Occitan, also known as lenga d'òc by its native speakers, sometimes also referred to as Provençal, is a Romance language spoken in Southern France, Monaco, Italy's Occitan Valleys, as well as Spain's Val d'Aran in Catalonia; collectively, these regions are sometimes referred to as Occitania. It is also spoken in Calabria in a linguistic enclave of Cosenza area. Some include Catalan in Occitan, as the linguistic distance between this language and some Occitan dialects is similar to the distance between different Occitan dialects. Catalan was considered a dialect of Occitan until the end of the 19th century and still today remains its closest relative.
The Tyrrhenian Sea is part of the Mediterranean Sea off the western coast of Italy. It is named for the Tyrrhenian people identified with the Etruscans of Italy.
The mistral is a strong, cold, northwesterly wind that blows from southern France into the Gulf of Lion in the northern Mediterranean. It produces sustained winds averaging 31 miles an hour, sometimes reaching 60 miles an hour. It can last for several days. Periods of the wind exceeding 30 km/h for more than sixty-five hours have been reported. It is most common in the winter and spring, and strongest in the transition between the two seasons.
A compass rose or compass star, sometimes called a wind rose or rose of the winds, is a polar diagram displaying the orientation of the cardinal directions and their intermediate points. It is used on compasses, maps, or monuments. It is particularly common in navigation systems, including nautical charts, non-directional beacons (NDB), VHF omnidirectional range (VOR) systems, satellite navigation devices ("GPS").
The points of the compass are a set of horizontal, radially arrayed compass directions used in navigation and cartography. A compass rose is primarily composed of four cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west—each separated by 90 degrees, and secondarily divided by four ordinal (intercardinal) directions—northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest—each located halfway between two cardinal directions. Some disciplines such as meteorology and navigation further divide the compass with additional azimuths. Within European tradition, a fully defined compass has 32 "points".
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties may not be. This is a typical occurrence with widely spread languages and language families around the world, when these languages did not spread recently. Some prominent examples include the Indo-Aryan languages across large parts of India, varieties of Arabic across north Africa and southwest Asia, the Turkic languages, the varieties of Chinese, and parts of the Romance, Germanic and Slavic families in Europe. Terms used in older literature include dialect area and L-complex.
Sirocco or scirocco is a Mediterranean wind that comes from the Sahara and can reach hurricane speeds in North Africa and Southern Europe, especially during the summer season.
The bora is a northerly to north-easterly katabatic wind in areas near the Adriatic Sea. Similar nomenclature is used for north-eastern winds in other littoral areas of eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea basins.
The Gregale is a Mediterranean wind that can occur during times when a low-pressure area moves through the area to the south of Malta and causes a strong, cool, northeasterly wind to affect the island. It also affects other islands of the Western Mediterranean. The Italian name "Grecale" could be translated as Greek wind, as the wind starts at the Ionian Island Zakynthos.
Ricadi is a small rural town, as well as a municipality, located along the Tyrrhenian coast, in the province of Vibo Valentia, in the Italian region of Calabria.
Gales from between north-north-east and east-north-east are the most important gales of the east coast of Spain. They are known locally as llevantades and are an intense form of the llevant or levanter, i.e., north-easterly winds of long fetch, as opposed to diurnal coastal breezes. These gales are most frequent and dangerous in spring and autumn, and are generally associated with slow-moving depressions crossing the Mediterranean between France and Algeria.
Italo-Western is, in some classifications, the largest branch of the Romance languages. It comprises two of the branches of Romance languages: Italo-Dalmatian and Western Romance. It excludes the Sardinian language and Eastern Romance.
Tramontane is a classical name for a northern wind. The exact form of the name and precise direction varies from country to country. The word came to English from Italian tramontana, which developed from Latin trānsmontānus, "beyond/across the mountains", referring to the Alps in the North of Italy. The word has other non-wind-related senses: it can refer to anything that comes from, or anyone who lives on, the other side of mountains, or even more generally, anything seen as foreign, strange, or even barbarous.
Ostro, or Austro, is a southerly wind in the Mediterranean Sea, especially the Adriatic. Its name is Italian, derived from the Latin name Auster, which also meant a southerly wind. It is a warm and humid wind that often carries rain, but it is also sometimes identified with the Libeccio and Sirocco.
Nj is a letter present in South Slavic languages such as the Latin-alphabet version of Serbo-Croatian and in romanised Macedonian. It is also used in the Albanian alphabet. In all of these languages, it represents the palatal nasal. It is pronounced as Dom Pérignon. For example, the Serbo-Croatian word konj is pronounced.
Apertium is a free/open-source rule-based machine translation platform. It is free software and released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Language secessionism is an attitude supporting the separation of a language variety from the language to which it has hitherto been considered to belong, in order for this variety to be considered a distinct language. This attitude was first analyzed in Catalan sociolinguistics but it is attested in other parts of the world.
The winds of Provence, the region of southeast France along the Mediterranean from the Alps to the mouth of the Rhone River, are an important feature of Provençal life, and each one has a traditional local name, in the Provençal language.
In the ancient Mediterranean world, the classical compass winds were names for the points of geographic direction and orientation, in association with the winds as conceived of by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Ancient wind roses typically had twelve winds and thus twelve points of orientation, sometimes reduced to eight or increased to twenty-four.
