227 research outputs found
Indo-European vocabulary in Old Chinese : a new thesis on the emergence of Chinese language and civilization in the late Neolithic age
No full textThis study is a much expanded version of the paper I read at the XXXII International Congress for Asian and North African Studies on August 28, 1986 in Hamburg (Germany). Contents 1. Recent developments in the field of historical linguistics 2. Monosyllabic structure of Chinese words and Indo-European stems 3. Tonal accents of Middle Chinese 4. Preliminaries on the comparison of consonants and vowels 5. Some IE stems corresponding to Chinese words of entering tone 6. Middle Chinese tones and final consonants of IE stems 7. Some IE stems corresponding to Chinese words of rising tone 8. Some IE stems corresponding to Chinese words of vanishing tone 9. Some IE stems corresponding to Chinese words of level tone 10. Reconstruction of Middle Chinese vocalism according to Yün-ching 11. Old Chinese vocalism 12. Vocalic correspondences between Chinese and IE 13. Initials of Old Chinese 14. Initial consonant clusters in Old Chinese as seen from IE-stems 15. Proximity of Chinese to Germanic 16. Relation of Old Chinese to neighboring languages 17. Emergence of Chinese Empire and language in the middle of the third millennium B.C. Appendix * Abbrevations * Bibliography * Rhyme Tables of Early Middle Chinese (600) * Rhyme Tables of Early Mandarin (1300) * Word Index o English o Pinyin In 1786, just over two hundred years ago, comparative historical linguistics was born, when Sir William Jones (1746-1794) discovered the relationship between Old-Indian Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. Since then, the emerging Indo-European philology has thrown much light on the early history of mankind in Eurasia. During the past two hundred years, many suggestions were also made in regard to relationships of Indo-European to other languages such as Semitic, Altaic, Austronesian, Korean etc., but Indo-Europeanists commonly rejected such attempts for want of convincing evidence. As to Chinese, Joseph Edkins was the first to advance the thesis of its proximity to Indo-European. In his work China's Place in Philology. An Attempt to show that the Language of Europe and Asia have a Common Origin (1871) he presented a number of Chinese words similar to those of Indo-European. In his time, Edkins' thesis seemed bold and extravagant. But today, more than a hundred years later, we are in a much better position to carry out a comprehensive and well-founded comparative study. Since the end of the nineteenth century, many Sinologists have been engaged in reconstruction of the mediaeval and archaic readings of Chinese characters. Among them, Karlgren (1889-1978) was the most successful, and in 1940 he published a comprehensive phonological and etymological dictionary entitled Grammata Serica. In the meantime, the Indo-Europeanists Alois Walde (1869-1924) and Julius Pokorny (1887-1970) were devoting themselves to the compilation of a useful etymological dictionary. The result was the Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch by Pokorny (1959) which provides a solid basis for our lexical comparisons. Soon thereafter, some Sinologists made use of the two dictionaries by Karlgren and Pokorny to compare Chinese and Indo-European words. In 1967, an unaffiliated German scholar, Jan Ulenbrook, published an article "Einige Übereinstirnrnungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen", in which he claimed that 57 words are related. Shortly afterwards, Tor Ulving of the University of Goteborg, Sweden, wrote a review of this article framing the title as a question: "Indo-European elements in Chinese?" While working on his thesis on word families in Chinese, Ulving compiled for his own use two dictionaries: "Archaic Chinese - English" and "English - Archaic Chinese", and discovered thereby 238 Chinese words similar to Indo-European roots. In spite of this considerable number of word equivalents, however, Mr. Ulving became discouraged and, as he told me in his letter of April, 1986, has given up his researches in this field. The skepticism, common among Indo-Europeanists in regard to comparative studies with other languages, is largely based on the dogmatic opinion that only morphology is relevant but not vocabulary. Since the typology of Chinese seems to preclude a cognate relation to Indo-European, they are inclined to discard any lexical correspondences as merely accidental or onomatopoetic. Besides, prehistorical contacts and mixtures between these languages seem not conceivable, as the Indo-Europeans are supposed to have originated in Northern Europe or at best in the Central Asian steppe, thousands of miles away from East Asia. Hence, any research into a relationship between Old Chinese and Indo-European languages would be but futile from the outset. Yet there are also opposing views among Indo-Europeanists. Investigations into Germanic languages and the oldest Indo-European language, Hittite, led some of them to a critical revision of the prevailing conception about a Proto-Indo-European. Hermann Hirt (1934) for instance states: "Inflexion of Indo-European languages is due to a relatively late development, and its correct comprehension can be achieved only by proceeding from the time of non-inflexion." And Carl Karstien (1936) holds the opinion that "Chinese corresponds most ideally to the hypothetic prototype of Indo-European." Regarding vocabulary, there are striking similarities in the monosyllabic structure of the basic words. In modern German and English, all the words of everyday speech are monosyllabic and their stereotypical structure is: initial consonant(s) + vowel(s) + final consonant(s). The same word structure is valid for Chinese as well. It is fundamentally different from the disyllabic structure of Altaic words and from the triconsonantal-disyllabic structure of Semitic words. Characteristic of the monosyllabic word structure is, besides, the complexity of the syllable nucleus, which consists of different vowels and vowel clusters in contrast to the monophthongal vocalism of polysyllabic words. Another objection raised to comparisons between Chinese and Indo-European is the existence of tonal accents in Chinese. Since most modern Indo-European languages have only expiratory accents, Chinese is considered to be a highly exotic language. Yet, even in Chinese, the use of tonal accents as a means of lexical differentiation is a result of comparatively recent development in the long history of Chinese language, the earliest monuments of which date back to 1300 B.C. (cf. Chang 1970, p.21). Unknown to Old Chinese, the existence of tonal accents was for the first time mentioned in the 5th century by Shen Yüeh (441-513). In Middle Chinese (Mch.) there were four tone categories: A P'ing-sheng 平 a level tone (which developed into Mandarin tone 1 or 2). B Shang-sheng 上 a rising tone (Mandarin tone 3). C Ch'u-sheng 去 a vanishing, i.e. falling tone (Mandarin tone 4). D Ju-sheng 入 an entering tone with a staccato effect, the word being abruptly stopped by a final consonant -p, -t, -k. (In Early Mandarin the words of this tone lost their final consonant and were distributed among the tones 2, 3 and 4, respectively according to the phonation of initials). In Middle Chinese, words of the entering tone were the only group which still preserved the final stops and therefore a close syllabic structure. So they are most appropriate for convincing comparisons with monosyllabic Indo-European word stems. The final stops -p, -t, -k of the entering tone are nowadays still extant in daily speech of several dialects in South China as well as in Chinese borrowings in Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean. As a speaker of a Taiwan dialect of Minnan origin, I could immediately identify some Indo-European stems with corresponding Chinese words. Besides, the command of Japanese and German was also a great help for this study. In the following lists I have chosen a number of Indo-European stems which are phonetically and semantically equivalent to Chinese words. Correspondences in initial and final consonants refer to the points of articulation, thus we have equations: IE labials = Old Chinese labials, IE dentals = dentals, IE l, r = dentals (cf. p. 31); Ø, i (final and medial) IE velars = velars and laryngeals, and occasionally (the so-called "satem"-forms) IE velars = dental sibilants and affricates. Regarding the manner of articulation, there are no regular correspondences between Indo-European and Chinese consonants like Grimm's law which is valid among Indo-European dialects to a certain extent. But this is not astonishing, since in Old Chinese the alternation of initials in voicing was a conventional means of creating new words from one basic form. The rules of vocalic correpondences among Indo-European dialects are quite complex. Vowels permanently change their qualities from one language to another, and from time to time within one language also, as is well known from the history of English pronunciations. Generally, the vocalism of Old Greek is taken as the standard for Proto-Indo-European. Old Chinese vowels corresponds nearly (cf. p. 30), but the details about the reconstruction of Middle and Old Chinese vocalism will be treated later (pp. 26-30). For the moment, it is necessary to notice in advance that the stem of ablauting Germanic verbs is the form of preterite or noun, rather than that of infinitive as assumed hitherto. Therefore, in some cases I must slightly modify the basic vowel of verbal stems given in Pokorny, in order to get better basis for comparison. As Old Chinese verbs were non-flexional, they might probably have preserved the original vowel the best
Keer electro-optic measurements in liquid dielectrics
No full textThesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2014.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references.Kerr electro-optic technique has been used to measure the electric field distribution in high voltage stressed dielectric liquids, where the difference between refractive indices for light polarized parallel and perpendicular to the local electric field is a function of the electric field intensity. For transformer oil, the most widely-used insulating liquids in power apparatus and high voltage technology, Kerr effect is very weak due to its low Kerr constant. Previous Kerr measurements have been using ac modulation technique, which is only applicable to dc steady-state electric field mapping while various instabilities develop in liquid under long-term high voltage application. The use of the high-sensitivity CCD camera as optical detector makes it possible to capture the weak Kerr effect in high voltage stressed transformer oil. The first part of this thesis is to demonstrate the reliability and evaluate the sensitivity of the measurements for various cases with identical electrodes under pulsed excitation with insignificant flow effects. After the validation and optimization of the experimental setup, measurements are taken to record the time evolution of electric field distributions in transformer oil stressed by high voltage pulses, from which the dynamics of space charge development can be obtained. Correlation between space charge distribution pattern and impulse breakdown voltage is examined. Hypothetically, bipolar homo-charge injection with reduced electric field at both electrodes may allow higher voltage operation without insulation failure, since electrical breakdown usually initiates at the electrode-dielectric interfaces. It is shown that the hypothesis is testable and correct only under specific circumstances. Besides, fractal-like kinetics for electrode charge injection is identified from the measurement data, which enriches the knowledge on ionic conduction in liquids by offering an experimentally-determined boundary condition to the numerical model. Physical mechanisms based on formative steps of adsorption-reaction-desorption reveal possible connections between geometrical characteristics of electrode surfaces and fractal-like kinetics of charge injection. The second part of this thesis focuses on the fluctuations in the detected light intensity in Kerr measurements. Up to now, within an experimentally-determined valid range of high voltage pulse duration, the strategy to reduce fluctuation has been taking multiple measurements and then averaging the results. For very short impulses, it is found that the light intensities near the rough surfaces of electrodes both fluctuate in repeated measurements and vary spatially in a single measurement. The major cause is electrostriction which brings disturbances into optical detection. The calculated spatial variation has a strong nonlinear dependence on the applied voltage, which generates a precursory indicator of the electrical breakdown initiation. This result may have potential applications in non-destructive breakdown test and inclusion detection in dielectric liquids. When the applied voltage is dc or ac, signatures of turbulent electroconvection in transformer oil are identified from the Kerr measurement data. It is found that when the applied dc voltage is high enough, compared with the results in the absence of high voltage, the optical scintillation index and image entropy exhibit substantial enhancement and reduction respectively, which are interpreted as temporal and spatial signatures of turbulence. Under low-frequency ac high voltages, spectral and correlation analyses also indicate that there exist interacting flow and charge processes in the gap. This also clarifies the meaning of dc steady state and the requirement on ac modulation frequency in Kerr measurements.by Xuewei Zhang.Ph. D
Variant logic meta-data management for model driven applications
No full textThe scope for end users to influence the design and functionality of off the shelf Enterprise Information system (EIS) applications is usually minimal, requiring pursuing expensive vendor supported customisations. Our ongoing development of temporal meta-data EIS applications seeks to overcome these issues, through modelling rather than coding, and with the meta-data model supporting the capability for end users to define their own application logic meta-data, to supplement or replace the originating vendor’s pre-defined application logic, as what we term Variant Logic. Variant Logic can be applied to any object defined in a meta-data EIS application, and can be defined by any authorised user, without the need for additional coding, and is available for immediate execution by the framework runtime engine. Variant Logic is also preserved during automated meta-data application updates
Temporal meta-data management for model driven applications
No full textIn this paper we discuss how the application of temporal data management techniques to the atomic elements of a meta-data application model can provide for a complete temporal execution capability for meta-data Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) applications by maintaining a perfect synchronisation of historical data and historical application states. Temporal data management is a well understood field as it applies to the common database and its application to the meta-data EIS application lifecycle in such a solution would minimise the reduction of historical information accessibility currently experienced in most applications as the logical application functionality and data formats are regularly changed due to often irreversible version upgrades
Diatonic Scale Interaction and Intervallic Content in Contrapuntal Polydiatonicism: On the Applicability of Set Theory
No full textInterval classes (ICs) can be generated not only through the combination of pitches within a single pitch-class set, but also through the interaction between pitches from two distinct sets (scales), thereby revealing the potential for generating various intervals across different sets. In actual music, such inter-set interaction is primarily manifested in the construction of harmonic intervals in contrapuntal polytonal music. One particularly representative structure is contrapuntal polydiatonicism, which is developed on the basis of the diatonic scale. This article analyzes contrapuntal polydiatonicism involving twelve different tonal relationships using interval vectors from set theory, demonstrating that their intervallic content distributions differ significantly. Certain interval classes appear in greater numbers within specific combinations; this distributional feature may influence a composer’s choice of tonal relationships within polydiatonic structures.Classes de intervalos (CIs) podem ser geradas não apenas por meio da combinação de alturas dentro de um único conjunto de classes de alturas, mas também pela interação entre alturas provenientes de dois conjuntos distintos (escalas), revelando assim o potencial de geração de diversos intervalos entre conjuntos diferentes. Na música real, tal interação entre conjuntos manifesta-se principalmente na construção de intervalos harmônicos na música politonal contrapontística. Uma estrutura particularmente representativa é o polidiatonismo contrapontístico, desenvolvido com base na escala diatônica. Este artigo analisa o polidiatonismo contrapontístico envolvendo doze diferentes relações tonais, utilizando vetores intervalares da teoria dos conjuntos, demonstrando que suas distribuições de conteúdo intervalar diferem significativamente. Certas classes de intervalos aparecem em maior número em combinações específicas; essa característica distributiva pode influenciar a escolha do compositor em relação às combinações tonais dentro de estruturas polidiatônicas
Development Strategies on Agricultural Insurance under the Building of New Countryside
No full textAbstractIt will be impossible to develop modern agriculture actively and accelerate new socialist countryside construction effectively without support and protection of agricultural insurance, which acts as both “stabilizer” and “booster”. The author did empirical research on this issue based on the questionnaire survey and statistical data from 1998 to 2009, and then revealed four problems on agricultural insurance development and five original causes. Furthermore, the author proposed seven suggestions for practical economic decision-makers on how to develop agricultural insurance and promote new countryside construction
Ca-modified Al–Mg–Sc alloy with high strength at elevated temperatures due to a hierarchical microstructure
No full textAl-Mg alloys are normally prone to lose part of their yield and tensile strength at high temperatures due to insufficient thermal stability of the microstructure. Here, we present a Ca-modified Al–Mg–Sc alloy demonstrating high strength at elevated temperatures. The microstructure contains Al4Ca phases distributed as a network along the grain boundary and Al3(Sc,Zr) nano-particles dispersed within the grains. The microstructure evolution and age-hardening analysis indicate that the combination of an Al4Ca network and Sc-rich nano-particles leads to excellent thermal stability even upon aging at 300 °C. The tensile strength of the alloy for temperatures up to 250 °C is significantly improved by an aging treatment and is comparable with the commercial heat-resistant aluminum alloys, i.e., A356 and A319. At a high temperature of 300 °C, the tensile strength is superior to the above-mentioned commercial alloys, even more so when expressed as the specific strength due to the low density of Ca-modified Al–Mg–Sc alloy. The excellent high-temperature strength results from a synergistic effect of solid solution strengthening, grain boundary strengthening and nanoparticle order strengthening.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Novel Aerospace Material
A Fixed-Wing UAV Formation Algorithm Based on Vector Field Guidance
No full textThe vector field method was originally proposed to guide a single fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) towards a desired path. In this work, a non-uniform vector field method is proposed that changes in both magnitude and direction, for the purpose of achieving formations of UAVs. As compared to related work in the literature, the proposed formation control law does not need to assume absence of wind. That is, due to the effect of the wind on the UAV, one can handle the UAV air speed being different from its ground speed, and the UAV heading angle being different from its course angle. Stability of the proposed formation method is analyzed via Lyapunov stability theory, and validations are carried out in software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop comparative experiments. Note to Practitioners - The software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop experiments, which are done with PX4 autopilot software and hardware, show that the proposed method can be implemented on board of UAVs and integrated with the control architecture of existing autopilot suites. Comparisons with standard formation algorithms show that the proposed method is effective in achieving formation in different path scenarios.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Team Bart De Schutte
The use of guanxi in everyday life: The Case of School Selection in China
No full textThis research focuses on the use of guanxi (Chinese personal connections) in everyday urban life: in particular, how and why people develop their bonding, bridging and linking social capital in their guanxi networks. While much existing research focuses on the roles of bonding, bridging and linking social capital in different contexts, little is known about the process of developing and using these three types of social capitals in Chinese society. Although Kwang Kwo Hwang, Yunxiang Yan, and Xianqun Chang have distinguished different types of guanxi related to closeness, how these are related to social capital remains unknown. The study presented here aims to fill this gap in the research.
Data of this research was drawn from two ethnographic studies of school place allocation in two Chinese cities during 2012-2013. The research finds that ritual is vital in guanxi practice, and it has more significant impact in moderate guanxi than close and distant guanxi. When la guanxi, people tend to apply Confucian li to show more Confucian ren in order to gain the same level of ren treatment in return from others. Thus, guanxi capital is mostly gained by ritual investment due to the influence of Confucianism. Based on this finding, the research proposes a new concept, described as “ritual capital”, which refers to a part of an individual’s cultural capital, fostered and maintained through practice of proper ritual
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No full textThe liver X receptors (LXRs) are transcriptional regulators of lipid homeostasis that also have potent anti-inflammatory effects. The molecular basis for their anti-inflammatory effects is incompletely understood, but has been proposed to involve the indirect tethering of LXRs to inflammatory gene promoters. Here we demonstrate that the ability of LXRs to repress inflammatory gene expression in cells and mice derives primarily from their ability to regulate lipid metabolism through transcriptional activation and can occur in the absence of SUMOylation. Moreover, we identify the putative lipid transporter Abca1 as a critical mediator of LXR's anti-inflammatory effects. Activation of LXR inhibits signaling from TLRs 2, 4 and 9 to their downstream NF-κB and MAPK effectors through Abca1-dependent changes in membrane lipid organization that disrupt the recruitment of MyD88 and TRAF6. These data suggest that a common mechanism-direct transcriptional activation-underlies the dual biological functions of LXRs in metabolism and inflammation
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