text:
A team of researchers announced a surprising discovery during a scholarly presentation in Toronto last Friday. The research team, based at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, has been helping to excavate an ancient Roman cemetery at the site of Vagnari in southern Italy. Led by Professor Tracy Prowse, they've been analyzing the skeletons found there by performing DNA and oxygen isotope tests.
The surprise is that the DNA tests show that one of the skeletons, a man, has an East Asian ancestry – on his mother's side. This appears to be the first time that a skeleton with an East Asian ancestry has been discovered in the Roman Empire.
The man with East Asian ancestry may well have been a slave himself. He lived sometime in the first to second century AD, in the early days of the Roman Empire. Much of his skeleton (pictured here) has not survived. The man's surviving grave goods consist of a single pot (which archaeologists used to date the burial). To top things off someone was buried on top of him - with a superior collection of grave goods.
The researchers determined his ancestry by analyzing his mitochondrial DNA – material that is passed down from mother to offspring.
As DNA is passed down from generation to generation there are mutations. People who are related to each other will have similar changes – allowing researchers to put them into broad "haplogroups," that tend to relate to geographical areas.
This technique has been used to map the spread of humans throughout the world.
The man found in the cemetery has DNA that belongs to what scientists called haplogroup D. "The haplogroup itself has this East Asian origin, it's not something that's found in past European populations - the origin of this haplogroup is East Asia," said Dr. Barta.
January 29, 2010
Mongoloid mtDNA in Imperial-era Italy
59 comments:
- Maju said...
Read that yesterday and dismissed as nonsense: mtDNA D is just too common in West Eurasia (and not that common in East Asia south of Siberia or East of Central Asia) as to consider that news article purely amateurish yellow sensationalism. That individual was either from West Asia or East Europe, this last region being one of the main providers of slave workforce in Antiquity and the Middle Ages.
- Saturday, January 30, 2010 12:31:00 am
- Ebizur said...
Maju said,
"Read that yesterday and dismissed as nonsense: mtDNA D is just too common in West Eurasia (and not that common in East Asia south of Siberia or East of Central Asia) as to consider that news article purely amateurish yellow sensationalism."
I don't know what you have been smoking, Maju, but mtDNA haplogroup D is the most common haplogroup in East Asia (where it accounts for approximately 40% of all Japanese and Tibetan mitochondrial DNA, for example), and it attains its highest average frequency and diversity in East Asia among all world regions, though it is also very common in Central Asia. It is not particularly common in Siberia, where haplogroups C (especially in "Altaic" populations) and G (especially in "Palaeo-Siberian" populations) tend to occur more frequently. - Saturday, January 30, 2010 3:09:00 am
- Maju said...
Mitochondrial haplogroup D? Aren't you messing things up with Y-DNA D, which is indeed most important among Japanese and Tibetan?
D has a distribution, AFAIK, very similar to C (or CZ): Northern Eurasia and America.
From Wikipedia:
It is found in Northeast Asia (including Siberia). Its subclade D1 (along with D2 and D4) is one of five haplogroups found in the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the others being A, B, C, and X.
Haplogroup D is also found quite frequently in Central Asia[ref], where it makes up the second most common mtDNA clade (after H). Haplogroup D also appears at a low frequency in northeastern Europe and southwestern Asia.
I know I can commit errors and I normally trust you in this stuff, Ebizur, but in this case, I think it's you who has smoked something... ;) - Saturday, January 30, 2010 5:40:00 am
- Maju said...
Checking around: Kivisild 2002 mentions 10/69 Han Chinese were found to belong to mtDNA D. Ok, that's like 15%, about the same as D in Central Asia (31/232) but less than in Turkmens (6/20) or Uyghurs (7/16) (per Comas, link above).
I'm sure that if you check around you'll find many Siberian and NE European populations where mtDNA D is quite common. A week or two ago even a rare mtDNA D individual sample showed up in some other discussion on tribal India. Comas certainly mentions D among Siberians too (and also among Turkish but this is probably a recent arrival from Central Asia).
Whatever the case, imagining that just because some guy had mtDNA D in Roman Age Italy, he was an exotic import from China, is worse than building on thin air: it has all chances of being a the wrong conjecture, as there were many other peoples (including Turks already in the Eurasian steppes) who are much better candidates. To be honest, my first thought were Finns (but it's arbitrary, I know). - Saturday, January 30, 2010 6:12:00 am
- Ebizur said...
I am talking about mtDNA haplogroup D. It must be a coincidence that both Y-DNA and mtDNA haplogroup D are predominant among Japanese and Tibetans and both Y-DNA and mtDNA haplogroup C are predominant among "Altaic" (and especially Tungusic) populations of Siberia.
Please refer to Table 2 of the paper by Masashi Tanaka, Vicente M. Cabrera, Ana M. González et alii, "Mitochondrial Genome Variation in Eastern Asia and the Peopling of Japan," Genome Research 2004 14: 1832-1850.
According to this data table, at least 37.5% of the authors' large pool of 1312 Japanese (with more than 50% of the samples obtained from individuals in Tokyo and another 25% of the samples obtained from individuals in Aichi Prefecture, particularly in the city of Nagoya) belong to mtDNA haplogroup D. Among the Japanese haplogroup D mtDNAs, haplogroup D4(xD4a, D4b, D4d, D4k, D4n) is the most common designation, accounting by itself for 18.9% of the total pool of Japanese samples. In addition, another 2.13% of the Japanese mtDNAs have been labeled as "G1a1/D," which I assume to mean that, under the resolution of the earlier study or studies from which the data regarding these particular samples have been obtained, it is impossible to determine whether these samples belong to haplogroup G1a1 or rather to haplogroup D.
The same study's pool of Tibetan samples includes 25/65 = 38.5% haplogroup D mtDNA (12/65 = 18.5% D4b, 8/65 = 12.3% D4(xD4a, D4b, D4d, D4k, D4n), 2/65 = 3.1% D4k, 1/65 = 1.5% D4a1, 1/65 = 1.5% D5a, and 1/65 = 1.5% D5(xD5a)).
Haplogroup D mtDNA is much less common in Siberia overall, though it is found fairly frequently in some populations within that vast region (e.g. 8/36 = 22.2% D in a sample of Tuvinians, 12/60 = 20% D4 in a sample of Chukchi, 7/38 = 18.4% D4 in a sample of "Finno-Ugrians" according to the same data table of Tanaka et al.). - Saturday, January 30, 2010 7:55:00 am
- Maju said...
Ok. Fair enough. I was aware that Ainu don't have any mtDNA D and that instead this is somewhat frequent north of them.
Regardless, the point is that mtDNA D (unlike, say, F or M7) is a lineage that is relatively common in West Eurasia. I can only think of two such matrilineages with an East Asian origin that are that common on this side of Eurasia: CZ and D. So claiming that the guy in question had "East Asian ancestry" is totally out of place, unless they are thinking in early UP times or something like that or they suddenly decided that Finno-Ugrics and Central Asians are East Asians for the sake of sensationalism. - Saturday, January 30, 2010 9:40:00 am
- Gioiello said...
I have no time in this moment to deepen the question, but I ask: hg.D? Which clade? I think we should have more details. If I remember well this hg. was found among the Etruscans, one of the proof of their origin from Asia Minor. We should exam the papers of Arredi or Vernesi or others. I'll do it this afernoon, after my work.
- Saturday, January 30, 2010 9:53:00 am
- Gioiello said...
It has been found a D4g1 (5178A, 16278, 16294 16362 16519, 146) at Murlo, deep Etruria (Achilli A. et al., Mitochondrial DNA Variation of Modern Tuscans Supports the Near Eastern Origin of Etruscans, AJHG, 2007, 759-768) and 2 D at Mimice (Babalini C., The population history of the Croatian linguistic minority of Molise (southern Italy): a maternal view, in EJHG, 2005, 902-912) etc.
I could say as Nolan Admin – Glenn Allen Nolen from "Worldfamilies": "That's what these professionals do. Publish! They should just publish the samples and do away with analysis".
My old great professor of philosophy at Florence University, Giulio Preti, would have said that they are only βάναυσοι. - Saturday, January 30, 2010 4:45:00 pm
- Maju said...
Thanks for that info, Gioello. I bet that Achilli never said that it meant any sort of "East Asian" connection.
D4c is the most important Central Asian D sublineage, notably among Turkmen. - Saturday, January 30, 2010 6:48:00 pm
- Ebizur said...
Maju, you have it all bass ackwards again. Haplogroup D is one of the most common mtDNA haplogroups in present-day Ainu and in prehistoric samples from Hokkaido, alongside haplogroup M7 and haplogroup N9.
As I have mentioned in my previous post, haplogroup D is generally less common among indigenous Siberians than it is among Japanese, Tibetans, etc. The Oroks, a demographically miniscule Tungusic-speaking population of Sakhalin Island, do exhibit an unusually high frequency of mtDNA haplogroup D (68.9% according to Bermisheva et al. 2005), but recent drift and founder effects are very likely in their case. I won't even begin to address your quaint delusions about indigenous peoples of Siberia, but perhaps you should, at the very least, quit talking about mtDNA haplogroup D before you make an even more ridiculous error. - Saturday, January 30, 2010 7:42:00 pm
- Maju said...
Ok. Seems you're right.
But my essential point remains the same: mtDNA D is sufficiently common in West Eurasia not to make the claim the article makes.
Any objection in this crucial aspect, Ebizur? - Sunday, January 31, 2010 1:37:00 am
- Onur Dincer said...
Gioiello, has hg D or any other maternal or paternal mainly Mongoloid, Indian or Negroid hg been detected in any non-Etruscan ancient Italian specimen (not just the Roman era) other than this new find, and in what fraction of the Etruscan and contemporary Italian specimens for each of these three racial groups both maternally and paternally?
- Sunday, January 31, 2010 3:04:00 am
- terryt said...
And D is also common evidently in SE Asia, but not so common in Aboriginal Taiwanese.
- Sunday, January 31, 2010 5:10:00 am
- Gioiello said...
Unfortunately we must confide in these βάναυσοι and we haven't the possibility to confirm or not their analysis. We don't know the mutations of these mtDNA hg. D, and to say D is to say nothing. There are too many D, which can have been separated from 10, 2o0 30,000 or more years. These D4g1 found in Tuscany has two mutations more than the Japanese D4g1 in HVRI (16294T and 16519C beyond the common 16223T, 16278T and 16362C). Two mutations in HVRI can mean a separation of any thousands of years and on SMGF this haplotype matches only an L3 and we don't know if this is a D4g1 or an L3: there is the possibility that they have had convergent mutations, anyway it is very rare and perhaps unique. The paper of Babalini has found 1 L1b in Puglia (Italy) and 1 M1 and 1 L2a3 in Croatian Islands or Croatian Italians.
In the paper on Etruscans we have L1b, L3d and M1b but only a deep analysis could say if they are of recent immigration (Roman Empire) or from many thousands of years before. - Sunday, January 31, 2010 9:03:00 am
- Onur Dincer said...
Erratum: "Local Anatolian or West Asian" would be "native Anatolian or West Asian."
- Sunday, January 31, 2010 12:51:00 pm
- Gioiello said...
I have written so many on this argument in other forums and I don't desire to repeat it. If Etruscans came from Aegean Sea (and it isn't said: it could be true also the contrary) anyway the came from there when Turks lived in Central Asia, the place of their origin, more than 2500 years before they arrived to Asia Minor. Anyway modern Turks are genetically at 90% descendants from ancient Anatolians and less than 10% genetically Turks. They superimposed their language, but not their genes. Then Etruscans have probably something to do with ancient Anatolians but not with Asiatic Turks.
- Sunday, January 31, 2010 4:24:00 pm
- ashraf said...
There is no such thing as mongoloid or caucasoid mt DNA,Y-DNA.
All Y-DNA and mt-DNA(E,R,Q,A Y DNA included)could be caucasoid if they would have for second homeland Arabia+Levant+Mesoptamia+South Anatolia after the discovery of agriculture there.
That's why R1 is Europoid,it's sister R2 is Weddid and it's cousin Q is Mongoloid,because R1 origin is ALMSA(Arabia+Levant+Mesoptamia+South Anatolia) - Sunday, January 31, 2010 8:41:00 pm
- ashraf said...
1Proto Human=Proto Khoisano-Bushmenic
1.2Fertile Crescentic
1.2.1Borean(agglutinative languages)
18.104.22.168Vasco-Pelasgo-Kartvelian and non Indo-European substratum in Armenian
126.96.36.199South Afro-Asiatic:a/Tchadic,b/Proto north Afro-Asiatic adstratum in Kushitic languages
1.2.2Adamic(prophet Adam)Languages or Lislakh(inflective+apophonic languages with dual+feminine pronouns)=stage 3 languages
126.96.36.199Noahtique(prophet Noah)group=NiLa group(Ni=I,La=no):a/Semito-Egyptian or Gelgameshic sub-group,b/Berber
18.104.22.168Enkiduic group(=savage illetrate hordes acquiring a corrupted form of Adamic)=MiNa group(Mi=I,Na=no):Indo-Hittite(or perhaps more accurately Irano-Hittite since Irano-Armenic is much more diverse than Indic)
1.3.1Synthetic stage group(or stage 2)
18.104.22.168Uralico-Siberic(including Chuktco-Kamatchkan,Yukaghir&Eskimo-Aleut)
18.104.22.168Macro-Altaic(including Gilyak-Nivkh,Ainuic,Japonic&Koreanic)
1.3.2Analytic stage group(or stage 1):macro Sino-Tibetan(including Hmong-Mien&Thai-Kadai)
There are mutual linguistic influences between 1.2 and 1.3 due to the open geography of Eurasia and Siberia-Alaska junction whereas sahara(for 1.1)and ocean(for 1.4)are barrier against such influences=>this resulted in some overlapping between languages of 1.2 and 1.3 seen best by the Sino-Caucasian,Eurasiatic and Nostratic hypothesis.
Very very little remains of the genetical unity of some language families such as Amerindic and (especially)Australo-Papuanic since the very very long isolation endured by those language families - Sunday, January 31, 2010 8:54:00 pm
- Onur Dincer said...
All Y-DNA and mt-DNA(E,R,Q,A Y DNA included)could be caucasoid if they would have for second homeland Arabia+Levant+Mesoptamia+South Anatolia after the discovery of agriculture there.
But they didn't...
There is no such thing as mongoloid or caucasoid mt DNA,Y-DNA.
You contradict this statement with your admission above. - Sunday, January 31, 2010 11:40:00 pm
- Onur Dincer said...
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- Sunday, January 31, 2010 11:49:00 pm
- ashraf said...
How could you in so case explain that E1b1a is a negroid hg whereas it's sister sub clade is considered caucasoid by geneticists.
For the languages classification it could be more accurate than the hypothetical Eurasiatic macro-family of Greenberg which group together mongoloid Ainu and Eskimos of the far east with languages such as Greek and Persian ignoring that the common words between these languages are simple loans and that the morphology and grammar of indo-european(inflective,apophonic language with dual and feminine pronouns)is totally different from the morphology and grammar of uralo-altaic languages(agglutinative languages with no apophony,no inflection and no feminine or dual pronouns)but it's almost identical to the grammar and morphology of Semito-Egypto-Berber.
But this could be explained perhaps(with some fantasy)with the Enkidu legacy. - Monday, February 01, 2010 12:07:00 am
- Onur Dincer said...
E1b1b isn't entirely considered Caucasoid, only its subclades that have been outside of sub-Saharan Africa for thousands of years due to intensive genetic admixture.
I have always tended to agree with the theory of Indo-Europian being closer to Afro-Asiatic than to Uralic or Altaic languages (they are no longer considered as a single group). In addition to the morphological and grammatical relationships you highlighted, the original Indo-Europeans were probably genetically closer to the original Afro-Asiatics than to the original Uralics or Altaics. - Monday, February 01, 2010 1:14:00 am
- Maju said...
E1b1b isn't entirely considered Caucasoid...
Lineages are not races or morphotypes. You can perfectly have Y-DNA R1b1b2a1 and be blacker than Mugabe, and you can perfectly have Y-DNA L1 and be whiter than Queen Beth.
This is because your the ancestor that gave you that lineage is only one among millions.
Of course, Dienekes sets bad example mixing apples and oranges like that in his titles and texts. Enfin. - Monday, February 01, 2010 2:52:00 am
- anaveno said...
I think that Maju is totally confused.
After the debacle with his mtdna,new strike from R1b... proved that it is no "archaic" in Europe and that comes from Anatolia.
But he still believes in the stories (for children) and must support "the blog boss", who is in the same situation.... - Monday, February 01, 2010 7:55:00 am
- anaveno said...
- This comment has been removed by the author.
- Monday, February 01, 2010 8:09:00 am
- anaveno said...
Y HG C is found in Greece(Vincenza Battaglia 2008), maybe "Roman" mtdna is correlated with it?
We "know" that Greeks are "ancient"..and Romans were crazy about "greek things"...
It would be interesting if the Greeks would have take a genetic analysis of the skeletons from Minoan I, graves from Hagios Nikolaos........ - Monday, February 01, 2010 8:12:00 am
- Maju said...
Dunno what you're ranting about (again), anaveno. I don't fight battles for mtDNA or R1b or anything of the like: I feel that one of the main problems in finding out the truth is that too many people seem to have preconceptions, biases and ridiculous agendas. Hence I make my best to avoid that.
If I was wrong and someone else was right, then I have to concede. You can call that "a debacle" if you wish but in fact it's a victory (not for me, who could not matter less, but for the truth).
So quit trying to make personal attacks and start discussing facts and opinions like true person. And, please, make an effort to make your confusing babble minimally comprehensible (it's like: "uh, what the heck is this guy talking about?", you know). - Monday, February 01, 2010 8:13:00 am
- terryt said...
"How could you in so case explain that E1b1a is a negroid hg whereas it's sister sub clade is considered caucasoid by geneticists".
As Maju said, 'Lineages are not races or morphotypes. You can perfectly have Y-DNA R1b1b2a1 and be blacker than Mugabe, and you can perfectly have Y-DNA L1 and be whiter than Queen Beth. This is because your the ancestor that gave you that lineage is only one among millions'. And that million ancestors happens just 20 generations back, or 500 years plus or minus (disregarding any possible inbreeding, or shared ancestors). The 'race or morphotype' can be halved with just the first cross, if the other person belongs to a different 'race or morphotypes'.
"For the languages classification it could be more accurate than the hypothetical Eurasiatic macro-family of Greenberg"
Languages are even less closely associated with particular haplogroups. - Monday, February 01, 2010 9:32:00 am
- Onur Dincer said...
Lineages are not races or morphotypes. You can perfectly have Y-DNA R1b1b2a1 and be blacker than Mugabe, and you can perfectly have Y-DNA L1 and be whiter than Queen Beth.
This is because your the ancestor that gave you that lineage is only one among millions.
If lineages were ubiquitous or randomly distributed among races, I would agree with you. - Monday, February 01, 2010 12:47:00 pm
- Maju said...
They are to a great extent. And cases like Y-DNA E1b, R1 or N1c, not to mention the lager clades they belong to, are perfect examples. It may be less common for mtDNA (surely a better indicator of overall ancestry when applied to whole populations, not individuals) but happens too.
- Monday, February 01, 2010 12:59:00 pm
- Onur Dincer said...
Those examples you mention are either too much bottom of the human genetic tree (i.e., race-specific only in their branches) or a result of racial admixture.
- Monday, February 01, 2010 1:14:00 pm
- Onur Dincer said...
Erratum: "Too much bottom" would be "too much at the bottom."
- Monday, February 01, 2010 1:47:00 pm
- Onur Dincer said...
- This comment has been removed by the author.
- Monday, February 01, 2010 1:58:00 pm
- Onur Dincer said...
There are also combinations of the two, i.e., racial admixture occurring thousands of years ago followed by a genetic assimilation of the lineage into its new race (as in the case of some E1b1b subclades).
- Monday, February 01, 2010 2:01:00 pm
- AG said...
Not a slave, but a master like invading Hun in Hungary. Why always assume Mongloid as slave? Most acient time, Mongloids were conquerors.
- Tuesday, February 02, 2010 1:20:00 am
- terryt said...
"If lineages were ubiquitous or randomly distributed among races, I would agree with you".
Obviously if your million ancestors from 500 years ago have all lived in the same small region for a very long time you will have more chance of carrying a haplogroup common in that particular region. But even in each small region we've finished up with combinations of haplogroups originally from widely separated regions.
But if a member of a new haplogroup arrives and has children with some local his or her children will be likely in turn to have children with locals. The haplogroup remains in the population but it ceases to be associated with the original phenotype. And it can happen on a larger scale. In which case we get 'racial admixture occurring thousands of years ago followed by a genetic assimilation of the lineage into its new race'. Dienekes has even worked hard to dissect the proportions of the original populations in certain modern regional populations. - Tuesday, February 02, 2010 4:08:00 am
- Onur Dincer said...
Obviously if your million ancestors from 500 years ago have all lived in the same small region for a very long time you will have more chance of carrying a haplogroup common in that particular region. But even in each small region we've finished up with combinations of haplogroups originally from widely separated regions.
Exactly. Haplogroups are meaningful (hence give information about race) at community base, not at individual base. - Tuesday, February 02, 2010 6:01:00 am
- ashraf said...
In the same time Turkic shares some lexical similarities with both Indo-European, Uralic(and also Semitic as in Turkic kes=to cut/Semitic qas=to cut)
Perhaps R1's were speaking an agglutinative language close to Turkic and Uralic and when they went south to Arabia(climatic refugium)they underwent some sort of Afro-Asiatic grammatical and lexical sprachbund.
This will explain why Kyrghyzs who are World top R1 are Turkic speaking and Hungarians who are very high in R1 are Uralic speaking.
If you look to R1a distribution a map on wiki
you will see that R1a is nearly inexistent in such strong ie regions as Iran,Pakistan and North India whereas there is a big spot in the Turkmen region of Iraq around Kerkuek.
According to linguist Bomhard 318 out of 458 proto ie roots are present in Afro-Asiatic and many others are also present in Turkic and Uralic.
For example:proto ie root *kap=to take is identical to Turkish kap=to take.
According to another linguist Turkic is a mix between an altaic substratum and an east iranic superstratum.
Also according to the Arab linguist Bander Alfraikh(being Arab can not be a reason to dont taking him seriously)
"Proto-Semitic has one important advantage over Indo-European. In Indo-European one works from the known to get to the unknown root. The h of Eng. horn goes to a k and this gives corn. After many gradings to the vowels and discarding with the suffixes you end up with *ker which is not a lexical unit of speech but only a root. In Semitics, especially Arabic, we start from the root ker which was unknown in Indo-European. Ker is a lexical root in Arabic denoting "repetitiveness and circular objects". It appears in such phrases as ker wa far "charge, retreat (warfare)". From the known we go to the unknown to find that the plosive k was changed to a similar consonant q and n added as a suffix just like Eng. to prduce qern "horn". We can go further into the unknown to find qarin "counterpart". This came from the pre-historic practice of yoking an inexperienced bull to a trained bull to do plowing. We could still go to the very unknown, to the etymon of qiran "marriage, which comes from the fact that marriage is union or 'yoking'". This finally takes us to zouj or zoug "spouse". And zoug becomes, through the Comparative Method, the same as the Indo-European root *yeug. Here we moved from the known, which is the "root", to the unknown, which is the "word".
There is also the fact in Comparative Linguistics, as it pertains to Indo-European, to grade the root and make it sometimes zero-grade. Could this be due to an unconscious effort on the part of the corporatist to get to Proto-Semitic which is consonantal (no vowels)? Or is it merely a predetermined effort to make the unknown fit the known? If the former, and if we are interested in language thousands of years before 3000 B.C.E., then Proto-Semitic is a more able candidate to explain the nature of language than Indo-European. It may well lead us to find out some, if not all, of the shortcomings of the Comparative Method. One of these shortcomings, as an example, is the fact that there is no attestation in Indo-European languages on the word sea. If we turn to Semitic languages we find that Eng. mere and Latin mare are descended from Semitic mur "bitter, salty". Mur was used to differentiate sea water from sweat or river water. Sea could have descended from the Semitic root seh(s, heth) signifying motion of water. The heth of seh is hard to pronounce in Germanics and had to go to a vowel, a in this case2."
Some of Turkish/Greek cognates
miz/mas/we - Tuesday, February 02, 2010 2:49:00 pm
- Gioiello said...
I have cuddled another person from this forum, who had the same analogical way of reasoning. If you go to a Western University to do an exam of glottology you will be expelled by a blow to the bottom. Your words demonstrates only your way of reasoning: racist, obsolete, magic, religious, fundamentalist et cetera et cetera (I have used only Latin words).
- Tuesday, February 02, 2010 4:50:00 pm
- Maju said...
Ashraf: people change languages - while they can't change their genes. Languages are not just learned by birth but also because of other social needs.
Languages are primarily a social instrument and that means that, if society changes, languages changes. The many languages that are being lost right now because the offspring of the last speakers just don't need them for anything, not even communicating with their parents anymore, should give you a clue.
All those language families that are extense, are so because there were political expansions in the past, even if at a semi-tribal level of organization, that promoted them. In some cases these expansions may have been associated with some degree of colonization/migration but it doesn't really needs to be a pervasive one, just a socially dominant one, probably by political means.
Furthermore, there has been a recent study that quite clearly finds that the more extended languages/families are also the simplest ones grammatically. Because adult learners tend to ignore a lot of complex grammatical features that are not strictly necessary, causing that simplification or creolization of the languages.
This is true for Indoeuropean, for Turkic, for Afroasiatic, for Chinese and for Niger-Congo: all those language families that have expanded have been creolized in a very drastic manner. - Tuesday, February 02, 2010 7:05:00 pm
- Crimson Guard said...
- This comment has been removed by the author.
- Tuesday, February 02, 2010 7:19:00 pm
- Crimson Guard said...
mtDNA is descended from M, which is found in Italy and it is entirely Caucasoid. I wouldnt jump the gun on Mongoloid just because D is common in parts of East Asia. A mongoloid sample in the early days of the Empire may be possible due to the Sino-Roman relations, hence this ambassador or slave(but it is supposedly only half East Asian) idea. I would suspect similar occurrences in Greece, even if the Anatolian Etruscans may of also carried this marker to some degree or East Asian slaves brought back to Greece and Macedon during Alexander and post Alexander times.
Also I wouldnt rule out possible contamination from one of the diggers or scientists involved. But they should also have gotten this skeleton's Y-Chromosome. - Tuesday, February 02, 2010 7:21:00 pm
- ashraf said...
Mr Gioiello,(western)Cambridge university which is one of the top ten universities in the world has published Nostratic dictionnary.
Please look here below
I'm religious but not fundamentalist nor racist or magical.
My point is that we can not racially classify Haplotypes,as demonstrated by E1b1b being accepted as caucasoid while it's brother sub-sub-sub clade is considered negroid by geneticists.
Arabic,which is the oldest language still in use,has retained case system and dual pronouns of proto lislakh whereas the other languages losted many grammatical features of proto lislakh.
Arnaud Fournet which is a western linguist considers indo-european languages as a branch of hamito-semitic and bases his works essentially upon Arabic.
The facts that all alphabets we used derive from proto Arabic ugaritic alphabet,the religions we believe have also the same origin,agriculture,and all prophets originated in the same region,and perhaps langauges spoken by more than 4 billions originated there make me very enthusiastic about that region of the world and Arabic,please dont see this as racism,obsolete or magical as it's difficult to understand for non believers.
Also I can't be racist,I have black and mongoloid friends and also black and mongoloid relatives,as skin colour and skull form dont matter anything for us the muslims(or at least it should be so).
And generally speaking we are all brothers and sisters whatever our race,language or religion are as it's said in the coran.
There is no differences between arabe,non arabs,white and blacks except their piosity - Tuesday, February 02, 2010 8:28:00 pm
- Gioiello said...
Dear Ashraf, I am not contrary to the Nostratic theory or others, being a followers of the monogenetic theory of the language of Alfredo Trombetti. I have often supported also on this forum these theories. I am saying only that your theories are vitiated by religious prejudices. When you'll use in your comparisons linguistic arguments and not religious prejudices, I'll be glad to exam seriously your theories.
- Tuesday, February 02, 2010 9:50:00 pm
- terryt said...
"the religions we believe have also the same origin,agriculture,and all prophets originated in the same region"
And those reasons account for virtually all the similarities in the languages you mention. They are borrowings.
"Arabic,which is the oldest language still in use"
I think some Australian Aborigines and New Guineans would argue against that idea, not to mention Khoi-San languages. Perhaps you're just refering to written languages. In which case they have all had contact with each other and the above argument applies. It also eplains your observation, 'The facts that all alphabets we used derive from proto Arabic ugaritic alphabet'. - Wednesday, February 03, 2010 2:27:00 am
- Maju said...
Yah, or Coptic, Basque, Greek, Chinese and virtually every other language around, specially those that have not expanded and hence creolized.
Plus, there's not one Arabic: that's a religious myth. It has been diverging for more than 1300 years in spite of religious obsession for that language. Nothing remains, all changes. Arabic too, of course and how could it be otherwise if so expansive?
That catchphrase of "Arabic is the oldest language still in use" is just one of those repetitive slogans that religious fanatics like to repeat (prayers and "absolute truths" that are not such). - Wednesday, February 03, 2010 7:46:00 am
- ashraf said...
mr Terryt.
Semitic and Indo-European have same morphology and grammar and there are common roots between these 2 language families,I say that convinctingly after reading a dozen of linguistic books(one of them is the more than 3000 pages Dolgopolsky Nostratic dictionnary and the voluminous Bomhard's Nostratic macrofamily...)
Those common roots are present in the Akkadian language which is attested as old as 3000 bc,and also in Semitic texts in Egypt as old as 2800 bc far a time before monotheism rose,and of course in such ancient languages as Sanskrit,Avestan,Hittite,Gothic,old Celtic,old Hebrew,Coptic,old Greek etc..
But what is more important than common lexical roots is the common morphology and grammar shared by these languages.
As there's not one(spoken)Arabic,there's also not one Turkish,Greek,Castillan,Italian...
But the Arabic used in schools and medias is the same modern standard Arabic first atetsted in its actual form in the 4 th century but it's to some extent intelligible with proto Arabic Ugaritic which dates to 1600 bc.(Ugaritic is the first attested alphabet in the world as proto sinaitic is an abjad and it's the first which uses the current alphabetical order:alp,bayt,gimal,delta...)
The fact that standard modern Arabic is the oldest language still in use(in medias and tought in schools)is a fact.
I'm based on my reading of dozens of western scholars
Also if we have the idea to replace Standard modern Arabic by spoken Arabic we will not be able to understand coran and ancient arabic poetry and besides all spoken language are changing constantly so if we make 2000's spoken Arabic(s) the official language,then we will need to redo the same thing with 2500's spoken Arabic(s) as dialects are dynamic. - Wednesday, February 03, 2010 10:36:00 am
- ashraf said...
Addenda et erratum:
Shared morphology and grammar between north afro-asiatic and indo-european(please read some books of Hodge,Dolgopolsky,Bomhard and if you know deutsch,you can read the first books working in the subject of afro-asiatic/indo-european genetical relation[both morphologically and lexically]ie the works of Herman Möller and Linus Brünner)
For example:ancient Egyptian pt,Akkadian patu,Hebrew pateh,Arabic fatah,Greek petanumi,Latin patere all meaning to open.
Yes this could be a borrowing but when such basical words as human bodies in proto north afro-asiatic and proto indo-european organs share also the same roots this can not be due to borrowings.
qf/caput(greek kefali)=head
Finally please note that the 458 proto ie roots are not present in all ie branches,for example Greek branch has less proto ie roots than....Semitic!!!
Dolgopolsky explained that fact very well in his Nostratic dictionnary writing that if afro-asiatic would not be considered nostratic then languages as Greek,Sanskrit,Slavic.. can not be considered indo-european!!!
mr Maju
As there's not one(spoken)Arabic,there's also not one Turkish,Greek,Castillan,Italian...
etc.... - Wednesday, February 03, 2010 10:50:00 am
- Maju said...
The Latin taught in schools and used in temples till a few decades ago is perfectly intelligible (at least in written form) with the Latin spoken by Caesar and all those old people. In fact, it's the same artificially fossilized language, even if it has not been spoken in the streets since the very days of the late Roman Empire. This is like Sanskrit and modern/historical Indo-Aryan languages, I presume.
I'm pretty sure that in the case of Greek it's a much more direct continuity. Coptic and ancient Egyptian are the very same language. There are heated arguments nowadays because some controversial findings suggest that the Basque spoken in the 3rd century was much like today's Basque and so on.
Your claim is a religious/political cliché and I'd suggest you anyhow to make a comparison at least with Chinese and Greek, both literary languages that clearly pre-date the expansion of Arabic and have more ancient literary forms.
But anyhow, we are clearly off topic again. - Wednesday, February 03, 2010 10:59:00 am
- ashraf said...
Thank you
I could be induced to errors by some books I read even if they seem objective and are written by western scholars(French scholar Petru Rossi for example).
And of course you know more about Basque,Latin etc...but for Greek,modern Greek is distinct form ancient Greek.
Anyway,retaining a fossilized language is a chance(to read coran and ancient literary texts)and not a handicap,as languages are constantly changing. - Wednesday, February 03, 2010 11:48:00 am
- Gioiello said...
Thousands of years before the fossilized Arabic it was Sumerian to be used from thousands of years as unchanged language. Sumerian wasn't linked with Semite, probably I think with Sino-Tibetan, and Sumerian was the first language written. Your Semite only developed alphabet from Sumerian or Egyptian. Your claims of supremacy are ridiculous: also your J1 probably arose some thousands of kilometers from Arabia.
I don't know Petru Rossi, but from name and surname he seems a Corse, than an Italian, who are using a Corse name and not the French Pierre. - Wednesday, February 03, 2010 2:38:00 pm
- Dienekes said...
How can a post about Mongoloid mtDNA in imperial-age Italy devolve into discussion of Semitic linguistics.
Do people have trouble understanding what ON TOPIC means? - Wednesday, February 03, 2010 2:49:00 pm
- ashraf said...
To the blog owner mr Dienekes:very sorry please delete all the off topics and I will make my best to be a silent blog reader.
Petru Rossi is a French corsican in fact.
I dont claim Semitic superiority because there is no relation between language and accomplishements and dont forget that except Israel(which is somehow European)all the semitic countries belong to the third word,are governed by dictatorships and rely on west for everything.
This for the present,as for the past there was many civilisations greater(according to me)than semites=Sumerian,Egyptian.
And is well known that Semitics "made" alphabet from logogrammic hyerogliph.
Also I'am not J1 and my Y-DNA most probably originated in levant,south Anatolia or mesopotamia.
This is the last post here and again sorry as my usual mistake(the same mistakes that caused my ban from dna-forums)is mixing sentiments with science whereas the memebers here discuss scientifically,it's perhaps the fault of our educational system which mix sentiments with science. - Wednesday, February 03, 2010 5:15:00 pm
- Dienekes said...
I don't generally ban people or delete posts unless I have to, so feel free to post here, but try to stay close to the topic at hand.
- Wednesday, February 03, 2010 8:15:00 pm
It balances out the man with the western Eurasian haplogroup found in China.
Individuals got around. I am finding that at 23andMe with my RF cousins. They seem as far as haplogroups go, to span the world. - Thursday, February 04, 2010 1:44:00 pm
- Marnie said...
"Individuals got around."
Ponto, could you expand on that? - Thursday, February 04, 2010 8:34:00 pm
- Marnie said...
I mean, I've gotten over it, the whole R1b thing, for instance . . . the wandering moral state of my great-great- . . . . . . -great grand-father.
No need for Y-DNA testing here. That's been taken care of by g^1000 grandpa.
And I really wouldn't get my mtDNA tested. Too afraid of the insurance companies. - Thursday, February 04, 2010 8:44:00 pm
Cash Making Opportunities - The Beginning The working life is already tough enough, but the worries of being out of work was even tougher. The unsecured working environment have prompted me to search the internet for an alternative source of extra income so that I could learn how to Make Money Work for me and be Financially Independent. I listed down a number of Free Internet Business Opportunity Ideas while researching ways how people earn money online while working-from-home.......
www.onlineuniversalwork.com - Tuesday, February 09, 2010 8:16:00 am
- Unknown said...
Sad to see so many arrogant queens tarnishing this good blog's integrity trying to enforce their egos one over the other. Ashraf gave us a lesson on humility regardless of how incorrect was all that he said. But when it comes to Gioiello... I'm really sorry, because maybe I'm quite misinformed... Is he one of the incarnations of God?
- Thursday, January 24, 2013 3:51:00 am


text:
In a piece in The New Yorker, Brad Leithauser cites a line attributed to Marilyn Monroe, who said she liked to read poetry because it saves time. An observation worthy of Yogi Bera perhaps. A poet himself, Leithauser writes about his love for the haiku, epigram or quip that gets the job done in as few words as possible. So we'd like to hear about your favorite piece of concise writing, poetry in particular, 800-989-8255. Email us: firstname.lastname@example.com. You can also join the conversation on our website, that's at npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION.
Brad Leithauser is the author of several novels and of a forthcoming collection of poetry, "The Oldest Word for Dawn." His piece in The New Yorker's Page-Turner blog is titled "In Praise of Concision." He's with us from New England Public Radio, our member station in Amherst, Massachusetts. Good of you to be with us today.
BRAD LEITHAUSER: Thanks for inviting me.
CONAN: And when we think of short poetry, I guess the first name that comes to mind for a lot of people is Ogden Nash.
Yes. And I had thought - I'd been telling people for years and years that Ogden Nash wrote what I thought was the shortest successful poem ever written, called "Fleas," and in entirety it's Adam had 'em. But it turned out I was wrong and it was somebody else. It was a poem that should've been written by Ogden Nash and so it got attributed to him.
Attributed to him. So those things can happen. That line from Marilyn Monroe, you said, there's in the news business stories too good to check.
LEITHAUSER: Yeah. I don't know if she ever actually said that but I - and I'm hoping that if I'm wrong, no one will ever correct me.
CONAN: There's a few of Yogi Bera's lines that nobody wants to check either because he didn't say them. As you look at short poetry, you tend to think, yeah, Ogden Nash and people like that, this is going to be mostly light verse.
LEITHAUSER: Yeah. I think that's true, although, you know, I - one of the places I like to look for poetry is in graveyards and some of that, of course, is very serious indeed. But you've - you're paying a stonecutter. You really don't want to go on at great length, the stone costs money. So - but there's something very touching, it seems to me, and especially if they're people you don't know and they've been dead for a while, in seeing, you know, how they are meant to be commemorated often in little bits of verse here and there.
CONAN: I guess I never thought of it that way. You always heard about how Dickens was paid by the word and stonecutters also paid by the word.
LEITHAUSER: No, exactly. And, you know, it's funny. I - Robert Louis Stevenson has - actually, if you wouldn't mind I read it, it's very short.
CONAN: Sure.
LEITHAUSER: But his epitaph called "Requiem" is eight lines long and I think it's very serious. He says - but I think it's extremely beautiful, and it just - it's all the words are basically monosyllabic. It's just his declaration of how he wants to go out from the planet: Under the wide and starry sky, dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, and I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be. Home is the sailor, home from sea, and the hunter home from the hill.
Now, it seems to me in eight lines that really does capture a view of life. You sense his gratitude. There's an irony here, is that when he's writing that he's at home, he's - he died out in the Pacific, thousands and thousands of miles from his native Scotland. But he is home in the sense that, you know, he's returned to the earth. I think in eight lines you have a vision of the world that's just benign and sweet and lovely.
CONAN: There's a piece that you cite in your story in The New Yorker. It's called - it's about Donald Hall's "Exile." A poem, you say presents the double bonus of being a few syllables shorter and having a draft history of a dramatic excision that was initially a hundred lines long when it was first published, and he worked it and worked it and worked it and got it down to six.
LEITHAUSER: Yeah. No, exactly. And it may have been longer than that. The version I had seen that was published was a hundred lines. And, you know, I - it's the most dramatic case that comes right to mind of seeing in the big mound of dirt, you know, the little veins of gold or whatever. And I think that the little six-line poem is quite beautiful. But again, you know, there too - I think we tend to think of short poems, we think of light verse. Most of us think of limericks, of course, and I love limericks, but a number of lovely little things have been done in just a few lines too.
CONAN: Do you have a copy of it there with you, or should I read it?
LEITHAUSER: No, please, I'd love to hear you read it.
CONAN: A boy who played and talked and read with me fell from a maple tree. I loved her, but I told her I did not, and wept and then forgot. I walked the streets where I was born and grew, and all the streets were new.
LEITHAUSER: Yeah. And as I mention in the piece, for some reason those last two lines have just stuck with me. And I grew up in Detroit. And every time I return to the city, that feeling that even if the streets are the same, they're new. You know, life has moved on. And, you know, it's funny. The language of very short poems moves into slogans and, you know, I was thinking today of the - which was a slogan from World War II, loose lips sink ships. It's a perfect little poem. You know, it balances. It's a couplet, you know, two lines and two lines.
And, you know, of course, it had - it too had a very serious message, that if you know anything about what's going with your son or in the military or any - your brother, whatever, don't say anything. You don't know who is going to hear and somehow a little loose talk and the next thing you know somewhere thousands of miles away a ship has gone done. It's an extremely - I love those moments where you feel you couldn't cut another word out of this if you tried. You know, there's nothing here that - it's just as spare as spare can be. It's very pleasing to me.
CONAN: Let's get a caller in on the conversation. This is Scott, and Scott with us from Inverness in Florida.
SCOTT: Hi. I'm actually from Pensacola. That's just where my phone is.
SCOTT: All right. Anyway, my favorite is Langston Hughes' "Motto."
CONAN: And how does that go?
SCOTT: I play it cool and dig all jive. That is how I stay alive. My motto as I live and learn is dig can be dug in return.
CONAN: Dig can be dug in return.
SCOTT: It's my motto too.
CONAN: It's interesting. We got an email. This from Ryan in Ross - excuse me - Jennifer Ross, who also cited another Langston Hughes poem titled "Little Lyric." I wish the rent was heaven sent.
Scott, thanks for sharing that.
LEITHAUSER: And that one too, that one too is a perfect balanced couplet. You know, I mean it's funny. On the one hand it's as informal as can be. And on the other hand there's a skeleton there that is, you know, quite rigid, you know, quite rigorous.
CONAN: Here's an email, and this is from Eliza in Baton Rouge: My mom used to recite the R.L. Stevenson couplet from "A Child's Garden of Verses" called "A Happy Thought." The world is so full of a number of things. I sure - I am sure we should all be as happy as kings. After my mom died of brain cancer in 2008, this poem stuck with me. It's been a reminder to find the joy in life even when things are hard. A few years ago, I got the poem as a tattoo, a tribute to my Mom. This is another benefit of a short poem. Pithiness means it doesn't take up much space.
LEITHAUSER: Yeah. It's like the stone-cutter. And it's interesting that Stevenson has come up, you know, twice in our very brief conversation. But I think he was the spirit of thanksgiving. And himself, if we're talking about health, had bad health, you know, much of his life but managed somehow to take joy in things and express it appealingly in just a few lines sometimes.
CONAN: And are those poems, the child's collection for verse, were they written for children and thus short for short attention spans or written and then said, well, that's good for kids?
LEITHAUSER: No, I think written for children, but you know, there was the expectation that children used to have longer attention spans than they do, clearly. I don't know if they were unrealistic back then or if there's been a huge change, but I am struck often reading, you know, children's verse, it really is designed for kids of, you know, the last century and thinking, huh, you know, this is very complicated, you know, and it's long and it's, you know, the - there was - they had not yet invented the phrase dumbing down and perhaps had not even begun to really engineer it in ways that we maybe have.
CONAN: Well, I guess I'm old enough to have been required to memorize, you know, Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo and a fair amount of other, you know - Poe is easy to remember, the tintinnabulation of the bells, I can recall that but...
LEITHAUSER: Mm-hmm.
CONAN: Here's - we were talking about brown pelicans in the previous segment. This is a short poem written in 1910 by Dixon Lanier Merritt. It's an email from Megan: A wonderful bird is the pelican, mouth can hold more than its belly can. He holds, in his beak, enough food for a week, and I wonder how in the hell he can.
LEITHAUSER: Mm-hmm. I've always like that. And it's one of the - it's, you know, it's the limerick structure but it - with just the touch of naughtiness to it but, you know, unlike many limericks, it could not be read over the radio.
CONAN: No, it couldn't...
LEITHAUSER: It's cute and sweet, yeah.
CONAN: The other form that, I guess, by definition is short is the haiku. Here's a tweet from Jillian Beck: My teacher at UCLA is wearing a shirt with this haiku on it. Haikus are easy but sometimes they don't make sense. Refrigerator.
CONAN: Let's see if we can go next to - this is Joan, and Joan's with us from Wiggins, Colorado.
JOAN: Hi there.
CONAN: Go ahead, please.
JOAN: The poem that I particularly like is from Shel Silverstein. And it's I made an airplane out of stone. I always did like staying home.
LEITHAUSER: You're cheating on the rhyme a little bit, but we'll forgive it.
CONAN: We'll cut him some slack? He's a songwriter, too, so I guess that explains it.
JOAN: Yes.
CONAN: Thanks, Joan, very much.
JOAN: Thank you.
CONAN: We're talking with Brad Leithauser, who wrote a piece for The New Yorker's blog about shot verse. 800-989-8255. Email: firstname.lastname@example.com. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
And this is an email from - about a Dickinson poem - I am sorry. This is John(ph). John with us from San Francisco.
JOHN: Yes, hello?
CONAN: John, you're on the air.
JOHN: Thank you. And actually my name wasn't John, she got that wrong. But, hey, I'm an HR director and I worked wherein a lot of people sometimes they come in grumpy moods and whatever. I've created a stupid little poem that's cheered up more people in the last 30 years. Here it goes. Roses are red, violets are blue, some poems rhyme but this one doesn't.
CONAN: I'm not sure that's original with you.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: OK. Probably isn't, but I have used that dozens and dozens of times over the last 30 years. It has turned people's attitudes and their days around for whatever reason.
CONAN: All right. I'll take your word for that.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: OK. Enjoy your program. Thanks.
CONAN: Thanks very much for the phone call. Let's go to - this is John. John with us from Louisville.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Hi, Neal. I'm happy to be a part of this conversation. I love poetry and always have.
CONAN: And which one would you nominate in this regard?
JOHN: Well, I was tempted to reference Robert Herrick's description of the sentiment form as that brave vibration each way free. But the one I'd really like to talk about is James Henry Leigh Hunt, too, is the author of "Abou Ben Adhem" and some other things. He wrote a poem called "Jenny Kissed Me." And if I may I'll...
LEITHAUSER: Oh, I've always - I love that poem, yeah.
CONAN: Go ahead, John.
JOHN: Jenny kissed me when we met. Jumping from the chair she sat in. Time, you thief, who love to get sweets into your list, put that in. Say I'm weary, say I'm sad, say that health and wealth have missed me, say I'm growing old, but add, Jenny kissed me.
CONAN: Oh, that's nice.
JOHN: I love that poem.
LEITHAUSER: I was - I resisted the temptation to burst in and - turned it to double. But I, too, I've always - I just have always loved that. It's just...
JOHN: It's so much about the - you know, describing the man and that one moment in his life, maybe decades earlier that made it all worthwhile.
CONAN: Thanks very much, John.
JOHN: Sure.
CONAN: And this is an email that we have from George: My favorite short poem has to be William Carlos Williams "The Red Wheelbarrow." So much depends upon red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens.
Let's see if we go next to - this is Ian.
IAN: Hi.
CONAN: Hi. You're on the air. Go ahead, please.
IAN: This is a Jim Morrison poem and, yes, the songwriter. It's really short, published in one of his works. It was called "Do You Have Straitjackets To Accommodate The Guests." Why yes, we do.
CONAN: All right.
IAN: That was it.
CONAN: And I supposed that's one of the few of his that we can read on the radio too.
IAN: Oh, no, most of the stuff's fairly tame, believe it or not.
CONAN: Interesting. All right. Thanks very much.
IAN: Mm-hmm. (Unintelligible).
CONAN: You too. Let's go to Lisa. Lisa with us from Montrose in Colorado.
LISA: Hi.
CONAN: Hi. Go ahead.
LISA: I was raised on Ogden Nash. Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.
CONAN: That's one of my favorites too.
LISA: Yeah.
CONAN: Thanks very much.
LISA: You're welcome.
CONAN: In this same category, you have a lot of, you know, the epigrams, you know, Dorothy Parker is the Bronx, no thonx. I guess it's a poem but it wasn't - I don't think, conceived that way.
LEITHAUSER: Yeah. No - I like all of that sort of funny odd mixture of things where it's hard, you know, to exactly identify what it is. And when I say to you, you know, loose lips, sink ships - yeah, it is a poem, I mean, but I used it loosely and, you know, there is - just this range - and really what I'm interested in is the - is getting to that moment where is - everything is paired - is stripped away and you feel that - as it's true with candy is dandy.
There's - that you can add anything. There is just such a - it's - you can't take anything away. You feel as though, you know, it's an intact union and somehow in a way that is not possible when things are long, you feel as though, you know, it was always there. The poem existed and it was just, you know, she happened to recognize that or Ogden Nash happened to recognized it. But with these very short poems you can sometimes feel truly that they don't have an author, so much as, you know, just a discoverer.
CONAN: Let's end with a poem you also cited in your piece, W.H. Arden's "Epitaph On A Tyrant." Perfect of a kind was what he was after, and the poetry he invented was easy to understand. He knew human folly like the back of his hand, and was greatly interested in armies and fleets. When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter. When he cried, the little children died in the streets.
That's awesome.
LEITHAUSER: Oh, it is awesome. Yeah, it is.
CONAN: Thanks very much for being with us today.
LEITHAUSER: Well, thank you so much for having me.
CONAN: Are the poems in forthcoming collection short ones?
LEITHAUSER: Yeah, a number of them are. Yeah, quite of - I mean, I wish there were more of them that, you know, that I feel had too many words in them. But I tried to - the kind of way where I can.
CONAN: That forthcoming collection is called "The Oldest Word for Dawn." Its author is Brad Leithauser, who joins us today from New England Public Radio in Amherst, Massachusetts. And thanks again for your time.
LEITHAUSER: Thank you.
CONAN: Next week, I'm going to be away and it's going to be a different show with a different host, but I'll be back a week after that. Have a great time everybody. Tomorrow, Ira Flatow is here with TALK OF THE NATION: SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
The tone is nicely academic. However, (like many academics (including me)), the author is given to parenthetical remarks, which tend to interrupt the flow of the sentence or paragraph, and often seem to me to convey non-critical information. At first I thought, hmmm, well, I suppose this being a textbook she wanted to avoid using footnotes... but then I discovered that footnotes were indeed in use. I would recommend eliminating many parentheticals, and replacing some of those that shouldn't be eliminated with footnotes.Happily the proposal was accepted and I'm merrily writing drafts full of parentheticals, then editing them out at a later stage. It's just the way my brain works. But reflecting on my parenthetical life/style/lifestyle led me to think a bit about the terms for the things that go on either side of a parenthetical comment. You could call them parentheses--I certainly would, but BrE prefers brackets--so much so that a second-year, native-English-speaking university student listed parentheses as a word she didn't understand in an assigned reading last term.
These brackety things come up a lot in my work, since in semantics one is wont to write or read things like:
[Event GO ([Thing ], [Path IN ([Thing ])])]Here the ( )s and the [ ]s represent different kinds of things, so it's important for me to be able to distinguish them when I talk to students. In Montague grammar, one uses a lot of these things: < >. And in formal logic, I was taught to use these things as well: { }. AmE uses different names for all these things, but in BrE, they tend to be referred to generally as brackets, with different modifiers:
(= a Conceptual Semantics way of representing the meaning of enter)
AmE | BrE | |
( ) | parentheses | (round) brackets |
[ ] | (square) brackets | square brackets |
{ } | braces | curly brackets |
< > | angle brackets | angle brackets |
Now, I'm not actually claiming that the words listed as "AmE" here are dialect-specific. They are the correct printing terms in BrE as well. The difference is that people don't tend to use these words in general BrE, which is particularly noticeable in the everyday reference to parentheses as brackets.
I believe I've just written a blog entry that is free of parenthetical comments! Do I get a prize?


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text:
GEOM(4) | Device Drivers Manual | GEOM(4) |
— modular
disk I/O request transformation framework
options GEOM_AES
options GEOM_BDE
options GEOM_BSD
options GEOM_CACHE
options GEOM_CONCAT
options GEOM_ELI
options GEOM_FOX
options GEOM_GATE
options GEOM_JOURNAL
options GEOM_LABEL
options GEOM_LINUX_LVM
options GEOM_MAP
options GEOM_MBR
options GEOM_MIRROR
options GEOM_MULTIPATH
options GEOM_NOP
options GEOM_PART_APM
options GEOM_PART_BSD
options GEOM_PART_BSD64
options GEOM_PART_EBR
options GEOM_PART_EBR_COMPAT
options GEOM_PART_GPT
options GEOM_PART_LDM
options GEOM_PART_MBR
options GEOM_PART_PC98
options GEOM_PART_VTOC8
options GEOM_PC98
options GEOM_RAID
options GEOM_RAID3
options GEOM_SHSEC
options GEOM_STRIPE
options GEOM_SUNLABEL
options GEOM_UZIP
options GEOM_VIRSTOR
options GEOM_VOL
options GEOM_ZERO
The GEOM
framework provides an
infrastructure in which "classes" can perform transformations
on disk I/O requests on their path from the upper kernel to the device
drivers and back.
Transformations in a GEOM
context range
from the simple geometric displacement performed in typical disk
partitioning modules over RAID algorithms and device multipath resolution to
full blown cryptographic protection of the stored data.
Compared to traditional "volume management",
differs from most and in some cases all
previous implementations in the following ways:
is extensible. It is trivially simple to write a new class of transformation and it will not be given stepchild treatment. If someone for some reason wanted to mount IBM MVS diskpacks, a class recognizing and configuring their VTOC information would be a trivial matter.GEOM
is topologically agnostic. Most volume management implementations have very strict notions of how classes can fit together, very often one fixed hierarchy is provided, for instance, subdisk - plex - volume.
Being extensible means that new transformations are treated no differently than existing transformations.
Fixed hierarchies are bad because they make it impossible to
express the intent efficiently. In the fixed hierarchy above, it is not
possible to mirror two physical disks and then partition the mirror into
subdisks, instead one is forced to make subdisks on the physical volumes and
to mirror these two and two, resulting in a much more complex configuration.
on the other hand does not care in which order
things are done, the only restriction is that cycles in the graph will not
be allowed.
is quite object oriented and
consequently the terminology borrows a lot of context and semantics from the
OO vocabulary:
A "class", represented by the data structure g_class implements one particular kind of transformation. Typical examples are MBR disk partition, BSD disklabel, and RAID5 classes.
An instance of a class is called a "geom" and represented by the data structure g_geom. In a typical i386 FreeBSD system, there will be one geom of class MBR for each disk.
A "provider", represented by the data structure g_provider, is the front gate at which a geom offers service. A provider is "a disk-like thing which appears in /dev" - a logical disk in other words. All providers have three main properties: "name", "sectorsize" and "size".
A "consumer" is the backdoor through which a geom connects to another geom provider and through which I/O requests are sent.
The topological relationship between these entities are as follows:
- A class has zero or more geom instances.
- A geom has exactly one class it is derived from.
- A geom has zero or more consumers.
- A geom has zero or more providers.
- A consumer can be attached to zero or one providers.
- A provider can have zero or more consumers attached.
All geoms have a rank-number assigned, which is used to detect and prevent loops in the acyclic directed graph. This rank number is assigned as follows:
- A geom with no attached consumers has rank=1.
- A geom with attached consumers has a rank one higher than the highest rank of the geoms of the providers its consumers are attached to.
In addition to the straightforward attach, which attaches a consumer to a provider, and detach, which breaks the bond, a number of special topological maneuvers exists to facilitate configuration and to improve the overall flexibility.
- is a process that happens whenever a new class or new provider is created,
and it provides the class a chance to automatically configure an instance
on providers which it recognizes as its own. A typical example is the MBR
disk-partition class which will look for the MBR table in the first sector
and, if found and validated, will instantiate a geom to multiplex
according to the contents of the MBR.
A new class will be offered to all existing providers in turn and a new provider will be offered to all classes in turn.
Exactly what a class does to recognize if it should accept the offered provider is not defined by
, but the sensible set of options are:- Examine specific data structures on the disk.
- Examine properties like "sectorsize" or "mediasize" for the provider.
- Examine the rank number of the provider's geom.
- Examine the method name of the provider's geom.
- is the process by which a provider is removed while it potentially is
still being used.
When a geom orphans a provider, all future I/O requests will "bounce" on the provider with an error code set by the geom. Any consumers attached to the provider will receive notification about the orphanization when the event loop gets around to it, and they can take appropriate action at that time.
A geom which came into being as a result of a normal taste operation should self-destruct unless it has a way to keep functioning whilst lacking the orphaned provider. Geoms like disk slicers should therefore self-destruct whereas RAID5 or mirror geoms will be able to continue as long as they do not lose quorum.
When a provider is orphaned, this does not necessarily result in any immediate change in the topology: any attached consumers are still attached, any opened paths are still open, any outstanding I/O requests are still outstanding.
The typical scenario is:
- A device driver detects a disk has departed and orphans the provider for it.
- The geoms on top of the disk receive the orphanization event and orphan all their providers in turn. Providers which are not attached to will typically self-destruct right away. This process continues in a quasi-recursive fashion until all relevant pieces of the tree have heard the bad news.
- Eventually the buck stops when it reaches geom_dev at the top of the stack.
- Geom_dev will call destroy_dev(9) to stop any more requests from coming in. It will sleep until any and all outstanding I/O requests have been returned. It will explicitly close (i.e.: zero the access counts), a change which will propagate all the way down through the mesh. It will then detach and destroy its geom.
- The geom whose provider is now detached will destroy the provider, detach and destroy its consumer and destroy its geom.
- This process percolates all the way down through the mesh, until the cleanup is complete.
While this approach seems byzantine, it does provide the maximum flexibility and robustness in handling disappearing devices.
The one absolutely crucial detail to be aware of is that if the device driver does not return all I/O requests, the tree will not unravel.
- is a special case of orphanization used to protect against stale metadata.
It is probably easiest to understand spoiling by going through an example.
Imagine a disk, da0, on top of which an MBR geom provides da0s1 and da0s2, and on top of da0s1 a BSD geom provides da0s1a through da0s1e, and that both the MBR and BSD geoms have autoconfigured based on data structures on the disk media. Now imagine the case where da0 is opened for writing and those data structures are modified or overwritten: now the geoms would be operating on stale metadata unless some notification system can inform them otherwise.
To avoid this situation, when the open of da0 for write happens, all attached consumers are told about this and geoms like MBR and BSD will self-destruct as a result. When da0 is closed, it will be offered for tasting again and, if the data structures for MBR and BSD are still there, new geoms will instantiate themselves anew.
Now for the fine print:
If any of the paths through the MBR or BSD module were open, they would have opened downwards with an exclusive bit thus rendering it impossible to open da0 for writing in that case. Conversely, the requested exclusive bit would render it impossible to open a path through the MBR geom while da0 is open for writing.
From this it also follows that changing the size of open geoms can only be done with their cooperation.
Finally: the spoiling only happens when the write count goes from zero to non-zero and the retasting happens only when the write count goes from non-zero to zero.
- is the process where the administrator issues instructions for a
particular class to instantiate itself. There are multiple ways to express
intent in this case - a particular provider may be specified with a level
of override forcing, for instance, a BSD disklabel module to attach to a
provider which was not found palatable during the TASTE operation.
Finally, I/O is the reason we even do this: it concerns itself with sending I/O requests through the graph.
- represented by struct bio, originate at a consumer,
are scheduled on its attached provider and, when processed, are returned
to the consumer. It is important to realize that the
struct bio which enters through the provider of a
particular geom does not "come out on the other side". Even
simple transformations like MBR and BSD will clone the
struct bio, modify the clone, and schedule the clone
on their own consumer. Note that cloning the struct
bio does not involve cloning the actual data area specified in the
I/O request.
In total, four different I/O requests exist in
: read, write, delete, and "get attribute".Read and write are self explanatory.
Delete indicates that a certain range of data is no longer used and that it can be erased or freed as the underlying technology supports. Technologies like flash adaptation layers can arrange to erase the relevant blocks before they will become reassigned and cryptographic devices may want to fill random bits into the range to reduce the amount of data available for attack.
It is important to recognize that a delete indication is not a request and consequently there is no guarantee that the data actually will be erased or made unavailable unless guaranteed by specific geoms in the graph. If "secure delete" semantics are required, a geom should be pushed which converts delete indications into (a sequence of) write requests.
"Get attribute" supports inspection and manipulation of out-of-band attributes on a particular provider or path. Attributes are named by ASCII strings and they will be discussed in a separate section below.
(Stay tuned while the author rests his brain and fingers: more to come.)
Several flags are provided for tracing
operations and unlocking protection mechanisms
via the kern.geom.debugflags sysctl. All of these
flags are off by default, and great care should be taken in turning them
- 0x01 (
) - Provide tracing of topology change events.
- 0x02 (
) - Provide tracing of buffer I/O requests.
- 0x04 (
) - Provide tracing of access check controls.
- 0x08 (unused)
- 0x10 (allow foot shooting)
- Allow writing to Rank 1 providers. This would, for example, allow the super-user to overwrite the MBR on the root disk or write random sectors elsewhere to a mounted disk. The implications are obvious.
- 0x40 (
) - This is unused at this time.
- 0x80 (
) - Dump contents of gctl requests.
libgeom(3), DECLARE_GEOM_CLASS(9), disk(9), g_access(9), g_attach(9), g_bio(9), g_consumer(9), g_data(9), g_event(9), g_geom(9), g_provider(9), g_provider_by_name(9)
This software was developed for the FreeBSD Project by Poul-Henning Kamp and NAI Labs, the Security Research Division of Network Associates, Inc. under DARPA/SPAWAR contract N66001-01-C-8035 ("CBOSS"), as part of the DARPA CHATS research program.
The first precursor for GEOM
was a
gruesome hack to Minix 1.2 and was never distributed. An earlier attempt to
implement a less general scheme in FreeBSD never
Poul-Henning Kamp <firstname.lastname@example.com>
June 8, 2015 | Debian |


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MIAMI (AP) _ Florida wildlife officials say 11 Burmese pythons were killed during the first three days of a public hunt for the invasive species in the Everglades.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission says more than 1,000 people from more than 30 states have registered to compete in the monthlong "Python Challenge."
The pythons killed since the competition began Saturday will be processed by the University of Florida.
Officials say they hope the large number of hunters will help researchers gather more information about the snakes' habits.
It's unknown how many pythons live in the Everglades. Researchers say the large snakes menace native wildlife in the struggling ecosystem.
Florida law prohibits possession or sale of the pythons for use as pets.
The competition ends Feb. 10.


text:
A woman is responsible for guiding and guarding the home. She cannot guard it if she is not free to be home and look after it. God gave her the authority to mind her own business at home and to manage it.
A woman's place is in the home because there she has freedom.
Some people assume that a homemaker is just confined to the home and unable to go to and fro freely, but this just is not so. She has much more freedom than any other kind of worker. She is free to go to the market and find high quality food, and to find things for her home that will make it a lovely place to live. She keeps her own schedule according to the needs of her family, and makes her own decisions according to what is best for them.
Being a home maker is more than cleaning and cooking, although these things are important. She is there for a deeper, spiritual reason, but that does not require that she neglect the cleaning and cooking. Both are wrought together harmoniously. If it were just a matter of good housekeeping, she would not be needed, and any one could be hired to do her job. If it were just a matter of being an advisor, she would miss out on many other fulfilling things that make a home a real home.
A woman is needed at home to put limits on the demands which confront her family.
Without the woman there to draw the line on spending money, and busy activities, other people would take advantage of them. Children need mothers to regulate their activities and their rest. Men need the home to provide a place of good nutrition and lack of stress. Some women become the social secretaries of their homes, appropriately accepting and declining time-c0nsuming activities. Women are needed at home to protect the health of their husbands by seeing that others do not put stress or extra demands on them.
Time is needed at home for women to devote to spiritual matters: Caring for a home is one of the most varied and interesting things in the world, and it is easy to get totally absorbed in it.
Seasoned homemakers will tell you that they never get caught up on their housework. Therefore it is important to put aside some time each day to meditate and pray and and settle your mind. Anyone can mechanically keep house, but a woman who has prepared her mind, spiritually, can do it with a greater purpose: to bring her and her family closer to God.
The word of God is called a seed. It has to be planted in the mind and allowed to germinate. A woman who feeds on the word of God will be able to recall what she has read when she is confronted with problems regarding the guiding of the home. Without this time of meditation and prayer, her job can become material and mechanical. She needs to set aside some time with her Bible, a pretty notebook, a nice pen, and a hymn book. It is a good time to get her thoughts together and list a few desires of her heart and pray about them.This time is her own personal worship service, when she dedicates her service to God. It will make a big difference between a house that is merely cleaned and a house that is cared for. This will have a big effect on the neighbors and friends who observe her quiet and busy way of life and bring more glory to God.
Imagine the person enduring a personal crisis just looking for some kind of relief. It is a shame that they turn to this worlds solutions, when only a small extension of hospitality will work wonders. Women need to be home to be available for any kind of emergency call. It is discouraging to young women when they are looking for encouragement and knowledge, to find all those women absent from their homes because they answered the call to go to work. The Bible gives women a place and gives it to them alone: to guard and guide and keep the home. The world has no business convincing them to abandon it.
A woman's place is in the home so that men can be providers and have a real home to come home to. When women go to work, they are saying that they have no confidence in their husbands as providers. Unmarried women should try to keep good relations with their parents so that they can be useful at home until they marry and go into their own homes. When husbands send their wives to work, it is unbliblical and they are taking authority where God has already commanded. When they demand that women go to work outside the home, they are saying that they have no confidence in them as home keepers, and they are showing they do not believe that God's plan is good enough.
A woman's place is in the home because it is where she will be under the least pressure to conform to the standards of the prevailing culture. She is accepted for her inner beauty and she encourages her husband and children to respect her and her work. No one can possibly keep up with feminisms demands to achieve and accomplish so much in the corporate world. No one can keep up with the fashions or the youth oriented culture. Home is where she can have dignity without pressure, just because that is where she belongs ad that is where she reigns.
A woman's place is in the home, because that is where her greatest authority is. No other place can provide this place of honour and responsibility, where her influence and her works will be passed down to others for generations.
A Woman's Place is Her Home. It belongs to her and no one else. When we say a woman's place is the home, it is because of God's word, not because we invented the idea. I mentioned Titus 2 in the New Testament, but there is also Ist Timothy 5:11-15. Younger widows are also younger women, and both have the same problems if they do not align their lives to these scriptures. The Old Testament shows Sarah entertaining strangers at almost a moments notice. Her kingdom was her home. Proverbs 31 has lately been made into a mandate for real estate agents, but in reality, it shows the woman in charge of the home and the family.


text:
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Have your say: Rob Tornoe's Eagles cartoon caption contest
Throughout this season, Inquirer cartoonist Rob Tornoe has been sketching - and skewering - the Eagles' ups and downs.
Now you get to play a role in Tornoe's next creation.
We've got this exclusive sketch, but it needs a caption. Post your ideas in the comments section below. We'll pick the best and run the result on Friday.
For the results of last week's caption contest, click here.


text:
Wendy's Is Getting Its First Makeover in 30 Years
The Wendy's logo is getting a makeover for the first time since 1983, as the Ohio based burger chain steers its focus on becoming known as a high-end hamburger restaurant.
The new logo shies away from the almost-30-year-old boxed in, red-and-yellow burger badge with a distinguished new red font against a plain white background and a more mature cartoon image of the girl known as Wendy.
According to Wendy's CEO Emil Brolick, the company has been testing dozens of new logos over the past several months as replacement for the company's current three-decade-old brand image. Surprisingly, the new logo will only mark the restaurants fifth image update since founder Dave Thomas opened the first Wendy's in 1969.
Along with a logo change in March, customers can expect to start seeing renovations to outdated restaurants complete with natural lighting, new TVs and more variety in seating options, according to Brolick.
Wendy's hopes that its new makeover will help make the restaurant competitive with the likes of places like Panera Bread and Chipotle Mexican Grill, which are typically revered as higher-end eating establishments.
[ABC News]


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Cary before. . .
Cary during. . .
More photos and story below. . .
And Cary after. . .
Ta Dah!
Don't know who Cary is? Meet her in A Tiny Tail For Mother's Day.
Don't worry, it'll grow back. But don't get too attached to that snow white wool. Less than 48 hours after being sheared she jumped right back into her recurring role as. . . Dirty Cary. My kid cannot stay clean.
Despite a few frigid nights, I'm still very happy that we decided to shear the sheep before lambing season started. So far our little experiment is working out well, and I think we made the right choice. The first three or four days after the sheep are shorn are the most critical, and fortunately it stayed dry and didn't get too cold (freezing rain is the worst). Our shearer also used a different cutting comb than he does during warmer months, so more wool was left on the sheep. And it's already starting to grow back.
It's really helpful to be able to look at my three dozen (!) pregnant ewes' bodies without all that wool on them, and the books were right—the sheep know to head for shelter to keep their shorn bodies warm. While they normally love to sleep out under the stars in the farmyard, the last few nights when I checked on them, everyone was tucked into the barn—including Dan with his winter fluff (not because he's a wimp, but because he's guarding his sheep of course).
This will become even more important when there are bouncing baby lambs all over the place (starting next month!). Super woolly mothers might not think to come in from the cold because they don't really notice it (especially those with woolly faces like Snugglebunny), but a shorn sheep will feel that arctic blast and lead her much-less-insulated baby to the barn.
Many of you have asked me about the shorn fleeces. Because we raise meat sheep (as opposed to wool sheep), the fleeces that come off our sheep when they are shorn aren't the kind desired by handspinners. Our sheep are mostly Suffolks, and that breed is known for having wool that is coarse and short (and even shorter this time since we sheared five months earlier than usual)--not usually desirable qualities for spinning.
Add to that the fact that our sheep regularly tromp through the woods and brambles and do not wear little cloth coats to keep their coats clean, and let's just say that Cary isn't the only dirty one. . . (though I did of course save Baby's First Fleece).
Oh, and then there were the bright red blotches of raddle marker on the backs of all the ewes. . . (This paste-like stuff was spread on Studly Do-Right Jefferson's chest last fall so we would be able to tell when each of the ewes had been bred—very helpful since I never would have guessed how, um, efficient Studly Jeff was at his One And Only Job. I just had no idea the girls were going to be permanently marked.)
I'm still catching up with your comments, and I thank you for your patience (and for taking the time to write). I did have a chance to answer the Cary and sheep shearing questions on February 7th's farm photo—click here and scroll down to the end of the comments section if you'd like to read them.
A year of Farm Photos ago:
2/11/06: Fortunately For Dan That's Not Fat, It's Fluff
2/10/06: In This Spot. . . A Miracle Has Occurred!
2/9/06: Same Scene, New View
2/8/06: There's Something About A Sunrise
And WCB#36: Decisions, Decisions
© 2007 FarmgirlFare.com, the well coiffed foodie farm blog where Farmgirl Susan shares recipes, stories, and photos from her crazy country life on 240 remote Missouri acres.


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Maximum Awesome is the winner of this little quiz.
He said:
"I'm guessing:
Neutral or Natural Colours
Different answers might also be right, but I'd say the frames were non-garish BG heavy.
As for explaining the concept: keeping BGs mostly rich, warm, neutral earth tones and subtle mixes of colours so that spots of bright, intense colour "pop" more. Using colour schemes based on nature, not self-cannibalising cartoons and "video box covers"."
I was also pleased that lots of people noticed other good things about images in this post.
It's hard to write about artistic concepts, I'm never 100% sure whether I get what I'm trying to say across.This is a follow up post to a series of articles I did a while back. These pics illustrate a concept I'm somewhat obsessed about.
I'd love to know whether anyone can tell just by looking at these what particular post and concept these frames help illustrate.
I'd also be curious to know if anyone could explain the concept back to me.
That way, I'd have some inkling whether I am able to explain in words the concepts I love and try to share with other folks who may no have thought about them before.
So do me a favor if you're interested and let me know what concept is shared by all these pics, and maybe what previous post went into it in detail...


text:
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Candy Crush is my not-so secret addiction. It has consumed my days and plagued my nights. I've been crushing so much candy over the last few months, in fact, I've managed to figure out quite a few tips, tricks, and flat out cheats that have helped me beat level after level. And it's time I shared them all with you, the iMore nation!
So here they are, my top 10 ways to beat the candy out of Candy Crush: (Update: We've also added a second set of top 10 Candy Crush hints, guides, and ways to get extra lives!)
1. Find the patterns!
There are things that will make a sprinkle donut hole or special candy effortlessly. Recognizing and repeating them allows you to wipe the board and earn your ticket to the next level faster. I'm always looking for these patterns. I memorize which patterns lead to which special candy and then set them up whenever possible and as needed.
2. Start at the bottom
Crushing candies on the bottom is better than crushing candies at the top, because candies drop down, creating the potential for a cascade effect that essentially gives you free moves.
3. Go for combos
The two best combinations are the wrapped candy and the striped candy, and the sprinkle donut hole and the striped candy. Together, they can wipe out over half the board for you. This can also help you get to places which are off the board or otherwise difficult to reach. This is the only way you will get by levels such as 181, which have unreachable squares. Also, a wrapped candy switched with another wrapped candy will ignite a 6 by 4 square which can clear a huge area.
4. Know your stripes!
Candy is striped in the same direction as the final candy moved to complete the previous formation. If you move a candy horizontally, it will make a horizontal stripe, which will then explode horizontally as well.
5. Assess your threats!
Assess your threats. Prioritize getting rid of evil candy by their threat levels. For example, I usually make it a rule to kill low number bombs first, then chocolate, then go after the blocks.
Master your iPhone in minutes
iMore offers spot-on advice and guidance from our team of experts, with decades of Apple device experience to lean on. Learn more with iMore!
6. Clear jellies on the edge!
Clearing jellies on the edge. When getting rid of jellies, only worry about the edges, especially the corners and bottoms. These jellies have the least number of combinations which can eliminate them, so will be the hardest to get rid of. Take a moment each move to see if you can get rid of edge jellies and, if not, go after an easier one.
7. Have a plan!
Have a plan. Each time you start a new level, look at the hardest element on that level and think out how you can defeat it first before you use up lives. Also, pause between moves. You may have a sprinkle and not even realize it if you're watching the candies from a lesser move get crushed.
8. Understand chocolate!
Understand chocolate. If you've eaten a piece of chocolate one round, chocolate will not regenerate the following round. This is a great way to keep chocolate at bay. Try to destroy chocolate each round so that it won't regenerate the next. You can clear the entire board of chocolate using this method, though in later levels there is a chocolate maker which will bring them back in vicious fashion. Chocolate will avoid special candy if it can. Chocolate will also not eat a fruit or nut, though it will absorb bombs.
9. +5 Candy is your friend.
Make a candy crush chain with +5 on whatever levels you can. This will add 5 seconds to a time trial level. You can tell if it is a "time trial" level or a "clear the jelly" level based on the small icon in the lower left corner of the start up screen for each level.
10. Cheat time for extra lives!
If you don't use Facebook, there's still a cheat to get you extra lives. Turn the clock on your mobile device ahead 2 hours, and then keep playing to your hearts content. Go to Settings > General> Date & Time > Set Time Off > Set Date and Time > Add two hours forward and get 4 more lives in your game. You will eventually have to pay back the time, but schedule that for when you're sleeping anyway. Remember to change the time from PM to AM if you are going past midnight.
Update: rodrigonew in the comments adds this brilliant twist to the extra lives cheat:
11. 10 more cheats!
Don't forget our second set of top 10 Candy Crush hints, guides, and ways to get extra lives!
Your best Candy Crush cheats?
Well, there they are -- my top 10 tips for tricking or flat out cheating at Candy Crush. I'd love to hear how they work for you in the comments, and if you've come across any other great Candy Crush tips, tricks, or cheats, for the sake of my sanity, let me know!
I'd love to hear how these tips and cheats work for you in the comments, and if you've come across any other great Candy Crush tips, tricks, or cheats, for the sake of my sanity, let me know!
Senior Editor at iMore and a practicing therapist specializing in stress and anxiety. She speaks everywhere from conferences to corporations, co-host of Vector and Isometric podcasts, follow her on Twitter @Georgia_Dow and check out her series at anxiety-videos.com.