The Italian language is the third most spoken language (after Croatian and Serbian) in the Republic of Croatia today. It is an officially recognized minority language in Istria County (where it is spoken by 7.69% of the population).
The 2001 census in Croatia reported 19,636 ethnic Italians in the country (some .44% of the total population). Ethnologue reported 70,000 speakers in 1998: 40,000 ethnic Italians and 30,000 ethnic Croats and Istrian people. Native Italian speakers are largely concentrated along the Adriatic coast. In addition, roughly 120,000 Italian tourists visit Croatia each year, so many in the service and tourist industries have some knowledge of the language.As the 3/4 of the Italian community is concentrated in Istria, according to Ethnologue's estimates ( 70.000 ), at least 20% of the population of Istria is Italian mother tongue, although many simply declare themselves as Istrian.
Historically, the language had a much larger population than it does now. Italians have lived on the Adriatic coast for hundreds of years, and Istria was part of the Kingdom of Italy from 1919 until 1947. However the Istrian exodus after the Second World War and Yugoslavian ethnic cleansing in the form of the Foibe massacres forced the greater part of the Istrian Italians to flee to Italy.
During the Italian exodu, about 350000 people left Istria, Dalmatia and the isles of Croatia.
Government services are provided in Italian and Croatian in Istria County, including the official government website (which is also available in English). There are four Italian-language schools in Istria: primary schools in Buje (Buie) and Novigrad (Cittanova) and secondary schools in Pula (Pola) and Rovinj (Rovigno).
Objectivism (Ayn Rand)
Objectivism is a philosophy that was started by Ayn Rand. It has four main ideas:
1. Everything that exists has an identity. This identity does not depend on how people think about it or talk about it. This is also true for things like feelings or ideas. It says that a thing is the thing which it is, or "A is A." What people learn about the things that exist comes both from the identity of the things themselves and from the way that people observe (see) and think about what they have observed.
2. Reason is how a person knows that what he thinks or believes is true. A person cannot make something true just by wanting it to be true or by mysticism. Only rational, logical thinking can produce the best outcome. This means recognizing that a thing is the thing it is, and to not confuse it with things which it is not.
3. It is good to be happy, and it is good for a person to try to be happy. People should always try to improve their lives and be happy in the long term, so that they are happy now and in the future. People should not hurt others to try to be happy, but they also should not hurt themselves to try to make other people happy. People should also not make themselves less happy to help something like God. Ayn Rand called this "rational self-interest".
4. If governments or criminals take things away from people, or try to make people do things they do not want to do, it does damage to everybody. Ayn Rand thought that governments should only be able to protect people from violence, theft, fraud, and other actions that go against people's rights. This includes laissez-faire capitalism and is sometimes called libertarianism.
She first told people these ideas in her novels "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged". She talked about them more in "The Objectivist Newsletter", "The Objectivist", "The Ayn Rand Letter", "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" and "The Virtue of Selfishness".
Dike (goddess)
Dike is the Greek goddess of moral justice for human being.
Dalmatia
Dalmatia is a region of the Balkan Peninsula along the Adriatic Sea. It mostly belongs to Croatia. It goes from the island of Rab in the northwest to the Bay of Kotor (in Montenegro) in the southeast.
Konrad Lorenz
Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (Vienna, 7 November 1903 – Vienna, 27 February 1989) was an Austrian zoologist, naturalist, ornithologist and Nobel Prize winner. He is one of the founders of studies on animal behaviour (ethology). Lorenz studied instinctive behavior in animals, especially in Greylag geese and jackdaws.
In his autobiographical essay, published in 1973 in "Les Prix Nobel" (people who win the Nobel Prize are asked to write essays about their lives), Lorenz said that his parents were the main reason he was so successful. He also said that a book by Selma Lagerlof called "The Wonderful Adventures of Nils" that he read as a child was the reason he became interested in wild geese.
Lorenz began his studies in 1922 at Columbia University, but he returned to Vienna in 1923 to continue his studies at the University of Vienna until 1928. At this university he became an assistant professor from 1928 to 1935.
In 1936, Lorenz met his great friend and colleague Niko Tinbergen. Together they studied geese – wild, domestic, and hybrid.
In 1940 Lorenz became a professor of psychology at the University of Königsberg. He was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1941. He tried to become a motorcycle mechanic, but instead he was assigned as a medic. He was a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union from 1942 to 1948. During this time, he continued to work as a medical doctor and "got quite friendly with some Russians, mostly doctors". When he was sent back home after the war, he was allowed to keep both the manuscript of the book he had been writing and his pet starling. He arrived back in Altenberg "with manuscript and bird intact." The manuscript became his book "Behind the Mirror".
Lorenz shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for discoveries in individual and social behavior patterns" with two other important early ethologists, Niko Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch. In 1969, he became the first person to receive the Prix mondial "Cino Del Duca".
Lorenz retired from the Max Planck Institute in 1973 but continued to research and publish from his family home, in Austria. Konrad Lorenz died on 27 February 1989, in Altenberg.
Lorenz joined the Nazi Party in 1938 and accepted a university position under Nazi Germany. In his application for membership to the Nazi-party NSDAP he wrote in 1938: "I'm able to say that my whole scientific work is devoted to the ideas of the National Socialists."
When he accepted the Nobel Prize in 1973, Lorenz apologized for a 1940 publication that included Nazi views of science, saying that "many highly decent scientists hoped, like I did, for a short time [that] National Socialism [would produce good results], and many quickly turned away from it with the same horror as I [did]."
Together with Niko Tinbergen, Lorenz formed the idea of an innate releasing mechanism to explain instinctive behaviors (fixed action patterns). Building on the ideas of William McDougall, Lorenz developed this into a "psychohydraulic" explanation of the motives (reasons) of behavior. Another contribution is his work on imprinting. His influence on a younger generation of ethologists, as well as his books, were important in bringing ethology to the attention of the general public.
Lorenz predicted that market economics could eventually destroy Earth's ecosystem. In his 1973 book, "Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins", Lorenz considered the following paradox:
Lorenz adopts an ecological model to attempt to explain how this contradiction can exist:
In nature, these mechanisms tend towards a 'stable state' among the living beings of an ecology: