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Ticknor, George

(Encyclopedia)Ticknor, George tĭkˈnər [key], 1791–1871, American author and teacher, b. Boston, grad. Dartmouth, 1807. In 1815 he went to Germany to study at the Univ. of Göttingen. While abroad he was appoin...

Free State

(Encyclopedia)Free State, formerly Orange Free State, province, 50,126 sq mi (129,825 sq km), E central South Africa. It was renamed Free State shortly after the 1994...

Huron, indigenous people of North America

(Encyclopedia)Huron hyo͝orˈänˌ [key], confederation of four Native North American groups who spoke the Wyandot language, which belongs to the Iroquoian branch of the Hokan-Siouan linguistic stock (see Native Am...

inflection

(Encyclopedia)inflection, in grammar. In many languages, words or parts of words are arranged in formally similar sets consisting of a root, or base, and various affixes. Thus walking, walks, walker have in common ...

Esperanto

(Encyclopedia)Esperanto ĕspəränˈtō [key], an artificial language introduced in 1887 and intended by its inventor, Dr. Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof (1859–1917), a Polish oculist and linguist, to ease communication ...

Catalan language

(Encyclopedia)Catalan language, member of the Romance group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. It is spoken by about 8 million people in Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, and...

pidgin

(Encyclopedia)pidgin pĭjˈən [key], a lingua franca that is not the mother tongue of anyone using it and that has a simplified grammar and a restricted, often polyglot vocabulary. The earliest documented pidgin i...

Library of Congress

(Encyclopedia)Library of Congress, national library of the United States, Washington, D.C., est. 1800. It occcupies three buildings on Capitol Hill: The Thomas Jefferson Building (1897), the John Adams Building (19...

Webster, Noah

(Encyclopedia)Webster, Noah, 1758–1843, American lexicographer and philologist, b. West Hartford, Conn., grad. Yale, 1778. After serving in the American Revolution, Webster practiced law in Hartford. His Grammati...

Cambridge, University of

(Encyclopedia)Cambridge, University of, at Cambridge, England, one of the oldest English-language universities in the world. Originating in the early 12th cent. (legend places its origin even earlier than that of t...