Fortis N.V./S.A. was a Belgian financial company active in insurance, banking and investment management. In 2007 it was the 20th largest business in the world by revenue but after encountering severe problems in the financial crisis of 2008, most of the company was sold in parts, with only insurance activities remaining.
The Benelux countries were Fortis's home base and its strength. Fortis's banking operations included network (retail), commercial, and merchant banking; its insurance products included life, health, and property/casualty lines. Products were sold through independent agents, brokers and financial planners, and through branches of Fortis Bank. It was listed on the Euronext Brussels, Euronext Amsterdam, and Luxembourg stock exchanges.
The company was broken up after having critical difficulty financing its part of a joint acquisition of ABN AMRO (as a member of a consortium which also included Royal Bank of Scotland Group and Banco Santander). After receiving a bailout from the Benelux governments, its Belgian banking operations were sold to BNP Paribas, while its insurance and banking subsidiaries in the Netherlands were nationalised by the Dutch government and renamed ABN AMRO. The Dutch insurance arm of Fortis was split off as ASR Nederland.
Fortis may refer to:
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Fortis is a propelled ground vehicle ("aerojeep") designed by Zhukovsky Aerodynamics Research Institute and by the group of students from MAMI Moscow State Technical University. It can ride both on ground and water while maintaining good stability. Fortis has Chevy 350 as its engine its main features include the speed up to 100 kilometres per hour (62 mph) and resource of 6 hours.
In linguistics, fortis and lenis (/ˈfɔːrtɪs ˈliːnɪs/; Latin for "strong" and "weak"), sometimes identified with tense and lax, are pronunciations of consonants with relatively greater and lesser energy. English has fortis consonants, such as the p in pat, with a corresponding lenis consonant, such as the b in bat. Fortis and lenis consonants may be distinguished by tenseness or other characteristics, such as voicing, aspiration, glottalization, velarization, length, and length of nearby vowels. Fortis and lenis were coined for languages where the contrast between sounds such as p and b does not involve voicing (vibration of the vocal cords).
Originally, the terms were used to refer to an impressionistic sense of strength differences, though more sophisticated instruments eventually gave the opportunity to search for the acoustic and articulatory signs. For example, Malécot (1968) tested whether articulatory strength could be detected by measuring the force of the contact between the articulators or of the peak pressure in the mouth. Because such studies initially found little to substantiate the terminology, phoneticians have largely ceased using them, though they are still commonly used as "phonological labels for specifying a dichotomy when used language-specifically." This can be useful when the actual articulatory features underlying the distinction are unknown or unimportant.