title: Tournament

text: American sports are also unusual in providing fixtures between competitors who are, for ranking purposes, in different groups. Another, systematic, example of this was the 2006 Women's Rugby World Cup: each of the teams in Group A played each of the teams in Group B, with the groups ranked separately based on the results. (Groups C and D intertwined similarly.) An elaboration of this system is the Mitchell movement in duplicate bridge, discussed below, where north–south pairs play east–west pairs.


title: Tournament

text: In 2-competitor games where ties are rare or impossible, competitors are typically ranked by number of wins, with ties counting half; each competitors' listings are usually ordered Wins–Losses(–Ties). Where ties are more common, this may be 2 points for a win and 1 for a tie, which is mathematically equivalent but avoids having too many half-points in the listings, or 3 points for a win and 1 for a tie, which de-emphasizes ties in favor of playing to a decisive result. These are usually ordered Wins–Ties–Losses. If there are more than two competitors per fixture, points may be ordinal (for example, 3 for first, 2 for second, 1 for third).


title: Tournament

text: Many tournaments are held in multiple stages, with the top teams in one stage progressing to the next. American professional team sports have a "regular season" (group tournament) acting as qualification for the "post season" or "playoffs" (single-elimination tournament). A group stage (also known as pool play or the pool stage) is a round-robin stage in a multi-stage tournament. The competitors are divided into multiple groups, which play separate round-robins in parallel. Measured by a points-based ranking system, the top competitors in each group qualify for the next stage. In most editions of the FIFA World Cup finals tournament, the first round has been a group stage with groups of four teams, the top two qualifying for the "knockout stage" played as a single-elimination tournament. This format is common in many international team events, such as World Cups or Olympic tournaments. Some tournaments have two group stages, for example the 1982 FIFA World Cup or the 1999–2000 UEFA Champions League. As well as a fixed number of qualifiers from each group, some may be determined by comparing between different groups: at the 1986 FIFA World Cup and UEFA Euro 2016, the best four of six third-place sides qualified; at the 1999 Rugby World Cup the best one of five third-place sides did so.


title: Tournament

text: Sometimes, results from an earlier phase are carried over into a later phase. In the Cricket World Cup, the second stage, known as the Super Eight since 2007 and before that the Super Six, features two teams from each of four preliminary groups (previously three teams from two preliminary groups), who do not replay the teams they have already played, but instead reuse the original results in the new league table. Formerly in the Swiss Football League, teams played a double round-robin, at which point they were split into a top "championship" group and a bottom "relegation" group; each played a separate double round-robin, with results of all 32 matches counting for ranking each group. A similar system is also used by the Scottish Premiership and its historic predecessor, the Scottish Premier League, since 2000. After 33 games, when every club has played every other club three times, the division is split into two halves. Clubs play a further five matches, against the teams in their half of the division. This can (and often does) result in the team placed seventh having a higher points total than the team placed sixth (because their final five games are considerably easier), nevertheless, a team in the bottom half never receives a higher final ranking than a team which qualified for the top half.


title: Tournament

text: A multi-stage pool system was implemented by Curling Canada for the Canadian championship curling tournaments (the Scotties Tournament of Hearts for women and the Tim Hortons Brier for men) starting in 2018. The change was intended to allow the expansion of the main stage of the tournament from twelve to sixteen teams while keeping the round robin at eleven games. The teams are seeded using a ranking system in which points are calculated based on the teams' results in all competitive bonspiels using a complicated formula. Seeds 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 12, 13 and 16 and placed in Pool A while seeds 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 14 and 15 are placed in Pool B. After each team has played seven games, the top four teams from each pool advance to the "Championship Pool." Carrying over their entire round robin records with them, Championship Pool teams play one game against each of the four teams in the opposite pool, with the top four teams qualifying for the page playoffs. In contrast, teams that fail to qualify for the Championship Pool play only one additional "Placement Round" game against the team that finished in the same position in the opposite pool for the purposes of determining final tournament ranking. For these teams, there is little else to play for since there is no form of relegation (and, with the expansion of the field to sixteen teams, no "Pre-Qualifying Tournament") and seeding is based solely on the performances of the participating teams and not the past results of the provinces and territories they represent.


title: Tournament

text: The top Slovenian basketball league has a unique system. In its first phase, 12 of the league's 13 clubs compete in a full home-and-away season, with the country's representative in the Euroleague (an elite pan-European club competition) exempt. The league then splits. The top seven teams are joined by the Euroleague representative for a second home-and-away season, with no results carrying over from the first phase. These eight teams compete for four spots in a final playoff. The bottom five teams play their own home-and-away league, but their previous results "do" carry over. These teams are competing to avoid relegation, with the bottom team automatically relegated and the second-from-bottom team forced to play a mini-league with the second- and third-place teams from the second level for a place in the top league.


title: Tournament

text: In many international team events, such as World Cups or Olympic tournaments, different variants of the combination of the group stage (round-robin tournament) and the knockout stage (single-elimination tournament) are used. Such tournaments have significant structural problems that lead, among other things, to the violation of fair play. The following classification of these problems, with examples from football championships, applies in principle to tournaments in all other sports.


title: Tournament

text: 1. In the group stage, it often happens that some teams have already reached the knockout stage after two match days or can no longer qualify for the knockout stage. Consequently, the result of the last group match has no meaning for these teams.


title: Tournament

text: If two such teams meet in the last group match, then it will not have a major tournament impact. It is just a training match with no relevance to the championship. However, such meaningless matches are not always advantageous for the already qualified teams. The game rhythm is lost and the team may have difficulties finding it in the next game.


title: Tournament

text: 2. More problematic are the constellations in which the game has no meaning for only one team. The lack of motivation of this team can influence the result of the match and thus lead to unfair competition.


title: Tournament

text: In other problematic constellations, it is possible that a certain result is enough for both teams to qualify for the final stage regardless of the other group match.


title: Tournament

text: In such "fair play potentially problematic" constellations, the violation of fair play in one way or another is possible and not excluded by the rules of the tournament format. In most cases, even in these constellations, the matches are played according to fair play and there are no repercussions for the other teams in the group. Nevertheless, this possibility exists, which can lead to irritations around the matches. Sometimes, in these cases, the teams concerned even feel compelled to assure that no arrangements are made, as was the case at the 2014 World Cup before the final group match between Germany and the USA.


title: Tournament

text: 3. In another type of constellations, the already qualified teams can still have a supposed aim in the third group match: first place in the group. But the possible first opponent in the knockout stage is known only for the teams whose third match will take place after the matches in the parallel groups. The opponents in the possible further course of the knockout stage are also difficult to estimate. Therefore, in many cases, there is no reason to win the third match at all costs and become the group winner. Such matches function more as a kind of additional draw. The result has no sporting significance for the teams concerned, so these matches are meaningless and may lead to "fair play problematic" constellations.


title: Tournament

text: 4. In some cases, however, there might be a motivation for teams to finish first in their group, especially if a top favorite is waiting for the group runner-up. If, however, the top favorite surprisingly finished second in its group and now faces the group winner, then it will be an advantage to finish second. According to the tournament format, winning in this case paradoxically reduces the chances of advancing. This was particularly illustrated in the scandal at the 2012 Olympic badminton tournament. Several participants in the badminton tournament were disqualified because they had tried to get easier competitors or a better starting position for the final stage by losing. Sometimes neither of the participants was really willing to leave the field as the winner. The championships of all sports are not immune to such constellations.


title: Tournament

text: 5. Another general problem of the group stage could be observed at the 2018 World Cup. If two or more teams are equal based on the results criteria (number of points, goal difference, etc.), their ranking is determined according to other criteria. In Group H, Senegal was eliminated from the knockout stage only because the team conceded two more yellow cards than Japan.


title: Tournament

text: 6. In the knockout stage, the format single-elimination tournament is used. This format is most efficient to determine the winner quickly with the smallest possible number of matches. And it is the most ineffective to determine the actual best team as the winner with the highest possible probability. The poor performance of the single-elimination tournament can be explained by the fact that a team is eliminated from the tournament after a single defeat. Even the best team can occasionally lose, for example in a penalty shoot-out. In addition, the stronger teams can meet in the earlier rounds and eliminate each other from the tournament. Thus, the number of "better" teams is reduced and "weaker" teams get more chances to become tournament winner.


title: Tournament

text: 7. The results in the group stage and in the earlier rounds of the knockout stage are not taken into account in any way. This leads to paradoxical effects and non-transparent final rankings. For example, at the 2020 European Championship, Denmark reached the semifinals with a total of three losses, while Belgium, after winning all of its first four games (including against Denmark), was already eliminated in the quarterfinals after its only loss against eventual champions Italy.


title: Tournament

text: 8. The proportion of matches between the best teams is too small compared to the total number of matches. For example, in the World Cup there are 64 matches in total. 57 matches of them are played in the group stage (including several meaningless and "fair play problematic" ones), in the round of 16 and for the insignificant third place. Only seven matches are reserved for the exciting and high-class encounters between eight last teams fighting for the championship title.


title: Tournament

text: 9. There are no positive prospects for future World Cups. FIFA is planning the 2026 World Cup with 48 teams. In the group phase, 16 groups of 3 teams each are to be formed, followed by the knockout stage with 32 participants. In the groups with three participants, "fair-play problematic" constellations and meaningless matches are also possible. And in the case of the single-elimination tournament with 32 teams, the determination of the world champion is influenced even more by random factors.


title: Tournament

text: Where the number of competitors is larger than a tournament format permits, there may be multiple tournaments held in parallel, with competitors assigned to a particular tournament based on their ranking. In Chess, Scrabble, and many other individual games, many tournaments over one or more years contribute to a player's ranking. However, many team sports involve teams in only one major tournament per year. In European sport, including football, this constitutes the sole ranking for the following season; the top teams from each division of the league are promoted to a higher division, while the bottom teams from a higher division are relegated to a lower one.


title: Tournament

text: This promotion and relegation occurs mainly in league tournaments, but also features in Davis Cup and Fed Cup tennis:


title: Tournament

text: In contract bridge a "tournament" is a tournament in the first sense above, composed of multiple "events", which are tournaments in the second sense. Some events may be single-elimination, double-elimination, or Swiss style. However, "Pair events" are the most widespread. In these events, a number of deals (or "boards") are each played several times by different players. For each such board the score achieved by each north–south (NS) pair is then measured against all the other NS pairs playing the same board. Thus pairs are rewarded for playing the same cards better than others have played them. There is a predetermined schedule of fixtures depending on the number of pairs and boards to be played, to ensure a good mix of opponents, and that no pair plays the same board or the same opponents twice (see duplicate bridge movements).


title: Tournament

text: In poker tournaments, as players are eliminated, the number of tables is gradually reduced, with the remaining players redistributed among the remaining tables. Play continues until one player has won all of the chips in play. Finishing order is determined by the order in which players are eliminated: last player remaining gets first place, last player eliminated gets second, previous player eliminated gets third, etc.


title: Tournament

text: In a "shootout" tournament, players do not change tables until every table has been reduced to one player.


title: Tournament

text: While tournament structures attempt to provide an objective format for determining the best competitor in a game or sport, other methods exist.


title: Tournament

text: Tournaments of value have come to legitimise what are often seen as marginalised practices that sit outside of popular culture. For example, the Grammy Award ceremony helped to shape country music as a viable commercial field, and Booker Prize ceremony helped to create new fields of literary fiction. Tournaments of value go beyond game show and simple contests as the tournament itself emerges as being more significant, bestowing status and prestige on the winner and, in the process, shapes industry practices and acts as institutional mechanisms for shaping social fields.


The 2020 United States presidential election in Nebraska was held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, as part of the 2020 United States presidential election in which all 50 states plus the District of Columbia participated. Nebraska voters chose electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote, pitting the Republican Party's nominee, incumbent President Donald Trump, and running mate Vice President Mike Pence against Democratic Party nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his running mate California Senator Kamala Harris. Nebraska has five electoral votes in the Electoral College, two from the state at large, and one each from the three congressional districts.


title: 2020 United States presidential election in Nebraska

text: Located in the conservative Great Plains, Nebraska is one of the most reliably Republican states in the country, having backed the Democratic presidential nominee only once since 1936, during Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 landslide, and having gone to the Republican nominee by a double-digit margin in every presidential election since. However, Nebraska is one of two states, the other being Maine, to allocate its electoral votes by congressional district. A candidate receives one electoral vote for each district won while the statewide winner receives an additional two electoral votes. Ever since Nebraska first adopted this system in 1992, in practice the Republican nominee has almost always won all three districts, and hence all the state's electoral votes. The first time it split its electoral votes came in 2008 when Barack Obama carried Nebraska's 2nd congressional district, anchored by Omaha, and thus received one electoral vote from the state despite losing statewide. The 2nd district returned to the Republican column in the following two elections, but in 2020 it was considered a key battleground.


text: Trump carried Nebraska statewide by 19 points on Election Day, down from 25 points in 2016. Biden was able to flip the 2nd district, carrying it by 6.6 points, the best Democratic performance since Nebraska first adopted its system of allocation by district, and the first time in this period that the district has voted more Democratic than the nation. Trump received the state's other four electoral votes. Prior to the election, all news organizations declared Nebraska a safe red state, while most organizations viewed the 2nd district as either Lean Biden or a tossup. This was the first election in which both Nebraska and Maine would officially split their electoral votes.


text: Biden won only the two most populous counties in the state: Douglas County, home to Omaha, by 11 points, approximately the same margin Lyndon B. Johnson won the county with in 1964 and the best result for Democrats since that election, and Lancaster County, home to the state's second largest city and state capital Lincoln, where the University of Nebraska is located, by just under 8 points, another 56-year high for Democrats. While he didn't win the state's third largest, Sarpy County, a growing suburban county to the south of Omaha, which in all presidential elections from 1968 to 2016 except 2008 had backed the Republican candidate by at least 21 points, he reduced Trump's winning margin to only 11 points and won 43 percent of the vote there, again a 56-year best for Democrats. Biden also received more than 40 percent of the vote in two counties in the northeastern corner of the state: Thurston County with a Native American majority, and Dakota County with a large Hispanic population.


text: Per exit polls by the Associated Press, Trump's strength in Nebraska came from whites, who comprised 90% of the electorate, and specifically from Protestants with 70%. Post-election, many rural Nebraskans expressed worries about trade and the economy under a Biden presidency, with 59% of voters stating they trusted Trump more to handle international trade.


text: Joe Biden improved on Hillary Clinton's performance in Nebraska, as he did in most other states. Nebraska was one of 43 states where the Democratic nominee received a greater proportion of the two-party vote than in the prior election.


text: Donald Trump was declared the winner in the Republican primary, and thus received all of Nebraska's 36 delegates to the 2020 Republican National Convention.


text: Jo Jorgensen was declared the winner of the Libertarian primary and went on to win the LP nomination.


text: These slates of electors were nominated by each party in order to vote in the Electoral College should their candidate win the state:


text: As expected, Trump easily carried the state at large. However, because Nebraska (along with Maine) allocates its remaining electoral votes by congressional district, Joe Biden was able to win an electoral vote from Nebraska's second district, which covers the increasingly liberal Omaha metro area. Barack Obama also won the same district in 2008 before it went back to the Republican column in 2012 and 2016.


title: The Problem with Apu

text: The Problem with Apu is a 2017 documentary film written by and starring comedian Hari Kondabolu and produced and directed by Michael Melamedoff. It focuses on the character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, an Indian immigrant in the animated sitcom "The Simpsons" who, for a period, was the only figure of Indian heritage to appear regularly on mainstream U.S. television. The film explores encounters with negative stereotypes, minstrelsy, racial microaggressions, and slurs against people of Indian and South Asian heritage.


title: The Problem with Apu

text: Kondabolu grew up watching "The Simpsons" and cites it as a major influence on his comedy and cultural savvy. Initially, he liked the character Apu because the character was the only representation of his family's culture regularly aired on television in the United States. Kondabolu told the BBC, "Apu was the only Indian we had on TV at all so I was happy for any representation as a kid." As he grew older, Kondabolu became more critical of Apu, saying, "he's funny, but that doesn't mean this representation is accurate or right or righteous. It gets to the insidiousness of racism, though, because you don't even notice it when it's right in front of you."


title: The Problem with Apu

text: According to Kondabolu, his mother taught him that "you can criticize something you love because you expect more from it." His first public critique of "The Simpsons" character came at the insistence of W. Kamau Bell during the first season of his FX television show "Totally Biased". In 2012 Kondabolu worked as a writer on the show, and Bell heard him railing against Apu for fomenting racial stereotypes about Indians. Bell then told Kondabolu that if he did not write it into a stand up comedy routine and perform it on the show, Bell would fire him. In his bit, Kondabolu criticizes voice actor Hank Azaria (who is of Sephardic Jewish descent), calling him "a white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father". Kondabolu went on to cite other portrayals of South Asians in mainstream television and film—such as a man eating monkey brains in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" and an actor petting a stuffed mongoose in a metroPCS commercial—as racist. Kondabolu eventually decided to expand the one-minute segment about Apu into an hour-long documentary.


title: The Problem with Apu

text: In a 2015 interview Azaria acknowledged the character's impact as fodder for widespread racially motivated bullying that targets children with South Asian heritage. Kondabolu reached out to Azaria to be interviewed for the film, but Azaria declined for fear that his words would be manipulated by the film's editing process. He agreed to have a discussion facilitated either by Terry Gross on the public radio program "Fresh Air" or on Marc Maron's podcast "WTF", but according to Kondabolu, Azaria rescinded the offer once it was accepted.


title: The Problem with Apu

text: In the film Kondabolu speaks with other South Asian-American entertainers about the impact of Apu on their lives. Actors Aziz Ansari, Kal Penn, Maulik Pancholy, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Samrat Chakrabarti, Sakina Jaffrey, Aasif Mandvi, and Hasan Minhaj relate childhood anecdotes of being called "Apu" by other children or having the character's catchphrases from the show said to them by strangers because of their perceived heritage. They also relate stories of becoming trained professional actors and being asked to deliver lines in the style and accent of Apu.


title: The Problem with Apu

text: Kondabolu compares this instance of Azaria portraying a caricature of an Indian shopkeeper to blackface and interviews African-American actress Whoopi Goldberg, who is a longtime collector of racist ephemera from the 20th and 21st centuries. Goldberg agrees with the interpretation of Apu as a form of brownface. Kondabolu traces the origins of "The Simpsons" character to a legacy of brownface performance by actors such as Peter Sellers in "The Party".


title: The Problem with Apu

text: In parts of the documentary, Kondabolu expresses his appreciation for "The Simpsons" as a subversive and culturally astute institution on the landscape of mainstream North American media. Additionally, he draws out a range of opinions from his peers; for instance, while Kondabolu said that despite Apu he still loved "The Simpsons", Kal Penn said the character ruined the show for him. Kondabolu said, "I made this film to not only talk about the origin of Apu and highlight the impact of such images in media, but also to celebrate the diversity and complexity of my community."


title: The Problem with Apu

text: Filming for "The Problem with Apu" began in April 2016. The film was given special screenings featuring live appearances and talkback with Hari Kondabolu in the fall of 2017, preceding its release on the truTV network on November 19. 250,000 people watched the initial airing on its first-run.


title: The Problem with Apu

text: Kondabolu appeared on "The Daily Show with Trevor Noah" to promote the film. He argued that the Apu character had a serious and insidious effect, and that the use of humor in the portrayal is an artful way of making racism more appealing; this would hypothetically be relieved by the introduction of a range of brown characters.


title: The Problem with Apu

text: The documentary received mostly positive reviews from critics. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gave the film an approval rating of 90% based on reviews from 21 critics, with an average critical score of 8.3/10, Metacritic gave it a score of 77 out of 100, based on four reviews.


title: The Problem with Apu

text: Daniel Fienberg, writing for "The Hollywood Reporter", praised the documentary for providing "its thesis against the character's acceptability ... with such clarity, it's hard to imagine it generating an adversarial response more cogent than that hoary classic 'It's a joke, stop taking it so seriously,' which is no response at all." Fienberg criticized it as being "half a documentary", saying "it becomes disingenuous when Kondabolu declares, 'I realize some of you think I'm some annoying PC social-justice warrior' and then calculatedly skips those voices, and disappointing when Kondabolu and friends wonder what can be done about Apu now and there's nobody around to make it into a real conversation."


title: The Problem with Apu

text: Scott Pierce of "The Salt Lake Tribune" found the documentary "thought-provoking and entertaining", and concluded that "Kondabolu raises some troubling questions. I’ll never be able to watch "The Simpsons" without thinking about this again." Meenasarani Linde Murugan, writing for the "Los Angeles Review of Books", contrasted the documentary's progressive advocacy with the view of media diversity promulgated by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai: "In celebrating how far we have come, we should not only remember how brownface and brown voice persist on contemporary television, but also call out those public South Asian figures who would use this same history of ridicule to leverage a vision of the future wholly run by corporations that would further racial and economic inequity."


title: The Problem with Apu

text: Justin Charity, writing for "The Ringer", agreed with the film's argument, but found the pursuit of Azaria to appear in the film "a prevailing distraction from more ambitious consideration of the ideal future of "The Simpsons" and the cultural shifts that have rendered Apu increasingly unpalatable." He also found the documentary lacked imagination in finding a solution to creating a more nuanced portrayal of Apu: "that lapse of Kondabolu's imagination is the documentary's real waste." Neal Justin of "Minneapolis Star Tribune" noted "any criticism directed at the show's portrayal of the convenience-store owner in his documentary ... is drowned out by frustration that he can't land an interview with the character's voice actor."


title: The Problem with Apu

text: In October 2018, in the "South Park" episode "The Problem with a Poo", Mr. Hankey is expelled and sent to a land where "people don't care about bigotry and hate" – Springfield – where he is welcomed by Apu. The episode ended with a title card, "#cancelthesimpsons", similar to the promo for "South Park" which called for the cancellation of itself, leading many to assume that the episode was "South Park" siding with the documentary. On the DVD commentary, "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone stated that the people on The Simpsons are their friends, and that the episode was not a jab at "The Simpsons" but at the documentary and the critique of Apu, and that they found it amusing how many misinterpreted the joke as an attack on "The Simpsons". In addition, a writer for "The Simpsons", Al Jean, tweeted about the episode: "It's actually in favor of us saying people are too critical."


title: The Problem with Apu

text: "The Simpsons" episode "No Good Read Goes Unpunished", first aired on April 8, 2018, was widely received as a response to Kondabolu's film. In it, Marge finds that a book she loved as a child contains elements that would now be considered offensive, and edits the book herself to remove these elements. In doing this she finds the book loses its "emotional journey". She and Lisa then look to a picture of Apu, and Lisa comments that "something that started decades ago and was applauded and inoffensive, is now politically incorrect. What can you do?" Kondabolu wrote on Twitter that he was disappointed that the message of his film had been reduced to the concept of "politically incorrect". In an interview with "USA Today", creator Matt Groening dismissed the criticism of the Apu character, saying "I think it's a time in our culture where people love to pretend they're offended". "Simpsons" writer and producer Mike Reiss wrote in his 2018 memoir "Springfield Confidential" that he believed that Kondabolu had made a "nasty little documentary" and that taunting Indian children about Apu was not racist but "kids [being] dicks".


title: The Problem with Apu

text: During an appearance that same month on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert", Azaria said that he would be "perfectly willing to step aside" from the role of voicing Apu, saying that he was increasingly worried about the character causing harm by reinforcing stereotypes and that "the most important thing is to listen to Indian people and their experience with it ... I really want to see Indian, South Asian writers in the writers' room, genuinely informing whichever direction this character takes." Kondabolu had a positive reaction to Azaria's comments.


title: The Problem with Apu

text: Azaria announced in January 2020 that he "won't be doing the voice anymore, unless there's some way to transition it or something." In June 2020, in response to the George Floyd protests, the show's producers announced in a statement that "The Simpsons" will no longer have non-white characters voiced by white actors.


title: The Problem with Apu

text: In the April 12, 2021, episode of Dax Shepard's podcast "Armchair Expert", Azaria apologized for "racism, my participation in racism, or at least in a racist practice or in structural racism, as it relates to show business or ... all the above." One reaction to Azaria's apology came from actress and writer Mellini Kantayya, who in a "Washington Post" opinion piece wrote about Azaria's concession:


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: St. Cloud is a city in the U.S. state of Minnesota and the largest population center in the state's central region. The population was 68,881 at the 2020 census, making it Minnesota's 12th-largest city. St. Cloud is the county seat of Stearns County and was named after the city of Saint-Cloud, France (in Île-de-France, near Paris), which was named after the 6th-century French monk Clodoald.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: Though mostly in Stearns County, St. Cloud also extends into Benton and Sherburne counties, and straddles the Mississippi River. It is the center of a contiguous urban area, with Waite Park, Sauk Rapids, Sartell, St. Joseph, Rockville, and St. Augusta directly bordering the city, and Foley, Rice, Kimball, Clearwater, Clear Lake, and Cold Spring nearby. The St. Cloud metropolitan area had a population of 199,671 at the 2020 census. It has been listed as the fifth-largest metro with a presence in Minnesota, behind Minneapolis–St. Paul, Duluth–Superior, Fargo-Moorhead, and Rochester. But the entire St. Cloud area is entirely in Minnesota, while most of Fargo-Moorhead's population is in North Dakota and Superior, Wisconsin, contributes significant population to the Duluth area.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: St. Cloud is northwest of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis–St. Paul along Interstate 94, U.S. Highway 52 (conjoined with I-94), U.S. Highway 10, Minnesota State Highway 15, and Minnesota State Highway 23. The St. Cloud Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) is made up of Stearns and Benton Counties. The city was included in a newly defined Minneapolis–St. Paul–St. Cloud Combined Statistical Area (CSA) in 2000. St. Cloud as a whole has never been part of the 13-county MSA comprising Minneapolis, St. Paul, Bloomington and parts of western Wisconsin.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: St. Cloud State University, Minnesota's third-largest public university, is located between the downtown area and the Beaver Islands, which form a maze for a two-mile stretch of the Mississippi. The approximately 30 undeveloped islands are a popular destination for kayak and canoe enthusiasts and are part of a state-designated 12-mile stretch of wild and scenic river.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: St. Cloud owns and operates a hydroelectric dam on the Mississippi, the state's largest city-owned hydro facility, that can produce almost nine megawatts of electricity, about 10% of the total electricity generated by 11 Mississippi hydro dams in Minnesota.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: What is now the St. Cloud area was occupied by various indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Europeans encountered the Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Winnebago when they started to trade with Native American peoples.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: Minnesota was organized as a territory in 1849. The St. Cloud area was opened up to settlers in 1851 after treaty negotiations with the Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) tribe in 1851 and 1852. John Wilson, a Maine native with French Huguenot ancestry and an interest in Napoleon, named the settlement St. Cloud after Saint-Cloud, the Paris suburb where Napoleon had his favorite palace.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: St. Cloud was a waystation on the Middle and Woods branches of the Red River Trails used by Métis traders between the Canada–US border at Pembina, North Dakota and St. Paul. The cart trains often consisted of hundreds of oxcarts. The Métis, bringing furs to trade for supplies to take back to their rural settlements, would camp west of the city and cross the Mississippi in St. Cloud or just to the north in Sauk Rapids


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: The City of St. Cloud was incorporated in 1856. It developed from three distinct settlements, known as Upper Town, Middle Town, and Lower Town, that were established by European-American settlers starting in 1853. Remnants of the deep ravines that separated the three are still visible today. Middle Town was settled primarily by Catholic German immigrants and migrants from eastern states, who were recruited to the region by Father Francis Xavier Pierz, a Catholic priest who also ministered as a missionary to Native Americans.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: Lower Town was founded by settlers from the Northern Tier of New England and the mid-Atlantic states, including former residents of upstate New York. Lower Town's Protestant settlers opposed slavery.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: Upper Town, or Arcadia, was plotted by General Sylvanus Lowry, a slaveholder and trader from Kentucky who brought slaves with him, although Minnesota was organized as a free territory. He served on the territorial Council from 1852 to 1853 and was elected president of the newly formed town council in 1856, serving for one year (the office of mayor did not yet exist).


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: Jane Grey Swisshelm, an abolitionist newspaper editor who had migrated from Pittsburgh, repeatedly attacked Lowry in print. At one point Lowry organized a "Committee of Vigilance" that broke into Swisshelm's newspaper office and removed her press, throwing it into the Mississippi River. Lowry started a rival paper, "The Union".


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: The US Supreme Court's 1857 decision in "Dred Scott" ruled that slaves could not file freedom suits and found the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, so the territory's prohibition against slavery became unenforceable. Nearly all Southerners left the St. Cloud area when the Civil War broke out, taking their slaves with them. Lowry died in the city in 1865.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: Beginning in 1864, Stephen Miller served a two-year term as Minnesota governor, the only citizen of St. Cloud ever to hold the office. Miller was a "Pennsylvania German businessman", lawyer, writer, active abolitionist, and personal friend of Alexander Ramsey. He was on the state's Republican electoral ticket with Abraham Lincoln in 1860.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: Steamboats regularly docked at St. Cloud as part of the fur trade and other commerce, although river levels were not reliable. This ended with the construction of the Coon Rapids Dam in 1912–14. Granite quarries have operated in the area since the 1880s, giving St. Cloud its nickname, "The Granite City."


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: In 1917, Samuel Pandolfo started the Pan Motor Company in St. Cloud. Pandolfo claimed his Pan-Cars would make St. Cloud the new Detroit but the company failed at a time when resources were directed toward the World War I effort. He was later convicted and imprisoned for attempting to defraud investors.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: The city is bisected by the Mississippi River, and part of the Sauk River runs along its northern edge.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: Just south of downtown is the 7-acre, 35-feet-deep Lake George. In 2021, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) credited decade long-city investments in stormwater filtration with reducing Lake George's phosphorus levels well below the state standard. It called Lake George one of three "success stories" in the state, and planned to remove it from a list of impaired waters.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: Granite bedrock quarried in the area has been estimated to be 1.7 billion years old and was exposed after several miles of rock above it eroded. The city lies on a band of modern Mississippi river sediment surrounded by land scoured several times by Wisconsin Age glaciers beginning about 35,000 years ago, ending with the Lake Superior St. Croix lobe. The later Des Moines lobe created glacial moraines and drift south and east of the city.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: St. Cloud lies in the warm summer humid continental climate zone (Köppen climate classification: "Dfb"), with warm summers and cold winters with moderate to heavy snowfall. The monthly normal daily mean temperature ranges from in January to in July. The record high temperature is 107 °F (42 °C). The record low temperature is -43 °F (-42 °C).


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: As of the census of 2020, there were 68,881 people and 26,374 households residing in the city. The population density was . The racial makeup of the city was 77.1% White, 14.6% African American, 0.6% Native American, 3.4% Asian, and 3.4% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 3.2% of the population.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: St. Cloud is the principal city of the St. Cloud Metropolitan Statistical Area, a metropolitan area that covers Sherburne, Benton and Stearns counties and had a combined population of 199,671 at the 2020 census, an increase of 5.59% since 2010.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: As of the census of 2010, there were 65,842 people, 25,439 households, and 13,348 families residing in the city. The population density was . There were 27,338 housing units at an average density of . The racial makeup of the city was 84.6% White, 7.8% African American, 0.7% Native American, 3.7% Asian, 0.8% from other races, and 2.5% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 2.4% of the population.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: There were 25,439 households, of which 25.0% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 37.6% were married couples living together, 10.4% had a female householder with no husband present, 4.5% had a male householder with no wife present, and 47.5% were non-families. 30.8% of all households were made up of individuals, and 7.8% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.37 and the average family size was 2.95.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: The median age in the city was 28.8 years. 18.9% of residents were under the age of 18; 23.9% were between the ages of 18 and 24; 25.5% were from 25 to 44; 21.5% were from 45 to 64; and 10.3% were 65 years of age or older. The gender makeup of the city was 51.5% male and 48.5% female.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: As of the census of 2000, 27.3% of St. Cloud households had children under the age of 18 living with them, 41.4% were married couples living together, 9.4% had a female householder with no husband present, and 45.9% were non-families. 30.2% of all households were made up of individuals, and 8.0% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.40 and the average family size was 3.00.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: The racial makeup of the city was 91.7% White, 2.4% African American, 0.7% Native American, 3.1% Asian, 0.7% other races, and 1.4% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 1.3% of the population.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of May 2020 the annual mean wage for 99,600 employees across all occupations in St. Cloud was $50,800. The median hourly wage was $24.42.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: In 2019 the city of Saint Cloud, Minnesota was awarded three first places awards from the Rome based International Awards for Liveable Communities (LivCom), one of several "most livable cities" awards. The city won the first-place whole city award for its size and first-place for cities of all sizes for Enhancement of landscapes and public spaces, Arts, culture and heritage management and Community participation and empowerment. The international organization praised the city for its focus on improving parkland and trails, as well as its enhancements and maintenace of 96 parks. The city has been a finalist at the LivCom awards four times since 2007.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: The St. Cloud Area Convention and Visitors Bureau promotes an area events calendar, dining and lodging information. The city-owned St. Cloud River's Edge Convention Center hosts a variety of events including regional conferences, consumer/trade shows, small group meetings and social events.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: The city maintains 95 parks, totaling more than and ranging in size from "neighborhood and mini parks" to . The largest developed park, Whitney Memorial Park, is the former location of the city airport. It features a recreation center for senior citizens, a dog park, and numerous softball, baseball, and soccer fields.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: St. Cloud has been moved by Congressional redistricting to a wide variety of Minnesota regions, including northern, south central, northwest and southwest. In Congressional district maps in effect since 2003, it has been grouped with rural areas and suburbs north and west of the Twin Cities. The district had only minor changes in a 2022 map drawn by a five-judge panel based on the 2020 census. St. Cloud is the largest city in Minnesota's 6th congressional district, represented by Republican Tom Emmer.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: The city makes up the majority of population of Minnesota State Senate District 14, which straddles the Mississippi River and includes parts of three counties, represented by Aric Putnam. Minnesota House District 14A includes generally western parts of the city as well as Waite Park, St. Augusta and adjacent rural areas, represented by Dan Wolgamott. District 14B includes east central and northeast St. Cloud, neighboring Sauk Rapids and parts of rural Benton and Sherburne Counties, represented by Tama Theis.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: In 2016, St. Cloud converted from 5% to 80% renewable energy by using solar gardens, street light improvements, bio-gas, and other energy efficiency initiatives. St. Cloud's wastewater plant converts sugar-laden liquids from local food and beer manufacturers into fuel and fertilizer. Since 2020, the city has produced more energy than it consumes.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris won St. Cloud's votes in the 2020 presidential election by a margin of 9%, higher than the state margin of 7.12%. In 2016, former President Donald Trump won St. Cloud by 1.75% over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: Almost all of St. Cloud, including the portions in Stearns and Sherburne Counties, and much the portion in Benton County, is in the St. Cloud Public School District. A portion of Benton County St. Cloud is in the Sauk Rapids-Rice Public Schools district.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: The St. Cloud Area School District serves St. Cloud, St. Augusta, Clearwater, Waite Park, St. Joseph, Haven Township, and parts of Sauk Rapids. It has eight elementary schools, a new K-8 school in St. Joseph, and two major public high schools, St. Cloud Technical High School and St. Cloud Apollo High School. St. Cloud also has a major private high school, Cathedral High School. Both public high schools offer a broad selection of Advanced Placement courses and rank high in the state in the number of AP tests taken and of test takers. St. Cloud Tech opened in 1917 across from a city park and Lake George. In 2019, it moved to a new 69-acre, $104 million facility on the southwest edge of the city. The historic 1917 building has been acquired for use by city government. Apollo opened in 1970 and serves the expanding north side of the city. Other high schools and secondary schools that serve St. Cloud include St. Robert Bellarmine's Academy, St. Cloud Christian School, Immaculate Conception Academy, St. John's Preparatory School, St. Cloud Alternative Learning Center, and the charter school STRIDE Academy, which is K-8. The nearby cities of Sauk Rapids and Sartell also have their own school districts and high schools, bringing the number of public high schools in the metropolitan area to four.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: St. Cloud is home to several higher education institutions, including Minnesota's third-largest university, St. Cloud State University. St. Cloud State's fall 2020 enrollment was 12,607, in a year affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: St. Cloud's other post-secondary institutions and campuses include St. Cloud Technical and Community College (SCTCC) and Rasmussen College. Neighboring Sartell is home to a campus of the Duluth-based College of St. Scholastica, and the College of St. Benedict and St. John's University are in neighboring St. Joseph and nearby Collegeville, respectively.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: St. Cloud is part of the Twin Cities television market. One full-power station, the Ion-owned KPXM-TV (channel 41), is licensed to the city, but moved its transmitter to the Twin Cities in 2009 as part of the digital transition, and maintains no presence in the city. WCMN-LD (channel 13) is a low-power station licensed to St. Cloud that broadcasts in ATSC 3.0. Additionally, St. Cloud State University students operate cable-only UTVS (channel 180), which includes local news and broadcasts from a studio on campus.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: St. Cloud is a regional transportation hub within Minnesota. Major roadways including Interstate Highway 94, U.S. Highway 10, and Minnesota State Highways 15 and 23 pass through the city.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: Bus service within the city and to neighboring Sartell, Sauk Rapids, and Waite Park is offered through St. Cloud Metro Bus, which was recognized in 2007 as the best transit system of its size in North America. An innovative system gives transit buses a slight advantage at stoplights in order to improve efficiency and on-time performance. The Metro Bus Transit Center in the downtown area is also shared with Jefferson Lines, providing national bus service.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: Bus service links downtown St. Cloud and St. Cloud State University with the western terminus of the Northstar Commuter Rail line in Big Lake, by the way of Northstar Link Commuter Bus, which in turn links to the Metro Transit bus and light rail system at Target Field Station in downtown Minneapolis.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: Several rail lines run through the city, which is a stop on Amtrak's "Empire Builder" passenger rail line.


title: St. Cloud, Minnesota

text: St. Cloud is home to St. Cloud Regional Airport, from which daily connecting flights to Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport were made on Delta Connection, operated by Mesaba Airlines, until January 1, 2010, when the service was discontinued. On December 15, 2012, Allegiant Air began nonstop flights between St. Cloud Regional Airport and Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, on McDonnell Douglas MD-80 aircraft.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: The Angevins (; "from Anjou") were a royal house of French origin that ruled England in the 12th and early 13th centuries; its monarchs were Henry II, Richard I and John. In the 10 years from 1144, two successive counts of Anjou in France, Geoffrey and his son, the future Henry II, won control of a vast assemblage of lands in western Europe that would last for 80 years and would retrospectively be referred to as the Angevin Empire. As a political entity this was structurally different from the preceding Norman and subsequent Plantagenet realms. Geoffrey became Duke of Normandy in 1144 and died in 1151. In 1152, his heir, Henry, added Aquitaine by virtue of his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine. Henry also inherited the claim of his mother, Empress Matilda, the daughter of King Henry I, to the English throne, to which he succeeded in 1154 following the death of King Stephen.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: Henry was succeeded by his third son, Richard, whose reputation for martial prowess won him the epithet "" or "Lionheart". He was born and raised in England but spent very little time there during his adult life, perhaps as little as six months. Despite this Richard remains an enduring iconic figure both in England and in France, and is one of very few kings of England remembered by his nickname as opposed to regnal number.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: When Richard died, his brother John – Henry's fifth and last surviving son – took the throne. In 1204, John lost many of the Angevins' continental territories, including Anjou, to the French crown. He and his successors were still recognized as dukes of Aquitaine. The loss of Anjou, for which the dynasty is named, is the rationale behind John's son, Henry III of England, being considered the first Plantagenet a name derived from the nickname of his great-grandfather, Geoffrey. Where no distinction is made between the Angevinsand Angevin eraand subsequent English kings, Henry II is the first Plantagenet king. From John, the dynasty continued successfully and unbroken in the senior male line until the reign of Richard II before dividing into two competing cadet branches, the House of Lancaster and the House of York. In the 17th century, historians would use the term "Plantagenet" when describing the house.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: The adjective Angevin is especially used in English history to refer to the kings who were also counts of Anjoubeginning with Henry IIdescended from Geoffrey and Matilda; their characteristics, descendants and the period of history which they covered from the mid-twelfth to early-thirteenth centuries. In addition, it is also used pertaining to Anjou, or any sovereign, government derived from this. As a noun, it is used for any native of Anjou or Angevin ruler. As such, Angevin is also used for other counts and dukes of Anjou; including the three kings' ancestors, their cousins who held the crown of Jerusalem and unrelated later members of the French royal family who were granted the titles to form different dynasties amongst which were the Capetian House of Anjou and the Valois House of Anjou.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: The term "Angevin Empire" was coined in 1887 by Kate Norgate. As far as it is known, there was no contemporary name for this assemblage of territories, which were referred toif at allby clumsy circumlocutions such as "our kingdom and everything subject to our rule whatever it may be" or "the whole of the kingdom which had belonged to his father". Whereas the Angevin part of this term has proved uncontentious, the empire portion has proved controversial. In 1986, a convention of historical specialists concluded that there had been no Angevin state and no empire but the term "espace Plantagenet" was acceptable.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: Richard of York, 3rd Duke of York, adopted Plantagenet as his family name in the 15th century. "Plantegenest" (or "Plante Genest") had been a 12th-century nickname for his ancestor Geoffrey, Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy. One of many popular theories suggests the blossom of common broom, a bright yellow ("gold") flowering plant, genista in medieval Latin, as the source of the nickname.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: It is uncertain why Richard chose this specific name, although, during the Wars of the Roses, it emphasised Richard's status as Geoffrey's patrilineal descendant. The retrospective usage of the name for all of Geoffrey's male-line descendants was popular during the subsequent Tudor dynasty, perhaps encouraged by the further legitimacy it gave to Richard's great-grandson, Henry VIII. In the late 17th century, this name passed into common usage among historians.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: The Angevins descend from Geoffrey II, Count of Gâtinais and Ermengarde of Anjou. In 1060 this couple inherited, via cognatic kinship, the county of Anjou from an older line dating from 870 and a noble called Ingelger. The marriage of Count Geoffrey to Matilda, the only surviving legitimate child of Henry I of England, was part of a struggle for power during the tenth and eleventh centuries among the lords of Normandy, Brittany, Poitou, Blois, Maine and the kings of France. It was from this marriage that Geoffrey's son, Henry, inherited the claims to England, Normandy and Anjou that marks the beginning of the Angevin and Plantagenet dynasties. This was the third attempt by Geoffrey's father Fulk V to build a political alliance with Normandy. The first was by marrying his daughter Matilda to Henry's heir William Adelin, who drowned in the wreck of the "White Ship". Fulk then married his daughter Sibylla to William Clito, heir to Henry's older brother Robert Curthose, but Henry had the marriage annulled to avoid strengthening William's rival claim to his lands.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: As society became more prosperous and stable in the 11th century, inheritance customs developed that allowed daughters (in the absence of sons) to succeed to principalities as well as landed estates. The twelfth-century chronicler Ralph de Diceto noted that the counts of Anjou extended their dominion over their neighbours by marriage rather than conquest. The marriage of Geoffrey to the daughter of a king (and widow of an emperor) occurred in this context. It is unknown whether King Henry intended to make Geoffrey his heir, but it is known that the threat presented by William Clito's rival claim to the duchy of Normandy made his negotiating position very weak. Even so, it is probable that, should the marriage be childless, King Henry would have attempted to be succeeded by one of his Norman kinsmen such as Theobald II, Count of Champagne, or Stephen of Blois, who in the event did seize King Henry's English crown. King Henry's great relief in 1133 at the birth of a son to the couple, described as "the heir to the Kingdom", is understandable in the light of this situation. Following this, the birth of a second son raised the question of whether custom would be followed with the maternal inheritance passing to first born and the paternal inheritance going to his brother, Geoffrey.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: According to William of Newburgh, writing in the 1190s, the plan failed because of Geoffrey's early death in 1151. The dying Geoffrey decided that Henry would have the paternal and maternal inheritances while he needed the resources to overcome Stephen, and left instructions that his body would not be buried until Henry swore an oath that, once England and Normandy were secured, the younger Geoffrey would have Anjou. Henry's brother Geoffrey died in 1158, too soon to receive Anjou, but not before being installed count in Nantes after Henry aided a rebellion by its citizens against their previous lord.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: The unity of Henry's assemblage of domains was largely dependent on the ruling family, influencing the opinion of most historians that this instability made it unlikely to endure. The French custom of partible inheritance at the time would lead to political fragmentation. Indeed, if Henry II's sons Henry the Young King and Geoffrey of Brittany had not died young, the inheritance of 1189 would have been fundamentally altered. Henry and Richard both planned for partition on their deaths while attempting to provide overriding sovereignty to hold the lands together. For example, in 1173 and 1183, Henry tried to force Richard to acknowledge allegiance to his older brother for the duchy of Aquitaine, and later Richard would confiscate Ireland from John. This was complicated by the Angevins being subjects of the kings of France, who felt these feudal rights of homage and the right of allegiance more legally belonged to them. This was particularly true when the wardship of Geoffrey's son Arthur and lordship of Brittany was contended between 1202 and 1204. Upon the Young King's death in 1183, Richard became heir in chief, but refused to give up Aquitaine to give John an inheritance. More by accident than design this meant that, while Richard inherited the patrimony, John would become lord of Ireland and Arthur would be duke of Brittany. By the mid-thirteenth century, there was a clear unified patrimony and Plantagenet empire but this cannot be called an "Angevin Empire" as by this date Anjou and most of the continental lands had been lost.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: Henry I of England named his daughter Matilda heir; but when he died in 1135 Matilda was far from England in Anjou or Maine, while her cousin Stephen was closer in Boulogne, giving him the advantage he needed to race to England and have himself crowned and anointed king of England. Matilda's husband Geoffrey, though he had little interest in England, commenced a long struggle for the duchy of Normandy. To create a second front, Matilda landed in England during 1139 to challenge Stephen, instigating the civil war known as the Anarchy. In 1141, she captured Stephen at the battle of Lincoln, prompting the collapse of his support. While Geoffrey pushed on with the conquest of Normandy over the next four years, Matilda threw away her position through arrogance and inability to be magnanimous in victory. She was even forced to release Stephen in a hostage exchange for her half-brother Robert, 1st Earl of Gloucester, allowing Stephen to resume control of much of England. Geoffrey never visited England to offer practical assistance, but instead sent Henry as a male figureheadbeginning in 1142 when Henry was only 9with a view that if England was conquered it would be Henry that would become king. In 1150, Geoffrey also transferred the title of Duke of Normandy to Henry but retained the dominant role in governance. Three fortuitous events allowed Henry to finally bring the conflict to a successful conclusion:


title: Angevin kings of England

text: Henry faced many challenges to secure possession of his father's and grandfathers’ lands that required the reassertion and extension of old suzerainties. In 1162 Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, died, and Henry saw an opportunity to re-establish what he saw as his rights over the church in England by appointing his friend Thomas Becket to succeed him. Instead, Becket proved to be an inept politician whose defiance alienated the king and his counsellors. Henry and Becket clashed repeatedly: over church tenures, Henry's brother's marriage and taxation. Henry reacted by getting Becket, and other members of the English episcopate, to recognise sixteen ancient customsgoverning relations between the king, his courts, and the churchin writing for the first time in the Constitutions of Clarendon. When Becket tried to leave the country without permission, Henry attempted to ruin him by laying a number of suits relating to Becket's time as chancellor. In response Becket fled into exile for five years. Relations later improved, allowing Becket's return, but soured again when Becket saw the coronation of Henry's son as coregent by the Archbishop of York as a challenge to his authority and excommunicated those who had offended him. When he heard the news, Henry said: "What miserable drones and traitors have I nurtured and promoted in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born clerk." Three of Henry's men killed Becket in Canterbury Cathedral after Becket resisted a botched attempt to arrest him. Within Christian Europe Henry was widely considered complicit in Becket's death. The opinion of this transgression against the church made Henry a pariah, so in penance he walked barefoot into Canterbury Cathedral where he was scourged by monks.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: In 1171, Henry invaded Ireland to assert his overlordship following alarm at the success of knights that he had allowed to recruit soldiers in England and Wales, who had assumed the role of colonisers and accrued autonomous power, including Strongbow. Pope Adrian IV had given Henry a papal blessing to expand his power into Ireland to reform the Irish church. Originally, this would have allowed some territory to be granted to Henry's brother, William, but other matters had distracted Henry and William was now dead. Instead, Henry's designs were made plain when he gave the lordship of Ireland to his youngest son, John.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: In 1172, Henry II tried to give his landless youngest son John a wedding gift of the three castles of Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau. This angered the 18-year-old Young King, who had yet to receive any lands from his father, and prompted a rebellion by Henry II's wife and three eldest sons. Louis VII supported the rebellion to destabilise Henry II. William the Lion and other subjects of Henry II also joined the revolt and it took 18 months for Henry to force the rebels to submit to his authority. In Le Mans in 1182, Henry II gathered his children to plan a partible inheritance in which his eldest son (also called Henry) would inherit England, Normandy and Anjou; Richard the Duchy of Aquitaine; Geoffrey Brittany, and John Ireland. This degenerated into further conflict. The younger Henry rebelled again before he died of dysentery and, in 1186, Geoffrey died after a tournament accident. In 1189, Richard and Philip II of France took advantage of Henry's failing health and forced him to accept humiliating peace terms, including naming Richard as his sole heir. Two days later, the old king died, defeated and miserable in the knowledge that even his favoured son John had rebelled. This fate was seen as the price he paid for the murder of Beckett.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: On the day of Richard's English coronation, there was a mass slaughter of Jews, described by Richard of Devizes as a "holocaust". After his coronation, Richard put the Angevin Empire's affairs in order before joining the Third Crusade to the Middle East in early 1190. Opinions of Richard by his contemporaries varied. He had rejected and humiliated the king of France's sister; deposed the king of Cyprus and sold the island; insulted and refused to give spoils from the Third Crusade to Leopold V, Duke of Austria, and allegedly arranged the assassination of Conrad of Montferrat. His cruelty was exemplified by the massacre of 2,600 prisoners in Acre. However, Richard was respected for his military leadership and courtly manners. Despite victories in the Third Crusade he failed to capture Jerusalem, retreating from the Holy Land with a small band of followers.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: Richard was captured by Leopold on his return journey. He was transferred to Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, and a 25-percent tax on goods and income was required to pay his 150,000-mark ransom. Philip II of France had overrun Normandy, while John of England controlled much of Richard's remaining lands. However, when Richard returned to England he forgave John and re-established his control. Leaving England permanently in 1194, Richard fought Philip for five years for the return of holdings seized during his incarceration. On the brink of victory, he was wounded by an arrow during the siege of Château de Châlus-Chabrol and died ten days later.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: His failure to produce an heir caused a succession crisis. Anjou, Brittany, Maine and Touraine chose Richard's nephew Arthur as heir, while John succeeded in England and Normandy. Philip II of France again destabilised the Plantagenet territories on the European mainland, supporting his vassal Arthur's claim to the English crown. Eleanor supported her son John, who was victorious at the Battle of Mirebeau and captured the rebel leadership.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: Arthur was murdered (allegedly by John), and his sister Eleanor would spend the rest of her life in captivity. John's behaviour drove a number of French barons to side with Philip, and the resulting rebellions by Norman and Angevin barons ended John's control of his continental possessions—the "de facto" end of the Angevin Empire, although Henry III would maintain his claim until 1259.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: After re-establishing his authority in England, John planned to retake Normandy and Anjou by drawing the French from Paris while another army (under Otto IV, Holy Roman Emperor) attacked from the north. However, his allies were defeated at the Battle of Bouvines in one of the most decisive battles in French history. John's nephew Otto retreated and was soon overthrown, with John agreeing to a five-year truce. Philip's victory was crucial to the political order in England and France, and the battle was instrumental in establishing absolute monarchy in France.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: John's French defeats weakened his position in England. The rebellion of his English vassals resulted in "Magna Carta", which limited royal power and established common law. This would form the basis of every constitutional battle of the 13th and 14th centuries. The barons and the crown failed to abide by "Magna Carta", leading to the First Barons' War when rebel barons provoked an invasion by Prince Louis. Many historians use John's death and William Marshall's appointment as protector of nine-year-old Henry III to mark the end of the Angevin period and the beginning of the Plantagenet dynasty. Marshall won the war with victories at Lincoln and Dover in 1217, leading to the Treaty of Lambeth in which Louis renounced his claims. In victory, the Marshal Protectorate reissued "Magna Carta" as the basis of future government.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: Historians use the period of Prince Louis's invasion to mark the end of the Angevin period and the beginning of the Plantagenet dynasty. The outcome of the military situation was uncertain at John's death; William Marshall saved the dynasty, forcing Louis to renounce his claim with a military victory. However, Philip had captured all the Angevin possessions in France except Gascony. This collapse had several causes, including long-term changes in economic power, growing cultural differences between England and Normandy and (in particular) the fragile, familial nature of Henry's empire. Henry III continued his attempts to reclaim Normandy and Anjou until 1259, but John's continental losses and the consequent growth of Capetian power during the 13th century marked a "turning point in European history".


title: Angevin kings of England

text: Richard of York adopted "Plantagenet" as a family name for himself and his descendants during the 15th century. "Plantegenest" (or "Plante Genest") was Geoffrey's nickname, and his emblem may have been the common broom ("planta genista" in medieval Latin). It is uncertain why Richard chose the name, but it emphasised Richard's hierarchal status as Geoffrey's (and six English kings') patrilineal descendant during the Wars of the Roses. The retrospective use of the name for Geoffrey's male descendants was popular during the Tudor period, perhaps encouraged by the added legitimacy it gave Richard's great-grandson Henry VIII of England.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: Through John, descent from the Angevins (legitimate and illegitimate) is widespread, and includes all subsequent monarchs of England and the United Kingdom. He had five legitimate children with Isabella:


title: Angevin kings of England

text: John also had illegitimate children with a number of mistresses, including nine sons—Richard, Oliver, John, Geoffrey, Henry, Osbert Gifford, Eudes, Bartholomew and (probably) Philip—and three daughters—Joan, Maud and (probably) Isabel. Of these, Joan was the best known, since she married Prince Llywelyn the Great of Wales.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: The chronicler Gerald of Wales borrowed elements of the Melusine legend to give the Angevins a demonic origin, and the kings were said to tell jokes about the stories.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: Henry was an unpopular king, and few grieved his death; William of Newburgh wrote during the 1190s, "In his own time he was hated by almost everyone". He was widely criticised by contemporaries, even in his own court. Henry's son Richard's contemporary image was more nuanced, since he was the first king who was also a knight. Known as a valiant, competent and generous military leader, he was criticised by chroniclers for taxing the clergy for the Crusade and his ransom; clergy were usually exempt from taxes.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: Chroniclers Richard of Devizes, William of Newburgh, Roger of Hoveden and Ralph de Diceto were generally unsympathetic to John's behaviour under Richard, but more tolerant of the earliest years of John's reign. Accounts of the middle and later years of his reign are limited to Gervase of Canterbury and Ralph of Coggeshall, neither of whom were satisfied with John's performance as king. His later negative reputation was established by two chroniclers writing after the king's death: Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris. The latter claimed that John attempted to convert to Islam, but this is not believed by modern historians.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: Many of the changes Henry introduced during his rule had long-term consequences. His legal innovations form part of the basis for English law, with the Exchequer of Pleas a forerunner of the Common Bench at Westminster. Henry's itinerant justices also influenced his contemporaries' legal reforms: Philip Augustus's creation of itinerant "bailli", for example, drew on Henry's model. Henry's intervention in Brittany, Wales and Scotland had a significant long-term impact on the development of their societies and governments. John's reign, despite its flaws, and his signing of "Magna Carta", were seen by Whig historians as positive steps in the constitutional development of England and part of a progressive and universalist course of political and economic development in medieval England. Winston Churchill said, "[W]hen the long tally is added, it will be seen that the British nation and the English-speaking world owe far more to the vices of John than to the labours of virtuous sovereigns". "Magna Carta" was reissued by the Marshal Protectorate and later as a foundation of future government.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: There was no distinct Angevin or Plantagenet culture that would distinguish or set them apart from their neighbours in this period. Robert of Torigni recorded that Henry built or renovated castles throughout his domain in Normandy, England, Aquitaine, Anjou, Maine and Tourraine. However, this patronage had no distinctive style except in the use of circular or octagonal kitchens of the Fontevraud type. Similarly, amongst the multiple vernacularsFrench, English and Occitanthere was not a unifying literature. French was the lingua franca of the secular elite and Latin or the church.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: The Angevins were closely associated with the Fontevraud Abbey in Anjou. Henry's aunt was Abbess, Eleanor retired there to be a nun and the abbey was originally the site of his grave and those of Eleanor, Richard, his daughter Joan, grandson Raymond VII of Toulouse and John's wifeIsabella of Angoulême. Henry III visited the abbey in 1254 to reorder these tombs and requested that his heart be buried with them.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: According to historian John Gillingham, Henry and his reign have attracted historians for many years and Richard (whose reputation has "fluctuated wildly") is remembered largely because of his military exploits. Steven Runciman, in the third volume of the "History of the Crusades", wrote: "He was a bad son, a bad husband, and a bad king, but a gallant and splendid soldier."


title: Angevin kings of England

text: Eighteenth-century historian David Hume wrote that the Angevins were pivotal in creating a genuinely English monarchy and, ultimately, a unified Britain. Interpretations of "Magna Carta" and the role of the rebel barons in 1215 have been revised; although the charter's symbolic, constitutional value for later generations is unquestionable, for most historians it is a failed peace agreement between factions. John's opposition to the papacy and his promotion of royal rights and prerogatives won favour from 16th-century Tudors. John Foxe, William Tyndale and Robert Barnes viewed John as an early Protestant hero, and Foxe included the king in his "Book of Martyrs". John Speed's 1632 "Historie of Great Britaine" praised John's "great renown" as king, blaming biased medieval chroniclers for the king's poor reputation. Similarly, later Protestant historians view Henry's role in Thomas Becket's death and his disputes with the French as worthy of praise. Similarly, increased access to contemporary records during the late Victorian era led to a recognition of Henry's contributions to the evolution of English law and the exchequer. William Stubbs called Henry a "legislator king" because of his responsibility for major, long-term reforms in England; in contrast, Richard was "a bad son, a bad husband, a selfish ruler, and a vicious man".


title: Angevin kings of England

text: The growth of the British Empire led historian Kate Norgate to begin detailed research into Henry's continental possessions and create the term "Angevin Empire" during the 1880s. However, 20th-century historians challenged many of these conclusions. During the 1950s, Jacques Boussard, John Jolliffe and others focused on the nature of Henry's "empire"; French scholars, in particular, analysed the mechanics of royal power during this period. Anglocentric aspects of many histories of Henry's reign were challenged beginning in the 1980s, with efforts to unite British and French historical analyses of the period. Detailed study of Henry's written records has cast doubt on earlier interpretations; Robert Eyton's 1878 volume (tracing Henry's itinerary by deductions from pipe rolls), for example, has been criticised for not acknowledging uncertainty. Although many of Henry's royal charters have been identified, their interpretation, the financial information in the pipe rolls and broad economic data from his reign has proven more challenging than once thought. Significant gaps in the historical analysis of Henry remain, particularly about his rule in Anjou and the south of France.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: Interest in the morality of historical figures and scholars waxed during the Victorian period, leading to increased criticism of Henry's behaviour and Becket's death. Historians relied on the judgement of chroniclers to focus on John's ethos. Norgate wrote that John's downfall was due not to his military failures but his "almost superhuman wickedness", and James Ramsay blamed John's family background and innate cruelty for his downfall.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: Richard's sexuality has been controversial since the 1940s, when John Harvey challenged what he saw as "the conspiracy of silence" surrounding the king's homosexuality with chronicles of Richard's behaviour, two public confessions, penances and childless marriage. Opinion remains divided, with Gillingham arguing against Richard's homosexuality and Jean Flori acknowledging its possibility.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: According to recent biographers Ralph Turner and Lewis Warren, although John was an unsuccessful monarch, his failings were exaggerated by 12th- and 13th-century chroniclers. Jim Bradbury echoes the contemporary consensus that John was a "hard-working administrator, an able man, an able general" with, as Turner suggests, "distasteful, even dangerous personality traits". John Gillingham (author of a biography of Richard I) agrees and judges John to be a less-effective general than Turner and Warren do. Bradbury takes a middle view, suggesting that modern historians have been overly lenient in evaluating John's flaws. Popular historian Frank McLynn wrote that the king's modern reputation amongst historians is "bizarre" and, as a monarch, John "fails almost all those [tests] that can be legitimately set".


title: Angevin kings of England

text: Henry II appears as a fictionalised character in several modern plays and films. The king is a central character in James Goldman's play "The Lion in Winter" (1966), depicting an imaginary encounter between Henry's family and Philip Augustus over Christmas 1183 at Chinon. Philip's strong character contrasts with John, an "effete weakling". In the 1968 film, Henry is a sacrilegious, fiery and determined king. Henry also appears in Jean Anouilh's play "Becket", which was filmed in 1964. The Becket conflict is the basis for T. S. Eliot's play "Murder in the Cathedral", an exploration of Becket's death and Eliot's religious interpretation of it.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: During the Tudor period, popular representations of John emerged. He appeared as a "proto-Protestant martyr" in the anonymous play "The Troublesome Reign of King John" and John Bale's morality play "Kynge Johan", in which John attempts to save England from the "evil agents of the Roman Church". Shakespeare's anti-Catholic "King John" draws on "The Troublesome Reign", offering a "balanced, dual view of a complex monarch as both a proto-Protestant victim of Rome's machinations and as a weak, selfishly motivated ruler". Anthony Munday's plays "The Downfall and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington" demonstrate many of John's negative traits, but approve of the king's stand against the Roman Catholic Church.


title: Angevin kings of England

text: Richard is the subject of two operas: In 1719, George Frideric Handel used Richard's invasion of Cyprus as the plot for "Riccardo Primo", and, in 1784, André Grétry wrote "Richard Coeur-de-lion".


title: Angevin kings of England

text: The earliest ballads of Robin Hood such as those compiled in "A Gest of Robyn Hode" associated the character with a king named "Edward" and the setting is usually attributed by scholars to either the 13th or the 14th century. As the historian J.C. Holt notes at some time around the 16th century, tales of Robin Hood started to mention him as a contemporary and supporter of Richard, Robin being driven to outlawry during John's misrule, while in the narratives Richard was largely absent, away at the Third Crusade. Plays such as Robert Davenport's "King John and Matilda" further developed the Elizabethan works in the mid-17th century, focussing on John's tyranny and transferring the role of Protestant champion to the barons. Graham Tulloch noted that unfavourable 19th-century fictionalised depictions of John were influenced by Sir Walter Scott's historical romance "Ivanhoe". They, in turn, influenced the children's author Howard Pyle's "The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood" (1883) which cast John as the principal villain of the Robin Hood narrative. During the 20th century, John also appeared in fictional books and films with Robin Hood. Sam De Grasse's John, in the 1922 film version, commits atrocities and acts of torture. Claude Rains' John, in the 1938 version with Errol Flynn, began a cinematic trend in which John was an "effeminate ... arrogant and cowardly stay-at-home". John's character highlights Richard's virtues and contrasts with Guy of Gisbourne, the "swashbuckling villain" opposing Robin. In the Disney cartoon version, John (voiced by Peter Ustinov) is a "cowardly, thumbsucking lion".


title: Angevin kings of England

text: During the 13th century, a folktale developed in which Richard's minstrel Blondel roamed (singing a song known only to him and Richard) to find Richard's prison. This story was the foundation of André Ernest Modeste Grétry's opera "Richard Coeur-de-Lion", and inspired the opening of Richard Thorpe's film version of "Ivanhoe". Sixteenth-century tales of Robin Hood began describing him as a contemporary (and supporter) of Richard the Lionheart; Robin became an outlaw during the reign of Richard's evil brother, John, while Richard was fighting in the Third Crusade.


title: Johnny Brown (actor)

text: Johnny Brown (June 11, 1937 – March 2, 2022) was an American actor and singer. He was most famous for his role as building superintendent Nathan Bookman on the 1970s CBS sitcom, "Good Times". Brown portrayed Bookman until the series was cancelled in 1979.


title: Johnny Brown (actor)

text: A nightclub promoter and performer, his early best role was as a regular cast member of the television series "Laugh-in". Brown is mostly remembered for his portly physique, beautiful smile, mobile facial expressions, and easy, pleasant joking style.


title: Johnny Brown (actor)

text: Brown made appearances on "The Flip Wilson Show", "The Jeffersons", "Family Matters", "Sister, Sister", "The Jamie Foxx Show", "The Wayans Bros", and "Martin". He had a recurring role as building super Nathan Bookman in the 1970's TV series "Good Times". He had a small role in the 1970 film "The Out-of-Towners" starring Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis as a waiter on a railroad dining car. Brown went to school with Walter Dean Myers when he lived in Harlem, New York City as a boy.


title: Johnny Brown (actor)

text: Brown also appeared in several television commercials, including ads for Hunt's Manwich and the Write Brothers pen, a short-lived product of the Papermate pen company in the 1970s. The commercial consisted of an elaborate musical number, "Write On, Brothers, Write On", led by Brown as a schoolteacher who encourages his chorus line of students to use this pen for their school assignments.


title: Johnny Brown (actor)

text: In 1997, Brown contributed his voice to the introduction of the compilation album "Comedy Stew: The Best of Redd Foxx". In the introduction, Brown tells of how Norman Lear had considered Brown to play the role of Lamont in "Sanford and Son", but was unavailable to do so because of his prior commitment to "Laugh-In", leading Lear to give the role to Demond Wilson instead.


title: Johnny Brown (actor)

text: Brown died in Los Angeles on March 2, 2022, at the age of 84. He collapsed shortly after leaving a doctor's appointment for his pacemaker and was pronounced dead when brought to hospital.


title: Johnny Brown (actor)

text: Brown began recording as a singer as late as 1961, after having toured with Sam "The Man" Taylor since 1958. His first release was on Columbia Records, "Walkin', Talkin', Kissin' Doll" b/w "Sundown" in February 1961. He was only 23 at the time. The promotional release was accompanied with a special insert describing his background (see picture). His next record happened in early 1968 on Atlantic Records, "You're Too Much in Love With Yourself" b/w "Don't Dilly Dally, Dolly", the latter showing off his impression skills as Louis Armstrong. That release had initially been available on Crest Records.


title: Standard German phonology

text: The phonology of Standard German is the standard pronunciation or accent of the German language. It deals with current phonology and phonetics as well as with historical developments thereof as well as the geographical variants and the influence of German dialects.


title: Standard German phonology

text: While the spelling of German is officially standardised by an international organisation (the Council for German Orthography) the pronunciation has no official standard and relies on a "de facto" standard documented in reference works such as (German Pronunciation Dictionary) by Eva-Maria Krech et al., (Duden volume 6, The Pronunciation Dictionary) by Max Mangold and the training materials of radio and television stations such as "Westdeutscher Rundfunk", "Deutschlandfunk", or "Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen". This standardised pronunciation was invented, rather than coming from any particular German-speaking city. But the pronunciation that Germans usually consider to be closest to the standard is that of Hanover. Standard German is sometimes referred to as (stage German), but the latter has its own definition and is slightly different.


title: Standard German phonology

text: Some scholars treat as an unstressed allophone of . Likewise, some scholars treat as an allophone of the unstressed sequence . The phonemic status of is also debated – see below.


title: Standard German phonology

text: Although there is also a length contrast, vowels are often analyzed according to a tenseness contrast, with long being the tense vowels and short their lax counterparts. Like the English checked vowels, the German lax vowels require a following consonant, with the notable exception of (which is absent in many varieties, as discussed below). is sometimes considered the lax counterpart of tense in order to maintain this tense/lax division. Short occur in unstressed syllables of loanwords, for instance in ('psychometry'). They are usually considered allophones of tense vowels, which cannot occur in unstressed syllables (unless in compounds).


title: Standard German phonology

text: Northern German varieties influenced by Low German could be analyzed as lacking contrasting vowel quantity entirely:


title: Standard German phonology

text: The long open-mid front unrounded vowel does not exist in many varieties of Standard German and is rendered as the close-mid front unrounded vowel , so that both ('ear of grain') and ('honor') are pronounced (instead of "Ähre" being ) and both ('bears') and ('berries') are pronounced (instead of being ). However, the disputed vowel seems much more stable in other contexts, i.e., not preceding /r/ as in the examples above. Other relevant minimal pairs include "beten" ('pray') - "bäten" ('bid, conjunctive'), "dehnen" ('stretch') - "Dänen" ('Danes'), "Segen" ('blessing') - "Sägen" ('saws, n.'). It has been debated whether is a distinct phoneme or even exists, except when consciously self-censoring speech, for several reasons:


title: Standard German phonology

text: The following usually are not counted among the German diphthongs as German speakers often feel they are distinct marks of "foreign words" (). These appear only in loanwords:


title: Standard German phonology

text: In the varieties where speakers vocalize to in the syllable coda, a diphthong ending in may be formed with every stressable vowel:


title: Standard German phonology

text: With around 22 to 26 phonemes, the German consonant system has an average number of consonants in comparison with other languages. One of the more noteworthy ones is the unusual affricate .


title: Standard German phonology

text: ' is the voiceless palatal fricative (which is found in the word 'I'), and ' is the voiceless velar fricative (which is found in the word the interjection 'oh', 'alas'). is the German word for 'sound, phone'. In German, these two sounds are allophones occurring in complementary distribution. The allophone occurs after back vowels and (for instance in 'book'), the allophone after front vowels (for instance in 'me/myself') and consonants (for instance in 'fear', 'sometimes'). The allophone also appears after vocalized in superregional variants, e.g. in 'fear'. In southeastern regiolects, the is commonly used here, yielding .


title: Standard German phonology

text: In loanwords, the pronunciation of potential fricatives in onsets of stressed syllables varies: in the Northern varieties of standard German, it is , while in Southern varieties, it is , and in Western varieties, it is (for instance in : vs. vs. ).


title: Standard German phonology

text: The diminutive suffix is always pronounced with an . Usually, this ending triggers umlaut (compare for instance 'dog' to 'little dog'), so theoretically, it could only occur after front vowels. However, in some comparatively recent coinings, there is no longer an umlaut, for instance in the word (a diminutive of 'woman'), so that a back vowel is followed by a , even though normally it would be followed by a , as in ('to smoke'). This exception to the allophonic distribution may be an effect of the morphemic boundary or an example of "phonemicization", where erstwhile allophones undergo a split into separate phonemes.


title: Standard German phonology

text: The allophonic distribution of after front vowels and after other vowels is also found in other languages, such as Scots, in the pronunciation of "light". However, it is by no means inevitable: Dutch, Yiddish, and many Southern German dialects retain (which can be realized as instead) in all positions. It is thus reasonable to assume that Old High German "ih", the ancestor of modern , was pronounced with rather than . While it is impossible to know for certain whether Old English words such as "niht" (modern "night") were pronounced with or , is likely (see Old English phonology).


title: Standard German phonology

text: Despite the phonetic history, the complementary distribution of and in modern Standard German is better described as backing of after a back vowel, rather than fronting of after a front vowel, because is used in onsets ( 'chemistry') and after consonants ( 'newt'), and is thus the underlying form of the phoneme.


title: Standard German phonology

text: According to Kohler, the German is further differentiated into two allophones, and : occurs after (for instance in 'book') and after (for instance in 'brook'), while either or may occur after , with predominating.


title: Standard German phonology

text: In Western varieties, there is a strong tendency to realize as unrounded or , and the phoneme may be confused or merged with altogether, secondarily leading to hypercorrection effects where is replaced with , for instance in , which may be realized as .


title: Standard German phonology

text: Various German consonants occur in pairs at the same place of articulation and in the same manner of articulation, namely the pairs , , , , . These pairs are often called fortis–lenis pairs, since describing them as voiced–voiceless pairs is inadequate. With certain qualifications, , and are also considered fortis–lenis pairs.


title: Standard German phonology

text: The fortis stops are aspirated in many varieties. The aspiration is strongest in the onset of a stressed syllable (such as 'thaler'), weaker in the onset of an unstressed syllable (such as 'father'), and weakest in the syllable coda (such as in 'seed'). All fortis consonants, i.e. are fully voiceless.


title: Standard German phonology

text: The lenis consonants range from being weakly voiced to almost voiceless after voiceless consonants: ('kasbah'), ('to resign'), ('red-yellow'), ('dropping'), ('intention'), ('wooden jalousie'), ('to chase away'), ('to drop'), ('fruit juice'). states that they are "to a large extent voiced" in all other environments, but some studies have found the stops to be voiceless word/utterance-initially in most dialects (while still contrasting with due to the aspiration of the latter).


title: Standard German phonology

text: The nature of the phonetic difference between the voiceless lenis consonants and the similarly voiceless fortis consonants is controversial. It is generally described as a difference in articulatory force, and occasionally as a difference in articulatory length; for the most part, it is assumed that one of these characteristics implies the other.


title: Standard German phonology

text: In various central and southern varieties, the opposition between fortis and lenis is neutralized in the syllable onset; sometimes just in the onset of stressed syllables, sometimes in all cases.


title: Standard German phonology

text: The pair is not considered a fortis–lenis pair, but a simple voiceless–voiced pair, as remains voiced in all varieties, including the Southern varieties that devoice the lenes (with however some exceptions). Generally, the southern is realized as the voiced approximant . However, there are southern varieties which differentiate between a fortis (such as in 'culpable' from Middle High German stræflich) and a lenis (, such as in 'polite' from Middle High German hovelîch); this is analogous to the opposition of fortis () and lenis .


title: Standard German phonology

text: In varieties from Northern Germany, lenis stops in the syllable coda are realized as fortis stops. This does not happen in varieties from Southern Germany, Austria or Switzerland.


title: Standard German phonology

text: Since the lenis stops are unvoiced or at most variably voiced (as stated above), this cannot be called devoicing in the strict sense of the word because it does not involve the loss of phonetic voice. More accurately, it can be called coda fortition or a neutralization of fortis and lenis sounds in the coda. Fricatives are truly and contrastively voiced in Northern Germany. Therefore, the fricatives undergo coda devoicing in the strict sense of the word. It is disputed whether coda devoicing is due to a constraint which specifically operates on syllable codas or whether it arises from constraints which "protect voicing in privileged positions."


title: Standard German phonology

text: As against standard pronunciation rules, in western varieties including those of the Rhineland, coda fortis–lenis neutralization results in "voicing" rather than "devoicing" if the following word begins with a vowel. For example, becomes and becomes . The same sandhi phenomenon exists also as a general rule in the Luxembourgish language.


title: Standard German phonology

text: In German words there is always one syllable carrying main stress, with all other syllables either carrying secondary stresses or being unstressed. The position of the main stress syllable has been a matter of debate. Traditionally, word stress is seen as falling onto the first stem syllable. In recent analyses, there is agreement that main stress is placed onto one of the last three (stressable) syllables. Within this "three-syllable window", word stress is put regularly onto the second-to-last syllable, the penultimate syllable. However, syllable quantity may modify this pattern: a heavy final or prefinal syllable, i.e., one with a long vowel or with one or more consonants in the syllable coda, will usually attract main stress.


title: Standard German phonology

text: A set of illustrative examples also stems from Japanese loan words, as these cannot be borrowed with their stress patterns (Japanese has a system of pitch accents, completely different from word stress in Germanic languages):


title: Standard German phonology

text: A list of reveals that none of the words with four syllables has initial stress, confirming the "three-syllable-window" analysis. Secondary stresses precede main stresses if at least two syllables are present, as in "̩Bib-li- ̩o-the-'ka-rin".


title: Standard German phonology

text: Suffixes, if containing a stressable vowel, are either stressed "(-ei, ion, -al", etc.) or unstressed ("-ung, -heit, -isch", etc.)


title: Standard German phonology

text: In addition, German uses different stresses for separable prefixes and inseparable prefixes in verbs and words derived from such verbs: