Man [man]

Man

[man]
Man, town (1996 est. pop. 112,600), W central Côte d'Ivoire, at the foot of the Toura Mts. It is an administrative and commercial center for a region producing coffee, cacao, kola nuts, rice, and cassava. Iron ore, bauxite, copper, and gold are mined nearby.
Man, Isle of, island and dependency of the British crown (2005 est. pop. 75,000), 227 sq mi (588 sq km), off Great Britain, in the Irish Sea. The coast is rocky with precipitous cliffs; the Calf of Man is a detached rocky islet off the southwest coast. The island's towns include Douglas (the capital), Peel, Ramsey, and Castletown. The rounded hills in the center of the island rise to 2,034 ft (620 m) at Snaefell. The beautiful scenery and extremely mild climate (subtropical plants are grown without protection) make the island a popular resort. The people are mainly of Manx (Norse-Celtic) and British descent, Christian (Anglican, Roman Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, and other denominations), and speak English and Manx Gaelic.

The economy relies on offshore banking, financial services, high-tech manufacturing, and tourism. Agriculture and fishing, once the economic mainstays, have declined. Nonetheless, oats, barley, turnips, and potatoes are grown, and cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry are raised. Dairying and fishing remain somewhat important, and Manx tweeds are made from local wool.

The monarch of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, represented by the lieutenant governor, is the head of state. The government is headed by the chief minister, who is elected by the legislature. The Isle of Man's bicameral legislature, the Tynewald, consists of the 11-seat Legislative Council, whose members are appointed, and the 24-seat House of Keys, whose members are popularly elected for five-year terms. The Tynewald is the world's oldest continuous legislative assembly

Traces of occupants of the isle from Neolithic times exist. Of interest are ancient crosses and other stone monuments, a round tower, an old fort, and castles. Occupied by Vikings in the 9th cent., the island was a dependency of Norway until 1266, when it passed to Scotland. From the 14th to the 18th cent. (except for brief periods when it reverted to the English crown) it belonged to the earls of Salisbury and of Derby. Since 1765, when Parliament purchased it from the Duke of Atholl, the isle has been a dependency of the crown, but it is not subject to acts of the British Parliament.

man, prehistoric, or early man: see human evolution.
Ray, Man, 1890-1976, American photographer, painter, and sculptor, b. Philadelphia. Along with Marcel Duchamp, Ray was a founder of the Dada movement in New York and Paris. He is celebrated for his later surrealist paintings and photography. Among his inventions is the rayograph, a photograph obtained by the direct application of objects of varying opacity to a light-sensitive plate. His works include the painting The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows and the enigmatic sculpture Gift (both: Mus. of Modern Art, New York City). Ray also made several surrealist films, of which L'Étoile de Mer (1928) is the best known.

See his autobiography (1963). See also studies by N. Baldwin (1988), M. Foresta (1988), and R. Penrose (1989); Man Ray Fautographe (CD-ROM, 1996).

Priestly healer or shaman, especially among the American Indians. The medicine man (often a woman in some societies) commonly carries a kit of objects such as feathers, stones, or hallucinogenic plants that have magical associations. The work of healing often involves the extraction—by sucking, pulling, or other means—of offending substances from the patient's body. Singing, recitation of myths, and other ceremonies often accompany the healing rite.

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or man-o'-war bird

Great frigate bird (Fregata minor).

Any member of five species of large seabirds constituting the family Fregatidae, found worldwide along tropical and semitropical coasts and islands. About the size of a hen, frigate birds have extremely long, slender wings, which span up to about 8 ft (2.3 m), and long, deeply forked tails. Most adult males are all black; most females are marked with white below. Both sexes have a bare-skinned throat pouch, tiny feet, and a long hooked bill that is used to attack and rob other seabirds of their fish. The courting male's throat pouch becomes bright red and is inflated to the size of a person's head. Perhaps the most aerial of all birds except the swifts, frigate birds land only to sleep or tend the nest.

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or white shark

Large, aggressive shark (Carcharodon carcharias, family Lamnidae), considered the species most dangerous to humans. It is found in tropical and temperate regions of all oceans and is noted for its voracious appetite. Its diet includes fishes, sea turtles, birds, sea lions, small whales, carcasses, and ships' garbage. The great white is heavy-bodied and has a crescent-shaped tail and large, saw-edged, triangular teeth. It can reach a length of more than 20 ft (6 m) and is generally gray, bluish, or brownish, with the colour shading suddenly into a whitish belly. Though it is widely feared, only a few hundred humans are known to have ever been killed by the great white shark.

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orig. Emmanuel Radnitzky

(born Aug. 25, 1890, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.—died Nov. 18, 1976, Paris, France) U.S. photographer, painter, and filmmaker. He grew up in New York City, where he studied architecture, engineering, and art. With Marcel Duchamp he formed the New York Dada group in 1917 and produced ready-mades. In 1921 he moved to Paris and became associated with the Surrealists. He rediscovered the technique for making “cameraless” pictures (photograms), which he called “rayographs,” by placing objects on light-sensitive paper; he also experimented with the technique of solarization, which renders part of the image negative and part positive by exposing a print or negative to a flash of light during development. He turned to portrait and fashion photography and made a virtually complete record of the celebrities of Parisian cultural life of the 1920s and '30s. He also made important contributions as an avant-garde filmmaker in the 1920s.

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Any of various floating, warm-water marine cnidarians (genus Physalia, class Hydrozoa) found worldwide but mostly in the Gulf Stream and the Indian and Pacific oceans. The medusa-form body consists of a translucent, jellylike, gas-filled float, which may be 3–12 in. (9–30 cm) long. Polyps beneath the float bear hanging tentacles up to 165 ft (50 m) long. Nematocysts on some polyps paralyze fish and other prey. Other polyps then attach to, spread over, and digest the victim. A third type of polyp is involved in reproduction. The painful sting of Physalia can cause fever, shock, or disruption of heart and lung function.

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Forgery of human fossil remains that impeded early 20th-century progress in the study of human evolution. The apparently fossilized skull found at Piltdown Common near Lewes, Eng., was first proposed as a new species of prehistoric man (“Piltdown man”) in 1912. Only in 1954 was the skull shown to consist of a human cranium skillfully joined to the jaw of an orangutan. The hoax may have been perpetrated by the skull's discoverer, Charles Dawson, though evidence discovered in the 1970s suggests a British Museum staff member, Martin A.C. Hinton.

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Island, in the Irish Sea off the northwestern coast of England. Area: 221 sq mi (572 sq km). Population (2002 est.): 76,900. It is a self-governing crown possession of Britain, with its own legislature. The popularly elected House of Keys constitutes one of the most ancient legislative assemblies in the world. Capital: Douglas (pop., 2001: 25,347). The island is about 30 mi (48 km) long and 10 mi (16 km) wide. The Manx breed of tailless cats is believed to have originated there. The isle was home to Irish missionaries beginning in the 5th century AD. It was held by the Norse (9th–13th centuries), Scots (13th–14th centuries), and English settlers (from the 14th century). It was made a crown possession in 1828.

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in full (2002– ) Man Booker Prize

Prestigious British award given annually to a full-length novel. It was established in 1968 by the multinational company Booker McConnell as a counterpart to the French Prix Goncourt. The Booker Prize Foundation administers the prize, aided by an advisory committee. Entries, which are nominated by publishers, must be written by an English-language author from the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth countries, Ireland, or South Africa. Its winners have included Kingsley Amis, A.S. Byatt, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and Salman Rushdie. In 1992 a Booker Russian Novel Prize was introduced.

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People, many of Juchen ancestry, who acquired a Manchu identity in the 17th century before conquering Ming China and forming the Qing dynasty (1644–1911/12). Though official policy aimed to maintain the Manchu as a distinct people, this did not prevent considerable intermarriage and adoption of Chinese customs in areas of maximum contact with Chinese. China today recognizes the Manchu as a distinct ethnic group; its more than 10 million members live mainly in northeastern China.

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Common name of fossilized Homo erectus remains found in 1891 at Trinil, Java. The remains, a skullcap and thighbone, represent the first known fossils of H. erectus (though originally assigned to Pithecanthropus erectus) and, together with numerous other finds along the Solo River, suggest that H. erectus was present in eastern Asia some 1,000,000 years ago and persisted there for at least 500,000 years and possibly as long as 800,000 years. Java man predates the finds at Zhoukoudian (Peking Man) in China and is considered somewhat more primitive.

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Island, in the Irish Sea off the northwestern coast of England. Area: 221 sq mi (572 sq km). Population (2002 est.): 76,900. It is a self-governing crown possession of Britain, with its own legislature. The popularly elected House of Keys constitutes one of the most ancient legislative assemblies in the world. Capital: Douglas (pop., 2001: 25,347). The island is about 30 mi (48 km) long and 10 mi (16 km) wide. The Manx breed of tailless cats is believed to have originated there. The isle was home to Irish missionaries beginning in the 5th century AD. It was held by the Norse (9th–13th centuries), Scots (13th–14th centuries), and English settlers (from the 14th century). It was made a crown possession in 1828.

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is the oldest existing collection of Japanese poetry, compiled sometime in the Nara or early Heian periods. The anthology is one of the most revered of Japan's poetic compilations. The compiler, or the final in a series of compilers, is believed to be Ōtomo no Yakamochi. The collection contains poems ranging from 347 (#85-89) through 759 (#4516) , with the bulk of them representing the period between 600 and 759.

The collection is divided into twenty parts or books, mirroring a similar practice in collections of Chinese poems of the time; this number was followed in most later collections. Unlike later collections, however, the parts of the Man'yōshū are not organized into topics or ordered chronologically. The collection contains 265 chōka (long poems), 4,207 tanka (short poems), one tanrenga (short connecting poem), one bussokusekika (poems on the Buddha's footprints at Yakushi-ji in Nara), four kanshi (Chinese poems), and 22 Chinese prose passages. There is no preface: the format of prefacing official collections, such as the Kokin Wakashū, developed later.

It is standard to regard the Man'yōshū as a particularly Japanese work. This does not mean that the poems and passages of the collection differed starkly from the scholarly standard (in Yakamochi's time) of Chinese literature and poetics. Certainly many entries of the Man'yōshū have a continental tone, earlier poems having Confucian or Taoist themes and later poems reflecting on Buddhist teachings. Yet, the Man'yōshū is singular, even in comparison with later works, in choosing primarily Yamato themes, extolling Shintō virtues of and . In addition, the language of many entries of the Man'yōshū exerts a powerful sentimental appeal to readers:

[T]his early collection has something of the freshness of dawn. [...] There are irregularities not tolerated later, such as hypometric lines; there are evocative place names and []; and there are evocative exclamations such as kamo, whose appeal is genuine even if incommunicable. In other words, the collection contains the appeal of an art at its pristine source with a romantic sense of venerable age and therefore of an ideal order since lost.

The collection is customarily divided into four periods. The earliest dates to prehistoric or legendary pasts, from the time of Yūryaku (r.?456–?479) to those of the little documented Yōmei (r.585–587), Saimei (r.594–661), and finally Tenji (r.668–671) during the Taika Reforms and the time of Fujiwara no Kamatari (614–669). The second period covers the end of the seventh century, coinciding with the popularity of Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, one of Japan's greatest poets. The third period spans 700–c.730 and covers the works of such poets as Yamabe no Akahito, Ōtomo no Tabito and Yamanoue no Okura. Akahito chiefly among them is resolutely Japanese; the rest freely incorporate and adapt Continental elements. The fourth period spans 730–760 and includes the work of the last great poet of this collection, the compiler Ōtomo no Yakamochi himself, who not only wrote many original poems but also edited, updated and refashioned an unknown number of ancient poems.

In addition to its artistic merits, the Man'yōshū is important for using one of the earliest Japanese writing systems, the cumbersome man'yōgana. Though it was not the first use of this writing system, which was also used in the earlier Kojiki (712), it was influential enough to give the writing system its name: "the kana of the Man'yōshū". This system uses Chinese characters in a variety of functions: their usual ideographic or logographic senses; to represent Japanese syllables phonetically; and sometimes in a combination of these functions. The use of Chinese characters to represent Japanese syllables was in fact the genesis of the modern syllabic kana writing systems, being simplified forms (hiragana) or fragments (katakana) of the man'yōgana.

Julius Klaproth was the first to publish any translation of Taika era Japanese poetry in the West. Donald Keene explained in a preface to the Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai edition of the Man'yōshū:

"One 'envoy' (hanka) to a long poem was translated as early as 1834 by the celebrated German orientalist Heinrich Julius Klaproth (1783-1835). Klaproth, having journeyed to Siberia in pursuit of strange languages, encountered some Japanese castaways, fisherman, hardly ideal mentors for the study of 8th century poetry. Not surprisingly, his translation was anything but accurate.

The Man'yōshū has been accepted in the Japanese Translation Series of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

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