Black Tartarian Black Tartarian Black Tartarian (originally "Ronald's Large Black Heart") is an heirloom cultivar of cherry. It was brought from Circassia to England in the 1700s by a man named Hugh Ronalds, and from England it was brought to the United States in the 1800s. The fruit of the Black Tartarian is about one inch in diameter, with a unique taste and texture, but too soft for commercial shipping. It is primarily grown as a pollinator for other cherry varieties. The Black Tartarian cultivar is best suited for USDA Zones 5-7. It is a very vigorous, heavy-bearing variety, but is primarily
Varieties of Chinese their own standard languages. In China, however, Literary Chinese maintained its monopoly on formal writing until the start of the 20th century. The logographic writing, read with varying local pronunciations, continued to serve as a source of vocabulary and idioms for the local varieties. The new national standard, Vernacular Chinese, the written counterpart of spoken Standard Chinese, is also used as a literary form by speakers of all varieties. Dialectologist Jerry Norman estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum, in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances