to him. Sensing the hostile mood, Kissinger speaking in French said: "It was not my fault about the bombing". Before Kissinger could say anymore, Thọ exploded in rage, saying in French: "Under the pretext of interrupted negotiations, you resumed the bombing of North Vietnam, just at the moment when I reached home. You have 'greeted' my arrival in a very courteous manner! You action, I can say, is flagrant and gross! You and no one else strained the honor of the United States". Thọ shouted at Kissinger for over an hour, and despite Kissinger's requests not to speak so loudly because the reporters outside the room could hear what he was saying, he did not relent. Thọ concluded: "For more than ten years, America has used violence to beat down the Vietnamese people-napalm, B-52s. But you don't draw any lessons from your failures. You continue the same policy. "Ngu xuẩn! Ngu xuẩn! Ngu xuẩn!"" When Kissinger asked what "ngu xuẩn" meant in Vietnamese, the translator refused to translate, as "ngu xuẩn" (in Chữ Nôm: 愚蠢) roughly means that a person is grossly stupid.


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: When Kissinger was finally able to speak, he argued that it was Thọ who by being unreasonable had forced Nixon to order the Christmas bombings, a claim that led Thọ to snap in fury: "You've spent billions of dollars and many tons of bombs when we had a text ready to sign". Kissigner replied: "I have heard many adjectives in your comments. I propose that you should not use them". Thọ answered: "I have used those adjectives with a great deal of restraint already. The world opinion, the U.S. press and U.S. political personalities have used harsher words".


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: When the talks finally began, Kissinger put forward the demand that North Vietnam pull out all of its troops out of South Vietnam, a demand that Thọ rejected out of hand. Thọ stated the only issues remaining were the demilitarized zone (DMZ), which he wanted to see abolished under the grounds that all of Vietnam was one country while Kissinger insisted that only civilians be allowed to cross the DMZ that divided the two Vietnams. After much argument, Kissinger agreed to take the issue of the DMZ out of the peace agreement and inserted the phrase "among the questions to be negotiated there is the question of the modalities for civilian movement across the provisional military demarcation line". A paragraph was inserted calling for the withdraw of all foreign forces from South Vietnam, which Kissinger claimed was a commitment from Thọ to pull out North Vietnamese forces, an interpretation he did not share as he argued that the North Vietnamese troops were not foreign. Thọ told Kissinger that if a peace agreement was signed, that within 15 days a peace agreement would be signed for Laos, but he stated unlike the Pathet Lao in Laos, North Vietnam had no influence or control over the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Kissinger did not believe Thọ's claims that the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot was a fanatical Khmer nationalist with a ferocious hatred of the Vietnamese, the ancient arch-enemies of the Khmer. After the meeting, Kissinger told Thọ: "We must forget all that has happened. When we walk out, we must be smiling".


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: On the night of 9 January 1973, Kissinger phoned Nixon in Washington to say that a peace agreement would be signed very soon. On 10 January 1973, the negotiations broke down when Kissinger demanded the release of all American POWs in North Vietnam once a peace agreement was signed, but offered no guarantees about Viet Cong prisoners being held in South Vietnam. Thọ stated: "I cannot accept your proposal. I completely reject it". Thọ wanted the release of all prisoners once a peace agreement was signed, which led Kissinger to say this was an unreasonable demand. Thọ who had been tortured as a young man by the French colonial police for advocating Vietnamese independence shouted: "You have never been a prisoner. You don't understand suffering. It's unfair". Kissinger finally offered the concession that the United States would use "maximum influence" to pressure the South Vietnamese government to release all Viet Cong prisoners within sixty days of a peace agreement being signed. On 23 January 1973 at 12:45 pm Kissinger and Thọ signed the peace agreement.


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: The basic facts of the Accords included: release of POWs within 80 days; ceasefire to be monitored by the International Commission of Control and Supervision (ICC); free and democratic elections to be held in South Vietnam; U.S. aid to South Vietnam would continue; and North Vietnamese troops could remain in South Vietnam. On 28 March 1973, the last of the American forces left South Vietnam. While 23 January is generally recognized as the enactment date of the Peace Accords, the talks continued out of necessity. Sporadic fighting continued in some regions, while U.S. ground forces were removed by 29 March. Due to continued ceasefire violations by all sides, Kissinger and Thọ met in Paris in May and June 1973 for the purpose of getting the implementation of the peace agreement back on track. On 13 June 1973, the United States and North Vietnam signed a joint communique pledging mutual support for full implementation of the Paris Accords.


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: Thọ and Henry Kissinger were jointly awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts in negotiating the Paris Peace Accords. However, Thọ declined to accept the award, claiming that peace had not yet been established, and that the United States and the South Vietnamese governments were in violation of the Paris Peace Accords:


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: In January 1974, Thọ told General Hoàng Văn Thái he could not leave to take up a command in South Vietnam as he had expected, saying that the Politburo had assigned Thai another, more important task. General Thai begged Thọ to let him go win glory on the battlefield, but he was unyielding, saying that turning the Ho Chi Minh Trail into a highway was more important. Using bulldozers from the Soviet Union and China, over the course of 1974, General Thai transformed the Ho Chi Minh Trail into a paved, four lane highway that ran 1,200 km from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia into South Vietnam. He also laid down a 3, 000 mile pipeline to carry oil. The paving of the Ho Chi Minh Trail allowed North Vietnam to not only send more troops to South Vietnam, but to keep them well supplied.


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: In December 1974, the North Vietnamese launched an offensive in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam that proved more successful than expected and on 6 January 1975 took the provincial capital of Phuoc Long. Le Duan, the secretary-general of the Vietnamese Workers' Party, decided to follow up this victory with an offensive to seize all of the Central Highlands and sent Thọ down to monitor operations. Following the Communist victory at the Battle of Ban Me Thuot which ended on 11 March 1975, Thọ approved the plans of the North Vietnamese commander, General Van Tien Dung, to take Pleiku and push further south. Thọ also reported to Hanoi that the South Vietnamese Army were suffering from low morale and fighting poorly, which led him to suggest that all of South Vietnam might be taken that year, instead of 1976 as originally planned. The name of the campaign to take Saigon would be the Ho Chi Minh campaign. The principle problem for the North Vietnamese was that operations had to be completed before the monsoons arrived in June, giving them a very short period of two months to win the war in 1975. Thọ sent Le Duan a poem that began "You warned: Go out and come back in victory...The time of opportunity has arrived". By April 1975, the North Vietnamese had advanced within striking distance of Saigon with what would prove to be the last major battle of the Vietnam war taking place at Phan Rang between 13 and 16 April 1975.


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: On 22 April 1975, General Dung showed Thọ his plan to take Saigon, which he approved, saying as he signed off on Dung's plan that this was the death sentence for the regime of "reactionary traitors" in Saigon. On 30 April 1975, the North Vietnamese took Saigon and Thọ entered the city in triumph. He immediately set about giving orders to ensure that the water works and electricity grid of Saigon was still functioning; that food would continue to arrive from the countryside; to make arrangements to deal with the one million soldiers of the South Vietnamese Army that he ordered dissolved; and appointing administrators to replace the South Vietnamese officials. On behalf of the Politburo he gave General Dung a telegram from Hanoi that simply read: "Political Bureau is most happy". On 1 May 1975, a parade was held in Saigon to celebrate both May Day and the victory with Thọ watching the victorious soldiers march down the streets of Saigon, which was soon renamed Ho Chi Minh City.


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: From 1978 to 1982 Lê Đức Thọ was named by Hanoi to act as chief advisor to the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation (FUNSK) and later to the nascent People's Republic of Kampuchea. Lê Đức Thọ's mission was to ensure that Khmer nationalism would not override Vietnam's interests in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge was overthrown.


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: Lê Đức Thọ was the Standing Member of the Central Committee's Secretariat of the Party from 1982 to 1986 and later became the Advisor of Party's Central Committee.


title: Lê Đức Thọ

text: Lê Đức Thọ died on 13 October 1990, the evening before his 79th birthday, having reportedly suffered from cancer, in Hanoi.


title: Rafael de la Fuente

text: Rafael de la Fuente (born November 11, 1986) is a Venezuelan actor and singer. He is known for his roles in the fantasy television series "Grachi" (2011–2013) and the soap opera reboot "Dynasty" (2017–present) as Sam "Sammy Jo" Jones. His other notable role was in the first and second seasons of the drama series "Empire" (2015–2016).


title: Rafael de la Fuente

text: Rafael Alfredo De la Fuente Torres Jr. was born in Caracas, Venezuela. on November 11, 1986. His parents are Rafael Sr., a bariatric surgeon, and Helena. He has a younger sister, Alma.


title: Rafael de la Fuente

text: His early goal was to pursue a career as a singer. After high school, he moved to the United States to attend The University of Tampa. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2009. After graduation, he decided to focus on an acting career and began landing roles.


title: Rafael de la Fuente

text: His first acting job came by chance. When he was 18, a casting director visited his father's office and saw a picture of him. This led to a two episode appearance on a Venezuelan telenovela.


title: Rafael de la Fuente

text: In 2009, he played Jorge Giraldo in the Telemundo telenovela, '. In 2011, de la Fuente appeared as Max in the telenovela '. This was followed by the recurring role of Diego Forlán in the Nickelodeon Latin America fantasy series, ', which became a main role in the second season. In 2014, de la Fuente appeared as Coach Julio on "Every Witch Way", an English-language remake of '.


title: Rafael de la Fuente

text: In 2015 and 2016, de la Fuente appeared in the recurring role of Michael Sanchez, the boyfriend of Jamal Lyon, in the Fox musical prime time soap opera, "Empire". In 2017, he appeared as Cleve Jones' boyfriend Ricardo Canto in the ABC miniseries "When We Rise".


title: Rafael de la Fuente

text: In 2017 and 2018, he appeared in the films "¡He matado a mi marido!" and "Antidote". He also guest starred on American Horror Story.


title: Rafael de la Fuente

text: In March 2017, de la Fuente was cast in The CW's "Dynasty" reboot as Sam Jones, a gay male version of the original series' Sammy Jo Carrington (Heather Locklear).


title: Rafael de la Fuente

text: De La Fuente is a spokesperson for "Uniquely You", a brand of ACV gummy vitamins, and the charity website "Every.Org". He actively supports many charitable causes, especially those effecting the environment and the LGBTQ community.


title: Rafael de la Fuente

text: De La Fuente is openly gay. He was married to Australian actor Hugh Sheridan in 2009 but the marriage ended in 2018.


title: Test of Proficiency in Korean

text: The Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK) is a Korean language test for non-native speakers of Korean. The test is offered six times annually (Jan, Apr, May, Jul, Oct, Nov) within Korea and less often to people studying Korean in other countries. The test is for individuals whose first language is not Korean and is taken by overseas ethnic Koreans, those wishing to study at a Korean university, and for those who want to be employed at Korean companies in and outside of Korea. Since 2011, TOPIK is administered by the (국립국제교육원, NIIED), a branch of the Ministry of Education in South Korea.


title: Test of Proficiency in Korean

text: The test was first administered in 1997 and taken by 2,274 people. Initially the test was held only once a year. In 2009, 180,000 people took the test. The Korean government introduced a law in 2007 that required Chinese workers of Korean descent with no relatives in Korea to attain more than 200 points (out of 400) in the Business TOPIK (B-TOPIK) so they could be entered into a lottery for work visa.


title: Test of Proficiency in Korean

text: In 1997 – 1998, TOPIK was administered by Korea Research Foundation (KRF). In 1999 – 2010, TOPIK was administered by the (KICE).


title: Test of Proficiency in Korean

text: In 2012, more than 150,000 candidates took the TOPIK, and the total number of people who have taken the test since its date of inception surpassed 1 million.


title: Test of Proficiency in Korean

text: In previous years, the test was divided into four parts: vocabulary and grammar, writing, listening, and reading. Two versions of the test were offered: the Standard (S)-TOPIK and the Business (B)-TOPIK. There were three different levels of S-TOPIK: beginner (초급), intermediate (중급), and advanced (고급). Depending on the average score and minimum marks in each section it was possible to obtain grades 1-2 in beginner, 3-4 in intermediate and 5-6 in advanced S-TOPIK. In B-TOPIK the scores in each section (out of 100) were added together to give a score out of 400.


title: Test of Proficiency in Korean

text: A new format of the TOPIK took effect from the 35th TOPIK test, held on 20 July 2014. Instead of the original ternary (Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced) classification, there are now only two test levels – TOPIK I and TOPIK II. TOPIK I has sub-levels 1 and 2, whereas TOPIK II has four sub-levels from 3 to 6. Another important change is that now the TOPIK I has only two sections – Reading and Listening, instead of four sections in the old format. TOPIK II has three sections – Reading, Listening and Writing.


title: Test of Proficiency in Korean

text: TOPIK I is the basic level test containing two obtainable grades, while TOPIK II is the combined intermediate/advanced level with four obtainable grades. The evaluation is based on the total number of points earned.


title: Test of Proficiency in Korean

text: The test consists of mostly multiple-choice questions; however, the TOPIK II level writing examination will require a short-answer. TOPIK I consists of multiple-choice questions for listening (40 minutes long with 30 questions) and reading (60 minutes long with 40 questions). Both examination areas are worth a score of 100 with a combining score of 200. TOPIK II has two slots. The first slot is the listening examination (60 minutes long with 50 questions) and writing (50 minutes long with 4 short-answer questions). The second slot is for the reading examination (70 minutes long with 50 questions). All three examinations of TOPIK II are worth a score of 100 with a combining score of 300.


title: Test of Proficiency in Korean

text: As of February 2021, there are 314 testing centers, with 54 in South Korea and the remaining are in 87 countries.


title: Test of Proficiency in Korean

text: In addition to Korea, TOPIK is available in the following countries and districts: Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Jordan,Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, Myanmar, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Pakistan, Paraguay, Philippines, Portugal, Poland, Russia, Romania, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Turkey, UAE, Ukraine, USA, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. Examination times are divided into three time zones: China and marginal states (China, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Philippines, Taiwan, Singapore and Brunei; which shares the same time zone of UTC+8), Korea and Japan (which shares the same time zone of UTC+9), and other countries (which follows local time of a specific country). In India, TOPIK test is conducted in 5 cities - New Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ranchi, and Manipur.


title: Sumiyoshi-kai

text: The , sometimes referred to as the , is the second-largest yakuza group in Japan with an estimated 4,000 members.


title: Sumiyoshi-kai

text: Their territories mainly consist of upscale districts such as Kabukichō and Ginza. Shops operating in these territories are often part of protection rackets in which they must pay a fee called a .


title: Sumiyoshi-kai

text: The Sumiyoshi-kai is a confederation of smaller gangs. Structurally, the Sumiyoshi-kai differs from its main rival, the Yamaguchi-gumi. The Sumiyoshi-kai, as a federation, has a looser chain of command and while there is a chairman, some power is delegated to affiliate clan leaders.


title: Sumiyoshi-kai

text: The group has a complex history, with numerous name changes along the way. It was founded in 1958 as the Minato-kai (港会) by Shigesaku Abe who was the 3rd of the Sumiyoshi-ikka. Yoshimitsu Sekigami, who was the 4th "sōchō" of Sumiyoshi-ikka, renamed it to Sumiyoshi-kai. It was dissolved in 1965.


title: Sumiyoshi-kai

text: In 1969, the group was rebuilt as a union, the Sumiyoshi-rengo, by Masao Hori, who was the 5th "sōchō" of Sumiyoshi-ikka. He remade it as the Sumiyoshi-rengokai (住吉連合会) in 1982, and Hori became "kaicho" (president). Chief Director Ryoji Kawaguchi assumed the role of "kaicho", and Hori was promoted to "sosai", or chairman, in 1988. Kawaguchi died of illness in May 1990, and Hori died of illness in October of the same year.


title: Sumiyoshi-kai

text: Shigeo Nishiguchi, born in 1929, became the 6th "sōchō" of Sumiyoshi-ikka and "kaicho" of this group in February, 1991. At that time, it was again renamed the Sumiyoshi-kai. Chief Director Hareaki Fukuda, born in 1943, became "kaicho", and Nishiguchi was promoted to "sosai" in June 1998. Fukuda became the 7th "sōchō" of the Sumiyoshi-ikka on April 17, 2005.


title: Sumiyoshi-kai

text: On 19 April 2003, Takao Nishida, head of the affiliated Nishida-gumi, was gunned down in Ōizumi, Gunma. Police stated that they were probing for possible links between the murder and a series of shootings between the Sumiyoshi-kai and the Yamaguchi-gumi in neighboring Tochigi Prefecture.


title: Sumiyoshi-kai

text: On the morning of Monday, 5 January 2007, boss Ryoichi Sugiura was shot in his car in Tokyo. Within hours the offices of the Yamaguchi-gumi were fired upon in retribution. The following month, 70-year-old Kazuyoshi Kudo, head of the Kokusui-kai, was discovered in his home in Tokyo, police said. A gun was found by his side, suspected to be a suicide, raising tensions between the Sumiyoshi-kai and the Yamaguchi-gumi.


title: Sumiyoshi-kai

text: In September of 2017, Sumiyoshi-kai "sosai", or chairman, Shigeo Nishiguchi died of natural causes at the age of 88.


title: Sumiyoshi-kai

text: In April 2020, a report from the National Police Agency shows that the total number of members of organized crime gangs fell to historical lows, having just 2,800 members and 1,700 associated members.


title: Pseudosuchia

text: Pseudosuchia is one of two major divisions of Archosauria, including living crocodilians and all archosaurs more closely related to crocodilians than to birds. Pseudosuchians are also informally known as "crocodilian-line archosaurs". Prior to 2011, the clade Pseudosuchia was often called Crurotarsi in reference to the crurotarsal ankle found in almost all members of the group, which traditionally included phytosaurs, ornithosuchids, and suchians. However, a major 2011 study of Triassic archosaur relations proposed that phytosaurs were not closely related to other traditional "crurotarsans", at least compared to "bird-line archosaurs" (Avemetatarsalians) such as pterosaurs and dinosaurs. As a result, the possession of a crurotarsal ankle was considered a plesiomorphic ("primitive") feature retained by pseudosuchians. Crurotarsi now refers to a broader group of reptiles including Pseudosuchia, Phytosauria, and Avemetatarsalia. Despite Pseudosuchia meaning "false crocodiles", the name is a misnomer as true crocodilians are a subset of the group.


title: Pseudosuchia

text: Contrary to popular belief, crocodilians differ significantly from their ancestors and distant relatives, as Pseudosuchia contains a staggering diversity of reptiles with many different lifestyles. Early pseudosuchians were successful in the Triassic period. They included giant, quadrupedal apex predators such as "Saurosuchus", "Prestosuchus", and "Fasolasuchus". Ornithosuchids were large scavengers, while erpetosuchids and gracilisuchids were small, light-footed predators. A few groups acquired herbivorous diets, such as the heavily armored aetosaurs, and several were bipedal, such as "Poposaurus" and "Postosuchus". The bizarre, ornithomimid-like shuvosaurids were both bipedal and herbivorous, with toothless beaks.


title: Pseudosuchia

text: Many of these Triassic pseudosuchian groups went extinct at or before the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event. However, one group, the crocodylomorphs, survived the major extinction. Crocodylomorphs themselves evolved a diverse array of lifestyles during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, although only a single subset of crocodylomorphs, the Crocodilia, survive to the present day. Living crocodilians include crocodiles, alligators, caimans, and gavialids.


title: Pseudosuchia

text: The name "Pseudosuchia" was originally given to a group of superficially crocodile-like prehistoric reptiles from the Triassic period, but fell out of use in the late 20th century, especially after the name Crurotarsi was established in 1990 to label the clade (evolutionary grouping) of archosaurs encompassing most reptiles previously identified as pseudosuchians. By this time, Pseudosuchia had also been defined as a clade, but it was not widely embraced until 2011.


title: Pseudosuchia

text: In 2011 paleontologist Sterling Nesbitt proposed that Crurotarsi, as it was then defined, must include not only crocodilian-line archosaurs, but all other archosaurs including birds, non-avian dinosaurs, and pterosaurs. The clade Pseudosuchia as originally defined could still be used to identify crocodilian-line archosaurs, and since many recent studies support Nesbitt's findings, Pseudosuchia is now commonly used.


title: Pseudosuchia

text: The name Pseudosuchia was coined by Karl Alfred von Zittel in 1887–1890 to include three taxa (two aetosaurs and "Dyoplax") that were superficially crocodilian-like, but were not actually crocodilian. Hence the name "false crocodiles".


title: Pseudosuchia

text: In mid-20th century textbooks, like Alfred Sherwood Romer's "Vertebrate Paleontology" and Edwin H. Colbert's "Evolution of the Vertebrates", Pseudosuchia constitutes one of the suborders of the now-abandoned order Thecodontia. Zittel's aetosaurs were placed in their own suborder, Aetosauria. Colbert considered small lightly built archosaurs, such as "Ornithosuchus" and "Hesperosuchus" —both of which were at the time reconstructed as theropod dinosaur-like bipeds — to be typical pseudosuchians. These small forms were assumed to be the ancestors of all later archosaurs. The name Pseudosuchia became a wastebasket taxon into which all thecodonts that did not fit in the other three suborders could be placed. Even "Sharovipteryx" and "Longisquama", two enigmatic Triassic reptiles that bear little resemblance to archosaurs, have been regarded as pseudosuchians.


title: Pseudosuchia

text: Gauthier and Padian (1985) and Gauthier (1986) became the first to establish the name Pseudosuchia in a phylogenetic context, using it as a branch-based taxon for all archosaurs more closely related to crocodilians than to birds. This made the name Pseudosuchia somewhat ironic because true crocodiles (i.e. members of Crocodylia) were now included in the group. Phylogenetic definitions of Pseudosuchia include "Crocodiles and all archosaurs closer to crocodiles than to birds" (Gauthier and Padian), "Extant crocodiles and all extinct archosaurs that are closer to crocodiles than they are to birds" (Gauthier 1986), and more recently "the most inclusive clade within Archosauria that includes Crocodylia but not Aves" (Senter 2005). As a branch-based clade, Pseudosuchia is the sister taxon of another branch-based clade, the Avemetatarsalia. Avemetatarsalians are bird-line archosaurs, including pterosaurs and dinosaurs (the latter including birds).


title: Pseudosuchia

text: A different definition was suggested by Benton and Clark, 1988: the node-based taxon including the last common ancestor of Rauisuchidae and aetosaurs and all of its descendants. Benton and Clark also named a group called Crocodylotarsi, which includes most taxa now considered pseudosuchians.


title: Pseudosuchia

text: In 1990, Paul Sereno erected the clade Crurotarsi to supplant Pseudosuchia. However, Sereno defined Crurotarsi as a node-based clade, relying on the inclusion of groups such as Phytosauria, Aetosauria, and Crocodylomorpha. It is not equivalent to Pseudosuchia, which by definition must include all crocodilian-line archosaurs. For many years, Pseudosuchia and Crurotarsi have been considered partial synonyms because the latter clade encompasses all crocodilian-line archosaurs in most phylogenetic analyses. Sterling Nesbitt's 2011 analysis places one crurotarsan group, Phytosauria, outside Pseudosuchia. Since the definition of Crurotarsi relies on phytosaurs, their placement outside Pseudosuchia (and thus Archosauria) means that the clade Crurotarsi includes both pseudosuchians and avemetatarsalians.


title: Pseudosuchia

text: Pseudosuchia is one of the two primary "daughter" clades of the Archosauria. The skull is often massively built, especially in contrast to ornithodires; the snout is narrow and tends to be elongated, the neck is short and strong, and the limb posture ranges from a typical reptilian sprawl to an erect stance like dinosaurs' or mammals', although achieving it a different way. The body is often protected by two or more rows of armored plates. Many crurotarsans reached lengths of three meters or more.


title: Pseudosuchia

text: Pseudosuchians appeared during the late Olenekian (early Triassic); by the Ladinian (late Middle Triassic) they dominated the terrestrial carnivore niches. Their heyday was the Late Triassic, during which time their ranks included erect-limbed rauisuchians, herbivorous armored aetosaurs, the large predatory poposaurs, the small agile sphenosuchian crocodilians, and a few other assorted groups.