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Possible definitions for haaf

Haas
U.S. linguist. Born in Richmond, Ind., she studied with E. Sapir at Yale Univ. Her dissertation was on Tunica, a moribund Amer. Indian language, and she continued her fieldwork on and comparative studies of Amer. Indian languages, especially of the SE U.S., incl. Natchez and Muskogean languages, for the rest of her life. She directed the Survey of California Indian Languages while on the UC-Berkeley faculty (1945-77). Her many students have done invaluable descriptive work on languages heading rapidly for extinction.


Haifa
City (pop., 1997 est.: 255,000) and chief port, NW Israel. Located on the Bay of Haifa overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, it is first mentioned in the Talmud (c.1st-4th cent. AD). Conquered in 1100 by the Crusaders, it was taken by Napoleon in 1799, and by Egyptian general Ibrahim Pasha in 1839. Occupied by British forces in 1918, it became part of mandated Palestine. It came under Israeli control in 1948, during the Arab-Israeli War. Situated on the N slopes of Mt. Carmel, with the exception of its port section on the bay, it is a tourist resort and a commercial center. Haifa is the world headquarters of the Baha'i movement.


Arafat
Palestinian leader. Born in Jerusalem, he graduated from the Univ. of Cairo as a civil engineer and served in the Egyptian army during the 1956 war with Israel. That year, working as an engineer in Kuwait, he cofounded the guerrilla organization Fatah, which became the leading military component of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which he led from 1969. In 1974 the PLO was formally recognized by the U.N., and Arafat became the first leader of a nongovernmental organization to address the U.N. In 1988 he acknowledged Israel's right to exist, and in 1993 he formally recognized Israel during direct talks regarding land controlled by Israel since the Six-Day War. In 1994 he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Y. Rabin and S. Peres. In 1996 he became president of the new Palestinian Authority.


Baal
God worshiped in many ancient Middle Eastern communities, especially among Canaanites, for whom he was a fertility deity. In the mythology of Canaan, he was locked in combat with Mot, the god of death and sterility; depending on the outcome of their struggles, seven-year cycles of fertility or famine would ensue. Baal was also king of gods, having seized the kingship from the sea god, Yamm. Baal worship was popular in Egypt from the later New Kingdom to its end (1400-1075 BC). The Aramaeans used the Babylonian pronunciation Bel; Bel became the Greek Belos, identified with Zeus. The Old Testament often refers to a specific local Baal or multiple Baalim.


Biafra
Former secessionist state, W. Africa. It constituted the former Eastern Region of Nigeria, inhabited principally by the Igbo (Ibo). In a period of political and economic instability in the 1960s, the resentment of the Hausa in the north toward ...

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