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Euhemerus

(Encyclopedia)Euhemerus yo͞ohĕmˈərəs [key], fl. c.300 b.c., Cyrenaic philosopher, b. Sicily. He is famous for a theory of mythology embodied in his philosophical romance, Sacred History, a work of which only f...

Heliodorus of Emesa

(Encyclopedia)Heliodorus of Emesa ĕmˈəsə [key], fl. 3d cent., Syrian Greek writer. He wrote the romance Aethiopica, one of the oldest and best of surviving Greek romances. Little is known of his life except tha...

Micaëlis de Vasconcelos, Carolina

(Encyclopedia)Micaëlis de Vasconcelos, Carolina kärōlēˈnä mēkäāˈlĭs dĭ väshˌko͝onsĕlˈo͝osh [key], 1851–1925, Portuguese scholar, b. Berlin. As a youth she gained a considerable reputation as a R...

Barbour, John

(Encyclopedia)Barbour, John bärˈbər [key], c.1316?–1395, Scottish poet. He was archdeacon of Aberdeen from 1355 until his death. His romance, The Bruce (1375), celebrating Scotland's emancipation from England,...

Kurdish

(Encyclopedia)Kurdish, language belonging to the Iranian group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Indo-Iranian languages. ...

programming language

(Encyclopedia)programming language, syntax, grammar, and symbols or words used to give instructions to a computer. Once the program is written and has had any errors repaired (a process called debugging), it may ...

gender

(Encyclopedia)gender [Lat. genus=kind], in grammar, subclassification of nouns or nounlike words in which the members of the subclass have characteristic features of agreement with other words. The term gender is n...

Avestan

(Encyclopedia)Avestan əvĕsˈtən [key], language belonging to the Iranian group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. One of the earliest forms of the Iranian languages to surviv...

Swahili language

(Encyclopedia)Swahili language, member of the Bantu group of African languages (see African languages and Bantu languages). Swahili is spoken by 30 million people, chiefly in Tanzania, Kenya, Congo (Kinshasa), Buru...

phonology

(Encyclopedia)phonology, study of the sound systems of languages. It is distinguished from phonetics, which is the study of the production, perception, and physical properties of speech sounds; phonology attempts t...