Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Bernstorff, Andreas Peter

(Encyclopedia)Bernstorff, Andreas Peter ändrāˈäs pāˈtər bĕrnsˈtôrf [key], 1735–97, Danish politician; nephew of Johann Hartwig Ernst Bernstorff. Made (1773) foreign minister after Struensee's fall from ...

Blaeu, Willem Janszoon

(Encyclopedia)Blaeu, Willem Janszoon vĭˈləm yänˈsōn blou [key], 1571–1638, Dutch cartographer and printer. He studied astronomy and instrument making under the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. The printing es...

Greenland

(Encyclopedia)Greenland, Green. Kalaallit Nunaat, Dan. Grønland, the largest island in the world (2015 est. pop. 56,000), 836,109 sq mi (2,166,086 sq km), self-governing overseas administrative division of Denmark...

Chinese

(Encyclopedia)Chinese, subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages (see Sino-Tibetan languages), which is also sometimes grouped with the Tai, or Thai, languages in a Sinitic subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan lan...

Hindi

(Encyclopedia)Hindi hĭnˈdē [key], language belonging to the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. The official language of India, Hindi is the written or literary va...

Afrikaans

(Encyclopedia)Afrikaans ăfˌrəkänsˈ [key], member of the West Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Germanic languages). Although its classification is still dis...

Germanic languages

(Encyclopedia)Germanic languages, subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages, spoken by about 470 million people in many parts of the world, but chiefly in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. All the modern ...

Whitney, William Dwight

(Encyclopedia)Whitney, William Dwight, 1827–94, American Sanskrit scholar and lexicographer, b. Northampton, Mass. After studying in Germany, Whitney became professor of Sanskrit and of comparative philology at Y...

Lithuanian

(Encyclopedia)Lithuanian lĭthˌo͞oāˈnēən [key], a language belonging to the Baltic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Baltic languages). The official language of Lithuania since 1918, Lit...

Backus, John Warner

(Encyclopedia)Backus, John Warner, 1924–2007, American computer scientist, b. Philadelphia, grad. Columbia (M.A. 1950). Trained as a mathematician, he was hired (1950) by IBM Corp. as a computer programmer. From ...