Biography.

Early life.

Genscher was born on 21 March 1927 in Reideburg (Province of Saxony), now a part of Halle, in what later became East Germany. He was the son of Hilda Kreime and Kurt Genscher. His father, a lawyer, died when Genscher was nine years old. In 1943, he was drafted to serve as a member of the Air Force Support Personnel ("Luftwaffenhelfer") at the age of 16. At age 17, close to the end of the war, he and his fellow soldiers became members of the Nazi Party due to a collective application ("Sammelantrag") by his Wehrmacht unit. He later said he was unaware of it at the time. Late in the war, Genscher was deployed as a soldier in General Walther Wenck's 12th Army, which ostensibly was directed to relieve the siege of Berlin. After the German surrender he was an American and British prisoner of war, but was released after two months. Following World War II, he studied law and economics at the universities of Halle and Leipzig (1946–1949) and joined the East German Liberal Democratic Party (LDPD) in 1946.

Political career.

In 1952, Genscher fled to West Germany, where he joined the Free Democratic Party (FDP). He passed his second state examination in law in Hamburg in 1954 and became a solicitor in Bremen. During these early years after the war, Genscher continuously struggled with illness. From 1956 to 1959 he was a research assistant of the FDP parliamentary group in Bonn. From 1959 to 1965 he was the FDP group managing director, while from 1962 to 1964 he was National Secretary of the FDP.  In 1965 Genscher was elected on the North Rhine-Westphalian FDP list to the West German parliament and remained a member of parliament until his retirement in 1998. He was elected deputy national chairman in 1968. From 1969 he served as minister of the interior in the SPD-FDP coalition government led by Chancellor Willy Brandt.  In 1974 he became foreign minister and vice chancellor, both posts he would hold for 18 years. From 1 October 1974 to 23 February 1985 he was Chairman of the FDP. It was during his tenure as party chairman that the FDP switched from being the junior member of social-liberal coalition to being the junior member of the 1982 coalition with the CDU/CSU. In 1985 he gave up the post of national chairman. After his resignation as Foreign Minister, Genscher was appointed honorary chairman of the FDP in 1992.

Federal Minister of the Interior.

After the federal election of 1969 Genscher was instrumental in the formation of the social-liberal coalition of chancellor Willy Brandt and was on 22 October 1969 appointed as federal minister of the interior. In 1972, while minister for the interior, Genscher rejected Israel's offer to send an Israeli special forces unit to Germany to deal with the Munich Olympics hostage crisis. A flawed rescue attempt by German police forces at Fürstenfeldbruck air base resulted in a bloody shootout, which left all eleven hostages, five terrorists, and one German policeman dead. Genscher's popularity with Israel declined further when he endorsed the release of the three captured attackers following the hijacking of a Lufthansa aircraft on 29 October 1972.  In the SPD–FDP coalition, Genscher helped shape Brandt's policy of deescalation with the communist East, commonly known as "Ostpolitik", which was continued under chancellor Helmut Schmidt after Brandt's resignation in 1974. He would later be a driving factor in continuing this policy in the new conservative-liberal coalition under Helmut Kohl.

Vice Chancellor and Federal Foreign Minister.

In the negotiations on a coalition government of SPD and FDP following the 1976 elections, it took Genscher 73 days to reach agreement with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.  As Foreign Minister, Genscher stood for a policy of compromise between East and West, and developed strategies for an active policy of détente and the continuation of the East-West dialogue with the USSR. He was widely regarded a strong advocate of negotiated settlements to international problems. As a popular story on Genscher's preferred method of shuttle diplomacy has it, "two Lufthansa jets crossed over the Atlantic, and Genscher was on both."  Genscher was a major player in the negotiations on the text of the Helsinki Accords. In December 1976, the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York City accepted Genscher's proposal of an anti-terrorism convention in New York, which was set among other things, to respond to demands from hostage-takers under any circumstances.  Genscher was one of the FDP's driving forces when, in 1982, the party switched sides from its coalition with the SPD to support the CDU/CSU in their Constructive vote of no confidence to have incumbent Helmut Schmidt replaced with opposition leader Helmut Kohl as Chancellor. The reason for this was the increase in the differences between the coalition partners, particularly in economic and social policy. The switch was controversial, not least in his own party.  At several points in his tenure, he irritated the governments of the United States and other allies of Germany by appearing not to support Western initiatives fully. "During the Cold War, his penchant to seek the middle ground at times exasperated United States policy-makers who wanted a more decisive, less equivocal Germany," according to Tyler Marshall. Genscher's perceived quasi-neutralism was dubbed "Genscherism". "Fundamental to "Genscherism" was said to be the belief that Germany could play a role as a bridge between East and West without losing its status as a reliable NATO ally." In the 1980s, Genscher opposed the deployment of new short-range NATO missiles in Germany. At the time, the Reagan Administration questioned whether Germany was straying from the Western alliance and following a program of its own.  In 1984, Genscher became the first Western foreign minister to visit Tehran since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In 1988, he appointed Jürgen Hellner as West Germany's new ambassador to Libya, a post that had been vacant since the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing, a tragedy which U.S. officials blamed on the government of Muammar Gaddafi.  Genscher's proposals frequently set the tone and direction of foreign affairs among Western Europe's democracies. He was also an active participant in the further development of the European Union, taking an active part in the Single European Act Treaty negotiations in the mid-1980s, as well as the joint publication of the Genscher-Colombo plan with Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Emilio Colombo which advocated further integration and deepening of relations in the European Union towards a more federal Europe. He later was among the politicians who pushed hard for monetary union alongside Edouard Balladur, France's finance minister, and Giuliano Amato, circulating a memorandum to that effect.  Genscher retained his posts as foreign minister and vice chancellor through German reunification and until 1992 when he stepped down for health reasons.

Reunification efforts.

Genscher is most respected for his efforts that helped spell the end of the Cold War, in the late 1980s when Communist eastern European governments toppled, and which led to German reunification. During his time in office, he focused on maintaining stability and balance between the West and the Soviet bloc. From the beginning, he argued that the West should seek cooperation with Communist governments rather than treat them as implacably hostile; this policy was embraced by many Germans and other Europeans.  Genscher had great interest in European integration and the success of German reunification. He soon pushed for effective support of political reform processes in Poland and Hungary. For this purpose, he visited Poland to meet the chairman of Solidarity Lech Wałęsa as early as January 1980. Especially from 1987 he campaigned for an "active relaxation" policy response by the West to the Soviet efforts. In the years before German reunification, he made a point of maintaining strong ties with his birthplace Halle, which was regarded as significant by admirers and critics alike.  When thousands of East Germans sought refuge in West German embassies in Czechoslovakia and Poland, Genscher held discussions on the refugee crisis at the United Nations in New York with the foreign ministers of Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1989. Genscher's 30 September 1989 speech from the balcony of the German embassy in Prague was an important milestone on the road to the end of the GDR. In the embassy courtyard thousands of East German citizens had assembled. They were trying to travel to West Germany, but were being denied permission to travel by the Czechoslovak government at the request of East Germany. He announced that he had reached an agreement with the Communist Czechoslovak government that the refugees could leave: "We have come to you to tell you that today, your departure..." (German: "Wir sind zu Ihnen gekommen, um Ihnen mitzuteilen, dass heute Ihre Ausreise..."). After these words, the speech was drowned in cheers.  With his fellow foreign ministers James Baker of the United States and Eduard Shevardnadze of the Soviet Union, Genscher is widely credited with securing Germany's subsequent peaceful unification and the withdrawal of Soviet forces. He negotiated the German reunification in 1990 with his counterpart from the GDR, Markus Meckel. On 12 September 1990 he signed the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany on behalf of West Germany. In November 1990, Genscher and his Polish counterpart Krzysztof Skubiszewski signed the German-Polish Border Treaty on the establishment of the Oder–Neisse line as Poland's western border. Meanwhile, he strongly endorsed the plans of the Bush Administration to assure continued U.S. influence in a post-Cold War Europe.

Post-reunification.

In 1991, Genscher successfully pushed for Germany's recognition of the Republic of Croatia in the Croatian War of Independence shortly after JNA entered Vukovar. After Croatia and Slovenia had declared independence, Genscher concluded that Yugoslavia could not be held together, and that republics that wanted to break from the Serbian-dominated federation deserved quick diplomatic recognition. He hoped that such recognition would stop the fighting. The rest of the European Union was subsequently pressured to follow suit soon afterward. The UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar had warned the German Government, that a recognition of Slovenia and Croatia would lead to an increase in aggression in the former Yugoslavia.  At a meeting of the European Community's foreign ministers in 1991, Genscher proposed to press for a war crimes trial for President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, accusing him of aggression against Kuwait, using chemical weapons against civilians and condoning genocide against the Kurds.  During the Gulf War, Genscher sought to deal with Iraq after other Western leaders had decided to go to war to force it out of Kuwait. Germany made a substantial financial contribution to the allied cause but, citing constitutional restrictions on the use of its armed forces, provided almost no military assistance. In January 1991, Germany sent Genscher on a state visit to Israel and followed up with an agreement to provide the Jewish state with $670 million in military aid, including financing for two submarines long coveted by Israel, a battery of Patriot missiles to defend against Iraqi missiles, 58 armored vehicles specially fitted to detect chemical and biological attacks, and a shipment of gas masks. When, in the aftermath of the war, a far-reaching political debate broke out over how Germany should fulfill its global responsibilities, Genscher responded that if foreign powers expect Germany to assume greater responsibility in the world, they should give it a chance to express its views "more strongly" in the United Nations Security Council. He also famously held that "whatever floats is fine, whatever rolls is not" to sum up Germany's military export policy for restless countries – based on a navy's unsuitability for use against a country's own people.  In 1992, Genscher, together with his Danish colleague Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, took the initiative to create the Council of the Baltic Sea States (CBSS) and the EuroFaculty.  More than half a century after Nazi leaders assembled their infamous exhibition "Degenerate Art," a sweeping condemnation of the work of the avant-garde, Genscher opened a re-creation of the show at the Altes Museum in March 1992, describing Nazi attempts to restrict artistic expression as "a step toward the catastrophe that produced the mass murder of European Jews and the war of extermination against Germany's neighbors." "The paintings in this exhibition have survived oppression and censorship," he asserted in his opening remarks. "They are not only a monument but also a sign of hope. They stand for the triumph of creative freedom over barbarism."  On 18 May 1992 Genscher retired at his own request from the federal government, which he had been member of for a total of 23 years. At the time, he was the world's longest-serving foreign minister and Germany's most popular politician. He had announced his decision three weeks earlier, on 27 April 1992. Genscher did not specify his reasons for quitting; however, he had suffered two heart attacks by that time. His resignation took effect in May, but he remained a member of parliament and continued to be influential in the Free Democratic Party.  Following Genscher's resignation, Chancellor Helmut Kohl and FDP chairman Otto Graf Lambsdorff named Irmgard Schwaetzer, a former aide to Genscher, to be the new Foreign Minister. In a surprise decision, however, a majority of the FDP parliamentary group rejected her nomination and voted instead to name Justice Minister Klaus Kinkel to head the Foreign Ministry.

Activities after politics.

Ahead of the German presidential election in 1994, Genscher proclaimed his lack of interest in the position, but was nonetheless widely considered a leading contender. After a poll taken for "Stern" magazine showed him to be the favored candidate of 48 percent of German voters, he reiterated in 1993 that he would "in no case" accept the presidency.  Having finished his political career, Genscher remained active as a lawyer and in international organizations. In late 1992, Genscher was appointed chairman of a newly established donors' board of the Berlin State Opera. Between 1997 and 2010, Genscher was affiliated with the law firm Büsing, Müffelmann & Theye. He founded his own consulting firm, Hans-Dietrich Genscher Consult GmbH, in 2000. Between 2001 and 2003, he served as president of the German Council on Foreign Relations. In 2001, Genscher headed an arbitration that ended a monthlong battle between German airline Lufthansa and its pilots' union and resulted in an agreement on increasing wages by more than 15 percent by the end of the following year.  In 2008, Genscher joined former Czech President Václav Havel, former United States Ambassador to Germany John Kornblum and several other well-known political figures in calling for a Cold War museum to be built at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. In 2009 Genscher expressed public concern at Pope Benedict XVI's lifting of excommunication of the bishops of the Society of Saint Pius X. Genscher wrote in the "Mitteldeutsche Zeitung": "Poles can be proud of Pope John Paul II. At the last papal election, we said We are the pope! But please—not like this." He argued that Pope Benedict XVI was making a habit of offending non-Catholics. "This is a deep moral and political question. It is about respect for the victims of crimes against humanity", Genscher said.  On 20 December 2013, it was revealed that Genscher played a key role in coordinating the release and flight to Germany of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of Yukos. Genscher had first met Khodorkovsky in 2002 and had chaired a conference at which Khodorkovsky blasted Russian President Vladimir Putin's pursuit of his oil company. Khodorkovsky asked his lawyers during a 2011 prison visit to let Genscher help mediate early release. Once Putin was re-elected in 2012, German Chancellor Angela Merkel instructed her officials to lobby for the president to meet Genscher. The subsequent negotiations involved two meetings between Genscher and Putin — one at Berlin Tegel Airport at the end of Putin's first visit to Germany after he was re-elected in 2012, the other in Moscow. While keeping the chancellor informed, Khodorkovsky's attorneys and Genscher spent the ensuing months developing a variety of legal avenues that could allow Putin to release his former rival early, ranging from amendments to existing laws to clemency. When Khodorkovsky's mother was in a Berlin hospital with cancer in November 2013, Genscher passed a message to Khodorkovsky suggesting the prisoner should write a pardon letter to Putin emphasizing his mother's ill health. Following Putin's pardoning of Khodorkovsky "for humanitarian reasons" in December 2013, a private plane provided by Genscher brought Khodorkovsky to Berlin for a family reunion at the Hotel Adlon.  Genscher signed on in 2014 to be a member of the Southern Corridor Advisory Panel, a BP-led consortium which includes former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Peter Sutherland, chairman of Goldman Sachs International. The panel's purpose is to facilitate the expansion of a vast natural-gas field in the Caspian Sea and the building of two pipelines across Europe. The $45 billion enterprise, championed by the Azerbaijani president, Ilham Aliyev, has been called by critics "the Blair Rich Project."

Death.

Genscher died at his home outside Bonn in Wachtberg on 31 March 2016 from heart failure, one week and three days after his 89th birthday.

Recognition (selection).

Genscher has been awarded honorary citizenship by his birthplace Halle (Saale) (in 1991) and the city of Berlin (in 1993).

External links.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher (21 March 1927 – 31 March 2016) was a German statesman and a member of the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), who served as the Federal Minister of the Interior from 1969 to 1974, and as the Federal Minister of Foreign Affairs and Vice Chancellor of Germany from 1974 to 1992 (except for a two-week break in 1982, after the FDP had left the Third Schmidt cabinet), making him the longest-serving occupant of either post and the only person, holding one of these posts under two different Chancellors of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1991 he was chairman of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).

汉斯-迪特里希·根舍(,1927年-3月21日-2016年-3月31日),生于普鲁士萨克森省的莱德堡(现属哈雷市),是德国自由民主党内的一名重要人物。


Terminology.

Israelis use the Hebrew term'"house of assembly". Ashkenazi Jews have traditionally used the Yiddish term'(cognate with the German,'school') in everyday speech. Sephardi Jews and Romaniote Jews generally use the term "kal" (from the Hebrew "Ḳahal", meaning "community"). Spanish Jews call the synagogue a and Portuguese Jews call it an. Persian Jews and some Karaite Jews also use the term "kenesa", which is derived from Aramaic, and some Mizrahi Jews use "kenis". Some Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative Jews use the word "temple". The Greek word "synagogue" is used in English (German, French and most Romance languages) to cover the preceding possibilities.

Origins.

Although synagogues existed a long time before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, communal worship in the time while the Temple still stood centered around the "korbanot" ("sacrificial offerings") brought by the "kohanim" ("priests") in the Temple in Jerusalem. The all-day Yom Kippur service, in fact, was an event in which the congregation both observed the movements of the "kohen gadol" ("high priest") as he offered the day's sacrifices and prayed for his success.  During the Babylonian captivity (586–537 BCE) the men of the Great Assembly formalized and standardized the language of the Jewish prayers. Prior to that people prayed as they saw fit, with each individual praying in his or her own way, and there were no standard prayers that were recited.  Johanan ben Zakai, one of the leaders at the end of the Second Temple era, promulgated the idea of creating individual houses of worship in whatever locale Jews found themselves. This contributed to the continuity of the Jewish people by maintaining a unique identity and a portable way of worship despite the destruction of the Temple, according to many historians.  Synagogues in the sense of purpose-built spaces for worship, or rooms originally constructed for some other purpose but reserved for formal, communal prayer, however, existed long before the destruction of the Second Temple. The earliest archaeological evidence for the existence of very early synagogues comes from Egypt, where stone synagogue dedication inscriptions dating from the 3rd century BCE prove that synagogues existed by that date. More than a dozen Jewish (and possibly Samaritan) Second Temple era synagogues have been identified by archaeologists in Israel and other countries belonging to the Hellenistic world.  Any Jew or group of Jews can build a synagogue. Synagogues have been constructed by ancient Jewish kings, by wealthy patrons, as part of a wide range of human institutions including secular educational institutions, governments, and hotels, by the entire community of Jews living in a particular place, or by sub-groups of Jews arrayed according to occupation, ethnicity (i.e. the Sephardic, Polish or Persian Jews of a town), style of religious observance (i.e., a Reform or an Orthodox synagogue), or by the followers of a particular rabbi.  It has been theorized that the synagogue became a place of worship in the region upon the destruction of the Second Temple during the First Jewish–Roman War; however, others speculate that there had been places of prayer, apart from the Temple, during the Hellenistic period. The popularization of prayer over sacrifice during the years prior to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE had prepared the Jews for life in the diaspora, where prayer would serve as the focus of Jewish worship.  Despite the possibility of synagogue-like spaces prior to the First Jewish–Roman War, the synagogue emerged as a stronghold for Jewish worship upon the destruction of the Temple. For Jews living in the wake of the Revolt, the synagogue functioned as a "portable system of worship". Within the synagogue, Jews worshipped by way of prayer rather than sacrifices, which had previously served as the main form of worship within the Second Temple.

Middle-Ages.

Rabbi and philosopher, Maimonides (1138–1204), described the various customs in his day with respect to local synagogues: Synagogues and houses of study must be treated with respect. They are swept and sprinkled [with water] to lay the dust. In Spain and the Maghreb, in Babylonia and in the Holy Land, it is customary to kindle lamps in the synagogues and to spread mats on the floor upon which the worshippers sit. In the lands of Edom (Christendom), they sit in synagogues upon chairs [or benches].

Samaritan synagogues.

Name and history.

The Samaritan house of worship is also called a synagogue. During the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE, during the Hellenistic period, the Greek word used in the Diaspora by Samaritans and Jews was the same: "proseucheμ" (literally, a place of prayer); a later, 3rd or 4th century CE inscription, uses a similar Greek term: "eukteμrion" (prayer house). The oldest Samaritan synagogue discovered so far is from Delos in the Aegean Islands, with an inscription dated between 250 and 175 BCE, while most Samaritan synagogues excavated in the wider Land of Israel and ancient Samaria in particular, were built during the 4th-7th centuries, at the very end of the Roman and throughout the Byzantine period.

Distinguishing elements.

The elements which distinguish Samaritan synagogues from contemporary Jewish ones are:

Archaeological finds.

Ancient Samaritan synagogues are mentioned by literary sources or have been found by archaeologists in the Diaspora, in the wider Holy Land, and specifically in Samaria.

Jewish-Christian synagogue-churches.

During the first Christian centuries, Jewish-Christians used houses of worship known in academic literature as synagogue-churches. Scholars have claimed to have identified such houses of worship of the Jews who had accepted Jesus as the Messiah in Jerusalem and Nazareth.

Architectural design.

There is no set blueprint for synagogues and the architectural shapes and interior designs of synagogues vary greatly. In fact, the influence from other local religious buildings can often be seen in synagogue arches, domes and towers.  Historically, synagogues were built in the prevailing architectural style of their time and place. Thus, the synagogue in Kaifeng, China looked very like Chinese temples of that region and era, with its outer wall and open garden in which several buildings were arranged. The styles of the earliest synagogues resembled the temples of other cults of the Eastern Roman Empire. The surviving synagogues of medieval Spain are embellished with mudéjar plasterwork. The surviving medieval synagogues in Budapest and Prague are typical Gothic structures.  With the emancipation of Jews in Western European countries, which not only enabled Jews to enter fields of enterprise from which they were formerly barred, but gave them the right to build synagogues without needing special permissions, synagogue architecture blossomed. Large Jewish communities wished to show not only their wealth but also their newly acquired status as citizens by constructing magnificent synagogues. These were built across Western Europe and in the United States in all of the historicist or revival styles then in fashion. Thus there were Neoclassical, Neo-Byzantine, Romanesque Revival, Moorish Revival, Gothic Revival, and Greek Revival. There are Egyptian Revival synagogues and even one Mayan Revival synagogue. In the 19th century and early 20th century heyday of historicist architecture, however, most historicist synagogues, even the most magnificent ones, did not attempt a pure style, or even any particular style, and are best described as eclectic.  In the post-war era, synagogue architecture abandoned historicist styles for modernism.

Interior elements.

Bimah (platform).

All synagogues contain a "Bimah", a large, raised, reader's platform (called (reading dais) by Sephardim), where the Torah scroll is placed to be read. In Sephardi synagogues it is also used as the prayer leader's reading desk.

Table or lectern.

In Ashkenazi synagogues, the Torah was read on a reader's table located in the center of the room, while the leader of the prayer service, the hazzan, stood at his own lectern or table, facing the Ark. In Sephardic synagogues, the table for reading the Torah (reading dais) was commonly placed at the opposite side of the room from the Torah Ark, leaving the center of the floor empty for the use of a ceremonial procession carrying the Torah between the Ark and the reading table. Most contemporary synagogues feature a lectern for the rabbi.

Torah Ark.

The Torah Ark, called in Hebrew "Aron Kodesh" or 'holy chest', and alternatively called the "heikhal"— or 'temple' by Sephardic Jews, is a cabinet in which the Torah scrolls are kept.  The ark in a synagogue is almost always positioned in such a way such that those who face it are facing towards Jerusalem. Thus, sanctuary seating plans in the Western world generally face east, while those east of Israel face west. Sanctuaries in Israel face towards Jerusalem. Occasionally synagogues face other directions for structural reasons; in such cases, some individuals might turn to face Jerusalem when standing for prayers, but the congregation as a whole does not.  The Ark is reminiscent of the Ark of the Covenant, which held the tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments. This is the holiest spot in a synagogue, equivalent to the Holy of Holies. The Ark is often closed with an ornate curtain, the, which hangs outside or inside the ark doors.

Eternal Light.

Other traditional features include a continually lit lamp or lantern, usually electric in contemporary synagogues, called the (), the "Eternal Light", used as a way to honor the Divine Presence.

Inner decoration.

A synagogue may be decorated with artwork, but in the Rabbinic and Orthodox tradition, three-dimensional sculptures and depictions of the human body are not allowed as these are considered akin to idolatry.

Seating.

Originally, synagogues were made devoid of much furniture, the Jewish congregants in Spain, the Maghreb (North Africa), Babylonia, the Land of Israel and Yemen having a custom to sit upon the floor, which had been strewn with mats and cushions, rather than upon chairs or benches. In other European towns and cities, however, Jewish congregants would sit upon chairs and benches. Today, the custom has spread in all places to sit upon chairs and benches.  Until the 19th century, in an Ashkenazi synagogue, all seats most often faced the Torah Ark. In a Sephardic synagogue, seats were usually arranged around the perimeter of the sanctuary, but when the worshipers stood up to pray, everyone faced the Ark.

Special seats.

Many current synagogues have an elaborate chair named for the prophet Elijah, which is only sat upon during the ceremony of Brit milah.  In ancient synagogues, a special chair placed on the wall facing Jerusalem and next to the Torah Shrine was reserved for the prominent members of the congregation and for important guests. Such a stone-carved and inscribed seat was discovered at archaeological excavations in the synagogue at Chorazin in Galilee and dates from the 4th–6th century; another one was discovered at the Delos Synagogue, complete with a footstool.

Rules for attendees.

Removing one's shoes.

In Yemen, the Jewish custom was to remove one's shoes immediately prior to entering the synagogue, a custom that had been observed by Jews in other places in earlier times. The same practice of removing one's shoes before entering the synagogue was also largely observed among Jews in Morocco in the early 20th-century. Today, the custom of removing one's shoes is no longer practiced in Israel.

Gender separation.

In Orthodox synagogues, men and women do not sit together. The synagogue features a partition () dividing the men's and women's seating areas, or a separate women's section located on a balcony.

Denominational differences.

Reform Judaism.

The German-Jewish Reform movement, which arose in the early 19th century, made many changes to the traditional look of the synagogue, keeping with its desire to simultaneously stay Jewish yet be accepted by the surrounding culture.  The first Reform synagogue, which opened in Hamburg in 1811, introduced changes that made the synagogue look more like a church. These included: the installation of an organ to accompany the prayers (even on Shabbat, when musical instruments are proscribed by halakha), a choir to accompany the hazzan, and vestments for the synagogue rabbi to wear.  In following decades, the central reader's table, the Bimah, was moved to the front of the Reform sanctuary—previously unheard-of in Orthodox synagogues.  Gender separation was also removed.

Synagogue as community center.

Synagogues often take on a broader role in modern Jewish communities and may include additional facilities such as a catering hall, kosher kitchen, religious school, library, day care center and a smaller chapel for daily services.

Synagogue offshoots.

Since many Orthodox and some non-Orthodox Jews prefer to collect a minyan (a quorum of ten) rather than pray alone, they commonly assemble at pre-arranged times in offices, living rooms, or other spaces when these are more convenient than formal synagogue buildings. A room or building that is used this way can become a dedicated small synagogue or prayer room. Among Ashkenazi Jews they are traditionally called (, pl. or, Yiddish for "little house"), and are found in Orthodox communities worldwide.  Another type of communal prayer group, favored by some contemporary Jews, is the "Chavurah" (חבורה, pl. "chavurot", חבורות), or prayer fellowship. These groups meet at a regular place and time, either in a private home or in a synagogue or other institutional space. In antiquity, the Pharisees lived near each other in "chavurot" and dined together to ensure that none of the food was unfit for consumption.

List of "great synagogues".

Some synagogues bear the title "great synagogue".

A synagogue (; from Ancient Greek, ', 'assembly'; ', 'house of assembly', or ', "house of prayer"; Yiddish: "shul", Ladino: ', 'bright as fire', or "") is a Jewish or Samaritan house of worship. Synagogues have a large place for prayer (the main sanctuary) and may also have smaller rooms for study and sometimes a social hall and offices. Some have a separate room for Torah study, called the "beth midrash", lit. "house of study".

犹太教堂(或称犹太会堂)的西文名称是从希腊语而来,转换成拉丁字母是synagogé,直译就是“聚会的场所”。各欧洲语言中称呼类似,如法语和英语的英语:synagogue,意大利语的等。一般由一个主要的祈祷房间和另外几个比较小的研究和学习犹太教的经典《希伯来经》的房间组成。


Overview.

A prime number is a natural number that has exactly two distinct natural number divisors: the number 1 and itself.  To find all the prime numbers less than or equal to a given integer by Eratosthenes' method:  The main idea here is that every value given to will be prime, because if it were composite it would be marked as a multiple of some other, smaller prime. Note that some of the numbers may be marked more than once (e.g., 15 will be marked both for 3 and 5).  As a refinement, it is sufficient to mark the numbers in step 3 starting from, as all the smaller multiples of will have already been marked at that point. This means that the algorithm is allowed to terminate in step 4 when is greater than.  Another refinement is to initially list odd numbers only,, and count in increments of from in step 3, thus marking only odd multiples of. This actually appears in the original algorithm. This can be generalized with wheel factorization, forming the initial list only from numbers coprime with the first few primes and not just from odds (i.e., numbers coprime with 2), and counting in the correspondingly adjusted increments so that only such multiples of are generated that are coprime with those small primes, in the first place.

Example.

To find all the prime numbers less than or equal to 30, proceed as follows.  First, generate a list of integers from 2 to 30:  The first number in the list is 2; cross out every 2nd number in the list after 2 by counting up from 2 in increments of 2 (these will be all the multiples of 2 in the list):  The next number in the list after 2 is 3; cross out every 3rd number in the list after 3 by counting up from 3 in increments of 3 (these will be all the multiples of 3 in the list):  The next number not yet crossed out in the list after 3 is 5; cross out every 5th number in the list after 5 by counting up from 5 in increments of 5 (i.e. all the multiples of 5):  The next number not yet crossed out in the list after 5 is 7; the next step would be to cross out every 7th number in the list after 7, but they are all already crossed out at this point, as these numbers (14, 21, 28) are also multiples of smaller primes because 7 × 7 is greater than 30. The numbers not crossed out at this point in the list are all the prime numbers below 30:

Algorithm and variants.

Pseudocode.

The sieve of Eratosthenes can be expressed in pseudocode, as follows:  This algorithm produces all primes not greater than. It includes a common optimization, which is to start enumerating the multiples of each prime from. The time complexity of this algorithm is, provided the array update is an operation, as is usually the case.

Segmented sieve.

As Sorenson notes, the problem with the sieve of Eratosthenes is not the number of operations it performs but rather its memory requirements. For large, the range of primes may not fit in memory; worse, even for moderate, its cache use is highly suboptimal. The algorithm walks through the entire array, exhibiting almost no locality of reference.  A solution to these problems is offered by "segmented" sieves, where only portions of the range are sieved at a time. These have been known since the 1970s, and work as follows:  If is chosen to be, the space complexity of the algorithm is, while the time complexity is the same as that of the regular sieve.  For ranges with upper limit so large that the sieving primes below as required by the page segmented sieve of Eratosthenes cannot fit in memory, a slower but much more space-efficient sieve like the sieve of Sorenson can be used instead.

Incremental sieve.

An incremental formulation of the sieve generates primes indefinitely (i.e., without an upper bound) by interleaving the generation of primes with the generation of their multiples (so that primes can be found in gaps between the multiples), where the multiples of each prime are generated directly by counting up from the square of the prime in increments of (or for odd primes). The generation must be initiated only when the prime's square is reached, to avoid adverse effects on efficiency. It can be expressed symbolically under the dataflow paradigm as  Primes can also be produced by iteratively sieving out the composites through [[Trial division|divisibility testing]] by sequential primes, one prime at a time. It is not the sieve of Eratosthenes but is often confused with it, even though the sieve of Eratosthenes directly generates the composites instead of testing for them. Trial division has worse theoretical [[Analysis of algorithms|complexity]] than that of the sieve of Eratosthenes in generating ranges of primes.  When testing each prime, the "optimal" trial division algorithm uses all prime numbers not exceeding its square root, whereas the sieve of Eratosthenes produces each composite from its prime factors only, and gets the primes "for free", between the composites. The widely known 1975 [[functional programming|functional]] sieve code by [[David Turner (computer scientist)|David Turner]] is often presented as an example of the sieve of Eratosthenes but is actually a sub-optimal trial division sieve.

Computational analysis.

The work performed by this algorithm is almost entirely the operations to cull the composite number representations which for the basic non-optimized version is the sum of the range divided by each of the primes up to that range or where is the sieving range in this and all further analysis.  By rearranging Mertens' second theorem, this is equal to as approaches infinity, where M is the Meissel–Mertens constant of about...  The optimization of starting at the square of each prime and only culling for primes less than the square root changes the "" in the above expression to (or ) and not culling until the square means that the sum of the base primes each minus two is subtracted from the operations. As the sum of the first primes is and the prime number theorem says that is approximately, then the sum of primes to is, and therefore the sum of base primes to is expressed as a factor of. The extra offset of two per base prime is, where is the prime-counting function in this case, or ; expressing this as a factor of as are the other terms, this is. Combining all of this, the expression for the number of optimized operations without wheel factorization is  For the wheel factorization cases, there is a further offset of the operations not done of where is the highest wheel prime and a constant factor of the whole expression is applied which is the fraction of remaining prime candidates as compared to the repeating wheel circumference. The wheel circumference is and it can easily be determined that this wheel factor is as is the fraction of remaining candidates for the highest wheel prime,, and each succeeding smaller prime leaves its corresponding fraction of the previous combined fraction.  Combining all of the above analysis, the total number of operations for a sieving range up to including wheel factorization for primes up to is approximately  To show that the above expression is a good approximation to the number of composite number cull operations performed by the algorithm, following is a table showing the actually measured number of operations for a practical implementation of the sieve of Eratosthenes as compared to the number of operations predicted from the above expression with both expressed as a fraction of the range (rounded to four decimal places) for different sieve ranges and wheel factorizations (Note that the last column is a maximum practical wheel as to the size of the wheel gaps Look Up Table - almost 10 million values):  The above table shows that the above expression is a very good approximation to the total number of culling operations for sieve ranges of about a hundred thousand (10) and above.

Algorithmic complexity.

The sieve of Eratosthenes is a popular way to benchmark computer performance. As can be seen from the above by removing all constant offsets and constant factors and ignoring terms that tend to zero as n approaches infinity, the time complexity of calculating all primes below in the random access machine model is operations, a direct consequence of the fact that the prime harmonic series asymptotically approaches. It has an exponential time complexity with regard to input size, though, which makes it a pseudo-polynomial algorithm. The basic algorithm requires of memory.  The bit complexity of the algorithm is bit operations with a memory requirement of.  The normally implemented page segmented version has the same operational complexity of as the non-segmented version but reduces the space requirements to the very minimal size of the segment page plus the memory required to store the base primes less than the square root of the range used to cull composites from successive page segments of size.  A special rarely if ever implemented segmented version of the sieve of Eratosthenes, with basic optimizations, uses operations and bits of memory.  To show that the above approximation in complexity is not very accurate even for about as large as practical a range, the following is a table of the estimated number of operations as a fraction of the range rounded to four places, the calculated ratio for a factor of ten change in range based on this estimate, and the factor based on the estimate for various ranges and wheel factorizations (the combo column uses a frequently practically used pre-cull by the maximum wheel factorization but only the 2/3/5/7 wheel for the wheel factor as the full factorization is difficult to implement efficiently for page segmentation):  The above shows that the estimate is not very accurate even for maximum practical ranges of about 10. One can see why it does not match by looking at the computational analysis above and seeing that within these practical sieving range limits, there are very significant constant offset terms such that the very slowly growing term does not get large enough so as to make these terms insignificant until the sieving range approaches infinity – well beyond any practical sieving range. Within these practical ranges, these significant constant offsets mean that the performance of the Sieve of Eratosthenes is much better than one would expect just using the asymptotic time complexity estimates by a significant amount, but that also means that the slope of the performance with increasing range is steeper than predicted as the benefit of the constant offsets becomes slightly less significant.  One should also note that in using the calculated operation ratios to the sieve range, it must be less than about 0.2587 in order to be faster than the often compared sieve of Atkin if the operations take approximately the same time each in CPU clock cycles, which is a reasonable assumption for the one huge bit array algorithm. Using that assumption, the sieve of Atkin is only faster than the maximally wheel factorized sieve of Eratosthenes for ranges of over 10 at which point the huge sieve buffer array would need about a quarter of a terabyte (about 250 gigabytes) of RAM memory even if bit packing were used. An analysis of the page segmented versions will show that the assumption that the time per operation stays the same between the two algorithms does not hold for page segmentation and that the sieve of Atkin operations get slower much faster than the sieve of Eratosthenes with increasing range. Thus for practical purposes, the maximally wheel factorized Sieve of Eratosthenes is faster than the Sieve of Atkin although the Sieve of Atkin is faster for lesser amounts of wheel factorization.  Using big O notation is also not the correct way to compare practical performance of even variations of the Sieve of Eratosthenes as it ignores constant factors and offsets that may be very significant for practical ranges: The sieve of Eratosthenes variation known as the Pritchard wheel sieve has an performance, but its basic implementation requires either a "one large array" algorithm which limits its usable range to the amount of available memory else it needs to be page segmented to reduce memory use. When implemented with page segmentation in order to save memory, the basic algorithm still requires about bits of memory (much more than the requirement of the basic page segmented sieve of Eratosthenes using bits of memory). Pritchard's work reduced the memory requirement to the limit as described above the table, but the cost is a fairly large constant factor of about three in execution time to about three quarters the sieve range due to the complex computations required to do so. As can be seen from the above table for the basic sieve of Eratosthenes, even though the resulting wheel sieve has performance and an acceptable memory requirement, it will never be faster than a reasonably Wheel Factorized basic sieve of Eratosthenes for any practical sieving range by a factor of about two. Other than that it is quite complex to implement, it is rarely practically implemented because it still uses more memory than the basic Sieve of Eratosthenes implementations described here as well as being slower for practical ranges. It is thus more of an intellectual curiosity than something practical.

Euler's sieve.

Euler's proof of the zeta product formula contains a version of the sieve of Eratosthenes in which each composite number is eliminated exactly once. The same sieve was rediscovered and observed to take linear time by. It, too, starts with a list of numbers from 2 to in order. On each step the first element is identified as the next prime and the results of multiplying this prime with each element of the list are marked in the list for subsequent deletion. The initial element and the marked elements are then removed from the working sequence, and the process is repeated: Here the example is shown starting from odds, after the first step of the algorithm. Thus, on the th step all the remaining multiples of the th prime are removed from the list, which will thereafter contain only numbers coprime with the first primes (cf. wheel factorization), so that the list will start with the next prime, and all the numbers in it below the square of its first element will be prime too.  Thus, when generating a bounded sequence of primes, when the next identified prime exceeds the square root of the upper limit, all the remaining numbers in the list are prime. In the example given above that is achieved on identifying 11 as next prime, giving a list of all primes less than or equal to 80.  Note that numbers that will be discarded by a step are still used while marking the multiples in that step, e.g., for the multiples of 3 it is,,,,...,,..., so care must be taken dealing with this.

In mathematics, the sieve of Eratosthenes is an ancient algorithm for finding all prime numbers up to any given limit.

埃拉托斯特尼筛法(,英语:sieve of Eratosthenes ),简称-{zh-cn:埃氏筛; zh-tw:埃氏筛; zh-hk:爱氏筛}-,也称素数筛。这是一种简单且历史悠久的筛法,用来找出一定范围内所有的质数。


Biography.

Friedrich Fröbel was born at Oberweißbach in the Principality of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt in Thuringia. A cousin of his was the mother of Henriette Schrader-Breymann, and Henriette became a student of his. Fröbel's father, Johann Jacob Fröbel, who died in 1802, was the pastor of the orthodox Lutheran (alt-lutherisch) parish there. Fröbel's mother's name was Jaackbeen Elonor Fraidarika Hofman. The church and Lutheran Christian faith were pillars in Fröbel's own early education.  Oberweißbach was a wealthy village in the Thuringian Forest and had been known centuries long for its natural herb remedies, tinctures, bitters, soaps and salves. Families had their own inherited areas of the forest where herbs and roots were grown and harvested. Each family prepared, bottled, and produced their individual products which were taken throughout Europe on trade routes passed from father to son, who were affectionately called "Buckelapotheker" or "Rucksack Pharmacists". They adorned the church with art acquired from their travels, many pieces of which can still be seen in the renovated structure. The pulpit from which Fröbel heard his father preach is the largest in all Europe and can accommodate a pastor and 12 people, a direct reference to Christ's apostles.  Shortly after Fröbel's birth, his mother's health began to fail. She died when he was nine months old, profoundly influencing his life. In 1792, Fröbel went to live in the small town of Stadt-Ilm with his uncle, a gentle and affectionate man. At the age of 15 Fröbel, who loved nature, became the apprentice to a forester. In 1799, he decided to leave his apprenticeship and study mathematics and botany in Jena. From 1802 to 1805, he worked as a land surveyor.  On 11 September 1818, Fröbel wed Wilhelmine Henriette Hoffmeister (b. 1780) in Berlin. The union was childless. Wilhelmine died in 1839, and Fröbel married again in 1851. His second wife was Louise Levin.

Career.

Throughout his career, Fröbel would move between his interests in nature and in education. He began as an educator in 1805 at the "Musterschule" (a secondary school) in Frankfurt, where he learned about Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi's ideas. He later worked with Pestalozzi in Switzerland, where his ideas further developed. From 1806, Fröbel was the live-in teacher for a Frankfurt noble family's three sons. He lived with the three children from 1808 to 1810 at Pestalozzi's institute in Yverdon-les-Bains in Switzerland.  In 1811, Fröbel once again went back to school in Göttingen and Berlin, eventually leaving without earning a certificate. He became a teacher at the "Plamannsche Schule" in Berlin, a boarding school for boys, and at that time also a pedagogical and patriotic centre.  During his service in the Lützow Free Corps in 1813 and 1814 – when he was involved in two military campaigns against Napoleon – Fröbel befriended Wilhelm Middendorf, a theologian and fellow pedagogue, and Heinrich Langethal, also a pedagogue.  After Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna Fröbel found himself a civilian once again, and became an assistant at the Museum of Mineralogy under Christian Samuel Weiss during 1814–1816, studying and cataloging mineral crystals. He became fascinated with their structure, and later would write: "I continually proved to be true what had long been a presentiment with me, namely, that even in these so-called lifeless stones and fragments of rock, torn from their original bed, there lay germs of transforming, developing energy and activity. Amidst the diversity of forms around me, I recognised under all kinds of various modifications one law of development...And thereafter, my rocks and crystals served me as a mirror wherein I might descry mankind, and man’s development and history...Geology and crystallography not only opened up for me a higher circle of knowledge and insight, but also showed me a higher goal for my inquiry, my speculation, and my endeavour. Nature and man now seemed to me mutually to explain each other, through all their numberless various stages of development."  In 1816, he was offered a professorship in Stockholm, but he turned it down and instead founded the "Allgemeine Deutsche Erziehungsanstalt" (German General Education Institute) in Griesheim near Arnstadt in Thuringia. A year later, he moved the school to Keilhau near Rudolstadt. In 1831, work would be continued there by the other cofounders Wilhelm Middendorf and Heinrich Langethal.  In 1820, Fröbel published the first of his five Keilhau pamphlets, "An unser deutsches Volk" ("To Our German People"). The other four were published between then and 1823.  In 1826 he published his main written work, "Die Menschenerziehung" ("The Education of Man") and founded the weekly publication "Die erziehenden Familien" ("The Educating Families"). In 1828 and 1829 he pursued plans for a people's education institute ("Volkserziehungsanstalt") in Helba (nowadays a constituent community of Meiningen), but they were never realized.  From 1831 to 1836, Fröbel once again lived in Switzerland. In 1831 he founded an educational institute in Wartensee (Lucerne). In 1833 he moved this to Willisau, and from 1835 to 1836, he headed the orphanage in Burgdorf (Berne), where he also published the magazine "Grundzüge der Menschenerziehung" (Features of Human Education). In 1836 appeared his work "Erneuerung des Lebens erfordert das neue Jahr 1836" (The New Year 1836 Calls For the Renewal of Life).  He returned to Germany, dedicated himself almost exclusively to preschool child education and began manufacturing playing materials in Bad Blankenburg. In 1837 he founded a "care, playing and activity institute for small children" in Bad Blankenburg. From 1838 to 1840 he also published the magazine "Ein Sonntagsblatt für Gleichgesinnte" (A Sunday Paper for the Like-Minded).  In 1840 he coined the word kindergarten for the Play and Activity Institute he had founded in 1837 at Bad Blankenburg for young children, together with Wilhelm Middendorf and Heinrich Langethal. These two men were Fröbel's most faithful colleagues when his ideas were also transplanted to Keilhau near Rudolstadt.  He designed the educational play materials known as Froebel Gifts, or "Fröbelgaben", which included geometric building blocks and pattern activity blocks. A book entitled "Inventing Kindergarten", by Norman Brosterman, examines the influence of Friedrich Fröbel on Frank Lloyd Wright and modern art.  Friedrich Fröbel's great insight was to recognise the importance of the activity of the child in learning. He introduced the concept of "free work" ("Freiarbeit") into pedagogy and established the "game" as the typical form that life took in childhood, and also the game's educational worth. Activities in the first kindergarten included singing, dancing, gardening, and self-directed play with the Froebel Gifts. Fröbel intended, with his "" – a songbook that he published – to introduce the young child into the adult world.  These ideas about childhood development and education were introduced to academic and royal circles through the tireless efforts of his greatest proponent, the Baroness (Freiherrin) Bertha Marie von Marenholtz-Bülow. Through her Fröbel made the acquaintance of the Royal House of the Netherlands, various Thuringian dukes and duchesses, including the Romanov wife of the Grand Duke von Sachsen-Weimar. Baroness von Marenholtz-Bülow, Duke von Meiningen and Fröbel gathered donations to support art education for children in honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Goethe. The Duke of Meiningen granted the use of his hunting lodge, called Marienthal (Vale of Mary) in the resort town of Bad Liebenstein for Fröbel to train the first women as Kindergarten teachers "(Kindergärtnerinnen)".  After suppressing the German revolutions of 1848–49, the Prussian government continued a crackdown on new ideas, banning kindergartens in 1851. This dismayed Fröbel, who died on 21 June 1852 in Marienthal, now a constituent community of Schweina. His grave can still be found in the cemetery at Schweina, where his widow, who died in Hamburg, was also buried on 10 January 1900.

Legacy.

Fröbel’s idea of the kindergarten had found appeal, but its spread in Germany was thwarted by the Prussian government, whose education ministry banned it in a "Kindergartenverbot" edict on 7 August 1851 as "atheistic and demagogic" for its alleged "destructive tendencies in the areas of religion and politics". Other German states followed suit.  The reason for the ban, however, may have been a confusion of names. Fröbel's nephew Karl Fröbel had written and published "Weibliche Hochschulen und Kindergärten" ("Female Colleges and Kindergartens"), which apparently met with some disapproval. To quote Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, "The stupid minister (Karl Otto) von Raumer has decreed a ban on kindergartens, basing himself on a book by Karl Fröbel. He is confusing Friedrich and Karl Fröbel."  The sudden ban caused a diaspora of teachers from Germany, spreading their ideas to other countries. Fröbel's student Margarethe Schurz founded the first kindergarten in the United States at Watertown, Wisconsin in 1856; instruction was in the German language, to serve the immigrant community there. She inspired Elizabeth Peabody, who went on to found the first English-language kindergarten in the United States, in Boston in 1860. The German émigré Adolph Douai had also founded a kindergarten in Boston in 1859, but had to close it after only a year. By 1866, however, he was founding others in New York City.  The pedagogue August Köhler was the initiator and cofounder in 1863 of the "Deutscher Fröbelverein" (German Fröbel Association), first for Thuringia, out of which grew the "Allgemeiner Fröbelverein" (General Fröbel Association) in 1872, and a year later the "Deutscher Fröbelverband" (German Fröbel Federation). Köhler critically analyzed and evaluated Fröbel theory, adopted fundamental notions into his own kindergarten pedagogy and expanded on these, developing an independent "Köhler Kindergarten Pedagogy". He first trained kindergarten teachers in Gotha in 1857. In the beginning, Köhler had thought to engage male educators exclusively, but far too few applied.  Thekla Naveau founded in October 1853 the first kindergarten in Sondershausen and on 1 April 1867 the first kindergarten after the Prussian ban was lifted in Nordhausen. Angelika Hartmann founded in 1864 the first kindergarten after Fröbel’s model in Köthen, Anhalt. In 1908 and 1911, kindergarten teacher training was recognized in Germany through state regulatory laws.  Since then, there are many kindergartens in Germany named after Fröbel that continue his method. Many have sprung from parental or other private initiatives. The biggest Fröbel association, "Fröbel e.V.", today runs more than 100 kindergartens and other early childhood institutions throughout the country through the "Fröbel-Gruppe".  Committed to Fröbel's legacy is also the "Neuer Thüringer Fröbelverein" (NTFV; New Thuringian Fröbel Association), and in particular to protecting the legacy's business receipts. As well, the Association runs a school museum and the Fröbel Archive in Keilhau. Furthermore, it engages itself in Fröbel institutions worldwide (United States, United Kingdom, Japan). Through this network, the NTFV further continues one of the most prominent lines of modern pedagogy from the authentic "Fröbel town" of Keilhau. The Fröbel Diploma, now conferred by the Fröbel Academy in Nordhausen, can also be traced back to the NTFV. All this ensures that Fröbel’s ideas will live on into the future.  In 1892 followers of Fröbel established a college of teacher education in South West London to continue his traditions. Froebel College is now a constituent college of Roehampton University and is home to the university's department of education. The University of Roehampton Library is also home to the Froebel Archive for Childhood Studies, a collection of books, archives, photographs, objects and multi-media materials, centring on Friedrich Fröbel’s educational legacy, early years and elementary education. The Demonstration School, originally located at Colet Court, Kensington, has evolved into Ibstock Place School, Roehampton.  Today the Pestalozzi-Fröbel-Haus in Berlin continues to train nursery school teachers.

Cultural influence.

Fröbel's building forms and movement games are forerunners of abstract art as well as a source of inspiration to the Bauhaus movement. In Fröbel’s honour, Walter Gropius designed the "Friedrich Fröbel Haus". Many modernist architects were exposed as children to Fröbel's ideas about geometry, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Buckminster Fuller.

Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel or Froebel (; 21 April 1782 – 21 June 1852) was a German pedagogue, a student of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who laid the foundation for modern education based on the recognition that children have unique needs and capabilities. He created the concept of the "kindergarten" and coined the word, which soon entered the English language as well. He also developed the educational toys known as Froebel gifts.

弗里德里希·威廉·奥古斯特·福禄贝尔(,1782年-4月21日-1852年-6月2日),德国教育家,被公认为是19世纪欧洲最重要的几个教育家之一,现代学前教育的鼻祖。他不仅创办了第一所称为“幼稚园”的学前教育机构,他的教育思想迄今仍在主导着学前教育理论的基本方向。当时来说,能让孩子上其教育课程者均为有钱有权之父母。


History.

In the Phoenician alphabet, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative () in Egyptian, but was reassigned to (as in English "yes") by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound. This letter could also be used to represent, the close front unrounded vowel, mainly in foreign words.  The Greeks adopted a form of this Phoenician "yodh" as their letter "iota" () to represent, the same as in the Old Italic alphabet. In Latin (as in Modern Greek), it was also used to represent and this use persists in the languages that descended from Latin. The modern letter 'j' originated as a variation of 'i', and both were used interchangeably for both the vowel and the consonant, coming to be differentiated only in the 16th century. The dot over the lowercase 'i' is sometimes called a "tittle". In the Turkish alphabet, dotted and dotless I are considered separate letters, representing a front and back vowel, respectively, and both have uppercase ('I', 'İ') and lowercase ('ı', 'i') forms.

Use in writing systems.

English.

In Modern English spelling, represents several different sounds, either the diphthong ("long" ) as in "kite", the short as in "bill", or the sound in the last syllable of "machine". The diphthong developed from Middle English through a series of vowel shifts. In the Great Vowel Shift, Middle English changed to Early Modern English, which later changed to and finally to the Modern English diphthong in General American and Received Pronunciation. Because the diphthong developed from a Middle English long vowel, it is called "long" in traditional English grammar.  The letter is the fifth most common letter in the English language.  The English first-person singular nominative pronoun is "I", pronounced and always written with a capital letter. This pattern arose for basically the same reason that lowercase acquired a dot: so it wouldn't get lost in manuscripts before the age of printing:

Other languages.

In many languages' orthographies, is used to represent the sound or, more rarely,.

Other uses.

The Roman numeral I represents the number 1. In mathematics, the lowercase "" represents the unit imaginary number.

Forms and variants.

In some sans serif typefaces, the uppercase letter I, 'I' may be difficult to distinguish from the lowercase letter L, 'l', the vertical bar character '|', or the digit one '1'. In serifed typefaces, the capital form of the letter has both a baseline and a cap-height serif, while the lowercase L generally has a hooked ascender and a baseline serif.  The uppercase I does not have a dot (tittle) while the lowercase i has one in most Latin-derived alphabets. However, some schemes, such as the Turkish alphabet, have two kinds of I: dotted (İi) and dotless (Iı).  The uppercase I has two kinds of shapes, with serifs () and without serifs (). Usually these are considered equivalent, but they are distinguished in some extended Latin alphabet systems, such as the 1978 version of the African reference alphabet. In that system, the former is the uppercase counterpart of ɪ and the latter is the counterpart of 'i'.

I or i is the ninth letter and the third vowel letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its name in English is "i" (pronounced ), plural "ies".

I, i 是拉丁字母的第9个字母,源于希腊字母 Ι, ι(Iota),与伊特鲁里亚字母一样表示音值/i/。在拉丁语(包括当代拉丁语)还表示/j/(例如英语 Yoke 中的 Y)。在闪族语,/j/是 的普遍发音,/i/只用于外来语。在英语表示不同发音,包括长音和短音。


Etymology.

The word "consonant" comes from Latin oblique stem "cōnsonant-," from "cōnsonāns (littera)" "sounding-together (letter)", a calque of Greek σύμφωνον "sýmphōnon" (plural "sýmphōna").  Dionysius Thrax calls consonants "sýmphōna" "pronounced with" because they can only be pronounced with a vowel. He divides them into two subcategories: "hēmíphōna", semivowels ("half-pronounced"), which correspond to continuants, not semivowels, and "áphōna", mute or silent consonants ("unvoiced"), which correspond to stops, not voiceless consonants.  This description does not apply to some human languages, such as the Salishan languages, in which stops sometimes occur without vowels (see Nuxálk), and the modern conception of consonant does not require co-occurrence with vowels.

Letters.

The word consonant is also used to refer to a letter of an alphabet that denotes a consonant sound. The 21 consonant letters in the English alphabet are B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Z, and usually W and Y. The letter Y stands for the consonant in "yoke", the vowel in "myth", the vowel in "funny", the diphthong in "my", the r-colored vowel in myrrh, the last part of many diphthongs and/or digraphs (e.g. "gu"y", sa"y", bo"y", ke"y"", etc.) and numerous other phonemes. W always represents a consonant except in combination with a vowel letter, as in "growth", "raw", and "how", and in a few loanwords from Welsh, where it stands for, like "crwth" or "cwm".  In some other languages, such as Finnish, "y" only represents a vowel sound.

Consonants versus vowels.

Consonants and vowels correspond to distinct parts of a syllable: The most sonorous part of the syllable (that is, the part that's easiest to sing), called the "syllabic peak" or "nucleus," is typically a vowel, while the less sonorous margins (called the "onset" and "coda") are typically consonants. Such syllables may be abbreviated CV, V, and CVC, where C stands for consonant and V stands for vowel. This can be argued to be the only pattern found in most of the world's languages, and perhaps the primary pattern in all of them. However, the distinction between consonant and vowel is not always clear cut: there are syllabic consonants and non-syllabic vowels in many of the world's languages.  One blurry area is in segments variously called "semivowels", "semiconsonants", or "glides". On one side, there are vowel-like segments that are not in themselves syllabic, but form diphthongs as part of the syllable nucleus, as the "i" in English "boil". On the other, there are approximants that behave like consonants in forming onsets, but are articulated very much like vowels, as the "y" in English "yes". Some phonologists model these as both being the underlying vowel, so that the English word "bit" would phonemically be, "beet" would be, and "yield" would be phonemically. Likewise, "foot" would be, "food" would be, "wood" would be, and "wooed" would be. However, there is a (perhaps allophonic) difference in articulation between these segments, with the in "yes" and "yield" and the of "wooed" having more constriction and a more definite place of articulation than the in "boil" or "bit" or the of "foot".  The other problematic area is that of syllabic consonants, segments articulated as consonants but occupying the nucleus of a syllable. This may be the case for words such as "church" in rhotic dialects of English, although phoneticians differ in whether they consider this to be a syllabic consonant,, or a rhotic vowel, : Some distinguish an approximant that corresponds to a vowel, for "rural" as or ; others see these as a single phoneme,.  Other languages use fricative and often trilled segments as syllabic nuclei, as in Czech and several languages in Democratic Republic of the Congo, and China, including Mandarin Chinese. In Mandarin, they are historically allophones of, and spelled that way in Pinyin. Ladefoged and Maddieson call these "fricative vowels" and say that "they can usually be thought of as syllabic fricatives that are allophones of vowels". That is, phonetically they are consonants, but phonemically they behave as vowels.  Many Slavic languages allow the trill and the lateral as syllabic nuclei (see Words without vowels). In languages like Nuxalk, it is difficult to know what the nucleus of a syllable is, or if all syllables even have nuclei. If the concept of'syllable' applies in Nuxalk, there are syllabic consonants in words like (?)'seal fat'. Miyako in Japan is similar, with 'to build' and 'to pull'.

Features.

Each spoken consonant can be distinguished by several phonetic "features":  All English consonants can be classified by a combination of these features, such as "voiceless alveolar stop". In this case, the airstream mechanism is omitted.  Some pairs of consonants like "p::b", "t::d" are sometimes called fortis and lenis, but this is a phonological rather than phonetic distinction.  Consonants are scheduled by their features in a number of IPA charts:

Examples.

The recently extinct Ubykh language had only 2 or 3 vowels but 84 consonants; the Taa language has 87 consonants under one analysis, 164 under another, plus some 30 vowels and tone. The types of consonants used in various languages are by no means universal. For instance, nearly all Australian languages lack fricatives; a large percentage of the world's languages lack voiced stops as phonemes, such as,, and. Most languages, however, do include one or more fricatives, with being the most common, and a liquid consonant or two, with the most common. The approximant is also widespread, and virtually all languages have one or more nasals, though a very few, such as the Central dialect of Rotokas, lack even these. This last language has the smallest number of consonants in the world, with just six.

Most common.

The most common consonants around the world are the three voiceless stops,,, and the two nasals,. However, even these common five are not universal. Several languages in the vicinity of the Sahara Desert, including Arabic, lack. Several languages of North America, such as Mohawk, lack both of the labials and. The Wichita language of Oklahoma and some West African languages, such as Ijo, lack the consonant on a phonemic level, but do use it as an allophone of another consonant (of in the case of Ijo, and of in Wichita). A few languages on Bougainville Island and around Puget Sound, such as Makah, lack both of the nasals and. The 'click language' Nǁng lacks, and colloquial Samoan lacks both alveolars, and. Despite the 80-odd consonants of Ubykh, it lacks the plain velar in native words, as do the related Adyghe and Kabardian languages. But with a few striking exceptions, such as Xavante and Tahitian—which have no dorsal consonants whatsoever—nearly all other languages have at least one velar consonant: the few languages that do not have a simple usually have a consonant that is very similar. For instance, an areal feature of the Pacific Northwest coast is that historical * has become palatalized in many languages, so that Saanich for example has and but no plain ; similarly, historical * in the Northwest Caucasian languages became palatalized to in Ubykh and in most Circassian dialects.  The most "frequent" consonant (that is, the one appearing most often in speech) in many languages is.

Audio samples.

The following pages include consonant charts with links to audio samples.

In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are, pronounced with the lips;, pronounced with the front of the tongue;, pronounced with the back of the tongue;, pronounced in the throat; and, pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (fricatives); and and, which have air flowing through the nose (nasals). Contrasting with consonants are vowels.

辅音,或称子音,在调音语音学中是语音的一类,与元音相对,发音的调音环节中气流在调音器官某一部分受到完全或部分阻碍。


Description.

Like most other sedimentary rocks, most limestone is composed of grains. Most grains in limestone are skeletal fragments of marine organisms such as coral or foraminifera. These organisms secrete shells made of aragonite or calcite, and leave these shells behind when they die. Other carbonate grains composing limestones are ooids, peloids, intraclasts, and extraclasts.  Limestone often contains variable amounts of silica in the form of chert (chalcedony, flint, jasper, etc.) or siliceous skeletal fragment (sponge spicules, diatoms, radiolarians), and travertine (a precipitate of calcite and aragonite). Secondary calcite may be deposited by supersaturated meteoric waters (groundwater that precipitates the material in caves). This produces speleothems, such as stalagmites and stalactites. Another form taken by calcite is oolitic limestone, which can be recognized by its granular (oolite) appearance.  The primary source of the calcite in limestone is most commonly marine organisms. Some of these organisms can construct mounds of rock known as reefs, building upon past generations. Below about 3,000 meters, water pressure and temperature conditions cause the dissolution of calcite to increase nonlinearly, so limestone typically does not form in deeper waters (see lysocline). Limestones may also form in lacustrine and evaporite depositional environments.  Calcite can be dissolved or precipitated by groundwater, depending on several factors, including the water temperature, pH, and dissolved ion concentrations. Calcite exhibits an unusual characteristic called retrograde solubility, in which it becomes less soluble in water as the temperature increases.  Impurities (such as clay, sand, organic remains, iron oxide, and other materials) will cause limestones to exhibit different colors, especially with weathered surfaces.  Limestone may be crystalline, clastic, granular, or massive, depending on the method of formation. Crystals of calcite, quartz, dolomite or barite may line small cavities in the rock. When conditions are right for precipitation, calcite forms mineral coatings that cement the existing rock grains together, or it can fill fractures.  Travertine is a banded, compact variety of limestone formed along streams, particularly where there are waterfalls and around hot or cold springs. Calcium carbonate is deposited where evaporation of the water leaves a solution supersaturated with the chemical constituents of calcite. Tufa, a porous or cellular variety of travertine, is found near waterfalls. Coquina is a poorly consolidated limestone composed of pieces of coral or shells.  During regional metamorphism that occurs during the mountain building process (orogeny), limestone recrystallizes into marble.  Limestone is a parent material of Mollisol soil group.

Classification.

Two major classification schemes, the Folk and the Dunham, are used for identifying the types of carbonate rocks collectively known as limestone.

Folk classification.

Robert L. Folk developed a classification system that places primary emphasis on the detailed composition of grains and interstitial material in carbonate rocks. Based on composition, there are three main components: allochems (grains), matrix (mostly micrite), and cement (sparite). The Folk system uses two-part names; the first refers to the grains and the second is the root. It is helpful to have a petrographic microscope when using the Folk scheme, because it is easier to determine the components present in each sample.

Dunham classification.

The Dunham scheme focuses on depositional textures. Each name is based upon the texture of the grains that make up the limestone. Robert J. Dunham published his system for limestone in 1962; it focuses on the depositional fabric of carbonate rocks. Dunham divides the rocks into four main groups based on relative proportions of coarser clastic particles. Dunham names are essentially for rock families. His work considers whether or not the grains were originally in mutual contact, and therefore self-supporting, or whether the rock is characterized by the presence of frame builders and algal mats. Unlike the Folk scheme, Dunham deals with the original porosity of the rock. The Dunham scheme is more useful for hand samples because it is based on texture, not the grains in the sample.  A revised classification was proposed by Wright (1992). It adds some diagenetic patterns and can be summarized as follows:

Formation.

See: Carbonate platform

Limestone landscape.

About 10% of all sedimentary rocks are limestones.  Limestone is partially soluble, especially in acid, and therefore forms many erosional landforms. These include limestone pavements, pot holes, cenotes, caves and gorges. Such erosion landscapes are known as karsts. Limestone is less resistant than most igneous rocks, but more resistant than most other sedimentary rocks. It is therefore usually associated with hills and downland, and occurs in regions with other sedimentary rocks, typically clays.  Karst topography and caves develop in limestone rocks due to their solubility in dilute acidic groundwater. The solubility of limestone in water and weak acid solutions leads to karst landscapes. Regions overlying limestone bedrock tend to have fewer visible above-ground sources (ponds and streams), as surface water easily drains downward through joints in the limestone. While draining, water and organic acid from the soil slowly (over thousands or millions of years) enlarges these cracks, dissolving the calcium carbonate and carrying it away in solution. Most cave systems are through limestone bedrock. Cooling groundwater or mixing of different groundwaters will also create conditions suitable for cave formation.  Coastal limestones are often eroded by organisms which bore into the rock by various means. This process is known as bioerosion. It is most common in the tropics, and it is known throughout the fossil record (see Taylor and Wilson, 2003).  Bands of limestone emerge from the Earth's surface in often spectacular rocky outcrops and islands. Examples include the Rock of Gibraltar, the Burren in County Clare, Ireland; the Verdon Gorge in France; Malham Cove in North Yorkshire and the Isle of Wight, England; the Great Orme in Wales; on Fårö near the Swedish island of Gotland, the Niagara Escarpment in Canada/United States, Notch Peak in Utah, the Ha Long Bay National Park in Vietnam and the hills around the Lijiang River and Guilin city in China.  The Florida Keys, islands off the south coast of Florida, are composed mainly of oolitic limestone (the Lower Keys) and the carbonate skeletons of coral reefs (the Upper Keys), which thrived in the area during interglacial periods when sea level was higher than at present.  Unique habitats are found on alvars, extremely level expanses of limestone with thin soil mantles. The largest such expanse in Europe is the Stora Alvaret on the island of Öland, Sweden. Another area with large quantities of limestone is the island of Gotland, Sweden. Huge quarries in northwestern Europe, such as those of Mount Saint Peter (Belgium/Netherlands), extend for more than a hundred kilometers.  The world's largest limestone quarry is at Michigan Limestone and Chemical Company in Rogers City, Michigan.

Uses.

Limestone is very common in architecture, especially in Europe and North America. Many landmarks across the world, including the Great Pyramid and its associated complex in Giza, Egypt, were made of limestone. So many buildings in Kingston, Ontario, Canada were, and continue to be, constructed from it that it is nicknamed the 'Limestone City'. On the island of Malta, a variety of limestone called Globigerina limestone was, for a long time, the only building material available, and is still very frequently used on all types of buildings and sculptures. Limestone is readily available and relatively easy to cut into blocks or more elaborate carving. Ancient American sculptors valued limestone because it was easy to work and good for fine detail. Going back to the Late Preclassic period (by 200–100 BCE), the Maya civilization (Ancient Mexico) created refined sculpture using limestone because of these excellent carving properties. The Maya would decorate the ceilings of their sacred buildings (known as lintels) and cover the walls with carved limestone panels. Carved on these sculptures were political and social stories, and this helped communicate messages of the king to his people. Limestone is long-lasting and stands up well to exposure, which explains why many limestone ruins survive. However, it is very heavy, making it impractical for tall buildings, and relatively expensive as a building material.  Limestone was most popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Train stations, banks and other structures from that era were normally made of limestone. It is used as a facade on some skyscrapers, but only in thin plates for covering, rather than solid blocks. In the United States, Indiana, most notably the Bloomington area, has long been a source of high-quality quarried limestone, called Indiana limestone. Many famous buildings in London are built from Portland limestone. Houses built in Odessa in Ukraine in the 19th century were mostly constructed from limestone and the extensive remains of the mines now form the Odessa Catacombs.  Limestone was also a very popular building block in the Middle Ages in the areas where it occurred, since it is hard, durable, and commonly occurs in easily accessible surface exposures. Many medieval churches and castles in Europe are made of limestone. Beer stone was a popular kind of limestone for medieval buildings in southern England.  Limestone and (to a lesser extent) marble are reactive to acid solutions, making acid rain a significant problem to the preservation of artifacts made from this stone. Many limestone statues and building surfaces have suffered severe damage due to acid rain. Likewise limestone gravel has been used to protect lakes vulnerable to acid rain, acting as a pH buffering agent. Acid-based cleaning chemicals can also etch limestone, which should only be cleaned with a neutral or mild alkali-based cleaner.  Other uses include:

Occupational safety and health.

People can be exposed to limestone in the workplace by inhalation of and eye contact with the dust.

United States.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set the legal limit (permissible exposure limit) for limestone exposure in the workplace as 15 mg/m total exposure and 5 mg/m respiratory exposure over an 8-hour workday. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has set a recommended exposure limit (REL) of 10 mg/m total exposure and 5 mg/m respiratory exposure over an 8-hour workday.

Graffiti.

Removing graffiti from weathered limestone is difficult because it is a porous and permeable material. The surface is fragile so usual abrasion methods run the risk of "severe surface loss". Because it is an acid-sensitive stone some cleaning agents cannot be used due to adverse effects.

Degradation by organisms.

The cyanobacterium "Hyella balani" can bore through limestone; as can the green alga "Eugamantia sacculata" and the fungus "Ostracolaba implexa".

Limestone is a carbonate sedimentary rock that is often composed of the skeletal fragments of marine organisms such as coral, foraminifera, and molluscs. Its major materials are the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of calcium carbonate (CaCO). A closely related rock is dolomite, which contains a high percentage of the mineral dolomite, CaMg(CO). In old USGS publications, dolomite was referred to as "magnesian limestone", a term now reserved for magnesium-deficient dolomites or magnesium-rich limestones.

石灰岩(灰石)(CaCO)简称灰岩,又叫石灰石,是以方解石(矿物)为主要成分的碳酸钙岩。石灰岩主要是在浅海的环境下形成的。石灰岩按成因可划分为粒屑石灰岩(流水搬运、堆积形成);生物骨架石灰岩和化学、生物化学石灰岩。