Alfred Wegeners Hypothesis About Pangaea

Alfred Wegener's Hypothesis About Pangaea In 1912 a German meteorologist named Alfred Wegener (1880-1931) hypothesized a single proto-supercontinent that divided up into the continents we now know because of continental drift and plate tectonics. This hypothesis is called Pangaea because the Greek word pan means all and Gaea or Gaia (or Ge) was the Greek name of the divine personification of the Earth. Discover the science behind how Pangaea broke apart millions of years ago. A Single Supercontinent Pangaea, therefore, means all the Earth. Around the single protocontinent or Pangaea was a single ocean called Panthalassa (all the sea). More than 2,000,000 years ago, in the late Triassic Period, Pangaea broke apart. Although Pangaea is a hypothesis, the idea that all the continents once formed a single supercontinent makes sense when you look at the shapes of the continents and how well they essentially fit together. Paleozoic and Mesozoic Era Pangaea, also known as Pangea, existed as a supercontinent during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic time periods.  The Paleozoic geologic era translates to ancient life and is over 250 million years old. Considered a time of evolutionary transformation, it ended with one of the biggest extinction events on Earth taking over 30 million years to recover due to it being on land. The Mesozoic era refers to the time in between the Paleozoic and Cenozoic era and extended over 150 million years ago. The Synopsis by Alfred Wegener In his book The Origin of Continents and Oceans,  Wegener foretold plate tectonics and provided an explanation for continental drift. Despite this,  the book is received as both influential and controversial even today, due to the opposition divided amongst geologists regarding his geographic theories.  His research created a forward understanding of the technical and scientific logic before the shift was confirmed. For example, Wegener mentioned  the fit of South America and Africa, ancient climate similarities, fossil evidence, comparisons of rock structures and more. An  excerpt from the book below demonstrates his geological theory: "In the whole of geophysics, there is probably hardly another law of such clarity and reliability as this- that there are two preferential levels for the world’s surface which occur in alternation side by side and are represented by the continents and the ocean floors, respectively. It is therefore very surprising that scarcely anyone has tried to explain this law."- Alfred L. Wegener, Interesting Pangaea Facts In mythology, Hercules wrestled with the giant Antaeus, who gained his strength from his mother, Gaia.Pangea lasted over 300 million years ago  and started to break apart around 175 million years ago.The contemporary theory suggests that the Earths outer shell is broken up into several plates that move over the Earths rocky shell. This is what we know of plate tectonics today.The process of Pangaea was put together slowly over time.  In fact, it took a few hundred million years before it was formed.

The Definition of Mother Tongue Plus the Worlds Top 20

The Definition of Mother Tongue Plus the World's Top 20 The term mother tongue refers to a persons native language - that is, a language learned from birth. Also called a  first language, dominant language, home language, and native tongue  (although these terms are not  necessarily  synonymous).   Contemporary linguists and educators commonly use the term L1 to refer to a first or native language (the mother tongue) and the term L2 to refer to a second language or a foreign language thats being studied. Use of the Term Mother Tongue [T]he general usage of the term mother tongue...denotes not only the language one learns from ones mother, but also the speakers dominant and home language; i.e., not only the first language according to the time of acquisition, but the first with regard to its importance and the speakers ability to master its linguistic and communicative aspects. For example, if a language school advertises that all its teachers are native speakers of English, we would most likely complain if we later learned that although the teachers do have some vague childhood memories of the time when they talked to their mothers in English, they, however, grew up in some non-English-speaking country and are fluent in a second language only. Similarly, in translation theory, the claim that one should translate only into ones mother tongue is in fact a claim that one should only translate into ones first and dominant language. The vagueness of this term has led some researchers to claim...that different connotative meanings of the term mother tongue vary according to the intended usage of the word and that differences in understanding the term can have far-reaching and often political consequences. (Pokorn, N. Challenging the Traditional Axioms: Translation Into a Non-Mother Tongue. John Benjamins, 2005.) Culture and Mother Tongue It is the language community of the mother tongue, the language spoken in a region, which enables the process of enculturation, the growing of an individual into a particular system of linguistic perception of the world and participation in the centuries-old history of linguistic production. (Tulasiewicz, W. and A. Adams, What Is Mother Tongue? Teaching the Mother Tongue in a Multilingual Europe. Continuum, 2005.) Cultural power can...backfire when the choices of those who embrace Americanness in language, accent, dress, or choice of entertainment stir resentment in those who do not. Every time an Indian adopts an American accent and curbs his mother tongue influence, as the call centers label it, hoping to land a job, it seems more deviant, and frustrating, to have only an Indian accent.(Giridharadas, Anand. America Sees Little Return From Knockoff Power. The New York Times, June 4, 2010.) Myth and Ideology The notion of mother tongue is thus a mixture of myth and ideology. The family is not necessarily the place where languages are transmitted, and sometimes we observe breaks in transmission, often translated by a change of language, with children acquiring as first language the one that dominates in the milieu. This phenomenon...concerns all multilingual situations and most of the situations of migration.(Calvet, Louis Jean. Towards an Ecology of World Languages. Polity Press, 2006.) Top 20 Mother Tongues The mother tongue of more than three billion people is one of 20: Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, Javanese, German, Wu Chinese, Korean, French, Telugu, Marathi, Turkish, Tamil, Vietnamese, and Urdu. English is the lingua franca of the digital age, and those who use it as a second language may outnumber its native speakers by hundreds of millions. On every continent, people are forsaking their ancestral tongues for the dominant language of their region’s majority. Assimilation confers inarguable benefits, especially as internet use proliferates and rural youth gravitate to cities. But the loss of languages passed down for millennia, along with their unique arts and cosmologies, may have consequences that won’t be understood until it is too late to reverse them.(Thurman, Judith. A Loss for Words. The New Yorker, March 30, 2015.) A Lighter Side of the Mother Tongue Gibs friend: Forget her, I hear she only likes intellectuals.Gib: So? Im intellectual and stuff.Gibs friend: Youre flunking English. Thats your mother tongue and stuff.(The Sure Thing, 1985)