Linear A

Linear A is one of two currently undeciphered writing systems used in ancient Greece (Cretan hieroglyphic is the other). Linear A was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civilization. It was discovered by archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans. It is the origin of the Linear B script, which was later used by the Mycenaean civilization.

In the 1950s, Linear B was largely deciphered and found to encode an early form of Greek. Although the two systems share many symbols, this did not lead to a subsequent decipherment of Linear A. Using the values associated with Linear B in Linear A mainly produces unintelligible words. If it uses the same or similar syllabic values as Linear B, then its underlying language appears unrelated to any known language. This has been dubbed the Minoan language.

Script

Linear A has hundreds of signs. They are believed to represent syllabic, ideographic, and semantic values in a manner similar to Linear B. While many of those assumed to be syllabic signs are similar to ones in Linear B, approximately 80% of Linear A's logograms are unique; the difference in sound values between Linear A and Linear B signs ranges from 9% to 13%. It primarily appears in the left-to-right direction, but occasionally appears as a right-to-left or boustrophedon script.

Presto (layout engine)

Presto was the layout engine of the Opera web browser for a decade. It was released on 28 January 2003 in Opera 7, and later used to power the Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers. As of Opera 15, the desktop browser uses a Chromium backend, replacing Presto with the Blink layout engine.

Presto is a dynamic engine. Webpages can be re-rendered completely or partially in response to DOM events. Its releases saw a number of bug fixes and optimizations to improve the speed of the ECMAScript (JavaScript) engine. It is proprietary software only available as a part of the Opera browsers.

ECMAScript engines

A succession of ECMAScript engines have been used with Opera. (For the origin of their names, see Cultural notes below). Pre-Presto versions of Opera used the Linear A engine. Opera versions based on the Core fork of Presto, Opera 7.0 through 9.27, used the Linear B engine. The Futhark engine is used in some versions on the Core 2 fork of Presto, namely Opera 9.5 to Opera 10.10. When released it was the fastest engine around, but in 2008 a new generation of ECMAScript engines from Google (V8), Mozilla (TraceMonkey), and Apple (SquirrelFish) took one more step, introducing native code generation. This opened up for potential heavy computations on the client side and Futhark, though still fast and efficient, was unable to keep up.

Linear A (Unicode block)

Linear A is a Unicode block containing the characters of the ancient, undeciphered Linear A.

References

Noun

A noun (from Latin nōmen, literally meaning "name") is a word that functions as the name of some specific thing or set of things, such as living creatures, objects, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Linguistically, a noun is a member of a large, open part of speech whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition.

Lexical categories (parts of speech) are defined in terms of the ways in which their members combine with other kinds of expressions. The syntactic rules for nouns differ from language to language. In English, nouns are those words which can occur with articles and attributive adjectives and can function as the head of a noun phrase.

History

Word classes (parts of speech) were described by Sanskrit grammarians from at least the 5th century BC. In Yāska's Nirukta, the noun (nāma) is one of the four main categories of words defined.

The Ancient Greek equivalent was ónoma (ὄνομα), referred to by Plato in the Cratylus dialog, and later listed as one of the eight parts of speech in The Art of Grammar, attributed to Dionysius Thrax (2nd century BC). The term used in Latin grammar was nōmen. All of these terms for "noun" were also words meaning "name". The English word noun is derived from the Latin term, through the Anglo-Norman noun.

Total order

In mathematics, a linear order, total order, simple order, or (non-strict) ordering is a binary relation on some set X, which is transitive, antisymmetric, and total (this relation is denoted here by infix ≤). A set paired with a total order is called a totally ordered set, a linearly ordered set, a simply ordered set, or a chain.

If X is totally ordered under ≤, then the following statements hold for all a, b and c in X:

Antisymmetry eliminates uncertain cases when both a precedes b and b precedes a. A relation having the property of "totality" means that any pair of elements in the set of the relation are comparable under the relation. This also means that the set can be diagrammed as a line of elements, giving it the name linear.Totality also implies reflexivity, i.e., a ≤ a. Therefore, a total order is also a partial order. The partial order has a weaker form of the third condition. (It requires only reflexivity, not totality.) An extension of a given partial order to a total order is called a linear extension of that partial order.

Linear (album)

Linear is the name of the debut studio album by the pop/freestyle group Linear. It was released on March 21, 1990, by Atlantic Records. The album's first single, Sending All My Love, reached #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 making the album itself reach #52 on the Billboard 200. It also won a Gold certificate the same year, for selling more than five hundred thousand copies in the United States. The second single, "Don't You Come Cryin'", did not repeat the success of the previous single - though it achieved some prominence, reaching the 70th spot on the Billboard Hot 100 list. The album's last single, "Something Going On", failed to succeed.

Track listing

Charts

Singles - Billboard (North America)

References