Wikipedia:Main Page history/2018 January 4

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From today's featured article

Lilias Armstrong (1882–1937) was an English phonetician. Her book on English intonation, written with Ida C. Ward, was in print for fifty years. She also provided some of the first detailed descriptions of tone in Somali and Kikuyu. Armstrong grew up in Northern England. She graduated from the University of Leeds, where she studied French and Latin. She taught French in an elementary school in the London suburbs before joining the University College Phonetics Department, headed by Daniel Jones, where she was eventually appointed as a reader. Her works include the 1926 book A Handbook of English Intonation (co-written with Ward), the 1934 paper "The Phonetic Structure of Somali", and the book The Phonetic and Tonal Structure of Kikuyu, published posthumously in 1940. She was the subeditor of the International Phonetic Association's journal Le Maître Phonétique for more than a decade, and was praised in her day for her teaching. Jones wrote in his obituary of her that she was "one of the finest phoneticians in the world". (Full article...)

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In the news

Rob Cross

In darts, Rob Cross (pictured) wins the PDC World Championship on his debut.
George Weah is elected President of Liberia.
Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski pardons jailed ex-president Alberto Fujimori.
Typhoon Tembin sweeps through the southern Philippines, killing more than two hundred people and leaving dozens of others missing.
HMAS AE1, a Royal Australian Navy submarine lost at sea in 1914, is located off the Duke of York Islands.

On this day...

January 4: Colonial Martyrs Repression Day in Angola (1961)

Sao Shwe Thaik

1798 – After having been invested as Prince of Wallachia, Constantine Hangerli arrived in Bucharest to assume the throne.
1885 – Sino-French War: French troops under General François Oscar de Négrier defeated a numerically superior Qing Chinese force at Núi Bop in northern Vietnam.
1912 – The Boy Scout Association was incorporated throughout the then British Empire by royal charter.
1948 – Burma achieved independence from the British Empire, with Sao Shwe Thaik (pictured) as its first president.
2007 – Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, becoming the highest-ranking woman in the history of the U.S. government.

Louis Braille (b. 1809) · Johanna Westerdijk (b. 1883) · T. S. Eliot (d. 1965)

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A ngayogyakarta-style blangkon used by the Javanese people of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Such traditional Javanese headdresses are worn by men and made using batik fabric. Aside from Yogyakarta, there are also styles from the Surakarta, Banyumas, and Kedu regions.

Photograph: Chris Woodrich

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