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142-433: History (derived from Ancient Greek ἱστορία ( historía )  'inquiry; knowledge acquired by investigation') is the systematic study and documentation of the human past . History is an academic discipline which uses a narrative to describe, examine, question, and analyze past events, and investigate their patterns of cause and effect. Historians debate which narrative best explains an event, as well as

284-800: A Western and an Eastern bloc , which later reunified to form the European Union . In the history of the Americas , the first anatomically modern humans arrived around 20,000 to 15,000 years ago. The Americas were home to some of the earliest civilizations, like the Norte Chico civilization in South America and the Maya and Olmec civilizations in Central America. Over the next millennia, major empires arose beside them, such as

426-543: A pitch accent . In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ ( iotacism ). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives , and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent . Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes. The examples below represent Attic Greek in

568-505: A sedentary lifestyle supported by early forms of agriculture . The absence of written documents from this period presents researchers with unique challenges. It results in an interdisciplinary approach relying on other forms of evidence from fields such as archaeology , anthropology , paleontology , and geology . Ancient history, starting roughly 3500 BCE, saw the emergence of the first major civilizations in Mesopotamia , Egypt,

710-465: A 5th-century BCE Greek historian , is often considered the "father of history", as one of the first historians in the Western tradition, though he has been criticized as the "father of lies". Along with his contemporary Thucydides , he helped form the foundations for the modern study of past events and societies. Their works continue to be read today, and the gap between the culture-focused Herodotus and

852-826: A Gaulish substrate, although there is some debate. One of these is considered certain, because this fact is clearly attested in the Gaulish-language epigraphy on the pottery found at la Graufesenque ( A.D. 1st century). There, the Greek word paropsid-es (written in Latin) appears as paraxsid-i . The consonant clusters /ps/ and /pt/ shifted to /xs/ and /xt/, e.g. Lat capsa > *kaxsa > caisse ( ≠ Italian cassa ) or captīvus > *kaxtivus > OF chaitif (mod. chétif ; cf. Irish cacht 'servant'; ≠ Italian cattiv-ità , Portuguese cativo , Spanish cautivo ). This phonetic evolution

994-424: A broad scope, the amount of primary sources is often too extensive for an individual historian to review. This forces them to either narrow the scope of their topic or rely on secondary sources to arrive at a wide overview. Chronological division is a common approach to organizing the vast expanse of history into more manageable segments. Different periods are often defined based on dominant themes that characterize

1136-421: A definitive influence on the development of Old French, which partly explains why the earliest attested Old French documents are older than the earliest attestations in other Romance languages (e.g. Strasbourg Oaths , Sequence of Saint Eulalia ). It is the result of an earlier gap created between Classical Latin and its evolved forms, which slowly reduced and eventually severed the mutual intelligibility between

1278-420: A fraindre, Fors Sarragoce qu'est en une montaigne; Li reis Marsilies la tient, ki Deu nen aimet, Mahomet sert ed Apolin reclaimet: Ne·s poet guarder que mals ne l'i ataignet! ˈt͡ʃarləs li ˈre͜is, ˈnɔstr‿empəˈræðrə ˈmaɲəs ˈsɛt ˈant͡s ˈtot͡s ˈple͜ins ˈað esˈtæθ en esˈpaɲə ˈtræs k‿en la ˈmɛr konˈkist la ˈtɛr alˈta͜iɲə t͡ʃasˈtɛl ni ˈaθ ki dəˈvant ˈly͜i rəˈma͜iɲəθ ˈmyrs nə t͡siˈtæθ n‿i ˈɛst rəˈmæs

1420-402: A historian writes a text about slavery based on an analysis of historical documents, then the text is a secondary source on slavery and a primary source on the historian's opinion. Consistency with available sources is one of the main standards of historical works. For instance, the discovery of new sources may lead historians to revise or dismiss previously accepted narratives. Source criticism

1562-477: A lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek , but its relationship to the historical dialects and

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1704-419: A lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek , spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either a fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in

1846-1242: A new orthography for the latter; among the earliest examples are parts of the Oaths of Strasbourg and the Sequence of Saint Eulalia . Some Gaulish words influenced Vulgar Latin and, through this, other Romance languages. For example, classical Latin equus was uniformly replaced in Vulgar Latin by caballus 'nag, work horse', derived from Gaulish caballos (cf. Welsh ceffyl , Breton kefel ), yielding ModF cheval , Occitan caval ( chaval ), Catalan cavall , Spanish caballo , Portuguese cavalo , Italian cavallo , Romanian cal , and, by extension, English cavalry and chivalry (both via different forms of [Old] French: Old Norman and Francien ). An estimated 200 words of Gaulish etymology survive in Modern French, for example chêne , 'oak tree', and charrue , 'plough'. Within historical phonology and studies of language contact , various phonological changes have been posited as caused by

1988-604: A particular event occurred, refute an existing theory, or confirm a new hypothesis. To answer research questions, historians rely on various types of evidence to reconstruct the past and support their conclusions. Historical evidence is usually divided into primary and secondary sources . A primary source is a source that originated during the period that is studied. Primary sources can take various forms, such as official documents, letters, diaries, eyewitness accounts, photographs, and audio or video recordings. They also include historical remains examined in archeology , geology , and

2130-498: A prefix /e-/, called the augment . This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist). The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment

2272-655: A radical change had the effect of rendering Latin sermons completely unintelligible to the general Romance-speaking public, which prompted officials a few years later, at the Third Council of Tours , to instruct priests to read sermons aloud in the old way, in rusticam romanam linguam or 'plain Roman[ce] speech'. As there was now no unambiguous way to indicate whether a given text was to be read aloud as Latin or Romance, various attempts were made in France to devise

2414-608: A separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek , and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek . There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek; Attic Greek developed into Koine. Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language , divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic , Aeolic , Arcadocypriot , and Doric , many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature , while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek

2556-428: A specific time frame and significant events that initiated these developments or brought them to an end. Depending on the selected context and level of detail, a period may be as short as a decade or longer than several centuries. A traditionally influential approach divides human history into prehistory , ancient history , post-classical history , early modern history , and modern history . Prehistory started with

2698-630: A standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance . This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek. From the Hellenistic period ( c.  300 BC ), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek , which is regarded as

2840-669: A state was organized internally , like factions , parties , leaders, and other political institutions. It also examines which policies were implemented and how the state interacted with other states. Political history has been studied since antiquity, making it the oldest branch of history, while other major subfields have only become established branches in the past century. Diplomatic and military history are closely related to political history. Diplomatic history examines international relations between states. It covers foreign policy topics such as negotiations, strategic considerations, treaties , and conflicts between nations as well as

2982-557: A very distinctive identity compared to the other future Romance languages. The first noticeable influence is the substitution of the Latin melodic accent with a Germanic stress and its result was diphthongization , differentiation between long and short vowels, the fall of the unaccented syllable and of the final vowels: Additionally, two phonemes that had long since died out in Vulgar Latin were reintroduced: [h] and [w] (> OF g(u)- , ONF w- cf. Picard w- ): In contrast,

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3124-510: A vowel or /n s r/ ; final stops were lost, as in γάλα "milk", compared with γάλακτος "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek . Ancient Greek had long and short vowels ; many diphthongs ; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; and

3266-505: A ˈfra͜indrə ˈfɔrs saraˈgot͡sə k‿ˈɛst en ˈynə monˈtaɲə li ˈre͜is marˈsiʎəs la ˈti͜ɛnt, ki ˈdɛ͜u nən ˈa͜iməθ mahoˈmɛt ˈsɛrt eð apoˈlin rəˈkla͜iməθ nə‿s ˈpu͜ɛt gwarˈdær kə ˈmals nə l‿i aˈta͜iɲəθ Charles the king, our great emperor, Has been in Spain for seven full years: He has conquered the lofty land up to the sea. No castle remains standing before him; No wall or city is left to destroy Other than Saragossa, which lies atop

3408-570: Is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in the epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects. The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of

3550-418: Is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r , however, add er ). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel: Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei . The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels, or that of the letter w , which affected

3692-538: Is attested as a distinct Gallo-Romance variety by the 12th century. Dialects or variants of Old French include: Some modern languages are derived from Old French dialects other than Classical French, which is based on the Île-de-France dialect. They include Angevin , Berrichon , Bourguignon-Morvandiau , Champenois , Franc-Comtois , Gallo, Lorrain, Norman , Picard, Poitevin , Saintongeais , and Walloon. Beginning with Plautus ' time (254–184 b.c. ), one can see phonological changes between Classical Latin and what

3834-490: Is called Vulgar Latin , the common spoken language of the Western Roman Empire . Vulgar Latin differed from Classical Latin in phonology and morphology as well as exhibiting lexical differences; however, they were mutually intelligible until the 7th century when Classical Latin 'died' as a daily spoken language, and had to be learned as a second language (though it was long thought of as the formal version of

3976-666: Is called 'East Greek'. Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian Greek had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to

4118-609: Is common in its later stages with the shift of the Latin cluster /kt/ in Old French ( Lat factum > fait , ≠ Italian fatto , Portuguese feito , Spanish hecho ; or lactem * > lait , ≠ Italian latte , Portuguese leite , Spanish leche ). This means that both /pt/ and /kt/ must have first merged into /kt/ in the history of Old French, after which this /kt/ shifted to /xt/. In parallel, /ps/ and /ks/ merged into /ks/ before shifting to /xs/, apparently under Gaulish influence. The Celtic Gaulish language

4260-448: Is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek . Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian ) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ). Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics , ancient Greek words could end only in

4402-400: Is crossed when people cease to live only in the present, and become consciously interested both in their past and in their future. History begins with the handing down of tradition; and tradition means the carrying of the habits and lessons of the past into the future. Records of the past begin to be kept for the benefit of future generations. This definition includes within the scope of history

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4544-400: Is possible for historians to concern themselves with both the very specific and the very general, though the trend has been toward specialization. The area called Big History resists this specialization, and searches for universal patterns or trends. History has often been studied with some practical or theoretical aim, but may be studied out of simple intellectual curiosity. Human history

4686-415: Is the memory of the past experience of Homo sapiens around the world, as that experience has been preserved, largely in written records. By "prehistory", historians mean the recovery of knowledge of the past in an area where no written records exist, or where the writing of a culture is not understood. By studying painting, drawings, carvings, and other artifacts, some information can be recovered even in

4828-425: Is the process of analyzing and evaluating the information a source provides. Typically, this process begins with external criticism, which evaluates the authenticity of a source. It addresses the questions of when and where the source was created and seeks to identify the author, understand their reason for producing the source, and determine if it has undergone some type of modification since its creation. Additionally,

4970-420: Is the use of periodization . It divides a timeframe into different periods, each organized around central themes or developments that shaped the period. For example, the three-age system divides early human history into Stone Age , Bronze Age , and Iron Age based on the predominant materials and technologies during these periods. Another methodological tool is the examination of silences, gaps or omissions in

5112-542: Is thought to have survived into the 6th century in France, despite considerable cultural Romanization. Coexisting with Latin, Gaulish helped shape the Vulgar Latin dialects that developed into French, with effects including loanwords and calques (including oui , the word for "yes"), sound changes shaped by Gaulish influence, and influences in conjugation and word order. A computational study from 2003 suggests that early gender shifts may have been motivated by

5254-495: Is to skillfully and objectively use the many sources from the past, most often found in the archives. The process of creating a narrative inevitably generates debate, as historians remember or emphasize different events of the past. The study of history has sometimes been classified as part of the humanities , other times part of the social sciences . It can be seen as a bridge between those two broad areas, incorporating methodologies from both. Some historians strongly support one or

5396-526: The langues d'oïl were contrasted with the langues d'oc , at the time also called "Provençal", adjacent to the Old French area in the southwest, and with the Gallo-Italic group to the southeast. The Franco-Provençal group developed in Upper Burgundy, sharing features with both French and Provençal; it may have begun to diverge from the langue d'oïl as early as the 9th century and

5538-531: The Bibliothèque bleue – that a standardized Classical French spread throughout France alongside the regional dialects. The material and cultural conditions in France and associated territories around the year 1100 triggered what Charles Homer Haskins termed the " Renaissance of the 12th century ", resulting in a profusion of creative works in a variety of genres. Old French gave way to Middle French in

5680-509: The Roman de Fauvel in 1310 and 1314, a satire on abuses in the medieval church, filled with medieval motets , lais , rondeaux and other new secular forms of poetry and music (mostly anonymous, but with several pieces by Philippe de Vitry , who would coin the expression ars nova to distinguish the new musical practice from the music of the immediately preceding age). The best-known poet and composer of ars nova secular music and chansons of

5822-759: The Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian , such as the Pella curse tablet , as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet , Emilio Crespo and other scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect , which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly . Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification. The Lesbian dialect

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5964-643: The Indus Valley , China, and Peru. The new social, economic, and political complexities necessitated the development of writing systems . Thanks to advancements in agriculture, surplus food allowed these civilizations to support larger populations, accompanied by urbanization , the establishment of trade networks, and the emergence of regional empires. Meanwhile, influential religious systems and philosophical ideas were first formulated, such as Hinduism , Buddhism , Confucianism , Judaism , and Greek philosophy . In post-classical history, beginning around 500 CE,

6106-557: The Mongol Empire became a dominant force during the 13th and 14th centuries. In early modern history, starting roughly 1500 CE, European states rose to global power. As gunpowder empires , they explored and colonized large parts of the world. As a result, the Americas were integrated into the global network, triggering a vast biological exchange of plants, animals, people, and diseases. The Scientific Revolution prompted major discoveries and accelerated technological progress. It

6248-548: The Teotihuacan , Aztec , and Inca empires . Following the arrival of the Europeans from the late 15th century onwards, the spread of newly introduced diseases drastically reduced the local population. Together with colonization and the massive influx of African slaves, it led to the collapse of major empires as demographic and cultural landscapes were reshaped. Independence movements in the 18th and 19th centuries led to

6390-610: The ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c.  1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c.  1200–800 BC ), the Archaic or Epic period ( c.  800–500 BC ), and the Classical period ( c.  500–300 BC ). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers . It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been

6532-525: The chansons de geste is The Song of Roland (earliest version composed in the late 11th century). Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube in his Girart de Vienne set out a grouping of the chansons de geste into three cycles : the Geste du roi centering on Charlemagne, the Geste de Garin de Monglane (whose central character was William of Orange ), and the Geste de Doon de Mayence or the "rebel vassal cycle",

6674-407: The medical sciences , such as artifacts and fossils unearthed from excavations . Primary sources offer the most direct evidence of historical events. A secondary source is a source that analyzes or interprets information found in other sources. Whether a document is a primary or a secondary source depends not only on the document itself but also on the purpose for which it is used. For example, if

6816-470: The methods they employ, such as quantitative history and digital history , which rely on quantitative methods and digital media . Comparative history compares historical phenomena from distinct times, regions, or cultures to examine their similarities and differences. Unlike most other branches, oral history relies on oral reports rather than written documents. It reflects the personal experiences and interpretations of what common people remember about

6958-501: The present , future , and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist , present perfect , pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice. The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least)

7100-737: The 12th century were ruled by the Plantagenet kings of England ), Upper Burgundy and the Duchy of Lorraine . The Norman dialect was also spread to England and Ireland , and during the Crusades , Old French was also spoken in the Kingdom of Sicily , and in the Principality of Antioch and the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the Levant . As part of the emerging Gallo-Romance dialect continuum,

7242-444: The 12th century), chronicle, account of events as relevant to a group of people or people in general (1155), dramatic or pictorial representation of historical events ( c.  1240 ), body of knowledge relative to human evolution, science ( c.  1265 ), narrative of real or imaginary events, story ( c.  1462 )". It was from Anglo-Norman that history was brought into Middle English , and it has persisted. It appears in

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7384-511: The 13th-century Ancrene Wisse , but seems to have become a common word in the late 14th century, with an early attestation appearing in John Gower 's Confessio Amantis of the 1390s (VI.1383): "I finde in a bok compiled | To this matiere an old histoire, | The which comth nou to mi memoire". In Middle English, the meaning of history was "story" in general. The restriction to the meaning "the branch of knowledge that deals with past events;

7526-1031: The 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent. /oː/ raised to [uː] , probably by the 4th century BC. Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages , is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases ( nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and vocative ), three genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ), and three numbers (singular, dual , and plural ). Verbs have four moods ( indicative , imperative , subjunctive , and optative ) and three voices (active, middle, and passive ), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect (generally simply called "tenses"):

7668-506: The 7th century CE and became the dominant faith in many empires. Meanwhile, trade along the trans-Saharan route intensified. Beginning in the 15th century, millions of Africans were enslaved and forcibly transported to the Americas as part of the Atlantic slave trade . Most of the continent was colonized by European powers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among rising nationalism , African states gradually gained independence in

7810-513: The Americas, and Oceania. The history of Africa stands at the dawn of human history with the evolution of anatomically modern humans about 200,000 years ago. The invention of writing and the establishment of civilization happened in ancient Egypt in the 4th millennium BCE. Over the next millennia, other notable civilizations and kingdoms formed in Nubia , Axum , Carthage , Ghana , Mali , and Songhay . Islam began spreading across North Africa in

7952-495: The Archaic period of ancient Greek (see Homeric Greek for more details): Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. The beginning of Apology by Plato exemplifies Attic Greek from

8094-601: The Classical period of ancient Greek. (The second line is the IPA , the third is transliterated into the Latin alphabet using a modern version of the Erasmian scheme .) Ὅτι [hóti Hóti μὲν men mèn ὑμεῖς, hyːmêːs hūmeîs,   Old French The mid-14th century witnessed the emergence of Middle French , the language of the French Renaissance in the Île-de-France region; this dialect

8236-511: The Europeans in the 16th century prompted significant transformations. By the end of the 19th century, most of the region had come under Western control. Oceania was dragged into various conflicts during the world wars and experienced decolonization in the post-war period . Historians often limit their inquiry to a specific theme belonging to a particular field. Some historians propose a general subdivision into three major themes: political history , economic history , and social history . However,

8378-596: The Gallo-Romance that prefigures French – after the Reichenau and Kassel glosses (8th and 9th centuries) – are the Oaths of Strasbourg (treaties and charters into which King Charles the Bald entered in 842): Pro Deo amur et pro Christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di en avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo, et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa ... (For

8520-747: The Italian, Portuguese and Spanish words of Germanic origin borrowed from French or directly from Germanic retain /gw/ ~ /g/ , e.g. Italian, Spanish guerra 'war', alongside /g/ in French guerre ). These examples show a clear consequence of bilingualism, that sometimes even changed the first syllable of the Latin words. One example of a Latin word influencing an OLF loan is framboise 'raspberry', from OF frambeise , from OLF *brāmbesi 'blackberry' (cf. Dutch braambes , braambezie ; akin to German Brombeere , English dial. bramberry ) blended with LL fraga or OF fraie 'strawberry', which explains

8662-565: The Old French dialects diverged into a number of distinct langues d'oïl , among which Middle French proper was the dialect of the Île-de-France region. During the Early Modern period , French was established as the official language of the Kingdom of France throughout the realm, including the langue d'oc -speaking territories in the south. It was only in the 17th to 18th centuries – with the development especially of popular literature of

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8804-497: The Renaissance short story ( conte or nouvelle ). Among the earliest works of rhetoric and logic to appear in Old French were the translations of Rhetorica ad Herennium and Boethius ' De topicis differentiis by John of Antioch in 1282. In northern Italy, authors developed Franco-Italian , a mixed language of Old French and Venetian or Lombard used in literary works in the 13th and 14th centuries. Old French

8946-500: The absence of a written record. Since the 20th century, the study of prehistory is considered essential to avoid history's implicit exclusion of certain civilizations, such as those of sub-Saharan Africa and pre-Columbian America . Historians in the West have been criticized for focusing disproportionately on the Western world . In 1961, British historian E. H. Carr wrote: The line of demarcation between prehistoric and historical times

9088-543: The aftermath of World War II , a period that saw economic progress, rapid population growth, and struggles for political stability. In the history of Asia , anatomically modern humans arrived around 100,000 years ago. As one of the cradles of civilization, Asia was home to some of the first ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China, which began to emerge in the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE. In

9230-550: The aorist. Following Homer 's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry , especially epic poetry. The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below. Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (A few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) The three types of reduplication are: Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab ) has

9372-419: The augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσ έ βαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο(-)μολῶ goes to ηὐ τομόλησα in

9514-492: The beginning of globalization . Various social revolutions challenged autocratic and colonial regimes, paving the way for democracies . Many developments in fields like science, technology, economy, living standards, and human population accelerated at unprecedented rates. This happened despite the widespread destruction caused by two world wars , which rebalanced international power relations by undermining European dominance. Areas of historical study can also be categorized by

9656-454: The beginning, historians have used such sources as monuments, inscriptions, and pictures. In general, the sources of historical knowledge can be separated into three categories: what is written, what is said, and what is physically preserved, and historians often consult all three. But writing is the marker that separates history from what comes before. Archaeology is especially helpful in unearthing buried sites and objects, which contribute to

9798-405: The boundaries between these branches are vague and their relation to other thematic branches, such as intellectual history , is not always clear. Political history studies the organization of power in society, examining how power structures arise, develop, and interact. Throughout most of recorded history, states or state-like structures have been central to this field of study. It explores how

9940-438: The center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for the dialects is: West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West

10082-452: The contradiction between textual documents idealizing "liberty" and the material record, demonstrating the possession of slaves and the inequalities of wealth made apparent by the study of the total historical environment. There are varieties of ways in which history can be organized, including chronologically, culturally , territorially, and thematically. These divisions are not mutually exclusive, and significant intersections are present. It

10224-511: The development of artistic activities, styles , and movements . Environmental history studies the relation between humans and their environment. It seeks to understand how humans and the rest of nature have affected each other in the course of history. Other thematic branches include constitutional history , legal history , urban history , business history , history of technology , medical history , history of education , and people's history . Some branches of history are characterized by

10366-590: The development of northern French culture in and around Île-de-France , which slowly but firmly asserted its ascendency over the more southerly areas of Aquitaine and Tolosa ( Toulouse ); however, the Capetians ' langue d'oïl , the forerunner of modern standard French, did not begin to become the common speech of all of France until after the French Revolution . In the Late Middle Ages,

10508-615: The dialect of Sparta ), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian ). All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek , but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of

10650-492: The duchies of Upper and Lower Lorraine to the east (corresponding to modern north-eastern France and Belgian Wallonia ), but the influence of Old French was much wider, as it was carried to England and the Crusader states as the language of a feudal elite and commerce. The area of Old French in contemporary terms corresponded to the northern parts of the Kingdom of France (including Anjou and Normandy , which in

10792-427: The evolution of human-like species several million years ago, leading to the emergence of anatomically modern humans about 200,000 years ago. Subsequently, humans migrated out of Africa to populate most of the earth. Towards the end of prehistory, technological advances in the form of new and improved tools led many groups to give up their established nomadic lifestyle, based on hunting and gathering , in favor of

10934-754: The first such text. At the beginning of the 13th century, Jean Bodel , in his Chanson de Saisnes , divided medieval French narrative literature into three subject areas: the Matter of France or Matter of Charlemagne ; the Matter of Rome ( romances in an ancient setting); and the Matter of Britain ( Arthurian romances and Breton lais ). The first of these is the subject area of the chansons de geste ("songs of exploits" or "songs of (heroic) deeds"), epic poems typically composed in ten-syllable assonanced (occasionally rhymed ) laisses . More than one hundred chansons de geste have survived in around three hundred manuscripts. The oldest and most celebrated of

11076-422: The following centuries, culminating in the 19th and early 20th centuries when many parts of Asia came under direct colonial control until the end of World War II . The post-independence period was characterized by modernization, economic growth, and a steep increase in population. The history of Europe began about 45,000 years ago with the arrival of the first anatomically modern humans. The Ancient Greeks laid

11218-503: The following millennia, all major world religions and several influential philosophical traditions were conceived and spread, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism , Christianity, and Islam. The Silk Road facilitated trade and cultural exchange across Eurasia , while powerful empires rose and fell, such as the Mongol Empire, which dominated the continent during the 13th and 14th centuries CE. European influence grew over

11360-427: The formal record or study of past events, esp. human affairs" arose in the mid-15th century. With the Renaissance , older senses of the word were revived, and it was in the Greek sense that Francis Bacon used the term in the late 16th century, when he wrote about natural history . For him, historia was "the knowledge of objects determined by space and time", that sort of knowledge provided by memory (while science

11502-606: The formation of new nations across the Americas. In the 20th century, the United States emerged as a dominant global power and a key player in the Cold War. The history of Oceania starts with the arrival of anatomically modern humans about 60,000 to 50,000 years ago. They established diverse regional societies and cultures , first in Australia and Papua New Guinea and later also on other Pacific Islands . The arrival of

11644-534: The foundations of Western culture , philosophy , and politics in the first millennium BCE. Their cultural heritage continued in the Roman Empire and later the Byzantine Empire . The medieval period began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century CE and was marked by the spread of Christianity . Starting in the 15th century, European exploration and colonization interconnected

11786-757: The gender of the corresponding word in Gaulish. The pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax of the Vulgar Latin spoken in Roman Gaul in late antiquity were modified by the Old Frankish language , spoken by the Franks who settled in Gaul from the 5th century and conquered the future Old French-speaking area by the 530s. The name français itself is derived from the name of the Franks. The Old Frankish language had

11928-422: The geographic locations they examine. Geography plays a central role in history through its influence on food production , natural resources , economic activities, political boundaries, and cultural interactions. Some historical works limit their scope to small regions, such as a village or a settlement. Others focus on broad territories that encompass entire continents, like the histories of Africa, Asia, Europe,

12070-484: The globe, while cultural, intellectual, and scientific developments transformed Western societies. From the late 18th to the early 20th centuries, European global dominance was further solidified by the Industrial Revolution and the establishment of large overseas colonies. It came to an end because of the devastating effects of two world wars. In the following Cold War era, the continent was divided into

12212-561: The historical Dorians . The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with the Dorians. The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from

12354-476: The historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not later than 1120 BC, at the time of the Dorian invasions —and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to

12496-417: The historical period in which they were writing, which is not necessarily the same as the period in which they specialized. Chroniclers and annalists , though they are not historians in the true sense, are also frequently included. Ancient Greek language Ancient Greek ( Ἑλληνῐκή , Hellēnikḗ ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː] ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and

12638-630: The historical record of events that occurred but did not leave significant evidential traces. Silences can happen when contemporaries find information too obvious to document but may also occur if there were specific reasons to withhold or destroy information. Conversely, when large datasets are available, quantitative approaches can be used. For instance, economic and social historians commonly employ statistical analysis to identify patterns and trends associated with large groups. Different schools of thought often come with their own methodological implications for how to write history. Positivists emphasize

12780-418: The historical record. The task of historical discourse is to identify the sources which can most usefully contribute to the production of accurate accounts of past. Therefore, the constitution of the historian's archive is a result of circumscribing a more general archive by invalidating the usage of certain texts and documents (by falsifying their claims to represent the "true past"). Part of the historian's role

12922-539: The incipient Middle French period was Guillaume de Machaut . Discussions about the origins of non-religious theater ( théâtre profane )—both drama and farce—in the Middle Ages remain controversial, but the idea of a continuous popular tradition stemming from Latin comedy and tragedy to the 9th century seems unlikely. Most historians place the origin of medieval drama in the church's liturgical dialogues and "tropes". Mystery plays were eventually transferred from

13064-679: The individual pieces of evidence fit together to form part of a larger story. Constructing this broader perspective is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of the topic as a whole. It is a creative aspect of historical writing that reconstructs, interprets, and explains what happened by showing how different events are connected. In this way, historians address not only which events occurred but also why they occurred and what consequences they had. While there are no universally accepted techniques for this synthesis, historians rely on various interpretative tools and approaches in this process. One tool to provide an accessible overview of complex developments

13206-461: The influence of religions continued to grow. Missionary religions, like Buddhism, Christianity , and Islam , spread rapidly and established themselves as world religions , marking a cultural shift as they gradually replaced local belief systems. Meanwhile, inter-regional trade networks flourished, leading to increased technological and cultural exchange. Conquering many territories in Asia and Europe,

13348-411: The information content of a source is understood, internal criticism is specifically interested in determining accuracy. Critics ask whether the information is reliable or misrepresents the topic and further question whether the source is comprehensive or omits important details. One way to make these assessments is to evaluate whether the author was able, in principle, to provide a faithful presentation of

13490-401: The interest in the past held by such peoples as Aboriginal Australians and New Zealand Māori , and the oral records they maintained and transmitted to succeeding generations, even before their contact with Europeans. Historiography has a number of related meanings. Firstly, it can refer to how history has been produced: the story of the development of methodology and practices (for example,

13632-639: The loss of an intervening consonant. Manuscripts generally do not distinguish hiatus from true diphthongs, but modern scholarly transcription indicates it with a diaeresis , as in Modern French: Presented below is the first laisse of The Song of Roland along with a broad transcription reflecting reconstructed pronunciation c.  1050 . Charles li reis, nostre emperedre magnes, Set anz toz pleins at estét en Espaigne. Tres qu'en la mer conquist la tere altaigne, Chastel n'i at ki devant lui remaignet. Murs ne citét n'i est remés

13774-570: The love of God and for the Christian people, and our common salvation, from this day forward, as God will give me the knowledge and the power, I will defend my brother Karlo with my help in everything ...) The second-oldest document in Old French is the Eulalia sequence , which is important for linguistic reconstruction of Old French pronunciation due to its consistent spelling. The royal House of Capet , founded by Hugh Capet in 987, inaugurated

13916-406: The mid-14th century, paving the way for early French Renaissance literature of the 15th century. The earliest extant French literary texts date from the ninth century, but very few texts before the 11th century have survived. The first literary works written in Old French were saints' lives . The Canticle of Saint Eulalie , written in the second half of the 9th century, is generally accepted as

14058-638: The military-focused Thucydides remains a point of contention or approach in modern historical writing. In East Asia a state chronicle , the Spring and Autumn Annals , was reputed to date from as early as 722 BCE, though only 2nd-century BCE texts have survived. The title "father of history" has also been attributed, in their respective societies, to Sima Qian , Ibn Khaldun , and Kenneth Dike . The word history comes from historía ( Ancient Greek : ἱστορία , romanized :  historíā , lit.   'inquiry, knowledge from inquiry, or judge'). It

14200-691: The modern era, available data is often limited, forcing economic historians to rely on scarce sources and extrapolate information from them. Social history is a broad field investigating social phenomena, but its precise definition is disputed. Some theorists understand it as the study of everyday life outside the domains of politics and economics, including cultural practices, family structures, community interactions, and education. A closely related approach focuses on experience rather than activities, examining how members of particular social groups, like social classes , races , genders , or age groups , experienced their world. Other definitions see social history as

14342-528: The monastery church to the chapter house or refectory hall and finally to the open air, and the vernacular was substituted for Latin. In the 12th century one finds the earliest extant passages in French appearing as refrains inserted into liturgical dramas in Latin, such as a Saint Nicholas (patron saint of the student clercs) play and a Saint Stephen play. An early French dramatic play is Le Jeu d'Adam ( c.  1150 ) written in octosyllabic rhymed couplets with Latin stage directions (implying that it

14484-555: The most famous characters of which were Renaud de Montauban and Girart de Roussillon . A fourth grouping, not listed by Bertrand, is the Crusade cycle , dealing with the First Crusade and its immediate aftermath. Jean Bodel 's other two categories—the "Matter of Rome" and the "Matter of Britain"—concern the French romance or roman . Around a hundred verse romances survive from the period 1150–1220. From around 1200 on,

14626-415: The move from short-term biographical narrative toward long-term thematic analysis). Secondly, it can refer to what has been produced: a specific body of historical writing (for example, "medieval historiography during the 1960s" means "Works of medieval history written during the 1960s"). Thirdly, it may refer to why history is produced: the philosophy of history . As a meta-level analysis of descriptions of

14768-402: The nature of history, which have evolved over the centuries and continue to change today. The modern study of history is wide-ranging, and includes the study of specific regions and certain topical or thematic elements of historical investigation. History is taught as a part of primary and secondary education, and the academic study of history is a major discipline in universities. Herodotus ,

14910-508: The older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language , which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek . By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek . Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia , which

15052-494: The other classification. In the 20th century the Annales school revolutionized the study of history, by using such outside disciplines as economics , sociology , and geography in the study of global history. Traditionally, historians have recorded events of the past, either in writing or by passing on an oral tradition , and attempted to answer historical questions through the study of written documents and oral accounts. From

15194-510: The past using historical sources such as written documents, oral accounts or traditional oral histories , art and material artifacts, and ecological markers. Stories common to a particular culture, but not supported by external sources (such as the tales surrounding King Arthur ), are usually classified as cultural heritage or legends . History differs from myth in that it is supported by verifiable evidence . However, ancient cultural influences have helped create variant interpretations of

15336-485: The past, and sometimes write to provide lessons for their own society. In the words of Benedetto Croce , "All history is contemporary history". History is facilitated by the formation of a "true discourse of past" through the production of narrative and analysis of past events relating to the human race. The modern discipline of history is dedicated to the institutional production of this discourse. All events that are remembered and preserved in some authentic form constitute

15478-409: The past, covering the processes of collecting, evaluating, and synthesizing evidence. It seeks to ensure scholarly rigor, accuracy, and reliability in how historical evidence is chosen, analyzed, and interpreted. Historical research often starts with a research question to define the scope of the inquiry. Some research questions focus on a simple description of what happened. Others aim to explain why

15620-403: The past, encompassing eyewitness accounts, hearsay , and communal legends . Counterfactual history uses counterfactual thinking to examine alternative courses of history, exploring what could have happened under different circumstances. Certain branches of history are distinguished by their theoretical outlook, such as Marxist and feminist history . Some distinctions focus on the scope of

15762-416: The past, this third conception can relate to the first two in that the analysis usually focuses on the narratives, interpretations, world view , use of evidence, or method of presentation of other historians. Historians debate whether history can be taught as a single coherent narrative or a series of competing narratives. The historical method is a set of techniques historians use to research and interpret

15904-487: The perfect stem eilēpha (not * lelēpha ) because it was originally slambanō , with perfect seslēpha , becoming eilēpha through compensatory lengthening. Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i . A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs. The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing ( c.  1450 BC ) are in

16046-401: The process involves distinguishing between original works, mere copies, and deceptive forgeries. Internal criticism evaluates the content of a source, typically beginning with the clarification of the meaning within the source. This involves disambiguating individual terms that could be misunderstood but may also require a general translation if the source is written in an ancient language. Once

16188-504: The replacement [b] > [f] and in turn the final -se of framboise added to OF fraie to make freise , modern fraise (≠ Wallon frève , Occitan fraga , Romanian fragă , Italian fragola , fravola 'strawberry'). Mildred Pope estimated that perhaps still 15% of the vocabulary of Modern French derives from Germanic sources. This proportion was larger in Old French, because Middle French borrowed heavily from Latin and Italian. The earliest documents said to be written in

16330-501: The role of gender in history, with a particular interest in the experiences of women to challenge patriarchal perspectives. History is a wide field of inquiry encompassing many branches. Some branches focus on a specific time period. Others concentrate on a particular geographic region or a distinct theme. Specializations of different types can usually be combined. For example, a work on economic history in ancient Egypt merges temporal, regional, and thematic perspectives. For topics with

16472-581: The role of international organizations in these processes. Military history studies the impact and development of armed conflicts in human history. This includes the examination of specific events, like the analysis of a particular battle and the discussion of the different causes of a war. It also involves more general considerations about the evolution of warfare, including advancements in military technology , strategies, tactics, and institutions. Economic history examines how commodities are produced, exchanged, and consumed. It covers economic aspects such as

16614-608: The scientific nature of historical inquiry, focusing on empirical evidence to discover objective truths . In contrast, postmodernists reject grand narratives that claim to offer a single, objective truth. Instead, they highlight the subjective nature of historical interpretation, which leads to a multiplicity of divergent perspectives. Marxists interpret historical developments as expressions of economic forces and class struggles . The Annales school highlights long-term social and economic trends while relying on quantitative and interdisciplinary methods. Feminist historians study

16756-441: The sense of a "researcher of history" is attested from 1531. In all European languages , the substantive history is still used to mean both "what happened with men" and "the scholarly study of the happened" or the word historiography . The adjective historical is attested from 1661, and historic from 1669. Historians write in the context of their own time, and with due regard to the current dominant ideas of how to interpret

16898-474: The significance of different causes and effects. Historians debate the nature of history as an end in itself, and its usefulness in giving perspective on the problems of the present. The period of events before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory . "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of these events. Historians seek knowledge of

17040-547: The spoken language). Vulgar Latin was the ancestor of the Romance languages , including Old French. By the late 8th century, when the Carolingian Renaissance began, native speakers of Romance idioms continued to use Romance orthoepy rules while speaking and reading Latin. When the most prominent scholar of Western Europe at the time, English deacon Alcuin , was tasked by Charlemagne with improving

17182-404: The standards of Latin writing in France, not being a native Romance speaker himself, he prescribed a pronunciation based on a fairly literal interpretation of Latin spelling. For example, in a radical break from the traditional system, a word such as ⟨viridiarium⟩ ' orchard ' now had to be read aloud precisely as it was spelled rather than */verdʒjær/ (later spelled as OF 'vergier' ). Such

17324-463: The studied event and to consider the influences of their intentions and prejudices. Being aware of the inadequacies of a source helps historians decide whether and which aspects of it to trust, and how to use it to construct a narrative. The selection, analysis, and criticism of sources result in the validation of a large collection of mostly isolated statements about the past. As a next step, sometimes termed historical synthesis , historians examine how

17466-475: The studied topic. Big history is the branch with the broadest scope, covering everything from the Big Bang to the present. World history is another branch with a wide topic. It examines human history as a whole, starting with the evolution of human-like species. The terms macrohistory , mesohistory , and microhistory refer to different scales of analysis, ranging from large-scale patterns that affect

17608-466: The study of history. Archeological finds rarely stand alone, with narrative sources complementing its discoveries. Archeology's methodologies and approaches are independent from the field of history. "Historical archaeology" is a specific branch of archeology which often contrasts its conclusions against those of contemporary textual sources. For example, Mark Leone, the excavator and interpreter of historical Annapolis, Maryland , US, has sought to understand

17750-435: The study of social problems, like poverty, disease, and crime, or take a broader perspective by examining how whole societies developed. Closely related fields include cultural history , gender history , and religious history . Intellectual history is the history of ideas. It studies how concepts, philosophies, and ideologies have evolved. It is particularly interested in academic fields but not limited to them, including

17892-530: The study of the beliefs and prejudices of ordinary people. In addition to studying intellectual movements themselves, it also examines the cultural and social contexts that shaped them and their influence on other historical developments. As closely related fields, the history of philosophy investigates the development of philosophical thought while the history of science studies the evolution of scientific theories and practices. The history of art , another connected discipline, examines historical works of art and

18034-517: The syllabic script Linear B . Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks , interword spacing , modern punctuation , and sometimes mixed case , but these were all introduced later. The beginning of Homer 's Iliad exemplifies

18176-514: The tendency was increasingly to write the romances in prose (many of the earlier verse romances were adapted into prose versions), although new verse romances continued to be written to the end of the 14th century. The most important romance of the 13th century is the Romance of the Rose , which breaks considerably from the conventions of the chivalric adventure story. Medieval French lyric poetry

18318-434: The two. The Old Low Franconian influence is also believed to be responsible for the differences between the langue d'oïl and the langue d'oc (Occitan), being that various parts of Northern France remained bilingual between Latin and Germanic for some time, and these areas correspond precisely to where the first documents in Old French were written. This Germanic language shaped the popular Latin spoken here and gave it

18460-431: The use of land, labor , and capital , the supply and demand of goods, the costs and means of production , and the distribution of income and wealth . Economic historians typically focus on general trends in the form of impersonal forces, such as inflation , rather than the actions and decisions of individuals. If enough data is available, they rely on quantitative methods, like statistical analysis. For periods before

18602-412: The verb trobar "to find, to invent"). By the late 13th century, the poetic tradition in France had begun to develop in ways that differed significantly from the troubadour poets, both in content and in the use of certain fixed forms. The new poetic (as well as musical: some of the earliest medieval music has lyrics composed in Old French by the earliest composers known by name) tendencies are apparent in

18744-797: The whole globe to detailed studies of small communities, particular individuals, or specific events. Closely related to microhistory is the genre of historical biography , which recounts an individual's life in its historical context and the legacy it left. Public history involves activities that present history to the general public . It usually happens outside the traditional academic settings in contexts like museums , historical sites , and popular media. Professional and amateur historians discover, collect, organize, and present information about past events. They discover this information through archeological evidence, written primary sources, verbal stories or oral histories, and other archival material. In lists of historians , historians can be grouped by order of

18886-480: Was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric ), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian ,

19028-464: Was a predecessor to Modern French . Other dialects of Old French evolved themselves into modern forms ( Poitevin-Saintongeais , Gallo , Norman , Picard , Walloon , etc.), each with its linguistic features and history. The region where Old French was spoken natively roughly extended to the northern half of the Kingdom of France and its vassals (including parts of the Angevin Empire ), and

19170-616: Was accompanied by other intellectual developments, such as humanism and the Enlightenment , which ushered in secularization . In modern history, beginning at the end of the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution transformed economies by introducing more efficient modes of production. Western powers established vast colonial empires , gaining superiority through industrialized military technology. The increased international exchange of goods, ideas, and people marked

19312-421: Was borrowed from Latin (possibly via Old Irish or Old Welsh ) into Old English as stær ("history, narrative, story"), but this word fell out of use in the late Old English period. Meanwhile, as Latin became Old French (and Anglo-Norman ), historia developed into forms such as istorie , estoire , and historie , with new developments in the meaning: "account of the events of a person's life (beginning of

19454-414: Was constantly changing and evolving; however, the form in the late 12th century, as attested in a great deal of mostly poetic writings, can be considered standard. The writing system at this time was more phonetic than that used in most subsequent centuries. In particular, all written consonants (including final ones) were pronounced, except for s preceding non- stop consonants and t in et , and final e

19596-721: Was in that sense that Aristotle used the word in his History of Animals . The ancestor word ἵστωρ is attested early on in Homeric Hymns , Heraclitus , the Athenian ephebes ' oath, and in Boeotic inscriptions (in a legal sense, either "judge" or "witness", or similar). The Greek word was borrowed into Classical Latin as historia , meaning "investigation, inquiry, research, account, description, written account of past events, writing of history, historical narrative, recorded knowledge of past events, story, narrative". History

19738-680: Was indebted to the poetic and cultural traditions in Southern France and Provence —including Toulouse and the Aquitaine region—where langue d'oc was spoken ( Occitan language ); in their turn, the Provençal poets were greatly influenced by poetic traditions from the Hispano-Arab world . Lyric poets in Old French are called trouvères – etymologically the same word as the troubadours of Provençal or langue d'oc (from

19880-590: Was pronounced [ ə ] . The phonological system can be summarised as follows: Notes: In Old French, the nasal vowels were not separate phonemes but only allophones of the oral vowels before a nasal consonant. The nasal consonant was fully pronounced; bon was pronounced [bõn] ( ModF [bɔ̃] ). Nasal vowels were present even in open syllables before nasals where Modern French has oral vowels, as in bone [bõnə] ( ModF bonne [bɔn] ). Notes: Notes: In addition to diphthongs, Old French had many instances of hiatus between adjacent vowels because of

20022-463: Was provided by reason , and poetry was provided by fantasy ). In an expression of the linguistic synthetic vs. analytic/isolating dichotomy, English like Chinese (史 vs. 诌) now designates separate words for human history and storytelling in general. In modern German , French , and most Germanic and Romance languages , which are solidly synthetic and highly inflected, the same word is still used to mean both "history" and "story". Historian in

20164-617: Was written by Latin-speaking clerics for a lay public). A large body of fables survive in Old French; these include (mostly anonymous) literature dealing with the recurring trickster character of Reynard the Fox . Marie de France was also active in this genre, producing the Ysopet (Little Aesop ) series of fables in verse. Related to the fable was the more bawdy fabliau , which covered topics such as cuckolding and corrupt clergy. These fabliaux would be an important source for Chaucer and for

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