title: Yolande de Polastron

text: Gabrielle's marriage was cordial, if not successful; it was typical of aristocratic arranged marriages. For many years, she was apparently in love with the captain of the Royal Guard, Joseph Hyacinthe François de Paule de Rigaud, Comte de Vaudreuil, although many of her friends considered Vaudreuil too domineering and too uncouth for the kind of society in which Gabrielle moved. It was rumored at Versailles that Gabrielle's youngest child was actually fathered by Vaudreuil. However, the exact nature of Gabrielle's relationship with Vaudreuil has been debated by some historians, who doubted the liaison was sexual. This theory has recently been resurrected by Catholic novelist and commentator Elena Maria Vidal. Despite the claims that they were lovers, Gabrielle showed no hesitation in distancing herself from Vaudreuil whenever she felt her own social position was threatened by the Queen's dislike of the manipulative courtier. There are hardly any letters surviving from the couple, who either in reality may not have been sufficiently close to write to each other when separated, or may just have been very careful in masking their communications for political reasons. Their letters may have been subsequently destroyed either by themselves or others for precaution's sake.


title: Yolande de Polastron

text: Perhaps due to the Queen's intense dislike of the Comte de Vaudreuil, whom she found rude and irritating, Gabrielle's influence over Marie Antoinette temporarily waned after 1785, when the Queen's second son was born. The Queen was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the ambition of her favourites, especially when they championed a politician whom the Queen despised. Marie Antionette confided to another lady-in-waiting, Henriette Campan, that she was "suffering acute dissatisfaction" over the Polignacs. Wrote Campan: "Her Majesty observed to me that when a sovereign raises up favourites in her court she raises up despots against herself". Eventually, Gabrielle felt Marie Antoinette's displeasure and decided to visit friends in England, particularly Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who was the leader of London high society and one of Gabrielle's closest friends. During her time in England, she earned the nickname "Little Po," due to her delicate constitution.


title: Yolande de Polastron

text: On September 14, 1788, anti-monarchy protests renewed, and in October 1788, protestors demanded money for fireworks, they demanded that anyone in a carriage dismount and salute to Henri IV, and they also burned effigies representing Yolande de Polastron, and then the troops were deployed and they dispersed the crowds with great bloodshed in the Place de la Grève.


title: Yolande de Polastron

text: The months leading up to the July 1789 outbreak of the French Revolution saw the Queen and the duchesse de Polignac become close again. Politically, Gabrielle and her friends supported the ultra-monarchist movement in Versailles, and Gabrielle became increasingly important in royalist intrigues as the summer progressed, usually in partnership with her friend, the comte d'Artois, the King's youngest brother.


title: Yolande de Polastron

text: The marquis de Bombelles, a diplomat and politician, remembered Gabrielle's ceaseless work to promote hardline responses against the emergent revolution. Together with the baron de Breteuil, Bombelles' godfather and former diplomat, and the comte d'Artois, Gabrielle persuaded Marie Antoinette to work against the King's popular minister of finances, Jacques Necker. However, without the necessary military support to crush the insurrection, Necker's dismissal fuelled the serious violence in Paris, culminating in the attack on the Bastille fortress.


title: Yolande de Polastron

text: After the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, all the members of the Polignac family went into exile. On Louis XVI's express orders, the comte d'Artois left, as did Breteuil; Gabrielle went with her family to Switzerland, where she kept in contact with the Queen through letters. After Gabrielle had left, the care of the royal children was entrusted to the Marquise de Tourzel.


title: Yolande de Polastron

text: After her departure from France, she and her family lived an ambulating life, travelling from one place to another. She kept in contact with Marie Antoinette through correspondence, by which her place of residence can be traced. The Polignac family travelled through Switzerland, Turin, Rome and Venice (where she attended the wedding of her son in March 1790), and from Italy to Vienna in Austria in 1791. She was reportedly present in the Austrian Netherlands during the Flight to Varennes, and in July 1791, she is noted as one of the extravagantly dressed women who attended the émigrée court of the count of Provence in Koblenz. The emigree court in Koblenz was however dissolved after the Battle of Valmy in 1792, and she returned to Austria, where she died.


title: Yolande de Polastron

text: Gabrielle developed a terminal illness while living in Switzerland, although she had arguably been in poor health for several years. She died in Austria in December 1793, shortly after hearing of Marie Antoinette's execution. Gabrielle's family simply announced that she had died as a result of heartbreak and suffering. Most historians have concluded that she died of cancer, and contradictory royalist reports of her death suggested consumption as an alternative cause.


title: Yolande de Polastron

text: No specific mention of her disease was made in the various allegorical pamphlets which showed the Angel of Death descending to take the soul of the still-beautiful duchesse de Polignac. Her beauty and early death became metaphors for the demise of the old regime, at least in early pamphlets. In subsequent family correspondence, the duchess's beauty was a much-emphasised point.


title: Yolande de Polastron

text: Gabrielle was the mother of Jules, prince de Polignac, who became Prime Minister for Charles X (the former comte d'Artois) in 1829. She was also the mother of Aglaé de Polignac, duchesse de Guiche, who died in 1803, in an accidental fire. Two of her grandsons were Camille Armand Jules Marie, Prince de Polignac and Prince Edmond de Polignac. Her great-great-grandson, Count Pierre de Polignac, was the father of Rainier III, Prince of Monaco. Her descendants can also be found in France and in Russia, where her granddaughter, daughter of "Guichette", married a nobleman, Aleksandr Lvovich .


title: Yolande de Polastron

text: Gabrielle de Polastron's mark in history can be seen in history books, novels, movies, and other media.


title: Yolande de Polastron

text: Her critics among historians have argued that the Duchesse de Polignac typified the aristocratic hangers-on at the court of Versailles before the French Revolution and that she embodied the exclusivity, the obliviousness, and the selfish extravagance of the ruling class. However, more sympathetic historians, such as Pierre de Nolhac and the Marquis de Ségur, agree that most of the problems originated with her entourage and that she was certainly no worse than many of the aristocrats or favourites who had preceded her at Versailles.


title: Yolande de Polastron

text: Assessments of her character aside, it is generally agreed that she was one of the key figures in the ultra-monarchist movement throughout the early summer of 1789, acting under the influence of her friend, the Comte d'Artois.


title: M. M. K. College

text: The Shrimati Mithibai Motiram Kundnani College of Commerce & Economics, commonly known as M. M. K. College (), is a private educational institution, located in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. It is affiliated with Mumbai University and offers a variety of courses in the field of commerce.


title: Buteyko method

text: The Buteyko method or Buteyko Breathing Technique is a form of complementary or alternative physical therapy that proposes the use of breathing exercises primarily as a treatment for asthma and other respiratory conditions.


title: Buteyko method

text: Buteyko asserts that numerous medical conditions, including asthma, are caused or exacerbated by chronically increased respiratory rate or hyperventilation. The method aims to correct hyperventilation and encourage shallower, slower breathing. Treatments include a series of reduced-breathing exercises that focus on nasal-breathing, breath-holding and relaxation.


title: Buteyko method

text: Advocates of the Buteyko method claim that it can alleviate symptoms and reliance on medication for patients with asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and chronic hyperventilation. The medical community questions these claims, given limited and inadequate evidence supporting the theory and efficacy of the method.


title: Buteyko method

text: The Buteyko method was originally developed in the 1950s by physiologist Konstantin Buteyko in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. The first official study into the effectiveness of the Buteyko Method on asthma was undertaken in 1968 at the Leningrad Institute of Pulmonology. The second, held at the First Moscow Institute of Pediatric Diseases in April 1980, eventually led to the head of the ministry of health to issue an order (No 591) for the implementation of the Buteyko method in the treatment of bronchial asthma. Later, this method was introduced to Australia, New Zealand, Britain and the United States, where it has received increasing exposure. Anecdotal reports of life-changing improvements attributed to the Buteyko method abound on the Internet and in books.


title: Buteyko method

text: The Buteyko method is one of a number of breathing retraining methods in use for treating lung diseases, including conventional techniques such as physiotherapist-led breathing exercises as well as alternative medicine techniques such as yoga.


title: Buteyko method

text: In 2019, the popular Indonesian singer Andien posted images of herself, her husband and their two-year-old son with tape over their mouths on social media. The pictures prompted discussion and interest in the Buteyko method.


title: Buteyko method

text: The Buteyko method emphasizes the role of carbon dioxide and hyperventilation in respiratory diseases as well as overall health. It is known that hyperventilation can lead to low carbon dioxide levels in the blood (or hypocapnea), which can subsequently lead to disturbances of the acid-base balance in the blood and lower tissue oxygen levels. Advocates of this method assert that the effects of "chronic" hyperventilation have wider effects than is commonly accepted. These effects include widespread spasms of the muscle in the airways (bronchospasm), disturbance of cell energy production via the Krebs cycle, as well as disturbance of numerous vital homeostatic chemical reactions in the body. The Buteyko method purports to retrain the body's breathing pattern to correct for the presumed "chronic" hyperventilation and hypocapnia, thereby treating or curing the body of these medical problems.


title: Buteyko method

text: The Buteyko method is not widely supported in the medical community, in part due to the lack of research supporting the theory that hyperventilation and hypocapnia causes disease, with one review noting the absence of convincing evidence to indicate that trying to change asthmatics' carbon dioxide level is either "desirable or achievable." Some studies that looked to corroborate the theory sought evidence such as by measuring the carbon dioxide levels in practitioners of Buteyko but failed to find conclusive support, leading some to propose alternate theoretical pathways for this method to improve symptoms.


title: Buteyko method

text: Although variations exist among teachers of the technique in different countries, the main objective is "normalization" of breathing and the three core principles of Buteyko remain the same: nasal breathing, reduced breathing, and relaxation.


title: Buteyko method

text: The Buteyko method emphasizes the importance of nasal breathing, which protects the airways by humidifying, warming, and cleaning the air entering the lungs. Many asthmatics have problems sleeping at night, and this is thought by Buteyko practitioners to be linked with poor posture and/or mouth breathing. By keeping the nose clear and encouraging nasal breathing during the day, night-time symptoms can also improve. Strictly nasal breathing during physical exercise is another key element of the Buteyko method.


title: Buteyko method

text: The core Buteyko exercises involve breath control: consciously reducing either breathing rate or breathing volume. Many teachers refer to Buteyko as 'breathing retraining' and compare the method to learning to ride a bicycle. They say that after adequate practice time, the techniques become instinctive and the exercises are gradually phased out as the condition improves.


title: Buteyko method

text: Buteyko uses a measurement called the Control Pause (CP), the amount of time between breaths that an individual can comfortably hold breath. According to Buteyko teachers, people with asthma who regularly practice Buteyko breathing will notice an increase in CP and decrease in pulse rate that corresponds to decreased asthma symptoms.


title: Buteyko method

text: Buteyko practice emphasizes relaxation to counter asthma attacks. The first feeling of an asthma attack is unsettling and can result in a short period of rapid breathing. Buteyko method claims that by controlling this initial over-breathing phase, asthmatics can prevent a "vicious circle of over-breathing" from developing and spiraling into an asthma attack.


title: Buteyko method

text: Advocates of the Buteyko method claim that it can treat a wide range of other diseases and symptoms (numbering up to 150), including diabetes. However, research into the effectiveness of Buteyko have focused almost exclusively on asthma with a small amount of research on sleep apnea. Members of the medical community have been skeptical of the efficacy of Buteyko due to the often "exaggerated and unsubstantiated claims" earlier made by Buteyko practitioners.


title: Buteyko method

text: There are few high quality studies such as randomized controlled trials looking at the efficacy of treating asthma with "breathing retraining" methods in general, which include the Buteyko method, yoga training and other relaxation techniques. Many of the studies that have evaluated breathing retraining have significant methodological flaws, including small sample sizes, possible patient selection bias as well as heterogeneity in design that makes coming to a firm conclusion difficult. These studies are also hampered by the difficulty in proper blinding and placebo control which could introduce more bias into these studies.


title: Buteyko method

text: In 2015 the Australian Government's Department of Health published the results of a review of alternative therapies that sought to determine if any were suitable for being covered by health insurance; the Buteyko method was one of 17 therapies evaluated for which no clear evidence of effectiveness was found. A 2020 Cochrane review has found that breathing exercises may have some positive impact on quality of life, hyperventilation symptoms and lung function (moderate to very low certainty). A 2014 British clinical guideline said that for adults the Buteyko method could improve some asthma symptoms and quality of life, but that it had little impact on lung function.


title: Lee Leonard

text: Lee Leonard (April 3, 1929 – December 16, 2018) was an American television personality who was involved in the launch of cable television networks ESPN and CNN.


title: Lee Leonard

text: Leonard was born Maxwell Lefkowitz on April 3, 1929, in New York City, the son of Estelle (Cohn), a beautician, and Daniel Lefkowitz. He was a midday radio personality on New York's WNBC-AM (660), shortly after it launched its "Conversation Station," a talk format, in 1964. He was part of a weekday talk-variety lineup that included "Big" Wilson, Robert Alda, Mimi Benzell, Sterling Yates, Bill Mazer, Brad Crandall and Long John Nebel and hosted a competition/quiz show for listeners called "Fortune Phone".


title: Lee Leonard

text: In the early 1970s, Leonard was part of an even earlier network TV innovation, partnering on CBS-TV with Jack Whitaker on "The NFL on CBS", a studio-based show wrapping around the network's coverage of the National Football League with pregame features and halftime and postgame highlights from around the league. As producers changed, Leonard and Whitaker were eventually succeeded by "The NFL Today" with Brent Musburger, Phyllis George, Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder and Irv Cross on one of network TV sports' longest-running studio-based programs. The core of the team would stay until the mid-1980s, while the show itself has aired continuously ever since, except for several years in the 1990s when CBS did not have NFL television rights.


title: Lee Leonard

text: As for Leonard, he would move to NBC and be teamed with Bryant Gumbel on its "GrandStand" show, where he would stay until just before ESPN launched. Also during the mid-1970s, Leonard hosted "Midday Live", the daily talk show on WNEW-TV (now WNYW) in New York City (he was replaced by Bill Boggs). While at WNEW, Leonard was one of the original co-hosts with Bill Mazer of "Sports Extra" - considered a pioneering show for the Sunday Evening Sports Wrap-Up show format.


title: Lee Leonard

text: On September 7, 1979, he was the first person to ever speak on ESPN. He gave a brief introduction before the network aired its first programming, which was the first episode of SportsCenter. Afterwards, he made occasional appearances on the show.


title: Lee Leonard

text: A year later (1980), Leonard moved over to CNN, where he hosted "People Tonight", the network's first Los Angeles-based live entertainment news talk show. Many of today's major name celebrities made their first national talk show appearances on "People Tonight". including Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks and Pee Wee Herman. The show was groundbreaking in its coverage of Hollywood red carpet premieres and many important breaking stories including the deaths of John Lennon and Natalie Wood. Robin Leach cut his teeth as a New York-based correspondent before signing on to do "Entertainment Tonight" and later launching the pop culture hit series, "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous". In the mid-to-late 1980s, Leonard co-hosted CNN's weekday entertainment-news program "Showbiz Today" with Liz Wickersham.


title: Lee Leonard

text: From 1996 to approximately 2002, Lee Leonard hosted "Jersey's Talking" on News 12 New Jersey. Leonard also hosted a public affairs program on the New Jersey-based cable network CN8.


title: Lee Leonard

text: Leonard was married to actress Kelly Bishop, who played Emily Gilmore on the CW show "Gilmore Girls" as well as Marjorie Houseman in "Dirty Dancing". He was married twice previously, including once to actress Salome Jens. He had one daughter. He died in South Orange, New Jersey, on December 16, 2018.


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: The Battle of Lysychansk was a military engagement between Russia and Ukraine in the wider Battle of Donbas of the Eastern Ukraine offensive during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. By May 2022, Lysychansk and its twin city of Sievierodonetsk were the two largest cities of the Luhansk Oblast not under Russian control.


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: On May, Russian forces launched an assault on Sievierodonetsk where a fierce battle followed until late June, when Ukrainian forces pulled out of the city. Fighting then continued as Russian forces started to attack Lysychansk across the Donets River.


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: After intense Russian shelling and ground clashes on the outskirts, the pro-Russian separatist Luhansk People's Republic (LPR) announced their forces had seized Lysychansk on 2 July, although Ukraine initially denied the city's capture. On 3 July, Russia claimed control of Lysychansk. The Ukrainian general staff conceded that their forces had withdrawn from the city "in order to save the lives of Ukrainian defenders."


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: The Russian government captured the entirety of Luhansk Oblast, with the capture of Lysychansk representing the last Ukrainian stronghold to be captured in the region. Russia has described this as the "liberation" of Luhansk Oblast.


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: The twin cities of Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk are divided by the Donets river. The hilltop city of Lysychansk is located in the west bank and offered Ukrainian defenders the high ground. On 11 April, Russian forces shelled Lysychansk with heavy artillery, destroying four houses, killing one person, and injuring another three. By 10 May, Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk had become the only remaining Ukrainian strongholds in the entirety of Luhansk Oblast. During the battle of Sievierodonetsk, the three bridges connecting both cities were destroyed, affording Ukrainian defenders a better defensive position from Russian assaults across the river.


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: By 23 June, Russia had fully broken through in the south, winning the battle at Toshkivka and making major gains south of Lysychansk. Russian forces captured , Myrna Dolyna, and all on 22 June. On 23 June, Russian forces cut off and surrounded the towns of Hirske and Zolote, which they claimed to have fully captured by the next day. By 25 June, Russia captured Sievierodonetsk. With Russia's breakthrough in the south and their victory in Sievierodonetsk, the attention of the Russian offensive shifted to Lysychansk.


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: After the fall of Sievierodonetsk, Lysychansk became the last major city in the Luhansk Oblast under Ukrainian control. Military units of the separatist Luhansk People's Republic (LPR) fought alongside Russian infantry and were supported by Russian artillery and airstrikes. The Rapid Response Brigade of the Ukrainian National Guard stressed that defensive positions in Lysychansk were more defensible than in Sievierodenetsk.


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: On 25 June, Russian and separatist units began entering Lysychansk from the south, reaching a mine and a gelatin factory on the outskirts of the city the same day. According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System also showed "heat anomalies" at the gelatin factory, corroborating reports of military activity there. On 26 June, TASS reported that Russian and separatist forces had entered the city from five directions and were isolating Ukrainian units, but this report could not be independently verified at the time. The Ukrainian general staff said intensive Russian airstrikes and artillery was aimed at cutting off Lysychansk from the south, but did not mention separatists entering the city. Civilian evacuations had been ordered, and one fleeing civilian interviewed in Pokrovsk called the situation in Lysychansk "a horror".


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: On 27 June, CNN reported that civilians in Lysychansk had been urged to leave immediately, as Russian forces gained ground in the city. Video footage taken by people within the city reportedly suggested that some civilians were reluctant to leave their homes, willing to stay regardless of who controlled the city. Ukraine's Lysychansk Military Administration said 10,000-15,000 people remained, and only around 50 people were evacuating per day. Meanwhile, LPR military officers claimed they had cut off two evacuation routes for Ukrainian troops from the city. Russian forces entered the Lysychansk Oil Refinery, located at Verkhnokamyanka, around 10 kilometers southwest of the city center, and consolidated their positions, including setting up artillery posts.


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: On 28 June, Rodion Miroshnik, the LPR's ambassador to Russia, claimed that Ukrainian forces in Lysychansk had begun withdrawing from the city. The ISW theorized that they were conducting a fighting retreat towards more defensible positions in Siversk, Kramatorsk, and Sloviansk.


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: On 29 June, Serhiy Haidai, the Ukrainian governor of Luhansk Oblast, said that Russian units had entered the outskirts of Lysychansk, but denied that there were clashes in the city itself, dismissing claims of such as Russian propaganda. He added that the city was being attacked from many directions. Ukrainian Su-25 and Su-24m bombers reportedly carried out "up to 10 airstrikes" in the Lysychansk area, striking Russian and LPR logistics centers, fuel depots, and armored combat vehicles. Ukraine's general staff said that a Russian airstrike was carried out on the Lysychansk Oil Refinery, where ground engagements were reportedly taking place.


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: On 30 June, governor Serhiy Haidai said there was a "peak of fighting" on the outskirts of the city, with "constant" Russian shelling and repeated ground assaults. The British Defence Ministry, in its daily intelligence bulletin, said the clashes were likely centered around the oil refinery and that Ukrainian units in the city proper were holding their positions. The Ukrainian General Staff said the Russians had "partial success" during assaults in the area of the refinery and were controlling the southeastern and northwestern parts of the plant itself. Russian assaults on the village of Topolivka, northeast of the refinery, and the towns of Vovchoiarivka and Maloriazantseve were "partially successful"; and the Topolivka-Lysychansk road came under Russian fire control. A Sky News report highlighted the "shockingly indiscriminate" Russian shelling on Lysychansk and described on-the-ground conditions in the city. Journalist Alex Crawford called the city "unrecognisable" and reported that 60 percent of the city was in ruins, citing a local police officer. The "46th Battalion of the 24th Brigade" defended the Lysychansk Oil Refinery from within a hidden bunker, offering stubborn resistance. With utilities down, civilians remaining in the city had to gather water from a nearby lake and waited on food parcels from aid distributors. Some civilians interviewed by Crawford blamed the Ukrainian and Western governments for their situation rather than Russia, reflecting a "not insignificant" pro-Russian separatist sentiment in the area.


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: The LPR's Rodion Miroshnik said in a Telegram post that Lysychansk was being attacked from four directions and claimed that Russian units had established a "wide bridgehead" on the right bank of the Donets and had reached the Lysychansk heliport. "From there, with a fairly wide front, they moved in a south-westerly direction towards the city centre." These claims were not independently verified at the time.


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: By 1 July, the Russian defence ministry said its forces had captured the mine and gelatin plant on the city's outskirts, and the northwestern town of Pryvillia as part of their encirclement, along with continued attempts to cut the Lysychansk-Bakhmut highway. The Russians claimed the Ukrainians were suffering increasing desertions and heavy losses in the area, including over 120 soldiers killed in one village within a day.


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: On 2 July, governor Serhiy Haidai again noted the incessant, "high density" shelling of Lysychansk, but sought to emphasize that two Russian advances had been repelled in the direction of Verkhniokamyanka and the gelatin plant. The Russian-backed separatists claimed to have completed its encirclement of the city after occupying the "last strategic heights," while the Ukrainian National Guard said fierce clashes were ongoing but the city was "not surrounded". Subsequently, Russian troops were reported to have reached the center of Lysychansk.


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: Later on 2 July, the separatists announced their forces had seized the city, which was also confirmed by the ISW, saying the capture likely occurred after a withdrawal by Ukrainian forces. The ISW called Ukraine's denial of the city's capture "outdated or erroneous". Rob Lee, a defence blogger covering the war, tweeted videos of Chechen Rosgvardia soldiers outside the administration building in Lysychansk. Pro-Russian sources also tweeted a video of the Soviet Banner of Victory in the ruins of the same building, and a video emerged of residents placing a Soviet flag at the city's "Memorial of Remembrance For The Fallen Soldiers," further corroborating Russian claims of capture.


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: On 3 July, Oleksiy Arestovych, an advisor to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, conceded that Lysychansk was in danger of being captured by the Russians. Luhansk governor Serhiy Haidai said the city was attacked "with inexplicably brutal tactics" and the Russians were "stubbornly advancing" amid losses. Russia's defence minister Sergei Shoigu informed president Vladimir Putin that Russian and LPR forces had fully controlled the city, and the LPR said it was being "cleared of Ukrainian nationalists". Observers noted that the fall of Lysychansk meant that Russia had achieved its strategic objective of capturing all of Luhansk Oblast, as part of its larger goal of seizing the entirety of the Donbas.


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: Later on 3 July, the Ukrainian General Staff confirmed that their forces had withdrawn from Lysychansk, however President Zelenskyy denied that the city was fully captured, saying "...we cannot definitely say that Lysychansk is under [Russian] control. Battles are raging on the outskirts of Lysychansk." Later that night, governor Haidai admitted Lysychansk had fallen and president Zelenskyy vowed to eventually retake the city, "thanks to the increase in the supply of modern weapons."


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: After the fall of Lysychansk, Russia declared full control over the entirety of Luhansk Oblast and President Vladimir Putin ordered a brief reprieve for the fighters that fought along that front. However, Luhansk governor Serhiy Haidai denied that all of the province had been captured and said that there were ongoing clashes in villages and towns on the western outskirts of Lysychansk, on the approach to Siversk.


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: On 10 September, Serhiy Haidai claimed Ukrainian forces moved into the outskirts of Lysychansk, in order to liberate the city., though this hasn't reappeared. However, Ukraine and the ISW claim Ukrainian control over Bilohorivka.


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: A Russian strike on a water line on 27 June killed at least 8 civilians and wounded 42. The Governor of Luhansk Oblast Serhiy Haidai said that a large number of those injured from the attack had to undergo surgery and lost limbs. He also reported that this attack had been effectuated with cluster bombs, the use of which is banned by international law (although neither Russia nor Ukraine are party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions). Another banned weapon that the Russians were alleged to be using near Lysychansk, according to Haidai, were anti-personnel mines. These claims were not independently verified at the time.


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: By 28 June, there were 15,000 civilians still in Lysychansk. 95,000 people lived in the city prior to the invasion.


title: Battle of Lysychansk

text: BBC defence correspondent Jonathan Beale observed that there had been initial hopes by Ukrainian defenders that the high ground offered by Lysychansk would provide a natural strong defence, but Russia's encirclement of the city from the south, north, and east, and superior firepower on the tactical level, prompted Ukrainian troops to withdraw before the pocket was completely closed. Beale also noted that Ukrainian officials were "unusually quiet" on 3 July about fighting in the city, possibly not wanting to broadcast any tactical retreat for operational security reasons.


title: Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit

text: Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is a 2020 racing mixed reality game. It is the fifteenth installment in the "Mario Kart" series, announced in celebration of the 35th anniversary of the "Super Mario" franchise. It was developed by Velan Studios and published by Nintendo released on October 16, 2020 for the Nintendo Switch. Its toy radio-controlled cars race around the player's house, streaming video from their onboard cameras into the video game. It received favorable reviews with 1.27 million copies sold worldwide.


title: Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit

text: Players build racing playsets around the house. The radio controlled cars are equipped with video cameras, controlled via the Nintendo Switch. The track has many traditional "Mario Kart" items. The game supports up to 4 players, either human or AI. The Grand Prix mode races the player against Bowser Jr. and the Koopalings, and unlocks new customization options and costumes for the playable characters. The level creation in "Home Circuit" is performed by placing guidance arrows along four gates to make checkpoints which advance the player through the five-lap race.


title: Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit

text: Velan Studios developed the mixed reality prototype for "Home Circuit", and demonstrated it to Nintendo staff, who were "thrilled" with "its potential". The game was primarily developed by Velan Studios, in collaboration with Nintendo EPD's Production Group No. 4, Nintendo European Research & Development and Nintendo PTD.


title: Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit

text: "Home Circuit" was first revealed in a Nintendo Direct on September 3, 2020, to celebrate the "Super Mario" franchise's 35th anniversary, where it was scheduled for release on October 16, 2020, with a launch price of .99. A toy set featuring Mario and another set featuring Luigi, including their respective drivers, four gates, arrow signs, and a charging cable, were also announced shortly after the Direct, and pre-orders became available shortly after.


title: Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit

text: Velan Studios, stated that the controls were designed to be easy to understand, while remaining faithful to the "Mario Kart" series.


title: Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit

text: Soon after the game's reveal, Ollie Barder of "Forbes" praised the concept, saying he "practically jumped for joy" at the trailer.


title: Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit

text: Within its first week of release in Japan, 73,918 copies were sold, making it the best-selling retail game of the week in the country.


title: Fenella Fielding

text: Fenella Fielding, OBE (born Fenella Marion Feldman; 17 November 1927 – 11 September 2018) was an English stage, film and television actress who rose to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, and was often referred to as "England's first lady of the double entendre". She was known for her seductive image and distinctively husky voice. Fielding appeared in two "Carry On" films, "Carry On Regardless" (1961) and "Carry On Screaming!" (1966).


title: Fenella Fielding

text: Fenella Marion Feldman was born on 17 November 1927 in Hackney, London, to a Romanian Jewish mother, Tilly ("" Katz; 1902–1977), and a Lithuanian Jewish father, Philip Feldman.


title: Fenella Fielding

text: She was the younger sister of Basil, later Baron Feldman. She grew up in Lower Clapton and later Edgware where she attended North London Collegiate School. Her father at one time managed a cinema in Silvertown, east London. She later resided in Chiswick, west London.


title: Fenella Fielding

text: Fielding began her acting career in 1952, concentrating on stage productions, including the Bromley Little Theatre. She was given her first break when she accompanied the then-unknown actor Ron Moody to an audition (they had met in an amateur production at the London School of Economics). Her performance in Sandy Wilson's musical version of "Valmouth" made her a star in 1958. By 1959 she was appearing with Kenneth Williams in the comedy revue "Pieces of Eight", written by Harold Pinter and Peter Cook. Fielding also guested in the "Hancock's Half Hour" episode "The Poetry Society" broadcast in December 1959.


title: Fenella Fielding

text: Fielding starred in her own television programme "Izeena" (1966). She had occasional guest appearances in television programmes such as "The Avengers" (after being passed over as Patrick Macnee's regular partner in favour of Honor Blackman) and in "Danger Man". She appeared in four episodes of "Morecambe and Wise Show" between 1969 and 1972. She was in two of the "Carry On" films, the second was her role as the vampish Valeria in "Carry On Screaming !" (1966), and three of the Doctor films (including "Doctor in Clover"). She interspersed these with performances in plays by Ibsen, Shakespeare and Henry James, reputedly keeping an edition of Plato's writings by her bed. Other theatre credits around this time included Sheridan and Chekhov. In 1977 she appeared on BBC TV's long running show, "The Good Old Days" performing 'Only A Glass of Champagne' and 'How'd You Like to Spoon with Me?'.


title: Fenella Fielding

text: Fielding was the uncredited Village announcer in "The Prisoner" (1967–68), and co-starred with Tom Poston and Robert Morley in the remake of "The Old Dark House" (1963). In "Dougal and the Blue Cat", based on "The Magic Roundabout", she voiced the character of the Blue Voice, referred to as "Madam" by both Buxton (the blue cat of the title) and Dougal at various stages throughout the film. In the late 1960s, Fielding was approached by Federico Fellini to work on one of his films, but turned the work down because she was already booked to perform on stage at the Chichester Festival Theatre.


title: Fenella Fielding

text: Fielding also starred in the children's television series "Uncle Jack" from 1990-1993 as the notorious villainess, The Vixen. In 1999, Fielding starred in Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson's film "Guest House Paradiso". She toured in a production of "Lady Windermere's Fan" the same year. In 2011, Fielding appeared at the Jermyn Street Theatre, London in an English Chamber Theatre presentation of Jane McCulloch's "Dearest Nancy, Darling Evelyn", the dramatised letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh.


title: Fenella Fielding

text: From 2012, Fielding performed readings of English translations of Greek classics by David Stuttard. Her partners for this were Simon Russell Beale and later Stephen Greif. Her autobiography was published in both audio and book form in 2017 and led to a number of appearances on stage reading extracts from it in places all over the UK.


title: Fenella Fielding

text: Fielding was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2018 Birthday Honours for services to drama and charity.


title: Fenella Fielding

text: Fielding voiced “The Blue Voice” in the 1972 English adaptation of the 1970 French film ‘Dougal And The Blue Cat’, 'MOOD', the quirky supercomputer in the video game in a script written by science fiction author Stephen Marley. After 2000 she recorded with "Savoy", a book publishing and recording company. Her work with them includes readings of Colette, J. G. Ballard's "Crash" and T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets". She made an album of cover songs including Robbie Williams's "Angels", Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out of My Head", New Order's "Blue Monday" and the White Stripes' "Passive Manipulation". In 2006, she toured Ireland in "The Vagina Monologues". She provided the voice to two tracks on the Graham Roos album "Quest". In the following years, Fielding was a regular guest contributor on BBC Radio 4's PM and Broadcasting House.


title: Fenella Fielding

text: A 2007 article in "The Independent" remarked that it was "one of the mysteries of British life that Fenella Fielding, whose wit and distinctive stage presence captivated figures such as Kenneth Tynan, Noël Coward and Federico Fellini, should have drifted into obscurity rather than being celebrated", and the same article quotes "The Times" as saying that Fielding's performance as Hedda Gabler was "one of the experiences of a lifetime". A 2017 article in "The Guardian" highlighted a career "renaissance in recent years" and describes Fielding as a phenomenal storyteller. "She reminds me of the great raconteur Quentin Crisp – the same love of language, mastery of its rhythms, perfectly formed sentences, and a joie de vivre even when relating her profound despair."


title: Fenella Fielding

text: Fielding suffered a stroke on 25 August 2018 and died two weeks later at Charing Cross Hospital in Hammersmith, on 11 September 2018, aged 90. She never married or had children.


title: Volkswagen Group MEB platform

text: The Volkswagen Group MEB platform (; English: "modular electric-drive toolkit") is a modular car platform for electric cars developed by the Volkswagen Group and its subsidiaries. It is used in models of Audi, SEAT, Škoda and Volkswagen. The architecture is aimed to "consolidate electronic controls and reduce the number of microprocessors, advance the application of new driver-assistance technology and somewhat alter the way cars are built" by the VW Group.


title: Volkswagen Group MEB platform

text: The MEB platform is part of a Volkswagen strategy to start production of new battery electric vehicles between 2019 and 2025. In 2017, the VW Group announced a gradual transition from combustion engine to battery electric vehicles with all 300 models across 12 brands having an electric version by 2030.


title: Volkswagen Group MEB platform

text: As of May 2018, the VW Group had committed in electric-vehicle batteries supplies and announced plans to outfit 16 factories to build electric cars by the end of 2022. The Volkswagen-branded production cars started to be assembled in VW's Zwickau plant in Germany for the European market at the end of 2019, while two plants in North America and China started production in 2020 and Chattanooga, Tennessee in 2022. The Škoda-branded SUV Vision E is produced in the Škoda plant in Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic, along with electric motors and electric car batteries.


title: Volkswagen Group MEB platform

text: , two types of the MEB platform were slated to be developed: one for passenger vehicles and one for utility automobiles that accommodate heavier cargo. VW also stated that the platform would be available for procurement to competitor manufacturers.


title: Volkswagen Group MEB platform

text: Ford Motor Company has a strategic partnership with Volkswagen for the MEB platform to benefit from economies of scale. Ford plans to build MEB cars by 2023.


title: Volkswagen Group MEB platform

text: The MEB platform is supported by the APP 310 electric motor, which is a permanent magnet brushless motor. Fully developed by Volkswagen, the name "APP" derives from the arrangement of the motor and the gearbox in parallel with the axle, while "310" references its maximum torque of . Maximum torque is achieved at a low engine speed, which means that a 1-speed gearbox is sufficient for the entire rotational speed range. Together with the gearbox, the motor weighs only around .


title: Volkswagen Group MEB platform

text: The motor is produced at component sites in Kassel, Germany and Tianjin, China, while the rotor and stator are produced in Salzgitter, Germany. The two plants will produce up to 1.4 million electric motors each year from 2023 onwards.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Bengali Muslims (; ) are adherents of Islam who ethnically, linguistically and genealogically identify as Bengalis. Comprising about two-thirds of the global Bengali population, they are the second-largest ethnic group among Muslims after Arabs. Bengali Muslims make up the majority of Bangladesh's citizens, and are the largest minority in the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura and Assam.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: They speak or identify the Bengali language as their mother tongue. The majority of Bengali Muslims are Sunnis who follow the Hanafi school of jurisprudence.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: The Bengal region was a leading power of the medieval Islamic East. European traders identified the Bengal Sultanate as "the richest country to trade with". During Emperor Aurangazeb's rule, the Bengal Subah and its citizens in eastern Bengal, chiefly Muslims, had the highest standard of living and real wages in the world. Bengal viceroy Muhammad Azam Shah assumed the imperial throne. Mughal Bengal became increasingly independent under the Nawabs of Bengal in the 18th century.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: The Bengali Muslim population emerged as a synthesis of Islamic and Bengali cultures. After the Partition of India in 1947, they comprised the demographic majority of Pakistan until the independence of East Pakistan (historic East Bengal) as Bangladesh in 1971.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: A Bengali is a person of ethnic and linguistic heritage from the Bengal region in South Asia speaking the Indo-Aryan Bengali language. Islam arrived in the first millennium and influenced the native Bengali culture. The influx of Persian, Turkic, Arab and Mughal settlers contributed further diversity to the cultural development of the region. According to historians, the origin of Bengali Muslim identity lies in the mass conversion by the sufis and immigration of the arabs, persians, turks and other muslims into Bengal in the medieval period. The Muslim population in Bengal further rose with the agricultural and administrative reforms during the Mughal period, particularly in eastern Bengal. Today, most Bengali Muslims live in the modern country of Bangladesh, the world's fourth largest Muslim-majority country, along with the Indian states of West Bengal and Assam.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: The majority of Bengali Muslims are Sunnis who follow the Hanafi school of jurisprudence. There are also minorities of Shias and Ahmadiyas, as well as people who identify as non-denominational (or "just a Muslim").


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Rice-cultivating communities existed in Bengal since the second millennium BCE. The region was home to a large agriculturalist population, marginally influenced by Dharmic religions. Buddhism influenced the region in the first millennium. The Bengali language developed from Apabhramsa, Sanskrit,Magadhi Prakrit between the 7th and 10th centuries. It once formed a single Indo-Aryan branch with Assamese and Oriya, before the languages became distinct.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: The spread of Islam in the Indian subcontinent can be a contested issue. Historical evidences suggest the early Muslim traders and merchants visited Bengal while traversing the Silk Road in the first millennium. One of the earliest mosques in South Asia is under excavation in northern Bangladesh, indicating the presence of Muslims in the area around the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad. Starting in the 9th century, Muslim merchants increased trade with Bengali seaports. Islam first appeared in Bengal during Pala rule, as a result of increased trade between Bengal and the Arab Abbasid Caliphate. Coins of the Abbasid Caliphate have been discovered in many parts of the region. The people of Samatata, in southeastern Bengal, during the 10th-century were of various religious backgrounds. During this time, Arab geographer Al-Masudi, who authored "The Meadows of Gold", travelled to the region and noticed a Muslim community of inhabitants.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: In addition to trade, Islam was also being introduced to the people of Bengal through the migration of Sufi missionaries prior to conquest. The earliest known Sufi missionaries were Syed Shah Surkhul Antia and his students, most notably Shah Sultan Rumi, in the 11th century. Rumi settled in present-day Netrokona, Mymensingh where he influenced the local ruler and population to embrace Islam.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: While Bengal was under the Hindu Sena Empire, subsequent Muslim conquests helped spread Islam throughout the region. Bakhtiyar Khalji, a Turkic Muslim general, defeated king Lakshman Sen in 1206 CE and annexed large parts of Bengal to the Delhi Sultanate. Khalji also mounted an Islamic invasion of Tibet. Following this initial conquest, an influx of missionaries arrived in Bengal and many Bengalis began to adopt Islam as their way of life. Sultan Balkhi and Shah Makhdum Rupos settled in the present-day Rajshahi Division in northern Bengal, preaching to the communities there. A community of 13 Muslim families headed by Burhanuddin also existed in the northeastern Hindu city of Srihatta (Sylhet), claiming their descendants to have arrived from Chittagong. By 1303, hundreds of Sufi preachers led by Shah Jalal aided the Muslim rulers in Bengal to conquer Sylhet, turning the town into Jalal's headquarters for religious activities. Following the conquest, Jalal disseminated his followers across different parts of Bengal to spread Islam, and became a household name among Bengali Muslims.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: The establishment of a single united Bengal Sultanate in 1352 by Shamsuddin Ilyas Shah finally gave rise to a ""Bengali"" socio-linguistic identity. The Ilyas Shahi dynasty acknowledged Muslim scholarship, and this transcended ethnic background. Usman Serajuddin, also known as "Akhi Siraj Bengali", was a native of Gaur in western Bengal and became the Sultanate's court scholar during Ilyas Shah's reign. Alongside Persian and Arabic, the sovereign Sunni Muslim nation-state also enabled the language of the Bengali people to gain patronage and support, contrary to previous states which exclusively favoured Sanskrit, Pali and Persian. The converted Sultan Jalaluddin Muhammad Shah funded the construction of Islamic seminaries as far as Mecca and Madina in the Middle East. The people of Arabia came to know these institutions as al-Madaris al-Bangaliyyah ("Bengali madrasas").


title: Bengali Muslims

text: The Bengal Sultanate was a melting pot of Muslim political, mercantile and military elites. During the 14th century, Islamic kingdoms stretched from Muslim Spain in the west to Bengal in the east. Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta's diary is one of the best known accounts of the prelude to the Bengal Sultanate. Ibn Battuta visited Bengal during the reign of Sultan Fakhruddin Mubarak Shah, a rebel governor of the Delhi Sultanate who established a city state in Sonargaon. At the time, Bengal was divided into the three city states of Sonargaon, Satgaon and Lakhnauti. In 1352, the three city states were united by Ilyas Shah into a single, unitary, independent Bengal Sultanate. The creation of the Bengal Sultanate sparked several Bengal-Delhi Wars, which resulted in Delhi recognizing Bengal's independence. The Ilyas Shahi dynasty consolidated Bengali statehood, the economy and diplomatic relations. A network of Mint Towns - provincial capitals which produced the Sultan's sovereign currency called the "tanka" - was established across Bengal. The Bengali state followed the Persian model of statecraft. Muslims from other parts of the world were imported for military, bureaucratic and household services. These immigrants included Turks from upper India who were originally recruited in Central Asia; as well as black Abyssinians imported via East Africa into the Bengali port of Chittagong. A highly commercialized and monetized economy evolved. Islamic architecture was introduced on a major scale. A huge mosque called the Adina Mosque was built following the design of the Great Mosque of Damascus. A distinct Bengali Muslim architectural style developed, with terracotta and stone buildings showing a fusion of Persian and Bengali elements. Mosques included two categories, including multi-domed rectangular structures and single-domed square structures. A distinct style of Bengali "mihrabs", "minbars", terracotta arabesque, and "do-chala" roofs developed; this influence also spread to other regions.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: The Bengal Sultanate was ruled by five dynastic periods, with each period have a particular ethnic identity. The Ilyas Shahi dynasty was of Turkic origins. It was replaced by the Bengali-origin dynasty of Jalaluddin Muhammad Shah and Shamsuddin Ahmad Shah for a few decades before being restored. In the 1490s, a series of Abyssinian generals took turns in becoming the Sultan of Bengal. They were succeeded by the Hussain Shahi dynasty which claimed Arab descent. They were in turn replaced by the Pashtun rulers of the Suri dynasty, who first acted as regional governors before restoring Bengali independence. The last dynasty, the Karrani dynasty, was also of Pashtun origin. The sultanate period saw a flourishing of Islamic scholarship and the development of Bengali literature. Scholars, writers and poets of sultanate-era Bengal included Usman Serajuddin, Alaul Haq, Nur Qutb Alam, Alaol, Shah Muhammad Sagir, Abdul Hakim, Syed Sultan, Qadi Ruknu'd-Din Abu Hamid Muhammad bin Muhammad al-'Amidi, Abu Tawwama, Saiyid Ibrahim Danishmand, Saiyid Arif Billah Muhammad Kamel and Saiyid Muhammad Yusuf among others. Bengal's tradition of Persian prose was acknowledged by Hafez. The "Dobhashi" tradition saw Bengali transliteration of Arabic and Persian words in Bengali texts to illustrate Islamic epics and stories.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: During the independent sultanate period, Bengal forged strong diplomatic relations with empires outside the subcontinent. The most notable of these relationships was with Ming China and its emperor Yongle. At least a dozen embassies were exchanged between China and Bengal. The Sultan of Bengal even gifted an East African giraffe to the Emperor of China as a tribute to China-Bengal relations. The Chinese Muslim admiral Zheng He visited Bengal as an envoy of the Emperor of China. Bengali ships transported the embassies of Sumatra, Brunei and Malacca to the port of Canton. China and the Timurid ruler of Herat mediated an end to the Bengal Sultanate-Jaunpur Sultanate War. The Sultan of Bengal also acknowledged the nominal authority of the Abbasid caliph in Cairo. Portuguese India was the first European state entity to establish relations with the Bengal Sultanate. The Bengal Sultan permitted the opening of the Portuguese settlement in Chittagong.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Soon after its creation, the Bengal Sultanate sent the first Muslim army into Nepal. Its forces reached as far as Varanasi while pursuing a retreating Delhi Sultan.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Arakan was the most volatile neighbor of the Bengal Sultanate. In 1428, the forces of Bengal restored Min Saw Mun as the king of Arakan after he fled to the court of Jalaluddin Muhammad Shah. According to traditional Arakanese history, Arakan became a tributary state of Bengal and its kings adopted Muslim titles to fashion themselves after Bengali Sultans. Arakan later shrugged off Bengali hegemony and restored full independence. It later invaded southeastern Bengal several times, sometimes with success and sometimes unsuccessfully. Arakan continued to mint its coins following the model of Bengali tanka for 300 years, even after the dissolution of the Bengal Sultanate. A total of 16 Arakanese kings used Muslim titles. Arakan forcefully deported thousands of Bengali Muslims and Hindus during its invasions and collusion with the Portuguese. Deportees included the poet Alaol. As a result, the Bengali minority in Arakan developed a distinct Arakanese identity and became influential elites in Arakanese society. Arakanese Muslims, known today as Rohingya people, trace their ancestry to the period of Bengali influence in Arakan.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: The Bengal Sultanate also counted Tripura as a vassal state. Bengal restored the throne of Tripura by helping Ratna Manikya I to assume the throne. The Bengal Sultanate controlled Odisha at various points since the reign of Ilyas Shah. During the reign of Alauddin Hussain Shah, Bengal became an expanding regional empire. Under Hussain Shah, Bengali territory covered Arakan, Assam, Tripura, Orissa, Bihar and Jaunpur. Hussain Shah minted coins with the proclamation "conqueror of Kamrupa, Kamata, Jajnagar and Orissa". The Pratapgarh Kingdom came under Bengali suzerainty. The island of Chandradwip was annexed by the Hussain Shahi dynasty. In 1498, the Hussain Shahi dynasty dispatched military general Shah Ismail Ghazi with an army of 24,000 soldiers and a naval flotilla to conquer Assam. The Bengal forces overthrew the Khen dynasty. Prince Daniyal, a son of the Sultan, was appointed governor of Assam. Bengali control of Assam extended into the Brahmaputra Valley and up to Hajo. Assamese Muslims can trace their history to the Bengal Sultanate's conquest.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Bengali ships dominated the Bay of Bengal and were the largest ships in the Indian and Pacific oceans. A royal vessel from Bengal could accommodate three tribute missions- from Bengal, Brunei and Sumatra- and was evidently the only vessel capable of such a task. European travelers like Ludovico di Varthema, Duarte Barbosa and Tomé Pires wrote about the presence of a large number of wealthy Bengali merchants and shipowners in Malacca. The trade between Bengal and the Maldives, based on rice and cowry shells, was probably done on Arab-style baghlah ships.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: The Chinese Muslim envoy Ma Huan wrote about a flourishing shipbuilding industry and Bengal's significant seaborne trade. The muslin trade in Bengal, the production of silk and the development of several other crafts were indicated in Ma Huan's list of items exported from Bengal to China. Bengali shipping co-existed with Chinese shipping until the latter withdrew from the Indian Ocean in the mid-15th-century. Bengali port cities like Chittagong and Satgaon were possibly entrepots for importing and re-exporting goods to China.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: The Mughal Empire eventually controlled the region under its Bengal Subah viceregal province. The Mughal Emperors considered Bengal their most prized province. Emperor Akbar redeveloped the Bengali calendar. In the 16th-century, many "Ulama" of the Bengali Muslim intelligentsia migrated to other parts of the subcontinent as teachers and instructors of Islamic knowledge such as Ali Sher Bengali to Ahmedabad, Usman Bengali to Sambhal and Yusuf Bengali to Burhanpur.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: The process of Islamization of eastern Bengal, now Bangladesh, is not fully understood due to limited documentation from the 1200s to 1600s, the period during which Islamization is believed to have occurred. There are numerous theories about how Islam spread in region; however, the overwhelming evidence is strongly suggestive of a gradual transition of the local population from Buddhism, Hinduism and other indigenous religions to Islam starting in the thirteenth century facilitated by Sufi missionaries (such as Shah Jalal in Sylhet for example) and later by Mughal agricultural reforms centered around Sufi missions


title: Bengali Muslims

text: The factors facilitating conversion to Islam from Buddhism, Hinduism and indigenous religions, again is not fully understood. Lack of primary sources from that era have resulted in various hypotheses. Generally modern prevailing hypotheses about the early stages of Islamification of East Bengal focus on Sufi missionaries capitalizing on disaffected Buddhists and other indigenous groups following the initial conquest of the area by the Brahmin and Kshatriya dominated Sena Empire followed a few decades later by the arrival of Bakhtiyar Khalji of the Delhi Sultanate in the early 1200s and the later agrarian reforms of the Mughal Empire in the 1500s.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Centuries prior to the advent of Islam into the region, Bengal was a major center of Buddhism on the Indian Subcontinent. The area was under the rule of the Buddhist Pala Empire for several centuries until its collapse and subsequent conquest by the Hindu Sena Empire in the 1170s. This was an era of significant Buddhist-Brahmin religious conflict as they represented diametrically opposite camps in the Dharmic tradition with the Buddhist focus on equality threatening the Brahmin caste-based power structure. In the preceding centuries Buddhism underwent a slow decline as Hindu kingdom gradually enveloped Buddhists states in the area and began of process of "de-Buddification" manifested by the reframing of Buddhist figures as Hindu avatars and the reincorporation of resistant Buddhist subjects into lower castes in society. As the Pala Empire's base of power was in Northern and Eastern Bengal, it is likely that these were areas with large Buddhist majorities which were likely heavily subjugated the Sena Empire. A few decades following the Sena Conquest of the region, the Sena, themselves, were conquered by Bakhtiyar Khalji opening up the region to a greater influx of Sufi missionaries. This hypothesis would explain why the Islam spread faster in East Bengal than West Bengal. Essentially, East Bengal had a large Buddhist population compared to West Bengal. The conquest of the area by Hindu kingdoms lead to the subjugation of Buddhists in the region. With the Turkic conquest, came the arrival of Sufi missionaries who were more successful at converting the largely disaffected Buddhist East Bengal versus the largely Hindu regions of West Bengal.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: A few centuries later the agrarian reforms of the Mughal Empire accelerated conversion and population growth across Bangladesh by creating a system of farming villages centered around Sufi missions. The Mughals granted landless peasants land around these missions in order to accelerate development of the fertile Ganges plain. The lead to greater concentrations of people in the area with more opportunities for Sufi missionaries to preach Islam. According to historian Richard M. Eaton, Islam became the religion of the plough in the Bengal delta. Islam's emergence in the region was intimately tied with agriculture. The delta was the most fertile region in the empire. Mughal development projects cleared forests and established thousands of Sufi-led villages, which became industrious farming and craftsmanship communities. The projects were most evident in the Bhati region of East Bengal, the most fertile part of the delta.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: This made East Bengal a thriving melting pot with strong trade and cultural networks. It was the most prosperous part of the subcontinent. East Bengal became the center of the Muslim population in the eastern subcontinent and corresponds to modern-day Bangladesh.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: According to the 1881 Census of Bengal, Muslims constituted a bare majority of the population of Bengal proper (50.2 percent compared with the Hindus at 48.5 percent). However, in the eastern part of Bengal, Muslims were thick on the ground. The proportions of Muslims in Rajshahi, Dhaka and Chittagong divisions were 63.2, 63.6 and 67.9 percent respectively. The debate draws on the writings of some late nineteenth-century authors, but in its current form was initially formulated in 1963 by M.A. Rahim. Rahim suggested that a significant proportion of Bengal's Muslims were not Hindu converts but were descendants of 'aristocratic' immigrants from various parts of the Muslim world. Specifically, he estimated that in 1770, of about 10.6 million Muslims in Bengal, 3.3 million (about 30 percent) had 'foreign blood'. In the late 1980s Richard Eaton, in a book and a series of papers, raised awkward questions about the social liberation theory of conversion from Hinduism to Islam that have yet to be fully addressed, further endorsing Rahim's argument. In the late 19th century, when the first census was conducted on Bengal region in the year of (1872), it was found that the number of Hindus are at (18m) and Muslims at (17.5m) were almost the same. According to the 1872 Census, only 1.52% or say 2.66 lakhs of the Bengali Muslim population claimed foreign ancestry.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Jalaluddin Muhammad Shah was born as Jadu, the son of Hindu King Raja Ganesha. He later ruled most of Bengal as a converted Muslim. Jalaluddin played a major role in converting the Hindus of Bengal to Islam. He maintained good rapport with Non-Muslims in his kingdom. According to an interpretation of a Sanskrit sloka by D. C. Bhattacharya, Jalaluddin appointed Rajyadhar, a Hindu, as the commander of his army. He gained support of Muslim scholars – "Ulama" and the "Shaikhs". He reconstructed and repaired the mosques and other religious architectures destroyed by Raja Ganesha.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: The Bengal region was annexed by the East India Company (EIC) in 1757. In the following decades, Bengalis led numerous revolts against Company rule. In the early 19th century, Titumir led a peasant uprising against the East India Company. Meanwhile, the Bengali Muslim Haji Shariatullah led the Faraizi movement, which advocated Islamic revivalism. The Faraizis sought to create a caliphate and cleanse the region's Muslim society of what they deemed "un-Islamic practices". They were successful in galvanising the Bengali peasantry against the EIC. However, the movement experienced a crackdown after the suppression of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and lost impetus after the death of Haji Shariatullah's son Dudu Miyan.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: After 1870, Muslims began a seeking British-style education in increasingly larger numbers. Under the leadership of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan the promotion the English language among Muslims of India also influenced Bengali Muslim society. Social and cultural leaders among Bengali Muslims during this period included Munshi Mohammad Meherullah, who countered Christian missionaries, writers Ismail Hossain Siraji and Mir Mosharraf Hossain; and feminists Nawab Faizunnesa and Roquia Sakhawat Hussain.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: A precursor to the modern state of Bangladesh was the province of Eastern Bengal and Assam in British India. The province was created on 16 October 1905 by the Viceroy of India Lord Curzon. The province covered present-day Bangladesh, northeastern India and a part of West Bengal. It had a Bengali Muslim majority. Dacca, the former Mughal capital of Bengal, was declared by the British as the capital of Eastern Bengal and Assam. The province was established through the first partition of Bengal. The British government cited administrative reasons for the creation of the new province. It promised increased investment in education and the economy of the new province. The partition galvanized Muslim nationalism in South Asia and led to the formation of the All India Muslim League in Dacca in 1906. It also stoked anti-Muslim sentiment and anti-British sentiment among Hindus. Growing opposition from the Indian National Congress, which accused the British of a divide and rule policy, caused the British government to reconsider the new provincial geography. During the Delhi Durbar in 1911, King George V announced that provinces would once again be reorganized. The first partition of Bengal was annulled; while Calcutta lost its status as the imperial capital of India. The imperial capital was shifted to New Delhi; while Calcutta became the capital of a reunited, albeit smaller, Bengal province. Assam was made a separate province. Orissa and Bihar were also separated from Bengal. As a compensation for Dacca, the British government established a university for the city in 1921.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: During the short lifespan of the province, school enrollment increased by 20%. New subjects were introduced into the college curriculum, including Persian, Sanskrit, mathematics, history and algebra. All towns became connected by an inter-district road network. The population of the capital city Dacca rose by 21% between 1906 and 1911.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: An important moment in the history of Bengali self-determination was the Lahore Resolution in 1940, which was promoted by politician A. K. Fazlul Huq. The resolution initially called for the creation of a sovereign state in the "Eastern Zone" of British India. However, its text was later changed by the top leadership of the Muslim League. The Prime Minister of Bengal Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy proposed an independent, undivided, sovereign "Free State of Bengal" in 1947. Despite calls from liberal Bengali Muslim League leaders for an independent United Bengal, the British government moved forward with the Partition of Bengal in 1947. The Radcliffe Line made East Bengal a part of the Dominion of Pakistan. It was later renamed as East Pakistan, with Dhaka as its capital. The All Pakistan Awami Muslim League was formed in Dhaka in 1949. The organisation's name was later secularised as the Awami League in 1955. The party was supported by the Bengali bourgeois, agriculturalists, the middle class, and the intelligentsia. Sir Khawaja Nazimuddin, Mohammad Ali of Bogra, and H. S. Suhrawardy, all of whom were Bengali Muslims, each served as Pakistan's prime minister during the 1950s; however, all three were deposed by the military-industrial complex in West Pakistan. The Bengali Language Movement in 1952 received strong support from Islamic groups, including the Tamaddun Majlish. Bengali nationalism increased in East Pakistan during the 1960s, particularly with the Six point movement for autonomy. The rise of pro-democracy and pro-independence movements in East Pakistan, with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the principal leader, led to the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Bangladesh was founded as a secular Muslim majority nation. In 1977, however, President Ziaur Rahman, trying to consolidate his power under martial law, removed secularism from the constitution and replaced it with "a commitment to the values of Islam." In 2010, the Bangladesh Supreme Court reaffirmed secular principles in the constitution.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Historical Islamic kingdoms that existed in Bengal employed several clever technologies in numerous areas such as architecture, agriculture, civil engineering, water management, etc. The creation of canals and reservoirs was a common practice for the sultanate. New methods of irrigation were pioneered by the Sufis. Bengali mosque architecture featured terracotta, stone, wood and bamboo, with curved roofs, corner towers and multiple domes. During the Bengal Sultanate, a distinct regional style flourished which featured no minarets, but had richly designed mihrabs and minbars as niches.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Islamic Bengal had a long history of textile weaving, including export of muslin during the 17th and 18th centuries. Today, the weaving of Jamdani is classified by UNESCO as an intangible cultural heritage.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Modern science was begun in Bengal during the period of British colonial rule. Railways were introduced in 1862, making Bengal one of the earliest regions in the world to have a rail network. For the general population, opportunities for formal science education remained limited. The colonial government and the Bengali elite established several institutes for science education. The Nawabs of Dhaka established Ahsanullah School of Engineering which later became the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: In the second half of the 20th century, the Bengali Muslim American Fazlur Rahman Khan became one of the most important structural engineers in the world, helping design the world's tallest buildings. Another Bengali Muslim German-American, Jawed Karim, was the co-founder of YouTube.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: In 2016, the modernist Bait-ur-Rouf Mosque, inspired by the Bengal Sultanate-style of buildings, won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Bengali Muslims constitute the world's second-largest Muslim ethnicity (after the Arab world) and the largest Muslim community in South Asia. An estimated 152million Bengali Muslims live in Bangladesh as of 2021, where Islam is the state religion and commands the demographic majority. The Indian state of West Bengal is home to an estimated 23-24 million Bengali Muslims as per 2021 estimation, rest 6-7 million Muslims are Urdu and Surjapuri speaking Muslims. Two districts in West BengalMurshidabad and Maldah have a Muslim majority and North Dinajpur has a plurality. The Indian state of Assam has over 9million Bengali Muslims out of 13 million Muslim population in Assam. Nine out of thirty-three districts in Assam have a Muslim majority. Tripura, a North Eastern state of India has around 3.8 lakh Bengali Muslim population, or say 9% as of 2021. The Rohingya community in western Myanmar have significant Bengali Muslim heritage.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: A large Bengali Muslim diaspora is found in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, which are home to several million expatriate workers from South Asia. A more well-established diaspora also resides in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Pakistan. The first Bengali Muslim settlers in the United States were ship jumpers who settled in Harlem, New York and Baltimore, Maryland in the 1920s and 1930s.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Surnames in Bengali Muslim society reflect the region's cosmopolitan history. They are mainly of Arabic and Persian origin, with a minority of Bengali surnames.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Sheikh Zainuddin was a prominent Bengali Muslim artist in the 18th century during the colonial period. His works were inspired by the style of Mughal courts.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: An indigenous style of Islamic architecture flourished in Bengal during the medieval Sultanate period. Terracotta and stone mosques with multiple domes proliferated in the region. Bengali Muslim architecture emerged as a synthesis of Bengali, Persian, Byzantine, and Mughal elements.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: The Indo-Saracenic style influenced Islamic architecture in South Asia during the British Raj. A notable example of this period is Curzon Hall. Modern and contemporary Islamic architecture evolved in the region since the 1950s.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Sufi spiritual traditions are central to the Bengali Muslim way of life. The most common Sufi ritual is the Dhikr, the practice of repeating the names of God after prayers. Sufi teachings regard the Prophet Muhammad as the primary perfect man who exemplifies the morality of God. Sufism is regarded as the individual internalisation and intensification of the Islamic faith and practice. The Sufis played a vital role in developing Bengali Muslim society during the medieval period. Historic Sufi missionaries are regarded as saints, including Shah Jalal, Khan Jahan Ali, Shah Amanat, Shah Makhdum Rupos and Khwaja Enayetpuri. Their mausoleums are focal points for charity, religious congregations, and festivities.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: As part of the conversion process, a syncretic version of mystical Sufi Islam was historically prevalent in medieval and early modern Bengal. The Islamic concept of tawhid was diluted into the veneration of Hindu folk deities, who were now regarded as pirs. Folk deities such as Shitala (goddess of smallpox) and Oladevi (goddess of cholera) were worshipped as pirs among certain sections of Muslim society.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Bengali Muslims maintain their indigenous language and script. This tradition is similar to that of Central Asian and Chinese Muslims.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Bengali evolved as the most easterly branch of the Indo-European languages. The Bengal Sultanate promoted the literary development of Bengali over Sanskrit, apparently to solidify their political legitimacy among the local populace. Bengali was the primary vernacular language of the Sultanate. Bengali borrowed a considerable amount of vocabulary from Arabic and Persian. Under the Mughal Empire, considerable autonomy was enjoyed in the Bengali literary sphere. The Bengali Language Movement of 1952 was a key part of East Pakistan's nationalist movement. It is commemorated annually by UNESCO as International Mother Language Day on 21 February.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: While proto-Bengali emerged during the pre-Islamic period, the Bengali literary tradition crystallised during the Islamic period. As Persian and Arabic were prestige languages, they significantly influenced vernacular Bengali literature. The first efforts to popularise Bengali among Muslim writers was by the Sufi poet Nur Qutb Alam. The poet established the "Rikhta" tradition which saw poems written in half Persian and half colloquial Bengali. The invocation tradition saw Bengali Muslim poets re-adapting Indian epics by replacing invocations of Hindu gods and goddesses with figures of Islam. The romantic tradition was pioneered by Shah Muhammad Sagir, whose work on "Yusuf and Zulaikha" was widely popular among the people of Bengal. Other notable romantic works included "Layla Madjunn" by Bahram Khan and "Hanifa Kayrapari" by Sabirid Khan. The "Dobhashi" tradition features the use of Arabic and Persian vocabulary in Bengali texts to illustrate Muslim contexts. Medieval Bengali Muslim writers produced epic poetry and elegies, such as "Rasul Vijay" of Shah Barid, "Nabibangsha" of Syed Sultan, "Janganama" of Abdul Hakim and "Maktul Hussain" of Mohammad Khan. Cosmology was a popular subject among Sufi writers. In the 17th century, Bengali Muslim writers such as such as Alaol found refuge in Arakan where he produced his epic, "Padmavati".


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Bengal was also a major center of Persian literature. Several newspapers and thousands of books, documents and manuscripts were published in Persian for 600 years. The Persian poet Hafez dedicated an ode to the literature of Bengal while corresponding with Sultan Ghiyasuddin Azam Shah.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: The first Bengali Muslim novelist was Mir Mosharraf Hossain in the 19th century. The highly acclaimed poetry of Kazi Nazrul Islam espoused spiritual rebellion against fascism and oppression. Nazrul also wrote Bengali ghazals. Begum Rokeya was a pioneering Bengali female writer who published Sultana's Dream, one of the earliest examples of feminist science fiction. The Muslim Literary Society of Bengal was founded by free-thinking and progressive teachers of Dacca University under the chairmanship of Dr.Muhammad Shahidullah on 19 January 1926. The Freedom of Intellect Movement was championed by the society. When Bengal was partitioned in 1947, a distinct literary culture evolved in East Pakistan and modern Bangladesh. Shamsur Rahman was regarded as the country's poet laureate. Jasimuddin became noted for poems and songs reflecting life in rural Bengal. Al Mahmud was considered one of the greatest Bengali poets to have emerged in the 20th century. Humayun Ahmed promoted the Bangladeshi field of magical realism. Akhtaruzzaman Elias was noted for his works set in Old Dhaka. Tahmima Anam has been a noted writer of Bangladeshi English literature.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: A notable feature of Bengali Muslim music is the syncretic Baul tradition. The leading iconic practitioner of Baul tradition was Fakir Lalon Shah. Baul music is included in the UNESCO Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: South Asian classical music is widely prevalent in the region. Alauddin Khan, Ali Akbar Khan, and Gul Mohammad Khan were notable Bengali Muslim exponents of classical music.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: In the field of modern music Runa Laila became widely acclaimed for her musical talents across South Asia.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Dhaka, the capital of Mughal Bengal and present day capital of Bangladesh, has been the epitome of Perso-Bengali and Arab-Bengali cuisines, a contrast to Calcutta, the former capital of the British India and capital of present-day West Bengal, which was the central point of Anglo-Indian cuisine. Within Bengali cuisine, Muslim dishes include the serving of meat curries, pulao rice, various biryani preparations, and dry and dairy-based desserts alongside traditional fish and vegetables. Bakarkhani breads from Dhaka were once immensely popular in the imperial court of the Mughal Empire. Other major breads consumed today include naan and paratha. In present-day Bangladesh the Mughal-influenced foods are immensely popular such as Shuti Kabab, Kalo Bhuna, Korma, Rôst, Mughlai Porota, Jali Kabab, Shami Kabab, Akhni, Tehari, Tanduri Chicken, Kofta, Phirni and Shingara.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Different types of Bengali biryani include the "Kachi" (mutton), "Illish pulao" (hilsa), "Tehari" (beef), and "Murg Pulao" (chicken). "Mezban" is a renowned spicy beef curry from Chittagong. Halwa, pithas, yogurt, and "shemai" are typical Muslim desserts in Bengali cuisine.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Eid-ul-Fitr at the end of Ramadan is the largest religious festival of Bengali Muslims. The festival of sacrifice takes place during Eid-al-Adha, with cows and goats as the main sacrificial animals. Muharram and the Prophet's Birthday are national holidays in Bangladesh. Other festivals like Shab-e-Barat feature prayers and exchange of desserts.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: The Bishwa Ijtema, organised annually in Bangladesh, is the second-largest Islamic congregation after the Hajj. It was founded by the orthodox Sunni Tablighi Jamaat movement in 1954.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: There is no single governing body for the Bengali Muslim community, nor a single authority with responsibility for religious doctrine. However, the semi-autonomous Islamic Foundation, a government institution, plays an important role in Islamic affairs in Bangladesh, including setting festival dates and matters related to zakat. The general Bengali Muslim clergy remains deeply orthodox and conservative. Members of the clergy include Mawlānās, Imams, Ulamas, and Muftis.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: The clergy of the Bengali Muslim Shia minority have been based in the old quarter of Dhaka since the 18th century.


title: Bengali Muslims

text: Muhammad Yunus is the first Bengali Muslim Nobel laureate who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for founding the Grameen Bank and pioneering the concepts of microcredit and microfinance. Begum Rokeya was one of the world's first Muslim feminists. Kazi Nazrul Islam was renowned as the "Rebel Poet" of British India and the National Poet of Bangladesh. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was the first President of Bangladesh. Iskander Mirza was the first president of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Khwaja Salimullah was one of the founders of the All-India Muslim League. Rushanara Ali was the amongst the first Muslim MPs in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. Fazlur Rahman Khan was a prominent American Bengali Muslim engineer who brought in spectacular changes in design of modern skyscraper construction. Jawed Karim is one of the co-founders of YouTube. Sal Khan is a co-founder of Khan Academy. Humayun Rashid Choudhury served as President of the United Nations General Assembly. M. A. G. Osmani was a four star general who founded the Bangladesh Armed Forces. Altamas Kabir was the Chief Justice of India. Nafisa Ali are prominent Bengali Muslims who act in Indian cinema. Alaol was a medieval Bengali Muslim poet who worked in the royal court of Arakan. Mohammad Ali Bogra served as the Prime Minister of Pakistan. Begum Sufia Kamal was a leading Bengali Muslim feminist, poet, and civil society leader. Zainul Abedin was the pioneer of modern Bangladeshi art. Muzharul Islam was the grand master of South Asian modernist terracotta architecture.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: Developed by Western missionaries working among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia in the 19th century and refined by missionaries working in Xiamen and Tainan, it uses a modified Latin alphabet and some diacritics to represent the spoken language. After initial success in Fujian, POJ became most widespread in Taiwan and, in the mid-20th century, there were over 100,000 people literate in POJ. A large amount of printed material, religious and secular, has been produced in the script, including Taiwan's first newspaper, the "Taiwan Church News".


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: During Taiwan under Japanese rule (1895–1945), the use of was suppressed and Taiwanese kana encouraged; it faced further suppression during the Kuomintang martial law period (1947–1987). In Fujian, use declined after the establishment of the People's Republic of China (1949) and by the early 21st century the system was not in general use there. However, Taiwanese Christians, non-native learners of Southern Min, and native-speaker enthusiasts in Taiwan are among those that continue to use . Full computer support was achieved in 2004 with the release of Unicode 4.1.0, and POJ is now implemented in many fonts, input methods, and is used in extensive online dictionaries.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: Versions of have been devised for other Southern Chinese varieties, including Hakka and Teochew Southern Min. Other related scripts include for Gan, for Hakka, for Hainanese, for Fuzhou, for Teochew, for Northern Min, and for Pu-Xian Min.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: In 2006, the Taiwanese Romanization System (), a government-sponsored successor based on , was released. Despite this, native language education, and writing systems for Taiwanese, have remained a fiercely debated topic in Taiwan.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: The name () means "vernacular writing", written characters representing everyday spoken language. The name "vernacular writing" could be applied to many kinds of writing, romanized and character-based, but the term is commonly restricted to the Southern Min romanization system developed by Presbyterian missionaries in the 19th century.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: The missionaries who invented and refined the system used, instead of the name , various other terms, such as "Romanized Amoy Vernacular" and "Romanized Amoy Colloquial." The origins of the system and its extensive use in the Christian community have led to it being known by some modern writers as "Church Romanization" () and is often abbreviated in POJ itself to . () There is some debate on whether "" or "Church Romanization" is the more appropriate name.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: Objections to "" are that it can refer to more than one system and that both literary and colloquial register Southern Min appear in the system and so describing it as "vernacular" writing might be inaccurate. Objections to "Church Romanization" are that some non-Christians and some secular writing use it. POJ today is largely disassociated from its former religious purpose. The term "romanization" is also disliked by some, who see it as belittling the status of by identifying it as a supplementary phonetic system instead of a standalone orthography.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: The history of has been heavily influenced by official attitudes towards the Southern Min vernaculars and the Christian organizations that propagated it. Early documents point to the purpose of the creation of POJ as being pedagogical in nature, closely allied to educating Christian converts.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: The first people to use a romanized script to write Southern Min were Spanish missionaries in Manila in the 16th century. However, it was used mainly as a teaching aid for Spanish learners of Southern Min, and seems not to have had any influence on the development of . In the early 19th century, China was closed to Christian missionaries, who instead proselytized to overseas Chinese communities in South East Asia. The earliest origins of the system are found in a small vocabulary first printed in 1820 by Walter Henry Medhurst, who went on to publish the "Dictionary of the Dialect of the Chinese Language, According to the Reading and Colloquial Idioms" in 1832.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: This dictionary represents the first major reference work in POJ, although the romanization within was quite different from the modern system, and has been dubbed "Early Church Romanization" by one scholar of the subject. Medhurst, who was stationed in Malacca, was influenced by Robert Morrison's romanization of Mandarin Chinese, but had to innovate in several areas to reflect major differences between Mandarin and Southern Min. Several important developments occurred in Medhurst's work, especially the application of consistent tone markings (influenced by contemporary linguistic studies of Sanskrit, which was becoming of more mainstream interest to Western scholars). Medhurst was convinced that accurate representation and reproduction of the tonal structure of Southern Min was vital to comprehension:


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: The system expounded by Medhurst influenced later dictionary compilers with regard to tonal notation and initials, but both his complicated vowel system and his emphasis on the literary register of Southern Min were dropped by later writers. Following on from Medhurst's work, Samuel Wells Williams became the chief proponent of major changes in the orthography devised by Morrison and adapted by Medhurst. Through personal communication and letters and articles printed in "The Chinese Repository" a consensus was arrived at for the new version of POJ, although Williams' suggestions were largely not followed.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: The first major work to represent this new orthography was Elihu Doty's "Anglo-Chinese Manual with Romanized Colloquial in the Amoy Dialect", published in 1853. The manual can therefore be regarded as the first presentation of a pre-modern POJ, a significant step onwards from Medhurst's orthography and different from today's system in only a few details. From this point on various authors adjusted some of the consonants and vowels, but the system of tone marks from Doty's "Manual" survives intact in modern POJ. John Van Nest Talmage has traditionally been regarded as the founder of POJ among the community which uses the orthography, although it now seems that he was an early promoter of the system, rather than its inventor.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: In 1842 the Treaty of Nanking was concluded, which included among its provisions the creation of treaty ports in which Christian missionaries would be free to preach. Xiamen (then known as Amoy) was one of these treaty ports, and British, Canadian and American missionaries moved in to start preaching to the local inhabitants. These missionaries, housed in the cantonment of Gulangyu, created reference works and religious tracts, including a bible translation. Naturally, they based the pronunciation of their romanization on the speech of Xiamen, which became the de facto standard when they eventually moved into other areas of the Hokkien Sprachraum, most notably Taiwan. The 1858 Treaty of Tianjin officially opened Taiwan to western missionaries, and missionary societies were quick to send men to work in the field, usually after a sojourn in Xiamen to acquire the rudiments of the language.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: Quanzhou and Zhangzhou are two major varieties of Southern Min, and in Xiamen they combined to form something "not Quan, not Zhang" – i.e. not one or the other, but rather a fusion, which became known as "Amoy Dialect" or "Amoy Chinese". In Taiwan, with its mixture of migrants from both Quanzhou and Zhangzhou, the linguistic situation was similar; although the resulting blend in the southern city of Tainan differed from the Xiamen blend, it was close enough that the missionaries could ignore the differences and import their system wholesale.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: The fact that religious tracts, dictionaries, and teaching guides already existed in the Xiamen tongue meant that the missionaries in Taiwan could begin proselytizing immediately, without the intervening time needed to write those materials.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: Missionary opinion was divided on whether POJ was desirable as an end in itself as a full-fledged orthography, or as a means to literacy in Chinese characters. William Campbell described POJ as a step on the road to reading and writing the characters, claiming that to promote it as an independent writing system would inflame nationalist passions in China, where characters were considered a sacred part of Chinese culture. Taking the other side, Thomas Barclay believed that literacy in POJ should be a goal rather than a waypoint:


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: A great boon to the promotion of POJ in Taiwan came in 1880 when James Laidlaw Maxwell, a medical missionary based in Tainan, donated a small printing press to the local church, which Thomas Barclay learned how to operate in 1881 before founding the Presbyterian Church Press in 1884. Subsequently, the "Taiwan Prefectural City Church News", which first appeared in 1885 and was produced by Barclay's Presbyterian Church of Taiwan Press, became the first printed newspaper in Taiwan.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: As other authors made their own alterations to the conventions laid down by Medhurst and Doty, evolved and eventually settled into its current form. Ernest Tipson's 1934 pocket dictionary was the first reference work to reflect this modern spelling. Between Medhurst's dictionary of 1832 and the standardization of POJ in Tipson's time, there were a number of works published, which can be used to chart the change over time of :


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: Competition for POJ was introduced during the Japanese era in Taiwan (1895–1945) in the form of Taiwanese kana, a system designed as a teaching aid and pronunciation guide, rather than an independent orthography like POJ. From the 1930s onwards, with the increasing militarization of Japan and the movement encouraging Taiwanese people to "Japanize", there were a raft of measures taken against native languages, including Taiwanese. While these moves resulted in a suppression of POJ, they were "a logical consequence of increasing the amount of education in Japanese, rather than an explicit attempt to ban a particular Taiwanese orthography in favor of Taiwanese kana".


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: The Second Sino-Japanese War beginning in 1937 brought stricter measures into force, and along with the outlawing of romanized Taiwanese, various publications were prohibited and Confucian-style () – private schools which taught Classical Chinese with literary Southern Min pronunciation – were closed down in 1939. The Japanese authorities came to perceive POJ as an obstacle to Japanization and also suspected that POJ was being used to hide "concealed codes and secret revolutionary messages". In the climate of the ongoing war the government banned the "Taiwan Church News" in 1942 as it was written in POJ.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: Initially the Kuomintang government in Taiwan had a liberal attitude towards "local dialects" (i.e. non-Mandarin varieties of Chinese). The National Languages Committee produced booklets outlining versions of Bopomofo for writing the Taiwanese tongue, these being intended for newly arrived government officials from outside Taiwan as well as local Taiwanese. The first government action against native languages came in 1953, when the use of Taiwanese or Japanese for instruction was forbidden. The next move to suppress the movement came in 1955, when the use of POJ for proselytizing was outlawed. At that point in time there were 115,000 people literate in POJ in Taiwan, Fujian, and southeast Asia.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: Two years later, missionaries were banned from using romanized bibles, and the use of "native languages" (i.e. Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, and the non-Sinitic Formosan languages) in church work became illegal. The ban on POJ bibles was overturned in 1959, but churches were "encouraged" to use character bibles instead. Government activities against POJ intensified in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when several publications were banned or seized in an effort to prevent the spread of the romanization. In 1964, use of Taiwanese in schools or official settings was forbidden, and transgression in schools was punished with beatings, fines and humiliation. The "Taiwan Church News" (printed in POJ) was banned in 1969, and only allowed to return a year later when the publishers agreed to print it in Chinese characters.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: In 1974, the Government Information Office banned "A Dictionary of Southern Min", with a government official saying: "We have no objection to the dictionary being used by foreigners. They could use it in mimeographed form. But we don't want it published as a book and sold publicly because of the Romanization it contains. Chinese should not be learning Chinese through Romanization." Also in the 1970s, a POJ New Testament translation known as the "Red Cover Bible" () was confiscated and banned by the Nationalist regime. Official moves against native languages continued into the 1980s, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of the Interior decided in 1984 to forbid missionaries to use "local dialects" and romanizations in their work.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: With the ending of martial law in 1987, the restrictions on "local languages" were quietly lifted, resulting in growing interest in Taiwanese writing during the 1990s. For the first time since the 1950s, Taiwanese language and literature was discussed and debated openly in newspapers and journals. There was also support from the then opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party, for writing in the language. From a total of 26 documented orthographies for Taiwanese in 1987 (including defunct systems), there were a further 38 invented from 1987 to 1999, including 30 different romanizations, six adaptations of Bopomofo and two hangul-like systems. Some commentators believe that the Kuomintang, while steering clear of outright banning of the native language movements after the end of martial law, took a "divide and conquer" approach by promoting Taiwanese Language Phonetic Alphabet (TLPA), an alternative to POJ, which was at the time the choice of the majority inside the nativization movement.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: Native language education has remained a fiercely debated topic in Taiwan into the 21st century and is the subject of much political wrangling.


title: Pe̍h-ōe-jī

text: The current system of has been stable since the 1930s, with a few minor exceptions (detailed below). There is a fair degree of similarity with the Vietnamese alphabet, including the distinction and the use of in Vietnamese compared with in POJ. POJ uses the following letters and combinations: