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Angoras are bred mainly for their wool because it is silky and soft. They have a humorous appearance, as they oddly resemble a fur ball. Most are calm and docile but should be handled carefully. Grooming is necessary to prevent the fiber from matting and felting on the rabbit. A condition called "wool block" is common ...
Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The ISO assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic, including its standard form of Literary Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic, which is derived from Classical Arabic. This distincti...
Arabic has influenced languages across the globe throughout its history, especially languages where Islam is the predominant religion and in countries that were conquered by Muslims. The most markedly influenced languages are Persian, Turkish, Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu), Kashmiri, Kurdish, Bosnian, Kazakh, Bengali, Ma...
Classification. Arabic is usually classified as a Central Semitic language. Linguists still differ as to the best classification of Semitic language sub-groups. The Semitic languages changed between Proto-Semitic and the emergence of Central Semitic languages, particularly in grammar. Innovations of the Central Semitic...
History. Old Arabic. Arabia had a wide variety of Semitic languages in antiquity. The term "Arab" was initially used to describe those living in the Arabian Peninsula, as perceived by geographers from ancient Greece. In the southwest, various Central Semitic languages both belonging to and outside the Ancient South Ara...
Linguists generally believe that "Old Arabic", a collection of related dialects that constitute the precursor of Arabic, first emerged during the Iron Age. Previously, the earliest attestation of Old Arabic was thought to be a single 1st century CE inscription in Sabaic script at , in southern present-day Saudi Arabia....
The earliest attestation of continuous Arabic text in an ancestor of the modern Arabic script are three lines of poetry by a man named Garm(')allāhe found in En Avdat, Israel, and dated to around 125 CE. This is followed by the Namara inscription, an epitaph of the king Imru' al-Qays bar 'Amro, dating to 328 CE, found ...
In the late 6th century AD, a relatively uniform intertribal "poetic koine" distinct from the spoken vernaculars developed based on the Bedouin dialects of Najd, probably in connection with the court of al-Ḥīra. During the first Islamic century, the majority of Arabic poets and Arabic-writing persons spoke Arabic as th...
Spread. Arabic spread with the spread of Islam. Following the early Muslim conquests, Arabic gained vocabulary from Middle Persian and Turkish. In the early Abbasid period, many Classical Greek terms entered Arabic through translations carried out at Baghdad's House of Wisdom. By the 8th century, knowledge of Classical...
Neo-Arabic. Charles Ferguson's koine theory claims that the modern Arabic dialects collectively descend from a single military koine that sprang up during the Islamic conquests; this view has been challenged in recent times. Ahmad al-Jallad proposes that there were at least two considerably distinct types of Arabic on ...
In around the 11th and 12th centuries in al-Andalus, the "zajal" and "muwashah" poetry forms developed in the dialectical Arabic of Cordoba and the Maghreb. Nahda. The "Nahda" was a cultural and especially literary renaissance of the 19th century in which writers sought "to fuse Arabic and European forms of expression....
In 1997, a bureau of Arabization standardization was added to the Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization of the Arab League. These academies and organizations have worked toward the Arabization of the sciences, creating terms in Arabic to describe new concepts, toward the standardization of these new terms ...
Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) largely follows the grammatical standards of Classical Arabic and uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties and has adopted certain new constructions and vocabulary fr...
MSA is the variety used in most current, printed Arabic publications, spoken by some of the Arabic media across North Africa and the Middle East, and understood by most educated Arabic speakers. "Literary Arabic" and "Standard Arabic" ( ") are less strictly defined terms that may refer to Modern Standard Arabic or Clas...
"Colloquial" or "dialectal" Arabic refers to the many national or regional varieties which constitute the everyday spoken language. Colloquial Arabic has many regional variants; geographically distant varieties usually differ enough to be mutually unintelligible, and some linguists consider them distinct languages. How...
Status and usage. Diglossia. The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia, which is the normal use of two separate varieties of the same language, usually in different social situations. "Tawleed" is the process of giving a new shade of meani...
The issue of whether Arabic is one language or many languages is politically charged, in the same way it is for the varieties of Chinese, Hindi and Urdu, Serbian and Croatian, Scots and English, etc. In contrast to speakers of Hindi and Urdu who claim they cannot understand each other even when they can, speakers of th...
From a linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the various spoken varieties of Arabic differ among each other collectively about as much as the Romance languages. This is an apt comparison in a number of ways. The period of divergence from a single spoken form is similar—perhaps 1500 years for Arabic, 2000 years f...
In modern times, the educated upper classes in the Arab world have taken a nearly opposite view. Yasir Suleiman wrote in 2011 that "studying and knowing English or French in most of the Middle East and North Africa have become a badge of sophistication and modernity and ... feigning, or asserting, weakness or lack of f...
Software and books with tapes are an important part of Arabic learning, as many of Arabic learners may live in places where there are no academic or Arabic language school classes available. Radio series of Arabic language classes are also provided from some radio stations. A number of websites on the Internet provide ...
This lexicographic tradition was traditionalist and corrective in nature—holding that linguistic correctness and eloquence derive from Qurʾānic usage, , and Bedouin speech—positioning itself against "laḥnu‿l-ʿāmmah" (), the solecism it viewed as defective. Western lexicography of Arabic. In the second half of the 19th ...
Loanwords. The most important sources of borrowings into (pre-Islamic) Arabic are from the related (Semitic) languages Aramaic, which used to be the principal, international language of communication throughout the ancient Near and Middle East, and Ethiopic. Many cultural, religious and political terms have entered Ara...
Influence on other languages. The influence of Arabic has been most important in Islamic countries, because it is the language of the Islamic sacred book, the Quran. Arabic is also an important source of vocabulary for languages such as Amharic, Azerbaijani, Baluchi, Bengali, Berber, Bosnian, Chaldean, Chechen, Chittag...
Terms borrowed range from religious terminology (like Berber "taẓallit", "prayer", from "salat" ( ')), academic terms (like Uyghur "mentiq", "logic"), and economic items (like English "coffee") to placeholders (like Spanish ', "so-and-so"), everyday terms (like Hindustani "lekin", "but", or Spanish and French ', meanin...
Since, throughout the Islamic world, Arabic occupied a position similar to that of Latin in Europe, many of the Arabic concepts in the fields of science, philosophy, commerce, etc. were coined from Arabic roots by non-native Arabic speakers, notably by Aramaic and Persian translators, and then found their way into othe...
Within the non-peninsula varieties, the largest difference is between the non-Egyptian North African dialects, especially Moroccan Arabic, and the others. Moroccan Arabic in particular is hardly comprehensible to Arabic speakers east of Libya (although the converse is not true, in part due to the popularity of Egyptian...
Phonology. While many languages have numerous dialects that differ in phonology, contemporary spoken Arabic is more properly described as a continuum of varieties. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), is the standard variety shared by educated speakers throughout Arabic-speaking regions. MSA is used in writing in formal print...
Literary Arabic. As in other Semitic languages, Arabic has a complex and unusual morphology, i.e. method of constructing words from a basic root. Arabic has a nonconcatenative "root-and-pattern" morphology: A root consists of a set of bare consonants (usually three), which are fitted into a discontinuous pattern to for...
The feminine singular is often marked by /-at/, which is pronounced as /-ah/ before a pause. Plural is indicated either through endings (the sound plural) or internal modification (the broken plural). Definite nouns include all proper nouns, all nouns in "construct state" and all nouns which are prefixed by the definit...
Nouns, verbs, pronouns and adjectives agree with each other in all respects. Non-human plural nouns are grammatically considered to be feminine singular. A verb in a verb-initial sentence is marked as singular regardless of its semantic number when the subject of the verb is explicitly mentioned as a noun. Numerals bet...
The following shows a paradigm of a regular Arabic verb, "" 'to write'. In Modern Standard, the energetic mood, in either long or short form, which has the same meaning, is almost never used. Derivation. Like other Semitic languages, and unlike most other languages, Arabic makes much more use of nonconcatenative morpho...
Examples of the different verbs formed from the root ' 'write' (using ' 'red' for Form IX, which is limited to colors and physical defects): Form II is sometimes used to create transitive denominative verbs (verbs built from nouns); Form V is the equivalent used for intransitive denominatives. The associated participle...
The following is an example of a regular verb paradigm in Egyptian Arabic. Writing system. The Arabic alphabet derives from the Aramaic through Nabatean, to which it bears a loose resemblance like that of Coptic or Cyrillic scripts to Greek script. Traditionally, there were several differences between the Western (Nort...
Originally Arabic was made up of only "rasm" without diacritical marks Later diacritical points (which in Arabic are referred to as "nuqaṯ") were added (which allowed readers to distinguish between letters such as b, t, th, n and y). Finally signs known as "Tashkil" were used for short vowels known as "harakat" and oth...
In modern times the intrinsically calligraphic nature of the written Arabic form is haunted by the thought that a typographic approach to the language, necessary for digitized unification, will not always accurately maintain meanings conveyed through calligraphy. Romanization. There are a number of different standards ...
These less "scientific" systems tend to avoid diacritics and use digraphs (like "sh" and "kh"). These are usually simpler to read, but sacrifice the definiteness of the scientific systems, and may lead to ambiguities, e.g. whether to interpret "sh" as a single sound, as in "gash", or a combination of two sounds, as in ...
To handle those Arabic letters that cannot be accurately represented using the Latin script, numerals and other characters were appropriated. For example, the numeral "3" may be used to represent the Arabic letter . There is no universal name for this type of transliteration, but some have named it Arabic Chat Alphabet...
Arabic alphabet and nationalism. There have been many instances of national movements to convert Arabic script into Latin script or to Romanize the language. Currently, the only Arabic variety to use Latin script is Maltese. Lebanon. The Beirut newspaper "La Syrie" pushed for the change from Arabic script to Latin lett...
A scholar, Salama Musa agreed with the idea of applying a Latin alphabet to Arabic, as he believed that would allow Egypt to have a closer relationship with the West. He also believed that Latin script was key to the success of Egypt as it would allow for more advances in science and technology. This change in alphabet...
Alfred Hitchcock Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English film director. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema. In a career spanning six decades, he directed over 50 feature films, many of which are still widely watched and studied today...
Hitchcock's other notable films include "Rope" (1948), "Strangers on a Train" (1951), "Dial M for Murder" (1954), "To Catch a Thief" (1955), "The Trouble with Harry" (1955), "Vertigo" (1958), "North by Northwest" (1959), "The Birds" (1963), "Marnie" (1964) and "Frenzy" (1972), all of which were also financially success...
Biography. Early life: 1899–1919. Early childhood and education. Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born on 13 August 1899 in the flat above his parents' leased greengrocer's shop at 517 High Road in Leytonstone, which was then part of Essex (now part of the London Borough of Waltham Forest). He was the son of greengrocer and...
Describing himself as a well-behaved boyhis father called him his "little lamb without a spot"Hitchcock said he could not remember ever having had a playmate. One of his favourite stories for interviewers was about his father sending him to the local police station with a note when he was five; the policeman looked at ...
The family moved again when Hitchcock was eleven, this time to Stepney, and on 5 October 1910 he was sent to St Ignatius College in Stamford Hill, a Jesuit grammar school with a reputation for discipline. As corporal punishment, the priests used a flat, hard, springy tool made of gutta-percha and known as a "ferula" wh...
Hitchcock's favourite subject was geography and he became interested in maps and the timetables of trains, trams and buses; according to John Russell Taylor, he could recite all the stops on the "Orient Express". He had a particular interest in London trams. An overwhelming majority of his films include rail or tram sc...
Hitchcock was too young to enlist when the First World War started in July 1914, and when he reached the required age of 18 in 1917, he received a C3 classification ("free from serious organic disease, able to stand service conditions in garrisons at home ... only suitable for sedentary work"). He joined a cadet regime...
Inter-war career: 1919–1939. Famous Players–Lasky. While still at Henley's, he read in a trade paper that Famous Players–Lasky, the production arm of Paramount Pictures, was opening a studio in London. They were planning to film "The Sorrows of Satan" by Marie Corelli, so he produced some drawings for the title cards a...
Gainsborough Pictures and work in Germany. When Paramount pulled out of London in 1922, Hitchcock was hired as an assistant director by a new firm run in the same location by Michael Balcon, later known as Gainsborough Pictures. Hitchcock worked on "Woman to Woman" (1923) with the director Graham Cutts, designing the s...
In Germany, Hitchcock observed the nuances of German cinema and filmmaking which had a big influence on him. When he was not working, he would visit Berlin's art galleries, concerts and museums. He would also meet with actors, writers and producers to build connections. Balcon asked him to direct a second film in Munic...
Hitchcock established himself as a name director with his first thriller, "" (1927). The film concerns the hunt for a Jack the Ripper-style serial killer who, wearing a black cloak and carrying a black bag, is murdering young blonde women in London, and only on Tuesdays. A landlady suspects that her lodger is the kille...
Continuing to market his brand following the success of "The Lodger", Hitchcock wrote a letter to the "London Evening News" in November 1927 about his filmmaking, participated in studio-produced publicity, and by December 1927 he developed the original sketch of his widely recognised profile which he introduced by send...
Reville became her husband's closest collaborator; Charles Champlin wrote in 1982: "The Hitchcock touch had four hands, and two were Alma's." When Hitchcock accepted the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979, he said that he wanted to mention "four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation and encouragemen...
In 1933, Hitchcock signed a multi-film contract with Gaumont-British, once again working for Michael Balcon. His first film for the company, "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1934), was a success; his second, "The 39 Steps" (1935), was acclaimed in the UK, and gained him recognition in the US. It also established the quinte...
Hitchcock released two spy thrillers in 1936. "Sabotage" was loosely based on Joseph Conrad's novel, "The Secret Agent" (1907), about a woman who discovers that her husband is a terrorist, and "Secret Agent", based on two stories in "" (1928) by W. Somerset Maugham. In his positive review of "Sabotage" for "The Spectat...
Hitchcock followed up with "Young and Innocent" in 1937, a crime thriller based on the 1936 novel "A Shilling for Candles" by Josephine Tey. Starring Nova Pilbeam and Derrick De Marney, the film was relatively enjoyable for the cast and crew to make. To meet distribution purposes in America, the film's runtime was cut ...
By 1938, Hitchcock was aware that he had reached his peak in Britain. He had received numerous offers from producers in the United States, but he turned them all down because he disliked the contractual obligations or thought the projects were repellent. However, producer David O. Selznick offered him a concrete propos...
Selznick contract. Selznick signed Hitchcock to a seven-year contract beginning in April 1939, and the Hitchcocks moved to Hollywood. The Hitchcocks lived in a spacious flat on Wilshire Boulevard, and slowly acclimatised themselves to the Los Angeles area. He and his wife Alma kept a low profile, and were not intereste...
Hitchcock approached American cinema cautiously; his first American film was set in England in which the "Americanness" of the characters was incidental: "Rebecca" (1940) was set in a Hollywood version of England's Cornwall and based on a novel by English novelist Daphne du Maurier. Selznick insisted on a faithful adap...
Early war years. In September 1940, the Hitchcocks bought the Cornwall Ranch near Scotts Valley, California, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Their primary residence was an English-style home in Bel Air, purchased in 1942. Hitchcock's films were diverse during this period, ranging from the romantic comedy "Mr. & Mrs. S...
"Saboteur" (1942) is the first of two films that Hitchcock made for Universal Studios during the decade. Hitchcock wanted Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck or Henry Fonda and Gene Tierney to star, but was forced by Universal to use Universal contract player Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane, a freelancer who signed a o...
Back in England, Hitchcock's mother Emma was severely ill; she died on 26 September 1942 at age 79. Hitchcock never spoke publicly about his mother, but his assistant said that he admired her. Four months later, on 4 January 1943, his brother William died of an overdose at age 52. Hitchcock was not very close to Willia...
Hitchcock's typical dinner before his weight loss had been a roast chicken, boiled ham, potatoes, bread, vegetables, relishes, salad, dessert, a bottle of wine and some brandy. To lose weight, his diet consisted of black coffee for breakfast and lunch, and steak and salad for dinner, but it was hard to maintain; Donald...
Post-war Hollywood years: 1945–1953. Later Selznick films. Hitchcock worked for David Selznick again when he directed "Spellbound" (1945), which explores psychoanalysis and features a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí. The dream sequence as it appears in the film is ten minutes shorter than was originally envisi...
The spy film "Notorious" followed next in 1946. Hitchcock told François Truffaut that Selznick sold him, Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant and Ben Hecht's screenplay, to RKO Radio Pictures as a "package" for $500,000 (equivalent to $ million in ) because of cost overruns on Selznick's "Duel in the Sun" (1946). "Notorious" sta...
"Under Capricorn" (1949), set in 19th-century Australia, also uses the short-lived technique of long takes, but to a more limited extent. He again used Technicolor in this production, then returned to black-and-white for several years. Transatlantic Pictures became inactive after the last two films. Hitchcock filmed "S...
Peak years: 1954–1964. "Dial M for Murder" and "Rear Window". "I Confess" was followed by three colour films starring Grace Kelly: "Dial M for Murder" (1954), "Rear Window" (1954) and "To Catch a Thief" (1955). In "Dial M for Murder", Ray Milland plays the villain who tries to murder his unfaithful wife (Kelly) for her...
"Alfred Hitchcock Presents". From 1955 to 1965, Hitchcock was the host of the television series "Alfred Hitchcock Presents". With his droll delivery, gallows humour and iconic image, the series made Hitchcock a celebrity. The title-sequence of the show pictured a minimalist caricature of his profile (he drew it himself...
Hitchcock's success in television spawned a set of short-story collections in his name; these included "Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology", "Stories They Wouldn't Let Me Do on TV," and "Tales My Mother Never Told Me". In 1956, HSD Publications also licensed the director's name to create "Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine"...
"The Wrong Man" (1956), Hitchcock's final film for Warner Bros., is a low-key black-and-white production based on a real-life case of mistaken identity reported in "Life" magazine in 1953. This was the only film of Hitchcock to star Henry Fonda, playing a Stork Club musician mistaken for a liquor store thief, who is ar...
In "Vertigo", Stewart plays Scottie, a former police investigator suffering from acrophobia, who becomes obsessed with a woman he has been hired to shadow (Novak). Scottie's obsession leads to tragedy, and this time Hitchcock did not opt for a happy ending. Some critics, including Donald Spoto and Roger Ebert, agree th...
"North by Northwest" and "Psycho". After "Vertigo", the rest of 1958 was a difficult year for Hitchcock. During pre-production of "North by Northwest" (1959), which was a "slow" and "agonising" process, his wife Alma was diagnosed with cancer. While she was in hospital, Hitchcock kept himself occupied with his televisi...
"Psycho" (1960) is arguably Hitchcock's best-known film. Based on Robert Bloch's 1959 novel "Psycho", which was inspired by the case of Ed Gein, the film was produced on a tight budget of $800,000 (equivalent to $ million in ) and shot in black-and-white on a spare set using crew members from "Alfred Hitchcock Presents...
Truffaut interview. On 13 August 1962, Hitchcock's 63rd birthday, the French director François Truffaut began a 50-hour interview of Hitchcock, filmed over eight days at Universal Studios, during which Hitchcock agreed to answer 500 questions. It took four years to transcribe the tapes and organise the images; it was p...
In "The Birds", Melanie Daniels, a young socialite, meets lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in a bird shop; Jessica Tandy plays his possessive mother. Hedren visits him in Bodega Bay (where "The Birds" was filmed) carrying a pair of lovebirds as a gift. Suddenly waves of birds start gathering, watching, and attacking. ...
"Marnie". In June 1962, Grace Kelly announced that she had decided against appearing in "Marnie" (1964). Hedren had signed an exclusive seven-year, $500-a-week contract with Hitchcock in October 1961, and he decided to cast her in the lead role opposite Sean Connery. In 2016, describing Hedren's performance as "one of ...
Hitchcock told cinematographer Robert Burks that the camera had to be placed as close as possible to Hedren when he filmed her face. Evan Hunter, the screenwriter of "The Birds" who was writing "Marnie" too, explained to Hitchcock that, if Mark loved Marnie, he would comfort her, not rape her. Hitchcock reportedly repl...
Hitchcock returned to Britain to make his penultimate film, "Frenzy" (1972), based on the novel "Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square" (1966). After two espionage films, the plot marked a return to the murder-thriller genre. Richard Blaney (Jon Finch), a volatile barman with a history of explosive anger, becom...
"Family Plot" (1976) was Hitchcock's last film. It relates the escapades of "Madam" Blanche Tyler, played by Barbara Harris, a fraudulent spiritualist, and her taxi-driver lover Bruce Dern, making a living from her phony powers. While "Family Plot" was based on the Victor Canning novel "The Rainbird Pattern" (1972), th...
His last public appearance was on 16 March 1980, when he introduced the next year's winner of the American Film Institute award. He died of kidney failure the following month, on 29 April, in his Bel Air home. Donald Spoto, one of Hitchcock's biographers, wrote that Hitchcock had declined to see a priest, but according...
Hitchcock's film production career evolved from small-scale silent films to financially significant sound films. Hitchcock remarked that he was influenced by early filmmakers George Méliès, D. W. Griffith and Alice Guy-Blaché. His silent films between 1925 and 1929 were in the crime and suspense genres, but also includ...
Earning the title "Master of Suspense", the director experimented with ways to generate tension in his work. He said, "My suspense work comes out of creating nightmares for the audience. And I "play" with an audience. I make them gasp and surprise them and shock them. When you have a nightmare, it's awfully vivid if yo...
Hitchcock's films, from the silent to the sound era, contained a number of recurring themes that he is famous for. His films explored audience as a voyeur, notably in "Rear Window", "Marnie" and "Psycho". He understood that human beings enjoy voyeuristic activities and made the audience participate in it through the ch...
According to Robin Wood, Hitchcock retained a feeling of ambivalence towards homosexuality, despite working with gay actors throughout his career. Donald Spoto suggests that Hitchcock's sexually repressive childhood may have contributed to his exploration of deviancy. During the 1950s, the Motion Picture Production Cod...
Hitchcock appears briefly in most of his own films. For example, he is seen struggling to get a double bass onto a train ("Strangers on a Train"), walking dogs out of a pet shop ("The Birds"), fixing a neighbour's clock ("Rear Window"), as a shadow ("Family Plot"), sitting at a table in a photograph ("Dial M for Murder...
Hitchcock's films often feature characters struggling in their relationships with their mothers, such as Norman Bates in "Psycho". In "North by Northwest", Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is an innocent man ridiculed by his mother for insisting that shadowy, murderous men are after him. In "The Birds", the Rod Taylor char...
Hitchcock believed that actors should concentrate on their performances and leave work on script and character to the directors and screenwriters. He told Bryan Forbes in 1967: "I remember discussing with a method actor how he was taught and so forth. He said, 'We're taught using improvisation. We are given an idea and...
Writing, storyboards and production. Hitchcock planned his scripts in detail with his writers. In "Writing with Hitchcock" (2001), Steven DeRosa noted that Hitchcock supervised them through every draft, asking that they tell the story visually. Hitchcock told Roger Ebert in 1969: Hitchcock's films were extensively stor...
Even when storyboards were made, scenes that were shot differed from them significantly. Krohn's analysis of the production of Hitchcock classics like "Notorious" reveals that Hitchcock was flexible enough to change a film's conception during its production. Another example Krohn notes is the American remake of "The Ma...
According to Krohn, this and a great deal of other information revealed through his research of Hitchcock's personal papers, script revisions and the like refute the notion of Hitchcock as a director who was always in control of his films, whose vision of his films did not change during production, which Krohn notes ha...
In 1978, John Russell Taylor described him as "the most universally recognizable person in the world" and "a straightforward middle-class Englishman who just happened to be an artistic genius". In 2002, "MovieMaker" named him the most influential director of all time, and a 2007 "The Daily Telegraph" critics' poll rank...
His flair was for narrative, cruelly withholding crucial information (from his characters and from us) and engaging the emotions of the audience like no one else." In 1992, the "Sight & Sound" Critics' Poll ranked Hitchcock at No. 4 in its list of "Top 10 Directors" of all time. 1 in its "50 Greatest Directors" lis...
In 2001, a series of 17 mosaics of Hitchcock's life and work, which are located in Leytonstone tube station in the London Underground, was commissioned by the London Borough of Waltham Forest. In 2012, Hitchcock was selected by artist Sir Peter Blake, author of the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album...
Anaconda Anacondas or water boas are a group of large boas of the genus Eunectes. They are a semiaquatic group of snakes found in tropical South America. Three to five extant and one extinct species are currently recognized, including one of the largest snakes in the world, "E. murinus", the green anaconda. Description...
Ray used a catalogue of snakes from the Leyden museum supplied by Dr. Tancred Robinson. The description of its habit was based on Andreas Cleyer, who in 1684 described a gigantic snake that crushed large animals by coiling around their bodies and crushing their bones. Henry Yule in his 1886 work "Hobson-Jobson", notes ...
Distribution and habitat. Found in tropical South America from Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela south to Argentina. Feeding. All five species are aquatic snakes that prey on other aquatic animals, including fish, river fowl, and caiman. Videos exist of anacondas preying on domestic animals such as goats and some...
Species. Rivas "et al". revised the taxonomy of "Eunectes", describing a new species of green anaconda ("Eunectes akayima") and merging "E. deschauenseei" and "E. beniensis" with "E. notaeus", which resulted in the recognition of only three species of anaconda. The result of their phylogenetic analysis is represented b...
Breeding balls. During the mating season female anacondas release pheromones to attract males for breeding, which can result in polyandrous breeding balls; these breeding balls have been observed in "E. murinus", "E. notaeus", and "E. deschauenseei", and likely also occur in "E. beniensis". In the green anaconda "(E. m...
Asexual reproduction. Although sexual reproduction is by far the most common in "Eunectes", "E. murinus" has been observed to undergo facultative parthenogenesis. In both cases, the females had lived in isolation from other anacondas for over eight years, and DNA analysis showed that the few fully formed offspring were...
Afghanistan (1911 Encyclopedia)
Altaic languages The Altaic () languages are a group of languages comprising the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic language families, with some linguists including the Koreanic and Japonic families. These languages share agglutinative morphology, head-final word order and some vocabulary. The once-popular theory attributin...

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