document_title: Beast (Disney)

question_text: what is the beats name in beauty and the beast

text: Beast (Disney)

text: Development

text: Determining a suitable appearance for the Beast proved challenging. Although entirely fictional, supervising animator Glen Keane felt it essential for the Beast to resemble a creature that could possibly be found on Earth as opposed to an alien. The initial designs had the Beast as humanoid but with an animal head attached as per the original fairy tale, but soon shifted towards more unconventional forms. The earlier sketches of the Beast’s character design are seen as gargoyles and sculptures in the Beast's castle.[1]

text: Inspired by a buffalo head that he purchased from a taxidermy,[2] Keane decided to base the Beast's appearance on a variety of wild animals, drawing inspiration from the mane of a lion, head of a buffalo, brow of a gorilla, tusks of a wild boar, legs and tail of a wolf, and body of a bear. However, he felt it important that the Beast's eyes remain human. In fear that Glen Keane would design the Beast to resemble voice actor Robby Benson, Walt Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg did not allow Keane to see Benson during production of the film.

text: Characteristics

text: The Beast is not of any one species of animal, but a chimera (a mixture of several animals), who would probably be classified as a carnivore overall. He has the head structure and horns of a buffalo, the arms and body of a bear, the eyebrows of a gorilla, the jaws, teeth, and mane of a lion, the tusks of a wild boar and the legs and tail of a wolf. He also bears resemblance to mythical monsters like the Minotaur or a werewolf. He also has blue eyes, the one physical feature that does not change whether he is a beast or a human.

text: As opposed to his original counterpart, Disney gave him a more primal nature to his personality and mannerisms, which truly exploited his character as an untamed animal (i.e. alternating between walking and crawling, animal growls). Producer Don Hahn envisioned that the Beast's psychological state has become increasing feral the longer he was under the curse, such that he would eventually lose his last vestiges of humanity and become completely wild if the spell could not be broken. Hahn's idea doesn't manifest prominently in the finished 1991 animated film, since the Beast is only seen in a brief scene some time after his transformation while much of the narrative starts during the later period of the curse.

text: In the original tale, the Beast is seen to be kind-hearted for the most part, and gentleman-like, with only an occasional tendency to be hot-tempered. Disney's interpretation of the Beast made him more constantly angry and depressed, due to the shame from his unkind actions which led to his transformation, and particularly his struggle of reconciling his hideous appearance with his inner humanity which made him feel hopeless about breaking the curse. Supervising animator Glen Keane describes The Beast as "a twenty-one-year-old guy who's insecure, wants to be loved, wants to love, but has this ugly exterior and has to overcome this."[3] Upon his reform under his love interest Belle, his personality changes to refined and more even-tempered, while naive about the world at the same time.

text: To reflect his early personality, the Beast is seen shirtless, with ragged, dark gray breeches, and a ragged reddish-colored cape with a golden colored circular-shaped clasp. Despite the actual color of his cape being a dark reddish color, the Beast's cape is more often referenced to be purple (and in most of the Beast's subsequent appearances after the film, such as Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas or the Kingdom Hearts games, his cape is colored purple). The reason for this change in color is unknown, although the most likely reason is that the color purple is often associated with royalty. After the Beast saves Belle from a pack of wolves, his dress-style changes to become more formal and disciplined, reflecting a more refined personality as he attempts to win Belle's friendship and love. His most referenced form of dress is his ballroom outfit, which consisted of a golden vest over a white dress shirt with a white kerchief, black dress pants trimmed with gold, and a royal blue ballroom tail coat trimmed with gold, worn during the film's ballroom dance sequence.

text: The blue tail coat outfit is retained after he was restored back to human, which is meant to be a stark contrast to the royal regalia and armor he was depicted in before his curse. His human form is that of a tall and slender young man with auburn hair and soft cream colored skin while also retaining his bright blue eyes. As human he is simply known as the "Prince", as supervising animator Glen Keane stated that everyone on the production was too busy to give him an alternative name, however some licensed works such as the trivia video game The D Show (1998) have named him "Prince Adam". Disney has come to embrace the name, as seen in multiple pieces of merchandise as well as a plaque hung up in 2012 (and still hangs there as of 2017) in Walt Disney World's Port Orleans Riverside Royal Rooms that clearly states his name as "Prince Adam." [4]

text: Appearances

text: Beauty and the Beast

text: A handsome young prince lives in a luxurious castle in France. He has everything he ever wanted, and as a result, he is spoiled, selfish and unkind. One night, his kindness is put to the test when a beggar woman comes to the castle and asks for shelter from the freezing cold, with a single rose as payment. When he shuns the beggar for her repulsive appearance, she then reveals her true form as a beautiful enchantress. Seeing her beauty and realizing her power, the Prince tries to apologize but she transforms him into a terrifying beast-like creature for his arrogance. She also casts a spell on the entire castle, transforming it into a dark, foreboding place, its lush green grounds into dangerous immortal wolf-infested woods, and the good-natured servants into anthropomorphic household objects to reflect their different personalities. Ashamed of his new appearance, the Beast conceals himself inside his castle with a magic mirror as his only window to the outside world, and an enchanted rose that would act as the curse's timer which would bloom until he turns 21. If the Beast could learn to love a woman and earn her love in return before the final petal fell off the rose, the curse would be broken, but if not he would remain a beast forever. The Beast turns to despair as the years pass by, with little hope of achieving this.

text: As the enchanted rose reaches late bloom and slowly wilts, the first outsider is an old man named Maurice who accidentally stumbles upon the castle, being allowed inside by the servants for shelter. However, the Beast detains Maurice in the tower as a prisoner for trespassing and stealing a rose. Maurice's horse returns back to the village, and then takes Maurice's daughter Belle back to the castle. In the tower Belle confronts Beast and pleads with him to let her father go, offering herself as a prisoner instead, to which the Beast agrees in return for her promise never to leave. Being prodded by his servants into believing that she is the key to breaking the spell, the Beast shows flashes of compassion for the first time despite his overall gruff manner. For instance, he feels some remorse for ejecting her father without a proper farewell, and as an atonement he lets her stay in a furnished room rather than the tower dungeon and places the servants at her disposal. When she enters the castle's forbidden west wing and nearly touches the rose, he frightens her into fleeing the castle via the woods, which he regrets upon realizing that he lost his temper, then he saves her from being killed by wild wolves. The Beast and Belle come to appreciate each other when she brings him back to the castle and tends to his wounds. He strikes up a friendship with her, by giving her the castle library and learns kindness and manners from her. Eventually, the Beast falls in love with Belle, and placing her happiness before his own, he releases her to tend to her sick father, a decision that disheartens him upon realizing that she had not yet returned his love which means that the curse remains unbroken.

text: A mob from the village comes to storm the castle and kill the Beast, led by a rival suitor named Gaston. Beast is too miserable from Belle's departure to respond to a challenge from Gaston, although his servants manage to beat back the villagers. Upon seeing Belle's return to the castle, the Beast's mood is roused and he duels Gaston upon the castle rooftops. The Beast uses guile to make up for his lack of weaponry, and remains unfazed by frequent taunts from Gaston, who proclaims that handsome appearance is the entitlement to Belle. The Beast eventually overpowers Gaston and intends to drop him until the hunter begs him not to. Not wanting to sink to Gaston's level of behavior, the Beast decides to show mercy and spare Gaston on the condition that he immediately leave the castle. Belle then shows up on the balcony and the Beast climbs up to meet her; however Gaston refuses to accept defeat and stabs the Beast from behind. Gaston loses his balance and falls from the castle roof to his death, but Belle manages to grab the Beast and pull him up. The Beast, knowing he is mortally wounded, expresses his appreciation to Belle for returning and being able to see her one last time, before falling unconscious and apparently succumbing to his injuries. Belle is able to tell the Beast that she loves him before the final petal falls. Then, Belle's declaration of love for the Beast breaks the spell and transforms him back into the prince.

text: In this film, which takes place not long after the Beast rescued Belle from the wolves, much to Beast's frustration, Belle wants to celebrate Christmas and throw a real Christmas party. Beast hates the idea of Christmas, for it was the very day almost ten years ago when the Enchantress cast the spell on him and the entire castle. (In contrast to the 1991 animated film where the Prince is depicted in stained-glass windows wearing royal regalia and armor before being cursed, the Prince in Enchanted Christmas is dressed simply in a white shirt and black breeches prior to his transformation.) While Beast sits most of the preparations out, a treacherous servant plots to have Belle thrown out of the castle: Forte the Pipe Organ, since he is far more appreciated by the Beast while under the spell.

text: Unknown to Beast, Belle writes him a special book which he doesn't see until later on. She also meets Forte later on in a chance meeting. Forte tells her that Beast's favorite Christmas tradition was the Christmas tree. Belle becomes frustrated, for no tree she has seen on the grounds has been tall enough to hang ornaments. Forte lies to Belle, saying that a perfect tree can be found in the woods beyond the castle. Reluctant to go against Beast's orders that she never leave the castle, Belle leaves nonetheless in order to find the perfect tree. When Belle does not arrive to see Beast's Christmas present to her, he begins to suspect that she isn't there at all. When Cogsworth, having been ordered to retrieve Belle, explains that the household cannot find her, Beast becomes enraged. He goes to Forte to ask for advice, and Forte lies that Belle has abandoned him. Beast manages to find Belle and saves her in time from drowning after she fell through thin ice.

text: Still believing that Belle disobeyed him by breaking her promise not to leave, Beast locks her into the dungeons to rot. But when Forte goads him into destroying the rose to end his suffering, Beast finds Belle's book in the West Wing and reads it, coming to his senses and realizing that all Belle wants is for him to be happy. Releasing Belle from the dungeon and asking for her forgiveness, Beast prepares to join in the Christmas festivities. But Forte doesn't give up and even goes as far as to attempt to destroy the entire castle with Beethoven's 5th. Fortunately, Beast finds him in time and destroys his keyboard with Franz Schubert's Symphony No 8. Losing his balance (and his pipes), Forte falls from the wall he is leaned up against and is silenced forever. Later, the castle and servants are arrayed in Christmas decorations when Belle and the Beast do their famous ballroom dance from the first film.

text: The story flashes forward to the first Christmas after the spell is broken. The Prince and Belle give Chip, Mrs. Potts' son, a book to read, which he loves. As the Prince and Belle come out to the balcony, he gives her something: a rose.

text: Belle's Magical World

text: In the final entry of the franchise, made up of four segments from a presumably failed television series, Belle teaches the Beast a thing or two about life itself, consideration and manners. He appears only in the first and fourth segments, and in a cameo in the third. In the first part, The Perfect Word, Beast and Belle have a bitter falling out at dinner when the Beast demands that Cogsworth open the windows to cool him down, despite the fact that he is the only one hot and there is a cold wind, and angrily strikes his servant, Webster, a long-tongued dictionary. Despite Lumiere and Cogsworth's pleas, Beast refuses to apologise for his behaviour, until Webster, Crane and LePlume forge a letter of apology from the Beast to Belle. All is settled, until the Beast realises that it was a forgery. He furiously banishes Webster, Crane and LePlume from the castle, but Belle brings them back from the woods, and the Beast soon learns to forgive them, as their intentions were good.

text: In the fourth part, The Broken Wing, the Beast loses his temper with Belle again when she brings an injured bird into the castle, as he dislikes birds. As he tries to chase the bird out, however, he falls over on the stairs and hits his head hard, stripping him of his hatred for birds. However, his selfishness still remains, and he locks the bird in a cage in his room, demanding that it sing for him whenever he demands it. The bird, terrified, refuses, until Belle teaches the Beast that the bird will only sing when happy. The Beast lets the bird out, and learns to consider others before himself.

text: Earlier on, in the third segment, Mrs. Potts' Party, the Beast makes several cameos sleeping in his bed in the West Wing. Dialogue between Lumiere and Cogsworth shows that he had spent the entire previous night mending leaks in the castle roof, and is still resting. An argument between Lumiere and Cogsworth about Mrs. Potts' favourite flowers lead to them having to hide several bunches of flowers around the Beast's bed. At one point, the Beast begins to smell one of the flowers and almost wakes up, but it is removed just in time, and he falls asleep again.

text: In other media

text: Beast appears as a major Disney character in the bestselling video game series Kingdom Hearts.

text: Kingdom Hearts

text: In the first Kingdom Hearts, during a time in which the spell had not yet broken, Beast's home is attacked by the Heartless, led by Maleficent, who take Belle captive. Determined to rescue Belle, Beast goes as far as to exploit the power of darkness and risk his own life to transport himself to Hollow Bastion, where Belle is being held captive with the other six Princesses of Heart. Upon arriving in Hollow Bastion, Beast is confronted by Riku, who challenges him to a duel and easily defeats him. Beast is saved at the last minute by Sora, Donald and Goofy, who are looking for Kairi. Allying himself with Sora, since Donald and Goofy have temporarily joined Riku, Beast fights the Heartless and protects Sora while they work their way into the Hollow Baston castle. Entering the castle, Beast, Sora, Donald and Goofy fight their way through until they encounter and defeat Maleficent, who transforms into her dragon form and challenges them once again, only to be defeated once more. The four heroes find Kairi, but the circumstances cause Sora, Donald, Goofy and Kairi to leave Hollow Bastion, and Beast states that he will not leave without Belle. Later on, Beast encounters Sora once again when he returns to Hollow Bastion to lock the Keyhole. During their second search, Beast and Sora find Belle, who embraces Beast and presents Sora with the Divine Rose Keychain. In the Final Mix version of the game, Beast allies himself with Sora once again to fight and defeat Xemnas (then known as "Unknown").

text: Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories

text: In Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, Beast is merely a figment of Sora's memories. He is once again separated from Belle, courtesy of Maleficent, but once more, Beast defeats Maleficent with Sora's help and rescues Belle.

text: Kingdom Hearts II

text: After Sora defeats Ansem, all the previously attacked worlds are restored, including Beast's Castle. Afterwards, Beast and Belle return to their home to carry on with their lives. However, the peace is shattered once again when Beast is approached by Xaldin of Organization XIII to do his bidding. Xaldin is determined to manipulate Beast into becoming a Heartless. If that happens, Beast will not only become a strong Heartless which Sora would have to destroy and feed to Kingdom Hearts, but also leave behind a powerful Nobody for Xaldin to use as he wishes (just like what happened to Xehanort). Manipulated and controlled, Beast is forced to allow the Heartless into the castle and lock the entire servant staff in the dungeons, with Belle too scared to intervene. Beast starts mistreating Belle. When Sora, Donald and Goofy arrive, they are encountered by Beast, who attacks them without hesitation. Sora wins the battle, and Beast comes back to his senses thanks to his servants who were released by Sora. Xaldin appears to flee. Later on, during a ball, Xaldin returns and steals the rose, throwing Beast into a depression and causing him to ask Belle and Sora to leave his castle. However a pep talk from Sora spurs him back into action. Xaldin confronts them and sends his Nobodies at them. They fight the Nobodies off, but Xaldin escapes to the castle drawbridge with Belle and the rose. Belle manages to escape from Xaldin's clutches with the rose, and Xaldin is then killed by Beast, Sora, Donald and Goofy. Belle gives Beast the rose but he is more relieved that she wasn't hurt. Beast then bids a grateful farewell to Sora, and returns to a normal life with Belle, until the spell is finally broken and Beast turns back into a human at the end of the game (a scene witnessed during the game's credits following completion). Beast's Limit attack for Kingdom Hearts II is Twin Howl, where he and Sora violently roar together and slash at enemies furiously.

text: Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days

text: In Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, Beast appears along with his homeworld again. The missions in Beast's Castle chronicle some of the events that occurred between Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II, such as Belle and Beast attempting to resume their normal lives and Beast's first encounter with Xaldin.

text: Broadway musical

text: The Beast appears in the Broadway musical adaptation of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, originally portrayed by Terrence Mann.[5] Other actors who have taken on the role include Chuck Wagner (1997),[5] James Barbour (1998), Jeff McCarthy (2004), and Steve Blanchard.[6]

text: The D Show

text: The movie and others never made mention of his real name. A CD-ROM game[7] said "The Prince's name is Adam."

text: Once Upon a Time

text: In the 2011 ABC series Once Upon a Time, the show's version of "the Beast" is actually another fairy tale character, Rumplestiltskin (played by Robert Carlyle), who gains possession of Belle as part of a deal to save Belle's kingdom from losing a war.

text: I (film)

text: Indian actor Vikram portrayed Beast for sequences in a dreamy song "Ennodu Nee Irundhal" in the 2015 Tamil language film "I" opposite Amy Jackson who portrayed Belle.[8] The original prosthetic make-up for the characters were provided by Sean Foot (Shaun) and Davina Lamont and additional works were done by National Film Award winners—Christien Tinsley and Dominie Till.[9][10]

text: Beauty and the Beast (2017 live action film)

text: In March 2015, English actor Dan Stevens was cast as the Beast in a live-action adaptation of the film, which was released on March 17, 2017.[11] The Beast was portrayed with a “more traditional motion capture puppeteering for the body and the physical orientation", where Stevens was "in a forty-pound gray suit on stilts for much of the film". The facial capture for the Beast was done separately order to "communicate the subtleties of the human face" and "[capture the] thought that occurs to him" which gets "through [to] the eyes, which are the last human element in the Beast.”[12]

text: The live-action portrayal closely follows the animated version, but with some differences. The backstory is expanded and reveals that the Prince's mother died of an illness when he was a boy, leaving his father to raise him. He eventually grew up to be as vain, self-centered and arrogant as his father, and he taxed the villagers of his kingdom harshly.

text: The Prince was hosting a debutante ball at his castle when a beggar woman appeared at his castle and offered a single rose as payment for shelter from an oncoming storm. The Prince turned her away twice, prompting the beggar to reveal herself to be an enchantress. The Enchantress placed a powerful spell upon the kingdom, turning the Prince into a beast and the servants into animated household objects, while also wiping all memory of the castle from the nearby village's inhabitants. If the Beast was unable to love another and earn that person's love in return, by the time the last petal on the enchanted rose fell, he would remain a beast forever, and in addition his servants would become inanimate antiques.

text: The live-action version of the Beast is quite civilized in personality and mannerisms, in contrast to the Beast in the animated film which was originally quite primal in behavior. Although the Beast does not seem to have become increasing feral the longer the enchantment runs, in contrast to his animated counterpart from 1991 (reflecting Don Hahn's original intent for the Beast eventually grow wild if he never met Belle), it is his transformed servants who are gradually losing their remaining humanity while the castle deteriorates.

text: The last rose petal falls before the curse is broken; however, upon seeing Belle profess her love for the Beast, the enchantress reveals herself and lifts the spell on the castle and its inhabitants. Afterward, Prince and Belle host a ball for all the villagers.


document_title: Jim Tavaré

question_text: who did jim tavare play in harry potter

question_tokens: who did jim tavare play in harry potter

root

text: Jim Tavaré

text: This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (September 2011) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

tag: table

text:
Jim Tavaré

Jim Tavaré

Born
(1963-04-30) 30 April 1963 (age 54)
Essex, England

Medium
Stand-up, television

Website
jimtavare.org

text: Jim Tavaré (/ˈtævəreɪ/; born 30 April 1963)[1] is an English stand-up comedian, actor, and musician. He is best known for his work on The Sketch Show on ITV, which won a BAFTA award. He played the role of Tom (the owner of the Leaky Cauldron) in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and has appeared in several music videos, including Roots Manuva's "Too Cold", McFly's "It's All About You" (for BBC Comic Relief), Phoenix Foundation's "Thames Soup", and Letlive's "Banshee".

tag: p

text: Life and career[edit]

text: Tavaré was born in Essex, England in 1963. When he was 7, he and his family moved to Cheshire, where he eventually attended art school in Northwich. After finishing his art studies, he moved to London, where he worked with Corin Redgrave. As a result, he successfully auditioned for and attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.[2] Tavaré's first film appearance was as a student in Another Country (1984) with Rupert Everett and Colin Firth. Although uncredited, he was a featured extra appearing in numerous scenes throughout the film. Tavaré was Colin Firth's stand-in for the duration of the film. Charles Spencer, Diana, Princess of Wales's brother, was also an uncredited extra. Tavaré eventually branched out into stand-up comedy with a unique act which featured his double bass, an instrument he had learned to play during his childhood.

text: In 1995, Tavaré wrote and starred in a series of short silent films for BBC2, titled Jim Tavaré Pictures Presents.[3] On Channel Five, he had a skit series of his own that he co-wrote with Ricky Gervais, called The Jim Tavaré Show. He appeared three times in the Royal Variety Performance and subsequently worked for Prince Charles at several private engagements, including at a private Christmas party and at a gala held at Highgrove in front of Queen Elizabeth II and 13 other crowned heads of state. He became renowned in the UK as Prince Charles's favourite comedian. Following an appearance at the Montreal Just For Laughs festival, CBS commissioned a special episode of the American series Wings based on and written entirely around his comedy act. Tavaré starred in this episode, which was called "Take My Life Please".

text: Tavaré co-wrote and appeared in the BAFTA-winning ITV series The Sketch Show,[4] alongside Lee Mack, Tim Vine, Ronni Ancona, Karen Taylor, and Kitty Flanagan. In 2004, Tavaré appeared in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban as Tom the Innkeeper. In 2008, he finished in fourth place on Last Comic Standing 6, having been the only overseas act ever to have reached the final show. He performed a 63-date national tour with the other four Last Comic Standing finalists throughout the US. He appeared in the fifth series of the David Duchovny comedy-drama Californication as an English butler to a hip-hop mogul played by Wu-Tang Clan frontman RZA. He made a guest-star appearance in season 5 of the comedy and spy drama Chuck, the TV show Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and on Comedy Central's Tosh.0. In September 2013, he began filming the role of The Dog Catcher in Syco Entertainment's feature film Pudsey: The Movie alongside David Walliams, Jessica Hynes, and John Sessions. In 2014, Tavaré appeared in Camp Abercorn, a web series that depicts a fictional Boy Scouts of America camp and how one of its gay staff members deals with their exclusion policy.[5] In March 2017, Tavaré was in an intensive care unit after being injured in a collision with a car.[6]


document_title: History of Costa Rica

question_text: when did costa rica gain independence from spain

text: History of Costa Rica

text: Pre-Columbian Costa Rica[edit]

text: In Pre-Columbian times, the Native Americans in what is now Costa Rica were part of a cultural complex known as the "Intermediate Area," between the Mesoamerican and Andean cultural regions.[2]

text: The northwest of the country, the Nicoya Peninsula, was the southernmost point of Nahuatl cultural influence when the Spanish conquerors (conquistadores) came in the sixteenth century. The central and southern portions of the country had Chibcha influences. The indigenous people have influenced modern Costa Rican culture to a relatively small degree. In the years soon after European encounter, many of the people died due to infectious diseases, such as measles and smallpox, which were endemic among the Europeans but to which they had no immunity.[3]

text: Hunter-gatherers (10,000–2,000 BC)[edit]

text: The oldest evidence of human occupation in Costa Rica is associated with the arrival of groups of hunter-gatherers about 10,000 to 7,000 years BC, with ancient archaeological evidence (stone tool making) located in the Turrialba Valley, at sites called Guardiria and Florence, with matching quarry and workshop areas with presence of type clovis spearheads and South American inspired arrows. All this suggests the possibility that in this area two different cultures coexisted.

text: The people of this era were nomadic. They were organized in family-based bands of about 20 to 30 members. Their usual prey animals were called megafauna, such as giant armadillos and sloths, mastodons, etc. These became extinct about 8,000 years before the modern era. The first settlers had to adapt to hunting smaller animals and develop appropriate strategies to adjust to the new conditions.

text: Spanish colonization[edit]

text: The colonial period began when Christopher Columbus reached the eastern coast of Costa Rica on his fourth voyage on September 18, 1502. Numerous subsequent Spanish expeditions followed, eventually leading to the first Spanish colony in Costa Rica, Villa Bruselas founded in 1524.[4]

text: During most of the colonial period, Costa Rica was the southernmost province of the Captaincy General of Guatemala, which was nominally part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (i.e., Mexico). In practice it operated as a largely autonomous entity within the Spanish Empire. Costa Rica's distance from the capital in Guatemala, its legal prohibition under Spanish law against trading with its southern neighbors in Panama, then part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada (i.e., Colombia), and the lack of resources such as gold and silver, resulted in Costa Rica attracting few inhabitants. It was a poor, isolated, and sparsely inhabited region within the Spanish Empire.[5] a Spanish governor in 1719 described Costa Rica as "the poorest and most miserable Spanish colony in all America." [6]

text: The area suffered a lack of indigenous population available for forced labor, which meant that most of the Costa Rican settlers had to work their own land. This prevented the establishment of large haciendas. For all these reasons Costa Rica was by and large unappreciated and overlooked by the Spanish Crown and left to develop on its own. The small landowners' relative poverty, the lack of a large indigenous labor force, the population's ethnic and linguistic homogeneity, and Costa Rica's isolation from the Spanish colonial centers in Mexico and the Andes, all contributed to the development of an autonomous and individualistic agrarian society. Even the Governor had to farm his own crops and tend to his own garden due to his poverty.[7][disputed – discuss]

text: Independence from Spain[edit]

text: In the early 19th century, Napoleon's occupation of Spain led to the outbreak of revolts all across Spanish America. In New Spain, all of the fighting by those seeking independence was done in the center of that area from 1810 to 1821, what today is central Mexico. Once the Viceroy was defeated in the capital city—today Mexico City—in 1821, the news of independence was sent to all the territories of New Spain, including the Intendencies of the former Captaincy of Guatemala. Costa Rica joined the other Central American Intendancies in a joint declaration of independence from Spain, the 1821 Act of Independence.

text: On October 13, 1821 the documents arrived at Cartago, and an emergency meeting was called upon by Governor Juan Manuel de Cañas. There were many ideas on what to do upon gaining independence, such as joining Mexico, joining Guatemala or Nueva Granada (today Colombia). A group was declared (Junta de Legados), which created the temporary Junta Gubernativa Superior. Meanwhile, "the clouds clear up" ("Mientras se aclaraban los nublados del día"), was a famous phrase of the events of the day.

text: Independence from Spain was acknowledged and ratified on October 29, 1821 by the colonial authorities. It was then ratified in the cities of San José on November 1, 1821, at Cartago on November 3rd, 1821, at Heredia on November 11, 1821, and Alajuela on November 25th, 1821.[8]

text: After the declaration of independence, the New Spain parliament intended to establish a commonwealth whereby the King of Spain, Ferdinand VII, would also be Emperor of New Spain, but in which both countries were to be governed by separate laws and with their own legislative offices. Should the king refuse the position, the law provided for a member of the House of Bourbon to accede to the New Spain throne. Ferdinand VII did not recognize the colony's independence and said that Spain would not allow any other European prince to take the throne of New Spain.

text: By request of Parliament, the president of the regency, Agustín de Iturbide, was proclaimed emperor of New Spain, which was renamed as Mexico. The Mexican Empire was the official name given to this monarchical regime from 1821 to 1823. The territory of the Mexican Empire included the continental intendancies and provinces of New Spain proper (including those of the former Captaincy General of Guatemala) (See: History of Central America).

text: United Provinces of Central America[edit]

text: In 1823, a revolution in Mexico ousted Emperor Agustín de Iturbide. A new Mexican congress voted to allow the Central American Intendancies to decide their own fate. That year, the United Provinces of Central America was formed of the five Central American Intendancies under General Manuel José Arce. The Intendancies took the new name of States. The United Provinces federation, not strongly united to begin with, rapidly disintegrated under the pressures of intra-provincial rivalries.

text: Following full independence in 1838, Costa Rica had no regular trade routes established to export their coffee to European markets. They had problems with lack of infrastructure producing problems in transportation: the coffee-growing areas were mainly in the Central Valley and had access only to the port of Puntarenas on the Pacific Coast. Before the Panama Canal was opened, ships from Europe had to sail around Cape Horn in order to get to the Pacific Coast. In 1843, the country established a trade route to Europe with the help of William Le Lacheur, a Guernsey merchant and shipowner.

text: In 1856, William Walker, an American filibuster, began incursions into Central America. After landing in Nicaragua, he proclaimed himself as president of Nicaragua and re-instated slavery, which had been abolished.[9] He intended to expand into Costa Rica and after he entered that territory, the country declared war against his forces. Led by Commander in Chief of the Army of Costa Rica, President Juan Rafael Mora Porras, the filibusters were defeated and forced out of the country. Costa Rican forces followed the filibusters into Rivas, Nicaragua, where in a final battle, William Walker and his forces were finally pushed back. Juan Santamaría, a drummer boy from Alajuela who lost his life torching the filibusters' stronghold, was killed in this final battle. He is today remembered as a national hero.[10]

text: Democracy[edit]

text: An era of peaceful democracy in Costa Rica began in 1869 with elections. Costa Rica has avoided much of the violence that has plagued Central America. Since the late nineteenth century, only two brief periods of violence have marred its democratic development. In 1917–19, Federico Tinoco Granados ruled as a dictator.

text: In 1948, José Figueres Ferrer led an armed uprising in the wake of a disputed presidential election. "With more than 2,000 dead, the 44-day Costa Rican Civil War resulting from this uprising was the bloodiest event in twentieth-century Costa Rican history."[11] The victorious junta drafted a constitution guaranteeing free elections with universal suffrage and the abolition of the military. Figueres became a national hero, winning the first election under the new constitution in 1953. Since then Costa Rica has been one of the few democracies to operate without a standing army.[12] The nation has held 16 successive presidential elections, all peaceful, the latest being in 2014.

text: Costa Rica's economy went under a transformation in 1978. The country went from being "an economic development success story" to entering a severe socio-economic crisis. Costa Rica relied on the exportation of bananas and coffee. In 1978, coffee prices dropped, and its revenues declined. In 1979, the price of oil, a main imported item, increased sharply and rapidly, plunging the country into crisis. In order to help improve the economy, President Rodrigo Carazo continued to borrow money internationally. In return, this led the country to be more in debt.[13]

text: Once a largely agricultural country, Costa Rica has transformed to relying on technology industry and services, and eco-tourism. Costa Rica's major source of export income is technology based. Microsoft, Motorola, Intel and other technology-related firms have established operations in Costa Rica. Local companies create and export software as well as other computer-related products. Tourism is growing at an accelerated pace, and many believe that income from this tourism may soon become the major contributor to the nation's GDP. Traditional agriculture, particularly coffee and bananas, continues to be an important part of Costa Rica's exports.


document_title: Eight Below

question_text: what are the names of the dogs in eight below

text: Eight Below

text: Plot[edit]

text: In 1993, Jerry Shepard is a guide at an Antarctica research base under contract with the National Science Foundation. UCLA professor, Dr. Davis McClaren, arrives at the base. He presses Shepard to take him to Mount Melbourne to find a rare meteorite from Mercury. Shepard decides that the only way to get to Mount Melbourne is by dog sled.

text: Shepard and McClaren make it to Mount Melbourne, but are called back to base camp due to an approaching heavy storm. McClaren begs for more time, and Shepard gives him half a day, which is enough time to find a fragment of the meteorite. En route back to base, McClaren slips down an embankment, breaking his leg and falling into freezing water. Shepard uses the lead dog Maya to carry a rope to McClaren and pulls him out. The two battle hypothermia, frostbite and near whiteout conditions as the dogs lead them home. Once there, the entire human crew is immediately evacuated, while the dogs are left behind. Certain that their pilot will return within days for the dogs, Shepard tightens their collars to ensure they cannot get loose and run away. But because of the harsh weather conditions, no rescue can be attempted until the next spring - and by then the dogs will be dead.

text: Back at home, Shepard tries to secure a plane to return and save the dogs, but no one is willing to finance the risky expedition. Five months later, Shepard makes one last attempt to get back. McClaren realizes the magnitude of his ingratitude and uses the remaining balance of his grant money to finance a rescue mission. Shepard acknowledges that there is almost no chance that any of the dogs have survived this long, but he owes it to his team to go back for them.

text: After being left behind, the eight sled dogs – lead dog Maya, Old Jack, Shorty, Dewey, Truman, Shadow, Buck, and the young Max, wait in the freezing conditions for Shepard to return. After two weeks without eating, they free themselves to forage for food, except Old Jack who remains attached to the chain. Some time later, Dewey slips and falls down an incline, where he is fatally injured. The team stays with him until morning, but have to leave as he has already died. In the blizzard, Max becomes separated from the group. Maya manages to lead the team to the Russian base, which is unsecured and full of food, while Max finds his way back to the American base, which is still locked and abandoned. Setting back out into the wilderness, Max finds the carcass of a dead Orca, but is driven off by a leopard seal. Maya and the team are nearby, and Max lures the seal away so the team can eat. It doubles back and attacks Maya, who is badly injured when it claps its reptile-like maw onto her paw. The team, now reunited, continue traveling. They are starving, freezing and exhausted, and eventually the injured Maya collapses into the snow. The dogs lie down beside their leader as the snow piles up around them. They have been on their own for nearly six months.

text: Shepard makes it back to base with the others and is dismayed to find the body of Old Jack, still attached to the chain, and no sign of the other dogs. He hears the sound of barking and sees Max, Shorty, Truman, Shadow and Buck come over the horizon. After a joyous reunion, Shepard attempts to load the dogs into the snowmobile, but Max runs off, with Shepard in hot pursuit. Max leads him to Maya, lying in the snow – weak, but alive. With six of his eight sled dogs in tow, Shepard and his crew head back to civilization, with the last scene showing a grave for the two fallen dogs, Old Jack and Dewey.

text: Cast[edit]

text:
Paul Walker as Jerry Shepard
Bruce Greenwood as Dr. Davis McClaren
Moon Bloodgood as Katie
Jason Biggs as Charlie Cooper
Gerard Plunkett as Dr. Andy Harrison
August Schellenberg as Mindo
Wendy Crewson as Eve McClaren
Belinda Metz as Rosemary Paris
Connor Christopher Levins as Eric McClaren
Duncan Fraser as Captain Lovett
Dan Ziskie as Navy Commander
Michael David Simms as Armin Butler
Daniel Bacon as Bureaucrat #2
Laara Sadiq as Bureaucrat #3
Malcolm Stewart as Charles Buffett

tag: ul

text: Background[edit]

text: The 1958 ill-fated Japanese expedition to Antarctica inspired the 1983 hit film Antarctica, of which Eight Below is a remake.[1][2] Eight Below adapts the events of the 1958 incident, moved forward to 1993.[3]  In the 1958 event, fifteen Sakhalin Husky sled dogs were abandoned when the expedition team was unable to return to the base. When the team returned a year later, two dogs were still alive. Another seven were still chained up and dead, five were unaccounted for, and one died just outside Showa Station.

text: The film was dedicated to the memory of Koreyoshi Kurahara, the director of Antarctica, who died four years before it was released.

text: Sled dogs[edit]

text: In Eight Below there are two Alaskan Malamutes (Buck and Shadow) and six Siberian Huskies (Max, Maya, Truman, Dewey, Shorty, and Old Jack). Each actor-dog had help from other dogs that performed stunts and pulled sleds. In all, over 30 dogs were used to portray the film's eight canine characters. Max, Maya, Dewey, and Buck (Old Jack's stunt double) were played by dogs seen in Disney's Snow Dogs.[4]  The animal filming was supervised by the American Humane Association, and the film carries the standard "No animals were harmed..." disclaimer, despite an on-set incident in which a trainer used significant force to break up an animal fight.[5]

text: Release[edit]

text: Critical reception[edit]

text: On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film has a rating of 72%, based on 146 reviews. The site's critical consensus reads, "Featuring a stellar cast of marooned mutts, who deftly display emotion, tenderness, loyalty and resolve, Eight Below is a heartwarming and exhilarating adventure film."[6] Roger Ebert from Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 3 out of 4 stars, and said "Eight Below succeeds as an effective story."[7] BBC liked the movie as well, but did not like its long length (2 hours).[8] Reel.com liked it, saying "the movie succeeds at drawing you into their incredible adventure".[9] However, the San Francisco Chronicle disliked the film, saying: "The movie is overly long and much too intense for small children, yet it's filled with dialogue and plot turns that are too juvenile to thrill adult audiences."[10] William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reacted favorably ("the dog actors will melt your heart"), but pointed out, as did other reviewers, that "Antarctica buffs" will be critical of errors, such as portraying midwinter events occurring in "balmy, blazing daylight at a time Antarctica is locked in round-the-clock darkness and temperatures of 140 degrees below."[11]

text: Box office[edit]

text: According to Box Office Mojo, the film opened at #1 on February 17, 2006, with a total weekend gross of $20,188,176 in 3,066 theaters, averaging to about $6,584 per theater. The film closed on June 1, 2006 with a total worldwide gross of $120,453,565 ($81,612,565 domestic and $38,841,000 overseas).[12]

text: Awards[edit]

text: Wins

text: ASCAP Film and Television Music Awards: ASCAP Award, Top Box Office Films (Mark Isham) 2007.

text: Nominations

text: Satellite Awards: Satellite Award, Best Youth DVD, 2006.

text: Home media[edit]

text: This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

text: The film was released on separate format widescreen and full screen editions on DVD on June 20, 2006. It was also released on PlayStation Portable (an original widescreen format) on June 26, 2006. The film was released on high definition Blu-ray for an original widescreen presentation on September 19, 2006.


document_title: Boston Red Sox spring training home

question_text: where is the red sox spring training held

text: Boston Red Sox spring training home

text: Since 1993, the city of Fort Myers in Lee County, Florida, United States has been the Spring training home of the Boston Red Sox when the club moved from Winter Haven. Boston trains at the JetBlue Park at Fenway South since the ballpark opened in 2012, and the minor-league facility, featuring five full fields, is also within the Fenway South complex.

text: The Minnesota Twins play their spring training at Hammond Stadium, which is also located in Fort Myers. Each spring the two teams will play five of their preseason games against each other in a series known as the Mayor's Cup.

text: New spring facility opened in 2012[edit]

text: The Red Sox's spring training lease with Fort Myers runs through 2019, however, the Red Sox began toying with exercising an early out in their contract that allowed them to leave following the 2009 spring season. Chief operating officer Mike Dee met with Sarasota officials on April 25, 2008 to discuss the possibility of the Red Sox moving to Sarasota's Ed Smith Stadium once its current spring inhabitants, the Baltimore Orioles, move to their new spring home in Sarasota.[1]

text: On October 28, 2008, the Lee County commission voted 13-11 to approve an agreement with the Boston Red Sox to build a new spring-training facility for the team in south Lee County. Dee was present in the chambers for the vote, and took the agreement back to Boston to meet with team owner John W. Henry and other team officials.[2] On November 15, 2008, the Red Sox signed an agreement with Lee County that will keep their spring training home in the Fort Myers area for 20 more years.[3]

text: Wednesday, April 10, 2008, the Lee County commissioners selected the Watermen-Pinnacle site on Daniels Parkway (a little more than a mile east of Interstate 75) as the site for the new facility.

text: On March 29, 2011, it was announced that the new field would be named JetBlue Park[4] at Fenway South. The park was named JetBlue Park after JetBlue Airlines,[5] which has maintained major operations at Boston's Logan International Airport since 2004.

text: The new stadium opened in March, 2012. Many characteristics of the stadium were taken from Fenway Park, including a 37-foot (11 m) Green Monster wall in left field, featuring seating on top of and behind the wall. Included in the wall is a restored version of the manual scoreboard that was housed at Fenway for almost 30 years, beginning in the 1970s.[6] The field dimensions at JetBlue Park are identical to those at Fenway.[6]

text: Previous Boston Red Sox Spring Training Locations[edit]

text:
Charlottesville, Virginia (1901)
Augusta, Georgia (1902)
Macon, Georgia (1903-06)
Little Rock, Arkansas (1907-08)
Hot Springs, Arkansas: Majestic Park, Whittington Park, (1909-10, 1912-18, 1920-23)
Redondo Beach, California (1911)
Tampa, Florida (1919)
San Antonio, Texas (1924)
New Orleans, Louisiana (1925-27)
Bradenton, Florida (1928-29)
Pensacola, Florida (1930-31)
Savannah, Georgia (1932)
Sarasota, Florida (1933-42, 1946-58)
Medford, Massachusetts (1943-44)
Atlantic City, New Jersey (1945)
Scottsdale, Arizona (1959-65)
Winter Haven, Florida (1966-92)
Fort Myers, Florida (1993-present)


document_title: Big Bang nucleosynthesis

question_text: for heavy elements what is the ratio of neutrons to protons that predicts a stable nucleus

text: Big Bang nucleosynthesis

text: Characteristics[edit]

text: There are several important characteristics of Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN):

text:
The initial conditions (neutron-proton ratio) were set in the first second after the Big Bang.
The fusion of nuclei occurred between roughly 10 seconds to 20 minutes after the Big Bang; this corresponds to the temperature range when the universe was cool enough for deuterium to survive, but hot and dense enough for fusion reactions to occur at a significant rate.[1]
It was widespread, encompassing the entire observable universe.

text: The key parameter which allows one to calculate the effects of BBN is the baryon/photon number ratio, which is a small number of order 6 x 10−10. This parameter corresponds to the baryon density and controls the rate at which nucleons collide and react; from this it is possible to calculate element abundances after nucleosynthesis ends. Although the baryon per photon ratio is important in determining element abundances, the precise value makes little difference to the overall picture. Without major changes to the Big Bang theory itself, BBN will result in mass abundances of about 75% of hydrogen-1, about 25% helium-4, about 0.01% of deuterium and helium-3, trace amounts (on the order of 10−10) of lithium, and negligible heavier elements. That the observed abundances in the universe are generally consistent with these abundance numbers is considered strong evidence for the Big Bang theory.

text: In this field, for historical reasons it is customary to quote the helium-4 fraction by mass, symbol Y, so that 25% helium-4 means that helium-4 atoms account for 25% of the mass, but less than 8% of the nuclei would be helium-4 nuclei. Other (trace) nuclei are usually expressed as number ratios to hydrogen.

text: Important parameters[edit]

text: The creation of light elements during BBN was dependent on a number of parameters; among those was the neutron-proton ratio (calculable from Standard Model physics) and the baryon-photon ratio.

text: Neutron–proton ratio[edit]

text: The neutron-proton ratio was set by Standard Model physics before the nucleosynthesis era, essentially within the first 1-second after the Big Bang. Neutrons can react with positrons or electron neutrinos to create protons and other products in one of the following reactions:

text: At times much earlier than 1 sec, these reactions were fast and maintained the n/p ratio close to 1:1. As the temperature dropped, the equilibrium shifted in favour of protons due to their slightly lower mass, and the n/p ratio smoothly decreased. These reactions continued until the decreasing temperature and density caused the reactions to become too slow, which occurred at about T = 0.7 MeV (time around 1 second) and is called the freeze out temperature. At freeze out, the neutron-proton ratio was about 1/6. However, free neutrons are unstable with a mean life of 880 sec; some neutrons decayed in the next few minutes before fusing into any nucleus, so the ratio of total neutrons to protons after nucleosynthesis ends is about 1/7. Almost all neutrons that fused instead of decaying ended up combined into helium-4, due to the fact that helium-4 has the highest binding energy per nucleon among light elements. This predicts that about 8% of all atoms should be helium-4, leading to a mass fraction of helium-4 of about 25%, which is in line with observations. Small traces of deuterium and helium-3 remained as there was insufficient time and density for them to react and form helium-4.[2]

text: Baryon–photon ratio[edit]

text: The baryon–photon ratio, η, is the key parameter determining the abundances of light elements after nucleosynthesis ends. Baryons and light elements can fuse in the following main reactions:

text: along with some other low-probability reactions leading to 7Li or 7Be. (An important feature is that there are no stable nuclei with mass 5 or 8, which implies that reactions adding one baryon to 4He, or fusing two 4He, do not occur). Most fusion chains during BBN ultimately terminate in 4He (helium-4), while "incomplete" reaction chains lead to small amounts of left-over 2H or 3He; the amount of these decreases with increasing baryon-photon ratio. That is, the larger the baryon-photon ratio the more reactions there will be and the more efficiently deuterium will be eventually transformed into helium-4. This result makes deuterium a very useful tool in measuring the baryon-to-photon ratio.

text: Sequence[edit]

text: Big Bang nucleosynthesis began roughly 10 seconds after the big bang, when the universe had cooled sufficiently to allow deuterium nuclei to survive disruption by high-energy photons. (Note that the neutron-proton freeze-out time was earlier). This time is essentially independent of dark matter content, since the universe was highly radiation dominated until much later, and this dominant component controls the temperature/time relation. At this time there were about six protons for every neutron, but a small fraction of the neutrons decay before fusing in the next few hundred seconds, so at the end of nucleosynthesis there are about seven protons to every neutron, and almost all the neutrons are in Helium-4 nuclei. The sequence of these reaction chains is shown on the image.[3]

text: One feature of BBN is that the physical laws and constants that govern the behavior of matter at these energies are very well understood, and hence BBN lacks some of the speculative uncertainties that characterize earlier periods in the life of the universe. Another feature is that the process of nucleosynthesis is determined by conditions at the start of this phase of the life of the universe, and proceeds independently of what happened before.

text: As the universe expands, it cools. Free neutrons and protons are less stable than helium nuclei, and the protons and neutrons have a strong tendency to form helium-4. However, forming helium-4 requires the intermediate step of forming deuterium. Before nucleosynthesis began, the temperature was high enough for many photons to have energy greater than the binding energy of deuterium; therefore any deuterium that was formed was immediately destroyed (a situation known as the deuterium bottleneck). Hence, the formation of helium-4 is delayed until the universe became cool enough for deuterium to survive (at about T = 0.1 MeV); after which there was a sudden burst of element formation. However, very shortly thereafter, around twenty minutes after the Big Bang, the temperature and density became too low for any significant fusion to occur. At this point, the elemental abundances were nearly fixed, and the only changes were the result of the radioactive decay of the two major unstable products of BBN, tritium and beryllium-7.[4]

text: History of theory[edit]

text: The history of Big Bang nucleosynthesis began with the calculations of Ralph Alpher in the 1940s. Alpher published the Alpher–Bethe–Gamow paper that outlined the theory of light-element production in the early universe.

text: During the 1970s, there was a major puzzle in that the density of baryons as calculated by Big Bang nucleosynthesis was much less than the observed mass of the universe based on measurements of galaxy rotation curves and galaxy cluster dynamics. This puzzle was resolved in large part by postulating the existence of dark matter.[citation needed]

text: Heavy elements[edit]

text: Big Bang nucleosynthesis produced no elements heavier than lithium, due to a bottleneck: the absence of a stable nucleus with 8 or 5 nucleons. This deficit of larger atoms also limited the amounts of lithium-7 produced during BBN. In stars, the bottleneck is passed by triple collisions of helium-4 nuclei, producing carbon (the triple-alpha process). However, this process is very slow and requires much higher densities, taking tens of thousands of years to convert a significant amount of helium to carbon in stars, and therefore it made a negligible contribution in the minutes following the Big Bang.

text: The predicted abundance of CNO isotopes produced in Big Bang nucleosynthesis is expected to be on the order of 10−15 that of H, making them essentially undetectable and negligible.[5] Indeed, none of these primordial isotopes of the elements from lithium to oxygen have yet been detected, although those of beryllium and boron may be able to be detected in the future. So far, the only stable nuclides known experimentally to have been made before or during Big Bang nucleosynthesis are protium, deuterium, helium-3, helium-4, and lithium-7.[6]

text: Big Bang nucleosynthesis predicts a primordial abundance of about 25% helium-4 by mass, irrespective of the initial conditions of the universe. As long as the universe was hot enough for protons and neutrons to transform into each other easily, their ratio, determined solely by their relative masses, was about 1 neutron to 7 protons (allowing for some decay of neutrons into protons). Once it was cool enough, the neutrons quickly bound with an equal number of protons to form first deuterium, then helium-4. Helium-4 is very stable and is nearly the end of this chain if it runs for only a short time, since helium neither decays nor combines easily to form heavier nuclei (since there are no stable nuclei with mass numbers of 5 or 8, helium does not combine easily with either protons, or with itself). Once temperatures are lowered, out of every 16 nucleons (2 neutrons and 14 protons), 4 of these (25% of the total particles and total mass) combine quickly into one helium-4 nucleus. This produces one helium for every 12 hydrogens, resulting in a universe that is a little over 8% helium by number of atoms, and 25% helium by mass.

text: One analogy is to think of helium-4 as ash, and the amount of ash that one forms when one completely burns a piece of wood is insensitive to how one burns it. The resort to the BBN theory of the helium-4 abundance is necessary as there is far more helium-4 in the universe than can be explained by stellar nucleosynthesis. In addition, it provides an important test for the Big Bang theory. If the observed helium abundance is significantly different from 25%, then this would pose a serious challenge to the theory. This would particularly be the case if the early helium-4 abundance was much smaller than 25% because it is hard to destroy helium-4. For a few years during the mid-1990s, observations suggested that this might be the case, causing astrophysicists to talk about a Big Bang nucleosynthetic crisis, but further observations were consistent with the Big Bang theory.[7]

text: Deuterium[edit]

text: This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

text: Deuterium is in some ways the opposite of helium-4, in that while helium-4 is very stable and difficult to destroy, deuterium is only marginally stable and easy to destroy. The temperatures, time, and densities were sufficient to combine a substantial fraction of the deuterium nuclei to form helium-4 but insufficient to carry the process further using helium-4 in the next fusion step. BBN did not convert all of the deuterium in the universe to helium-4 due to the expansion that cooled the universe and reduced the density, and so cut that conversion short before it could proceed any further. One consequence of this is that, unlike helium-4, the amount of deuterium is very sensitive to initial conditions. The denser the initial universe was, the more deuterium would be converted to helium-4 before time ran out, and the less deuterium would remain.

text: There are no known post-Big Bang processes which can produce significant amounts of deuterium. Hence observations about deuterium abundance suggest that the universe is not infinitely old, which is in accordance with the Big Bang theory.

text: During the 1970s, there were major efforts to find processes that could produce deuterium, but those revealed ways of producing isotopes other than deuterium. The problem was that while the concentration of deuterium in the universe is consistent with the Big Bang model as a whole, it is too high to be consistent with a model that presumes that most of the universe is composed of protons and neutrons. If one assumes that all of the universe consists of protons and neutrons, the density of the universe is such that much of the currently observed deuterium would have been burned into helium-4.[citation needed] The standard explanation now used for the abundance of deuterium is that the universe does not consist mostly of baryons, but that non-baryonic matter (also known as dark matter) makes up most of the mass of the universe.[citation needed] This explanation is also consistent with calculations that show that a universe made mostly of protons and neutrons would be far more clumpy than is observed.[8]

text: It is very hard to come up with another process that would produce deuterium other than by nuclear fusion. Such a process would require that the temperature be hot enough to produce deuterium, but not hot enough to produce helium-4, and that this process should immediately cool to non-nuclear temperatures after no more than a few minutes. It would also be necessary for the deuterium to be swept away before it reoccurs.[citation needed]

text: Producing deuterium by fission is also difficult. The problem here again is that deuterium is very unlikely due to nuclear processes, and that collisions between atomic nuclei are likely to result either in the fusion of the nuclei, or in the release of free neutrons or alpha particles. During the 1970s, cosmic ray spallation was proposed as a source of deuterium. That theory failed to account for the abundance of deuterium, but led to explanations of the source of other light elements.

text: Measurements and status of theory[edit]

text: The theory of BBN gives a detailed mathematical description of the production of the light "elements" deuterium, helium-3, helium-4, and lithium-7. Specifically, the theory yields precise quantitative predictions for the mixture of these elements, that is, the primordial abundances at the end of the big-bang.

text: In order to test these predictions, it is necessary to reconstruct the primordial abundances as faithfully as possible, for instance by observing astronomical objects in which very little stellar nucleosynthesis has taken place (such as certain dwarf galaxies) or by observing objects that are very far away, and thus can be seen in a very early stage of their evolution (such as distant quasars).

text: As noted above, in the standard picture of BBN, all of the light element abundances depend on the amount of ordinary matter (baryons) relative to radiation (photons). Since the universe is presumed to be homogeneous, it has one unique value of the baryon-to-photon ratio. For a long time, this meant that to test BBN theory against observations one had to ask: can all of the light element observations be explained with a single value of the baryon-to-photon ratio? Or more precisely, allowing for the finite precision of both the predictions and the observations, one asks: is there some range of baryon-to-photon values which can account for all of the observations?

text: More recently, the question has changed: Precision observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation[9][10] with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and Planck give an independent value for the baryon-to-photon ratio. Using this value, are the BBN predictions for the abundances of light elements in agreement with the observations?

text: The present measurement of helium-4 indicates good agreement, and yet better agreement for helium-3. But for lithium-7, there is a significant discrepancy between BBN and WMAP/Planck, and the abundance derived from Population II stars. The discrepancy is a factor of 2.4―4.3 below the theoretically predicted value and is considered a problem for the original models,[11] that have resulted in revised calculations of the standard BBN based on new nuclear data, and to various reevaluation proposals for primordial proton-proton nuclear reactions, especially the abundances of 7Be + n → 7Li + p, versus 7Be + 2H → 8Be + p.[12]

text: Non-standard scenarios[edit]

text: In addition to the standard BBN scenario there are numerous non-standard BBN scenarios. These should not be confused with non-standard cosmology: a non-standard BBN scenario assumes that the Big Bang occurred, but inserts additional physics in order to see how this affects elemental abundances. These pieces of additional physics include relaxing or removing the assumption of homogeneity, or inserting new particles such as massive neutrinos.[13]

text: There have been, and continue to be, various reasons for researching non-standard BBN. The first, which is largely of historical interest, is to resolve inconsistencies between BBN predictions and observations. This has proved to be of limited usefulness in that the inconsistencies were resolved by better observations, and in most cases trying to change BBN resulted in abundances that were more inconsistent with observations rather than less. The second reason for researching non-standard BBN, and largely the focus of non-standard BBN in the early 21st century, is to use BBN to place limits on unknown or speculative physics. For example, standard BBN assumes that no exotic hypothetical particles were involved in BBN. One can insert a hypothetical particle (such as a massive neutrino) and see what has to happen before BBN predicts abundances that are very different from observations. This has been done to put limits on the mass of a stable tau neutrino.[14]


document_title: American Sign Language

question_text: who brought sign language from france to america

text: American Sign Language

text: Classification[edit]

text: ASL emerged as a language in the American School for the Deaf (ASD), founded in 1817.[7]:7 This school brought together Old French Sign Language, various village sign languages, and home sign systems; ASL was created in this situation of language contact.[8]:11[nb 1] ASL was influenced by its forerunners but distinct from all of them.[7]:7

text: The influence of French Sign Language (LSF) on ASL is readily apparent; for example, it has been found that about 58% of signs in modern ASL are cognate to Old French Sign Language signs.[7]:7[8]:14 However, this is far less than the standard 80% measure used to determine whether related languages are actually dialects.[8]:14 This suggests that nascent ASL was highly affected by the other signing systems brought by the ASD students, despite the fact that the school's original director Laurent Clerc taught in LSF.[7]:7[8]:14 In fact, Clerc reported that he often learned the students' signs rather than conveying LSF:[8]:14

text: I see, however, and I say it with regret, that any efforts that we have made or may still be making, to do better than, we have inadvertently fallen somewhat back of Abbé de l'Épée. Some of us have learned and still learn signs from uneducated pupils, instead of learning them from well instructed and experienced teachers.

text: It has been proposed that ASL is a creole with LSF as the superstrate language and with the native village sign languages as substrate languages.[9]:493 However, more recent research has shown that modern ASL does not share many of the structural features that characterize creole languages.[9]:501 ASL may have begun as a creole and then undergone structural change over time, but it is also possible that it was never a creole-type language.[9]:501 There are modality-specific reasons that sign languages tend towards agglutination, for example the ability to simultaneously convey information via the face, head, torso, and other body parts. This might override creole characteristics such as the tendency towards isolating morphology.[9]:502 Additionally, Clerc and Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet may have used an artificially constructed form of manually coded language in instruction rather than true LSF.[9]:497

text: Although the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia share English as a common oral and written language, ASL is not mutually intelligible with British Sign Language (BSL) or Auslan.[10]:68 All three languages show degrees of borrowing from English, but this alone is not sufficient for cross-language comprehension.[10]:68 It has been found that a relatively high percentage (37–44%) of ASL signs have similar translations in Auslan, which for oral languages would suggest that they belong to the same language family.[10]:69 However, this does not seem justified historically for ASL and Auslan, and it is likely that this resemblance is due to the higher degree of iconicity in sign languages in general, as well as contact with English.[10]:70

text: American Sign Language is growing in popularity among many states. Many people in high school and colleges desire to take it as a foreign language, but until recently, it was not a creditable foreign language elective. The issue was that many didn't consider it a foreign language. ASL users, however, have a very distinct culture and way they interact when talking. Their facial expressions and hand movements reflect what they are conveying. They also have their own sentence structure which sets the language apart.[11]

text: American sign language is now being accepted by many colleges as a foreign language credit;[12] many states are making it mandatory to accept it.[13][citation needed]

text: History[edit]

text: Prior to the birth of ASL, sign language had been used by various communities in the United States.[7]:5 In the United States, as elsewhere in the world, hearing families with deaf children have historically employed ad-hoc home sign, which often reaches much higher levels of sophistication than gestures used by hearing people in spoken conversation.[7]:5 As early as 1541 at first contact by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, there were reports that the Plains Indians had developed a sign language to communicate between tribes of different languages.[14]

text: In the 19th century, a "triangle" of village sign languages developed in New England: one in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts; one in Henniker, New Hampshire, and one in Sandy River Valley, Maine.[15] Martha's Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL), which was particularly important for the history of ASL, was used mainly in Chilmark, Massachusetts.[7]:5–6 Due to intermarriage in the original community of English settlers of the 1690s, and the recessive nature of genetic deafness, Chilmark had a high 4% rate of genetic deafness.[7]:5–6. MVSL was used even by hearing residents whenever a deaf person was present,[7]:5–6 and also in some situations where spoken language would be ineffective or inappropriate, such as during church sermons or between boats at sea.[16]

text: ASL is thought to have originated in the American School for the Deaf (ASD), founded in Hartford, Connecticut in 1817.[7]:4 Originally known as The American Asylum, At Hartford, For The Education And Instruction Of The Deaf And Dumb, the school was founded by the Yale graduate and divinity student Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet.[17][18] Gallaudet, inspired by his success in demonstrating the learning abilities of a young deaf girl Alice Cogswell, traveled to Europe in order to learn deaf pedagogy from European institutions.[17] Ultimately, Gallaudet chose to adopt the methods of the French Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris, and convinced Laurent Clerc, an assistant to the school's founder Charles-Michel de l'Épée, to accompany him back to the United States.[17][nb 2] Upon his return, Gallaudet founded the ASD on April 15, 1817.[17]

text: The largest group of students during the first seven decades of the school were from Martha's Vineyard, and they brought MVSL with them.[8]:10 There were also 44 students from around Henniker, New Hampshire, and 27 from the Sandy River valley in Maine, each of which had their own village sign language.[8]:11[nb 3] Other students brought knowledge of their own home signs.[8]:11 Laurent Clerc, the first teacher at ASD, taught using French Sign Language (LSF), which itself had developed in the Parisian school for the deaf established in 1755.[7]:7 From this situation of language contact, a new language emerged, now known as ASL.[7]:7

text: More schools for the deaf were founded after ASD, and knowledge of ASL spread to these schools.[7]:7 In addition, the rise of Deaf community organizations bolstered the continued use of ASL.[7]:8 Societies such as the National Association of the Deaf and the National Fraternal Society of the Deaf held national conventions that attracted signers from across the country.[8]:13 This all contributed to ASL's wide use over a large geographical area, atypical of a sign language.[8]:14[8]:12

text: Up to the 1950s, the predominant method in deaf education was oralism – acquiring oral language comprehension and production.[19] Linguists did not consider sign language to be true "language", but rather something inferior.[19] Recognition of the legitimacy of ASL was achieved by William Stokoe, a linguist who arrived at Gallaudet University in 1955 when this was still the dominant assumption.[19] Aided by the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Stokoe argued for manualism, the use of sign language in deaf education.[19][20] Stokoe noted that sign language shares the important features that oral languages have as a means of communication, and even devised a transcription system for ASL.[19] In doing so, Stokoe revolutionized both deaf education and linguistics.[19] In the 1960s, ASL was sometimes referred to as "Ameslan", but this term is now considered obsolete.[21]

text: Population[edit]

text: Counting the number of ASL signers is difficult because ASL users have never been counted by the American census.[1]:1[nb 4] The ultimate source for current estimates of the number of ASL users in the United States is a report for the National Census of the Deaf Population (NCDP) by Schein and Delk (1974).[1]:17 Based on a 1972 survey of the NCDP, Schein and Delk provided estimates consistent with a signing population between 250,000 and 500,000.[1]:26 The survey did not distinguish between ASL and other forms of signing; in fact, the name "ASL" was not yet in widespread use.[1]:18

text: Incorrect figures are sometimes cited for the population of ASL speakers in the United States based on misunderstandings of known statistics.[1]:20 Demographics of the deaf population have been confused with those of ASL use, since adults who become deaf late in life rarely use ASL in the home.[1]:21 This accounts for currently cited estimations which are greater than 500,000; such mistaken estimations can reach as high as 15,000,000.[1]:1, 21 A 100,000-person lower bound has been cited for ASL users; the source of this figure is unclear, but it may be an estimate of prelingual deafness, which is correlated with but not equivalent to signing.[1]:22

text: ASL is sometimes incorrectly cited as the third- or fourth-most-spoken language in the United States.[1]:15, 22 These figures misquote Schein and Delk (1974), who actually concluded that ASL speakers constituted the third-largest population requiring an interpreter in court.[1]:15, 22 Although this would make ASL the third-most used language among monolinguals other than English, it does not imply that it is the fourth-most-spoken language in the United States, since speakers of other languages may also speak English.[1]:21–22

text: Geographic distribution[edit]

text: ASL is used throughout Anglo-America.[8]:12 This contrasts with Europe, where a variety of sign languages are used within the same continent.[8]:12 The unique situation of ASL seems to have been caused by the proliferation of ASL through schools influenced by the American School for the Deaf, wherein ASL originated, and the rise of community organizations for the Deaf.[8]:12–14

text: Throughout West Africa, ASL-based sign languages are spoken by educated Deaf adults.[22]:410 These languages, imported by boarding schools, are often considered by associations to be the official sign languages of their countries, and are named accordingly, e.g. Nigerian Sign Language, Ghanaian Sign Language.[22]:410 Such signing systems are found in Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Liberia, Mauritania, Mali, Nigeria, and Togo.[22]:406 Due to lack of data, it is still an open question how similar these sign languages are to the variety of ASL used in America.[22]:411

text: In addition to the aforementioned West African countries, ASL is reported to be used as a first language in Barbados, Bolivia, Cambodia,[23] the Central African Republic, Chad, China (Hong Kong), the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Jamaica, Kenya, Madagascar, the Philippines, Singapore, and Zimbabwe.[24] ASL is also used as a lingua franca throughout the deaf world, widely learned as a second language.[24]

text: Regional variation[edit]

text: Sign production[edit]

text: Sign production can often vary according to location. Signers from the South tend to sign with more flow and ease. Native signers from New York have been reported as signing comparatively more quickly and sharply. Sign production of native Californian signers has also been reported as being fast as well. Research on this phenomenon often concludes this fast-paced production for signers form the coast could be due to the fast-paced nature of living in large metropolitan areas. This conclusion also supports how the ease with which Southern sign could be due to the easy going environment of the South in comparison to that of the East and West coast.[25]

text: Sign production can also vary depending on age and native language. For example, sign production of letters may vary in older signers. Slight differences in finger spelling production can be a signal of age. Additionally, signers who learned American Sign Language as a second language vary in production. For Deaf signers who learned a different sign language before learning American Sign Language, qualities of their native language may show in their ASL production. Some examples of this varied production are finger spelling towards the body instead of away from, and signing certain movement from bottom to top instead of top to bottom.  Hearing people that learn American Sign Language also have noticeable differences in signing production. The most notable production difference of hearing people learning American Sign Language is their rhythm and arm posture.[26]

text: Sign variants[edit]

text: Most popularly there are variants of the signs for English words such as "birthday", "pizza", "Halloween", "early", and "soon". These are just a sample of the most commonly recognized signs with variant based on regional change. The sign for "school" is commonly varied between black and white signers. The variation between sign produced by black and white signers is sometimes referred to as Black American Sign Language.[27]

text: History and implications[edit]

text: The prevalence of residential Deaf schools can account for much of the regional variance of signs and sign productions across the United States. Deaf schools often serve students of the state in which the school resides. This limited access to signers from other regions, combined with the residential quality of Deaf Schools promoted specific use of certain sign variants. Native signers did not have much access to signers from other regions during the beginning years of their education. It is hypothesized that because of this seclusion, certain variants of a sign prevailed over others other due to the choice of variant used by the student of the school/signers in the community.

text: However, American Sign Language does not appear to be vastly varied when compared to other signed languages. This is because when Deaf education was beginning in the United States, many educators flocked to the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. This central location for the first generation of educators in Deaf education to learn American Sign Language allows ASL to be more standardized than it is variant.[27]

text: Varieties[edit]

text: Varieties of ASL are found throughout the world. There is little difficulty in comprehension among the varieties of the United States and Canada.[24]

text: Just as there are accents in speech, there are regional accents in sign. People from the South sign slower than people in the North—even people from northern and southern Indiana have different styles.

text: Mutual intelligibility among these ASL varieties is high, and the variation is primarily lexical.[24] For example, there are three different words for English about in Canadian ASL; the standard way, and two regional variations (Atlantic and Ontario), as shown in the videos on the right.[28] Variation may also be phonological, meaning that the same sign may be signed in a different way depending on the region. For example, an extremely common type of variation is between the handshapes /1/, /L/, and /5/ in signs with one handshape.[29]

text: There is also a distinct variety of ASL used by the Black Deaf community.[24] Black ASL evolved as a result of racially segregated schools in some states, which included the residential schools for the deaf.[30]:4 Black ASL differs from standard ASL in vocabulary, phonology, and some grammatical structure.[24][30]:4 While African American English (AAE) is generally viewed as more innovating than standard English, Black ASL is more conservative than standard ASL, preserving older forms of many signs.[30]:4 Black sign language speakers use more two-handed signs than in mainstream ASL, are less likely to show assimilatory lowering of signs produced on the forehead (e.g. KNOW) and use a wider signing space.[30]:4 Modern Black ASL borrows a number of idioms from AAE; for instance, the AAE idiom "I feel you" is calqued into Black ASL.[30]:10

text: ASL is used internationally as a lingua franca, and a number of closely related sign languages derived from ASL are used in many different countries.[24] Even so, there have been varying degrees of divergence from standard ASL in these imported ASL varieties. Bolivian Sign Language is reported to be a dialect of ASL, no more divergent than other acknowledged dialects.[31] On the other hand, it is also known that some imported ASL varieties have diverged to the extent of being separate languages. For example, Malaysian Sign Language, which has ASL origins, is no longer mutually comprehensible with ASL and must be considered its own language.[32] For some imported ASL varieties, such as those used in West Africa, it is still an open question how similar they are to American ASL.[22]:411

text: When communicating with hearing English speakers, ASL-speakers often use what is commonly called Pidgin Signed English (PSE) or 'contact signing', a blend of English structure with ASL.[24][33]  Various types of PSE exist, ranging from highly English-influenced PSE (practically relexified English) to PSE which is quite close to ASL lexically and grammatically, but may alter some subtle features of ASL grammar.[33] Fingerspelling may be used more often in PSE than it is normally used in ASL.[34] There have been some constructed sign languages, known as Manually Coded English (MCE), which match English grammar exactly and simply replace spoken words with signs; these systems are not considered to be varieties of ASL.[24][33]

text: Tactile ASL (TASL) is a variety of ASL used throughout the United States by and with the deaf-blind.[24] It is particularly common among those with Usher's syndrome.[24] This syndrome results in deafness from birth followed by loss of vision later in life; consequently, those with Usher's syndrome often grow up in the Deaf community using ASL, and later transition to TASL.[35] TASL differs from ASL in that signs are produced by touching the palms, and there are some grammatical differences from standard ASL in order to compensate for the lack of non-manual signing.[24]

text: Stigma[edit]

text: In 2013 the White House published a response to a petition that gained over 37,000 signatures to officially recognize American Sign Language as a community language and a language of instruction in schools. The response is titled "there shouldn't be any stigma about American Sign Language" and addressed that ASL is a vital language for the Deaf and hard of hearing. Stigmas associated with sign languages and the use of sign for educating children often lead to the absence of sign during periods in children's lives when they can access languages most effectively.[36] Scholars such as Beth S. Benedict advocate not only for bilingualism (using ASL and English training) but also for early childhood intervention for children who are deaf.  York University psychologist Ellen Bialystok has also campaigned for bilingualism, arguing that those who are bilingual acquire cognitive skills that may help to prevent dementia later in life.[37]

text: The majority of children born to deaf parents are hearing.[38]:192 These children, known as CODAs ("Children Of Deaf Adults") are often more culturally Deaf than deaf children, the majority of whom are born to hearing parents.[38]:192 Unlike many deaf children, CODAs acquire ASL as well as Deaf cultural values and behaviors from birth.[38]:192 These bilingual hearing children may be mistakenly labeled as being "slow learners" or as having "language difficulties" due to preferential attitudes towards spoken language.[38]:195

text: Writing systems[edit]

text: Although there is no well-established writing system for ASL,[39] written sign language dates back almost two centuries. The first systematic writing system for a sign language seems to be that of Roch-Ambroise Auguste Bébian, developed in 1825.[40]:153 However, written sign language remained marginal among the public.[40]:154 In the 1960s, linguist William Stokoe created Stokoe notation specifically for ASL. It is alphabetic, with a letter or diacritic for every phonemic (distinctive) hand shape, orientation, motion, and position, though it lacks any representation of facial expression, and is better suited for individual words than for extended passages of text.[41] Stokoe used this system for his 1965 A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles.[42]

text: SignWriting, proposed in 1974 by Valerie Sutton,[40]:154 is the first writing system to gain use among the public and the first writing system for sign languages to be included in the Unicode Standard.[43] SignWriting consists of more than 5000 distinct iconic graphs/glyphs.[40]:154 Currently, it is in use in many schools for the Deaf, particularly in Brazil, and has been used in International Sign forums with speakers and researchers in more than 40 countries, including Brazil, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, Tunisia, and the United States. Sutton SignWriting has both a printed and an electronically produced form so that persons can use the system anywhere that oral languages are written (personal letters, newspapers, and media, academic research). The systematic examination of the International Sign Writing Alphabet (ISWA) as an equivalent usage structure to the International Phonetic Alphabet for spoken languages has been proposed.[44] According to some researchers, SignWriting is not a phonemic orthography and does not have a one-to-one map from phonological forms to written forms.[40]:163 This assertion has been disputed and the process for each country to look at the ISWA and create a phonemic/morphemic assignment of features of each sign language was proposed by researchers Msc. Roberto Cesar Reis da Costa and Madson Barreto in a thesis forum on June 23, 2014.[45] The SignWriting community has an open project on Wikimedia Labs to support the various Wikimedia projects on Wikimedia Incubator[46] and elsewhere involving SignWriting.  The ASL Wikipedia request was marked as eligible in 2008[47] and the test ASL Wikipedia has 50 articles written in ASL using SignWriting.

text: The most widely used transcription system among academics is HamNoSys, developed at the University of Hamburg.[40]:155 Based on Stokoe Notation, HamNoSys was expanded to about 200 graphs in order to allow transcription of any sign language.[40]:155 Phonological features are usually indicated with single symbols, though the group of features that make up a handshape is indicated collectively with a symbol.[40]:155

text: Several additional candidates for written ASL have appeared over the years, including SignFont, ASL-phabet, and Si5s.

text: For English-speaking audiences, ASL is often glossed using English words. These glosses are typically all-capitalized and are arranged in ASL order. For example, the ASL sentence DOG NOW CHASE>IX=3 CAT, meaning "the dog is chasing the cat", uses NOW to mark ASL progressive aspect and shows ASL verbal inflection for the third person (written with >IX=3). However, glossing is not used to write the language for speakers of ASL.[39]

text: Phonology[edit]

text: Each sign in ASL is composed of a number of distinctive components, generally referred to as parameters. A sign may use one hand or both. All signs can be described using the five parameters involved in signed languages, which are handshape, movement, palm orientation, location and non-manual markers.[7]:10  Just as phonemes of sound distinguish meaning in spoken languages, these parameters are the phonemes that distinguish meaning in signed languages like ASL.[48] Changing any one of these may change the meaning of a sign, as illustrated by the ASL signs THINK and DISAPPOINTED:

text:
THINK[7]:10

handshape

closed fist with index finger extended

orientation

facing signer's body

location

tip of finger in contact with forehead

movement

unidirectional single contacting movement

DISAPPOINTED[7]:10

handshape

(as for THINK)

orientation

(as for THINK)

location

tip of finger in contact with chin

movement

(as for THINK)

text: There are also meaningful non-manual signals in ASL.[7]:49 This may include movement of the eyebrows, the cheeks, the nose, the head, the torso, and the eyes.[7]:49

text: William Stokoe proposed that these components are analogous to the phonemes of spoken languages.[40]:601:15[nb 5] There has also been a proposal that these are analogous to classes like place and manner of articulation.[40]:601:15 As in spoken languages, these phonological units can be split into distinctive features.[7]:12 For instance, the handshapes /2/ and /3/ are distinguished by the presence or absence of the feature [± closed thumb], as illustrated to the right.[7]:12 ASL has processes of allophony and phonotactic restrictions.[7]:12,19 There is ongoing research into whether ASL has an analog of syllables in spoken language.[7]:1

text: Grammar[edit]

text: Morphology[edit]

text: ASL has a rich system of verbal inflection. This involves both grammatical aspect—how the action of verbs flows in time—and agreement marking.[7]:27–28 Aspect can be marked by changing the manner of movement of the verb; for example, continuous aspect is marked by incorporating rhythmic, circular movement, while punctual aspect is achieved by modifying the sign so that it has a stationary hand position.[7]:27–28 Verbs may agree with both the subject and the object, and are marked for number and reciprocity.[7]:28 Reciprocity is indicated by using two one-handed signs; for example, the sign SHOOT, made with an L-shaped handshape with inward movement of the thumb, inflects to SHOOT[reciprocal], articulated by having two L-shaped hands "shooting" at each other.[7]:29

text: ASL has a productive system of classifiers, which are used to classify objects and their movement in space.[7]:26 For example, a rabbit running downhill would use a classifier consisting of a bent V classifier handshape with a downhill-directed path; if the rabbit is hopping, the path is executed with a bouncy manner.[7]:26 In general, classifiers are composed of a "classifier handshape" bound to a "movement root".[7]:26 The classifier handshape represents the object as a whole, incorporating such attributes as surface, depth, and shape, and is usually very iconic.[49] The movement root consists of a path, a direction and a manner.[7]:26

text: Fingerspelling[edit]

text: ASL possesses a set of 26 signs known as the American manual alphabet, which can be used to spell out words from the English language.[50] These signs make use of the 19 handshapes of ASL.  For example, the signs for 'p' and 'k' use the same handshape but different orientations. A common misconception is that ASL consists only of fingerspelling; although such a method (Rochester Method) has been used, it is not ASL.[34]

text: Fingerspelling is a form of borrowing, a linguistic process wherein words from one language are incorporated into another.[34] In ASL, fingerspelling is used for proper nouns and for technical terms with no native ASL equivalent.[34] There are also some other loan words which are fingerspelled, either very short English words or abbreviations of longer English words, e.g. O-N from English 'on', and A-P-T from English 'apartment'.[34] Fingerspelling may also be used to emphasize a word that would normally be signed otherwise.[34]

text: Syntax[edit]

text: The basic word order of ASL is disputed. Most linguists agree that ASL is a subject–verb–object (SVO) language with various phenomena affecting this basic word order.[51] Basic SVO sentences are signed without any pauses:[27]

text: FATHER – LOVE – CHILD"The father loves the child."[27]

text: However, other word orders may also occur, as ASL allows the topic of a sentence to be moved to sentence-initial position, a phenomenon known as topicalization.[52] In object-subject-verb (OSV) sentences, the object is topicalized, marked by a forward head-tilt and a pause:[53]

text: CHILDtopic, FATHER – LOVE"The father loves the child."[53]

text: Even more, word orders can be obtained through the phenomenon of subject copy. In subject copy, the subject is repeated at the end of the sentence, accompanied by head nodding, either for clarification or emphasis:[27]

text: FATHER – LOVE – CHILD – FATHERcopy"The father loves the child."[27]

text: ASL also allows null subject sentences, where the subject is implied rather than stated explicitly. Subjects can be copied even in a null subject sentence, in which the subject is omitted from its original position, yielding a verb–object–subject (VOS) construction:[53]

text: LOVE – CHILD – FATHERcopy"The father loves the child."[53]

text: Topicalization, accompanied with a null subject and a subject copy, can produce yet another word order, object–verb–subject (OVS).

text: CHILDtopic, LOVE – FATHERcopy"The father loves the child."[53]

text: These properties of ASL allow it a variety of word orders, leading many to question which is the true, underlying, "basic" order. There are several other proposals that attempt to account for the flexibility of word order in ASL. One proposal is that languages like ASL are best described with a topic–comment structure, where words are ordered by their importance in the sentence rather than by their syntactic properties.[54] Another hypothesis is that ASL exhibits free word order, in which syntax is not encoded in word order whatsoever, but can be encoded by other means (e.g. head nods, eyebrow movement, body position).[51]

text: Iconicity[edit]

text: A common misconception is that signs are iconically self-explanatory, that they are a transparent imitation of what they mean, or even that they are pantomime.[55] In fact, many signs bear no resemblance to their referent, either because they were originally arbitrary symbols or because their iconicity has been obscured over time.[55] Even so, in ASL iconicity plays a significant role; a high percentage of signs resemble their referents in some way.[56] This may be due to the fact that the medium of sign—three-dimensional space—naturally allows more iconicity than oral language.[55]

text: In the era of the influential linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, it was assumed that the mapping between form and meaning in language must be completely arbitrary.[56] Although onomatopoeia is a clear exception, since words like 'choo-choo' bear clear resemblance to the sounds that they mimic, the Saussurean approach was to treat these as marginal exceptions.[57] ASL, with its significant inventory of iconic signs, directly challenges this theory.[58]

text: Research on acquisition of pronouns in ASL has shown that children do not always take advantage of the iconic properties of signs when interpreting their meaning.[citation needed] It has been found that when children acquire the pronoun "you", the iconicity of the point (at the child) is often confused, being treated more like a name.[59] This is a similar finding to research in oral languages on pronoun acquisition. It has also been found that iconicity of signs does not affect immediate memory and recall; less iconic signs are remembered just as well as highly iconic signs.[60]