The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) is a Micronesian island nation in the western Pacific Ocean. The capital of Marshall Islands is Majuro. The official languages are Marshallese and English.
National Anthem: Forever Marshall Islands
Roughly 10% of the population of the Marshall Islands can now be found in northwest Arkansas, U.S. Most live and work in the city of Springdale, a community of roughly 50,000. Each year, the Marshallese host a homecoming event so friends and relatives can get together to celebrate, stay in touch with politics at home, and spread their island culture. They meet at the Jones Center for Families in Springdale and have dancing, feasting, volleyball, and basketball. As a population, they are devoted to family and church and bring island dance and song to this corner of Arkansas.
Alphabet
An alphabet is a writing system, a list of symbols for writing. The basic symbols in an alphabet are called "letters". In an alphabet, each letter is a symbol for a sound or related sounds. To make the alphabet work better, more signs assist the reader: punctuation marks, spaces, standard reading direction, and so on.
The name "alphabet" comes from "Aleph" and "Beth", the first two letters in the Phoenician alphabet.
This article is written with the Roman alphabet (or Latin alphabet). It was first used in Ancient Rome to write Latin. Many languages use the Latin alphabet: it is the most used alphabet today.
It seems that the idea of an alphabet – a script based entirely upon sound – has been copied and adapted to suit many different languages. Although no alphabet fits its language perfectly, they are flexible enough to fit any language approximately. The alphabet was a unique invention.
The Roman alphabet, the Cyrillic, and a few others come from the ancient Greek alphabet, which dates back to about 1100 to 800. The Greek alphabet was probably developed from the Phoenician script, which appeared somewhat earlier, and had some similar letter-shapes.
The Phoenicians spoke a Semitic language, usually called Canaanite. The Semitic group of languages includes Arabic, Maltese, Hebrew and also Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus. We do not know much about how the alphabetic idea arose, but the Phoenicians, a trading people, came up with letters which were adapted by the early Greeks to produce their alphabet. The one big difference is that the Phoenician script had no pure vowels. Arabic script has vowels which may, or may not, be shown by diacritics (small marks above or below the line). The oldest Qu'ran manuscripts had no diacritics. Israeli children to about the third grade use Hebrew texts with vowel 'dots' added.
No ancient script, alphabetic or not, had pure vowels before the Greeks. The Greek alphabet even has two vowels (Eta) and Epsilon) for 'e' and two (Omega and Omicron) for 'o', to distinguish between the long and short sounds. It appears that careful thought went into both the Phoenician invention and the Greek adaptation, but no details survive of either process.
Semitic scripts apparently derive from "Proto-Sinaitic", a script of which only 31 inscriptions (plus 17 doubtful) are known. It is thought by some researchers that the original source of this script was the Egyptian hieratic script, which by the late Middle Kingdom (about 1900) had added some alphabetic signs for representing the consonants of foreign names. Egyptian activity in Sinai was at its height at that time. A similar idea had been suggested many years previously.
A list of alphabets and examples of the languages they are used for:
Other writing systems do not use letters, but they do (at least in part) represent sounds. For example, many systems represent syllables. In the past such writing systems were used by many cultures, but today they are almost only used by languages people speak in Asia. A "syllabary" is a system of writing that is similar to an alphabet. A syllabary uses one symbol to indicate each syllable of a word, instead of one symbol for each letter of the word. For example, a syllabary would use one symbol to mean the syllable "ga", instead of two letters of the alphabet "g" and "a".
Originally, 1200 BC in the Shang dynasty, Chinese characters were mainly "pictographic", using pictures to show words or ideas. Now only 1% of Chinese characters are pictographic. 97% of modern characters are SP characters. These are a pair of symbols, one for meaning (semantics) and the other for pronunciation. In many cases the P and S parts are put together into one joint character. Chinese is not one spoken language, but many, but the same writing system is used for all. This writing system has been reformed a number of times.
County
A county is the name for a piece of land. It has a different meaning in different languages. Originally the word was for the land under a count (in Great Britain an earl). Today a "county" is often something between a larger state and a smaller town or district.
County governments keep records and organize elections and laws. They are a kind of local government.
Canada has ten provinces. Five of them have counties in them. In Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, these are local government units, but in Quebec and Prince Edward Island they are now only geographical units.
The word "county" is the English name for the Chinese word "xiàn" (县 or 縣). On Mainland China under the People's Republic of China, counties are the third level of local government. On Taiwan, the county is the highest governmental level below the Republic of China central government.
There are about 2,000 counties in China; this number is about the same as in the Han dynasty, 2,000 years ago. The county is one of the oldest levels of government in China.
In the past, "prefecture" and "district" were names for "xiàn", before the Republic of China. People started using the English name "county" after the start of the Republic of China.
The head of a county is the magistrate.
Counties started to be units of regional self-government in Croatia in 1990. There are twenty counties and the city of Zagreb which has the same status. They are called "županije" and their leader is a "župan".
There was a change in the historical counties of France in 1790 after the Revolution. The new government unit was the "département". But French people use the word county (comté) in the name of the Free County region, the old Free County of Burgundy.
The government unit of Hungary is "megye", or in Latin: "comitatus". This is the same as the word "county". Today Hungary has 19 counties, 20 city counties and 1 capital, Budapest. The comitatus was also the unit in the Kingdom of Hungary.
Ireland originally had 32 counties in the nineteenth century. 26 of these later formed the Republic of Ireland and 6 formed Northern Ireland. The counties were in 4 provinces - Leinster (12 counties), Munster (6) Connacht (5) and Ulster (9).
In the 1970s in Northern Ireland and in the 1990s in the Republic of Ireland, there was a change in the county numbers and borders (where they started and finished). In the Republic, for example, the change broke Dublin County into four parts: Dublin City, Dún Laoghaire - Rathdown, Fingal, and South Dublin. 'County Tipperary' is really two counties, Tipperary North Riding and Tipperary South Riding. The towns Cork, Galway, Limerick, and Waterford are now separated from the countryside areas of their counties. So the Republic of Ireland now has thirty-four "county-level" units. But for sports, culture etc. people normally talk about the original 32 counties and 4 provinces.
Each county has a flag/colours and often a nickname too.
"County" is one name for "gun" (郡), which is a part of a prefecture. Other names for "gun" are "rural district", "rural area" or "district". People do not like to use "district" because the usual translation of "district" is "choume" (丁目).
Today, "counties" have no political power or organisation use. Postal services use it.