The recent referendum on Scottish independence was characterised by a fail­ ing on behalf of the Better Together campaign to articulate a positive vision and concep­ tion of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In particular, any per­ suasive notion of Britishness was notable by its absence. This paper attempts to shed light on the question of nationalism, in the British co...

The historiography of Chinese folklore studies commonly traces the advent of the discipline to the Folksong Studies Movement (Geyaoxue yundong 歌谣学运动; (hereafter, FSM) of the May Fourth era (1910s to 1920s)1 (Chao 1942; 1943; Honko 1986; Hung 1985; Tuohy 1991). In his critical study of this movement, Wolfram Eberhard highlighted the underlying forces of nationalism and cultural awakening that re...

This paper considers the question of economic nationalism through the lens of economic openness. Complete economic openness, which connotes close or total integration of a country with that of the world economy, is the antonym of economic nationalism. The paper argues that economic openness is a multi-dimensional concept. A country can be open, or not so open to all or some of the following: tr...

Sports events, as the ancient Greeks knew well, could be used as a substitute for war in city-state competition, hence the creation of the ancient Olympics. Although the founder of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, envisioned an event free of consumerism and nationalism, they are now a forum for national conflict and rivalry (Riggs 1993). As Katz and Dayan (1985) argue, the Olympics are...

National identity should be sharply distinguished from nationalism. People speak by reference to a general and assumed membership of a country, and routine markers of behaviour and style may exhibit this sense of membership. This matter-of-fact acceptance of ‘national’ membership does not guarantee enthusiasm for the ‘nation’ and it cannot be taken as a signal of nationalism, banal or otherwise...

Arabic morphology poses special challenges to computational natural language processing systems. Its rich morphology and the highly complex word formation process of roots and patterns make computational approaches to Arabic very challenging. In this paper we present an approach for morphological analysis and generation of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Our approach is based on Arabic morphologi...

Electronic Document Management (EDM) technology is being widely adopted as it makes for the efficient routing and retrieval of documents. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is an important front end for such technology. Excellent OCR now exists for Latin based languages, but there are few systems that read Arabic, which limits the penetration of EDM into Arabicspeaking countries. In developing...

The present research aims to identify Japanese listeners’ perception patterns of non-native liquid contrasts. The study examines Japanese listeners’ perception of Arabic liquids (/l/, /r/, /ll/ and /rr/). Japanese listeners showed poor performance on the Arabic /l/-/r/ discrimination and very good performance on the discrimination of the other liquid contrasts (/l/-ll/, /ll/-/rr/, /l/-/rr/, /r/...

This paper presents a novel holistic technique for classifying Arabic handwritten text documents. The classification of Arabic handwritten documents is performed in several steps. First, the Arabic handwritten document images are segmented into words, and then each word is segmented into its connected parts. Second, several structural and statistical features are extracted from these connected ...