Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Pashto

(Encyclopedia)Pashto –to͞o [key], or Afghan, language belonging to the Iranian group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Indo-Iranian languages. ...

Eskimo-Aleut

(Encyclopedia)Eskimo-Aleut, family of Native American languages consisting of Aleut (spoken on the Aleutian Islands and the Kodiak Peninsula) and Eskimo or Inuktitut (spoken in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Siberi...

Turkish language

(Encyclopedia)Turkish language, member of the Turkic subdivision of the Altaic subfamily of the Ural-Altaic family of languages (see Uralic and Altaic languages). Turkish is the official language of Turkey and one ...

Vardar

(Encyclopedia)Vardar värˈdär [key], river, c.240 mi (390 km) long, rising in the Šar Planina, North Macedonia, and flowing northeast then southeast in a fertile valley, past Skopje, through NE Greece to the Aeg...

Greenberg, Joseph Harold

(Encyclopedia)Greenberg, Joseph Harold, 1915–2001, American anthropological linguist, b. New York City, grad. Columbia (A.B., 1936) and Northwestern Univ. (Ph.D., 1940). He was a professor of anthropology at Colu...

Manx

(Encyclopedia)Manx măngks [key], virtually extinct language belonging to the Goidelic or Gaelic group of the Celtic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. The last native speaker, Ned Madrell, died in...

Aram, Eugene

(Encyclopedia)Aram, Eugene āˈrəm [key], 1704–59, English philologist, b. Yorkshire. A self-taught linguist, Aram was the first to identify the Celtic languages as related to the other languages of Europe. In 1...

Donets

(Encyclopedia)Donets dənyĕtsˈ [key], river, c.650 mi (1,050 km) long, in Ukraine and SW European Russia. A tributary of the Don, it is also called the North Donets (Rus. Severny Donets). It rises NE of Belgorod,...

Chautauqua Lake

(Encyclopedia)Chautauqua Lake shətôˈkwə [key], 18 mi (29 km) long and from 1 to 3 mi (1.6–4.8 km) wide, W N.Y., SW of Buffalo, in a resort, vineyarding, and orcharding area. Jamestown lies at its southeast en...

Gomorrah

(Encyclopedia)Gomorrah or Gomorrha both: gəmôrˈə, –mŏrˈə [key], in the Bible, city, destroyed with Sodom. Some have speculated that the ruins southeast of the Dead Sea at Numeira, discovered in 1973, may b...