Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Occitan

(Encyclopedia)Occitan prôväNsälˈ [key], member of the Romance group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Romance languages). The language label Provençal is often restricted in...

Vulgar Latin

(Encyclopedia)Vulgar Latin, vernacular form of the Latin language spoken in ancient Rome and the Roman Empire, as distinguished from classical or literary Latin. Vulgar Latin, rather than classical Latin, is the tr...

mood

(Encyclopedia)mood or mode, in verb inflection, the forms of a verb that indicate its manner of doing or being. In English the forms are called indicative (for direct statement or question or to express an uncertai...

Du Cange, Charles du Fresne, sieur

(Encyclopedia)Du Cange, Charles du Fresne, sieur shärl dü frĕn syör dü käNzh [key], 1610–88, French medieval historian and philologist. He is principally known for his Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinitat...

international language

(Encyclopedia)international language, sometimes called universal language, a language intended to be used by people of different linguistic backgrounds to facilitate communication among them and to reduce the misun...

Lewis, Sir George Cornewall

(Encyclopedia)Lewis, Sir George Cornewall, 1806–63, English statesman and man of letters. Entering Parliament as a Liberal in 1847, he served as chancellor of exchequer (1855–58), home secretary (1859–61), an...

Ibn Tufayl

(Encyclopedia)Ibn Tufayl ĭˈbən to͞ofālˈ [key], d. 1185/86?, 12th-century Spanish-Arab philosopher and physician, b. near Granada. His chief work was a philosophical romance, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, describing the de...

Portuguese language

(Encyclopedia)CEE Portuguese language, member of the Romance group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Romance languages). It is the mother tongue of about 170 million people, c...

Mandeville, Sir John

(Encyclopedia)Mandeville, Sir John, 14th-century English author of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Originally written in Norman French, the work became enormously popular and was translated into English, Latin,...

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

(Encyclopedia)Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 1807–82, American poet, b. Portland, Maine, grad. Bowdoin College, 1825. He wrote some of the most popular poems in American literature, in which he created a new body o...