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Barge

Barge often refers to a flat-bottomed inland waterway vessel which does not have its own means of mechanical propulsion. The first modern barges were pulled by tugs, but on inland waterways, most are pushed by pusher boats, or other vessels. The term barge has a rich history, and therefore there are many other types of barges.

Etymology
"Barge" is attested from 1300, from Old French barge, from Vulgar Latin barga. The word originally could refer to any small boat; the modern meaning arose around 1480. Bark "small ship" is attested from 1420, from Old French barque, from Vulgar Latin barca (400 AD). The more precise meaning of Barque as "three-masted sailing vessel" arose in the 17th century, and often takes the French spelling for disambiguation. Both are probably derived from the Latin barica, from Greek baris "Egyptian boat", from Coptic bari "small boat", hieroglyphic Egyptian and similar ba-y-r for "basket-shaped boat". By extension, the term "embark" literally means to board the kind of boat called a "barque".

The British river barge
In Great Britain a merchant barge was originally a flat bottomed merchant vessel for use on navigable rivers. Most of these barges had sails. For traffic on the River Severn the barge was described as: The lesser sort are called barges and frigates, being from forty to sixty feet in length, having a single mast and square sail, and carrying from twenty to forty tons burthen. The larger vessels were called trows. On the River Irwell there was reference to barges passing below Barton Aqueduct with their mast and sails standing. Barges on the Thames were called west country barges.

British canals: narrowboats and widebeams
During the Industrial Revolution, a substantial network of narrow canals was developed in Great Britain from 1750 onward. These new British canals had locks of only 7 ft wide. This led to the development of the narrowboats, which had a beam of no more than 6 ft. It was soon realized that the narrow locks were too limiting. Later locks were therefore doubled in width to 14 ft. This led to the development of the widebeam.

The narrowboats were initially also known as barges, but only a very few had sails, unlike earlier vessels. From the start, most of the new canals were constructed with an adjacent towpath along which draft horses walked, towing the barges. These types of canal craft are so specific that on the British canal system the term 'barge' was not used to describe narrowboats and widebeams. Narrowboats and widebeams are still used on canals, now engine-powered.

The Thames barge and Dutch barge
On the British canal system, the Thames sailing barge, and Dutch barge and unspecified other styles of barge, are still known as barges. The term Dutch barge is nowadays often used to refer to an accommodation ship, but originally refers to the slightly larger Dutch version of the Thames sailing barge.

Crew and pole
The people who moved barges were known as lightermen. Poles are used on barges to fend off other nearby vessels or a wharf. These are often called 'pike poles'. The long pole used to maneuver or propel a barge has given rise to the saying "I wouldn't touch that [subject/thing] with a barge pole."

The 19th century British barge
In the United Kingdom the word barge had many meanings by the 1890s, and these varied locally. On the Mersey a barge was called a 'Flat', on the Thames a Lighter or barge, and on the Humber a 'Keel'. A Lighter had neither mast nor rigging. A keel did have a single mast with sails. Barge and lighter were used indiscriminately. A local distinction was that any flat that was not propelled by steam was a barge, although it might be a sailing flat.

The term Dumb barge was probably taken into use to end the confusion. The term Dumb barge surfaced in the early nineteenth century. It first denoted the use of a barge as a mooring platform in a fixed place. As it went up and down with the tides, it made a very convenient mooring place for steam vessels. Within a few decades, the term dumb barge evolved, and came to mean: 'a vessel propelled by oars only'. By the 1890s Dumb barge was still used only on the Thames.

By 1880 barges on British rivers and canals were often towed by steam tugboats. On the Thames, many dumb barges still relied on their poles, oars and the tide. Others dumb barges made use of about 50 tugboats to tow them to their destinations. While many coal barges were towed, many dumb barges that handled single parcels were not.

The 19th century American barge
In the United States a barge was not a sailing vessel by the end of the 19th century. Indeed, barges were often created by cutting down (razeeing) sailing vessels. In New York this was an accepted meaning of the term barge. The somewhat smaller scow was built as such, but the scow also had its sailing counterpart the sailing scow.

The iron barge
The innovation that led to the modern barge was the use of iron barges towed by a steam tugboat. These were first used to transport grain and other bulk products. From about 1840 to 1870 the towed iron barge was quickly introduced on the Rhine, Danube, Don, Dniester, and rivers in Egypt, India and Australia. Many of these barges were built in Great Britain.

Nowadays 'barge' generally refers to a dumb barge. In Europe, a Dumb barge is: An inland waterway transport freight vessel designed to be towed which does not have its own means of mechanical propulsion. In America, a barge is generally pushed.

Modern use

Barges are used today for transporting low-value bulk items, as the cost of hauling goods that way is very low and for larger project cargo, such as offshore wind turbine blades. Barges are also used for very heavy or bulky items; a typical American barge measures 195 x, and can carry up to about 1500 ST of cargo. The most common European barges measure 76.5 x and can carry up to about 2450 t.

As an example, on June 26, 2006, in the US a 565 ST catalytic cracking unit reactor was shipped by barge from the Tulsa Port of Catoosa in Oklahoma to a refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Extremely large objects are normally shipped in sections and assembled after delivery, but shipping an assembled unit reduces costs and avoids reliance on construction labor at the delivery site, which in the case of the reactor was still recovering from Hurricane Katrina. Of the reactor's 700 mi journey, only about 40 miles were traveled overland, from the final port to the refinery.

The Transportation Institute at Texas A&M found that inland barge transportation in the US produces far fewer emissions of carbon dioxide for each ton of cargo moved compared to transport by truck or rail. According to the study, transporting cargo by barge produces 43% less greenhouse gas emissions than rail and more than 800% less than trucks. Environmentalists claim that in areas where barges, tugboats and towboats idle may produce more emissions like in the locks and dams of the Mississippi River.

Self-propelled barges may be used for traveling downstream or upstream in placid waters; they are operated as an unpowered barge, with the assistance of a tugboat, when traveling upstream in faster waters. Canal barges are usually made for the particular canal in which they will operate.

Unpowered vessels—barges—may be used for other purposes, such as large accommodation vessels, towed to where they are needed and stationed there as long as necessary. An example is the Bibby Stockholm.

Types

 * ("accommodation barge")
 * Ferrocement or
 * or Spitz barge
 * Severn
 * Ferrocement or
 * or Spitz barge
 * Severn
 * or Spitz barge
 * Severn
 * or Spitz barge
 * Severn
 * or Spitz barge
 * Severn
 * or Spitz barge
 * Severn
 * or Spitz barge
 * Severn
 * or Spitz barge
 * Severn
 * or Spitz barge
 * Severn
 * or Spitz barge
 * Severn
 * or Spitz barge
 * Severn
 * or Spitz barge
 * Severn
 * or Spitz barge
 * Severn
 * Severn
 * Severn
 * Severn
 * Severn
 * Severn

title: Barge


text:
Bill Schelter

William Frederick Schelter (1947 – July 30, 2001) was a professor of mathematics at The University of Texas at Austin and a Lisp developer and programmer. Schelter is credited with the development of the GNU Common Lisp (GCL) implementation of Common Lisp and the GPL'd version of the computer algebra system Macsyma called Maxima. Schelter authored Austin Kyoto Common Lisp (AKCL) under contract with IBM. AKCL formed the foundation for Axiom, another computer algebra system. AKCL eventually became GNU Common Lisp. He is also credited with the first port of the GNU C compiler to the Intel 386 architecture, used in the original implementation of the Linux kernel.

Schelter obtained his Ph.D. at McGill University in 1972. His mathematical specialties were noncommutative ring theory and computational algebra and its applications, including automated theorem proving in geometry.

In the summer of 2001, age 54, he died suddenly of a heart attack while traveling in Russia.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Bill Schelter


text:
British English

British English is the set of varieties of the English language native to the island of Great Britain. More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in England, or, more broadly, to the collective dialects of English throughout the British Isles taken as a single umbrella variety, for instance additionally incorporating Scottish English, Welsh English, and Ulster English. Tom McArthur in the Oxford Guide to World English acknowledges that British English shares "all the ambiguities and tensions [with] the word 'British' and as a result can be used and interpreted in two ways, more broadly or more narrowly, within a range of blurring and ambiguity"..

Variations exist in formal (both written and spoken) English in the United Kingdom. For example, the adjective wee is almost exclusively used in parts of Scotland, north-east England, Northern Ireland, Ireland, and occasionally Yorkshire, whereas the adjective little is predominant elsewhere. Nevertheless, there is a meaningful degree of uniformity in written English within the United Kingdom, and this could be described by the term British English. The forms of spoken English, however, vary considerably more than in most other areas of the world where English is spoken and so a uniform concept of British English is more difficult to apply to the spoken language.

Globally, countries that are former British colonies or members of the Commonwealth tend to follow British English, as is the case for English used by European Union institutions. In China, both British English and American English are taught. The UK government actively teaches and promotes English around the world and operates in over 200 countries.

History
English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlers from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the northern Netherlands. The resident population at this time was generally speaking Common Brittonic—the insular variety of Continental Celtic, which was influenced by the Roman occupation. This group of languages (Welsh, Cornish, Cumbric) cohabited alongside English into the modern period, but due to their remoteness from the Germanic languages, influence on English was notably limited. However, the degree of influence remains debated, and it has recently been argued that its grammatical influence accounts for the substantial innovations noted between English and the other West Germanic languages.

Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually came to dominate. The original Old English language was then influenced by two waves of invasion: the first was by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who settled in parts of Britain in the eighth and ninth centuries; the second was the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman. These two invasions caused English to become "mixed" to some degree (though it was never a truly mixed language in the strictest sense of the word; mixed languages arise from the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who develop a hybrid tongue for basic communication).

The more idiomatic, concrete and descriptive English is, the more it is from Anglo-Saxon origins. The more intellectual and abstract English is, the more it contains Latin and French influences, e.g. swine (like the Germanic schwein) is the animal in the field bred by the occupied Anglo-Saxons and pork (like the French porc) is the animal at the table eaten by the occupying Normans. Another example is the Anglo-Saxon cu meaning cow, and the French bœuf meaning beef.

Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core of English; the later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance branch of the European languages. This Norman influence entered English largely through the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language of great flexibility and with a huge vocabulary.

Dialects
Dialects and accents vary amongst the four countries of the United Kingdom, as well as within the countries themselves.

The major divisions are normally classified as English English (or English as spoken in England (which is itself broadly grouped into Southern English, West Country, East and West Midlands English and Northern English), Ulster English (in Northern Ireland), Welsh English (not to be confused with the Welsh language), and Scottish English (not to be confused with the Scots language or Scottish Gaelic language). Each group includes a range of dialects, some markedly different from others. The various British dialects also differ in the words that they have borrowed from other languages.

Around the middle of the 15th century, there were points where within the 5 major dialects there were almost 500 ways to spell the word though.

Research
Following its last major survey of English Dialects (1949–1950), the University of Leeds has started work on a new project. In May 2007 the Arts and Humanities Research Council awarded a grant to Leeds to study British regional dialects.

The team are sifting through a large collection of examples of regional slang words and phrases turned up by the "Voices project" run by the BBC, in which they invited the public to send in examples of English still spoken throughout the country. The BBC Voices project also collected hundreds of news articles about how the British speak English from swearing through to items on language schools. This information will also be collated and analysed by Johnson's team both for content and for where it was reported. "Perhaps the most remarkable finding in the Voices study is that the English language is as diverse as ever, despite our increased mobility and constant exposure to other accents and dialects through TV and radio". When discussing the award of the grant in 2007, Leeds University stated: "that they were 'very pleased'—and indeed, 'well chuffed'—at receiving their generous grant. He could, of course, have been 'bostin' if he had come from the Black Country, or if he was a Scouser he would have been well 'made up' over so many spondoolicks, because as a Geordie might say, £460,000 is a 'canny load of chink'."

English regional
Most people in Britain speak with a regional accent or dialect. However, about 2% of Britons speak with an accent called Received Pronunciation (also called "the King's English", "Oxford English" and "BBC English" ), that is essentially region-less. It derives from a mixture of the Midlands and Southern dialects spoken in London in the early modern period. It is frequently used as a model for teaching English to foreign learners.

In the South East there are significantly different accents; the Cockney accent spoken by some East Londoners is strikingly different from Received Pronunciation (RP). Cockney rhyming slang can be (and was initially intended to be) difficult for outsiders to understand, although the extent of its use is often somewhat exaggerated.

Londoners speak with a mixture of accents, depending on ethnicity, neighbourhood, class, age, upbringing, and sundry other factors. Estuary English has been gaining prominence in recent decades: it has some features of RP and some of Cockney. Immigrants to the UK in recent decades have brought many more languages to the country and particularly to London. Surveys started in 1979 by the Inner London Education Authority discovered over 125 languages being spoken domestically by the families of the inner city's schoolchildren. Notably Multicultural London English, a sociolect that emerged in the late 20th century spoken mainly by young, working-class people in multicultural parts of London.

Since the mass internal migration to Northamptonshire in the 1940s and given its position between several major accent regions, it has become a source of various accent developments. In Northampton the older accent has been influenced by overspill Londoners. There is an accent known locally as the Kettering accent, which is a transitional accent between the East Midlands and East Anglian. It is the last southern Midlands accent to use the broad "a" in words like bath or grass (i.e. or ). Conversely crass or plastic use a slender "a". A few miles northwest in Leicestershire the slender "a" becomes more widespread generally. In the town of Corby, 5 mi north, one can find Corbyite which, unlike the Kettering accent, is largely influenced by the West Scottish accent.

Features
Phonological features characteristic of British English revolve around the pronunciation of the letter R, as well as the dental plosive T and some diphthongs specific to this dialect.

T-stopping
Once regarded as a Cockney feature, in a number of forms of spoken British English, has become commonly realised as a glottal stop  when it is in the intervocalic position, in a process called T-glottalisation. National media, being based in London, have seen the glottal stop spreading more widely than it once was in word endings, not being heard as "no" and bottle of water being heard as "bole of waer". It is still stigmatised when used at the beginning and central positions, such as later, while often has all but regained. Other consonants subject to this usage in Cockney English are p, as in paer and k as in baer.

R-dropping
In most areas of England and Wales, outside the West Country and other near-by counties of the UK, the consonant R is not pronounced if not followed by a vowel, lengthening the preceding vowel instead. This phenomenon is known as non-rhoticity. In these same areas, a tendency exists to insert an R between a word ending in a vowel and a next word beginning with a vowel. This is called the intrusive R. It could be understood as a merger, in that words that once ended in an R and words that did not are no longer treated differently. This is also due to London-centric influences. Examples of R-dropping are car and sugar, where the R is not pronounced.

Diphthongisation
British dialects differ on the extent of diphthongisation of long vowels, with southern varieties extensively turning them into diphthongs, and with northern dialects normally preserving many of them. As a comparison, North American varieties could be said to be in-between.

North
Long vowels /iː/ and /uː/ are usually preserved, and in several areas also /oː/ and /eː/, as in go and say (unlike other varieties of English, that change them to [oʊ] and [eɪ] respectively). Some areas go as far as not diphthongising medieval /iː/ and /uː/, that give rise to modern /aɪ/ and /aʊ/; that is, for example, in the traditional accent of Newcastle upon Tyne, 'out' will sound as 'oot', and in parts of Scotland and North-West England, 'my' will be pronounced as 'me'.

South
Long vowels /iː/ and /uː/ are diphthongised to [ɪi] and [ʊu] respectively (or, more technically, [ʏʉ], with a raised tongue), so that ee and oo in feed and food are pronounced with a movement. The diphthong [oʊ] is also pronounced with a greater movement, normally [əʊ], [əʉ] or [əɨ].

People in groups
Dropping a morphological grammatical number, in collective nouns, is stronger in British English than North American English. This is to treat them as plural when once grammatically singular, a perceived natural number prevails, especially when applying to institutional nouns and groups of people.

The noun 'police', for example, undergoes this treatment:

"Police are investigating the theft of work tools worth £500 from a van at the Sprucefield park and ride car park in Lisburn."

A football team can be treated likewise:

"Arsenal have lost just one of 20 home Premier League matches against Manchester City."

This tendency can be observed in texts produced already in the 19th century. For example, Jane Austen, a British author, writes in Chapter 4 of Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813:"All the world are good and agreeable in your eyes." However, in Chapter 16, the grammatical number is used. "The world is blinded by his fortune and consequence."

Negatives
Some dialects of British English use negative concords, also known as double negatives. Rather than changing a word or using a positive, words like nobody, not, nothing, and never would be used in the same sentence. While this does not occur in Standard English, it does occur in non-standard dialects. The double negation follows the idea of two different morphemes, one that causes the double negation, and one that is used for the point or the verb.

Standardisation
As with English around the world, the English language as used in the United Kingdom is governed by convention rather than formal code: there is no body equivalent to the Académie française or the Royal Spanish Academy. Dictionaries (for example, the Oxford English Dictionary, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, the Chambers Dictionary, and the Collins Dictionary) record usage rather than attempting to prescribe it. In addition, vocabulary and usage change with time: words are freely borrowed from other languages and other strains of English, and neologisms are frequent.

For historical reasons dating back to the rise of London in the ninth century, the form of language spoken in London and the East Midlands became standard English within the Court, and ultimately became the basis for generally accepted use in the law, government, literature and education in Britain. The standardisation of British English is thought to be from both dialect levelling and a thought of social superiority. Speaking in the Standard dialect created class distinctions; those who did not speak the standard English would be considered of a lesser class or social status and often discounted or considered of a low intelligence. Another contribution to the standardisation of British English was the introduction of the printing press to England in the mid-15th century. In doing so, William Caxton enabled a common language and spelling to be dispersed among the entirety of England at a much faster rate.

Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) was a large step in the English-language spelling reform, where the purification of language focused on standardising both speech and spelling. By the early 20th century, British authors had produced numerous books intended as guides to English grammar and usage, a few of which achieved sufficient acclaim to have remained in print for long periods and to have been reissued in new editions after some decades. These include, most notably of all, Fowler's Modern English Usage and The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers.

Detailed guidance on many aspects of writing British English for publication is included in style guides issued by various publishers including The Times newspaper, the Oxford University Press and the Cambridge University Press. The Oxford University Press guidelines were originally drafted as a single broadsheet page by Horace Henry Hart, and were at the time (1893) the first guide of their type in English; they were gradually expanded and eventually published, first as Hart's Rules, and in 2002 as part of The Oxford Manual of Style. Comparable in authority and stature to The Chicago Manual of Style for published American English, the Oxford Manual is a fairly exhaustive standard for published British English that writers can turn to in the absence of specific guidance from their publishing house.

Relationship with Commonwealth English
British English is the basis of, and very similar to Commonwealth English. Commonwealth English is English spoken and written in Commonwealth countries, though often with some local variation. This includes English spoken in Australia, Malta, New Zealand, Nigeria, and South Africa. It also includes South Asian English used in South Asia, in English varieties in Southeast Asia, and in parts of Africa. Canadian English is based on British English, but has more influence from American English, often grouped together due to their close proximity. British English, for example, is the closest English to Indian English, but Indian English has extra vocabulary and some English words are assigned different meanings.

title: British English


text:
Talk:British English

External link
I have found a video about British accents (20 British Accents in 1 Video), but I do not know whether Wikipedia will accept it. תיל"ם (talk) 15:41, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

 * Generally no. See WP:UGC Robynthehode (talk) 15:54, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

 * And what about this one: A Tour of The Accents of England? תיל"ם (talk) 13:31, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

The dustbin
This is my term for the parenthesised bit in the standard opening between the title of the article and the description of what it is. Here it contains three supposed alternative ways of writing "British English". I cannot see that any of them belongs here: "BrE" is a fairly common, and self-evident abbreviation; "en-GB" is an ISO 639-1 code for "English (UK)," which might or might not be the same as "British English", and "BE" is someone else's code. Anyone writing a dictionary is entitled to make up their own abbreviation, if they have such a category. I pinged user Isochrone because you put the Lexico reference next to the dustbin; I can't see anything at this reference other than an explanation that "British English" means the noun (language) "English" qualified by the adjective "British", so I don't really understand this. The objection to the dustbin is that it clutters the lead sentence, causing people like Google to cite the lead paragraph with anything in parenthesis omitted, sometimes seriously distorting the text. I suggest that mention of codes and abbreviations could be made further down the article. Imaginatorium (talk) 08:48, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

 * @Imaginatorium thanks, I moved the Lexico reference because someone on this talk said it was mentioned in the OED and I moved it without checking (oops). OED is on the Wikipedia Library so I can check in a bit to use that as a source. I agree that it might not be best to put these in the lead, I like how American English has done it, where they used a footnote in the lead to offer the alternative abbreviations. –  I s o chrone (T) 09:48, 13 October 2023 (UTC)
 * You mean ODE? The OED isn't in TWL. Nardog (talk) 18:55, 13 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Apologies, I also have access to the OED from another source. I can't check it now, but I'll get to it later. –  I s o chrone (T) 21:20, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Citation 7 "McArthur (2002), p. 45." is unclear. It probably means the book with the ISBN 0198662483, but since no title is specified I can't be sure. Joendter (talk) 22:01, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
 * @Joendter the title is in the prose immediately preceding the citation-- it is that book. –  Iso chrone (talk) 15:37, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

About Brits changing “British English” to “English”
I went through the revision history for my own entertainment and was surprised by the amount of British people changing “British English” to “English” justifying that it’s the default English and other dialects (like American English) branch from it.

Since we all know in reality American English is the true default dialect of English, should something be added to the top of this talk page discussing the current consensus (or at least I’m assuming there’s consensus, all of their edits immediately get reverted) to keep the term “British English” in the article? I’ve seen Q&A sections in talk pages before, I was thinking one of those could be added. 15:09, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Edit: I've gont through the revision history again, it seems like there's less edits making this change than I previously thought, I was fairly tired when I initially went through the revision history and probably clicked on the same revision a few times without realising. I still stand by what I said above though Theooolone ─ ( Talk ) 17:50, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Heads-up

 * This talk page is for discussing the British English article, not changes in the way that languages are denoted on Wikipedia. I think you can discuss this at the village pump or wherever this nerdy type of stuff are discussed.

 * 37.251.220.212 (talk) 14:23, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Shortcomings
The section "English regional" is noticeably imbalanced. At present a little attention is paid to RP, but the section focuses on London and a part of Northants and Leicestershire to the exclusion of everywhere else.

There is so much more work needed to be done to expand the section and better reflect the article's title. For example, recognition of other regions of England, not only those names popularly known (such as Scouse, Geordie, etc) but also to recognise the way that dialects and accents frequently change between places that are less than 40 miles apart. 2600:1700:EA01:1090:1CC8:B980:4211:B252 (talk) 00:22, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Will I be seeing you at school tomorrow 2601:243:C003:2750:F89A:CA6E:171:177A (talk) 03:05, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:British English


text:
Battle

A battle is an occurrence of combat in warfare between opposing military units of any number or size. A war usually consists of multiple battles. In general, a battle is a military engagement that is well defined in duration, area, and force commitment. An engagement with only limited commitment between the forces and without decisive results is sometimes called a skirmish.

The word "battle" can also be used infrequently to refer to an entire operational campaign, although this usage greatly diverges from its conventional or customary meaning. Generally, the word "battle" is used for such campaigns if referring to a protracted combat encounter in which either one or both of the combatants had the same methods, resources, and strategic objectives throughout the encounter. Some prominent examples of this would be the Battle of the Atlantic, Battle of Britain, and the Battle of France, all in World War II.

Wars and military campaigns are guided by military strategy, whereas battles take place on a level of planning and execution known as operational mobility. German strategist Carl von Clausewitz stated that "the employment of battles ... to achieve the object of war" was the essence of strategy.

Etymology
Battle is a loanword from the Old French bataille, first attested in 1297, from Late Latin battualia, meaning "exercise of soldiers and gladiators in fighting and fencing", from Late Latin (taken from Germanic) battuere "beat", from which the English word battery is also derived via Middle English batri.

Characteristics
The defining characteristic of the fight as a concept in military science has changed with the variations in the organisation, employment and technology of military forces. The English military historian John Keegan suggested an ideal definition of battle as "something which happens between two armies leading to the moral then physical disintegration of one or the other of them" but the origins and outcomes of battles can rarely be summarized so neatly. Battle in the 20th and 21st centuries is defined as the combat between large components of the forces in a military campaign, used to achieve military objectives. Where the duration of the battle is longer than a week, it is often for reasons of planning called an operation. Battles can be planned, encountered or forced by one side when the other is unable to withdraw from combat.

A battle always has as its purpose the reaching of a mission goal by use of military force. A victory in the battle is achieved when one of the opposing sides forces the other to abandon its mission and surrender its forces, routs the other (i.e., forces it to retreat or renders it militarily ineffective for further combat operations) or annihilates the latter, resulting in their deaths or capture. A battle may end in a Pyrrhic victory, which ultimately favors the defeated party. If no resolution is reached in a battle, it can result in a stalemate. A conflict in which one side is unwilling to reach a decision by a direct battle using conventional warfare often becomes an insurgency.

Until the 19th century the majority of battles were of short duration, many lasting a part of a day. (The Battle of Preston (1648), the Battle of Nations (1813) and the Battle of Gettysburg (1863) were exceptional in lasting three days.) This was mainly due to the difficulty of supplying armies in the field or conducting night operations. The means of prolonging a battle was typically with siege warfare. Improvements in transport and the sudden evolving of trench warfare, with its siege-like nature during the First World War in the 20th century, lengthened the duration of battles to days and weeks. This created the requirement for unit rotation to prevent combat fatigue, with troops preferably not remaining in a combat area of operations for more than a month.

The use of the term "battle" in military history has led to its misuse when referring to almost any scale of combat, notably by strategic forces involving hundreds of thousands of troops that may be engaged in either one battle at a time (Battle of Leipzig) or operations (Battle of Wuhan). The space a battle occupies depends on the range of the weapons of the combatants. A "battle" in this broader sense may be of long duration and take place over a large area, as in the case of the Battle of Britain or the Battle of the Atlantic. Until the advent of artillery and aircraft, battles were fought with the two sides within sight, if not reach, of each other. The depth of the battlefield has also increased in modern warfare with inclusion of the supporting units in the rear areas; supply, artillery, medical personnel etc. often outnumber the front-line combat troops.

Battles are made up of a multitude of individual combats, skirmishes and small engagements and the combatants will usually only experience a small part of the battle. To the infantryman, there may be little to distinguish between combat as part of a minor raid or a big offensive, nor is it likely that he anticipates the future course of the battle; few of the British infantry who went over the top on the first day on the Somme, 1 July 1916, would have anticipated that the battle would last five months. Some of the Allied infantry who had just dealt a crushing defeat to the French at the Battle of Waterloo fully expected to have to fight again the next day (at the Battle of Wavre).

Battlespace
Battlespace is a unified strategic concept to integrate and combine armed forces for the military theatre of operations, including air, information, land, sea and space. It includes the environment, factors and conditions that must be understood to apply combat power, protect the force or complete the mission, comprising enemy and friendly armed forces; facilities; weather; terrain; and the electromagnetic spectrum.

Factors
Battles are decided by various factors, the number and quality of combatants and equipment, the skill of commanders and terrain are among the most prominent. Weapons and armour can be decisive; on many occasions armies have achieved victory through more advanced weapons than those of their opponents. An extreme example was in the Battle of Omdurman, in which a large army of Sudanese Mahdists armed in a traditional manner were destroyed by an Anglo-Egyptian force equipped with Maxim machine guns and artillery.

On some occasions, simple weapons employed in an unorthodox fashion have proven advantageous; Swiss pikemen gained many victories through their ability to transform a traditionally defensive weapon into an offensive one. Zulus in the early 19th century were victorious in battles against their rivals in part because they adopted a new kind of spear, the iklwa. Forces with inferior weapons have still emerged victorious at times, for example in the Wars of Scottish Independence. Disciplined troops are often of greater importance; at the Battle of Alesia, the Romans were greatly outnumbered but won because of superior training.

Battles can also be determined by terrain. Capturing high ground has been the main tactic in innumerable battles. An army that holds the high ground forces the enemy to climb and thus wear themselves down. Areas of jungle and forest, with dense vegetation act as force-multipliers, of benefit to inferior armies. Terrain may have lost importance in modern warfare, due to the advent of aircraft, though the terrain is still vital for camouflage, especially for guerrilla warfare.

Generals and commanders also play an important role, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Khalid ibn Walid, Subutai and Napoleon Bonaparte were all skilled generals and their armies were extremely successful at times. An army that can trust the commands of their leaders with conviction in its success invariably has a higher morale than an army that doubts its every move. The British in the naval Battle of Trafalgar owed its success to the reputation of Admiral Lord Nelson.

Types
Battles can be fought on land, at sea, and in the air. Naval battles have occurred since before the 5th century BC. Air battles have been far less common, due to their late conception, the most prominent being the Battle of Britain in 1940. Since the Second World War, land or sea battles have come to rely on air support. During the Battle of Midway, five aircraft carriers were sunk without either fleet coming into direct contact.

 * A pitched battle is an encounter where opposing sides agree on the time and place of combat.
 * A battle of encounter (or encounter battle) is a meeting engagement where the opposing sides collide in the field without either having prepared their attack or defence.
 * A battle of attrition aims to inflict losses on an enemy that are less sustainable compared to one's own losses. These need not be greater numerical losses – if one side is much more numerous than the other then pursuing a strategy based on attrition can work even if casualties on both sides are about equal.  Many battles of the Western Front in the First World War were intentionally (Verdun) or unintentionally (Somme) attrition battles.
 * A battle of breakthrough aims to pierce the enemy's defences, thereby exposing the vulnerable flanks which can be turned.
 * A battle of encirclement—the of the German battle of manoeuvre (bewegungskrieg)—surrounds the enemy in a pocket.
 * A battle of envelopment involves an attack on one or both flanks; the classic example being the double envelopment of the Battle of Cannae.
 * A battle of annihilation is one in which the defeated party is destroyed in the field, such as the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile.

Battles are usually hybrids of different types listed above.

A decisive battle is one with political effects, determining the course of the war such as the Battle of Smolensk or bringing hostilities to an end, such as the Battle of Hastings or the Battle of Hattin. A decisive battle can change the balance of power or boundaries between countries. The concept of the decisive battle became popular with the publication in 1851 of Edward Creasy's The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World. British military historians J.F.C. Fuller (The Decisive Battles of the Western World) and B.H. Liddell Hart (Decisive Wars of History), among many others, have written books in the style of Creasy's work.

Land
There is an obvious difference in the way battles have been fought. Early battles were probably fought between rival hunting bands as unorganized crowds. During the Battle of Megiddo, the first reliably documented battle in the fifteenth century BC, both armies were organised and disciplined; during the many wars of the Roman Empire, barbarians continued to use mob tactics.

As the Age of Enlightenment dawned, armies began to fight in highly disciplined lines. Each would follow the orders from their officers and fight as a unit instead of individuals. Armies were divided into regiments, battalions, companies and platoons. These armies would march, line up and fire in divisions.

Native Americans, on the other hand, did not fight in lines, using guerrilla tactics. American colonists and European forces continued using disciplined lines into the American Civil War.

A new style arose from the 1850s to the First World War, known as trench warfare, which also led to tactical radio. Chemical warfare also began in 1915.

By the Second World War, the use of the smaller divisions, platoons and companies became much more important as precise operations became vital. Instead of the trench stalemate of 1915–1917, in the Second World War, battles developed where small groups encountered other platoons. As a result, elite squads became much more recognized and distinguishable. Maneuver warfare also returned with an astonishing pace with the advent of the tank, replacing the cannon of the Enlightenment Age. Artillery has since gradually replaced the use of frontal troops. Modern battles resemble those of the Second World War, along with indirect combat through the use of aircraft and missiles which has come to constitute a large portion of wars in place of battles, where battles are now mostly reserved for capturing cities.

Naval
One significant difference of modern naval battles, as opposed to earlier forms of combat is the use of marines, which introduced amphibious warfare. Today, a marine is actually an infantry regiment that sometimes fights solely on land and is no longer tied to the navy. A good example of an ancient naval battle is the Battle of Salamis. Most ancient naval battles were fought by fast ships using the battering ram to sink opposing fleets or steer close enough for boarding in hand-to-hand combat. Troops were often used to storm enemy ships as used by Romans and pirates. This tactic was usually used by civilizations that could not beat the enemy with ranged weaponry. Another invention in the late Middle Ages was the use of Greek fire by the Byzantines, which was used to set enemy fleets on fire. Empty demolition ships utilized the tactic to crash into opposing ships and set it afire with an explosion. After the invention of cannons, naval warfare became useful as support units for land warfare. During the 19th century, the development of mines led to a new type of naval warfare. The ironclad, first used in the American Civil War, resistant to cannons, soon made the wooden ship obsolete. The invention of military submarines, during World War I, brought naval warfare to both above and below the surface. With the development of military aircraft during World War II, battles were fought in the sky as well as below the ocean. Aircraft carriers have since become the central unit in naval warfare, acting as a mobile base for lethal aircraft.

Aerial
Although the use of aircraft has for the most part always been used as a supplement to land or naval engagements, since their first major military use in World War I aircraft have increasingly taken on larger roles in warfare. During World War I, the primary use was for reconnaissance, and small-scale bombardment. Aircraft began becoming much more prominent in the Spanish Civil War and especially World War II. Aircraft design began specializing, primarily into two types: bombers, which carried explosive payloads to bomb land targets or ships; and fighter-interceptors, which were used to either intercept incoming aircraft or to escort and protect bombers (engagements between fighter aircraft were known as dog fights). Some of the more notable aerial battles in this period include the Battle of Britain and the Battle of Midway. Another important use of aircraft came with the development of the helicopter, which first became heavily used during the Vietnam War, and still continues to be widely used today to transport and augment ground forces. Today, direct engagements between aircraft are rare – the most modern fighter-interceptors carry much more extensive bombing payloads, and are used to bomb precision land targets, rather than to fight other aircraft. Anti-aircraft batteries are used much more extensively to defend against incoming aircraft than interceptors. Despite this, aircraft today are much more extensively used as the primary tools for both army and navy, as evidenced by the prominent use of helicopters to transport and support troops, the use of aerial bombardment as the "first strike" in many engagements, and the replacement of the battleship with the aircraft carrier as the center of most modern navies.

Naming

Battles are usually named after some feature of the battlefield geography, such as a town, forest or river, commonly prefixed "Battle of...". Occasionally battles are named after the date on which they took place, such as The Glorious First of June. In the Middle Ages it was considered important to settle on a suitable name for a battle which could be used by the chroniclers. After Henry V of England defeated a French army on October 25, 1415, he met with the senior French herald and they agreed to name the battle after the nearby castle and so it was called the Battle of Agincourt. In other cases, the sides adopted different names for the same battle, such as the Battle of Gallipoli which is known in Turkey as the Battle of Çanakkale. During the American Civil War, the Union tended to name the battles after the nearest watercourse, such as the Battle of Wilsons Creek and the Battle of Stones River, whereas the Confederates favoured the nearby towns, as in the Battles of Chancellorsville and Murfreesboro. Occasionally both names for the same battle entered the popular culture, such as the First Battle of Bull Run and the Second Battle of Bull Run, which are also referred to as the First and Second Battles of Manassas.

Sometimes in desert warfare, there is no nearby town name to use; map coordinates gave the name to the Battle of 73 Easting in the First Gulf War. Some place names have become synonymous with battles, such as the Passchendaele, Pearl Harbor, the Alamo, Thermopylae and Waterloo. Military operations, many of which result in battle, are given codenames, which are not necessarily meaningful or indicative of the type or the location of the battle. Operation Market Garden and Operation Rolling Thunder are examples of battles known by their military codenames. When a battleground is the site of more than one battle in the same conflict, the instances are distinguished by ordinal number, such as the First and Second Battles of Bull Run. An extreme case are the twelve Battles of the Isonzo—First to Twelfth—between Italy and Austria-Hungary during the First World War.

Some battles are named for the convenience of military historians so that periods of combat can be neatly distinguished from one another. Following the First World War, the British Battles Nomenclature Committee was formed to decide on standard names for all battles and subsidiary actions. To the soldiers who did the fighting, the distinction was usually academic; a soldier fighting at Beaumont Hamel on November 13, 1916, was probably unaware he was taking part in what the committee named the Battle of the Ancre. Many combats are too small to be battles; terms such as "action", "affair", "skirmish", "firefight", "raid", or "offensive patrol" are used to describe small military encounters. These combats often take place within the time and space of a battle and while they may have an objective, they are not necessarily "decisive". Sometimes the soldiers are unable to immediately gauge the significance of the combat; in the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, some British officers were in doubt as to whether the day's events merited the title of "battle" or would be called an "action".

Effects
Battles affect the individuals who take part, as well as the political actors. Personal effects of battle range from mild psychological issues to permanent and crippling injuries. Some battle-survivors have nightmares about the conditions they encountered or abnormal reactions to certain sights or sounds and some experience flashbacks. Physical effects of battle can include scars, amputations, lesions, loss of bodily functions, blindness, paralysis and death. Battles affect politics; a decisive battle can cause the losing side to surrender, while a Pyrrhic victory such as the Battle of Asculum can cause the winning side to reconsider its goals. Battles in civil wars have often decided the fate of monarchs or political factions. Famous examples include the Wars of the Roses, as well as the Jacobite risings. Battles affect the commitment of one side or the other to the continuance of a war, for example the Battle of Inchon and the Battle of Huế during the Tet Offensive.

title: Battle


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Berry Berenson

Berinthia "Berry" Berenson-Perkins ( Berenson; April 14, 1948 – September 11, 2001) was an American actress, model and photographer. She was the widow of actor Anthony Perkins. She died in the September 11 attacks as a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11.

Early life
Berry Berenson was born in Murray Hill, Manhattan, New York City. Her mother was born Maria-Luisa Yvonne Radha de Wendt de Kerlor, better known as Gogo Schiaparelli, a socialite of Italian, Swiss, & French ancestry. Her father, Robert Lawrence Berenson, was an American career diplomat turned shipping executive; he was of Russian-Jewish and Polish-Jewish descent, and his family's original surname was "Valvrojenski".

Berenson's maternal grandmother was the Italian-born fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, and her maternal grandfather was Wilhelm de Wendt de Kerlor, a Theosophist and psychic medium. Her elder sister, Marisa Berenson, became a well-known model and actress. She also was a great-grandniece of Giovanni Schiaparelli, an Italian astronomer who believed he had discovered the supposed canals of Mars, and a second cousin, once removed, of art expert Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) and his sister Senda Berenson (1868–1954), an athlete and educator who was one of the first two women elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Career
Following a brief modeling career in the late 1960s, Berenson became a freelance photographer. By 1973, her photographs had been published in Life, Glamour, Vogue and Newsweek.

Berenson studied acting at New York's The American Place Theatre with Wynn Handman along with Richard Gere, Philip Anglim, Penelope Milford, Robert Ozn, Ingrid Boulting and her sister Marisa.

Berenson also appeared in several motion pictures. She starred opposite Anthony Perkins in the 1978 Alan Rudolph film Remember My Name, and appeared with Jeff Bridges in the 1979 film Winter Kills and Malcolm McDowell in Cat People (1982).

Personal life and death
On August 9, 1973, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Berenson, three months pregnant, married her future Remember My Name co-star Anthony Perkins. The couple raised two sons: actor-director Oz Perkins and folk/rock singer-songwriter Elvis Perkins. They remained married until Perkins died from AIDS-related complications on September 12, 1992.

Berenson died on September 11, 2001, as she was returning home to Los Angeles following a holiday on Cape Cod. She and the rest of the passengers and crew aboard American Airlines Flight 11 died when it was hijacked and crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center during the September 11 attacks in Manhattan.

At the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Berenson is memorialized at the North Pool, on Panel N-76.

title: Berry Berenson