1. Who were the Greek neighbors to the north?
2. Who was the ruler of these neighbors to the north?
3. How did Alexander the Great learn to be a military leader?
4. What motivated A the G to attack the Persian Empire?
5. Describe Alex's conquest and the acquisition of empire. (you may provide your answer by using letters: a., b., c. or bullets)
6. What age was Alex when he became king? When he died?
7. Why do you think (or just read the textbook) Alex had the extraordinary military success?
Due tomorrow
8. What was Al's legacy? (Be specific and there is more than one response)
9. Define Hellenistic.
10. What are the 4 kingdoms that emerge after Al's death?
11. What was the largest library in antiquity?
12. What contributions are made to literature during the Hellenistic Age?
13. Scientific and mathematical accomplishments:
a. Aristarchus
b. Erastosthenes
c. Euclid
d. Archimedes
e. Pythagorus
f. Hippocrates
14. Philosopher/Philosophical Ideas
a. Epicurs/Epicureanism
b. Zeno and Seneca/Stoicism
c. Diogenes/Cynicism
d. Pyrrho/Skepticism
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
NPR - Articles
Undocumented Language Found Hidden In India
A "hidden" language spoken by only about 1,000 people has been discovered in the remote northeast corner of India by researchers who at first thought they were documenting a dialect of the Aka culture, a tribal community that subsists on farming and hunting.
They found an entirely different vocabulary and linguistic structure.
A Newly Discovered Language
While going to record little-known languages in Arunachal Pradesh, India, linguist K. David Harrison discovered a language that hadn't previously been documented. A few hundred people speak Koro near Bana village. Here are some sound bites of the "hidden language" that Harrison calls "an enigma" because it has managed to survive. Harrison says it seems to be a tone language with short, melodic syllables.
Even the speakers of the tongue, called Koro, did not realize they had a distinct language, linguist K. David Harrison said Tuesday.
Culturally, the Koro speakers are part of the Aka community in India's Arunachal Pradesh state, and Harrison, associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, said both groups merely considered Koro a dialect of the Aka language.
But researchers studying the groups found they used different words for body parts, numbers and other concepts, establishing Koro as a separate language, Harrison said.
"Koro is quite distinct from the Aka language," said Gregory Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. "When we went there we were told it was a dialect of Aka, but it is a distant sister language."
People of the Aka culture live in small villages near the borders of China, Tibet and Burma [also known as Myanmar]. They practice subsistence hunting, farming and gathering firewood in the forest and tend to wear ornate clothing of hand-woven cloth, favoring red garments. Their languages are not well known, though they were first noted in the 19th century.
The region where they live in the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains requires a special permit to enter. There, the researchers crossed a mountain river on a bamboo raft and climbed steep hillsides to reach the remote villages, going door-to-door among the bamboo houses that sit on stilts.
In The Search For 'Last Speakers,' A Great Discovery
Linguist K. David Harrison discovered the hidden language Koro in a remote part of India.
Harrison and Anderson spoke at a news conference organized by the National Geographic Society, which supported their work.
The northeast corner of India is known as a hotspot of language diversity and researchers were documenting some of the unwritten tongues when they came across Koro in research started in 2008.
The timing of their discovery was important.
"We were finding something that was making its exit, was on its way out. And if we had waited 10 years to make the trip, we might not have come across close to the number of speakers we found," Anderson said.
Previously undocumented languages are "noticed from time to time" Harrison said, so such a discovery is not rare. But at the same time linguists estimate that a language "dies" about every two weeks with the loss of its last speakers.
Counting Koro there are 6,910 documented languages in the world, Harrison said. But he added that is really just a best estimate that can change regularly.
Many languages around the world are considered endangered, including Koro, he explained, because younger people tend to shift to the more dominant language in a region.
Unusually, Koro has been maintained within the Aka community, the researchers said, even though there is intermarriage and the groups share villages, traditions, festivals and food. In addition to the estimated 800 to 1,200 Koro speakers, the West Kameng and East Kameng districts of Arunachal Pradesh contain 4,000 to 6,000 Aka speakers.
The Koro speakers "consider themselves to be Aka tribally, though linguistically they are Koro. It's an unusual condition, such arrangement doesn't usually allow for maintenance of the minor language," Anderson said.
The threat, however, is from the spread of Hindi, a dominant language in India, and many youngsters go to boarding schools where they learn Hindi or English.
The researchers said they hope to figure out how the Koro language managed to survive within the Aka community.
They said Koro is a member of the Tibeto-Burman language family, a group of some 400 languages that includes Tibetan and Burmese. While Koro differs from Aka, it does share some things with another language, Tani, which is spoken farther to the east.
The research was started in 2008 to document two little-known languages, Aka and Miji, and the third language, Koro, was discovered in that process.
"We didn't have to get far on our word list to realize it was extremely different in every possible way," Harrison said.
They said Koro's inventory of sounds was completely different, and so was the way sounds combine to form words. Words also are built differently in Koro, as are sentences.
The Aka word for "mountain" is "phu," while the Koro word is "nggo." Aka speakers call a pig a "vo" while to Koro speakers, a pig is a "lele."
"Koro could hardly sound more different from Aka," reported Harrison, author of a new book "The Last Speakers," about vanishing languages. Joining the two was linguist Ganesh Murmu of Ranchi University in India.
The researchers detail Koro in a scientific paper to be published in the journal Indian Linguistics.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Philosophy Notes
Philosophy when considered an academic discipline is defined as the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, or existence. Philosophers have set views or theories about a variety of topics. The word philosophy comes from a Greek word that means “love of wisdom”.
Sophists
Sophists were traveling teachers in ancient Greece. They believed it was simply beyond the reach of the human mind to understand the universe. It was more important for individuals to improve themselves. The Sophists stressed the importance of rhetoric (the art of persuasive speaking and debating).
Socrates
The Socratic Problem – It is difficult to form an accurate picture of Socrates as he did not write philosophical texts. What is known of Socrates today is compiled from the writings of his students, such as Plato. The “real” Socrates is unclear as these texts are often philosophical and dramatic rather than histories. Plato is usually viewed as the most reliable and informative source of Socrates’ life and philosophies.
Socratic Method
Socrates accepted no pay from his students. He used a teaching style that is known today as the Socratic Method. The Socratic Method of teaching uses a question and answer format to lead students to see things for themselves by using their own reason. Socrates believed that all real knowledge is already present within each person.
Death of Socrates
Socrates lived during the height of Athenian hegemony and Athenian failure after the Peloponnesian War. Socrates pursuit of virture and truth was at odds with the Athenian’s political and social views. He was accused of corrupting the youth and convicted. His punishment was death by consuming a poison called hemlock.
Quotes:
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
“Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.”
“He is a man of courage who does not run away, but remains at his post and fights against the enemy.”
“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”
“The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.”
“Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.”
Plato
One of Socrates’ students was Plato. Unlike his teacher, Plato wrote a great deal. Plato is the founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Based on his experience in Athens, Plato had come to distrust the workings of democracy. To him, individuals could not achieve a good life unless they lived in a just and rational state.
The Republic – What is justice? Do men behave justly because it is good for them to do so?
Social or political justice – harmony in a structured political structure.
Ideal society consists of 3 main classes of people:
1. Guardians (rulers) – philosopher kings
2. Auxiliaries (warriors)
3. Producers (artisans, farmers, blacksmiths)
The soul has 3 parts:
1. Rational Part (reason, logic, thinking) – seeks truth
2. Spiritual Part (emotional) – desires honor; responsible for our feelings of anger and indignation.
3. Appetitive Part (base, self-interested) – desires money, luxury, and pleasure.
Theory of Forms
Two worlds:
1. Real world – visible world
2. Intelligible world – only grasped through our mind.
Allegories
1. Sun – goodness (it is the reflection of good in the intelligible world)
2. Lines – various stages of cognition
3. Cave (most famous) – the effects of education on the human soul
Education moves the philosopher through the stages on the divided line, and ultimately brings him to the Form of the Good.
Definitions:
1. Allegory – a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning typically a moral or political one.
2. Cognition – mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. The result of which is perception, sensation, notion, or intuition.
Quotes
“All men are by nature equal, made all of the same earth by one Workman; and however we deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince.”
“Apply yourself both now and in the next life. Without effort, you cannot be prosperous. Though the land be good, You cannot have an abundant crop without cultivation.”
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
“Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.”
“Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.”
“For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.”
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology.
Aristotle's interests, then, lay in analyzing and classifying things based on observation and investigation.
For his Politics, Aristotle looked at the constitutions of 158 states and found three good forms of government:
1. Constitutional government
2. Aristocracy
3. Monarchy
Three bad forms of government:
1. Democracy
2. Oligarchy
3. Tyranny
A good constitution is formulated according to the principle of distributive justice: equal people are treated equally and unequal people are treated unequally.
People are only as important as their contribution to society.
Moderation, education, and respect ensure stability.
A city should be small but self-sufficient.
Individuals are not more important than the city, rather the individual is defined by the city they live in and that the individual can be totally human (fully rational) only by participating in the city. The city is a complete whole and each individual a mere part. The city is thus more important than the individual.
Aristotle favored constitutional government as the best form for most people.
Quotes
“If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost.”
“Man is a political animal.”
“Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”
History
History as we know it—as a systematic analysis of past events—was created in the Western world by the Greeks. Herodotus, the father of history, was the author of History of the Persian Wars, a work commonly regarded as the first real history in Western civilization.
Many historians today consider Thucydides the greatest historian of the ancient world. Thucydides was an Athenian general who fought in the Great Peloponnesian War. A defeat in battle led the Athenian assembly to send him into exile. This gave him the opportunity to write his History of the Peloponnesian War.
Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides was not concerned with divine forces or gods as causal factors in history. He saw war and politics in purely human terms, as the activities of human beings. He examined the causes and the course of the Peloponnesian War clearly and fairly, placing much emphasis on the accuracy of his facts. He believed that the study of history is of great value in understanding the present.
Monday, October 4, 2010
West Africa
1. Mauritania - Nouakchott
2. Senegal - Dakar
3. Gambia - Banjul
4. Guinea-Bissau - Bissau
5. Guinea - Conakry
6. Mali - Bamako
7. Burkina Faso - Ouagadougou
8. Sierra Leone - Freetown
9. Liberia - Monrovia
10. Benin - Porto-Novo
11. Niger - Niamey
12. Chad - N'Djamena
13. Togo - Lome
14. Nigeria - Abuja
15. Cote d'Ivoire - Yamoussoukro
16. Ghana - Accra
Map Quiz - 10-11-10
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