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Youngest Toba eruption

The Toba eruption (sometimes called the Toba supereruption or the Youngest Toba eruption) was a supervolcanic eruption that occurred about 74,000 years ago during the Late Pleistocene at the site of present-day Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia. It was the last in a series of at least four caldera-forming eruptions at this location, with the earlier known caldera having formed around 1.2 million years ago. This last eruption had an estimated VEI of 8, making it the largest-known explosive volcanic eruption in the Quaternary, and one of the largest known explosive eruptions in the Earth's history.

Chronology of the Toba eruption
The exact year of the eruption is unknown, but the pattern of ash deposits suggests that it occurred during the northern summer because only the summer monsoon could have deposited Toba ashfall in the South China Sea. The eruption lasted perhaps 9 to 14 days. The most recent two high-precision argon–argon datings dated the eruption to 73,880 ± 320 and 73,700 ± 300 years ago. Five distinct magma bodies were activated within a few centuries before the eruption. The eruption commenced with small and limited air-fall and was directly followed by the main phase of ignimbrite flows. The ignimbrite phase is characterized by low eruption fountain, but co-ignimbrite column developed on top of pyroclastic flows reached a height of 32 km. Petrological constraints on sulfur emission yielded a wide range from $10,000,000,000,000$ to $1,000,000,000,000,000 g$, depending on the existence of separate sulfur gas in the Toba magma chamber. The lower end of estimate is due to the low solubility of sulfur in the magma. Ice core records estimate the sulfur emission on the order of $100,000,000,000,000 g$.

Effects of the eruption
Bill Rose and Craig Chesner of Michigan Technological University have estimated that the total amount of material released in the eruption was at least 2800 km3 —about 2000 km3 of ignimbrite that flowed over the ground, and approximately 800 km3 that fell as ash mostly to the west. However, as more outcrops become available, the most recent estimate of eruptive volume is 3800 km3 dense-rock equivalent (DRE), of which 1800 km3 was deposited as ash fall and 2000 km3 as ignimbrite, making this eruption the largest during the Quaternary period. Previous volume estimates have ranged from 2000 km3 to 6000 km3. Inside the caldera, the maximum thickness of pyroclastic flows is over 600 m. The outflow sheet originally covered an area of 20000-30000 km2 with thickness nearly 100 m, likely reaching into the Indian Ocean and the Straits of Malacca. The air-fall of this eruption blanketed the Indian subcontinent in a layer of 5 cm ash, the Arabian Sea in 1 mm, the South China Sea in 3.5 cm, and Central Indian Ocean Basin in 10 cm. Its horizon of ashfall covered an area of more than 38000000 km2 in 1 cm or more thickness. In Sub-Saharan Africa, microscopic glass shards from this eruption are also discovered on the south coast of South Africa, in the lowlands of northwest Ethiopia, in Lake Malawi, and in Lake Chala. In South China, Toba tephras is found in Huguangyan Maar Lake.

The subsequent collapse formed a caldera that filled with water, creating Lake Toba. The island in the center of the lake is formed by a resurgent dome.

Climate at time of eruption
Greenland stadial 20 (GS20) is a millennium-long cold event in the north Atlantic ocean that started around the time of Toba eruption. The timing of the initiation of GS20 is dated to 74.0–74.2 kyr, and the entire event lasted about 1,500 years. It is the stadial part of Dansgaard–Oeschger event 20 (DO20), commonly explained by an abrupt reduction in the strength of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). Weaker AMOC caused warming in Southern Ocean and Antarctica, and this asynchrony is known as bipolar seesaw. The start of GS20 cooling event corresponds to the start of Antarctic Isotope Maxima 19 (AIM19) warming event. GS20 was associated with iceberg discharges into the North Atlantic, thus it was also named Heinrich stadial 7a. Heinrich events tend to be longer, colder and with weaker AMOC in the Atlantic ocean than other DO stadials. From 74 to 58 kyr, Earth transitioned from interglacial MIS 5 to glacial MIS 4, experiencing cooling and glacial expansion. This transition is a part of Pleistocene interglacial-glacial cycle driven by variations in the earth's orbit. Ocean temperature cooled by 0.9 C-change. Sea level fell 60 m. Northern Hemisphere ice sheets embarked on significant expansion and surpassed the extent of Last Glacial Maximum in eastern Europe, Northeast Asia and the North American Cordillera. Southern Hemisphere glaciation grew to its maximum extent during MIS 4. Australasian region, Africa and Europe were characterized by increasingly cold and arid environment.

Possible climate records of eruption
While Toba eruption occurred in the backdrop of rapid climate transitions of GS20 and MIS 4 triggered by changes in ocean currents and insolation, whether the eruption played any role in accelerating these events is much more debated. South China Sea marine records of climate, sampled at every centennial interval, shows 1 C-change cooling above Toba ash layer for a thousand year but the authors concede that it may just be GS20. Arabian Sea marine records confirm that Toba ash occurred after the onset of GS20 but also that GS20 is not colder than GS21 in the records, from which authors conclude that the eruption did not intensify GS20 cooling. Dense sampling of environmental records, at every 6–9 year interval, in Lake Malawi, show no cooling-induced change in lake ecology and in grassy woodlands after the deposition of Toba ash, but cooling-forced aridity killed high elevation afromontane forests. The Lake Malawi studies concluded that the environmental effects of the eruption were mild and limited to less than a decade in East Africa, but these studies are questioned due to sediment mixing which would have diminished the cooling signal. Environmental records from a Middle Stone Age site in Ethiopia, however, shows that a severe drought occurred concurrently with Toba ash layer which altered early human foraging behaviours.

No Toba ash has been identified in ice core records, but four sulfate events within the ice strata have been proposed to possibly represent the deposition of aerosols from Toba eruption. One sulfate event at 73.75–74.16 kyr, which has all the characteristics of the Toba eruption, is among the largest sulfate loadings that have ever been identified. In the ice core records, GS20 cooling was already underway by the time of sulfate deposition, nonetheless a 110-year period of accelerated cooling followed the sulfate event, and the authors interpret this acceleration as AMOC weakened by the Toba eruption.

Climate modeling
The modeled climate effects of the Toba eruption hinges on the mass of sulfurous gases and aerosol microphysical processes. Modeling on an emission of $850,000,000,000,000 g$ of sulfur, which is 100 times the 1991 Pinatubo sulphur, volcanic winter has a maximum global mean cooling of 3.5 C-change and returns gradually within the range of natural variability 5 years after the eruption. An initiation of 1,000-year cold period or ice age is not supported by the model. Two other emission scenarios, $100,000,000,000,000 g$ and $1,000,000,000,000,000 g$, are investigated using state-of-art simulations provided by the Community Earth System Model. Maximum global mean cooling is 2.3 C-change for the lower emission and 4.1 C-change for the higher emission. Strong decrease in precipitation occurs in high emission. Negative temperature anomalies return to less than 1 C-change within 3 and 6 years for each emission scenario after the eruption. But so far no model can simulate aerosol microphysical processes with sufficient accuracy, empirical constraints from historical eruptions suggest that aerosol size may substantially reduce magnitude of cooling to less than 1.5 C-change no matter how much sulfur emitted.

Toba catastrophe theory
The Toba catastrophe theory holds that the eruption caused a severe global volcanic winter of six to ten years and contributed to a 1,000-year-long cooling episode, resulting in a genetic bottleneck in humans. However, some physical evidence disputes the association with the millennium-long cold event and genetic bottleneck, and some consider the theory disproven.

History
In 1972, an analysis of human hemoglobins found very few variants, and to account for the low frequency of variation human population must have been as low as a few thousand until very recently. More genetic studies confirmed an effective population on the order of 10,000 for much of human history. Subsequent research on the differences in human mitochondrial DNA sequences dated a rapid growth from a small effective population size of 1,000 to 10,000, sometime between 35 and 65 kyr.

In 1993, science journalist Ann Gibbons posited that population growth was suppressed by the cold climate of the last Pleistocene Ice Age, possibly exacerbated by the Toba super-eruption which at the time was dated to between 73 and 75 kyr near the beginning of glacial period MIS 4. The subsequent explosive human expansion was believed to be the result of the end of the ice age. Geologist Michael R. Rampino of New York University and volcanologist Stephen Self of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa supported her theory. In 1998, anthropologist Stanley H. Ambrose of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign hypothesized that the Toba eruption caused a human population crash to only a few thousand surviving individuals, and the subsequent recovery was suppressed by the global glacial condition of MIS 4 until the climate eventually transitioned to the warmer condition of MIS 3 about 60,000 years ago, during which rapid human population expansion occurred.

Possible effects on Homo
At least two other Homo lineages, H. neanderthals, and Denisovans, survived the Toba eruption and subsequent MIS 4 ice age, as their latest presence are dated to ca. 40 kyr, and ca. 55 kyr. Other lineages including H. floresiensis, H. luzonensis, and Penghu 1 may have also survived through the eruption. More recently, reconstructions of human demographic history using whole-genome sequencing  and discoveries of archaeological cultures with Toba ash layer  add further light to how humans had fared during the eruption and the following GS20 and MIS 4 ice age.

Human demographic history
Recent analysis applies Markov model to the complete set of genetic material to infer human population history. In non-African populations, studies recover a long-term steep decline in numbers starting 200 kyr and reaching the lowest point around 40–60 kyr. During this bottleneck non-African populations experienced 5- to 15-fold reduction, with only 1,000–3,000 remaining individuals at 50 kyr, consistent with the earliest mtDNA studies. This severe non-African contraction is consistent with founder effect caused by Out-of-Africa dispersal. As a small group with a size of a few thousand people migrated from the African continent into the Near East, the drastic reduction in numbers imprinted on non-African genomic diversity. Genetic analysis identified 56 selective sweeps related to cold adaptations in non-African populations, of which 31 sweeps occurred during 72–97 kyr. This event of closely timed selections is named Arabian Standstill and may have been caused by the severe cold arid conditions from the onset of MIS 4 and exacerbated by Toba super-eruption.

African populations experienced a slightly earlier, milder bottleneck and recovered earlier. Luhya and Maasai people attained their lowest numbers around 70–80 kyr, while Yoruba people reached a nadir around 50 kyr, though the long-term declining trend already started before 200 kyr. The estimated remaining effective population sizes are around 10,000 individuals, larger than the estimated non-African size during their bottleneck. Unlike the non-African populations, there is no consensus as to the cause of African bottleneck. Proposed causes include climatic deterioration (from MIS 5, Toba eruption, GS20 and/or MIS 4), reduction in substructure across African populations, and founder effects from the dispersal within Africa.

Earlier genetic analysis of Alu sequences across the entire human genome has shown that the effective human population size was less than 26,000 at 1.2 million years ago; possible explanations for the low population size of human ancestors may include repeated population crashes or periodic replacement events from competing Homo subspecies. Whole-genome analysis similarly recovers very low African population sizes around 1 million years ago. This 1 million year old bottleneck is thought to have been caused by severe ice age MIS 22 which marked the mid-Pleistocene climate transition with widespread aridity across Africa.

Archaeological studies
Other research has cast doubt on an association between the Toba Caldera Complex and a genetic bottleneck. For example, ancient stone tools at the Jurreru Valley in southern India were found above and below a thick layer of ash from the Toba eruption and were very similar across these layers, suggesting that the dust clouds from the eruption did not wipe out this local population. However, another site in India, the Middle Son Valley, exhibits evidence of a major population decline and it has been suggested that the abundant springs of the Jurreru Valley may have offered its inhabitants unique protection. At the Jurreru Valley in southern India, Middle Paleolithic stone tools below the Toba ash layer are dated by OSL to 77±4 kyr, while the age of stone tools above the ash layer is constrained to be no older than 55 kyr. This age gap is suspected to be due to the removal of post-eruption sediments or decimation of the local population until re-occupation at 55 kyr. Additional archaeological evidence from southern and northern India also suggests a lack of evidence for effects of the eruption on local populations, causing the authors of the study to conclude, "many forms of life survived the supereruption, contrary to other research which has suggested significant animal extinctions and genetic bottlenecks". However, some researchers have questioned the techniques utilized to date artifacts to the period subsequent to the Toba supervolcano. The Toba Catastrophe also coincides with the disappearance of the Skhul and Qafzeh hominins. Evidence from pollen analysis has suggested prolonged deforestation in South Asia, and some researchers have suggested that the Toba eruption may have forced humans to adopt new adaptive strategies, which may have permitted them to replace Neanderthals and "other archaic human species".

Genetic bottlenecks in other mammals
Some evidence indicates population crashes of other animals after the Toba eruption. The populations of the Eastern African chimpanzee, Bornean orangutan, central Indian macaque, cheetah and tiger, all expanded from very small populations around 70,000–55,000 years ago.

title: Youngest Toba eruption


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Population bottleneck

A population bottleneck or genetic bottleneck is a sharp reduction in the size of a population due to environmental events such as famines, earthquakes, floods, fires, disease, and droughts; or human activities such as genocide, speciocide, widespread violence or intentional culling. Such events can reduce the variation in the gene pool of a population; thereafter, a smaller population, with a smaller genetic diversity, remains to pass on genes to future generations of offspring. Genetic diversity remains lower, increasing only when gene flow from another population occurs or very slowly increasing with time as random mutations occur. This results in a reduction in the robustness of the population and in its ability to adapt to and survive selecting environmental changes, such as climate change or a shift in available resources. Alternatively, if survivors of the bottleneck are the individuals with the greatest genetic fitness, the frequency of the fitter genes within the gene pool is increased, while the pool itself is reduced.

The genetic drift caused by a population bottleneck can change the proportional random distribution of alleles and even lead to loss of alleles. The chances of inbreeding and genetic homogeneity can increase, possibly leading to inbreeding depression. Smaller population size can also cause deleterious mutations to accumulate.

Population bottlenecks play an important role in conservation biology (see minimum viable population size) and in the context of agriculture (biological and pest control).

Minimum viable population size
In conservation biology, minimum viable population (MVP) size helps to determine the effective population size when a population is at risk for extinction. The effects of a population bottleneck often depend on the number of individuals remaining after the bottleneck and how that compares to the minimum viable population size.

Founder effects
A slightly different form of bottleneck can occur if a small group becomes reproductively (e.g., geographically) separated from the main population, such as through a founder event, e.g., if a few members of a species successfully colonize a new isolated island, or from small captive breeding programs such as animals at a zoo. Alternatively, invasive species can undergo population bottlenecks through founder events when introduced into their invaded range.

Humans
According to a 1999 model, a severe population bottleneck, or more specifically a full-fledged speciation, occurred among a group of Australopithecina as they transitioned into the species known as Homo erectus two million years ago. It is believed that additional bottlenecks must have occurred since Homo erectus started walking the Earth, but current archaeological, paleontological, and genetic data are inadequate to give much reliable information about such conjectured bottlenecks. Nonetheless, a 2023 genetic analysis discerned such a human ancestor population bottleneck of a possible 100,000 to 1000 individuals "around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago [which] lasted for about 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction."

A 2005 study from Rutgers University theorized that the pre-1492 native populations of the Americas are the descendants of only 70 individuals who crossed the land bridge between Asia and North America.

The Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck refers to a period around 5000 BC where the diversity in the male y-chromosome dropped precipitously, to a level equivalent to reproduction occurring with a ratio between men and women of 1:17. Discovered in 2015 the research suggests that the reason for the bottleneck was not a reduction in the number of males, but a drastic decrease in the percentage of males with reproductive success.

Toba catastrophe theory
The controversial Toba catastrophe theory, presented in the late 1990s to early 2000s, suggested that a bottleneck of the human population occurred approximately 75,000 years ago, proposing that the human population was reduced to perhaps 10,000–30,000 individuals when the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted and triggered a major environmental change. Parallel bottlenecks were proposed to exist among chimpanzees, gorillas, rhesus macaques, orangutans and tigers. The hypothesis was based on geological evidence of sudden climate change and on coalescence evidence of some genes (including mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosome DNA and some nuclear genes) and the relatively low level of genetic variation in humans.

However, subsequent research, especially in the 2010s, appeared to refute both the climate argument and the genetic argument. Recent research shows the extent of climate change was much smaller than believed by proponents of the theory.

In 2000, a Molecular Biology and Evolution paper suggested a transplanting model or a 'long bottleneck' to account for the limited genetic variation, rather than a catastrophic environmental change. This would be consistent with suggestions that in sub-Saharan Africa numbers could have dropped at times as low as 2,000, for perhaps as long as 100,000 years, before numbers began to expand again in the Late Stone Age.

Other animals
European bison, also called wisent (Bison bonasus), faced extinction in the early 20th century. The animals living today are all descended from 12 individuals and they have extremely low genetic variation, which may be beginning to affect the reproductive ability of bulls.

The population of American bison (Bison bison) fell due to overhunting, nearly leading to extinction around the year 1890, though it has since begun to recover (see table).

A classic example of a population bottleneck is that of the northern elephant seal, whose population fell to about 30 in the 1890s. Although it now numbers in the hundreds of thousands, the potential for bottlenecks within colonies remains. Dominant bulls are able to mate with the largest number of females—sometimes as many as 100. With so much of a colony's offspring descended from just one dominant male, genetic diversity is limited, making the species more vulnerable to diseases and genetic mutations.

The golden hamster is a similarly bottlenecked species, with the vast majority of domesticated hamsters descended from a single litter found in the Syrian desert around 1930, and very few wild golden hamsters remain.

An extreme example of a population bottleneck is the New Zealand black robin, of which every specimen today is a descendant of a single female, called Old Blue. The Black Robin population is still recovering from its low point of only five individuals in 1980.

The genome of the giant panda shows evidence of a severe bottleneck about 43,000 years ago. There is also evidence of at least one primate species, the golden snub-nosed monkey, that also suffered from a bottleneck around this time. An unknown environmental event is suspected to have caused the bottlenecks observed in both of these species. The bottlenecks likely caused the low genetic diversity observed in both species.

Other facts can sometimes be inferred from an observed population bottleneck. Among the Galápagos Islands giant tortoises—themselves a prime example of a bottleneck—the comparatively large population on the slopes of the Alcedo volcano is significantly less diverse than four other tortoise populations on the same island. DNA analyses date the bottleneck to around 88,000 years before present (YBP). About 100,000 YBP the volcano erupted violently, deeply burying much of the tortoise habitat in pumice and ash.

Another example can be seen in the greater prairie chickens, which were prevalent in North America until the 20th century. In Illinois alone, the number of greater prairie chickens plummeted from over 100 million in 1900 to about 46 in 1998. These declines in population were the result of hunting and habitat destruction, but the random consequences have also caused a great loss in species diversity. DNA analysis comparing the birds from 1990 and mid-century shows a steep genetic decline in recent decades. Management of the greater prairie chickens now includes genetic rescue efforts including the translocation prairie chickens between leks to increase each populations genetic diversity.

Population bottlenecking poses a major threat to the stability of species populations as well. Papilio homerus is the largest butterfly in the Americas and is endangered according to the IUCN. The disappearance of a central population poses a major threat of population bottleneck. The remaining two populations are now geographically isolated and the populations face an unstable future with limited remaining opportunity for gene flow.

Genetic bottlenecks exist in cheetahs.

Selective breeding
Bottlenecks also exist among pure-bred animals (e.g., dogs and cats: pugs, Persian) because breeders limit their gene pools by a few (show-winning) individuals for their looks and behaviors. The extensive use of desirable individual animals at the exclusion of others can result in a popular sire effect.

Selective breeding for dog breeds caused constricting breed-specific bottlenecks. These bottlenecks have led to dogs having an average of 2–3% more genetic loading than gray wolves. The strict breeding programs and population bottlenecks have led to the prevalence of diseases such as heart disease, blindness, cancers, hip dysplasia, and cataracts.

Selective breeding to produce high-yielding crops has caused genetic bottlenecks in these crops and has led to genetic homogeneity. This reduced genetic diversity in many crops could lead to broader susceptibility to new diseases or pests, which threatens global food security.

Plants
Research showed that there is incredibly low, nearly undetectable amounts of genetic diversity in the genome of the Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis). The IUCN found a population count of 80 mature individuals and about 300 seedlings and juveniles in 2011, and previously, the Wollemi pine had fewer than 50 individuals in the wild. The low population size and low genetic diversity indicates that the Wollemi pine went through a severe population bottleneck.

A population bottleneck was created in the 1970s through the conservation efforts of the endangered Mauna Kea silversword (Argyroxiphium sandwicense ssp. sandwicense). The small natural population of silversword was augmented through the 1970s with outplanted individuals. All of the outplanted silversword plants were found to be first or subsequent generation offspring of just two maternal founders. The low amount of polymorphic loci in the outplanted individuals led to the population bottleneck, causing the loss of the marker allele at eight of the loci.

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

title: Population bottleneck


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Yuanfen

Yuán or Yuanfen, "fateful coincidence," is a concept in Chinese society describing good and bad chances and potential relationships. It can also be translated as "destiny, luck as conditioned by one's past", or "natural affinity among friends." It is comparable to the concept of karma in Buddhism, but yuanfen is interactive rather than individual. The driving forces and causes behind yuánfèn are said to be actions done in previous incarnations.

Scholars Yang Kuo-shu and David Ho have analysed the psychological advantages of this belief: by assigning causality of negative events to yuanfen beyond personal control, people tend to maintain good relationships, avoid conflict, and promote social harmony; likewise, when positive events are seen as a result of yuanfen, personal credit is not directly assigned, which reduces pride on one side of the relationship and envy and resentment on the other.

Role in society
Yang Kuo-shu and David Ho trace the origins of the term to traditional Buddhism and observe that yuan  or yuanfen are important concepts. Yang and Ho's research found that these concepts are still very much alive in Chinese social life and culture among university students. The concepts of yuan and yuanfen and beliefs in predestination and fatalism have waned, and belief in yuan has waned as well, but continuity with past conceptions is still strong.

Marc Moscowitz, an anthropologist, finds that yuanfen appears frequently in contemporary popular music. Here yuanfen refers to a “karmic relationship” with someone who was known in a previous life and is used to explain the end of a relationship that was not destined to work out.

Popular usage

 * The proverbial saying "have fate without destiny" (有緣無分) refers to couples who were fated to come together, but not destined to stay together, and as such is sometimes used as a break-up line.
 * Upon meeting a person (of any gender) who is hard to find, one might aptly exclaim: "It is yuánfèn that has brought us together!"
 * When one encounters another repeatedly in various locations such that it seems to be more than coincidence, one can refer to yuánfèn.
 * As a counter-example, when two people know each other, e.g. as penpals, but never have the opportunity to meet face-to-face, it can be said that their yuánfèn is too superficial or thin . Literally: It takes hundreds of rebirths to bring two persons to ride in the same boat; it takes a thousand eons to bring two persons to share the same pillow. This goes to show just how precious yuánfèn is.
 * An alternative of this proverb is: 十年修得同船渡，百年修得共枕眠 (pinyin: shí nián xiū dé tóng chuán dù, bǎi nián xiū dé gòng zhěn mián), which means literally: ten years of meditation (or good deeds) bring two people to cross a river in the same ferry, and a hundred years of meditation (or good deeds) bring two people to rest their heads on the same pillow. It conveys the same message.
 * It is important to note that although yuanfen is often used in the context of lovers' relationships, the concept itself is much broader and can refer to any relationship between people under any circumstance. For example, yuanfen can be thought of as the mechanism by which family members have been "placed" in each other's lives. On the other hand, even two strangers sitting next to each other on a short-haul plane ride are also thought to have a certain amount of yuanfen. The line of reasoning follows roughly as such: out of the seven billion or so people living on this planet, the odds of two specific persons riding in an airplane together are astronomically small. Thus, two specific persons riding together on a plane have beaten out all odds to end up in those specific seats. If, in addition to their chance encounter, they happen to strike up an engaging conversation and find that they have common interests—perhaps in cinema, music, and/or photography—it makes their meeting all the more precious, and the depth of their yuanfen all the more noteworthy.

Translations
"Affinity occasion" could be a good translation of yuánfèn, as yuánfèn depends on the probability, or chance, of meeting (or seeing) someone in the real world at any given time and place, and involves both persons feeling as if they have already known each other for a very long time, even though in reality, they haven't.

The concept of "synchronicity", first introduced by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, is a good English translation of yuanfen. The French writer Émile Deschamps claims in his memoirs that in 1805, he was treated to some plum pudding by a stranger named Monsieur de Fontgibu. Ten years later, the writer encountered plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant and wanted to order some, but the waiter told him that the last dish had already been served to another customer, who turned out to be de Fontgibu. Many years later, in 1832, Deschamps was at a dinner and once again ordered plum pudding. He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that only de Fontgibu was missing to make the setting complete—and in the same instant, the now senile de Fontgibu entered the room.

Often yuánfèn is said to be the equivalent of "fate" (as in the title of a 1984 film, 緣分, given the Western name Behind the Yellow Line, also known as Fate, starring Leslie Cheung), or "destiny". "Fateful affinity" is the term used to describe yuánfèn by a leading character in Hao Jingfang's novel Jumpnauts in Ken Liu's 2024 translation. However, these words do not have the element of the past playing a role in deciding the outcome of the uncertain future. The most common Chinese term for "fate" or "destiny" is  mìngyùn (, literally "the turn of events in life").

"Providence" and "predestination" are not exact translations, because these words imply that things happen by the will of God or gods, whereas yuánfèn does not necessarily involve divine intervention.

title: Yuanfen


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Ethnic groups in Gabon

Despite Gabon's small population (just over a million), this Central African country is home to many different Bantu tribes and a small pygmy population.

Here is a partial list of the ethnic groups in Gabon, by province.

Estuaire

 * Fang
 * Omyene Group
 * Benga
 * Akele
 * Simba
 * Beseki
 * Seke

Haut Ogooué

 * Téké
 * Mbahouin
 * Obamba
 * Bakaningui
 * Nzebi
 * Ndoumou
 * Ndassa
 * Ndumu
 * Awandji
 * Mbeté
 * Bakota

Moyen Ogooué

 * Apindji
 * Galoa
 * Fang
 * Akele
 * Vili
 * Enenga

Ngounié

 * Akélé
 * Banzebie
 * Mitsogho
 * Massango
 * Bavarama
 * Bapunu
 * Apindji
 * Bavungu
 * Guisir
 * Eviya

Mitsogho People
The Mitsoghos are the people of the Massifs de Chaillu mountains in the Ngounié province of Gabon. Tsogho is their language, hence the name Mi-Tsoghos (where the prefix "Mi" means plural). They are a relatively small ethnic group who are revered and feared for their abilities in conjuring spirits from the afterworld.

They may represent the first non-Baka Gabonese of the entire area. This knowledge can be extrapolated from the widespread usage of Mitsogho words and customs, especially pertaining to the animistic religious practices of all Gabonese ethnic groups. For example, Bwiti, the dominant religious doctrine of the country is a Mitshogo name and the Bwiti is based on the magic powers of "the sacred wood" or ibogha (small shrub - Tabernanthe iboga) which is also a Mitsogho word meaning healing-ibo and wood-gha.

Nearly all healing ceremonies in Gabonese traditional culture involve the singing of Mitsogho songs. In fact, Mitsogho words are so well known throughout the entire country that at one point the government was considering making Mitsogho the national ethnic language.

The majority of modern Mitsoghos live in Libreville and Mouila; however, their roots can be traced back north–south into the tropical mountain forests just west of where the Ngounié river meets the Ogoué river to where the Ogoulou river meets the Ngounié river. The most prominent old village sites were located near the 70 mile-long Ikobé valley.

This small but fierce group of people were the last ethnic group to be defeated by the French colonists (around 1940). In long-lived Mitsogho lore, a warrior by the name of Mbombet A Gnaghé hid out in the Ikobé valley to stage guerrilla attacks against the French military. Mbombet supposedly had magical powers, but was finally betrayed by a woman.

The modern day offspring who can be traced directly back to Mbombet still hold special positions within the traditional Mitsogho tribal authority. They are usually celebrated magicians and healers.

Nyanga

 * Bapunu
 * vili
 * lumbu

Ogooué-Ivindo

 * Fang
 * Bakota
 * Mahongue
 * Boungome
 * Kwele
 * Baschiwe
 * Basimba people
 * Akele

Ogooué-Lolo

 * Banzebi
 * Puvi
 * Akele
 * Massango
 * Aduma

Ogooué-Maritime

 * Omiene group( Oroungu, Nkomi)
 * lumbu

Woleu Ntem

 * Fang

 * Baka

title: Ethnic groups in Gabon


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Mojibake

Mojibake (文字化け;, "character transformation") is the garbled or gibberish text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding. The result is a systematic replacement of symbols with completely unrelated ones, often from a different writing system.

This display may include the generic replacement character ("�") in places where the binary representation is considered invalid. A replacement can also involve multiple consecutive symbols, as viewed in one encoding, when the same binary code constitutes one symbol in the other encoding. This is either because of differing constant length encoding (as in Asian 16-bit encodings vs European 8-bit encodings), or the use of variable length encodings (notably UTF-8 and UTF-16).

Failed rendering of glyphs due to either missing fonts or missing glyphs in a font is a different issue that is not to be confused with mojibake. Symptoms of this failed rendering include blocks with the code point displayed in hexadecimal or using the generic replacement character. Importantly, these replacements are valid and are the result of correct error handling by the software.

Causes
To correctly reproduce the original text that was encoded, the correspondence between the encoded data and the notion of its encoding must be preserved (i.e. the source and target encoding standards must be the same). As mojibake is the instance of non-compliance between these, it can be achieved by manipulating the data itself, or just relabelling it.

Mojibake is often seen with text data that have been tagged with a wrong encoding; it may not even be tagged at all, but moved between computers with different default encodings. A major source of trouble are communication protocols that rely on settings on each computer rather than sending or storing metadata together with the data.

The differing default settings between computers are in part due to differing deployments of Unicode among operating system families, and partly the legacy encodings' specializations for different writing systems of human languages. Whereas Linux distributions mostly switched to UTF-8 in 2004, Microsoft Windows generally uses UTF-16, and sometimes uses 8-bit code pages for text files in different languages.

For some writing systems, such as Japanese, several encodings have historically been employed, causing users to see mojibake relatively often. As an example, the word mojibake itself ("文字化け") stored as EUC-JP might be incorrectly displayed as "ﾊｸｻ�ｽ､ｱ", "ﾊｸｻ嵂ｽ､ｱ" (MS-932), or "ﾊｸｻ郾ｽ､ｱ" if interpreted as Shift-JIS, or as "Ê¸»ú²½¤±" in software that assumes text to be in the Windows-1252 or ISO 8859-1 encodings, usually labelled Western or Western European. This is further exacerbated if other locales are involved: the same text stored as UTF-8 appears as "譁�蟄怜喧縺�" if interpreted as Shift-JIS, as "æ–‡å—åŒ–ã‘" if interpreted as Western, or (for example) as "鏂囧瓧鍖栥亼" if interpreted as being in a GBK (Mainland China) locale.

Underspecification
If the encoding is not specified, it is up to the software to decide it by other means. Depending on the type of software, the typical solution is either configuration or charset detection heuristics. Both are prone to mis-prediction.

The encoding of text files is affected by locale setting, which depends on the user's language, brand of operating system, and many other conditions. Therefore, the assumed encoding is systematically wrong for files that come from a computer with a different setting, or even from a differently localized software within the same system. For Unicode, one solution is to use a byte order mark, but for source code and other machine readable text, many parsers do not tolerate this. Another is storing the encoding as metadata in the file system. File systems that support extended file attributes can store this as. This also requires support in software that wants to take advantage of it, but does not disturb other software.

While a few encodings are easy to detect, such as UTF-8, there are many that are hard to distinguish (see charset detection). A web browser may not be able to distinguish a page coded in EUC-JP and another in Shift-JIS if the encoding is not assigned explicitly using HTTP headers sent along with the documents, or using the HTML document's meta tags that are used to substitute for missing HTTP headers if the server cannot be configured to send the proper HTTP headers; see character encodings in HTML.

Mis-specification
Mojibake also occurs when the encoding is incorrectly specified. This often happens between encodings that are similar. For example, the Eudora email client for Windows was known to send emails labelled as ISO 8859-1 that were in reality Windows-1252. Windows-1252 contains extra printable characters in the C1 range (the most frequently seen being curved quotation marks and extra dashes), that were not displayed properly in software complying with the ISO standard; this especially affected software running under other operating systems such as Unix.

User oversight
Of the encodings still in common use, many originated from taking ASCII and appending atop it; as a result, these encodings are partially compatible with each other. Examples of this include Windows-1252 and ISO 8859-1. People thus may mistake the expanded encoding set they are using with plain ASCII.

Overspecification
When there are layers of protocols, each trying to specify the encoding based on different information, the least certain information may be misleading to the recipient. For example, consider a web server serving a static HTML file over HTTP. The character set may be communicated to the client in any number of 3 ways:
 * in the HTTP header. This information can be based on server configuration (for instance, when serving a file off disk) or controlled by the application running on the server (for dynamic websites).
 * in the file, as an HTML meta tag ( or  ) or the   attribute of an XML declaration. This is the encoding that the author meant to save the particular file in.
 * in the file, as a byte order mark. This is the encoding that the author's editor actually saved it in. Unless an accidental encoding conversion has happened (by opening it in one encoding and saving it in another), this will be correct. It is, however, only available in Unicode encodings such as UTF-8 or UTF-16.

Lack of hardware or software support
Much older hardware is typically designed to support only one character set and the character set typically cannot be altered. The character table contained within the display firmware will be localized to have characters for the country the device is to be sold in, and typically the table differs from country to country. As such, these systems will potentially display mojibake when loading text generated on a system from a different country. Likewise, many early operating systems do not support multiple encoding formats and thus will end up displaying mojibake if made to display non-standard text—early versions of Microsoft Windows and Palm OS for example, are localized on a per-country basis and will only support encoding standards relevant to the country the localized version will be sold in, and will display mojibake if a file containing a text in a different encoding format from the version that the OS is designed to support is opened.

Resolutions
Applications using UTF-8 as a default encoding may achieve a greater degree of interoperability because of its widespread use and backward compatibility with US-ASCII. UTF-8 also has the ability to be directly recognised by a simple algorithm, so that well written software should be able to avoid mixing UTF-8 up with other encodings.

The difficulty of resolving an instance of mojibake varies depending on the application within which it occurs and the causes of it. Two of the most common applications in which mojibake may occur are web browsers and word processors. Modern browsers and word processors often support a wide array of character encodings. Browsers often allow a user to change their rendering engine's encoding setting on the fly, while word processors allow the user to select the appropriate encoding when opening a file. It may take some trial and error for users to find the correct encoding.

The problem gets more complicated when it occurs in an application that normally does not support a wide range of character encoding, such as in a non-Unicode computer game. In this case, the user must change the operating system's encoding settings to match that of the game. However, changing the system-wide encoding settings can also cause Mojibake in pre-existing applications. In Windows XP or later, a user also has the option to use Microsoft AppLocale, an application that allows the changing of per-application locale settings. Even so, changing the operating system encoding settings is not possible on earlier operating systems such as Windows 98; to resolve this issue on earlier operating systems, a user would have to use third party font rendering applications.

English
Mojibake in English texts generally occurs in punctuation, such as em dashes (—), en dashes (–), and curly quotes (“,”,‘,’), but rarely in character text, since most encodings agree with ASCII on the encoding of the English alphabet. For example, the pound sign  will appear as   if it was encoded by the sender as UTF-8 but interpreted by the recipient as one of the Western European encodings (CP1252 or ISO 8859-1). If iterated using CP1252, this can lead to,  ,  ,  , and so on.

Similarly, the right single quotation mark (’), when encoded in UTF-8 and decoded using Windows-1252, becomes,  ,  , and so on.

Some computers did, in older eras, have vendor-specific encodings which caused mismatch also for English text. Commodore brand 8-bit computers used PETSCII encoding, particularly notable for inverting the upper and lower case compared to standard ASCII. PETSCII printers worked fine on other computers of the era, but inverted the case of all letters. IBM mainframes use the EBCDIC encoding which does not match ASCII at all.

Other Western European languages
The alphabets of the North Germanic languages, Catalan, Romanian, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish are all extensions of the Latin alphabet. The additional characters are typically the ones that become corrupted, making texts only mildly unreadable with mojibake: … and their uppercase counterparts, if applicable.
 * å, ä, ö in Finnish and Swedish (š and ž are present in some Finnish loanwords, é marginally in Swedish, mainly also in loanwords)
 * à, ç, è, é, ï, í, ò, ó, ú, ü in Catalan
 * æ, ø, å in Norwegian and Danish as well as optional acute accents on é etc for disambiguation
 * á, é, ó, ĳ, è, ë, ï in Dutch
 * ä, ö, ü, and ß in German
 * á, ð, í, ó, ú, ý, æ, ø in Faroese
 * á, ð, é, í, ó, ú, ý, þ, æ, ö in Icelandic
 * à, â, ç, è, é, ë, ê, ï, î, ô, ù, û, ü, ÿ, æ, œ in French
 * à, è, é, ì, ò, ù in Italian
 * á, é, í, ñ, ó, ú, ü, ¡, ¿ in Spanish
 * à, á, â, ã, ç, é, ê, í, ó, ô, õ, ú in Portuguese (ü no longer used)
 * á, é, í, ó, ú in Irish
 * à, è, ì, ò, ù in Scottish Gaelic
 * ă, â, î, ș, ț in Romanian
 * £ in British English (æ and œ are rarely used)

These are languages for which the ISO 8859-1 character set (also known as Latin 1 or Western) has been in use. However, ISO 8859-1 has been obsoleted by two competing standards, the backward compatible Windows-1252, and the slightly altered ISO 8859-15. Both add the Euro sign € and the French œ, but otherwise any confusion of these three character sets does not create mojibake in these languages. Furthermore, it is always safe to interpret ISO 8859-1 as Windows-1252, and fairly safe to interpret it as ISO 8859-15, in particular with respect to the Euro sign, which replaces the rarely used currency sign (¤). However, with the advent of UTF-8, mojibake has become more common in certain scenarios, e.g. exchange of text files between UNIX and Windows computers, due to UTF-8's incompatibility with Latin-1 and Windows-1252. But UTF-8 has the ability to be directly recognised by a simple algorithm, so that well written software should be able to avoid mixing UTF-8 up with other encodings, so this was most common when many had software not supporting UTF-8. Most of these languages were supported by MS-DOS default CP437 and other machine default encodings, except ASCII, so problems when buying an operating system version were less common. Windows and MS-DOS are not compatible, however.

In Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and German, vowels are rarely repeated, and it is usually obvious when one character gets corrupted, e.g. the second letter in the Swedish word kärlek ("love") when it is encoded in UTF-8 but decoded in Western, producing "kÃ¤rlek", or für in German, which becomes "fÃ¼r". This way, even though the reader has to guess what the original letter is, almost all texts remain legible. Finnish, on the other hand, frequently uses repeating vowels in words like hääyö ("wedding night") which can make corrupted text very hard to read (e.g. hääyö appears as "hÃ¤Ã¤yÃ¶"). Icelandic has ten possibly confounding characters, and Faroese has eight, making many words almost completely unintelligible when corrupted (e.g. Icelandic þjóðlöð, "outstanding hospitality", appears as "Ã¾jÃ³Ã°lÃ¶Ã°").

In German, Buchstabensalat ("letter salad") is a common term for this phenomenon, in Spanish, deformación (literally "deformation") is used, and in Portuguese, desformatação (literally "deformatting") is used.

Some users transliterate their writing when using a computer, either by omitting the problematic diacritics, or by using digraph replacements (å → aa, ä/æ → ae, ö/ø → oe, ü → ue etc.). Thus, an author might write "ueber" instead of "über", which is standard practice in German when umlauts are not available. The latter practice seems to be better tolerated in the German language sphere than in the Nordic countries. For example, in Norwegian, digraphs are associated with archaic Danish, and may be used jokingly. However, digraphs are useful in communication with other parts of the world. As an example, the Norwegian football player Ole Gunnar Solskjær had his last name spelled "SOLSKJAER" on his uniform when he played for Manchester United.

An artifact of UTF-8 misinterpreted as ISO 8859-1, "Ring meg nå" being rendered as "Ring meg nÃ¥", was seen in 2014 in an SMS scam targeting Norway.

The same problem occurs also in Romanian, see these examples:

Central and Eastern European
Users of Central and Eastern European languages can also be affected. Because most computers were not connected to any network during the mid- to late-1980s, there were different character encodings for every language with diacritical characters (see ISO/IEC 8859 and KOI-8), often also varying by operating system.

Hungarian
In Hungarian, the phenomenon is referred to as betűszemét, meaning "letter garbage". Hungarian has been particularly susceptible as it contains the accented letters á, é, í, ó, ú, ö, ü (all present in the Latin-1 character set), plus the two characters ő and ű which are not in Latin-1. These two characters can be correctly encoded in Latin-2, Windows-1250, and Unicode. However, before Unicode became common in e-mail clients, e-mails containing Hungarian text often had the letters ő and ű corrupted, sometimes to the point of unrecognizability. It is common to respond to a corrupted e-mail with the nonsense phrase "Árvíztűrő tükörfúrógép" (literally "Flood-resistant mirror-drilling machine") which contains all accented characters used in Hungarian.

Polish
Prior to the creation of ISO 8859-2 in 1987, users of various computing platforms used their own character encodings such as AmigaPL on Amiga, Atari Club on Atari ST and Masovia, IBM CP852, Mazovia and Windows CP1250 on IBM PCs. Polish companies selling early DOS computers created their own mutually-incompatible ways to encode Polish characters and simply reprogrammed the EPROMs of the video cards (typically CGA, EGA, or Hercules) to provide hardware code pages with the needed glyphs for Polish—arbitrarily located without reference to where other computer sellers had placed them.

The situation began to improve when, after pressure from academic and user groups, ISO 8859-2 succeeded as the "Internet standard" with limited support of the dominant vendors' software (today largely replaced by Unicode). With the numerous problems caused by the variety of encodings, even today some users tend to refer to Polish diacritical characters as krzaczki (, lit. "little shrubs").

Russian and other Cyrillic-based alphabets
Mojibake is colloquially called krakozyabry (кракозя́бры ) in Russian, which was and remains complicated by several systems for encoding Cyrillic. The Soviet Union and early Russian Federation developed KOI encodings (Kod Obmena Informatsiey, Код Обмена Информацией, which translates to "Code for Information Exchange"). This began with Cyrillic-only 7-bit KOI7, based on ASCII but with Latin and some other characters replaced with Cyrillic letters. Then came 8-bit KOI8 encoding that is an ASCII extension which encodes Cyrillic letters only with high-bit set octets corresponding to 7-bit codes from KOI7. It is for this reason that KOI8 text, even Russian, remains partially readable after stripping the eighth bit, which was considered as a major advantage in the age of 8BITMIME-unaware email systems. For example, the words "Школа русского языка" (shkola russkogo yazyka), when encoded in KOI8 and passed through the high bit stripping process, end up being rendered as "[KOLA RUSSKOGO qZYKA". Eventually, KOI8 gained different flavors for Russian and Bulgarian (KOI8-R), Ukrainian (KOI8-U), Belarusian (KOI8-RU), and even Tajik (KOI8-T).

Meanwhile, in the West, Code page 866 supported Ukrainian and Belarusian, as well as Russian and Bulgarian in MS-DOS. For Microsoft Windows, Code Page 1251 added support for Serbian and other Slavic variants of Cyrillic.

Most recently, the Unicode encoding includes code points for virtually all characters in all languages, including all Cyrillic characters.

Before Unicode, it was necessary to match text encoding with a font using the same encoding system; failure to do this produced unreadable gibberish whose specific appearance varied depending on the exact combination of text and font encoding. For example, attempting to view non-Unicode Cyrillic text using a font that is limited to the Latin alphabet, or using the default ("Western") encoding, typically results in text that consists almost entirely of capitalized vowels with diacritical marks (e.g. KOI8 "Библиотека" (biblioteka, library) becomes "âÉÂÌÉÏÔÅËÁ", while "Школа русского языка" (shkola russkogo yazyka, Russian-language school) becomes "ûËÏÌÁ ÒÕÓÓËÏÇÏ ÑÚÙËÁ"). Using Code Page 1251 to view text in KOI8, or vice versa, results in garbled text that consists mostly of capital letters (KOI8 and Code Page 1251 share the same ASCII region, but KOI8 has uppercase letters in the region where Code Page 1251 has lowercase, and vice versa).

During the early years of the Russian sector of the World Wide Web, both KOI8 and Code Page 1251 were common. Nearly all websites now use Unicode, but an estimated 0.35% of all web pages worldwide – all languages included – are still encoded in Code Page 1251, while less than 0.003% of sites are still encoded in KOI8-R. Though the HTML standard includes the ability to specify the encoding for any given web page in its source, this is sometimes neglected, forcing the user to switch encodings in the browser manually.

In Bulgarian, mojibake is often called majmunica (маймуница), meaning "monkey's [alphabet]". In Serbian, it is called đubre (ђубре), meaning "trash". Unlike the former USSR, South Slavs never used something like KOI8, and Code Page 1251 was the dominant Cyrillic encoding before Unicode; therefore, these languages experienced fewer encoding incompatibility troubles than Russian. In the 1980s, Bulgarian computers used their own MIK encoding, which is superficially similar to (although incompatible with) CP866.

Yugoslav languages
Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian (the seceding varieties of Serbo-Croatian language) and Slovenian add to the basic Latin alphabet the letters š, đ, č, ć, ž, and their capital counterparts Š, Đ, Č, Ć, Ž (only č/Č, š/Š and ž/Ž in Slovenian; officially, although others are used when needed, mostly in foreign names, as well). All of these letters are defined in Latin-2 and Windows-1250, while only some (š, Š, ž, Ž, Đ) exist in the usual OS-default Windows-1252, and are there because of some other languages.

Although Mojibake can occur with any of these characters, the letters that are not included in Windows-1252 are much more prone to errors. Thus, even nowadays, "šđčćž ŠĐČĆŽ" is often displayed as "šðèæž ŠÐÈÆŽ", although ð, È, and Æ are never used in Slavic languages.

When confined to basic ASCII (most user names, for example), common replacements are: š→s, đ→dj, č→c, ć→c, ž→z (capital forms analogously, with Đ→Dj or Đ→DJ depending on word case). All of these replacements introduce ambiguities, so reconstructing the original from such a form is usually done manually if required.

The Windows-1252 encoding is important because the English versions of the Windows operating system are most widespread, not localized ones. The reasons for this include a relatively small and fragmented market, increasing the price of high quality localization, a high degree of software piracy (in turn caused by high price of software compared to income), which discourages localization efforts, and people preferring English versions of Windows and other software.

The drive to differentiate Croatian from Serbian, Bosnian from Croatian and Serbian, and now even Montenegrin from the other three creates many problems. There are many different localizations, using different standards and of different quality. There are no common translations for the vast amount of computer terminology originating in English. In the end, people use English loanwords ("kompjuter" for "computer", "kompajlirati" for "compile," etc.), and if they are unaccustomed to the translated terms, they may not understand what some option in a menu is supposed to do based on the translated phrase. Therefore, people who understand English, as well as those who are accustomed to English terminology (who are most, because English terminology is also mostly taught in schools because of these problems) regularly choose the original English versions of non-specialist software.

When Cyrillic script is used (for Macedonian and partially Serbian), the problem is similar to other Cyrillic-based scripts.

Newer versions of English Windows allow the code page to be changed (older versions require special English versions with this support), but this setting can be and often was incorrectly set. For example, Windows 98 and Windows Me can be set to most non-right-to-left single-byte code pages including 1250, but only at install time.

Caucasian languages
The writing systems of certain languages of the Caucasus region, including the scripts of Georgian and Armenian, may produce mojibake. This problem is particularly acute in the case of ArmSCII or ARMSCII, a set of obsolete character encodings for the Armenian alphabet which have been superseded by Unicode standards. ArmSCII is not widely used because of a lack of support in the computer industry. For example, Microsoft Windows does not support it.

Asian encodings
Another type of mojibake occurs when text encoded in a single-byte encoding is erroneously parsed in a multi-byte encoding, such as one of the encodings for East Asian languages. With this kind of mojibake more than one (typically two) characters are corrupted at once. For example, if the Swedish word kärlek is encoded in Windows-1252 but decoded using GBK, it will appear as "k鋜lek", where "är" is parsed as "鋜". Compared to the above mojibake, this is harder to read, since letters unrelated to the problematic å, ä or ö are missing, and is especially problematic for short words starting with å, ä or ö (e.g. "än" becomes "鋘"). Since two letters are combined, the mojibake also seems more random (over 50 variants compared to the normal three, not counting the rarer capitals). In some rare cases, an entire text string which happens to include a pattern of particular word lengths, such as the sentence "Bush hid the facts", may be misinterpreted.

Vietnamese
In Vietnamese, the phenomenon is called chữ ma (Hán–Nôm: 𡨸魔, "ghost characters") or loạn mã (from Chinese 乱码, luànmǎ). It can occur when a computer tries to decode text encoded in UTF-8 as Windows-1258, TCVN3 or VNI. In Vietnam, chữ ma was commonly seen on computers that ran pre-Vista versions of Windows or cheap mobile phones.

Japanese
In Japan, mojibake is especially problematic as there are many different Japanese text encodings. Alongside Unicode encodings (UTF-8 and UTF-16), there are other standard encodings, such as Shift-JIS (Windows machines) and EUC-JP (UNIX systems). Even to this day, mojibake is often encountered by both Japanese and non-Japanese people when attempting to run software written for the Japanese market.

Chinese
In Chinese, the same phenomenon is called Luàn mǎ (Pinyin, Simplified Chinese 乱码, Traditional Chinese 亂碼, meaning 'chaotic code'), and can occur when computerised text is encoded in one Chinese character encoding but is displayed using the wrong encoding. When this occurs, it is often possible to fix the issue by switching the character encoding without loss of data. The situation is complicated because of the existence of several Chinese character encoding systems in use, the most common ones being: Unicode, Big5, and Guobiao (with several backward compatible versions), and the possibility of Chinese characters being encoded using Japanese encoding.

It is relatively easy to identify the original encoding when luànmǎ occurs in Guobiao encodings:

An additional problem in Chinese occurs when rare or antiquated characters, many of which are still used in personal or place names, do not exist in some encodings. Examples of this are:

 * The Big5 encoding's lack of the "煊" (xuān) in the name of Taiwanese politician Wang Chien-shien, the "堃" (kūn) in the name of Yu Shyi-kun , and the "喆" (zhé) in the name of singer David Tao ,
 * GB 2312's lack of the "镕" (róng) in ex-PRC Premier Zhu Rongji, and
 * GBK's lack of the copyright symbol "©".

Newspapers have dealt with missing characters in various ways, including using image editing software to synthesize them by combining other radicals and characters; using a picture of the personalities (in the case of people's names), or simply substituting homophones in the hope that readers would be able to make the correct inference.

Indic text
A similar effect can occur in Brahmic or Indic scripts of South Asia, used in such Indo-Aryan or Indic languages as Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu), Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, and others, even if the character set employed is properly recognized by the application. This is because, in many Indic scripts, the rules by which individual letter symbols combine to create symbols for syllables may not be properly understood by a computer missing the appropriate software, even if the glyphs for the individual letter forms are available.

One example of this is the old Wikipedia logo, which attempts to show the character analogous to "wi" (the first syllable of "Wikipedia") on each of many puzzle pieces. The puzzle piece meant to bear the Devanagari character for "wi" instead used to display the "wa" character followed by an unpaired "i" modifier vowel, easily recognizable as mojibake generated by a computer not configured to display Indic text. The logo as redesigned has fixed these errors.

The idea of Plain Text requires the operating system to provide a font to display Unicode codes. This font is different from OS to OS for Singhala and it makes orthographically incorrect glyphs for some letters (syllables) across all operating systems. For instance, the 'reph', the short form for 'r' is a diacritic that normally goes on top of a plain letter. However, it is wrong to go on top of some letters like 'ya' or 'la' in specific contexts. For Sanskritic words or names inherited by modern languages, such as कार्य, IAST: kārya, or आर्या, IAST: āryā, it is apt to put it on top of these letters. By contrast, for similar sounds in modern languages which result from their specific rules, it is not put on top, such as the word करणाऱ्या, IAST: karaṇāryā, a stem form of the common word करणारा/री, IAST: karaṇārā/rī, in the Marathi language. But it happens in most operating systems. This appears to be a fault of internal programming of the fonts. In Mac OS and iOS, the muurdhaja l (dark l) and 'u' combination and its long form both yield wrong shapes.

Some Indic and Indic-derived scripts, most notably Lao, were not officially supported by Windows XP until the release of Vista. However, various sites have made free-to-download fonts.

Burmese
Due to Western sanctions and the late arrival of Burmese language support in computers, much of the early Burmese localization was homegrown without international cooperation. The prevailing means of Burmese support is via the Zawgyi font, a font that was created as a Unicode font but was in fact only partially Unicode compliant. In the Zawgyi font, some codepoints for Burmese script were implemented as specified in Unicode, but others were not. The Unicode Consortium refers to this as ad hoc font encodings. With the advent of mobile phones, mobile vendors such as Samsung and Huawei simply replaced the Unicode compliant system fonts with Zawgyi versions.

Due to these ad hoc encodings, communications between users of Zawgyi and Unicode would render as garbled text. To get around this issue, content producers would make posts in both Zawgyi and Unicode. Myanmar government designated 1 October 2019 as "U-Day" to officially switch to Unicode. The full transition was estimated to take two years.

African languages
In certain writing systems of Africa, unencoded text is unreadable. Texts that may produce mojibake include those from the Horn of Africa such as the Ge'ez script in Ethiopia and Eritrea, used for Amharic, Tigre, and other languages, and the Somali language, which employs the Osmanya alphabet. In Southern Africa, the Mwangwego alphabet is used to write languages of Malawi and the Mandombe alphabet was created for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but these are not generally supported. Various other writing systems native to West Africa present similar problems, such as the N'Ko alphabet, used for Manding languages in Guinea, and the Vai syllabary, used in Liberia.

Arabic
Another affected language is Arabic (see below), in which text becomes completely unreadable when the encodings do not match.

Examples
The examples in this article do not have UTF-8 as browser setting, because UTF-8 is easily recognisable, so if a browser supports UTF-8 it should recognise it automatically, and not try to interpret something else as UTF-8.

title: Mojibake


text:
International Graphoanalysis Society

IGAS is the abbreviation for International Graphoanalysis Society. The organization is far more commonly referred to by its initials than the full name.

IGAS traces its beginnings back to 1929, when Milton N. Bunker formed The American Grapho Analysis Society. The company has seen an ownership change many times since it was founded. Around 1957, that organization was replaced by The International Graphoanalysis Society, which was run by V. Peter Ferrara. Upon V. Peter Ferrara's death, ownership of the company fell to his daughter, Kathleen Kusta. In June 2003, Kathleen Kusta sold most of the assets of IGAS by private auction to Greg Greco.

From the early seventies through the early eighties, the organization put energy into graphological research, the most important being Crumbaugh & Stockholm (1977) and Stockholm (1980), (1983).

Members
IGAS is a privately held corporation. As such, information about its finances, membership numbers, actual number of graduates, and related items can not be independently verified. The masthead of its publication The Journal of Graphoanalysis lists the organization's current claimed statistical data.

IGAS has roughly 30 chapters, covering the United States, parts of Canada, the UK, and South Africa.

The highest reported membership number, which was issued to a student of Graphoanalysis was just over 50,000. There are no reliable figures on the number of students at any specific time. Both the number of dues paying members, and the number of students are believed to have peaked during the late seventies. This was just before IGASHQ started the wholesale purging of members and chapters.

The Courses
Eight Basic Steps in Graphoanalysis is the beginning course that many members teach people interested in handwriting analysis.

The General Course of Graphoanalysis is the course taught by IGAS. Graduates of that course are awarded the designation Certified Graphoanalysts, more commonly referred to as CGA.

Graduates of The Advanced Course of Graphoanalysis are awarded the designation of Master Graphoanalyst or MGA.

Attendees of the annual Congress are awarded Three Year Study Certificates, or Six Year Study Certificates, upon attending the Congress the appropriate number of times.

The monthly study packet is a four-page lesson that challenges members to improve their ability to analyze handwriting. Beginning in the early-90s, the monthly study packet was incorporated into the IGAS's monthly journal publication.

The Dissenters
Because of the tight control that IGAS had on its members, the field of handwriting analysis is functionally divided into two groups—Graphoanalysts, and Graphologists.

A clause that was responsible for the expulsion of hundreds of members of IGAS between 1970 and 1990 was: Further, I will not affiliate with any group of handwriting analysts not sanctioned by the International Graphoanalysis Society, Inc., the last clause of the 1980 Code of Ethics of IGAS.'

In 1957, Charlie Cole set up a series of graphology lectures, which evolved into The American Handwriting Analysis Foundation. The lectures were intended for graduates of the MGA program only. Klara G. Roman gave the first series of lectures. Later lectures were given by other Holistic Graphologers. As a result of that study, Charlie Cole, and most of the people that attended that lecture series, were expelled from IGAS.

Handwriting Analysts of Minnesota was another group that was started as a direct result of the entire chapter being expelled for the unethical conduct of having a Holistic Graphologer lecture at their quarterly meeting.

The list of people who were thus expelled goes on and on. The net result of this is that the majority of currently active organizations of handwriting analysts in the United States were formed due to this wall of separation that IGAS required its members to keep.

Reference Texts
Crumbaugh, James C & Stockholm, Emilie (1977) Validation of Graphoanalysis by 'Global' or 'Holistic' Method. Perceptual And Motor Skills  April 1977, 44(2), 403–410.

Stockholm, Emilie (1980) Statistical Data For Basic Traits of Graphoanalysis: IGAS Trait Norm Project. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1980, 51, 220-222

Stockholm, Emilie (1983) Research Department releases findings of new reliability study Journal of Graphoanalysis , December 1983, 3-4

Graphology journals
The Canadian Analyst published by Alex Sjoberg documented most of the history of both The American Grapho Analysis Society, and IGAS. Prior its demise, it was the longest running graphological periodical in North America.

"The Grapho Analyst" was published by IGAS from 1940 to 1962. The Journal of Graphoanalysis was published by IGAS, from 1962 to 2003. Publication of the IGAS Journal has been published from 2004 to present.

For Further Research
Handwriting Analysis Research Library Greenfield, MA. Appointments are required to visit the library.

title: International Graphoanalysis Society