title: Whisper (app)

text: On October 23, 2014, U.S. Senator Jay Rockefeller asked Whisper's CEO to appear before him and the staff of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation to explain Whisper's tracking systems, tracking data retention, and data distribution. BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post and Fusion (TV channel) suspended their partnerships with Whisper.


title: Whisper (app)

text: In March 2015, "The Guardian" published a clarification of the October 2014 piece in which it had made numerous allegations about Whisper's privacy protection and metadata policy. "The Guardian" clarified the claims regarding user location, data storage, changes to Whisper's terms of service and security policy and the sharing of user data with the US Department of Defense. It also removed an opinion piece titled "Think you can Whisper privately? Think again." The retraction was covered by several news outlets, including "The Wall Street Journal", "CNN Money", "TechCrunch", and "Mashable".


title: Whisper (app)

text: On March 22, 2015, a security startup called Xipiter published a report in which they outlined serious security concerns and the resistance they met when trying to bring these concerns to the attention of Whisper.sh. They claimed that they could hijack a user's account, post (publicly or privately) as a hijacked user, and view all of a user's current and past private messages. In response, Whisper's co-founder Michael Heyward and its CTO Chad DePue claimed that it is not possible to do such things with their app and accused Xipiter of fabricating their proof-of-concept video. Xipiter's claims have yet to be validated or disproved by independent security researchers.


title: Whisper (app)

text: Whisper Text LLC claims to have set up a companion nonprofit for its users called "Your Voice", which, according to its website, is "dedicated to raising awareness about mental health issues on college campuses". The site claims to provide resources and support for college students dealing with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, sexuality and LGBTQ issues, bullying, suicide prevention, and stress management. The website provides links to various services run by other organizations, but offers no services of its own. The contact telephone number on the website to call for help is the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.


title: City status in Ireland

text: In Ireland, the term "city" has somewhat differing meanings in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.


title: City status in Ireland

text: Historically, city status in the United Kingdom, and before that in the Kingdom of Ireland, was a ceremonial designation. It carried more prestige than the alternative municipal titles "borough", "town" and "township", but gave no extra legal powers. This remains the case in Northern Ireland, which is still part of the United Kingdom. In the Republic of Ireland, "city" has an additional designation in local government.


title: City status in Ireland

text: Before the Partition of Ireland in 1920–22, the island formed a single jurisdiction in which "city" had a common history.


title: City status in Ireland

text: The first edition of the "Oxford English Dictionary" s.v. "city" (published 1893), explains that in England, from the time of Henry VIII, the word was applied to towns with Church of England cathedrals. It goes on to say:


title: City status in Ireland

text: The history of the word in Ireland is somewhat parallel. Probably all or most of the places having bishops have been styled on some occasion "civitas"; but some of these are mere hamlets, and the term 'city' is currently applied only to a few of them which are ancient and important boroughs. Thom's Directory applies it to Dublin, Cork, Derry, Limerick ('City of the violated treaty'), Kilkenny, and Waterford; also to Armagh and Cashel, but not to Tuam or Galway (though the latter is often called 'the City of the Tribes'). Belfast was, in 1888, created a 'city' by Royal Letters Patent.


title: City status in Ireland

text: In most European languages, there is no distinction between "city" and "town", with the same word translating both English words; for example, "ville" in French, or "Stadt" in German.


title: City status in Ireland

text: In Modern Irish, "city" is translated "cathair" and "town" is translated "baile"; however, this is a recent convention; previously "baile" was applied to any settlement, while "cathair" meant a walled or stone fortress, monastery, or city; the term was derived from Proto-Celtic *"katrixs" ("fortification"). For example, Dublin, long the metropolis of the island, has been called "Baile Átha Cliath" since the fifteenth century, while its earliest city charter is from 1172. The Irish text of the Constitution of Ireland translates "city of Dublin" as "cathair Bhaile Átha Chliath", combining the modern sense of "cathair" with the historic sense of "Baile". Conversely, the original Irish names of such smaller settlements as Cahir, Cahirciveen, Caherdaniel, or Westport ("Cathair na Mart") use "cathair" in the older sense.


title: City status in Ireland

text: In the Roman Empire, the Latin "civitas" referred originally to the jurisdiction of a capital town, typically the territory of a single conquered tribe. Later it came to mean the capital town itself. When Christianity was organised in Gaul, each diocese was the territory of a tribe, and each bishop resided in the "civitas". Thus "civitas" came to mean the site of a cathedral. This usage carried over generally to Anglo-Norman "cité" and English "city" in England. William Blackstone's "Commentaries on the Laws of England" of 1765 cites Edward Coke's "Institutes of the Lawes of England" of 1634:


title: City status in Ireland

text: A city is a town incorporated, which is or hath been the see of a bishop; and though the bishoprick be dissolved, as at Westminster, yet still it remaineth a city.


title: City status in Ireland

text: Subsequent legal authorities disputed this assertion; pointing out that the City of Westminster gained its status not implicitly from its (former) cathedral but explicitly from letters patent issued by Henry VIII shortly after the Diocese was established.


title: City status in Ireland

text: In any case it was moot whether the association of "city" with dioceses applied to Ireland. A 1331 writ of Edward III is addressed, among others, to "Civibus civitatis Dublin, —de Droghda, – de Waterford, de Cork, – de Limrik" implying "civitas" status for Drogheda. Some credence to the episcopal connection was given by the 1835 Report of the Commissioners into Municipal Corporations in Ireland and the 1846 "Parliamentary Gazetteer of Ireland" (see below).


title: City status in Ireland

text: Whereas the Normans moved many English sees from a rural location to a regional hub, the cathedrals of the established Church of Ireland remained at the often rural sites agreed at the twelfth-century Synod of Rathbreasail and Synod of Kells. The Roman Catholic church in Ireland had no cathedrals during the Protestant Ascendancy.


title: City status in Ireland

text: Downpatrick is noted as "the City of Down" in a 1403 record, although no granting instrument is known. The corporation was defunct by 1661, when Charles II initiated plans to revive it, which were not completed.


title: City status in Ireland

text: Although the charter of Clogher did not describe it as a city, the borough constituency in the Irish House of Commons was officially called "City of Clogher". It was a pocket borough of the Bishop of Clogher, disestablished by the Acts of Union 1800.


title: City status in Ireland

text: John Caillard Erck records of Old Leighlin, "So flourishing indeed was this town in subsequent times, that it received the appellation of the city of Leighlin, and was inhabited by eighty-six burgesses during the prelacy of Richard Rocomb, who died in 1420."


title: City status in Ireland

text: For seven settlements in Ireland (listed below), the title "city" was historically conferred by the awarding of a royal charter which used the word "city" in the name of the body corporate charged with governing the settlement. (In fact, charters were for centuries written in Latin, with "civitas" denoting "city" and "villa" "town".) Armagh had no charter recognising it as a city but claimed the title by prescription; acts of the Parliament of Ireland in 1773 and 1791 refer to the "city of Armagh". There is one reference in James I's 1609 charter for Wexford to "our said city of Wexford", but the rest of the charter describes it as a town or borough.


title: City status in Ireland

text: The label "city" carried prestige but was purely ceremonial and did not in practice affect the municipal government. However, a few acts of the Parliament of Ireland were stated to apply to "cities". A section of the Newtown Act of 1748 allowed for members of a Corporation to be non-resident of its municipality in the case of "any town corporate or borough, not being a city". This was enacted because there were too few Protestants in smaller towns to make up the numbers. The 1835 Report of the Commissioners on Municipal Corporations in Ireland questioned whether it was applicable in the case of Armagh and Tuam, both being episcopal sees and hence "cities" in Blackstone's definition. In fact, non-residents had served on both corporations. The provisions of a 1785 act for "the lighting and cleaning of cities" were extended by a 1796 act to "other towns, not being cities". In the 1613 Irish House of Commons, members from a borough constituency were paid 50% more if it was a city.


title: City status in Ireland

text: After the Acts of Union 1800, Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and British law governed the award and removal of the title "city".


title: City status in Ireland

text: The Municipal Corporations (Ireland) Act 1840 abolished both those corporations which were already "de facto" defunct and those which were most egregiously unrepresentative. The latter category included Armagh and Cashel. It was moot whether these "ipso facto" were no longer cities; some later sources continued to describe them as such.


title: City status in Ireland

text: The 1846 "Parliamentary Gazetteer of Ireland" uses the label "city" in a variety of ways. For Cork, Dublin, Kilkenny, Limerick, Derry, and Waterford, the definition at the start of the relevant article includes "a city". Armagh is defined as "[a] post, market, and ancient town, a royal borough, the capital of a county, and the ecclesiastical metropolis of Ireland"; however it is called a "city" throughout its article. Cashel is treated similarly to Armagh. For other episcopal seats, "city" is not used, or used in hedged descriptions like "episcopal city", "ancient city", or "nominal city". Of Kilfenora it says, "It belongs to the same category as Emly, Clonfert, Kilmacduagh, Ardfert, Connor, Clogher, Kilmore, Ferns, and Achonry, in exhibiting a shrunk and ghastly caricature upon the practical notion of a 'city;' and nothing but its episcopal name and historical associations prevent it from being regarded as a mean and shabby hamlet." Of Elphin it says "the general tone of at once masonry, manners, and business, is a hideous satire upon the idea of 'a city.'" Of Downpatrick it says "it displays a striking, and almost outré combination of unique and common place character, of ancient piles and modern edifices curiously mingling the features of city and village, of political grandeur and social littleness." There are passing references in other articles to "the city of Tuam", and "the city of Killaloe".


title: City status in Ireland

text: Belfast in 1887 applied to be granted city status on the occasion of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. The Home Office objected to setting a precedent for granting city status to towns not episcopal sees. Thomas Sexton asked in the House of Commons:


title: City status in Ireland

text: with regard to the granting of the City Charter to Belfast. A Question was lately put in the House upon the subject, and ... [ W. H. Smith] replied ... that the Government did not intend to recommend any such grant in connection with Her Majesty's Jubilee. ... I will ask him for a reply upon the point ... I do not know that there is much difference between a town and a city; but some people prefer the title of city, and if there is any advantage in a place being called a city, I think the people of Belfast are entitled to have their choice. There are eight cities in Ireland, and Belfast is next to Dublin in point of importance; according to Thom's information, it is the first town of manufacturing importance. I believe there is a strong desire that the title of city should be given to the place. ... It seems absurd that Belfast should be shut out from any City Charter, while Armagh, with 10,000 of a population, is a city; and when Cashell, with a population of 4,000, enjoys the distinction also. Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer will be able to say that, in consideration of the importance of the town, the Government will recommend the Crown to grant to it the title of city. Like civility, a Charter of this kind costs nothing; and, therefore, I think that this Charter might be promptly and gracefully conceded to the town.


title: City status in Ireland

text: In 1888, the request was granted by letters patent, setting a precedent for non-episcopal cities which was soon emulated by Dundee and Birmingham.


title: City status in Ireland

text: Prior to the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898, eight Irish municipalities were counties corporate. This was distinct from being a city. Five of the counties corporate were "County of the City", the other three being "County of the Town". The other cities —Derry, and until 1840 Cashel and Armagh— were not governed separately from their surrounding counties; however, the official name of County Londonderry was for long "the City and County of Londonderry". The 1898 act abolished the corporate counties of the city of Kilkenny and the towns of Galway, Drogheda, and Carrickfergus, and converted the other four corporate counties into county boroughs, a new class which also included the cities of Derry and Belfast.


title: City status in Ireland

text: The title lord mayor is given to the mayor of a privileged subset of UK cities. In some cases, a lord mayor additionally has the style "Right Honourable". The Mayor of Dublin gained the title "lord" by a charter of 1641, but the Confederate Wars and their aftermath meant the form "lord mayor" was not used until 1665. The style "Right Honourable" was originally a consequence of the lord mayor's membership of the Privy Council of Ireland; it was later explicitly granted by the 1840 Act. The Lord Mayor of Belfast gained the title in 1892 —based on the precedent of Dundee— and the style "Right Honourable" in 1923, in recognition of Belfast's status as capital of the newly created Northern Ireland. The Lord Mayor of Cork gained the title in 1900, to mark Queen Victoria's visit to Ireland; the style "Right Honourable" has never applied. Armagh gained a lord mayor in 2012 for the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II. The title of Right Honourable in the cities of Cork and Dublin was abolished by the Local Government Act 2001.


title: City status in Ireland

text: In the area which in 1921 became Northern Ireland, after Belfast received its charter in 1888, no further towns applied for city status until 1953, when Armagh began to argue for the restoration of the status lost in 1840. Its justification was that the Archbishop of Armagh was Primate of All Ireland. The council used the appellation "city" unofficially until 1994, when Charles, Prince of Wales, announced the status had been granted to mark the 1,550th anniversary of the traditional date of Armagh's foundation by Saint Patrick.


title: City status in Ireland

text: Lisburn and Ballymena entered a UK-wide competition for city status held to mark the millennium in 2000; neither was selected, being below the unofficial 200,000 population threshold. Controversy surrounded the decision-making process for the competition, and as a result the rules changed for a 2002 competition for the Golden Jubilee of Elizabeth II, with Northern Ireland guaranteed one new city. This encouraged more applicants, with Lisburn and Ballymena being joined by Carrickfergus, Craigavon, Coleraine, and Newry. Surprisingly, Lisburn and Newry were both successful, prompting allegations of political expediency, since Lisburn is strongly Protestant and Newry strongly Catholic. Ballymena representatives were aggrieved, and there were claims that Lisburn, as a suburb of Belfast, ought to be ineligible. Sinn Féin members of Newry and Mourne District Council were opposed to Newry's city status because of the connection to the British monarchy; other councillors welcomed the award.


title: City status in Ireland

text: Coleraine and Craigavon were again among the 26 applicants for city status at the 2012 Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II, but neither was among the three successful. Ballymena, Bangor, and Coleraine were among the 39 towns applying for city status as part of the Platinum Jubilee Civic Honours, with Bangor among the eight winners announced on 20 May 2022. A Bangor Green Party member of Ards and North Down Borough Council suggested the £10,000 to update Bangor's four welcome signs should not be spent during the UK cost-of-living crisis. The production by the Crown Office of the letters patent formally granting city status was delayed by the death of Elizabeth II. The document is expected to be issued in late November 2022 and formally presented in Bangor in December by the Lord Lieutenant of Down to the Mayor of Ards and North Down.


title: City status in Ireland

text: Thus the recognised cities in Northern Ireland number five (Armagh, Belfast, Derry, Lisburn, Newry) plus one announced for later in 2022 (Bangor). The local government districts named after two of the new cities were granted a corresponding change of name: from "Armagh District" to "Armagh City and District", and from "Lisburn Borough" to "Lisburn City". just as the older cities had Belfast City Council and Derry City Council. Newry and Mourne district's name did not use the word "city". In 2014–2015, the number of districts was reduced from 26 to 11 by merging all except Belfast with neighbouring ones. The successor districts inherited city status where applicable: those linked to a charter (Belfast, Derry, Lisburn) by request of its council, and those not linked to a charter (Armagh, Newry) automatically. This is reflected in the names of Derry City and Strabane District Council, Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council and Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council, but not in that of Newry, Mourne and Down District Council.


title: City status in Ireland

text: On the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 (Ireland from 1937), there were four county boroughs within its jurisdiction: Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Waterford. Galway was made a fifth county borough in 1986. The Local Government Act 2001 redesignated the five county boroughs as cities. These cities, like the county boroughs before them, are almost identical in power and function to the administrative counties. The five administrative cities were Cork, Dublin, Galway, Limerick, and Waterford. The Local Government Reform Act 2014 amalgamated the cities of Limerick and Waterford with their respective counties, creating local government areas under the category of Cities and Counties.


title: City status in Ireland

text: The Constitution of Ireland adopted in 1937 prescribes that the Oireachtas must meet, and the President must reside, "in or near the City of Dublin"; the only occurrences of "city" in the Constitution. In fact Leinster House and Áras an Uachtaráin are within the municipal limits of the city. The formula "in or near the City of Dublin" had occurred in earlier statutes, including Ormonde's Articles of Peace of 1649 and the 1922 Constitution.


title: City status in Ireland

text: A 2015 review proposed a merger of Cork city and county by 2019, but was not implemented after objections from the city. Instead, the boundary of the city of Cork was extended.


title: City status in Ireland

text: The Local Government Reform Act 2014 amalgamated the local government areas of the county of Limerick and the city of Limerick to form a single local government area named as Limerick City and County, and amalgamated the local government areas of the county of Waterford and the city of Waterford to form a single local government area named as Waterford City and County, with the first elections held to the new Limerick City and County Council and Waterford City and County Council at the 2014 local elections. Each of the two merged local government areas is termed a "city and county". The changes are "without prejudice to the continued use of the description city in relation to Limerick and to Waterford". Within each "city and county", the municipal district which contains the city is styled a "metropolitan district" ( in Irish).


title: City status in Ireland

text: Galway's status as a city was for long debatable. Its nickname was "the city of the Tribes" due to the fact that there were 14 main tribes there Athy, Blake, Bodkin, Browne, Darcy, Deane, French, Font, Joyce, Kirwan, Lynch, Martin, Morris, and Skerrett, families, but in British times it was legally a town, and its county corporate was the "county of the town of Galway". Its 1484 charter grants its corporation's head the title of Mayor, but so did the charters of Clonmel and Drogheda, as well as the charters extinguished in 1840 of Carrickfergus, Coleraine, Wexford, and Youghal, none of which claimed the title of "city". Under Irish self Rule however there has never been any debate about the city's status


title: City status in Ireland

text: Galway was nevertheless intermittently described as a city; John Speed's 1610 map of "Connaugh" includes a plan of "the Citie of Galway". In "The history of the town and county of the town of Galway" (1820), James Hardiman generally describes it as a town. However, his account of the 1651 map commissioned by Clanricarde concludes that at the time Galway "was universally acknowledged to be the most perfect city in the kingdom". Robert Wilson Lynd in 1912 referred to "Galway city – technically, it is only Galway town —". The Local Government (Galway) Act 1937, describes it as the "Town of Galway" and created a municipal government called the "Borough of Galway". On the other hand, the Aran Islands (Transport) Act 1936, regulates steamships travelling "between the City of Galway and the Aran Islands"; and legislators debating the passage of the 1937 Act frequently referred to Galway as a "city".


title: City status in Ireland

text: In 1986, the Borough of Galway became the County Borough of Galway and ceased to part of County Galway. The Borough Council became the "City Council" and it acquired its own "City Manager". This was not presented as the acquiring of city status; Minister for the Environment Liam Kavanagh said it was "the extension of the Galway City boundary and for upgrading of that city to the status of county borough".


title: City status in Ireland

text: A proposal to merge Galway city and county was put on hold in 2018 after Seanad opposition, and has now been completely abandoned by the government.


title: City status in Ireland

text: The only city in the Republic which was not a county borough was Kilkenny. The original version of the 2001 Act would have reclassified as "towns" all "boroughs" which were not county boroughs, including Kilkenny. This drew objections from Kilkenny's borough councillors, and from TDs Phil Hogan and John McGuinness. Accordingly, a clause was added to the bill:


title: City status in Ireland

text: In 2002, Phil Hogan (a Fine Gael TD) asked for "full city status" for Kilkenny; in 2009 he said "Kilkenny has lost its City status courtesy of Fianna Fáil".


title: City status in Ireland

text: The Local Government Reform Act 2014 established new municipal districts throughout the state and to abolish all the boroughs, including Kilkenny. Whereas the municipal district encompassing other boroughs are styled "the Borough District of Sligo [or Drogheda/Wexford/Clonmel]", that encompassing Kilkenny is styled "the Municipal District of Kilkenny City".


title: City status in Ireland

text: The National Spatial Strategy (NSS) for 2002–2020 planned to manage urban sprawl by identifying certain urban centres outside Dublin as areas for concentrated growth. The NSS report calls the regional centres "gateways" and the sub-regional centres "hubs". It does not call them "cities", but among the features it lists for "Gateways" are "City level range of theatres, arts and sports centres and public spaces/parks." and "City-scale water and waste management services." It also gives a target population for a gateway of over 100,000, including the suburban hinterland.


title: City status in Ireland

text: The report describes Cork, Limerick/Shannon, Galway and Waterford, as "existing gateways" and identifies four "new national level gateways": Dundalk, Sligo, and two "linked" gateways


title: City status in Ireland

text: Letterkenny/(Derry), and Athlone/Tullamore/Mullingar. The campaigns of Sligo and Dundalk for city status have referenced their status as regional gateways. The "Midlands Gateway", a polycentric zone based on Tullamore, Athlone, and Mullingar, has occasionally been described as constituting a new or future city. A 2008 study by Dublin Institute of Technology concluded that the growth in population of the designated gateways was far less than had been planned.


title: City status in Ireland

text: Local councillors and TDs from several towns have raised the possibility of gaining city status. Prior to the 2001 Act, these suggestions were a matter of simple prestige. Since the 2001 Act, the suggestions sometimes relate to the administrative functions of county-equivalent cities and sometimes to the ceremonial title. The Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage has not entertained these suggestions, and has said "A modernised legal framework and structures at both regional and local level are now in place ... I have no proposals for amending legislation, which would be necessary to establish new city councils."


title: City status in Ireland

text: The possibility of Drogheda gaining city status was raised in Dáil questions by Gay Mitchell in 2005, Michael Noonan in 2007 and by Fergus O'Dowd in 2007 and 2010. The Borough Council's draft development plan for 2011–17 does not mention city status, although the manager's summary of public submissions reported backing for city status for the greater Drogheda area, incorporating adjacent areas in Counties Louth and Meath. In 2010, a "Drogheda City Status Campaign" was launched, and in March 2012, Drogheda Borough Council passed a resolution, "That the members of Drogheda Borough Council from this day forward give their consent and approval to the people of Drogheda referring to Drogheda as the City of Drogheda".


title: City status in Ireland

text: A 1991 official report recommended that the borough of Dún Laoghaire should be "upgraded to city [i.e. county borough] status" with an extended boundary; instead the Local Government (Dublin) Act 1993 used a similar boundary to delimit a new administrative county, subsuming the old borough, named Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown.


title: City status in Ireland

text: Dundalk's development plan for 2003–09 stated "Dundalk, in order to fulfil its potential as a regional growth centre, should, in the near future achieve City Status, to acknowledge its present role and to enable its future growth as a regional gateway." Michael Noonan asked a question in the Dáil in 2007. Dundalk's draft development plan for 2009–15 seeks to develop the "Newry–Dundalk Twin City Region" with Newry, which is nearby across the border. The county manager of County Louth made a summary of public submissions on the plan, which predicted Dundalk Institute of Technology being upgraded to university status would help to win city status.


title: City status in Ireland

text: John Perry raised an adjournment debate in 1999 calling for Sligo to be declared a "millennium city", stating:


title: City status in Ireland

text: Declan Bree, mayor of the town in 2005, advocated "Sligo gaining city status similar to Limerick, Galway and Waterford." The town council and county council held meetings to plan an expansion of the borough boundaries with a view to enhancing the prospects for such a change.


title: City status in Ireland

text: The main building of Sligo Borough Council is called "City Hall". However Sligo is still not officially recognised as a City


title: City status in Ireland

text: Michael Kennedy, TD for Dublin North, stated in 2007 that "Fingal County Council is planning to confer city status on our county town of Swords in the next 15 to 20 years as its population grows to 100,000." In May 2008, the Council published "Your Swords, an Emerging City, Strategic Vision 2035", with a vision of Swords as "an emerging green city of 100,000 people."


title: City status in Ireland

text: A campaign to have Tallaght given city status was launched in 2003 by Eamonn Maloney, a member of South Dublin County Council. It is supported by the Tallaght Area Committee, comprising 10 of the 26 county councillors. Advantages envisaged by the campaign's website include having a dedicated Industrial Development Authority branch office for attracting investment, and facilitating the upgrade of Institute of Technology, Tallaght to university status. When Charlie O'Connor asked about city status for "Tallaght, Dublin 24" in 2007, the minister had "no plans to re-designate South Dublin County Council as a city council, or to establish Tallaght as a separate city authority". O'Connor said later "The only problem I can see is our close proximity to Dublin". The head of the local chamber of commerce said in 2010, "If Tallaght was anywhere else in the country, it would have been a city years ago. We already have the population, the hospital and the third-level institution. If we're missing something, someone needs to tell us, clarify what the criteria [are], and we'll get it."


title: City status in Ireland

text: This list includes places which have at some time had a legally recognised claim to the title "city". Informally the term may have been applied to other places or at other times.


title: Beiyang Army

text: The Beiyang Army (), named after the Beiyang region, was a large, Western-style Imperial Chinese Army established by the Qing dynasty government in the late 19th century. It was the centerpiece of a general reconstruction of Qing China's military system. The Beiyang Army played a major role in Chinese politics for at least three decades and arguably right up to 1949. It made the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 possible, and, by dividing into warlord factions known as the Beiyang Clique (), ushered in a period of regional division.


title: Beiyang Army

text: The Beiyang Army had its origins in the Newly Created Army established in late 1895 under Yuan Shikai's command, which rapidly expanded after 1901 with new recruits and by incorporating other forces. By 1906 it had six divisions and was the most advanced army under the command of the Qing dynasty.


title: Beiyang Army

text: The beginning of the Beiyang Army could be traced back to Li Hongzhang's Huai Army, which was raised to quell the Taiping Rebellion. Unlike the traditional Green Standard or Banner forces of the Qing, the Huai Army was largely a militia army based on personal, rather than institutional, loyalties. The Huai Army was at first equipped with a mixture of traditional and modern weapons. Its creator, Li Hongzhang, used the customs and tax revenues of the five provinces under his control in the 1880s and 1890s to modernize segments of the Huai Army, and to build a modern navy (the Beiyang Fleet).


title: Beiyang Army

text: It is around this time that the term "Beiyang Army" began to be used to refer to the military forces under his control. The term, meaning literally ""Northern Ocean"", refers to the customs and excise revenues collected in the Beiyang region (the northern coastal provinces of Zhili, Shandong and Liaoning, surrounding the imperial capital of Peking), which were used first to fund the Beiyang Fleet and later the Beiyang Army. However, funding was usually irregular and training by no means systematic. By the early 1890s, these modernized units established by Li Hongzhang that were known as the Beiyang Army were the best military forces that the Qing dynasty could field. Their first action was the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), which was fought almost entirely by the Beiyang Army, unsupported by the forces of other provinces. But Japan's German-styled conscript army, led by academy trained professional officers, handily defeated the Beiyang Army. The Qing government sued for peace after six months of uninterrupted Japanese victories.


title: Beiyang Army

text: Li Hongzhang died in 1901 and was replaced by Yuan Shikai, who took on Li's appointment as Viceroy of Zhili and as Minister of Beiyang (北洋通商大臣). Yuan had been given command of the brigade-sized New Created Army in 1895, which had 7,000 soldiers at the time and would expand to 20,000 by 1902. By the autumn of 1905 the Beiyang Army consisted of six divisions of 10,000 men each. It was organized into infantry, artillery, cavalry, and auxiliary troops, as well as maintenance and engineering. A seventh division was established in 1907 at Jiangsu. The Army's training instructors were mostly Japanese and Germans.


title: Beiyang Army

text: Yuan Shikai oversaw the reform of Qing military institutions after 1901 as the government tried to create a national army. He founded the Baoding Military Academy, which allowed him to expand the Beiyang Army, along with several other military schools and officer training academies. With the creation of the Commission for Army Reorganisation in December 1903, the Beiyang Army became the model on which the military forces of other provinces should be standardized. Although some units were based in the three northeastern provinces in Manchuria, the main base of the Beiyang Army was at Baoding, near Tianjin. In the early 1900s, a department for military administration was also created for the Beiyang divisions to manage logistics, which was divided into several branches. It was the opinion of foreign observers that the Beiyang Army was the largest, best equipped and best trained military force in China at the time.


title: Beiyang Army

text: The Empress Dowager Cixi died on 15 November 1908 and named the three-year-old Puyi as the new emperor. The new regent and father of Puyi, Prince Chun (醇親王), had Yuan Shikai dismissed the next year. Yuan bided his time in retirement, carefully maintaining his network of personal contacts in the Beiyang Army. At the time of the 1911 Revolution, command of the Beiyang Army was supposedly in the hands of the Qing minister Yinchang. In reality, Yuan Shikai still had the ability to manipulate it due to the loyalties of its officers to him personally. Four divisions were located in Zhili, the 3rd Division being in northeast China and the 5th Division in Shandong. Almost all the officers were ethnically Chinese, many of whom were returned students from Japan. Armament was not standardized, but was better in that respect than either before or later. Most of the infantry were armed with either the standard 1896 Japanese Type 30 rifle or the Mauser 7.9 mm.


title: Beiyang Army

text: The events of the revolution demonstrated that the Beiyang Army, which formed the core of the 36-division New Army, was absolutely the dominant military force within China. Controlling the fragmented loyalties of its formations was the key to political power in post–1911 China. The insurrection that actually set off the 1911 Revolution took place in Wuchang on 10 October. Four days later, the Qing court organized the New Armies in the north, and particularly the Beiyang Army, into three forces: the First Army, which would be sent to fight at Wuchang under the command of Army Minister Yinchang, the Second Army, which would act as a reserve force and would be sent to the front as needed, under the command of Feng Guozhang, and the Third Army, which would defend the capital, under Zaitao. The First and Second armies consisted of about 25,000 men each, or two divisions. The First included elements from the second, fourth, sixth divisions of the Beiyang army, which were the Qing government's crack troops, trained by Yuan Shikai.


title: Beiyang Army

text: The Second Army was never formed as a functional military unit as a result of mutiny, and thus never was sent to the front to assist the First Army. The formations were abolished in early December 1911.


title: Beiyang Army

text: On 12 October Yinchang was ordered to take two Beiyang Army divisions (the First Army) down the Beijing-Hankou Railway to suppress the uprising at Wuchang. He attacked the revolutionary army commanded by Huang Xing on 27 October. Covered by their own field artillery and the guns of the imperial fleet, the Beiyang infantry attacked with a cloud of skirmishers followed by a line of close-order company fronts. These textbook tactics were soon to be discredited in the intense fighting of the First World War, but against an undisciplined revolutionary force with no machine guns, they worked perfectly.


title: Beiyang Army

text: On that same day Yuan Shikai was ordered to take command of the forces at Wuchang. He refused, instead securing high commands for his two most trusted associates, Feng Guozhang and Duan Qirui. Fighting continued in Hubei for another month as Yuan negotiated with the dynasty and the revolutionaries using the Beiyang Army as a weapon of coercion. The end result was that he was elected provisional President of the Republic of China.


title: Beiyang Army

text: During the period 1911–1915, Yuan Shikai remained the only man who could hold the Beiyang Army together. He and his followers strongly resisted any attempt by the Kuomintang (KMT) to insert outsiders into their chain of command. They negotiated a loan of £25 million sterling from a five-power banking consortium to support the Beiyang Army, despite an uproar from the KMT. In 1913 Yuan Shikai appointed four of his loyal lieutenants as military governors in southern provinces: Duan Qirui in Anhui, Feng Guozhang in Jiangsu, Li Shun in Jiangxi and Tang Xiangming in Hunan. The unified Beiyang military clique now attained its maximum extent of territorial control. It exercised firm control over North China and the Yangtze River provinces. Throughout 1914 it supported Yuan in making revisions to the constitution to give himself treaty- and war-making powers as well as substantial emergency powers (the three commanders were nicknamed by the newspapers of the time as angel, tiger and dog. Angel was Duan Qirui, tiger Wang Shizhen and dog Feng Guozhang).


title: Beiyang Army

text: In December 1915 Yuan Shikai declared himself Emperor. This was opposed by almost all the generals and officers of the Beiyang Army, from Duan Qirui and Feng Guozhang on down. More importantly, many outlying provinces such as Yunnan openly opposed him. Yuan was forced to back down from his imperial designs. Both Duan and Feng refused to support him in power any further, and in the end the only prominent Beiyang general to remain loyal was the irrepressible Zhang Xun. Yuan died soon afterward. After his death the Beiyang Army split into cliques led by Yuan's principal protégés. Duan Qirui's Anhui clique and the Zhili clique, founded by Feng Guozhang but led after Feng's death by Cao Kun and Wu Peifu, were the principal Beiyang cliques. Disunited, the power of the Beiyang Army was challenged by provincial armies such as Yan Xishan's forces in Shanxi and Zhang Zuolin's Fengtian clique.


title: Beiyang Army

text: Pressure from the Beiyang commanders prevented any political figure of the left taking power in the government of the Republic of China. For almost a decade after Yuan's death, the agenda of the leading Beiyang warlords was to reunify China by first reuniting the Beiyang Army and then conquering the lesser provincial armies.


title: Beiyang Army

text: For a period from mid-1916, the ultraconservative Beiyang Gen. Zhang Xun managed to maintain the unity of the army via collegial contacts and negotiation. As Yuan Shikai had done, the Beiyang generals used their military power to intimidate the parliament into passing legislation they wanted. Following a dispute with President Li Yuanhong over a loan from Japan in early 1917, Duan Qirui declared independence from the government along with most of the other Beiyang generals. Zhang Xun then occupied Beijing with his army, and on 1 July shocked the Chinese political world by proclaiming the restoration of the Qing dynasty. All the other generals condemned this and the restoration soon collapsed. The elimination of Zhang Xun soon afterwards destroyed the balance of power between the rival factions of Feng and Duan/Wan and inaugurated a decade of warlordism.


title: Beiyang Army

text: Feng Guozhang went to Beijing to assume the presidency after securing the appointment of his protégé as military commander in Jiangxi, Hubei and Jiangsu. These three provinces became the power bases of the Zhili military clique. Duan Qirui resumed his position as prime minister; his Anhui (sometimes called Anfu) clique dominated the Beijing area. Using Japanese funding to build up his so-called "War Participation Army", Duan continued to struggle with Feng Guozhang.


title: Beiyang Army

text: Feng was eventually eliminated from political life in 1918, when Xu Shichang, the Beiyang elder statesman, became president. His deputy Cao Kun replaced him as leader of the Zhili clique. At the end of World War I, Duan dominated Chinese representation at the Treaty of Versailles and used the Shanghai peace conference in 1919 to bring pressure on the non-Beiyang militarists supporting Sun Yat-sen's government in Guangzhou. He continued to receive Japanese funding for his army (renamed "National Defence Army"), for which he was willing to grant Japan legal succession to the German rights in Shandong (see May Fourth Movement).


title: Beiyang Army

text: Before May–June 1919, some combination of fighting and negotiation among the major Beiyang leaders was expected to lead to military unification, which in turn would permit the restoration of the constitutional political processes that Yuan Shikai had disrupted. By 1919 the three major northern military cliques had cemented, two of them – Anhui and Zhili – directly from the Beiyang Army and the third, Fengtian under Gen. Zhang Zuolin, from an amalgamation of Beiyang and local troops. They and their imitators on a smaller scale were willing to get money and arms from any source in order to survive, and the weaker factions would combine against the stronger.


title: Beiyang Army

text: The history of the major warlord wars down to 1925 recount the failure of any of the military commanders in China to centralise political and military power to any degree. In a situation resembling the period of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, most of South China remained beyond Beiyang control, to become the incubator for both the KMT and Chinese Communist Party movements.


title: Beiyang Army

text: The Kuomintang established the National Revolutionary Army with the help of the Soviet Union and Chinese Communist Party. Chiang Kai-shek then launched the Northern Expedition in 1926 in an attempt to bring the warlords under his control. Some warlords of the Beiyang Army, including Wu Peifu and Sun Chuanfang, were defeated by Chiang's forces, and the National Revolutionary Army gradually became dominant in China. The warlord era would be officially ended by 1928, when most of the warlords were either defeated or allied with the Kuomintang, although it was often in name only. The Chinese Civil War that had resulted from a fallout between Chiang and the Communists was already underway by this time. In 1930 the Central Plains War began after some of the warlords allied with the Kuomintang became disenchanted and attempted to overthrow Chiang. They weren't successful, but lack of cooperation and rivalry continued to plague China through much of the years following, eventually leading to the demise of Chiang's regime in the Chinese Civil War in 1949.


title: Cosmoline

text: Cosmoline is the genericized trademark for a common class of brown, wax-like petroleum-based corrosion inhibitors, typically conforming to United States Military Standard MIL-C-11796C Class 3. They are viscous when freshly applied, have a slight fluorescence, and solidify over time with exposure to air. The main ingredient in cosmoline is aliphatic petroleum solvent, which is volatile and evaporates over time.


title: Cosmoline

text: Cosmoline was developed by Houghton International in the 1860s or 1870s as a pharmaceutical product. The original Cosmoline was an ointment and was used for many different cosmetic and medical purposes, it was even advocated to promote hair growth. It was kept in homes to disinfect wounds and was used by veterinarians to treat cuts, abrasions, bruises and sprains. Cosmoline could even be found on farms, where it was used to relieve swelling in cow's udders.


title: Cosmoline

text: Cosmoline became widely known when it received a government specification as a rust preventive and began its use by the military to protect various equipment from rust and corrosion. Cosmoline could be found on military equipment in the Spanish–American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Cosmoline conforms to MIL-SPEC (MIL-C-11796C, Class 3) for Preservative and Sealing Compounds.


title: Cosmoline

text: Chemically, Cosmoline is a homogeneous mixture of oily and waxy long-chain, non-polar hydrocarbons. It is always brown in color, but can differ in viscosity and shear strength. Cosmoline melts at 113–125 °F (45–52 °C) and has a flash point of 365 °F (185 °C).


title: Cosmoline

text: The most common use of Cosmoline is in the storage and preservation of some firearms, hand tools, machine tools and their tooling, and marine equipment. Entire vehicles can be preserved with cosmoline, as was attempted with "Miss Belvedere".


title: Cosmoline

text: Cosmoline is also frequently applied to automotive disc brake rotors at the factory, to prevent corrosion inside the box before the rotor is placed into service on a vehicle. It is easily removed by spraying brake cleaner on the braking surfaces of the rotor although brake pad manufacturers do not recommend this technique. These manufacturers recommend that rotors be washed with dish soap and water to remove cosmoline, as well as after machining brake drums and rotors.


title: Cosmoline

text: During World War II cosmoline was used to coat weapons, including entire tanks, for long sea voyages, to prevent corrosion in salty maritime conditions. U.S. Coast Artillerymen serving the huge coastal artillery batteries were known as "Cosmoliners" as they were regularly assigned the task of "greasing down" their big guns.


title: Cosmoline

text: Cosmoline was also used during the Pacific island campaigns in World War II by the United States Marines, who sang a song about it to the tune of the popular big-band hit Tangerine: "Cosmoline...keeps my rifle clean". Many felt that it had been invented not merely to prevent rust on their weapons but for making soldiers' lives miserable. Historical fiction author W.E.B. Griffin, in his 1986 novel "Semper Fi", describes in great detail the difficulties that cosmoline removal presented to a typical group of U.S. Marine Corps officer candidates in the months leading up to U.S. involvement in World War II.


title: Cosmoline

text: Freshly applied cosmoline, or that which is hermetically sealed in a plastic bag or shrink wrap, retains its grease-like viscosity and wipes near clean with a rag, leaving only a thin film behind. Older cosmoline which has had air exposure usually solidifies after a few years, once its volatile hydrocarbon fraction evaporates and leaves behind only the waxy remainder. This solid wax does not readily wipe off. It can be removed with laborious scraping but leaves crumbs to be swept or vacuumed away.


title: Cosmoline

text: The most effective and non-abrasive method to remove all cosmoline safely is accomplished using a dry ice blaster. High pressure compressed air with solid CO particles is directed to any area to be cleaned until removed. An experienced operator is required in order to protect the underlying substrate. Once removed, the cosmoline is blown away from the subject with gravity bringing it to the floor or surrounding horizontal surface. If properly performed, the results do not harm or change the finish of the protected surface.


title: Cosmoline

text: Application of gentle heat sufficient to melt the waxy hydrocarbons allows cosmoline to drip off. Penetrating oil (such as WD-40 or CRC 5-56 CLP) sprayed and allowed to soak in until cosmoline is restored to a viscous-fluid state allows it to be wiped off. A closed-cabinet parts washer may be used to power wash smaller items. An aqueous rather than petrochemical-based wash requires high heat, the proper aqueous detergent, and the correct hydraulic impact pressure.


title: Cosmoline

text: Soldiers in field conditions have often used gasoline or other handy petroleum-based solvent (such as kerosene) to clean cosmoline off stored weapons.


title: Cosmoline

text: It is not recommended to use harsh chemical solvents that could strip paint, finishes, or other aesthetic/functional coatings from the gun's surface. A better solvent is Stoddard Solvent, or mineral spirits. Complete instructions can be found on Cosmoline's official site.


title: Cosmoline

text: All cosmoline cleaning methods create hazardous waste that must be disposed of in the proper manner. Aqueous or solvent cleaning both have accepted methods to dispose of the "sludge" created. It has been reported that talcum powder can be used as an absorbent of Cosmoline by packing the powder around the item to be cleaned and applying sufficient heat to melt the solid film, allowing the compound to be wicked from the coated surface into the talcum, which can be scraped off more easily.


title: Common sole

text: The common sole, Dover sole, or black sole (Solea solea) is a species of flatfish in the family Soleidae. It is one of the largest fish in the "Solea" genus. It lives on the sandy or muddy seabed of the northern Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea where it often semi-immerses itself in the substrate. The upper side is greyish-brown while the underside is white. It grows to a maximum length of about . The species is prized as a food fish, being caught mostly by trawling on the seabed.


title: Common sole

text: The small eyes are close to each other on the right side of the body. This gives the fish the possibility of lurking half-buried in the sand for passing prey. The common sole, just like all other flatfishes, hatches as an "ordinary" fish with one eye on each side of the body. The young metamorphose to flatfish when they are about one centimeter long. The upper side is greyish-brown and the underside is white. The common sole approaches a maximum length of . In the UK, a small sole is commercially called a "slip".


title: Common sole

text: It has a preference for relatively shallow water (10-60 m) with sand or mud covering the bottom. They can be found at depths up to 200 m. Their preferred temperature range is from 8–24 °C.


title: Common sole

text: It is found in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean, from the south of Norway to Senegal, and in almost all of the Mediterranean Sea. In the winter, it withdraws to the somewhat warmer waters of the southern North Sea.


title: Common sole

text: The Dover sole reaches maturity at 3–5 years old, at which point they can begin to reproduce. Spawning usually occurs between February and May but in warmer areas it can also occur at the beginning of winter. It usually happens in shallow coastal waters that are between 6–12 °C.


title: Common sole

text: After the eggs have been fertilised, the incubation period lasts around five days. The larvae become juvenile fish after around 35 days.


title: Common sole

text: An ectoparasite of the common sole is the leech "Hemibdella soleae". The larvae settle on the upper surface of the fish, the only part not buried in the sediment, and after further development migrate to the underside, where they attach themselves with their suckers, feeding on the fish's blood.


title: Common sole

text: Chefs prize Dover sole for its mild, buttery, sweet flavour and versatility, and for its ease of filleting. The fish yields fillets that hold together well in a variety of recipes.


title: Common sole

text: The name "Dover" comes from Dover, the English fishing port landing the most sole in the 19th century.


title: Common sole

text: In 2010, Greenpeace International added the common sole to its seafood red list. "The Greenpeace International seafood red list is a list of fish that are commonly sold in supermarkets around the world, and which have a very high risk of being sourced from unsustainable fisheries."


title: Common sole

text: Because of its prestige, the name "Dover sole" was borrowed to name the eastern Pacific species "Microstomus pacificus", a quite distinct species with different culinary properties: the Pacific sole has thinner, less firm fillets and sells for a lower price.


title: Hakeem Dawodu

text: Hakeem Tyrone Dawodu (born July 2, 1991) is a Canadian mixed martial artist, currently signed to Ultimate Fighting Championship and fights in the Featherweight division. He previously competed for the World Series of Fighting.


title: Hakeem Dawodu

text: Dawodu was born in Calgary to a mother from Nigeria and a father from Jamaica. When he was six years old, his father was deported, forcing his mother to raise him on her own. He had a troubled childhood; he was first placed in a juvenile detention center at the age of 14. Two years later, his counselor placed him in Muay Thai training as a means of controlling his anger.


title: Hakeem Dawodu

text: On February 21, 2014, Dawodu made his professional debut at against Behrang Yousefi. He won the fight via knockout in the first round.


title: Hakeem Dawodu

text: On June 7, 2014, Dawodu faced Jake Macdonald at . He won the fighting via knockout in the second round.


title: Hakeem Dawodu

text: On October 11, 2014, Dawodu faced Mike Malott at . He won via technical knockout due to punches and elbows in the first round.


title: Hakeem Dawodu

text: On February 11, 2015, Dawodu faced Tristan Johnson at . He won via technical knockout in the third round.


title: Hakeem Dawodu

text: On June 5, 2015, Dawodu faced Chuka Willis at . He won via technical knockout due to knees and punches in the second round.


title: Hakeem Dawodu

text: On July 30, 2016, Dawodu faced Marat Magomedov at in a rematch. He won the fight via technical knockout in the second round.


title: Hakeem Dawodu

text: On March 18, 2017, Dawodu faced UFC vet Steven Siler at . He won the fight via unanimous decision, this marked the first time he gained victory by decision.


title: Hakeem Dawodu

text: Dawodu faced Danny Henry on March 17, 2018 at UFC Fight Night 127. He lost the fight via submission in the fight's opening minute.


title: Hakeem Dawodu

text: Dawodu faced Austin Arnett on July 28, 2018 at UFC on Fox 30. He won the fight via unanimous decision.


title: Hakeem Dawodu

text: Dawodu faced promotional newcomer Yoshinori Horie on July 27, 2019 at UFC 240 He won the fight via knockout in round three. This win earned him the "Performance of the Night" award.


title: Hakeem Dawodu

text: Dawodu faced Zubaira Tukhugov on September 27, 2020 at UFC 253. Tukhugov missed weight, and was subsequently fined a percentage of his purse, which will go to Dawodu. Dawodu won by split decision.


title: Hakeem Dawodu

text: Dawodu was expected to face Shane Burgos on January 24, 2021 at UFC 257. However, Dawodu was forced to withdraw from the bout, citing shoulder injury.'


title: Hakeem Dawodu

text: Dawodu faced Michael Trizano on February 5, 2022 at UFC Fight Night 200. He won the fight via unanimous decision.


title: Hakeem Dawodu

text: Dawodu faced Julian Erosa on September 10, 2022 at UFC 279. At the weigh-ins, Dawodu weighed in at 149.5 pounds, 3.5 pounds over the non-title featherweight limit. Dawodu was fined 30% of his purse, which will go to his opponent Erosa. Dawodu lost the fight via unanimous decision.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: Ladbrokes Coral is a British gambling company founded in 1886. Its product offering includes sports betting, online casino, online poker, and online bingo. The business is split into two divisions, UK and International. UK operations are conducted from its headquarters in London, England, while its International business operates from its overseas hubs in Gibraltar and Ceuta, Spain. The Ladbrokes portion of the group was established in 1886, and Coral in 1926. In November 2016, the companies merged to create Ladbrokes Coral Group. Since March 2018, it has been owned by Entain (formerly GVC Holdings). Prior to its sale, Ladbrokes Coral was listed on the London Stock Exchange, and was a member of the FTSE 250 Index.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: The company was founded by Messrs. Schwind and Pennington in 1886, as commission agents for horses trained at Ladbroke Hall in Warwickshire. The name Ladbrokes was adopted in 1902, when Arthur Bendir joined the partnership, and operations were moved to London.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: Ladbrokes' London offices were first in the vicinity of the Strand, moved to Hanover Square in 1906 and, in 1913, to Six Old Burlington Street, Mayfair. From 1913 to 1956, Ladbrokes' clientele was exclusively drawn from the British aristocracy and upper classes, many of whom were members of the elite gentlemen's clubs in the St James's area of Central London.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: Unusually for the times, Ladbrokes' principal longtime representative on British racecourses was a woman, Helen Vernet. Having joined the firm in 1919, she was made a partner in 1928 and remained with the firm until shortly before her death in 1956, at the age of 80.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: Following the end of World War II, Ladbrokes' fortunes were in steady decline, thanks to an austere postwar economic climate, a dwindling client base, and reluctance to change the firm's specialised approach to bookmaking. As a result, in 1956 the company was acquired by Mark Stein and his nephew Cyril Stein for a reported £100,000.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: In 1961, the government legalised betting shops under the Betting and Gaming Act. As managing director, Stein used profits from the business's traditional areas to establish a chain of betting shops. The company first diversified outside the betting business by taking a major stake in the Dragonara Palace in Malta, a casino and hotel, which opened its first phase in 1964.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: In 1967, Ladbrokes was floated on the London Stock Exchange. From 1967 to 1973, Ladbrokes' retail betting business grew from less than 50 shops to 1,135, and the company expanded its ventures to include bingo clubs, hotels under the Dragonara brand, casinos in London, holiday centres, and real estate investments. In 1973, Terry Rogers received £250,000 and 100,000 Ladbrokes shares when he sold his stake in a 53-shop chain of English betting shops to Ladbrokes.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: In 1975, Ladbrokes moved into racecourse management by purchasing Lingfield Park. This was followed by the acquisitions in 1976 of Perry Barr Stadium and Totalisators and Greyhound Holdings, which owned six greyhound racing stadia at Brough Park, Crayford & Bexleyheath, Leeds, Gosforth, Willenhall and Monmore. Arthur Aldridge, formerly of the Greyhound Racing Association, joined Ladbrokes as Racing Director.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: The company was rocked by scandal in 1979 with the exposure of illegal marketing schemes at its London casinos, including the bribery of a police officer to obtain information about high rollers at competing casinos. As a result, Ladbrokes was forced to close its four casinos in London, which accounted for roughly 40% of the company's profits.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: Ladbrokes acquired Texas Homecare, a chain of DIY stores, in 1986. In October 1987, it acquired Hilton International from Allegis Corporation for £645 million, gaining 91 hotels and the rights to the Hilton brand outside the United States. Ladbrokes acquired Vernons Football Pools in 1989.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: Stein retired in January 1994, under pressure from investors because of the company's rising debts and losses. Under new management, Ladbrokes focused on its core areas of hotels and gambling, and began to divest other parts of its business. Texas Homecare was sold to Sainsbury's in January 1995 for £290 million.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: Ladbrokes' extensive portfolio of commercial and residential real estate, valued at £1 billion in 1993, was sold off in pieces and by March 1997 was down to £70 million. As part of its redoubled focus on gambling, Ladbrokes returned to casinos in September 1994, with a £50 million purchase of three clubs in London, which it stated was the first step in building an international casino business.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: In September 1998, Ladbrokes purchased Coral, a chain of betting shops with 891 locations, from Bass plc for £363 million. The UK Government, however, ordered Ladbrokes to sell Coral after the Monopolies and Mergers Commission found that the acquisition was anti-competitive.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: The Coral business, except for 59 shops in Ireland and Jersey, was sold in a management buyout financed by Morgan Grenfell Private Equity for £390 million in February 1999. In March 1999, the company acquired Stakis Hotels for £1.3 billion, gaining 53 hotels and 22 casinos. Later that year, Ladbrokes renamed itself as Hilton Group plc, to reflect its increasing focus on the hotel business, which had come to represent over 80 percent of the company's assets.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: In August 1999, Hilton Group decided to dispose of its gambling operations outside of Europe due to disappointing results. Most of the assets, including racetracks and casinos in the United States and bingo and betting businesses in South America, were sold by 2001. In addition, the company sold its twenty-seven casinos in the United Kingdom to the Gala Group in December 2000 for £236 million.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: In February 2006, the company sold its hotel operations to Hilton Hotels Corporation for £3.5 billion, and once more rebranded itself as Ladbrokes plc. In March 2007, the Vernons brand was sold to Sportech.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: Following the introduction of the Gambling Act 2005 in the United Kingdom and the subsequent relaxation of advertising laws for gambling companies in 2007, a television campaign by Ladbrokes that included a host of ex professional footballers was the first to result in complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA); the ASA eventually cleared the campaign. The company once again came under fire from the ASA in January 2009, due to complaints relating to an advertising campaign.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: Since 2007, Ladbrokes operated in Spain through the LBApuestas brand, but in April 2014 it terminated its licence for LBApuestas and created a website, Sportium, in a joint venture with the Spanish gaming and leisure operator Cirsa. The company entered the online betting market in Australia with its acquisition of Bookmaker.com.au for £13 million in September 2013, followed by a purchase of Betstar for £12 million in April 2014.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: In June 2015, Ladbrokes announced that they were in talks with the board of Gala Coral Group over a possible merger. The combination of the two companies created Britain's biggest bookmaker, with over 4,000 betting shops and 30,000 employees.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: In July 2016, the Competition and Markets Authority identified 642 areas where the merger would harm local competition, and said 350 to 400 shops would need to be sold off for the merger to be approved. The merger was completed on 2 November 2016. To effect the merger, Ladbrokes acquired the Coral Group and then changed its name from Ladbrokes plc to Ladbrokes Coral Group plc.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: In December 2017, GVC Holdings agreed to buy Ladbrokes Coral in a deal that could be worth up to £4 billion.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: In January 2018, Ladbrokes Coral and the Scottish Professional Football League agreed to extend the betting company's sponsorship agreement until at 2020. The deal saw the bookmaker remain the principal sponsor of the top four divisions of Scottish football in a deal worth up to £5 million.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: In March 2018, Ladbrokes completed their omnichannel integration strategy with software provider Playtech, offering single account functionality for all its online, mobile and retail products in the United Kingdom. Also in March 2018, GVC Holdings completed its acquisition with GVC shareholders owning 53.5% and Ladbrokes Coral 46.5% of the combined company.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: In December 2018, Ladbrokes paid victims £1 million in compensation after it was disclosed that a problem gambler had been stealing funds from his business clients to fund his habit. The payments were made on the condition that the victims did not report the operator to the UK Gambling Commission, the regulatory body in charge of monitoring all gambling in the United Kingdom.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: On 31 July 2019, the UK Gambling Commission announced that Ladbrokes Coral would pay £5.9m for past failings in anti-money laundering and social responsibility. An investigation found that the companies failed to put in place effective safeguards, to prevent consumers suffering gambling harm and against money laundering, between November 2014 and October 2017.


title: Ladbrokes Coral

text: On 14 February 2020, the Liquor and Gaming New South Wales regulatory agency imposed a fine of AUD207,500 on Ladbrokes Australia and another GVC Holdings brand, Neds, for offering illegal gambling inducements to residents in New South Wales. The regulator called it "the biggest ever fine of its kind" in NSW.


title: Aaron Persky

text: Michael Aaron Persky (born 1962) is an American attorney and former judge of the Santa Clara County Superior Court from 2003 to 2018. He gained attention after his ruling in the case "People v. Turner", in which he in June 2016 sentenced Stanford University student Brock Turner to 6 months in prison for the sexual assault and attempted rape of an unconscious 22-year-old woman, Chanel Miller, which was a sentence recommended by the Santa Clara County Probation Department. Despite allegations that race, gender, and class bias influenced his lenient sentencing of Turner (prosecutors had asked for six years), the California Commission on Judicial Performance found no wrongdoing in their investigation of the case. Nonetheless, Persky was recalled by voters on June 5, 2018, during the 2018 California primary elections.


title: Aaron Persky

text: Prior to joining the bench, he practiced civil litigation for five years and was a prosecutor in Santa Clara County for six years. He also briefly coached girls' tennis at Lynbrook High School in the fall of 2019.


title: Aaron Persky

text: Michael Aaron Persky was born in 1962. His father, Murray Persky, was a psychiatrist. His mother, Susan Elder, was a French teacher. His paternal grandparents owned a poultry business. He grew up in San Francisco, California.


title: Aaron Persky

text: Persky graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University in 1984 with a bachelor's degree in international relations. He was the captain of the Stanford men's lacrosse team, a club sport. He received a master's degree in international policy studies from Stanford in 1985.


title: Aaron Persky

text: He graduated from the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) in 1990 and was admitted to the bar in California in the same year. After college, he played for the Berkeley club lacrosse team, for which he was also a captain.


title: Aaron Persky

text: Persky worked for the law firm of Morrison & Foerster, practicing corporate civil litigation. While in private practice, he received the California Association of Human Relations Organizations' Civil Rights Leadership Award for work on hate crimes, and the State Bar of California's Wiley Manuel Pro Bono Award for his pro bono work for the poor.


title: Aaron Persky

text: In 1997, Persky joined the Santa Clara District Attorney's Office. In this position, he prosecuted criminal offenses which included violent sex crimes and hate crimes. He served on the executive committee of the Support Network for Battered Women and the Santa Clara County Network for a Hate-Free Community.


title: Aaron Persky

text: By 2003, Persky was a deputy district attorney in the Santa Clara District Attorney's Office and prosecuted juvenile offenders; he was also a member of the DA's Juvenile Wards Team.


title: Aaron Persky

text: In 2002, Persky unsuccessfully ran for a seat on the Superior Court of California in Santa Clara County, losing to Ron Del Pozzo, who was also a deputy DA. Persky received 102,801 votes (47.9%), to Del Pozzo's 111,679 votes (52.1%) for Seat 16 on the court. In his 2002 run, Persky was endorsed by the Santa Clara County Bar Association (and its Women Lawyers Committee) and by the "San Jose Mercury News", while Del Pozzo received the endorsement of Sheriff Laurie Smith, U.S. Representatives Zoe Lofgren and Mike Honda, and the AFL–CIO. Both candidates ran a positive race.


title: Aaron Persky

text: In June 2016, Persky was elected without opposition for another six-year term on the bench. The vast majority of Santa Clara County judges—25 in total—ran unopposed in 2016.


title: Aaron Persky

text: In 2016, Persky received international media attention and widespread criticism for sentencing Brock Allen Turner, a 20-year-old Stanford student convicted of three felony counts of sexual assault, to six months in jail and three years of probation. The statutory maximum sentence was fourteen years; prosecutors sought a six-year term, while the Santa Clara County Probation Department, in its presentence investigation report, recommended a six-month term in county jail, and the defense asked for a four-month term in county jail. During sentencing, Persky said he considered the factors noted by the Probation Office and the "severe impact" of imprisonment on the defendant's life. Following the controversy, the Associated Press analyzed 20 cases where Persky had passed sentences since January 2015 and found that Persky had followed the sentencing recommendation of the probation department every time.


title: Aaron Persky

text: Some legal experts viewed the sentence in the case as unusually light. One juror in the Turner case wrote to Persky that his sentence was "ridiculously lenient" and made a "mockery" of the entire trial. Danny Cevallos, a Pennsylvania-based criminal defense lawyer and CNN legal analyst, said that while the sentence was lenient, Turner's prior clean record made him a candidate for minimum sentencing.


title: Aaron Persky

text: On December 19, 2016, the California Commission on Judicial Performance cleared Persky of any judicial wrongdoing in the Turner sentence.


title: Aaron Persky

text: Although he did not face any opposition in an election held five days after the sentencing, Persky lost his seat in a June 5, 2018, recall election. Online petitions calling for Persky to be removed following his lenient sentencing in the Turner case attracted over a million signatures by June 10, 2016. Professor Michele Dauber, a sociologist at the Stanford Law School and longtime advocate on campus sexual assault, who is also a family friend of the victim Chanel Miller, led the committee to Recall Judge Persky. The Committee planned to collect signatures in Santa Clara County to force a November 2017 recall vote. The demands received support from Representative Ted Poe (R-Texas), who took to the floor of the United States House of Representatives to condemn Turner's sentence as too lenient and to call for Persky's removal.


title: Aaron Persky

text: Santa Clara County district attorney Jeff Rosen said "Judicial independence is a critical part of the U.S. justice system. The immense power that comes with judicial independence also comes with accountability to the people we serve." Danny Cevallos stated that judges enjoy a modicum of independence from public pressure, and "there are no apparent grounds for impeachment or allegations of judicial misconduct, based on this sentence alone." Cevallos said that the recall movement "raises the question: is removing judges good for the spirit of the judiciary system, especially when the judge's sole transgression is a legal sentence" where he correctly applied the law. The Santa Clara County Bar Association released a statement saying that removing Persky would be a "threat to judicial independence" and weighs just one of his 13 years of decisions too heavily, saying they see "no credible assertions that in issuing the sentence, Judge Persky violated the law or his ethical obligations or acted in bad faith." Similarly, other sitting judges (both state and federal) and legal commentators defended Persky's decision, noted that the sentence might, in their opinion, be disproportionate due to the lifelong consequences of a criminal conviction and sex offender registration, and called on the bar to protect the independence of the judiciary.


title: Aaron Persky

text: In June 2016, at least ten prospective jurors refused to serve in a misdemeanor trial for possession of stolen property where Persky was presiding, citing the judge's sentencing of Turner as a reason. The following week, Rosen filed a peremptory motion for recusal in a case where Persky was to preside over the criminal trial of a male surgical nurse charged with sexual battery for allegedly touching the genitals and breasts of a female patient under sedation. Rosen called his move to have the judge removed from the case, "a rare and carefully considered step for our office."


title: Aaron Persky

text: As a result of the backlash in the wake of his sentencing of Turner, Persky asked not to hear any more criminal cases, and was reassigned to the Civil Division of the California Court system.


title: Aaron Persky

text: In 2011, Persky presided over a civil lawsuit against multiple members of the De Anza College baseball team, who were accused by the minor plaintiff, "Jane Doe", of gang-raping her while she was unconscious until a passerby intervened. During the trial, Persky decided that the jury should be allowed to view photographs of the plaintiff taken at a party she attended approximately a year after the alleged gang rape, as per the defense's claim that this evidence contradicted the plaintiff's claims of suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The jury found the defendants not liable.


title: Aaron Persky

text: Following Turner's sentencing in 2016, the plaintiff's attorneys in the De Anza case criticized Persky for allowing the photos into evidence. Attorneys for Doe said the photographs were not the only evidence that Persky unfairly permitted. Four of the baseball players had invoked Fifth Amendment rights not to self-incriminate during the discovery phase of the litigation. According to a lawyer for Doe, that was a critical juncture: it prevented the plaintiff's legal team from obtaining evidence that could have helped them pursue their case. The original judge in the case ruled in 2010 that the defendants could refuse to testify, but that would also mean that they would be prohibited from subsequently testifying in the case. That ruling was, however, overturned by Persky after he took over the trial in 2011, a move that Doe's attorneys say undermined her case.


title: Aaron Persky

text: An organization named "Recall Judge Persky" was established seeking to collect the 80,000 signatures of county voters required to hold a special recall election. The organizer of the petition was Stanford law professor Michele Dauber.


title: Aaron Persky

text: The move to recall Persky was opposed by the Santa Clara County public defender, who said she was "alarmed by the hysteria" about the Turner sentence. Rosen, whose office prosecuted Turner and chose not to appeal the sentence, stated, "While I strongly disagree with the sentence that Judge Persky issued in the Brock Turner case, I do not believe he should be removed from his judgeship." At the same time, Rosen's office asked to have Persky removed as the judge in an upcoming sexual assault trial, saying that he had lost confidence that the judge could "fairly participate" in the case. Persky formed a committee to fight the recall effort, called "Retain Judge Persky — No Recall". Persky also initiated a proceeding to enjoin the circulation of the recall petition, which was denied, and Persky's appeal of that denial was also denied.


title: Aaron Persky

text: On January 24, 2018, the county Registrar of Voters confirmed that sufficient signatures had been verified to put the recall on a ballot. There were 94,539 signatures submitted, far more than necessary. The recall issue was on the state elections ballot on June 5, 2018.


title: Aaron Persky

text: At least 93 law professors from public and private universities, including 29 professors from Stanford, signed a letter backing Persky in the recall effort. In addition, the Santa Clara Bar Association issued a statement opposing the recall, saying that it was unaware “of any other complaints or allegations of impropriety against Judge Persky during his 13 years on the bench." He stood by his sentencing, saying he's been unfairly targeted as the "face of rape" by recall advocates, at the same time admitting, "There is an underlying deep frustration among actual victims of sexual assault and women in general about the criminal justice system not taking sexual assault and domestic violence seriously. It's a very genuine and important problem." "The passion is authentic, the end is justified, let's increase sexual assault reporting. Let's do criminal justice reform where it's smart to do so." In a May 18, 2018, interview, Persky stated he had no regrets, and would rule exactly the same again on this case.


title: Aaron Persky

text: On June 5, Persky was recalled by Santa Clara County voters, who supported his removal by a margin of 61.51% to 38.49%. Persky became the first judge to be recalled in California in over 80 years. Two women, Cindy Hendrickson, a Santa Clara County assistant district attorney and Angela Storey, a civil attorney, appeared on the ballot to take Persky's position, should his recall succeed. Storey opposed the recall on principle. When the election results were being tabulated, and they indicated Persky would be recalled, Dauber stated, "The vote today...is a vote against impunity for high-status offenders of domestic violence and sexual violence." Hendrickson won the election to take Persky's place.


title: Aaron Persky

text: In October 2018, Persky was ordered to pay $161,825.68 to Dauber's recall campaign, which Persky had sued.


title: Aaron Persky

text: A 2022 study found that the recall of Persky subsequently led California judges to give more punitive sentencing.


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: Metathesis (; from Greek , from "I put in a different order"; Latin: "transpositio") is the transposition of sounds or syllables in a word or of words in a sentence. Most commonly, it refers to the interchange of two or more contiguous segments or syllables, known as adjacent metathesis or local metathesis:


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: Metathesis may also involve interchanging non-contiguous sounds, known as nonadjacent metathesis, long-distance metathesis, or hyperthesis, as shown in these examples of metathesis sound change from Latin to Spanish:


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: Many languages have words that show this phenomenon, and some even use it as a regular part of their grammar, such as Hebrew and Fur. The process of metathesis has altered the shape of many familiar words in English as well.


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: The original form before metathesis may be deduced from older forms of words in the language's lexicon or, if no forms are preserved, from phonological reconstruction. In some cases it is not possible to settle with certainty on the original version.


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: Dionysius of Halicarnassus was a historian and scholar in rhetoric living in 1st century BC Greece. He analysed classical texts and applied several revisions to make them sound more eloquent. One of the methods he used was re-writing documents on a mainly grammatical level: changing word and sentence orders would make texts more fluent and "natural", he suggested. He called this way of re-writing "metathesis".


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: In ASL, several signs which have a pre-specified initial and final location (such as the signs RESTAURANT, PARENT, TWINS) can have the order of these two locations reversed in contexts which seem to be purely phonological. While not possible with all signs, this does happen with quite a few. For example, the sign DEAF, prototypically made with the "1" handshape making contact first with the cheek and then moving to contact the jaw (as in the sentence FATHER DEAF), can have these locations reversed if the preceding sign, when part of the same constituent, has a final location more proximal to the jaw (as in the sentence MOTHER DEAF). Both forms of the sign DEAF are acceptable to native signers. A proposed prerequisite for metathesis to apply in ASL is that both signs must be within the same region on the body. Constraints on the applications of metathesis in ASL has led to discussions that the phonology breaks down the body into regions distinct from settings.


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: Amharic has a few minor patterns of metathesis, as shown by Wolf Leslau. For example, "matches" is sometimes pronounced as , "nanny" is sometimes pronounced as . The word "Monday" is , which is the base for "Tuesday" , which is often metathesized as . All of these examples show a pair of consonants reversed so that the stop begins the next syllable.


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: A common example of metathesis in Egyptian Arabic is when the order of the word's root consonants has changed.


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: The following examples of metathesis have been identified in Egyptian Arabic texts, but are not necessarily more common than their etymological spellings:


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: The likely cause for metathesis in the word "hospital" is that the result resembles a common word pattern familiar to Arabic speakers (namely a Form X verbal noun).


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: Perhaps the clearest example of metathesis in Egyptian Arabic is the modern name of the city of Alexandria: ()"Iskandariya" (). In addition to the metathesis of "x" /ks/ to /sk/, the initial "Al" of "Alexandria" has been reanalyzed as the Arabic definite article.


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: Metathesis is responsible for some common speech errors, such as children acquiring "spaghetti" as "pasketti". The word "ask" has the nonstandard variant "ax" pronounced ; the spelling "ask" is found in Shakespeare and in the King James Bible and "ax" in Chaucer, Caxton, and the Coverdale Bible. The word "ask" derives from Proto-Germanic "*aiskōną".


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: The process has shaped many English words historically. "Bird" and "horse" came from Old English and ; and were also written and .


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: The Old English "three" formed "thrid" and "þrēotene" "thriteen". These underwent metathesis to forms which became Modern English and .


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: The Old English verb "to work" had the passive participle "worked". This underwent metathesis to , which became Modern English .


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: The Old English "hole" underwent metathesis to "þryl". This gave rise to a verb "pierce", which became Modern English , and formed the compound "nose-hole" which became Modern English (May have occurred in the early Middle English Period: "nosþyrlu" ( 1050); "nos-thirlys" ( 1500). In 1565 "nosthrille" appears; "thirl"/"thurl" survived even longer, until 1878).


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: In western dialects of Finnish, historical stem-final /h/ has been subject to metathesis (it is lost in standard Finnish). That leads to variant word forms:


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: Sporadic examples include the word "green", which derives from older , and the vernacular change of the word "jovial" to (also a separate word meaning "bristly").


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: Deliberate metathesis also occurs extensively in the informal French pattern of speech called "verlan" (itself an example: < , meaning "the reverse" or "the inverse"). In verlan new words are created from existing words by reversing the order of syllables. Verlanization is applied mostly to two-syllable words and the new words that are created are typically considerably less formal than the originals, and/or take on a slightly different meaning. The process often involves considerably more changes than simple metathesis of two phonemes but this forms the basis for verlan as a linguistic phenomenon. Some of these words have become part of standard French.


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: In Greek, the present stem often consists of the root with a suffix of "y" (˰ in Greek). If the root ends in the vowel "a" or "o", and the consonant "n" or "r", the "y" exchanges position with the consonant and is written "i":


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: For metathesis of vowel length, which occurs frequently in Attic and Ionic Greek, see quantitative metathesis.


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: In Hebrew the verb conjugation ("binyan") "hitpaēl" () undergoes metathesis if the first consonant of the root is an alveolar or postalveolar fricative. Namely, the pattern "hiṯ1a22ē3" (where the numbers signify the root consonants) becomes "hi1ta22ē3". Examples:


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: Hebrew also features isolated historical examples of metathesis. For example, the words "keves" and "kesev" (meaning "lamb") both appear in the Torah.


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: In case of a narrow range of Hungarian nouns, metathesis of a h sound and a liquid consonant occurs in nominative case, but the original form is preserved in accusative and other suffixed forms:


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: The other instances are [intestinal] villus/fluff/fuzz/nap vs. "bolyhok", vs. "molyhos" down/pubescence [on plants], and the obsolete animal's fetus (cf. "vemhes" "pregnant [animal]"). The first of them is often used in the regular form ().


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: Metathesis from earlier protoform, though not so prevalent in Malay, can still be seen, as in the following:


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: Loanwords can also be products of metathesis. The word "tembikai" "watermelon" is a metathesis of "mendikai" borrowed from .


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: In Navajo, verbs have (often multiple) morphemes prefixed onto the verb stem. These prefixes are added to the verb stem in a set order in a prefix positional template. Although prefixes are generally found in a specific position, some prefixes change order by the process of metathesis.


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: However, when occurs with the prefixes and , the metathesizes with , leading to an order of + + , as in


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: Similar to the French "verlan" is the Totoiana, a speech form spoken in the village of Totoi in Romania. It consists in the inversion of syllables of Romanian words in a way that results unintelligible for other Romanian speakers. Its origins or original purpose are unknown. Its current use is recreative.


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: The Rotuman language of Rotuman Island (a part of Fiji) uses metathesis as a part of normal grammatical structure by inverting the ultimate vowel with the immediately preceding consonant.


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: In Saanich, metathesis is used as a grammatical device to indicate "actual" aspect. The actual aspect is most often translated into English as a "be ... -ing" progressive. The actual aspect is derived from the "nonactual" verb form by a CV → VC metathetic process (i.e., consonant metathesizes with vowel).


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: Metathesis of liquid consonants is an important historical change during the development of the Slavic languages: a syllable-final liquid metathesized to become syllable-initial, therefore e.g. Polish or Czech vs. English .


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: A number of Proto-Indo-European roots indicate metathesis in Slavic forms when compared with other Indo-European languages:


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: Old Spanish showed occasional metathesis when phonemes not conforming to the usual euphonic constraints were joined. This happened, for example, when a clitic pronoun was attached to a verb ending: it is attested that forms like "leave [plural] him" were often metathesized to (the phoneme cluster does not occur elsewhere in Spanish). The Spanish name for Algeria ("Argelia") is likely a metathesis of the Arabic name for the territory ().


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: Lunfardo, an argot of Spanish from Buenos Aires, is fond of vesre, metathesis of syllables. The word itself is an example:


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: In Swahili, some foreign words can undergo metathesis during their importation. For instance, "American" becomes "mmarekani".


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: From a comparative study of Dravidian vocabularies, one can observe that the retroflex consonants () and the liquids of the alveolar series () do not occur initially in common Dravidian etyma, but Telugu has words with these consonants at the initial position. It was shown that the etyma underwent a metathesis in Telugu, when the root word originally consisted of an initial vowel followed by one of the above consonants. When this pattern is followed by a consonantal derivative, metathesis has occurred in the phonemes of the root-syllable with the doubling of the suffix consonant (if it had been single); when a vowel derivative follows, metathesis has occurred in the phonemes of the root syllable attended by a contraction of the vowels of root and (derivative) suffix syllables. These statements and the resulting sequences of vowel contraction may be summed up as follows:


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: Two types of metathesis are observed in Turkish. The examples given are from Anatolian Turkish, though the closely related Azerbaijani language is better known for its metathesis:


title: Metathesis (linguistics)

text: Like many other natural languages Urdu and Hindi also have metathesis like in this diachronic example:


title: Manisa

text: Manisa (), historically known as Magnesia, is a city in Turkey's Aegean Region and the administrative seat of Manisa Province.


title: Manisa

text: Modern Manisa is a booming center of industry and services, advantaged by its closeness to the international port city and the regional metropolitan center of İzmir and by its fertile hinterland rich in quantity and variety of agricultural production. In fact, İzmir's proximity also adds a particular dimension to all aspects of life's pace in Manisa in the form of a dense traffic of daily commuters between the two cities, separated as they are by a half-hour drive served by a fine six-lane highway nevertheless requiring attention at all times due to its curves and the rapid ascent (sea-level to more than 500 meters at Sabuncubeli Pass) across Mount Sipylus's mythic scenery.


title: Manisa

text: The historic part of Manisa spreads out from a forested valley in the immediate slopes of Sipylus mountainside, along Çaybaşı Stream which flows next to Niobe's "Weeping Rock" (""Ağlayan Kaya""), an ancient bridge called the "Red Bridge" (""Kırmızı Köprü"") as well as to several tombs-shrines in the Turkish style dating back to the Saruhan period (14th century). Under Ottoman rule in the centuries that followed, the city had already extended into the undulated terrain at the start of the plain. In the last couple of decades, Manisa's width more than tripled in size across its vast plain formed by the alluvial deposits of the River Gediz, a development in which the construction of new block apartments, industrial zones and of Celal Bayar University campus played a key role.


title: Manisa

text: The city of Manisa is also widely visited, especially during March and September festivals, the former festival being the continuation of a five-hundred-year-old "Mesir Paste Distribution" tradition, and also for the nearby Mount Spil national park. It is also a departure point for other visitor attractions of international acclaim which are located nearby within Manisa's depending region, such as Sardes and Alaşehir (ancient Philadelphia) inland. The city also has a Jewish community.


title: Manisa

text: Historically, the city was also called "Magnesia", and more precisely as Magnesia ad Sipylum, to distinguish from Magnesia on the Maeander at a relatively short distance to the south. Traditional view held that the name "Magnesia" derived from the tribe of Magnetes who would have immigrated here from Thessaly at the dawn of the region's recorded history. A connection with native Anatolian languages has also been suggested of recent date, particularly on the basis of discoveries made in the Hittite archives treating the Luwian western Anatolia. The name is rendered as Μαγνησία in ancient and modern Greek language.


title: Manisa

text: The name "Magnesia ad Sipylus" refers to Mount Sipylus (Mount Spil) that towers over the city and Magnesia became a city of importance starting with the Roman dominion, particularly after the 190 BC Battle of Magnesia. The names "Sipylus" or "Sipylum" in reference to a settlement here are also encountered in some sources, again in reference to the mountain and as abbreviated forms. Pliny the Elder, supported by other sources, mentions that formerly in the same place was a very celebrated city which was called "Tantalis" or "the city of Tantalus" whose ruins were still visible around his time.


title: Manisa

text: Under Turkish rule, the name attached to the Beys of "Saruhan", who founded the Beylik which preceded the Ottomans in the region, has been officially used, along with the name Manisa, for the city and the region alternatively and this until the present period of the Republic of Turkey. The Ottoman Turkish form of the name "Manisa" (ماغنيسا) was usually as it is still used presently, but a spelling with a longer first syllable, transcribed to modern Turkish as "Mağnisa", was also occasionally encountered. During the first centuries of the Ottoman Empire, many of the sons of sultans received their education in Manisa and the city is still commonly known in Turkey as "the city of shahzades" ("Şehzadeler şehri"), a distinctive title it shares only with Amasya and Trabzon.


title: Manisa

text: The English language root word ""magnesia"", from which the words ""magnet"" and ""magnetism"" and numerous other derivations were coined, as well as their equivalents in many other languages, may derive from the city's name.


title: Manisa

text: Traces of prehistory in the Manisa region, although few in number, nevertheless include two very interesting finds that shed much light on western Anatolia's past. The first are the fossilized footprints, numbering more than fifty and dated to around 20.000-25.000 BC, discovered in 1969 by MTA, Turkey's state body for mineral exploration, in Sindel village near Manisa's depending district of Salihli and referred to under that village's name. Some of these footprints are on display today in Manisa Museum while their site of origin of Sindel, where there are also prehistoric paintings, will reportedly become Turkey's first geopark through a joint project with the European Commission.


title: Manisa

text: The second finds are tombs contemporaneous with Troy II (3000-2500 BC) and found in the village of Yortan near Kırkağaç district center, north of Manisa. Original burial practices observed in these sepulchres led scholars to the definition of a "Yortan culture" in Anatolia's prehistory, many of whose aspects remain yet to be explored.


title: Manisa

text: Central and southern parts of western Anatolia entered history with the still obscure Luwian kingdom of Arzawa, probably offshoots, as well as neighbors and, after around 1320 BCE, vassals of the Hittite Empire. Cybele monument located at Akpınar on the northern flank of Mount Sipylus, at a distance of from Manisa on the road to Turgutlu is, along with the King of Mira rock relief at Mount Nif near Kemalpaşa and a number of cuneiform tablet records are among the principal evidence of extension of Hittite control and influence in western Anatolia based on local principalities. Cybele monument by itself represents a step of innovation in Hittite art where full-faced figures in high relief are rare.