Gord (archaeology)

A gord is a medieval Slavonic fortified settlement, also occasionally known as a burgwall or Slavic burgwall after the German term for such sites. The ancient peoples were known for building wooden fortified settlements. The reconstructed Centum-satem isogloss word for such a settlement is g'herdh, gordъ, related to the Germanic *gard and *gart (as in Stuttgart etc.). This Proto-Slavic word (*gordъ) for town or city, later differentiated into grad (Cyrillic: град), gard,gorod (Cyrillic: город), etc.

Similar strongholds were built during the late Bronze and early Iron Ages by the Lusatian culture (ca. 1300 BC – 500 BC), and later in the 7th - 8th centuries BC in modern-day Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic and eastern Germany. These settlements were usually founded on strategic sites such as hills, riverbanks, lake islands or peninsulas.

A typical gord was a group of wooden houses, built either in rows or in circles, surrounded by one or more rings of walls made of earth and wood, a palisade and/or moats. Some gords were ring-shaped, with a round, oval or occasionally polygonal fence or wall surrounding a hollow. Others, built on a natural hill or a man-made mound, were cone-shaped. Those with a natural defense on one side, such as a river or lake, were usually horseshoe-shaped.

Grad (toponymy)

Grad (Cyrillic: Град) is an Old Slavic word meaning "town", "city", "castle" or "fortified settlement". Initially present in all related languages as Gord (archaeology), it can still be found as "grad", or as Horod or Gorod (toponymy) in many placenames today.

These places have grad as part of their name:

Schisma

In music, the schisma (also spelled skhisma) is the interval between a Pythagorean comma (531441:524288) and a syntonic comma (81:80) and equals 32805:32768, which is 1.9537 cents ( Play ). It may also be defined as:

Schisma is a Greek word meaning a split (see schism) whose musical sense was introduced by Boethius at the beginning of the 6th century in the 3rd book of his 'De institutione musica'. Boethius was also the first to define diaschisma.

Andreas Werckmeister defined the grad as the twelfth root of the Pythagorean comma, or equivalently the difference between the justly tuned fifth and the equally tempered fifth of 700 cents. This value, 1.955 cents, may be approximated by the ratio 886:885. This interval is also sometimes called a schisma.

Curiously, 2^1/12 5^1/7 appears very close to 4:3, the just perfect fourth. That's because the difference between a grad and a schisma is so small. So, a rational intonation version of equal temperament may be realized by flattening the fifth by a schisma rather than a grad, a fact first noted by Johann Kirnberger, a pupil of Bach. Twelve of these Kirnberger fifths of 16384:10935 exceed seven octaves, and therefore fail to close, by the tiny interval of 2¹⁶¹ 3⁻⁸⁴ 5⁻¹², the atom of Kirnberger of 0.01536 cents.

Grad (surname)

Grad is the surname of the following people

Geography

Geography (from Greek γεωγραφία, geographia, lit. "earth description") is a field of science devoted to the study of the lands, the features, the inhabitants, and the phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or picture or write about the earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes (276–194 BC). Four historical traditions in geographical research are spatial analysis of the natural and the human phenomena (geography as the study of distribution), area studies (places and regions), study of the human-land relationship, and research in the Earth sciences. Nonetheless, modern geography is an all-encompassing discipline that foremost seeks to understand the Earth and all of its human and natural complexities—not merely where objects are, but how they have changed and come to be. Geography has been called "the world discipline" and "the bridge between the human and the physical science". Geography is divided into two main branches: human geography and physical geography.

Word chain

Word chain, also known as Grab on Behind, Last and First, Alpha and Omega, and The Name Game. is a word game in which players come up with words that begin with the letter or letters that the previous word ended with. A category of words is usually chosen, there is a time limit such as five seconds, and words may not be repeated in the same game. An example chain for food would be: Soup - Peas - Sugar - Rice.

It is used as a tool for teaching English as a second language and as a car game.

The version of the game in which cities are used is called Geography.

Related games

A similar Japanese game is Shiritori, in which the word must begin with the last syllable, or kana, of the previous word. It includes a rule for loss: words ending with N may not be used since the kana is never used in the beginning of words. The game Antakshari (ant means end, akshar means letter), played in India, Pakistan and Nepal also involves chaining, but with verses of movie songs (usually Bollywood songs). In Russia a game similar to the Word chain is called Words (Russian: слова).

Geography (Ptolemy)

The Geography (Greek: Γεωγραφικὴ Ὑφήγησις, Geōgraphikḕ Hyphḗgēsis, lit. "Geographical Guidance"), also known by its Latin names as the Geographia and the Cosmographia, is a gazeteer, an atlas, and a treatise on cartography, compiling the geographical knowledge of the 2nd-century Roman Empire. Originally written by Ptolemy in Greek at Alexandria around AD 150, the work was a revision of a now-lost atlas by Marinus of Tyre using additional Roman and Persian gazetteers and new principles. Its translation into Arabic in the 9th century and Latin in 1406 was highly influential on the geographical knowledge and cartographic traditions of the medieval Caliphate and Renaissance Europe.

Manuscripts

Versions of Ptolemy's work in antiquity were probably proper atlases with attached maps, although some scholars aver that the references to maps in the text were later additions.

No Greek manuscript of the Geography survives from earlier than the 13th century. A letter written by the Byzantine monk Maximus Planudes records that he searched for one for Chora Monastery in the summer of 1295; one of the earliest surviving texts may have been one of those he then assembled. In Europe, maps were sometimes made redrawn using the coördinates provided by the text, as Planudes was forced to do. Later scribes and publishers could then copy these new maps, as Athanasius did for the emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus. The three earliest surviving texts with maps are those from Constantinople (Istanbul) based on Planudes's work.