Using critiques of ‘the human’ drawn from Black feminism, this chapter examines the aesthetic components of ‘race’ as the concept begins, in the early nineteenth century, to resemble its current form. After a brief introduction featuring Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814), the main test cases are early to mid-decade representations of Khoikhoi women and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The chapter ends by looking forward to works like Sanditon by Jane Austen and Ourika (1823) by Claire de Duras. Ultimately, the chapter aims to show that the 1810s were a period where the concept of race became simultaneously more unsettled and more established as a distinct realm of human experience. Further, it argues for the crucial role aesthetic representation played in this contradictory state of affairs and in the development of modern identity categories.

Much has been written about Maltese and its transformation into a language in its own right, both through external contact with other languages and due to internal factors. Less has been said about the English of Malta. In spite of regular criticism from purists, Maltese English has started to be regarded as a variety, distinct from others. This chapter examines the complex plurilinguistic context within which the variety has emerged and continues to flourish. It demonstrates how the socio-political context provided perfect conditions for the establishment of English as the de facto second language of Malta. Extensive use of English in different domains has also contributed to shaping the local variety in distinct ways to reflect the needs of the community (or subsets thereof) it serves. The chapter also outlines some of the more salient characteristics of the variety, in terms of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, meaning and discourse.

This chapter explores some of the distinctive characteristics of English in Tyneside in relation to the socio-historical and sociolinguistic contexts in which they have emerged, evolved and in some cases declined. The main focus is on features of phonetics and phonology, but some consideration is also given to lexis, as a useful introduction to many of the historical influences that have played a part in moulding the dialect, and to aspects of grammar and discourse, which will be seen to reflect some of the same factors that have shaped the accent. In all of these areas, there is some loss of older, traditional forms, but the story is not just one of the increasing prevalence of supraregional variants; there are also more recent developments and current changes which are themselves distinctive and therefore help to maintain the individual character of Tyneside English.

The Introduction offers the reader a way into the 1810s through Anna Letitia Barbauld’s bleak, prophetic satire, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: A Poem (1812). A poem written amidst the tensions of war, famine, unemployment, food shortages, and economic decline, it also serves as a record of the peculiarity of this decade as one caught amidst a flurry of new ideas, beliefs, and concepts, but without a clear sense of how such newness might be understood, interpreted, or even accepted. The chapter reads Barbauld’s poem as a framing device to introduce the twelve chapters that comprise the volume and their shared concerns with sexuality and identity, religion and politics, race and gender, disability and the environment, aesthetics and philanthropy, communication and confusion, and social and interspecies relations.

In the wake of the October 2023 escalation of the Israel–Palestine conflict, NYC-based graffiti bomber Miss17 visualized her solidarity with the Palestinian people by filling her tag name with the colors of the Palestinian flag. In 2024, the largest all-woman graffiti crew in the United States – Few & Far – completed a mural with a feminist take on the “Forbidden Fruit” idea, which gave the grrlz the space to publicly claim their opposition to the genocide of the Palestinian people by painting watermelons – a symbol of Palestinian resistance similar in effect and meaning to the flag. In this chapter, visual arts scholar Dr. Pabón-Colón examines these works, the sociopolitical context in which they were made, and their reception on social media to argue that by performing their feminism in their graffiti these grrlz rejected US imperialism in favor of modeling transnational feminist solidarity.

This chapter deviates slightly from other chapters. In other chapters, the approach to thermodynamics focused heavily on the nature of heat and the performance of machines without taking into account the molecular makeup of matter. This approach is called classical thermodynamics. Another approach looks at the principles of heat and thermodynamics from a molecular point of view, leading to a statistical description of the various thermodynamic properties learned so far. The statistical study of a large number of particles (such as atoms or molecules) is called statistical mechanics. This chapter will cover, extremely briefly, some very basic results of this statistical approach and its relation to thermodynamics. In doing so, the last, and final, thermodynamic law is introduced: the third law.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It discusses the various models and methodologies that have been developed to analyse diachronic data concisely and consistently. The new history furthermore examines the trajectories the language has embarked on during its spread worldwide and presents overviews of the varieties of English found throughout the world today.

Data about Earth obtained from space provide vital insights for disaster mitigation, weather prediction, natural resource management, agricultural efficiency, human migration, and climate change. This chapter addresses legal and normative frameworks that exist for sharing such data, including the Outer Space Treaty, the Remote Sensing Principles, the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters, and the World Meteorological Organization’s Resolution 40. It addresses the role of commercial actors, the types of data (raw, processed, analyzed), and provides suggestions to further develop and improve mechanisms for sharing such vital data.

This chapter deals with Scotland’s Northern Isles, Orkney and Shetland, which are home to two of the most conservative and distinctive local dialects in Scotland and Britain. An overview is provided of the local histories that led to the emergence of the present-day dialects and speech communities. Linguistic features are summarised and the linguistic situation discussed with regard to Scots and Scottish Standard English (SSE). To illustrate the local Scots–SSE speech range, a model of vowel variation along with text passages for the two poles is provided for Shetland. A corpus-based study of the lesser-known feature of pulmonic ingressive speech in Orkney and Shetland is presented. The chapter concludes with a discussion of ongoing societal and demographic changes and their potential effects on the linguistic situation and local dialects.

This chapter offers a new outlook on the history of Scots, a minority language related to English, up to 1700. Scots and its history have been a subject of pioneering work in historical linguistics, especially in historical dialectology and digital approaches to language change. The chapter takes stock of previous scholarship and the extra-linguistic events which shaped the linguistic situation in Scotland from the medieval period till the early eighteenth century. It then highlights problematic areas and questions related to constructing a narrative for a history of an unstandardised minority language, with special focus on defining Scots as a language of written communication, its family tree, periodisation and status, as well as metalinguistic perspectives. The discussion finishes with an overview of the most recent research on various aspects of structure and language use, and a summary of available resources for the study of historical Scots.

This chapter introduces the two main, and original, statements of the second law of thermodynamics: the Clausius statement and the Kelvin–Planck statement. In addition, this chapter discusses the idea of a perfect engine and its requirements. Then, a discussion of reversibility ensues. This leads to the introduction of the Carnot engine, which is considered a perfect engine. Then, Carnot’s propositions are put forth, which paves the way for the introduction of thermodynamic temperature, which is a temperature scale that does not rely on the material used for the temperature measurement. Using these concepts, a new thermodynamic property is deduced: entropy. Entropy and heat are related to each other for reversible processes, and the idea of a temperature–entropy diagram is introduced and discussed. Although this chapter does not quite follow the historical timeline, the discussion of the second law is still nevertheless motivated by the historical development.

The United Nations recently reported that while 90 percent of countries prioritize action on water for adaptation on their national climate financing agenda, 50 percent of countries revealed that they do not have the formal national mechanisms to facilitate cross-sectoral coordination that is critical to ensure resilient socioecological systems (United Nations 2023). Conventional environmental models are, however, unable to account for poor coordination between the proposed technical/management options and the environmental outcomes, which are often shaped by uncertainty and changes that arise in the policy environment. The use of improved assessment methods which can capture a complete view is thus required to design technologies and management systems to restore climate resilience. In this regard, this chapter discusses two methodological innovations (trade-off intensity and typology assessments) that can unleash insights on structural variables that intersect with forces of history, norms, and hierarchy to produce changes in collective behavior while they have an ameliorating impact on environmental and social outcomes in the context of climate change. The authors rely on an analysis of five cases of common pool resources management combined with an expert panel review of climate loss and damage in Jordan to examine their implications for the knowledge commons framework.

With the multiplication of space operators and the increasing number of operators involved in space missions, state and nonstate stakeholders are currently intensifying their efforts in enhancing space situational awareness by collecting data related to outer space. These efforts are both technical innovations and political and legal strategies. This chapter addresses the ways states collect, exchange, use, and manage data, and who benefits from the development of space situational awareness, especially in light of current multilateral discussions on space security and safety.

The relative malleability of adults’ first language grammar, and thus the contribution of the post-adolescent individual to historical language change, is a contested issue in linguistic research. The argument revolves around the extent to which it is possible for post-adolescent individuals to modify the grammatical system of their native language(s). This chapter summarises the contribution of several areas of linguistics to this debate, highlighting in particular some historical sociolinguistic studies of English. We then review the evidence from over forty-six longitudinal linguistic panel studies, confirming that some adults can adjust their native repertoires across the life-course, even into old age. Yet many questions remain to be answered with regard to the nature of post-adolescent linguistic lability. We discuss several questions of particular importance for the study of generational language change.

In its history, the phonology of Irish English went through a number of stages in which features arose and subsequently declined. Many of the traits to be seen in the textual record for early modern Irish English were lost by the nineteenth century, with others being retained, such as the incomplete long vowel shift and dentalisation of stops before R. The early twentieth century saw a change in supraregional Irish English given the endonormative reorientation which set in after independence in 1922. Language contact between Irish and English has been a consistent theme in Ireland’s history and has led to a prolonged language shift, which culminated in the accelerated switch in the mid nineteenth century with the vast majority of the population being native speakers of English by the onset of the twentieth century. The language shift also resulted in many instances of grammatical transfer from Irish to English, a small number of which remained emblematic of Irish English and have survived to this day.

This chapter presents a sociolinguistically focused overview of the history of Received Pronunciation (RP). The sociolinguistic community for whom it is a vernacular is a small one numerically but its form of speech had an outsized historical and sociolinguistic impact for over a century. Fundamental sociological and historical changes have since upended the sociolinguistic status of the elite sociolect in Great Britain and across the world. In attempting to place RP within the overall history of the English language, its development as a vernacular has often been overshadowed by, and confused with, its status as a standard accent in certain contexts and settings. The present discussion will distinguish between vernacular and standard, and focus on the variation and change of a vernacular elite sociolect over time, with an emphasis on the evolutions that took place in the period after the Second World War in Great Britain.

Word combinations can be “compositional” (the meaning of the whole is straightforwardly and transparently derivable from the individual parts) or else “non-compositional” (and not so easily derivable). Chapter 3 discusses the combination WRENCH-ENGAGING SURFACE from a dental patent which has a non-compositional purpose or design component in its meaning (the surface is designed for engagement with a wrench), and this was crucial for a determination of patent infringement or not. The precise meaning of another word combination REHAB FOR BILLY was at the center of a libel suit over whether BILLY was actually in, or going into, rehab.

Word combinations, especially compound nouns, feature regularly in trademark disputes. The basic categories of trademark law are summarized, generic, descriptive, suggestive, arbitrary, and fanciful terms. The chapter then exemplifies genericness with APP STORE and gives semantic, grammatical, and corpus evidence for making this classification. It cannot be a trademark. HALF PRICE BOOKS is argued to be a descriptive term, not a generic one, and can be trademarked as long as “secondary meaning” is proven, whereby it also refers to a particular company.

This chapter discusses the perceptions of English variation from the earliest available commentary to the present day. Historical commentary on English variation from various sources is discussed and contrasted with contemporary accounts of the perception of variation in English. The chapter discusses commonalities in the perception of regional variation over time, examining three overarching themes: the presence of a linguistic hierarchy; the focus on the ‘best’ forms of English in areas (and occupations) proximal to the centres of power, and general concerns about language change.