122-671: Dian Lake ( Chinese : 滇池 ; pinyin : Diānchí ), also known as Dianchi, Dianchi Lake, Lake Dian and Kunming Lake , is a fault lake located on the Puduhe - Xishan fault in Kunming , Yunnan , China at 24°23′–26°22′ N, 102°10′–103°40′ E. Its nickname is the "Sparkling Pearl Embedded in a Highland" ( Chinese : 高原明珠 ; pinyin : Gāoyuánmíngzhū ). It is the model for the Kunming Lake in Beijing 's Summer Palace . Its name
244-469: A nucleus that has a vowel (which can be a monophthong , diphthong , or even a triphthong in certain varieties), preceded by an onset (a single consonant , or consonant + glide ; a zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a coda consonant; a syllable also carries a tone . There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where
366-457: A subject–verb–object word order , and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words , another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction , pronoun dropping , and
488-553: A 5th-century BC Chinese military treatise mentions tactics of Assassination and its merits. In the Old Testament , King Joash of Judah was assassinated by his own servants; Joab assassinated Absalom , King David 's son; King Sennacherib of Assyria was assassinated by his own sons; and Jael assassinated Sisera . Chanakya ( c. 350 –283 BC) wrote about assassinations in detail in his political treatise Arthashastra . His student Chandragupta Maurya ,
610-510: A Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian , a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including oracle bone versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions and
732-599: A Shanghai resident may speak both Standard Chinese and Shanghainese ; if they grew up elsewhere, they are also likely fluent in the dialect of their home region. In addition to Standard Chinese, a majority of Taiwanese people also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (also called 台語 ; 'Taiwanese' ), Hakka , or an Austronesian language . A speaker in Taiwan may mix pronunciations and vocabulary from Standard Chinese and other languages of Taiwan in everyday speech. In part due to traditional cultural ties with Guangdong , Cantonese
854-462: A central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity. The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is 方言 ; fāngyán ; 'regional speech', whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called 地点方言 ; 地點方言 ; dìdiǎn fāngyán ; 'local speech'. Because of
976-615: A compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language known as Guanhua , based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin. Standard Chinese is an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore , and one of
1098-714: A corresponding increase in the number of homophones . As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary lists six words that are commonly pronounced as shí in Standard Chinese: In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th century Yuen Ren Chao poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced shi . As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only
1220-628: A dissident from Bulgaria , was assassinated by ricin poisoning. A tiny pellet containing the poison was injected into his leg through a specially designed umbrella . Widespread allegations involving the Bulgarian government and the KGB have not led to any legal results. However, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was learned that the KGB had developed an umbrella that could inject ricin pellets into
1342-434: A frost-free period of 227 days, and an annual precipitation of 1036 mm. The lake covers 298 km (115 sq mi). The lake has an average depth of 4.4 m (14 ft), and is divided into two parts by an artificial dike . The northern end of the lake is called Caohai ( Chinese : 草海 ; pinyin : Cáohǎi ) and has a surface area of 7.5 km and an average depth of 2.5 meters. The southern end of
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#17327720675651464-450: A history of serious depression, and 39% had a history of substance abuse. With the advent of effective ranged weaponry and later firearms , the position of an assassination target was more precarious. Bodyguards were no longer enough to deter determined killers, who no longer needed to engage directly or even to subvert the guard to kill the leader in question. Moreover, the engagement of targets at greater distances dramatically increased
1586-569: A larger touch. Explosives, especially the car bomb , become far more common in modern history, with grenades and remote-triggered land mines also used, especially in the Middle East and the Balkans; the initial attempt on Archduke Franz Ferdinand 's life was with a grenade. With heavy weapons, the rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) has become a useful tool given the popularity of armored cars (discussed below), and Israeli forces have pioneered
1708-576: A millennium. The Four Commanderies of Han were established in northern Korea in the 1st century BCE but disintegrated in the following centuries. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese. Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving as
1830-488: A model for the national "reclaiming land from the sea" campaign. The goal was to reclaim 30,000 mu (20 km) of land from Dian Lake to develop agriculture. Tan Furen personally spearheaded the reclamation project until his death by assassination in 1970. Pollution is a major problem for the lake. Yunnan Province has long been primarily agricultural , but the Dianchi basin has witnessed high industrial growth and boasts
1952-413: A more or less competent successor, whether the assassination provokes ire in the state in question, whether the assassination leads to souring domestic public opinion, and whether the assassination provokes condemnation from third-parties. One study found that perceptual biases held by leaders often negatively affect decision making in that area, and decisions to go forward with assassinations often reflect
2074-542: A secure reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty . As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate
2196-508: A similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin
2318-678: A single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a family . Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese , of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min ), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese ), and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese ). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with
2440-434: A threat. An army and even a nation might be based upon and around a particularly strong, canny, or charismatic leader , whose loss could paralyze the ability of both to make war. For similar and additional reasons, assassination has also sometimes been used in the conduct of foreign policy . The costs and benefits of such actions are difficult to compute. It may not be clear whether the assassinated leader gets replaced with
2562-631: A unified standard. The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones dated to c. 1250 BCE , during the Late Shang . The next attested stage came from inscriptions on bronze artifacts dating to the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching . Scholars have attempted to reconstruct
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#17327720675652684-575: A variety of Yue from a small coastal area around Taishan, Guangdong . In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbors. For example, Wuzhou and Taishan are located approximately 260 km (160 mi) and 190 km (120 mi) away from Guangzhou respectively, but the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than
2806-546: A victim, and two former KGB agents who defected stated that the agency assisted in the murder. The CIA made several attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro ; many of the schemes involving poisoning his cigars. In the late 1950s, the KGB assassin Bohdan Stashynsky killed Ukrainian nationalist leaders Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera with a spray gun that fired a jet of poison gas from a crushed cyanide ampule, making their deaths look like heart attacks. A 2006 case in
2928-602: Is Taishanese. Wuzhou is located directly upstream from Guangzhou on the Pearl River , whereas Taishan is to Guangzhou's southwest, with the two cities separated by several river valleys. In parts of Fujian , the speech of some neighbouring counties or villages is mutually unintelligible. Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials: Proportions of first-language speakers The classification of Li Rong , which
3050-601: Is called an assassin . Assassin comes from the Italian and French Assissini, believed to derive from the word hashshashin ( Arabic : حشّاشين , romanized : ḥaššāšīyīn ), and shares its etymological roots with hashish ( / h æ ˈ ʃ iː ʃ / or / ˈ h æ ʃ iː ʃ / ; from حشيش ḥašīš ). It referred to a group of Nizari Ismailis known as the Order of Assassins who worked against various political targets. Founded by Hassan-i Sabbah ,
3172-490: Is called either 华语 ; 華語 ; Huáyǔ or 汉语 ; 漢語 ; Hànyǔ ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. Diglossia is common among Chinese speakers. For example,
3294-603: Is often described as a 'monosyllabic' language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with a morpheme , the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free , such as 'seven', 'elephant', 'para-' and '-able'. Some of
3416-507: Is one of the oldest tools of power politics . It dates back at least as far as recorded history. The Egyptian pharaoh Teti , of the Old Kingdom Sixth Dynasty (23rd century BCE), is thought to be the earliest known victim of assassination, though written records are scant and thus evidence is circumstantial. Two further ancient Egyptian monarchs are more explicitly recorded to have been assassinated; Amenemhat I of
3538-445: Is only about an eighth as many as English. All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. A very common example used to illustrate
3660-526: Is particularly susceptible to harmful algal blooms and heavy metal contamination . From 1966 to 1970, the lake reclamation project caused severe damage to marsh wetlands in the Caohai area, which along with the large amounts of urban sewage and industrial wastewater traditionally discharged into the lake, exceeded its self-purification capacity and caused serious pollution. It has also been badly affected by cyanobacteria outbreaks in recent decades. To control
3782-668: Is specifically meant. However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, 石 ; shí alone, and not 石头 ; 石頭 ; shítou , appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as 石膏 ; shígāo ; 'plaster', 石灰 ; shíhuī ; 'lime', 石窟 ; shíkū ; 'grotto', 石英 ; 'quartz', and 石油 ; shíyóu ; 'petroleum'. Although many single-syllable morphemes ( 字 ; zì ) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as 词 ; 詞 ; cí , which more closely resembles
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3904-489: Is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms, and names of political figures, businesses, and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD), based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary,
4026-474: Is the source of Yunnan 's Chinese abbreviation 滇 . Dian Lake is a shallow freshwater fault lake . The Lake is 40 km long, running from north to south, and has an average width of 7 km with the widest point being 12.5 km. The lake is 1886 meters above sea level and has 150 km of coastline. The lake's drainage area has a monsoon-affected subtropical highland climate ( Köppen Cwb ), with an average annual temperature of 14.4 °C,
4148-432: Is the willful killing, by a sudden, secret, or planned attack, of a person—especially if prominent or important . It may be prompted by grievances , notoriety , financial, military, political or other motives . Assassinations are ordered by both individuals and organizations, and are carried out by their accomplices. Acts of assassination have been performed since ancient times . A person who carries out an assassination
4270-501: Is used as an everyday language in Hong Kong and Macau . The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form. Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu, and so on as "dialects" because
4392-500: Is used in education, media, formal speech, and everyday life—though Mandarin is increasingly taught in schools due to the mainland's growing influence. Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for
4514-552: Is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups: Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect on Hainan , Waxianghua spoken in western Hunan , and Shaozhou Tuhua spoken in northern Guangdong . Standard Chinese is the standard language of China (where it is called 普通话 ; pǔtōnghuà ) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it
4636-428: Is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics. The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia : as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while
4758-753: The Qieyun rime dictionary (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system. These works define phonological categories but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese , borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. The resulting system
4880-533: The Korean , Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean. Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in
5002-710: The May Fourth Movement beginning in 1919. After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin ) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. The 1324 Zhongyuan Yinyun was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language. Together with
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5124-762: The Middle Ages , regicide was rare in Western Europe, but it was a recurring theme in the Eastern Roman Empire . Strangling in the bathtub was the most commonly used method. With the Renaissance , tyrannicide —or assassination for personal or political reasons—became more common again in Western Europe. During the 16th and 17th centuries, international lawyers began to voice condemnation of assassinations of leaders. Balthazar Ayala has been described as "the first prominent jurist to condemn
5246-620: The Middle Kingdom Twelfth Dynasty (20th century BCE) is recorded to have been assassinated in his bed by his palace guards for reasons unknown (as related in the Instructions of Amenemhat ); meanwhile contemporary judicial records relate the assassination of New Kingdom Twentieth Dynasty monarch Ramesses III in 1155 BCE as part of a failed coup attempt . Between 550 BC and 330 BC, seven Persian kings of Achaemenid Dynasty were murdered. The Art of War ,
5368-595: The National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it 普通话 ; 普通話 ; pǔtōnghuà ; 'common speech'. The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan. In Hong Kong and Macau , Cantonese is the dominant spoken language due to cultural influence from Guangdong immigrants and colonial-era policies, and
5490-669: The assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira during the Rwandan Civil War sparked the Rwandan genocide . In Israel, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated on November 4, 1995, by Yigal Amir , who opposed the Oslo Accords . In Lebanon , the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on February 14, 2005, prompted an investigation by the United Nations. The suggestion in
5612-448: The basin : Acheilognathus elongatus , Anabarilius alburnops , Anabarilius polylepis , Cyprinus micristius , Liobagrus kingi , Pseudobagrus medianalis , Silurus mento , Sinocyclocheilus grahami , Sphaerophysa dianchiensis and Xenocypris yunnanensis . Today, the only endemic fish known to survive in the lake itself is Anabarilius alburnops , but it is endangered . The remaining have not been recorded there since
5734-478: The oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang dynasty c. 1250 BCE . The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern period , Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The Qieyun , a rime dictionary , recorded
5856-596: The phonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters. Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids. Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at
5978-708: The 12-volume Hanyu Da Cidian , records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai , a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases, and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific, and technical terms. The 2016 edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian , an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words. Assassination Note: Varies by jurisdiction Note: Varies by jurisdiction Assassination
6100-525: The 1990s or earlier, and most are presumed extinct . Two other species, Schizothorax grahami and Yunnanilus nigromaculatus , are endemic to the general region, but have also disappeared from Dian Lake itself. Among the non-endemic natives, only gold fish and Asian swamp eel still live in Dian Lake. In contrast to the status of the natives, the lake is now home to more than 25 introduced fish species. The Yunnan lake newt ( Cynops wolterstorffi )
6222-453: The 74 principal incidents evaluated in a major study about assassination attempts in the US in the second half of the 20th century, 51% were undertaken by a handgun, 30% with a rifle or shotgun, 15% used knives, and 8% explosives (the use of multiple weapons/methods was reported in 16% of all cases). In the case of state-sponsored assassination, poisoning can be more easily denied. Georgi Markov ,
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#17327720675656344-761: The Assassins were active in the Near East from the 11th to the 13th centuries. The group killed members of the Abbasid , Seljuk , Fatimid , and Christian Crusader elite for political and religious reasons. Although it is commonly believed that members of the Order of Assassins were under the influence of hashish during their killings or during their indoctrination, there is debate as to whether these claims have merit, with many Eastern writers and an increasing number of Western academics coming to believe that drug-taking
6466-620: The Conservative Party Conference in a Brighton hotel. Loyalist paramilitaries retaliated by killing Catholics at random and assassinating Irish nationalist politicians. Basque separatists ETA in Spain assassinated many security and political figures since the late 1960s, notably the president of the Francoist government of Spain, Luis Carrero Blanco , 1st Duke of Carrero-Blanco Grandee of Spain, in 1973. In
6588-742: The Czechoslovak government in exile in Operation Anthropoid , and knowledge from decoded transmissions allowed the United States to carry out a targeted attack , killing Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto while he was travelling by plane. During the 1930s and 1940s, Joseph Stalin 's NKVD carried out numerous assassinations outside of the Soviet Union, such as the killings of Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists leader Yevhen Konovalets , Ignace Poretsky , Fourth International secretary Rudolf Klement, Leon Trotsky , and
6710-498: The Israeli policy of targeted killing is not the same as assassination." Syracuse Law William Banks and GW Law Peter Raven-Hansen wrote, "Targeted killing of terrorists is... not unlawful and would not constitute assassination." Rory Miller writes: "Targeted killing... is not 'assassination. ' " Eric Patterson and Teresa Casale wrote, "Perhaps most important is the legal distinction between targeted killing and assassination." On
6832-578: The Kunming basin. On December 28, 1969, a rally for "reclaiming land from the sea" was held in Kunming's Dongfeng Square. 100,000 soldiers along with students and factory workers were mobilized to "fight a war of annihilation to take farmland from Dian Lake". The participants shouted the heroic slogan "March to Dian Lake! Take grain from Dian Lake!". Reclamation efforts were led by People's Liberation Army Lieutenant General Tan Furen . Immediately after taking office, Tan Furen announced that Dian Lake would be
6954-565: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet . English words of Chinese origin include tea from Hokkien 茶 ( tê ), dim sum from Cantonese 點心 ( dim2 sam1 ), and kumquat from Cantonese 金橘 ( gam1 gwat1 ). The sinologist Jerry Norman has estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum , in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though
7076-594: The Obama administration maintained a "kill list" containing terrorism suspects. The list is sometimes referred to as a "disposition matrix," and President Obama made a final decision on whether anyone listed would be killed, without court oversight and without trial. In September 2011, American citizens Anwar Al-Awlaki and Samir Khan were assassinated in Yemen by the United States government via drone strikes. Two weeks later, Awlaki's 16-year-old son, also an American citizen,
7198-674: The Tokugawa shogunate, during the Boshin War . Most of the assassinations in Japan were committed with bladed weaponry, a trait that was carried on into modern history. A video-record exists of the assassination of Inejiro Asanuma , using a sword. In 1895, a group of Japanese assassins killed the Korean queen (and posthumously empress) Myeongseong. In the United States, within 100 years, four presidents— Abraham Lincoln , James A. Garfield , William McKinley and John F. Kennedy —died at
7320-532: The UK concerned the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko who was given a lethal dose of radioactive polonium -210, possibly passed to him in aerosol form sprayed directly onto his food. Targeted killing is the intentional killing by a government or its agents of a civilian or " unlawful combatant " who is not in the government's custody. The target is a person asserted to be taking part in an armed conflict or terrorism, by bearing arms or otherwise, who has thereby lost
7442-896: The Workers' Party of Marxist Unification ( POUM ) leadership in Catalonia . India's "Father of the Nation", Mahatma Gandhi , was shot to death on January 30, 1948, by Nathuram Godse . The African-American civil rights activist, Martin Luther King Jr. , was assassinated on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel (now the National Civil Rights Museum ) in Memphis, Tennessee . Three years prior, another African-American civil rights activist, Malcolm X ,
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#17327720675657564-455: The actual attackers were found to be delusional , a figure that rose to 60% with "near-lethal approachers" (people apprehended before reaching their targets). That shows that while mental instability plays a role in many modern assassinations, the more delusional attackers are less likely to succeed in their attempts. The report also found that around two-thirds of attackers had previously been arrested, not necessarily for related offenses; 44% had
7686-585: The attempts to kill the Athenian Alcibiades during the Peloponnesian War . A number of additional examples from World War II show how assassination was used as a tool: Use of assassination has continued in more recent conflicts: Insurgent groups have often employed assassination as a tool to further their causes. Assassinations provide several functions for such groups: the removal of specific enemies and as propaganda tools to focus
7808-515: The attention of media and politics on their cause. The Irish Republican Army guerrillas in 1919 to 1921 killed many Royal Irish Constabulary Police intelligence officers during the Irish War of Independence . Michael Collins set up a special unit, the Squad , for that purpose, which had the effect of intimidating many policemen into resigning from the force. The Squad's activities peaked with
7930-419: The chances for assassins to survive since they could quickly flee the scene. The first heads of government to be assassinated with a firearm were James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray , the regent of Scotland, in 1570, and William the Silent , the Prince of Orange of the Netherlands, in 1584. Gunpowder and other explosives also allowed the use of bombs or even greater concentrations of explosives for deeds requiring
8052-399: The different spoken dialects varies, but in general, there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more polysyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which
8174-484: The difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include topolect , lect , vernacular , regional , and variety . Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to the morphology and also to the characters of the writing system, and phonologically they are structured according to fixed rules. The structure of each syllable consists of
8296-431: The early 1990s, it also began to target academics, journalists and local politicians who publicly disagreed with it. The Red Brigades in Italy carried out assassinations of political figures and, to a lesser extent, so did the Red Army Faction in Germany in the 1970s and the 1980s. In the Vietnam War , communist insurgents routinely assassinated government officials and individual civilians deemed to offend or rival
8418-464: The end of the syllable, developing into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection , and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles . Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui , Tang , and Song dynasties (6th–10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by
8540-444: The ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China , as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora . Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language . Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of
8662-581: The federal government to fall outside the assassination prohibition. Author and former U.S. Army Captain Matthew J. Morgan argued that "there is a major difference between assassination and targeted killing... targeted killing [is] not synonymous with assassination. Assassination... constitutes an illegal killing." Similarly, Amos Guiora , a professor of law at the University of Utah , wrote, "Targeted killing is... not an assassination." Steve David , professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University , wrote, "There are strong reasons to believe that
8784-433: The first wastewater plant was built in 1990. Some experts estimated that over 55% of the lake's fish population has been killed off by this disease-ridden type of pollution. The China Environmental Statistical Yearbook data reported that in 2013, 400 million tons of municipal sewage and 8 million tons of industrial waste water were dumped into Dian Lake of which only 1.5 million tons were treated before dumping. As of 2022,
8906-413: The first one, 十 , normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by the addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable
9028-491: The form of a word), to indicate a word's function within a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections —it possesses no tenses , no voices , no grammatical number , and only a few articles . They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood . In Mandarin, this involves the use of particles such as 了 ; le ; ' PFV ', 还 ; 還 ; hái ; 'still', and 已经 ; 已經 ; yǐjīng ; 'already'. Chinese has
9150-722: The founder of the Maurya Empire , later made use of assassinations against some of his enemies. Some famous assassination victims are Philip II of Macedon (336 BC), the father of Alexander the Great , and Roman dictator Julius Caesar (44 BC). Emperors of Rome often met their end in this way, as did many of the Muslim Shia Imams hundreds of years later. Three successive Rashidun caliphs ( Umar , Uthman Ibn Affan , and Ali ibn Abi Talib ) were assassinated in early civil conflicts between Muslims. The practice
9272-678: The government of the People's Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speaking communities overseas . Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family , together with Burmese , Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif . Although
9394-485: The hands of assassins. There have been at least 20 known attempts on U.S. presidents' lives. In Austria, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg was carried out in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, by Gavrilo Princip , a Serbian nationalist. He is blamed for igniting World War I . Reinhard Heydrich died after an attack by British-trained Czechoslovak soldiers on behalf of
9516-573: The head of Iranian intelligence. Evidence indicates that Fallahian's personal involvement and individual responsibility for the murders were far more pervasive than his current indictment record represents. In India, Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi (neither of whom was related to Mahatma Gandhi , who had himself been assassinated in 1948), were assassinated in 1984 and 1991 in what were linked to separatist movements in Punjab and northern Sri Lanka , respectively. In 1994,
9638-515: The highest population density within Kunming City. In the late 1990’s to early 2000’s, Dian Lake was identified as one of the 3 top water pollution concerns in China. The pollution peaked in 2009, at which time the water in Dian Lake was classified "worse than Grade 5" (too dangerous for human contact). Ninety percent of the city of Kunming's wastewater was dumped untreated into the lake until
9760-595: The immunity from being targeted that he would otherwise have under the Third Geneva Convention . It is a different term and concept from that of "targeted violence", as used by specialists who study violence. On the other hand, Gary D. Solis , a professor at Georgetown University Law Center , in his 2010 book The Law of Armed Conflict: International Humanitarian Law in War , wrote, "Assassinations and targeted killings are very different acts." The use of
9882-648: The killing of 14 British agents in Dublin on Bloody Sunday in 1920. The tactic was used again by the Provisional IRA during the Troubles in Northern Ireland (1969–1998). Assassination of unionist politicians and activists was one of a number of methods used in the Provisional IRA campaign 1969–1997 . The IRA also attempted to assassinate British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by bombing
10004-413: The lake's ecological balance. As a result, some wetland parks have been constructed in the lakeside zone to purify the water and create leisure areas for citizens. Wetland parks are mainly in the form of oxidation ponds . They are small water bodies with aquatic plants such as Phragmites australis , Typha orientalis , Acorus calamus , Eichhornia crassipes , Lemna minor , and Pistia stratiotes ; outside
10126-601: The lake, comprising the majority of the lake, is called Waihai ( Chinese : 外海 ; pinyin : Wàihǎi ) and has a surface area of 292 km and an average depth of 4.4 m. The water flows out of the lake to the west via the Pudu River ( Chinese : 普渡河; pinyin : Pǔdù Hé ) which eventually joins the Yangtze River before finally reaching the Pacific Ocean . Dian Lake is the sixth largest lake in China and
10248-586: The language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese. Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations . Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into
10370-723: The largest lake in Yunnan Province . The Chinese character for the lake ( Chinese : 滇 ; pinyin : Diān ) is a phonosemantic compound of the radical 氵 ("water") and the character 真 ("real"). The character was first found in the Records of the Grand Historian as the name of the Dian Kingdom . Modern studies suggest that the character 滇 is derived from the language of the extinct ancient Bo people and means basin . The character 滇 has been used as
10492-528: The late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called kanji , and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea, although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters called hanja is still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses
10614-552: The merits of the action. Assassination is widely defined as murder, and is for that reason prohibited in the United States ;... U.S. officials may not kill people merely because their policies are seen as detrimental to our interests... But killings in self-defense are no more "assassinations" in international affairs than they are murders when undertaken by our police forces against domestic killers. Targeted killings in self-defense have been authoritatively determined by
10736-455: The more conservative modern varieties, usually found in the south, have largely monosyllabic words , especially with basic vocabulary. However, most nouns, adjectives, and verbs in modern Mandarin are disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonetic erosion : sound changes over time have steadily reduced the number of possible syllables in the language's inventory. In modern Mandarin, there are only around 1,200 possible syllables, including
10858-425: The mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. However, calling major Chinese branches "languages" would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language. There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with
10980-591: The name of the lake since at least 109 BC, when the Han dynasty established "Dianchi County" (滇池县) in the area. Dian Lake was the site of the capital of the independent kingdom of the Cuan ( 爨 ) during the first millennium AD. At that time, it was known as Kunchuan ( 昆川 ).. Between 1958 and 1970, under the CCP's agriculture strategy of "Taking grain as the key link", approximately 54 square kilometers of Dian Lake marshland were reclaimed to expand industry and agriculture in
11102-583: The nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable. In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/ , /n/ , /ŋ/ , the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ , and voiceless stops /p/ , /t/ , /k/ , or /ʔ/ . Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only /n/ , /ŋ/ , and /ɻ/ . The number of sounds in
11224-545: The new Islamic government of Iran began an international campaign of assassination that lasted into the 1990s. At least 162 killings in 19 countries have been linked to the senior leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran . The campaign came to an end after the Mykonos restaurant assassinations because a German court publicly implicated senior members of the government and issued arrest warrants for Ali Fallahian ,
11346-592: The other hand, the American Civil Liberties Union also states on its website, "A program of targeted killing far from any battlefield, without charge or trial, violates the constitutional guarantee of due process . It also violates international law , under which lethal force may be used outside armed conflict zones only as a last resort to prevent imminent threats, when non-lethal means are not available. Targeting people who are suspected of terrorism for execution, far from any war zone, turns
11468-538: The other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin , Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin , Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan . All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic . The earliest attested written Chinese consists of
11590-405: The pollution of Dian Lake, the Chinese government listed it as a national sewage treatment project in the ‘‘Three Rivers and Three Lakes’’ ( Liaohe , Huaihe , Haihe , Taihu , Chaohu , and Dianchi) scheme launched in 1995. The extensive land reclamation and urbanization projects have had long-lasting impacts on Dian Lake, necessitating ongoing rehabilitation and pollution control efforts to restore
11712-443: The ponds, there are trails, trees, and lawns. Together with other Yunnan lakes ( Fuxian , Qilu , Yangzong , Xingyun , and Yilong ), Dian Lake is recognized as an ecoregion . Among the three major Yunnan lakes with a high number of endemics , the other two being Fuxian and Erhai , the most drastic loss of biodiversity has been seen in the Dian Lake. Of the 25 native fish species and subspecies in Dian Lake, 10 are endemic to
11834-404: The rate of change varies immensely. Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain . Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects were spoken. Specifically, most Chinese immigrants to North America until the mid-20th century spoke Taishanese ,
11956-552: The related subject dropping . Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers. However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for
12078-509: The relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic . Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones. Without
12200-494: The resulting Mehlis report that there was involvement by Syria prompted the Cedar Revolution , which drove Syrian troops out of Lebanon. On 2 September 2022, a 35 year old Brazilian national attempted to assassinate the then current vice-president of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner . However, the attempt was unsuccessful because the assassin's gun jammed. In 2012, The New York Times revealed that
12322-543: The revolutionary movement. Such attacks, along with widespread military activity by insurgent bands, almost brought the Ngo Dinh Diem regime to collapse before the US intervened. A major study about assassination attempts in the US in the second half of the 20th century came to the conclusion that most prospective assassins spend copious amounts of time planning and preparing for their attempts. Assassinations are thus rarely "impulsive" actions. However, about 25% of
12444-399: The six official languages of the United Nations . Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using a logography of Chinese characters , largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use of simplified characters has been promoted by
12566-561: The slightly later Menggu Ziyun , this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects. Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties , known as 官话 ; 官話 ; Guānhuà ; 'language of officials'. For most of this period, this language
12688-457: The target at long range, and the ability to score a first-round lethal hit at long range, which is usually measured in hundreds of meters. A dedicated sniper rifle is also expensive, often costing thousands of dollars because of the high level of precision machining and handfinishing required to achieve extreme accuracy. Despite their comparative disadvantages, handguns are more easily concealable and so are much more commonly used than rifles. Of
12810-569: The term "assassination" is opposed, as it denotes murder (unlawful killing), but the terrorists are targeted in self-defense, which is thus viewed as a killing but not a crime ( justifiable homicide ). Abraham D. Sofaer , former federal judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of New York , wrote on the subject: When people call a targeted killing an "assassination", they are attempting to preclude debate on
12932-623: The tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English. Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabic compounds . In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in 窟窿 ; kūlong from 孔 ; kǒng ; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to
13054-547: The traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include 汉堡包 ; 漢堡包 ; hànbǎobāo ; 'hamburger', 守门员 ; 守門員 ; shǒuményuán ; 'goalkeeper', and 电子邮件 ; 電子郵件 ; diànzǐyóujiàn ; 'e-mail'. All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages : they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure), rather than inflectional morphology (changes in
13176-401: The use of aircraft-mounted missiles, as well as the innovative use of explosive devices. A sniper with a precision rifle is often used in fictional assassinations; however, certain pragmatic difficulties attend long-range shooting, including finding a hidden shooting position with a clear line of sight, detailed advance knowledge of the intended victim's travel plans, the ability to identify
13298-467: The use of assassination in foreign policy". Alberico Gentili condemned assassinations in a 1598 publication where he appealed to the self-interest of leaders: (i) assassinations had adverse short-term consequences by arousing the ire of the assassinated leader's successor, and (ii) assassinations had the adverse long-term consequences of causing disorder and chaos. Hugo Grotius 's works on the law of war strictly forbade assassinations, arguing that killing
13420-512: The use of tones in Chinese is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese, along with the neutral tone, to the syllable ma . The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words: In contrast, Standard Cantonese has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered to be " checked tones " and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such: Chinese
13542-437: The vague hope that any successor might be better. In both military and foreign policy assassinations, there is the risk that the target could be replaced by an even more competent leader, or that such a killing (or a failed attempt) will prompt the masses to contemn the killers and support the leader's cause more strongly. Faced with particularly brilliant leaders, that possibility has in various instances been risked, such as in
13664-450: The water in the lake is still rated Grade 5, but is deemed to meet the functional requirements of a water environment. Historically, Dian Lake played an important role in regulating the microclimate of the surrounding area. It contributed to the productivity of Yunnan Province's industry, agriculture, husbandry, and fisheries. Because Dian Lake is a relatively closed lake with a slow water-exchange rate and low self-purification capacity, it
13786-452: The words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines. Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters , but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ Nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until
13908-517: The written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese . Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period . Its use in writing remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption of written vernacular Chinese with
14030-453: Was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court. In the 1930s, a standard national language ( 国语 ; 國語 ; Guóyǔ ), was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation,
14152-420: Was also endemic to the lake, but it has not been seen since 1979 and is considered extinct. Many native hydrophytes have also disappeared from the lake. Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing') is a group of languages spoken natively by
14274-566: Was also well known in ancient China, as in Jing Ke 's failed assassination of Qin king Ying Zheng in 227 BC. Whilst many assassinations were performed by individuals or small groups, there were also specialized units who used a collective group of people to perform more than one assassination. The earliest were the sicarii in 6 AD, who predated the Middle Eastern Assassins and Japanese shinobis by centuries. In
14396-557: Was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965. Most major powers repudiated Cold War assassination tactics, but many allege that was merely a smokescreen for political benefit and that covert and illegal training of assassins continues today, with Russia, Israel, the U.S., Argentina , Paraguay, Chile, and other nations accused of engaging in such operations. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979,
14518-433: Was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half
14640-509: Was killed in a strike targeting Ibrahim al-Banna , a senior operative in Al-Qaeda . Al-Banna was not killed in the strike. Assassination for military purposes has long been espoused: Sun Tzu , writing around 500 BC, argued in favor of using assassination in his book The Art of War . Over 2000 years later, in his book The Prince , Machiavelli also advises rulers to assassinate enemies whenever possible to prevent them from posing
14762-579: Was not the key feature behind the name. The term "assassinare" (assassin) was used in Medieval Latin from the mid 13th century. The earliest known use of the verb "to assassinate" in printed English was by Matthew Sutcliffe in A Briefe Replie to a Certaine Odious and Slanderous Libel, Lately Published by a Seditious Jesuite , a pamphlet printed in 1600, five years before it was used in Macbeth by William Shakespeare (1605). Assassination
14884-542: Was only permissible on the battlefield. In the modern world, the killing of important people began to become more than a tool in power struggles between rulers themselves and was also used for political symbolism, such as in the propaganda of the deed . In Japan, a group of assassins called the Four Hitokiri of the Bakumatsu killed a number of people, including Ii Naosuke who was the head of administration for
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