IT is known that the game of chess originated in India. It was passed on to the medieval West through the intermediary of the Persians and the Arabs, a fact to which we owe, for example, the expression "check-mate", (German: Schachmatt) which is derived from the Persian shah: "king" and the Arabic mat: "he is dead". At the time of the Renaissance some of the rules of the game were changed: the ...

Vigorous debate in phonetics and phonology has focused on the structure and cognitive foundation of distinctive feature theory, as well as on the definition and representation of features themselves. In particular, we show in Section 1 that, although vowel height has long been the object of close scrutiny, research on the threeor moretiered height representation of vowels in the phonology of En...

Synesthesia (Greek, syn = together + aisthesis = perception) is the involuntary physical experience of a cross-modal association. That is, the stimulation of one sensory modality reliably causes a perception in one or more different senses. Its phenomenology clearly distinguishes it from metaphor, literary tropes, sound symbolism, and deliberate artistic contrivances that sometimes employ the t...

Recent research has demonstrated that systematic mappings between phonological word forms and their meanings can facilitate language learning (e.g., in the form of sound symbolism or cues to grammatical categories). Yet, paradoxically from a learning viewpoint, most words have an arbitrary form-meaning mapping. We hypothesized that this paradox may reflect a division of labor between 2 differen...

Sri Chakra is the celebrated Yantra used in the worship of the primordial energy. The Chakra is conceived as a symbol of the human body. Some salient features of this symbolism are discussed in this article. An attempt has also been made to provide a short introduction to the Bhavanopanishad Prayogavidhi devised by Bhaskararaya, the doyen of Sri charka worshippers.

Astronomical & Astrophysical Transactions The Journal of the Eurasian Astronomical Society Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713453505 The celestial map: The symbolism of historical eras and reflection of the world model A. V. Kuzmin a a Institute for History of Science and Technology, RAS, Mosco...