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Brahe, Tycho

(Encyclopedia)Brahe, Tycho tīˈkō brä [key], 1546–1601, Danish astronomer. The most prominent astronomer of the late 16th cent., he paved the way for future discoveries by improving instruments and by his prec...

Utzon, Jørn

(Encyclopedia)Utzon, Jørn, 1918–2008, Danish architect, grad. Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen (1942). He worked for Eric Gunnar Asplund in Sweden and Alvar Aalto in Finland before opening (1950) his own C...

Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye

(Encyclopedia)Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye söˈrən ôbˈü kyĕrˈkəgôr [key], 1813–55, Danish philosopher and religious thinker. Kierkegaard's outwardly uneventful life in Copenhagen contrasted with his intensi...

Hawaiian

(Encyclopedia)Hawaiian, member of the Polynesian group of the Austronesian family of languages. Of the fewer than 10,000 people who speak Hawaiian, only a few hundred are native speakers, but the language is taught...

lingua franca

(Encyclopedia)lingua franca lĭngˈgwə frăngˈkə [key], an auxiliary language, generally of a hybrid and partially developed nature, that is employed over an extensive area by people speaking different and mutua...

Bloomfield, Leonard

(Encyclopedia)Bloomfield, Leonard, 1887–1949, American linguist, b. Chicago. Bloomfield was professor at Ohio State Univ. (1921–27), at the Univ. of Chicago (1927–40), and at Yale (from 1940). His specialty f...

Esperanto

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

Saussure, Ferdinand de

(Encyclopedia)Saussure, Ferdinand de fĕrdēnäNˈ də sōsürˈ [key], 1857–1913, Swiss linguist. One of the founders of modern linguistics, he established the structural study of language, emphasizing the arbit...

Egede, Hans

(Encyclopedia)Egede, Hans häns āˈgədə [key], 1686–1758, Norwegian Lutheran missionary, called the Apostle of Greenland. He went to Greenland in 1721 and, with the support of the Danish government, founded a ...

Diomede Islands

(Encyclopedia)Diomede Islands dīˈəmēd [key], pair of rocky islands in Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia. The larger island, Big Diomede, is Russian, while the smaller is part of Alaska. At 2 mi (3 km) ap...