6. Nature
The island is home to the endangered Homerus swallowtail, the largest butterfly in the Western Hemisphere. Its wingspan is 6 inches (25 cm), which makes this insect larger than many of the island's birds.
Bird watchers enjoy the 250 bird species that can be seen on the island, including 26 birds that are found nowhere else. The vervain, the world's second smallest bird is found here. This tiny hummingbird is only 2.5 inches (8 cm) long. Jamaica's national bird is the streamertail hummingbird, or "doctor bird." It has long tail feathers and a scarlet bill.Jamaica boasts more than 200 orchids and 550 different ferns. One quarter of the 3,000 plant species are endemic, or native species. Years of development have decreased the habitats for wildlife on the island. The American crocodile, manatee, and iguana are rare now because they were hunted for meat and hides.
https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/geography/countries/article/jamaica
AlfatogodeQFBere:7. jerk chicken
Synonymous with traditional Jamaican food, jerk chicken can be found on almost every street corner on the island. From roadside stands to gourmet restaurants, this spicy, marinated chicken dish got its name from the method used to prepare it, called “jerk cooking”.
Usually, the chicken is seasoned with a paste made from allspice, scotch bonnet peppers, cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, ginger, garlic, and thyme. After slow-smoked over pimento wood in old oil barrel drums, the smoky and charred chicken pieces are then served with rice and peas, steamed cabbage, and fried plantain. You’ll also find other variations of jerk meat in Jamaica, including beef, pork, goat, and fish.
8. Etymology of Jamaica.
The indigenous people, the Taíno, called the island Xaymaca in their language, meaning the "Land of Wood and Water" or the "Land of Springs". Yamaye has been suggested as an early Taino name for the island as recorded by Christopher Columbus. Colloquially, Jamaicans refer to their home island as the "Rock". 
9. Coconut Gizzada
Coconut gizzada is similar in appearance and preparation to the traditional gizzada, with its pinched tart shape and buttery crust. However, the filling of these Jamaican desserts is predominantly coconut-based, with the grated fruit mixed with spices like nutmeg and vanilla, and sweetened with brown sugar or syrup.
As coconut palms thrived in Jamaica, the versatile fruit became a central element in the island’s culinary traditions. The evolution of the original Gizzada to include a more pronounced coconut flavor was a natural progression. It pairs well with many popular Jamaican drinks.
2. Irish Language - A marvelous article from Dr. Stifter - The image is just an addendum of a insripted rock found in 1975, not present in the original article.
Historical linguistic overview
David Stifter
Maynooth University
[email protected]
The Irish language has been the main, but never the sole means of communication on the island of Ireland from the dawn of history until the beginning of the modern period when it began to be superseded by English. Over the more than 1.500 years of its written attestation, it has undergone substantial changes in its grammatical and lexical aspects, partly reflecting its changing sociolinguistic
and cultural role.
1. Linguistic characteristics
Irish is a Celtic language that, via Proto-Celtic (c. 1.000 B.C.), can be derived from the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language that was spoken in the Neolithic c. 6.000 years ago. Through this ancestry, Irish is very distantly related to most European languages and to many more in the Near and Middle East. This relationship not only means that linguistic features and many lexical items of Irish were inherited from the ancestral speech group, but it also entails the possibility that items of cultural and spiritual significance go back to this origin. Within the Indo-European supergroup, Irish belongs to the Celtic subbranch which today occupies the western fringes of Europe, but which in antiquity extended much further to the East into Central Europe. The closely related varieties of Gaelic languages outside of Ireland Scottish Gaelic, historically spoken in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, and Manx, an extinct, but now revitalised language on the Isle of Man ultimately form a dialect continuum especially with the northern varieties of Irish. The separation of these languages happened as late as the early middle ages when colonists from Ireland crossed the Irish Sea and established permanent settlements in Northern Britain and adjacent islands. Similar colonies from southern Ireland in southern parts of Britain, esp. in Wales, did not survive into recorded history. The British Celtic languages (Welsh, Cornish, Breton) and the extinct ancient languages of the Continent (especially Gaulish, Lepontic, Celtiberian) are more distantly related, but provide essential information for the diachronic elucidation of Irish.
The periods of attested Irish are traditionally divided into Proto-Goidelic pre-4th century A.D., Primitive Irish c. 4th - 6th centuries, Archaic Irish (or Early Old Irish) c. 7th century, Old Irish c. 8th - 9th centuries, Middle Irish c. 10th - 12 th centuries, and Modern Irish from 1200 onwards, the latter in turn divided into Classical (or Early) Modern Irish pre-1650, and dialectally differentiated Modern Irish since the middle of the 17th century. For the entirety of attested linguistic stages up to Middle Irish the cover term Early Irish is conveniently used.
The authoritative description of Old Irish (for the history see Russell 2005 and Ó Dochartaigh 2000) is Thurneysen (1946). Pedersen (1909-13), McCone (1994) and Stifter (2009) provide supplementary information. The main lexicographic work for the language from Old Irish up to Classical Modern Irish (early 17th century) is the Dictionary of the Irish Language, in its revised electronic version (eDIL; online at: edil.qub.ac.uk/). The main etymological resource is Lexique étymologique de l'irlandais antique (LEIA), unfinished as of yet. The prehistory of the Irish sound system and its transformations in the historic period are discussed in McCone (1996). Any linguistic trait that deviates from the Old Irish standard but does not yet conform to the Classical Modern Irish standard, is regarded as Middle Irish (c. 900 - 1200) irrespective of whether it is a genuine innovation or a hypercorrect aberration, as not infrequently happens. Because of its transitional character and the concomitant uncertainty about the authenticity vs. artificiality of many forms, the grammatical description of Middle Irish lags behind that of its ancestor and successor stages. Breatnach (1993) is the most extensive description, besides a concise overview in McCone (2005: 173 - 217) and a study devoted to the changes in the verbal system in McCone (1997: 163 - 241)
After the Middle Irish re-structurings and simplifications, Classical Modern Irish (c. 1200 - 1650) emerges, a learned written standard language again, meticulously safeguarded against the natural transformations of the spoken language by a professional class of scholars and poets. A succinct description of it is McManus (1994). Its history is treated by Doyle (2015); primary sources for the language history, from the Statutes of Kilkenny 1366 onwards, are edited by Crowley (2000). Ultimately, this register of the language had to give way to the dialectally differentiated variants of Modern Irish (c. 1650 - present) when the social fabric, which had held the Gaelic World and its autochthonous educational system together, was forcefully removed in conflicts with the English Crown in the 17th
century. The modern spoken form of Irish has three distinct dialects (Munster, Connacht, Ulster) and
one superimposed official standard (An Caighdeán Oifigiúil).
While the prehistoric Goidelic can be reconstructed with the features of a typical Indo-European inflectional language, similar in structure and behaviour to Latin or Ancient Greek, or to its less well attested sister-idiom Gaulish, massive phonological changes (esp. lenition, apocope, syncope of every second internal syllable, palatalisation; cf. McCone 1996) around the middle of the 1st millennium A.D., coinciding roughly with comparable transformations in other languages on the British Isles
and in Western Europe, caused a major shake-up of the morphology and morphosyntax that seriously
affected the typological character of the language. As a consequence, Old Irish stands out with an exceptionally intricate sound system that was only partially simplified in Middle and Modern Irish. Morphologically, Old Irish can be characterised as an overspecifying language which encodes grammatical information that has no communicative and semantic significance, while adding at the same time to the morphological complexity. It is almost prototypical for a language whose behaviour cannot be described adequately by synchronic rules alone. Its notoriously complex surface allomorphies, especially in the inflectional morphology of verbs, but also in derivation, often receive elucidation only on the level of the quite dissimilar underlying forms viewed from a diachronic perspective. In practice, what this means, is that during their first-language acquisition native speakers of Old Irish had to memorise a vast number of seemingly aberrant inflectional forms, lacking straightforward synchronic rules to generate all of them. Naturally, such a disparity between underlying forms and surface representations must have exerted pressure on the speakers towards the simplification of the system.
Irish shares grammatical characteristics with the British Celtic languages that set it apart from most European languages. The most conspicuous are:
1. Initial mutations: the initial sounds of words, especially consonants, undergo systematic changes that are triggered by grammatical properties of the preceding words or, occasionally, by specific syntactic contexts.
2. Nominal and, to a slightly lesser degree, verbal inflection is frequently expressed or accompanied by changes of stem-internal vowels and/or by alternations of internal consonants. This behaviour places the language in an areal context with other north-west and north European languages. Over time, the amount of inflectional alternations has been reduced on a broad scale, but even in Modern Irish traces of this behaviour remain.
3. Syntactically, Old Irish is a strict head-initial language, as illustrated by its verb-subjectobject word order, or by the fact that nominal attributes regularly follow their head nouns.
4. A double set of endings in the inflection of verbs, creating a distinction between so-called absolute forms when verbs occur unmodified, and conjunct forms when they are preceded by sentential or lexical particles. This feature was largely lost in the modern language. Despite traces of such a system in the British languages, it had been largely abandoned there already by the beginning of their written attestation.
5. Systematic cliticisation of pronouns after verbs, preverbal particles, and prepositions that led to a large-scale absence of stressed pronouns. This trend was reversed after the Old Irish period when new independent pronouns arose, but clitic pronouns remain a notable feature in various grammatical environments.
6. A strict morphosyntactic distinction between a stressed substantive verb) and an unstressed copula.
7. Communicative emphasis on sentential constituents is achieved by processes of movement and displacement, not by accentual means.
In the centuries after the completion of the massive transformations that led to the creation of Old Irish, the rate of language change slowed down, but it continued on the same trajectory, e.g. reductions of unstressed syllables and the concomitant weakening of phonological oppositions. While the phonological changes during the historic period are moderate, compared to the prehistoric changes,
their knock-on effect on the morphology nevertheless transformed the language decisively. Consequently, over the past two millennia, Irish has been moving from a synthetic to a more analytic type of language, in the recent past under the clear influence from English and through phenomena of language contact, especially through the transference of structural features by non-native speakers. This development can be observed for instance in the slow demise of noun inflection, the replacement of
nominal compounding by nominal phrases with dependent genitives, and the re-introduction of personal pronouns that reduce the functional load on verbal endings. Old Irish is so far removed from Modern Irish as Spanish or French are from Latin. Despite its marginal position in Western Europe, Irish was in constant contact with other languages. The extent to which submerged prehistoric languages of the British Isles influenced Irish is disputed. However, it is likely that some placenames and a portion of the lexicon that is not amenable to Indo-European etymology was borrowed from such substrate sources, e.g., words for specific items of the insular fauna and flora, such as ModIr. partán 'crab' or giomach / gliomach 'lobster'. It is probably also legitimate to attribute some unanalysable placenames to precursor languages, such as OIr. Liphe 'the area around the river Liffey' and Temair 'Tara'. Because of the phonetic properties of some of the loans it has been suggested that at least one such pre-Celtic language survived at least into the 6th century (Schrijver 2014:82-83; Schrijver 2015).
During its recorded history, Irish had contact mainly with the Early British Celtic languages, speakers of which seem to have settled in South-East Ireland in the early medieval period, Latin, Old Norse, Normanno-French, and Middle and Modern English. These adstratal and superstratal languages make themselves felt most notably in lexical borrowings, but occasionally left their imprint on the structure of Irish, for instance in word-formation, e.g., the agentive suffixes -aire and -(th)óir from Lat. -arius and -tor. The Latin language contributed not only words in well-defined semantic fields relating to education (reading, writing) and to the church, but it also introduced a sound into the Irish language which had been absent until the 5th century: p. Any word containing a p is either a loan from a foreign language or arose after the 6th century when the sound had established itself. A most curious loan from Old Welsh is the name of the Irish language itself. For phonetic reasons, the loan of OIr. Goídelc 'Irish language' and Goídel 'Irishman' from Welsh gwyddel 'wild' replacing Fény as the autochthonous name for the inhabitants of Ireland, cannot have taken place much earlier than the 7th century. Unlike Scottish Gaelic and Manx, where Norse influence makes itself profoundly felt even in phonology, the traces left by the Vikings are largely restricted to loanwords in specific semantic fields, especially sea-faring and commerce. While the impact of Old English was limited to a few loan-words, since the Norman invasion Irish has been subjected to extensive influence first from French and then much more strongly from English. This is evident not only in the lexicon, but also in the syntax and in idiomatic expressions.
2. Sources
No written evidence remains from the Proto-Goidelic period. Except for a few placenames in Ptolemy the language of that time is only accessible through linguistic reconstruction.
The first written remains of Irish are the Ogham stones of the Primitive Irish period (OIr. ogum; edited by Macalister 1945; on the script cf. McManus 1991), the main body of which is traditionally, but without secure criteria, assigned to the 4th centuries A.D. Ogham inscriptions consist chiefly of names in the genitive singular and reveal no further textual or historical information. The earliest Oghams preserve a very archaic form of the language; e.g., the Ogham name LUGUDECCA corresponds to OIr. Luigdech. Although the use of Ogham on wood for writing purposes occurs as a narrative motif in early sagas, and finds support in the very nature of the script (encarved notches on the edge of objects), no such objects have been discovered so far.
The first language that was systematically written on vellum in Ireland was Latin. While names and stray Irish words were included in the Latin, especially in annalistic records, the earliest writers on the island occasionally expressed possibly conventional discomfort about writing their own barbarous native tongue. Having to learn Latin from scratch in school forced Irish scholars to engage with grammatical theory, which ultimately shaped their attitude towards their own mother tongue. A paradigm shift occurred during the 7th century when finally literacy in the native language took off. Some scattered pieces of Irish poetry and prose survive that are attributed to authors from the beginning of this or possibly even from the end of the preceding century (Dallán Forgaill, Colmán mac Lénéni, Colmán moccu Béognae). However, these texts need not necessarily have been committed to writing so early. But by the second half of the century, the evidence for written works is undeniable, and by the beginning of the 8th century, the literary production in narrative and expository prose and in poetry was flourishing, thus making Irish the earliest vernacular, i.e. non-classical language to be routinely committed to writing in Europe. The late 7th century saw also the codification of Irish law with collections such as Senchas Már Great T Amazingly, no tradition of using Irish for monumental public inscriptions apart from Ogham ever developed before the modern period. To what extent there continued to exist an oral tradition beside the written one can only be speculated.
Literacy in the Latin alphabet was introduced by Christian missionaries who had received their education in Britain. The reduced version of the alphabet adopted for writing Irish is particularly ensuited for the sounds of the language. 18 letters, plus a diacritic symbol called fada to indicate vowel
length (e.g. á), have to represent the 57 phonemes of Old Irish (or 79, if labialised consonants are recognised as a separate phonemic series). No matter how the sounds are counted, any letter of the alphabet could stand for four or more sounds of the language. Depending on the dialect, post-Old Irish
changes slightly reduced the number of phonemes, but even in modern spelling there is still a glaring
mismatch between phonemes and graphemes. Some of the orthographic peculiarities of Old Irish, e.g.
the non-indication of some mutational effects, the different sound values of consonants depending on
their word-initial or word-internal position, etc., are due to the British transmission of literacy. Others,
such as indicating palatalisation by giving graphic expression to subphonemic glides, must have been
developed by Irish scholars themselves in a long process of experimentation. The orthographic practices are fundamentally identical in the Gaelic of Scotland, but for Manx, whose written documentation
did not start before the early 17th century, a very different approach is used, an orthography that is
chiefly based on English spelling conventions.
The precise circumstances under which writing in Irish established itself are, however, clouded in historical darkness. Writing education and writing practice were firmly connected with Christian
learning in early medieval Ireland. Some indications, partly legendary, partly linguistic and literary,
point to monastic centres in the north-eastern part of the island, between Armagh and Bangor, as the
cradle of vernacular literacy. Despite the production of large amounts of literature already soon after
its beginnings, no literary manuscripts from the early period remain, including, for instance, the pioneer collection of saga literature in the now lost manuscript called Cín Dromma Snechtai 'The book of Druimm Snechtai'. The only large contemporary witnesses of Old Irish are three Latin manuscripts
from the 8th and 9th centuries (Würzburg, Milan, St. Gall; edited in Thes.) that contain very extensive
Old Irish interlinear glosses. In the wake of Irish missionary activities, these manuscripts were brought
to the Continent where they are now preserved. These glosses, to which can be added a number of
other short texts and marginalia in manuscripts, form the basis of every modern grammatical description of classical Old Irish; the 'Old Irishness' of texts in later manuscripts is commonly measured against this linguistic standard.
If after reading half of the article you are interested in reading the last half you can find the whole article in the next site:
https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/12890/1/Stifter%20Encyc.pdf
3. Guinness
Yes that guinness beer...
If there is one thing that the people of Dublin love more than anything, it is beer. Guinness is an Irish dry stout that originated in the brewery of Arthur Guinness at St. James's Gate, Dublin, Ireland, in 1759.
Even now, the brand produces its beer in its home city, which is why you can also visit it and take a tour of the Storehouse.
