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Gerenuk

The gerenuk (garanuug; Litocranius walleri), also known as the giraffe gazelle, is a long-necked, medium-sized antelope found in parts of East Africa. The sole member of the genus Litocranius, the gerenuk was first described by the naturalist Victor Brooke in 1879. It is characterised by its long, slender neck and limbs. The antelope is 80 - 105 cm tall, and weighs between 18 and 52 kg. Two types of colouration are clearly visible on the smooth coat: the reddish brown back or the "saddle", and the lighter flanks, fawn to buff. The horns, present only on males, are lyre-shaped. Curving backward then slightly forward, these measure 25 - 44 cm.

Taxonomy and phylogeny
The gerenuk was first described by Victor Brooke in 1879 on the basis of three male specimens procured on "the mainland of Africa, north of the island of Zanzibar". Brooke used the scientific name Gazella walleri, on the request of Gerald Waller (who provided the specimens) to name it after his deceased brother. The type locality was later corrected by John Kirk, who originally obtained the specimens on the "coast near the River Juba in southern Somalia" before giving them to Waller. In 1886, Franz Friedrich Kohl proposed a new genus for the gerenuk, Litocranius. The common name derives from the Somali name for the animal (gáránúug); the first recorded use of the name dates back to 1895. It is also known as the "giraffe gazelle" due to its similarity to the giraffe.

Two subspecies have been proposed, but these are considered to be independent species by some authors.

 * L. w. sclateri (Northern gerenuk or Sclater's gazelle) Neumann, 1899 : Its range extends from northwestern Somalia (Berbera District) westward to touch the Ethiopian border and Djibouti.
 * L. w. walleri (Southern gerenuk or Waller's gazelle) (Brooke, 1879) : Its range extends through northeastern Tanzania through Kenya to Galcaio (Somalia). The range lies north of the Shebelle River and near Juba River.

In 1997 Colin Groves proposed that Litocranius is a sister taxon of the similarly long-necked dibatag (Ammodorcas clarkei), but withdrew from this in 2000. A 1999 phylogenetic study based on cytochrome b and cytochrome c oxidase subunit III analysis showed that the tribe Antilopini, to which the gerenuk belongs, is monophyletic. In 2013, Eva Verena Bärmann and colleagues (of the University of Cambridge) revised the phylogeny of tribe on the basis of nuclear and mitochondrial gene analysis. The cladogram prepared by them (given below) showed that the springbok (Antidorcas marsupialis) forms a clade with the gerenuk; this clade is sister to the saiga (Saiga tatarica, tribe Saigini) and the genera Antilope (blackbuck), Eudorcas, Gazella and Nanger (of Antilopini).

Description

The gerenuk is a notably tall, slender antelope that resembles gazelles. It is characterised by its long, slender neck and limbs, the flat, wedge-like head and the large, round eyes. Males are nearly 89 - 105 cm tall, and the shorter females 80 - 100 cm; the head-and-body length is typically between 140 and 160 cm. Males weigh between 31 and 52 kg; females are lighter, weighing 28 - 45 kg. The species is sexually dimorphic. The tail, that ends in a black tuft, measures 25 - 35 cm.

Two types of colouration are clearly visible on the smooth coat: the reddish brown dorsal parts (the back or the "saddle"), and the lighter flanks, fawn to buff. The underbelly and insides of the legs are cream in colour. The eyes and the mouth are surrounded by white fur. Females have a dark patch on the crown. The horns, present only on males, are lyre-like (S-shaped). Curving backward then slightly forward, these measure 25 - 44 cm.

The gerenuk resembles the dibatag, with which it is sympatric in eastern and central Somalia and southeastern Ethiopia. Both are brachyodonts and share several facial and cranial features, along with a two-tone colouration of the coat and strong thick horns (only in males). However, there are also some features distinguishing it from the gerenuk, including major morphological differences in horns, horn cores, tail, postorbital area and basioccipital processes. The gerenuk has a longer, heavier neck and a shorter tail. A finer point of difference is the absence of an inward-curving lobe in the lower edge of the ear (near its tip) in the gerenuk. The subspecies of the gerenuk are similar in colouration; the southern gerenuk is the smaller of the two. The Gerenuk stages of growth have a timespan from 4 months to 2.5 years: at four months, their shoulder height is about two-thirds of adult female, at six months their shoulder height is about three-quarters of adult female, at eight months their horn tips are clearly visible (about 1cm long), at one year their shoulder height is nearly equal to adult female but body more lightly built, their horns are slightly less than half ear-length, then curve, at two years their horns are about 1.5 times their ear length and the second curve becomes noticeable with the tips turning forwards, and finally at two and a half years the double curve in the horns are nearly completed.

Ecology and behavior
The gerenuk is a diurnal animal (active mainly during the day), though it typically stands or rests in shade during the noon. Foraging and feeding is the major activity throughout the day; females appear to spend longer time in feeding. The gerenuk may expose itself to rain, probably to cool its body. The social structure consists of small herds of two to six members. Herds typically comprise members of a single sex, though female herds additionally have juveniles. Some males lead a solitary life.

Fighting and travel are uncommon, possibly as a strategy to save energy for foraging. Both sexes maintain home ranges 3 - 6 km2 large, and might overlap. Those of males are scent-marked with preorbital gland secretions and guarded - hence these may be termed territories. The sedentary tendency of the antelope appears to increase with age.

Diet
Primarily a browser, the gerenuk feed on foliage of bushes as well as trees, shoots, herbs, flowers and fruits. It can reach higher branches and twigs better than other gazelles and antelopes by standing erect on its hindlegs and elongating its neck; this helps it reach over 2 m above the ground. Acacia species are eaten whenever available, while evergreen vegetation forms the diet during droughts. The pointed mouth assists in extracting leaves from thorny vegetation. The gerenuk does not drink water regularly. Major predators of the antelope include African wild dogs, cheetahs, hyenas, lions and leopards.

Reproduction
Gerenuk reproduce throughout the year. Females reach sexual maturity at around one year, and males reach sexual maturity at 1.5 years, although in the wild they may only be successful after acquiring a territory (perhaps 3.5 years). The gestation period is about seven months. They are born one at a time, weighing about 3 kg at birth. Offspring were produced through artificial insemination for the first time in 2010 at White Oak Conservation in Yulee, Florida. Four female calves were born, and one of the four was later inseminated successfully by White Oak and SEZARC (South-East Zoo Alliance for Reproduction & Conservation), creating a second generation of calves born from artificial insemination. Gerenuk can live thirteen years or more in captivity, and at least eight years in the wild.

title: Gerenuk


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Quneitra

Quneitra (also Al Qunaytirah, Qunaitira, or Kuneitra; ٱلْقُنَيْطِرَة or ٱلْقُنَيطْرَة, al-Qunayṭrah or al-Qunayṭirah ) is the largely destroyed and abandoned capital of the Quneitra Governorate in south-western Syria. It is situated in a high valley in the Golan Heights at 1,010 metres (3,313 feet) above sea level. Since 1974, pursuant to United Nations Security Council Resolution 350 and the Agreement on Disengagement between Israel and Syria, the city is inside the UN-patrolled buffer zone.

Quneitra was founded in the Ottoman era as a way station on the caravan route to Damascus and subsequently became a garrison town of some 20,000 people. In 1946, it became part of the independent Syrian Republic within the Riff Dimashq Governorate and in 1964 became the capital of the split Quneitra Governorate. On 10 June 1967, the last day of the Six-Day War, Quneitra came under Israeli control. It was briefly recaptured by Syria during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, but Israel regained control in its subsequent counter-offensive. The city was almost completely destroyed by Israel before it withdrew in June 1974. Syria later refused to rebuild the city and actively discouraged resettlement in the area. Israel was heavily criticized by the United Nations for the city's destruction, while Israel has also criticized Syria for not rebuilding Quneitra.

In 2004, its population was estimated at 153 persons, with some 4,000 more living in the surrounding areas of the former city.

During the Syrian Civil War, Quneitra became a clash point between rebel forces and Syrian Arab Army. Between 2014 and July 2018, Quneitra was de facto controlled by the Southern Front, a Syrian rebel alliance. By the end of July 2018, Syrian Government forces regained control over the city.

Etymology
Qantara is the Arabic word for arched bridge. Quneitra means small arch or bridge, and the name is derived from the small-arches bridge around which the town has been built.

Political status
Quneitra is the capital of the Quneitra Governorate, a district of southwestern Syria that incorporates the whole of the Golan Heights. The city of Quneitra is within the portion of the Golan Heights controlled by Syria. Madinat al-Baath (Baath City), also known as New Quneitra, replaced Quneitra as the administrative centre of Quneitra Governorate.

Geography and demographics
Quneitra is situated in a high valley in the Golan Heights at an altitude of 942 m above sea level. It is overshadowed to the west by the Israeli-held portion of the Golan Heights and the peak of Har Bental. The surrounding area is dominated by ancient volcanic lava flows interspersed by a number of dormant volcanic cones which rise some 150 to 200 m above the surrounding plain. The volcanic hills of the region have played a key role as observation points and natural firing positions in the conflicts over the region, most notably in the Yom Kippur War. In more peaceful times, the fertile volcanic soil has supported agricultural activities such as wheat growing and pastoralism.

Writing during the inter-war period, the American traveler Harriet-Louise H. Patterson recorded that Quneitra was

"charmingly set in a grove of eucalyptus trees. Its chief claim to charm or the few moments of a traveller's time beyond passport formalities is the beautiful vista which it offers of Jordan as it flows down from Hermon through banks of tangled bush and flowering pink and white oleanders. Kuneitra is pleasant as a stopping-place for lunch. It is cool under the spreading trees, usually quiet and restful."

The city's position on an important trade route gave it a varied population for much of its history. By the start of the 20th century it was dominated by Muslim Circassians from the Caucasus, accompanied by Turkmen and Arabs. Its population grew to some 21,000 people, mostly Arabs, followed by Turkmen and Circassians, following Syrian independence from France in 1946. After its abandonment in 1967 and subsequent destruction, its population was dispersed to other parts of Syria. The city remains abandoned apart from a residual Syrian security presence. Due to frequent and large population movements within Syria and across borders caused by war, there are no reliable population estimates available post-2011. The impact of the crisis has led to massive displacements and a gradual deterioration of access to basic services. Quneitra has also been the destination for many internally displaced persons (IDPs) from neighbouring Daraa and Rif Dimashq governorates. In August 2013, many of the estimated 75,000 IDPs from Nawa and Al-Harra in Daraa Governorate reportedly fled to Quneitra.

Prehistory

The surrounding area has been inhabited for millennia. Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers are thought to have lived there, as evidenced by the discovery of Levallois and Mousterian flint tools in the vicinity.

Hellenistic to Byzantine periods
A settlement was established at least as early as the late Hellenistic period, and continued through the Roman and Byzantine times; it was known by the name "Sarisai". The settlement served as a stop on the road from Damascus to western Palestine. Saint Paul is said to have passed through the settlement on his way from Jerusalem to Damascus. The site of the Conversion of Paul was traditionally identified with the small village of Kokab, north-east of Quneitra, on the road to Damascus.

Late Ottoman period
For much of the 18th and 19th centuries Quneitra was abandoned. In 1868 a travel handbook reported that the site was a "ruined village of about 80 or 100 houses" and that a large caravanserai also stood in ruins. Semi-nomadic pastoral groups such as the Arab Al Fadl and Banu Nu'aym tribes and several Turkmen tribes grazed their flocks in Quneitra's rocky lands.

In 1873, a group of Circassians from Sivas in Anatolia settled in Quneitra. This initial group did not cultivate the area for a number of years. A second wave of Circassians, numbering about 2,000, arrived in the Golan in 1878 via Acre after fleeing Bulgaria due to the Russo-Turkish War. Along with Quneitra, they settled or built number of other villages in the vicinity. The Circassians began farming the area and each family was given title to 70 to 130 dunams of land by the government depending on the family's size. The Ottomans encouraged Circassian settlement in the Golan as a means to drive a wedge between the frequently rebellious Druze villages of Mount Hermon and those in Jabal Hauran. The Circassians of Quneitra engaged in sustained conflicts with the Druze and the Al Fadl through the remainder of the 19th century.

Modern Quneitra grew around the nucleus of the old Ottoman caravanserai, which had been built using the stones of a ruined ancient settlement. By the mid-1880s, Quneitra had become the main city and seat of government of the Golan. Gottlieb Schumacher wrote in 1888 that it "consists of 260 buildings, which are mostly well and carefully constructed of basalt stones, and contains, excluding the soldiers and officials, 1,300 inhabitants, principally Circassians." Circassians moved away from the Golan beginning after the Six-Day War and again after the fall of the Soviet Union.

During World War I, the Australian Mounted Division and 5th Cavalry Division defeated the Ottoman Turks at Quneitra on 29 September 1918, before they took Damascus (see also Battle of Megiddo (1918)).

Second World War
Quneitra saw several battles during the Syria-Lebanon Campaign of the Second World War, including the Battle of Damascus and Battle of Kissoué.

Arab-Israeli conflict
When the modern states of Syria and Israel gained their independence from France and Britain respectively after the Second World War, Quneitra gained a new strategic significance as a key road junction some 24 km from the border. It became a prosperous market town and military garrison, with its population tripling to over 20,000 people, predominately Arabs.

Six-Day War
Quneitra was the Syrian headquarters for the Golan Heights. The Israeli capture of the city occurred in chaotic circumstances on 10 June 1967, the last day of the Six-Day War. Israeli forces advancing towards Quneitra from the north-west prompted Syrian troops to deploy north of the city, under heavy bombardment, to defend the road to Damascus. At 8:45 a.m., Syrian radio broadcast an announcement that the city had fallen, though it actually had not. Alarmed, the Syrian Army's redeployment turned into a chaotic retreat along the Damascus road.

According to 8th Brigade Commander Ibrahim Isma'il Khahya: We received orders to block the roads leading to Quneitra. But then the fall of the city was announced and that caused many of my soldiers to leave the front and run back to Syria while the roads were still open. They piled onto vehicles. It further crushed our morale. I retreated before I ever saw an enemy soldier.

Although a correction was broadcast two hours later, the Israelis took advantage of the confusion to seize Quneitra. An armoured brigade under Colonel Albert Mandler entered Quneitra at 2:30 p.m. and found the city deserted and strewn with abandoned military equipment. One of the Israeli commanders later commented:

"We arrived almost without hindrance to the gates of Quneitra ... All around us there were huge quantities of booty. Everything was in working order. Tanks with their engines still running, communication equipment still in operation, had been abandoned. We captured Quneitra without a fight."

Time magazine reported: "In an effort to pressure the United Nations into enforcing a ceasefire, Damascus Radio undercut its own army by broadcasting the fall of the city of El Quneitra three hours before it actually capitulated. That premature report of the surrender of their headquarters destroyed the morale of the Syrian troops left in the Golan area."

A ceasefire was agreed later in the afternoon, leaving Quneitra under Israeli control. In June 1967, Time magazine wrote that: "The city of El Quneitra was a ghost town, its shops shuttered, its deserted streets patrolled by Israelis on house-to-house searches for caches of arms and ammunition. The hills echoed with explosions as Israeli sappers systematically destroyed the miniature Maginot line from which the Syrians had shelled kibbutzim across the Sea of Galilee."

The United Nations Special Representative, Nils-Göran Gussing, visited it in July and reported that "nearly every shop and every house seemed to have been broken into and looted" and that some buildings had been set on fire after they had been stripped. Although Israeli spokesmen told Gussing that Quneitra had actually been looted by the withdrawing Syrians, the UN representative viewed this as unlikely given the extremely short space of time between the erroneous radio announcement and the fall of the city a few hours later. He concluded that "responsibility for this extensive looting of the town of Quneitra lay to a great extent with the Israeli forces."

Circassian dispersion from the Golan began after the Six-Day War, then additional numbers moved to the Caucasus after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Israeli occupation
The deserted city remained in Israeli hands for the next six years. However, Israel and Syria remained in a state of war throughout this period (and, indeed, to the present day). The town gained a fresh symbolic value; it was seen by the Syrians as "the badge of Syria's defeat, an emblem of hatred between Syria and Israel and a cross [Syrian President Hafez al-Assad] had to bear." Syria shelled the city several times during the early 1970s; in June 1970 a Syrian armored unit launched an attack, and in November 1972, Damascus radio announced that Syrian artillery had again shelled Quneitra.

Yom Kippur War
During the first few days of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Quneitra was briefly recaptured by the Syrian Army before it was repulsed in an Israeli counter-offensive. In the middle of October 1973 the Israeli counter-offensive started. The Syrians had massed nearly 1,000 tanks along a 60 mi front. With a massive concentration of tanks, the Israelis lashed into the Syrian forces. The Syrians at first fell back, but then managed to counterattack and drive back into occupied territory. Quneitra changed hands several times. Finally, Israeli armored units, closely supported by Phantoms and Skyhawks performing close air support with napalm strikes against the forward Syrian units, halted the Syrian drive and turned the Syrian Army back.

Destruction of Quneitra and return to Syrian control
Israel continued to control the city until early June 1974, when it was returned to Syrian civilian control following the signature of a United States-brokered disengagement agreement signed on 31 May 1974. The surrender of Quneitra was controversial, with Israeli settlers and the Likud and National Religious Party opposing it. According to Michael Mandelbaum, the agreement provided that the city was to be repopulated to serve as evidence of peaceful Syrian intentions, by doing so it would encourage the Israelis to pull back further.

In an attempt to block the withdrawal, a group of settlers from Merom Golan – a settlement established in 1967 – took over an abandoned bunker in Quneitra and declared it to be a new settlement called Keshet (Quneitra in Hebrew). The settlers also set about razing the existing town to the ground. The leader of Merom Golan, Yehuda Harel, and another Merom Golan member, Shimshon Wollner, initiated the destruction of Quneitra, which was carried out by the Land Development Administration of the Jewish National Fund. Harel later described what happened:

"Shimshon and I walked around Quneitra all day and tried decide what to do. And then these two strange ideas came up. One was to establish a settlement in Quneitra and the second was to destroy Quneitra."

Wollner and Harel asked the Jewish National Fund to carry out the work, ostensibly to prepare an area for agricultural cultivation, but were refused as they did not have permission from the Israeli army. They then approached the Assistant to the Head of Northern Command and asked him to mark on a map which buildings the army needed. According to Harel,

"So he took a felt pen and marked the hospital and a few other places – he wrote "not for destruction" and on other places he wrote "for destruction" and he signed. He thought he was signing about what not to destroy but he was actually writing to destroy . . . The tractors of the Jewish National Fund did the destroying. They weren't our tractors . . . I can tell you that even the tractor drivers were Arabs."

The buildings were systematically stripped, with anything movable being removed and sold to Israeli contractors, before they were pulled apart with tractors and bulldozers.

The disengagement went into force on 6 June. On 26 June, the Syrian president Hafez al-Assad travelled to Quneitra where he pledged to return the rest of the occupied territories to Syrian control. Western reporters accompanied Syrian refugees returning to the city in early July 1974 and described what they saw on the ground. Time magazine's correspondent reported that "Most of its buildings are knocked flat, as though by dynamite, or pockmarked by shellfire." Le Monde's Syria correspondent, in a report for The Times, gave a detailed eyewitness description of the destruction:

"Today the city is unrecognisable. The houses with their roofs lying on the ground look like gravestones. Parts of the rubble are covered with fresh earth furrowed by bulldozer tracks. Everywhere there are fragments of furniture, discarded kitchen utensils, Hebrew newspapers dating from the first week of June; here a ripped-up mattress, there the springs of an old sofa. On the few sections of wall still standing, Hebrew inscriptions proclaim: 'There'll be another round'; 'You want Quneitra, you'll have it destroyed.'"

Israel asserted that most of the damage had been caused in the two wars and during the artillery duels in between. Several reports from before the withdrawal did refer to the city as "ruined" and "shell-scarred". The Times' correspondent saw the city for himself on 6 May, a month before the Israeli withdrawal, and described it as being "in ruins and deserted after seven years of war and dereliction. It looks like a wild west city struck by an earthquake and if the Syrians get it back they will face a major feat of reconstruction. Nearly every building is heavily damaged and scores have collapsed."

Direct evidence of the city's condition was provided when it was filmed on 12 May 1974 by a British television news team which included the veteran journalist Peter Snow, who was reporting for Independent Television News on the disengagement negotiations. His report was broadcast on ITN's News at Ten programme. According to The Times' correspondent Edward Mortimer, "viewers were thus afforded a panoramic view of the city, which had stood almost completely empty since the Syrian army evacuated it in 1967. It could be seen that many of the buildings were damaged, but most of them were still standing." After it was handed over, "very few buildings were left standing. Most of those destroyed did not present the jagged outline and random heaps of rubble usually produced by artillery or aerial bombardment. The roofs lay flat on the ground, 'pancaked' in a manner which I am told can only be achieved by systematic dynamiting of the support walls inside." Mortimer concluded that the footage "establishes beyond reasonable doubt that much of the destruction took place after 12 May—at a time when there was no fighting anywhere near Kuneitra."

The United Nations established a Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories, which engaged a Swiss engineer Edward Gruner to investigate the damage. Gruner and a team of surveyors spent four months in Quneitra, documenting every building and its condition. His report concluded that Israeli forces had deliberately destroyed the city prior to their withdrawal, including almost 4,000 buildings and a large amount of infrastructure, of value estimated at 463 million Syrian pounds. The report's conclusions were subsequently adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. It passed a resolution on 29 November 1974 describing the destruction of Quneitra as "a grave breach of the [Fourth] Geneva Convention" and "condemn[ing] Israel for such acts," by a margin of 93 votes to 8, with 74 abstentions. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights also voted to condemn the "deliberate destruction and devastation" of Quneitra in a resolution of 22 February 1975, by a margin of 22 votes to one (the United States) with nine abstentions.

As a city ruin
The city remains in a destroyed condition. Syria has left the ruins in place and built a museum to memorialize its destruction. It maintains billboards at the ruins of many buildings and effectively preserves it in the condition that the Israeli army left it in. The former residents of the town have not returned and Syria discourages the re-population of the area. However, in the 2004 census by the Central Bureau of Statistics, a small population of 153 people living in 28 households was recorded, all living in the neighborhood of Rasm al-Rawabi. The Rough Guide to Syria describes the appearance of the city in 2001: "The first sight of the flattened houses on Quneitra's outskirts is the most dramatic; many of the unscathed roofs simply lie on top of a mass of rubble, leaving the impression of a building that has imploded."

The city has often been used as a stop for foreign VIPs, ranging from the Soviet foreign minister Alexei Kosygin in June 1976 to Pope John Paul II in May 2001. Only a handful of families now live in the town, making a living by providing services for the United Nations troops patrolling the demilitarized zone. According to The Times, "the carefully preserved ruined city has become a pilgrimage site for a generation of Syrians."

Prior to the Syrian Civil War, the city could be visited by tourists with a permit from the Syrian Ministry of the Interior and under the supervision of a military guide. The principal sights on the standard tour were the remains of Quneitra's hospital, mosque and Greek Orthodox church. A "Liberated Quneitra Museum", displaying artifacts from the city's ancient and medieval past, is housed in the former Ottoman Turkish caravanserai in the city centre. The western edge of the city marks the start of "no-man's land" beyond which lies Israeli-controlled territory. It was and still is not possible to visit Quneitra directly from Israel.

Syrian Civil War
On 13 November 2012, during the ongoing Syrian Civil War, which had begun in March 2011, Syria′s president Bashar al-Assad issued a decreed establishment of a branch of the University of Damascus in Quneitra.

On 6 June 2013, the nearby Quneitra border crossing was attacked by rebel forces and temporarily occupied, with Syrian army later retaking the crossing; In July 2013, opposition forces attacked a military checkpoint in Quneitra, and by the next day were attacking several Syrian Arab Army positions in Quneitra.

In August 2014, rebel forces captured the crossing. A Filipino peacekeeper of the UNDOF was wounded during the fighting. As a result the Austrian government announced the withdrawal of its troops from the UN mission.

On 26 July 2018, the Syrian Army took back the town of Quneitra after rebels surrendered and handed over the heavy and medium weapons to army.

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

title: Quneitra


text:
Talk:Null-subject language

Russian example
To be precise, Russian verbs do not have person marked in the past (which btw results in less frequent pronoun drops in the past then in other forms); but they have gender in singular. We just know that the Latin original phrase is first-person, but without this background пришёл, увидел, победил is 'I-m./you-m./he came,' etc. Ignatus (talk) 16:06, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

English
There seems to be quite a lot of this in English, at least in the first person singular, perhaps mainly in slightly informal contexts, like "Don't know much about history, don't know much about biology"; "Will you come to-morrow?" "Can't, I'm afraid"; "Can't pay, won't pay," and so on. Seadowns (talk) 13:30, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

Japanese requiring an expressed topic
The article states:
 * Japanese and several other null subject languages are topic-prominent languages: they require an expressed topic in order for sentences to make sense.

Although Japanese is topic-prominent, sentences definitely don't require an expressed topic to make sense. For one, the topic is always omitted when it is the same as the subject, and in other situations the topic, subject, and object can be, and frequently are omitted entirely, whenever they are expected to be implicitly understood. I will try to reword this section. LeeWilson (talk) 05:57, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Pro-drop parameter, parameter settings in the brain
this article should also include stuff about chomsky and "pro-drop parameter" and "parameter settings in the brain" Bogdan | Talk 19:03, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * Agree. - FrancisTyers 17:01, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Pro-drop languages
I think there's considerable overlap (and confusion) between "null subject" and "pro-drop". Modesty aside, I think the coverage of the subject in pro-drop language is fine, though of course this is not exactly the same phenomenon. I'd prefer to see these articles merged into one. In any case, I'm putting this up for attention. --Pablo D. Flores 14:30, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

 * I see what you're saying, but I do think a language can be one but not the other. Esperanto, for example, is non-pro-drop, but it seems that it is null-subject, since impersonal sentences do not require a subject. Conversely, it seems that a language that allowed some pronouns to be dropped, but never subject pronouns, would be pro-drop, but non-null-subject. I think the articles should simply do a better job explaining the difference. Alternatively, perhaps it should be explained that "null subject" and "pro-drop" are two different ways of looking at what is usually the same phenomenon: while the latter sees pronouns being dropped, the former doesn't see pronouns having been there to begin with. Also, perhaps it is better to say that one language can be more null-subject or pro-drop than another, rather than to attempt to categorize languages as either null-subject or not. Ruakh 05:39, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

I agree that this article needs to do a better job explaining the difference between null-subject and pro-drop. As of now, I don't quite get how this is in practice. Also, note that all examples in the article are in fact examples of pro-drop, leaving me wondering what other cases would look like. EldKatt (Talk) 11:39, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

 * Pro-drop is defined as the possibility (or the idiomatic obligation) of leaving out pronouns when pragmatically inferable. That's something completely different from the null-subject definition, which doesn't mention pragmatics at all but just syntax; and this article also mixes 1) null-subject as an example of pro-drop, and 2) null-subject as the alternative to dummy pronoun usage with semantically impersonal verbs. Then we had a lengthy discussion months ago about those, and settled on a NPOV compromise... but I still think it in it's raining is truly meaningless and an artifact of syntax. I suggest everybody (including myself) gets well into the subject and then we can discuss, so that we don't have neither overlap nor contradiction among articles. --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 13:52, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Slovenian language
I'm a Slovenian, and based on my understanding of null subject languages, Slovenian is one too.

Example:

I am eating.

Jem.

You are eating.

Ješ.

The verb agrees with subject in person and number, and if the subject is omitted, the verb itself signifies who is the object (in a given contex).

Compare:

Jaz jem. would mean It is me who is eating. or Moi, je mange. (in French).

 * Most, if not all, Slavic languages are like this (Russian, for example), and I see no reason for them not to be on the list, as it's a very prominent feature of those languages. Your examples in Russian: I am eating = (Я) ем, You are eating = (Ты) ешь. Another example: - Где Аня? - Ушла = - Where's Anna? - (She) went out. 84.202.199.101 19:02, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

 * I can't see any difference between Russian and Latin in this respect. The subject is in the verb form.( Also, I think someone has written object above when meaning subject.)Seadowns (talk) 13:01, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

Merger from Null subjects
It is evident that we don't need both articles. Does anyone see any problems or other issues in merging these two? --Lambiam Talk 14:14, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

 * Nope, sounds good to me. Ruakh 14:30, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

 * They clearly refer to the same thing and this is better named, so merge away! —Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 16:58, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

So done. --Lambiam Talk 05:46, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Irish?
I don't know whether Irish should be considered a null subject language or not. In Irish, some finite verb forms are inflected for person and number (synthetic forms), while others aren't and have to have an explicit subject (analytic forms). Using explicit subjects with synthetic forms is ungrammatical. So for example, the 1st person singular present indicative is synthetic: molaim means "I praise", and *molaim mé is ungrammatical (Irish being VSO the verb precedes the subject). But the 3rd person singular present indicative is analytic: molann sé means "he praises" and *molann without an explicit subject is ungrammatical (except in tag questions and as an answer to a question). So what's weird about Irish compared to "canonical" null-subject languages like Portuguese is (1) not all finite verb forms carry person and number information, and those that don't may not have a null subject, and (2) verb forms that do carry person and number information must have a null subject; it isn't optional. —Angr 11:33, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

 * I think that given what you just said, Irish is a null subject language, but that what you just said bears explanation in the article. Ruakh 15:05, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Okay, I'll see if I can dig up some sources. —Angr 15:32, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
 * On second thought, in light of the discussion below, I won't bother. —Angr 08:38, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Which languages to mention?
Mentioning a few diverse null subject languages in the article serves two purposes: (A) to give the reader for who this is a new concept a few examples they might be familiar with; and (B) to illustrate that this feature occurs in widely divergent language families. There are some 2000 null subject languages, and it is pointless to list here as many as possible. Additionally, there is a serious problem of unverifiability. If some user adds, say, Cotoname, who is going to verify this, or, alternatively, challenge this? So I propose to whittle and keep the list down to, say, ten widely known (if only by name) diverse languages. Other viewpoints? --Lambiam Talk 00:54, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

 * I'm with you 100%. Maybe more than 100%, even.

 * The current text is thus:

 * Among the null subject languages are Latin, most Romance languages (including Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, Franco-Provençal, Italian, and Romanian – but not French), Slavic languages (Polish, Slovenian, Croatian, etc.), Finnish, Hungarian, Modern and Ancient Greek, Amharic, Arabic, Ge'ez, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Persian, Tamil, Tigre, Tigrinya, and Turkish. Old Germanic languages also had this feature, for instance Old Norse regnir ("it rains").

 * How is this?:

 * There are some 2000 null subject languages in the world, from a wide diversity of unrelated language families. Null subject languages include Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese, as well as most of these languages' relatives, and many other languages besides.

 * (with references, of course). Is that still too long? I went with five languages I figured everyone would have heard of; I included two Indo-European languages because I assume it's the world's largest language family (in terms of number of speakers), and it's certainly the one most familiar to English Wikipedians, so it seemed worthwhile. The three others are all thought to be genetically unrelated to each other and to the Indo-European languages, though obviously the languages have influenced each other to varying extents.

 * Thoughts?

 * Ruakh 02:14, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Bah! If you want to have such a cut, you should name language families, and not languages. Velho 04:11, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

 * It is in general not a property of language families but of individual languages. --Lambiam Talk  07:07, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

 * True. Even languages as closely related as French and Spanish can differ on whether or not they allow null subjects. —Angr 07:23, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

 * Lambiam — Is that true? True, French is the only major Romance language that doesn't allow null subjects; but in general, I think null-subject-allowing might well be a property of language families. (Obviously it depends on big a family you're talking about, though; it's not obvious to me that Indo-European languages can, as a group, be considered null-subject.) Ruakh 15:16, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, it's somewhat of a truism to say that the tighter the relationship between two languages, the more likely they are to share a typological or other grammatical feature, and being null subject follows that pattern. It is not a very enlightening observation; it holds likewise for the preferred branching direction, the presence of a dual, or having a vocative. I can't claim to be an expert on the matter, but specifically for null subjects it would appear that distinction for person in the conjugation is a prerequisite. Since this was largely lost in French (except for being stubbornly retained in the orthography), it would explain the French exception to the Romance family. Modern Germanic languages tend not to inflect for person in the plural forms, which may explain their mandatory subject. I conjecture (but cannot check) that conversely languages having a clear person+number distinction in the verb will tend to be null subject. Changes of inflectional paradigm are among the more common in language evolution, possibly making the null subject feature one of the less stable ones. --Lambiam Talk  17:46, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

 * Velho — The problem with that is, it's hard to name language families that people have heard of. If we say, "Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese", people know what that means; if we say, "Romance languages, Indo-Aryan languages, Semitic languages, Sino-Tibetan languages, and Japonic languages", that's a lot more verbose and a lot less clear. Ruakh 15:16, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

I've replaced the text in the article by Ruakh's text, but instead of the absolute number 2000 (which is an undocumented estimate) I've put the vague but unassailable "a considerable part" (of the world's languages). --Lambiam Talk 04:55, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Aren't imperative sentences independent clauses?!
Why shouldn't we mention that imperative sentences often come without subject?! Velho 23:34, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

 * We should; it's just that that wasn't the place for it. I've now added that information in a section where it's more relevant (Null subject language). —RuakhTALK 01:55, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Also, the difference between independent clauses and dependent clauses has nothing to do with anything. —Angr 15:32, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

"Ele está a chover"
I've corrected the section which said that the construction "ele está a chover" doesn't exist in portuguese based on: and (both links are in portuguese) --LeRobert 18:06, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

 * I'm reverting your "correction", because "ele está a chover" gets zero hits on Google aside from this article (compared with "está a chover"'s 27,100), which casts a great deal of doubt on your sources' claim, and "ele chovia" gets 44 hits (compared with "chovia"'s 174,000, though that's a bit hard to interpret because it looks like "chovia" is a noun as well), which means that even if one person claims it's correct, the vast majority of Portuguese speakers apparently feel otherwise. —RuakhTALK 02:28, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

One of those links referred to a very famous Portuguese song. All I wanted to show was that it's perfectly fine to use that construction even if it's not a very common one (maybe that sentence is not a very good example for this article). --LeRobert 10:57, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

 * I don't think existing in a single very famous song makes a construction "perfectly acceptable" for normal speech, other than in (explicit or implicit) reference to that song. —RuakhTALK 18:24, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

You only very rarely hear that in Portuguese. It's either done for literary purposes, or (perhaps) characteristic of a few dialects. I think it's fair to say that it's not a part of the standard language, and I would not count it as a counterexample, myself. There is no comparison between those examples and English "It rains" or French "Il pleut", where the pronoun is absolutely mandatory. FilipeS 19:34, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

 * You're absolutely right Ruakh! However I only mentioned the song to show you that it's not such an unseen feature. It is rare (I agree with you Filipe) but it isn't wrong as it is stated in the article. --LeRobert 21:15, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

But c'mon! The article shouldn't point to the possibility of "ele" appearing. It looks now as if it was kind of an option or so. Whenever "ele" appears in such constructions, it is always somehow non-standard or even anti-standard. The article isn't giving the right idea! Velho 02:01, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

 * I disagree. With Ruakh's rewrite, the article is fine. FilipeS 13:26, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Hear! Hear! --LeRobert 13:40, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

 * I propose to take out the example sentence Está a chover entirely from the Examples section:
 * One way or another, it is somewhat anomalous since this is an impersonal construction.
 * Impersonal constructions are dealt with separately in the next section.
 * There is also a more general treatment of this in the article Impersonal verb.
 * Then we can drop this subject. :) --Lambiam Talk  07:20, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

 * I actually agree with Lambiam's suggestion. "Ele está a chover" is a very, very marginal construction. FilipeS 20:37, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

I've never ever met 'ele está a chover', or actually any instance of 'ele' as the subject of an otherwise impersonal construction in my lifetime as a native speaker and careful observer of the language. There is only 'Ele acontece.../há...' as a fixed expression. I'm willing to admit it might occur in dialectal or archaic usage, of the sort that nobody will ever meet in normal life. The song mentioned uses the fixed and normal, albeit stilted, 'ele há'.77.54.70.64 (talk) 17:47, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Very different situations for the current Portuguese examples
I am Brazilian and thus a native speaker of Portuguese. I would like to point out that according to Portuguese grammar, the second example (with "It is raining") is not exactly a case of omitted subject, and therefore may not be a case of null subject as defined here. Additionally, there is a good and precise reason why the subject may be omitted in the first example (with "I am going home").

In the first example, "Vou para casa" ("I am going home" - or, literally, "[I] go to [my] house" - there are actually two omitted pronouns in this sentence, one personal and one possessive!), it is simply the very detailed and precise Portuguese verb conjugation, mostly with a different verb form for each person, number and tense combination, that makes the pronoun implicit and redundant.

In other words, there is no way a pronoun other than eu ("I") could be used with vou; so, there is no gain in information content by using the pronoun explicitly (or loss by not using it). Both forms are grammatically correct and it is usually left to the speaker's or writer's preference to use either of them. However, as mentioned in the text, Brazilian Portuguese is indeed more liberal with using explicit pronouns or not than European Portuguese, where emphasis considerations weigh more (here in Brazil, we not only use the pronoun for emphasis, but must use the right voice tone when emphasis is desired - that is, the emphasis itself must be emphasized!). For this very reason, we are taught in school that it is considered more elegant to avoid using explicit subjects whenever possible, especially with eu, because saying "eu, eu, eu" all the time can be interpreted as a sign that the person is a total egocentric...

On the other hand, there are some verbs and tenses where the first and third person singular are conjugated the same way. The same very irregular verb ir ("to go") offers an example in the so-called imperfect past tense: "Eu ia à igreja" ("I used to go to church") and "Ele/ela ia à igreja" ("He/she used to go to church"). In such cases, the speaker or writer is advised to check if there are enough context clues before deciding whether to use an explicit subject or not, because otherwise there may be room for ambiguity sometimes.

However, chover ("to rain") is a completely different case. It is not a case where the subject may be omitted because it is already implicit: chover and other "weather" verbs are a special case of so-called "impersonal defective" verbs, and in their commonest usage (as in "It is raining" - "Está chovendo" in Brazil or "Está a chover" in Portugal), they are only conjugated in the third person singular and syntactically are considered to have no subject at all. That is, the subject is not being omitted - Portuguese grammar considers that it simply does not exist! (There are, however, figurative constructions which may have a subject, and then the verb will be conjugated accordingly; the prestigious Houaiss dictionary gives some examples, such as: "Após o apelo na TV, os donativos choveram." - "After the appeal on TV, donations rained.") With that in mind, is the basic sense of chover a null-subject example as defined by this article? I am not so sure.

I am not very proficient in Spanish, but the two languages are very similar, including much of their grammar, and I believe these same remarks probably apply to Spanish as well (including the case of llover - "to rain").

What do you think? --UrsoBR (talk) 11:01, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Over-representation of constructed languages
Here and in other linguistics articles, constructed languages are over-represented. That a given constructed language has a given characteristic is really irrelevant for most purposes, because it doesn't say anything meaningful about the characteristic (all it says is that the language's constructor thought it a good idea). That said, I feel awkward about removing this content without some sort of discussion first … so, thoughts? —RuakhTALK 21:16, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I totally agree. There are around 2000 Null Subject Languages and such from the 3 languages presented 2 are Interlingua and Esperanto? Mirc mirc 16:10, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

I reintroduced part of that section, for the following reasons. First, the section was nearly blanked. I can see devoting less space to one language type than another, but I see no reason to single out one type and nearly obliterate it. Second, the information was removed under the misunderstanding that this section deals with constructed languages and is therefore not meaningful. While Esperanto is considered constructed, Interlingua is considered a naturally occurring language, so it isn't clear to me how it is somehow less meaningful than French or Japanese. In any case, I think it's a big leap from "constructed" to "meaningless", and it seems an overstatement to suggest that including one constructed language is an over-representation. Finally, several officially null-subject languages are included, just not in the auxiliary language section. I've made this clearer in the text. Cal (talk) 06:05, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

 * Re: "Interlingua is considered a naturally occurring language": What the heck? —Ruakh TALK 06:41, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

 * Please see Gode's Manifesto de Interlingua, which explains that Interlingua didn't require any construction, and the Introduction to the Interlingua-English Dictionary, which describes how Interlingua is seen as developing naturally over hundreds of years. It's essentially the latent presence of a single language within the world's languages. The basic premise of Interlingua is that an international language doesn't need to be constructed: it exists.

 * Regarding my recent revision, I see no reason why a particular type of language - the auxiliary type - should be singled out and presented with no examples to facilitate comprehension. To my knowledge, Wikipedia doesn't consider prejudice to be a basis for making edits. Cal (talk) 01:42, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

 * Don't confuse "naturalistic" with "naturally occurring". Interlingua did, in fact, require construction.  From Wikipedia herself, "Interlingua was developed to combine a simple, mostly regular grammar" and "Conversely, it is used as a rapid introduction to many natural languages" (emphasis my own).  Had Interlingua not required construction, it would have existed before the publication of both Manifesto de Interlingua and Interlingua-English Dictionary, with native speakers being the authority on the language.  This was inarguably not so.  At the same time, it is designed to feel like and act like a natural language (specifically it feels Romance), making it thus naturalistic.  Though not to a great extent. PatrickNiedzielski (talk) 05:04, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

Semitic Languages
There is something I want to clarify before I write sections on Hebrew and Arabic. In null subject languages, is it necessary or just optional to omit the subject? I need to know this to finish my section on Hebrew. --Vgp0012 17:56, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

 * Just optional; Hebrew is indeed a null subject language (especially in the past tense). However, please think about whether these sections are really helpful, and if you do write them, please keep them brief; the last thing we need is for this article to mushroom in discussing the minutiae of fifty million languages. Indeed, we already have an "Auxiliary languages" section that's really just pointless and needs to be either eliminated, or shortened to just a sentence or two. —Ruakh TALK 23:30, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

 * Given Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, I think it would be difficult for any one editor to decide unilaterally which languages should be included in an article. One option would be to have a Specific languages section, with subsections Hebrew, Arabic, and Auxiliary languages. This way, the Auxiliary languages section would be less obtrusive. I've seen this approach used in many linguistic Wikipedia articles. It seems to work well, and I find the diversity of information very helpful. Cal (talk) 02:15, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

List
We need a List of null-subject languages as well as a List of non-null-subject languages. Openodd (talk) 03:33, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Removing parenthetical from Latin example
I'm removing the parenthetical addition from 94.225.100.28 on 30 September, 2011
 * (The above is a rather ambiguous example. In Latin the subject is not necessarily stated through a (personal) noun, but implied through conjugation. Therefore, the subject is present indeed: the first person singular is stated through the “i” in “ven-i“, “vid-i”, “vic-i”, and through the “o” in “cogit-o”. “To think, therefore to be” would be the literal translation of “Cogitare ergo esse“; “I think, therefore I am” is the truly literal translation of “Cogito ergo sum”. The stated examples are hence not a case of null-subject.)

Since the rest of the article considers verb conjugation to be perfectly compatible with classifying an example as Null-subject, even typical. 94.225.100.28's interpretation makes sense, but doesn't fit with the rest of the article. Aidan (talk) 19:23, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

 * Well, yes, Latin is an example. The problem is that the so-called "literal translations" (literal !) there now give the false impression that in fact subject person is unexpressed in the Latin, e.g. that veni could be just as well "you came" as "I came", when actually it's perfectly well expressed, just inflectionally rather than via an explicit pronoun subject.  Needs fixed. 4pq1injbok (talk) 16:53, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

 * I don't see what the problem with the Latin is. The article says right there in the second paragraph, "null-subject languages express person, number, and/or gender agreement with the referent on the verb, rendering a subject noun phrase redundant." This is exactly what's happening in the Latin examples: "veni" is conjugated in first person, so it does literally mean "I came", but the pronoun "I" ("ego") is not explicitly used in the sentence. If anything, the literal translations could put the subject in brackets to make it clear that what information is conveyed through the verb conjugation. But aside from that, there's absolutely nothing wrong with these examples. --Bigpeteb (talk) 16:17, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

 * I don't think the problem is with including Latin as an example, but rather that after 'veni, vidi, vici' it gives a "literal" translation as 'came, saw, conquered' and then an "idiomatic" translation that reads 'I came, etc.' The problem is that 'came, saw, conquered' would not be considered a "literal" translation by any Latin scholar or teacher. I am a Latin teacher and I would expect the pronoun expressed in an English rendering since it's clearly expressed in the Latin. The "literal" translation implies that Latin doesn't mark person and number on verbs, which is of course false. Now that I look at the other examples it looks like this problem pervades the article. Someone is trying to "recreate" the effect of such languages (I call them pro-drop) in English. The problem is that you can't create the effect in English, which is one of the points of the article, i.e. English is not a null-subject language! 'came, saw, conquered' does not create the effect that a Latin speaker would feel upon hearing 'veni, vidi, vici', in fact 'I came, I saw, I conquered' is as close as one can get to create the effect of this phrase in English. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.88.94.122 (talk) 20:06, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

Rich people and Hebrew grammar
What does this bit mean?
 * Subjects can usually omitted only when there is rich person cross-marking on the verb, as in third person plural in the example above.

There are some words missing, and I'm reading this as
 * Subjects can usually [be] omitted only when there is [a] rich person cross-marking on the verb, as in [the] third person plural in the example above.

-- which makes no sense. Sig Pig  |SEND - OVER 05:36, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

 * Ha. O.K., so in Hebrew, whether or not you can drop the subject depends largely on the verb form. For example, you can always drop first- and second-person pronouns in the past tense, largely because the verb endings in the past tense draw all the distinctions that these pronouns do, anyway. (First-person singular aní halákh ti , first-person plural anákhnu halákh nu , second-person masculine singular atá halákh ta , second-person feminine singular at halákh t , second-person masculine plural atém halakh tém /halákh tem , second-person feminine plural atén halakh tén /halákh ten .) By contrast, you can't drop these pronouns in the present tense, because the present-tense verb forms are only marked for gender and number, not for grammatical person. (Well, I suppose you can sometimes drop them, like how in English you can sometimes say "Coming?" instead of "Are you coming?", but it's very colloquial — generally even more so than in English, I think, though I guess it depends on the specific case.)
 * Verb inflection is far from the only factor in determining whether you can leave out the subject, but it's a major one.
 * So I assume that "when there is rich person cross-marking on the verb" is supposed to mean something like "when the verb form is marked for [= inflected to agree with] the grammatical person of the subject".
 * —Ruakh TALK 19:22, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

Explicit subject
I do not understand the concept of 'null subject' as explained here at all. In a form such as 'tulissem' it is surely the final grapheme/morpheme that carries the 'subject' information and is every bit as explicit as 'ego', which is quite simply made redundant and need not be added but can be added in some cases for particular effect. In languages where the pronoun information is usually explicitly required, the omission of it (Weiss nicht/Don't know) is possible because the context ensures that it is understood (Pamour (talk) 20:35, 24 October 2016 (UTC)).

Catalan, Spanish
Taken in account that the text is almost the same those sections could be together. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.123.118.0 (talk) 21:10, 6 May 2018 (UTC)

Hindi
"“Radical pro-drop is possible only in NP languages.”"

What is an NP language? I've searched the Wikipedia and failed. I see a lot of examples about "NP-completeness" in mathematics and computation; they obviously are not relevant. The only linguistic example I find is NP as an abbreviation of "noun phrase" but I can't make sense of that either in this context. — Tonymec (talk) 14:10, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

Turkish
In Turkish it is not actually possible to omit the subject. Because the language do extensively make use of possessive suffixes. So you will never ever have to "guess" the subject... .
 * "Geldi." Can you please tell me who arrived, without guessing? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eleman (talk • contribs) 14:54, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

title: Talk:Null-subject language


text:
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Albums by Moby

I created a new category called "Moby albums" tp be consistant will all other "Albums by artist" categories. This category is no longer needed. DCEdwards1966 19:04, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)

 * Request moved to Categories for Deletion JFW | T@lk  19:13, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)


text:
User:Niteowlneils/csdornot/Kingdom of Vicia

The Kingdom of Vicia is over 750-years-old. Today it is as Soveriegn Grand-Duchy under the protection of the United Kingdom. The islands which make up the Duchy have a population of around 36,600 people.

One half of the islands are extremely rich, and the other half are in extreme poverty, with people living in offices, warehouses and on the streets.

The monarchy under Grand Duchess Joannne (Joan) has been very popular. The Grand Duchess has tried to not interfere with parliaments democratic lesgislative power - on which the Crown has the final say.

The Crown
The Crown has absolute power and influence on the king is mainly from the rich and powerful fo the islands, not the parliament. Parliament's power is only there becuase the monarch has the will for a democracy.

The Grand Duchess still hass the power to veto laws, appoint governments and prime ministers, create laws without parliamentary accepteance, control teh armed forces and police, is head of the Anglican Church in Vicia, and can dissolve parliament at will.

Parliament
Parliament has 6 members, whom are elected from 6 different Electorial Provinces every 3 years.

In 2004 the Christian Democratic Party has no seats elected and saw the return to government of the Conservative People's Party.

Parliament meets in the Abbey in the south east of the islands twice a week.

The Lord Advisor
The Lord Adviser, who presently is Lord Constantine Griffith, is chief adviser to the Grand Duchess and hold theoretical power which has never been clearly staed by niether parliament or the Crown.


text:
Alversund

Alversund is a village in Alver municipality in Vestland county, Norway. The village is located on the mainland of the Lindås peninsula, along the shore of the Alverstraumen strait. The village sits between the villages of Alverstraumen (across the strait) and Alver (to the south), forming a large village area that is often referred to as Alversund.

The Alversund Bridge spans the Alverstraumen strait between Alversund and the village area of Alverstraumen located on the southern tip of the island of Radøy, creating a vital connection between Radøy and the mainland. In Alversund there is a primary school counting 400 pupils. Alversund Church (Alversund kyrkje) dates from 1879 and it is located in the village, along the main road. It was built of wood and has 200 seats. The village was historically the administrative centre of the old municipality of Alversund which existed from 1885 until 1964.

Among other things one will find Den Gamle Bokstova, a book café where a small group of people meets 6-8 times a year to discuss literature. The building dates from the 16th century and is a former bank, library, and community house.

Name
The municipality (originally the parish) is named after the old Alver farm (Old Norse: Alviðra) since the first church was built there. The meaning of the name is "all weather" (meaning "weather from all directions" - describing a farm with an exposed and unsheltered site). The last element is sund which means "sound" or "strait", referring to Alverstraumen strait.

Notable residents

 * Ivar Medaas (1938–2005), folksinger and fiddle player
 * Hans Karolus Ommedal (1901–1984), politician for the Christian Democratic Party
 * Nils Hjelmtveit (1892–1985), educator and politician for the Labour Party

title: Alversund


text: Category:Moby albums

title: Category:Moby albums


text:
User:Desdemona47

Desdemona47 is Elaine M. Brady, a graduate of Palmer Chiropractic College in Florida. She is a native of and lives in West Virginia, and grew up on a farm that raised brittanys, a type of bird dog. She is interested in punk, classic rock, and heavy metal music, fantasy books, Japanese Culture, and biology, particularly genetics.

title: User:Desdemona47


text:
Detente bala

"Detente bala" is an inscription used by Spanish soldiers from the 18th century.

The phrase detente bala means "stop, bullet" in Spanish. The whole motto is usually written ¡Detente bala, el Corazón de Jesús está conmigo! meaning: "Stop, bullet, the Sacred Heart of Jesus is with me (or protects me)!"

Patches of cloth with the phrase around a Sacred Heart of Jesus were worn on the chest as a protection and later as a piece of cloth under the name/rank badge (usually as close to the heart as possible). The devotion is derived by the badges of the Sacred Heart promoted by 17th-century saint Margaret Mary Alacoque against epidemics. They are still used by the Spanish soldiers in the 21st century.

The history of the use of the "Detente bala" dates back to 1686. Popular belief explains that saint Margaret Mary Alacoque started the custom of wearing a small cloth emblem with the image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus as a symbol of devotion. This symbol soon began to spread as a protection "amulet" against the epidemics that devastated Europe with the name of "Safeguard" initially and "stop" with the passage of time. It is from the eighteenth century when its use became popular among Spanish soldiers. Tradition has it that the "Detente bala" were embroidered by hand by the wives, mothers or sisters of the combatants before they left for the war, in the hope that they would stop the bullets that threatened their lives and return them safe and sound to their homes.

title: Detente bala


text:
Jimmy Quillen

James Henry Quillen (January 11, 1916 – November 2, 2003) was an American politician who served as a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from Tennessee from 1963 to 1997. Quillen represented the 1st congressional district, which covers the northeast corner of the state, including the Tri-Cities region.

Early life
Quillen was born in Scott County, Virginia, the fifth of ten children, son of John A. and Hannah Quillen, near the Tennessee line and was later a 1934 graduate of Dobyns-Bennett High School in Kingsport, Tennessee. Quillen worked as a restaurant kitchen prep worker, a grocery store clerk, a copy boy, and later as a young adult, an advertising salesman for a Kingsport newspaper.

During 1936, Quillen invested his own personal savings of $42 to become the publisher and owner of The Kingsport Mirror, a weekly newspaper that he started in Kingsport, Tennessee. Quillen sold The Kingsport Mirror during 1939 and moved to Johnson City, Tennessee (where he resided at the Montrose Court Apartments) to start up another weekly newspaper, The Johnson City Times.

Draft exemption and military service
Prior to the U.S. entry into World War II, Quillen received a two-year Selective Service System Class 3-A draft deferment beginning in December 1940 through late November 1942.

Quillen later served in the United States Navy as a public information officer from late 1942 to 1946. Quillen received his overseas orders in late 1944, with his assignment aboard the Ticonderoga class aircraft carrier USS Antietam (CV-36). The USS Antietam entered the Pacific theater of operations too late in the war to participate in combat, as the carrier arrived in Hawaii from the Panama Canal just as the first atomic bomb was dropped by the United States on Japan.

Entry into state and party politics
Eventually becoming a Kingsport and Johnson City based real estate development and insurance company owner (starting Kingsport Development Company, Inc.), and bank executive following World War II, Quillen also was elected as a Republican member of the Tennessee House of Representatives in 1954, serving four terms from a district in Sullivan County.

Quillen was later selected as a Tennessee delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1956, 1964, and 1968.

Elected into the U.S. Congress
During 1961, B. Carroll Reece, who had represented Tennessee's 1st congressional district for all but six of the last 40 years, died in office. His wife, Louise, took over as a caretaker until the next election. Quillen decided not to run for a fifth term in the state house in 1962, instead seeking the Republican nomination for the 1st District. This region was one of the few ancestrally Republican regions of the South; its voters had identified with the Republicans after the Civil War and had remained staunchly Republican ever since; indeed, Reece was one of the few truly senior Republican congressmen elected from a Southern state before the 1950s.

Quillen won a five-way Republican primary with only 28 percent of the vote, and won the general election with 53.8 percent of the vote. He was reelected 16 more times. Apart from his initial run for the seat, he only faced one relatively close contest, when he was held to 57 percent of the vote in 1976. The 1962 and 1976 contests were the only times that Quillen dropped below 64 percent of the vote and are the only times since 1898 that a Democrat has even managed 40 percent of the vote in this district. Quillen faced no major-party opposition in 1966 and 1980, and was completely unopposed in 1984 and 1990. Quillen eventually became de facto leader of the Republican Party in East Tennessee, and thus a statewide power broker within the tight circle of Tennessee Republican politics.

Quillen's popularity was not due only to his district's heavy Republican tilt, but also because he was widely perceived as providing strong constituent service. However, during his 34 years in Congress, Quillen managed to sponsor only three pieces of original federal legislation (including his legislation pertaining to the social security "notch babies" benefit adjustment and an anti-flag desecration amendment to the U.S. Constitution).

Social security "notch babies"
First surfacing as a federal legislative issue after the U.S. Congress decided to automatically link social security benefit increases to the consumer price index beginning in 1972, a cohort of social security retirees born during the period of 1910 through 1916 received undue windfall of payments from the federal taxpayers through the Social Security Administration miscalculating social security benefits based upon the 1910–1916 cohort. Social security retirees born immediately afterwards during the so-called "notch" period running approximately from 1917 to 1921–such as Quillen's wife Cecile–perceived agency mistreatment and petitioned members of Congress for a similar upward and unwarranted windfall adjustment for payments to their own social security benefits.

Controversies
Quillen amassed a large campaign treasury due to having received many large individual and PAC contributions, including those well financed PACs representing the beer, wine, and spirits beverage industries. Another important fact buttressing Quillen's re-election campaign finance efforts, according to Vin Weber of the Brookings Institution, was the Northeast Tennessee congressman's "...tremendous success...in shaking down the business community for [campaign] contributions." However, he never had to use much of this fund due to his district's heavy Republican bent.

Quillen twice voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964
Quillen voted twice against the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a landmark civil rights and US labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It ended unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public (known as "public accommodations").

Quillen first voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on February 10, 1964, and again on July 2, 1964, when the bill came back to the U.S. House of Representatives for a final vote with an amendment attached to the original bill by the U.S. Senate. Congress asserted its authority to legislate under several different parts of the United States Constitution, principally its power to regulate interstate commerce under Article One (section 8), its duty to guarantee all citizens equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment, and its duty to protect voting rights under the Fifteenth Amendment. The final version of Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law later on that same day by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 2, 1964, at the White House.

Quillen introduces amendment to the Teague-Cranston Act
In April 1971, U.S. Representative Olin Teague of Texas introduced a bill to create five medical schools in conjunction with established VA hospitals and U.S. Senator Alan Cranston of California introduced a companion bill within the U.S. Senate. Known as the Teague-Cranston Act, the federal legislative proposal called for the creation of five new medical schools in five states to meet the needs of the medically underserved areas of the country.

Quillen frequently reported to Tennessee news media that he himself had introduced an amendment to the Teague-Cranston Act legislation which required that any university to be considered for acceptance into this pilot program must be on government property contiguous and adjacent to a VA hospital, as East Tennessee State University was adjacent to the Mountain Home VA Hospital. However, the October 4, 1993, edition of the Kingsport Times-News released an investigative report entitled "Story of ETSU medical school's founding not always in agreement with facts" documented several facts pertaining to the Teague-Cranston Act that disputed Quillen's district claim of his amendment sponsorship:
 * one of the Teague-Cranston Act medical schools "was established at Texas A&M" within the district of U.S. Rep. Olin Teague and located about seventy miles away from the nearest Veterans Administration hospital;
 * Quillen only become a signatory sponsor two months after Teague had introduced the original bill specifying the creation of medical colleges in medically under served areas of the United States;
 * the Teague-Cranston Act was never in any danger of failing within the U.S. House of Representatives, and the legislation had actually been passed in the House by an overwhelming margin. and;
 * a memo from the Nixon Administration indicates that Nixon signed the bill "... primarily as an election-year gesture toward veterans."

The Teague-Cranston Act passed without a dissenting vote in October 1972, and was signed by U.S. President Richard Nixon.

Renaming of ETSU Quillen-Dishner College of Medicine
While serving as Governor of Tennessee, fellow Republican Winfield Dunn incurred Quillen's wrath by vetoing a bill establishing a medical school at East Tennessee State University. Dunn claimed that Tennessee lacked the resources to adequately staff and fund two first-rate medical schools and that more resources should instead be devoted to the existing medical school in Memphis, which was approximately 500 miles from Quillen's district.

One reason for Quillen's anger may have been that Dunn was from Memphis himself, and perhaps Quillen felt that Dunn was showing too much favoritism to his hometown. There has been considerable acrimony between East Tennessee and the state's other grand divisions dating back to settlement times. Whatever the case, Quillen never forgave Dunn, and it came back to haunt Dunn when he ran for governor again in 1986. Quillen made it known in East Tennessee Republican circles that Dunn was not to be supported. Dunn managed to overcome Quillen's opposition and won the nomination. However, without significant support in East Tennessee, Dunn stood almost no chance against the popular Democratic State House Speaker, Ned McWherter. Only a large turnout in his former Memphis base kept the margin of defeat to under nine points.

The ETSU medical school was subsequently built anyway after the legislature overrode Dunn's veto, and opened as the ETSU Quillen-Dishner College of Medicine. The name of one of the school's early benefactors and teachers, Paul Dishner, was later removed in the wake of a "homosexual sex scandal", and is now officially known as the East Tennessee State University James H. Quillen College of Medicine.

Quillen's Kingsport Development Co.
In 1972, a public interest task force led by Ralph Nader pointed a very public finger at Rep. Quillen, accusing the congressman of using his elected office to "...promote his business interests, specifically insurance sales through Kingsport Development Co., Inc.", a Kingsport-based real estate and insurance agency owned by Quillen.

USPS recall of 1980 Olympic postage stamps
In 1980, UPI Washington syndicated news reported that the United States Postal Service was "...investigating whether Rep. James H. Quillen, R-Tenn. illegally purchased hundreds of commemorative Olympic postage stamps after they were recalled" after the "stamps were ordered recalled last March 11 because of the U.S. boycott of the summer games in Moscow, and those stamps had been previously sold became collectors' items." A USPS spokesman said that postal inspectors were looking into whether Quillen had purchased the stamps before or after the recall order.

Savings and Loan "supervisory goodwill"
In 1989, Quillen (also a banker) worked against pending legislation for the savings and loan industry that would prohibit S&Ls from carrying "supervisory goodwill"—a form of phantom capital to count toward their capital requirements" for accounting and regulatory reports.

Passed over for Rules Committee chairmanship
Quillen's fellow Republicans passed him over in 1990 for consideration as ranking Republican on the House Rules Committee in favor of Gerald Solomon of New York, even though Quillen was the committee's most senior member. An unnamed fellow committee member was once quoted by the Kingsport Times-News (October 4, 1992) as saying, "Jimmy's one helluva nice guy, ... but let's face it. He couldn't organize a one-car funeral." He thus lost a chance to become the committee's chairman when the Republicans later gained control of Congress after the 1994 elections—thus making him one of the longest-serving congressmen to have never chaired a committee.

Rebuking 1992 presidential candidate Clinton as a "draft dodger"
The October 25, 1992, edition of the Johnson City Press reported that both Quillen and former U.S. Senate Howard Baker, while in Jonesborough, Tennessee on their Bush/Quayle/Quillen Victory Bus tour, attacked the character of U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton with Quillen telling the assembled crowd, "We don't want a draft dodger as President of the United States.," and referring to the 1992 elections as "a national crisis". Quillen had himself avoided conscription into military service during the early 1940s, but later served in the U.S. Navy from late 1942 to 1946.

Orlando Sentinel Congressional "baseball hitting percentages"
In 1993, a study first featured within the Orlando Sentinel used a baseball hitting percentages statistical analogy to rate the effectiveness of members of the U.S. Congress, listed Quillen with a .000 average.

Support of NAFTA and GATT
Quillen voted for approval of the 1994 modifications to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Retirement
Quillen did decide to retire prior to the 1996 election and was succeeded by circuit court judge Bill Jenkins, a fellow Republican.

Quillen holds the record for the longest unbroken tenure of a Tennessean within the U.S. House of Representatives. Only Reece had been elected to more terms in the House (18 terms to Quillen's 17), and only Kenneth McKellar had served in both chambers longer.

After retiring, Quillen was inducted as an honorary member of the East Tennessee State University chapter of Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity.

Quillen died on November 2, 2003, and was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Kingsport.

Quillen's estate was valued at approximately $17 million, with the majority going to schools in his district. King College, Milligan College, Carson-Newman College, and Tusculum College each received $250,000 for scholarships. East Tennessee State University received an estimated $14.6 million for two scholarship endowments, including one for students of James H. Quillen College of Medicine.

The East Tennessee State University Charles C. Sherrod Library also maintains the "Quillen Congressional Office and Gallery" on the fourth floor of the building, serving as a memorabilia shrine with an exact size replica of longtime U.S. Congressional Representative James H. Quillen's former Washington, D.C., office within the U.S. House of Representatives.

title: Jimmy Quillen


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Xfinity Center (College Park, Maryland)

Xfinity Center is the indoor arena and student activities center that serves as the home of the University of Maryland Terrapins men's and women's basketball teams. Ground was broken in May 2000 and construction was completed in October 2002 at a cost of $125 million. It replaced Cole Field House as the Terrapins' home court, which had served as the home of Maryland basketball since 1955.

The on-campus facility was originally named the Comcast Center after Comcast Corporation purchased a 20-year, $25 million corporate naming agreement when the arena opened in 2002. In July 2014, it was renamed Xfinity Center after Comcast's cable brand, Xfinity.

Xfinity Center, which has a capacity of 17,950, opened for Midnight Madness on October 11, 2002, and the first official men's game was a 64–49 victory over Miami University (Ohio) on November 24, 2002. In its first season, 281,057 fans visited to watch Terrapin basketball games for a per-game average of 17,566 as Maryland finished fifth in the nation in attendance. On January 25, 2012, the court was renamed in honor of Gary Williams, the men's basketball coach who retired the previous year.

Though Xfinity Center is the largest arena in the state of Maryland, it is the second-largest arena in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area by seating capacity, just behind Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., which has an official seating capacity of roughly 500 more than Xfinity Center. The facility is also used for concerts, graduation ceremonies including those for the University of Maryland, state high school basketball tournaments, and other special events. Concert seating capacity is nearly 19,000.

Amenities
In addition to the main basketball court, Xfinity Center also features a 1,500-seat gymnasium for volleyball, gymnastics, and wrestling, and a 7000 sqfoot academic support center for student-athletes. The facility also holds Heritage Hall, a 400-seat multi-purpose room overlooking the arena's seating bowl equipped to host banquets, press conferences, meetings and serve as a pregame restaurant. The team's athletic store and university athletic offices are located in the facility as well. Inside the lobby on the east side of the facility is the Terrapin Walk of Fame and History, featuring many images of the past of Maryland athletics as well as the 2002 men's national championship trophy and the 2006 women's national championship trophy.

In 2014, the university replaced the building's original scoreboard with a new, start-of-the-art center hung Daktronics videoboard that features two side displays measuring approximately 12.5 ft high by 33 ft wide and two end displays measuring approximately 9 ft high by 16.5 ft wide making it one of the largest jumbotrons in college basketball. The videoboard can display one single image to show live video and replays, but can also be divided into separate windows to display graphics, animations, game statistics, scoring information and advertisements. The Xfinity Center also features four message displays in each corner of the facility that are used to display closed captioning.

Student section
The student section contains 4,000 seats arranged in the first ten rows on all sides of the arena, among the largest student sections in the Big Ten. The most notable feature of the arena is the steeply pitched kop-style seating area at the west end of the arena behind the visiting team's second half basket, informally known as "the Wall." Originally designed to reduce excavation costs due to a hill, the area features 2,600 student seats meant to intimidate opposing players who shoot free throws in the second half. Maryland has long had a reputation for having one of the most raucous student sections in the nation for several years before Xfinity Center opened in 2002, and FanSided ranked Xfinity as the fifteenth-best college basketball atmosphere in 2018.

Because of the athletic department's online lottery system which distributes tickets to students, most games are student sell-outs. Student attendance is typically highest for conference games, non-conference games against top teams (such as the annual Big Ten-ACC Challenge), and the annual "Maryland Madness" event (formerly, though still colloquially, known as "Midnight Madness") held in October to signify the official start of the college basketball season. Attendance by students is generally lowest for early season exhibition and non-conference games, as well as games played while the students are on Thanksgiving and winter break.

Notable games at Xfinity Center

 * December 14, 2002 – In Maryland's debut game against a ranked opponent at the new arena, they fell to the #17 University of Florida Gators, 69–64. Despite a valiant effort, Maryland's inability to contain Anthony Roberson from behind the arc and shooting just 36% from the free throw line led to a less than auspicious christening of the facility against a ranked opponent.
 * January 18, 2003 – The Terrapins defeated then undefeated #1 Duke, 87–72.
 * February 17, 2003 – Due to a major snowstorm in the area, the game against #10 Wake Forest was postponed from the previous night. Since most ticket holders were unable to travel to College Park, the athletic department instituted an open attendance policy. Anyone with a valid student ID was given free admission and the general public was charged $20. The near-capacity crowd was composed mostly of students enjoying their snowday, and the Terrapins defeated the Demon Deacons, 90–67.
 * February 22, 2004 – The third largest crowd to watch an Atlantic Coast Conference women's regular season basketball game and the second largest crowd to watch a women's game at the arena (13,346), went home disappointed as No. 4-ranked Duke defeated the Terrapins 72–59.

 * February 12, 2005 – The Terrapins won their third consecutive game against Duke and became first team to sweep the regular season series from the Blue Devils since Wake Forest did it during 1995–96 season. The 99–92 overtime thriller coincided with a visit from ESPN's College GameDay.
 * February 13, 2005 – The No. 18-ranked women's team lost to No. 4-ranked Duke 60–49 in front of the largest crowd to watch an Atlantic Coast Conference women's regular season basketball game (17,243).
 * March 20–22, 2005 – Comcast Center (as it was then known) hosted first- and second-round games for the NCAA women's basketball tournament. The No. 7-seeded Terps used their home court advantage to defeat 10-seed Wisconsin–Green Bay but lost to No. 2-seeded Ohio State. In the other games, Liberty became only the second 13-seed to advance to the Sweet 16 by upsetting fourth-seeded Penn State and fifth-seeded DePaul.
 * February 7, 2006 – Maryland came from behind to beat Virginia, 76–65, to give Gary Williams 349 wins at Maryland, surpassing the record previously set by Charles "Lefty" Driesell.
 * January 28, 2007 – The largest crowd in ACC women's history, 17,950, watched second ranked North Carolina defeat third-ranked Maryland 84–71, surpassing the record set the previous season.
 * February 17, 2007 – Undefeated and No. 1 Duke women's team beat #6 Maryland on Senior Day 69–57 on only the second ever sold-out game for women's basketball at the Comcast Center.
 * January 14, 2008 – The #4 Maryland women's team beat #10 Duke 85–70 at home for the first time in ten years. The crowd of 15,531 is the fifth largest in ACC women's basketball history.
 * February 21, 2009 – Trailing by as many as 16 points, and still down by 9 with less than two minutes to go, unranked Maryland came back to beat #3 North Carolina 88–85 in overtime. Maryland fans rushed the court after the upset victory.
 * March 3, 2010 -Led by first team All-American point guard Greivis Vasquez, the Maryland men's basketball team defeated #4 Duke 79–72. As a result of the 79–72 victory, the Terps would go on to share the ACC regular season championship with Duke.
 * January 25, 2012 – The basketball court was named in honor of Gary Williams, the men's basketball coach who retired after the previous season. That night, the men's basketball team fell to Duke, 74–61.
 * February 16, 2013 – Maryland Men's Basketball upsets #2 Duke in a thrilling 83–81 victory. This was the first victory for the Terps against the Blue Devils since 2010 and the first win against a top 3 ranked team since 2009.  This also was the first victory against Duke for Mark Turgeon as the head coach for Maryland Basketball.
 * March 9, 2014 - Maryland Men's Basketball Team took down longtime rival #5 Virginia 75–69 in overtime. This was the last home game for the Terrapins as a member of the ACC. Also it was the last home game with the Terp's venue being named the Comcast Center.
 * February 24, 2015 - Maryland Men's Basketball Team upsets #5 Wisconsin 59–53.
 * November 17, 2015 - Maryland Men's Basketball Team defeats the Georgetown Hoyas behind a 24-point performance from guard Melo Trimble. This game was considered a renewal of the old-school rivalry between these teams. It was the first time they had played since 1993.
 * January 28, 2016 - First matchup featuring two top-ten ranked Men's Basketball teams in the history of the Xfinity Center. The #8 Maryland Terrapins defeated the #3 Iowa Hawkeyes 74–68 in front of a crowd of 17, 950 people.
 * March 8, 2020 - #9 Maryland Men's Basketball Team defeated the #25 Michigan Wolverines 74–66, clinching a share of the 2019-20 Big Ten regular-season championship. It was the first Big Ten title for the men's basketball team in school history.
 * February 16, 2023 - Maryland Men's Basketball Team upsets #3 Purdue 68-54 which was the first top 5 win at home since 2016 for the Terps.

title: Xfinity Center (College Park, Maryland)


text:
Bias (disambiguation)

Bias is an inclination toward something, or a predisposition, partiality, prejudice, preference, or predilection.

Bias may also refer to:

Scientific method and statistics

 * The bias introduced into an experiment through a confounder
 * Algorithmic bias, machine learning algorithms that exhibit politically unacceptable behavior
 * Cultural bias, interpreting and judging phenomena in terms particular to one's own culture
 * Funding bias, bias relative to the commercial interests of a study's financial sponsor
 * Infrastructure bias, the influence of existing social or scientific infrastructure on scientific observations
 * Publication bias, bias toward publication of certain experimental results
 * Bias (statistics), the systematic distortion of a statistic
 * Biased sample, a sample falsely taken to be typical of a population
 * Estimator bias, a bias from an estimator whose expectation differs from the true value of the parameter
 * Personal equation, a concept in 19th- and early 20th-century science that each observer had an inherent bias when it came to measurements and observations
 * Reporting bias, a bias resulting from what is and is not reported in research, either by participants in the research or by the researcher.

Cognitive science

 * Cognitive bias, any of a wide range of effects identified in cognitive science.
 * Confirmation bias, tendency of people to favor information that confirm their beliefs of hypothesis
 * See List of cognitive biases for a comprehensive list

Mathematics and engineering

 * Exponent bias, the constant offset of an exponent's value
 * Inductive bias, the set of assumptions that a machine learner uses to predict outputs of given inputs that it has not encountered.
 * Weight and bias, two terms used to describe parameters in a neural network.
 * Seat bias, any bias in a method of apportionment that favors either large or small parties over the other

Electricity

 * Biasing, a voltage or current added to an electronic device to move its operating point to a desired part of its transfer function
 * Grid bias of a vacuum tube, used to control the electron flow from the heated cathode to the positively charged anode
 * Tape bias (also AC bias), a high-frequency signal (generally from 40 to 150 kHz) added to the audio signal recorded on an analog tape recorder

Places

 * Bias, Landes, on the coast in southwestern France
 * Bias, Lot-et-Garonne, in southwestern France
 * Bias, West Virginia, a community in the United States
 * Bias Bay, now called Daya Bay, in Guangdong Province, China
 * Bias River, a river in north-western India

People

 * Bias (mythology), multiple figures in Greek mythology
 * Bias Brahmin, a Brahmin community found in India
 * Bias of Priene, one of the Seven Sages of Greece
 * Bias, a Spartan commander caught in an ambush by the Athenian general Iphicrates
 * Fanny Bias (1789–1825), French dancer, one of the first who raised on pointes
 * Len Bias (1963–1986), American basketball player
 * Oliver Bias (born 2001), footballer
 * Tiffany Bias (born 1992), Thai basketball player

Organisations

 * BIAS (Berkley Integrated Audio Software), a software company specializing in sound processing software such as Peak and SoundSoap
 * Bremer Institut für angewandte Strahltechnik (BIAS), a research institute dedicated to applied laser optics
 * Belgian International Air Services (BIAS), a former airline from Belgium (1959–80)
 * Birla Institute of Applied Sciences (BIAS), a higher education institute located in Bhimtal, Uttaranchal, India

In other areas

 * Bias (book), a book by journalist Bernard Goldberg
 * Bias (bird), the genus of the black-and-white shrike-flycatcher
 * Bias (textile) of a woven fabric, the 45-degree diagonal line along which it is most stretchable
 * Bias frame, an image obtained from an opto-electronic image sensor, with no actual exposure time
 * Bias ratio (finance), an indicator used in finance to analyze the returns of investment portfolios, and in performing due diligence
 * Media bias, the influence journalists and news producers have in selecting stories to report and how they are covered

title: Bias (disambiguation)