1.
Quran
–
The Quran is the central religious text of Islam, which Muslims believe to be a revelation from God. It is widely regarded as the finest work in classical Arabic literature, the Quran is divided into chapters, which are then divided into verses. The word Quran occurs some 70 times in the text of the Quran, although different names, according to the traditional narrative, several companions of Muhammad served as scribes and were responsible for writing down the revelations. Shortly after Muhammads death, the Quran was compiled by his companions who wrote down and these codices had differences that motivated the Caliph Uthman to establish a standard version now known as Uthmans codex, which is generally considered the archetype of the Quran known today. There are, however, variant readings, with minor differences in meaning. The Quran assumes familiarity with major narratives recounted in the Biblical scriptures and it summarizes some, dwells at length on others and, in some cases, presents alternative accounts and interpretations of events. The Quran describes itself as a book of guidance and it sometimes offers detailed accounts of specific historical events, and it often emphasizes the moral significance of an event over its narrative sequence. The Quran is used along with the hadith to interpret sharia law, during prayers, the Quran is recited only in Arabic. Someone who has memorized the entire Quran is called a hafiz, some Muslims read Quranic ayah with elocution, which is often called tajwid. During the month of Ramadan, Muslims typically complete the recitation of the whole Quran during tarawih prayers, in order to extrapolate the meaning of a particular Quranic verse, most Muslims rely on the tafsir. The word qurʼān appears about 70 times in the Quran itself and it is a verbal noun of the Arabic verb qaraʼa, meaning he read or he recited. The Syriac equivalent is qeryānā, which refers to reading or lesson. While some Western scholars consider the word to be derived from the Syriac, regardless, it had become an Arabic term by Muhammads lifetime. An important meaning of the word is the act of reciting, as reflected in an early Quranic passage, It is for Us to collect it, in other verses, the word refers to an individual passage recited. Its liturgical context is seen in a number of passages, for example, So when al-qurʼān is recited, listen to it, the word may also assume the meaning of a codified scripture when mentioned with other scriptures such as the Torah and Gospel. The term also has closely related synonyms that are employed throughout the Quran, each synonym possesses its own distinct meaning, but its use may converge with that of qurʼān in certain contexts. Such terms include kitāb, āyah, and sūrah, the latter two terms also denote units of revelation. In the large majority of contexts, usually with an article, the word is referred to as the revelation
Quran
–
Manuscript of the Quran.
Brooklyn Museum.
Quran
–
Quran
Quran
–
11th-century North African Quran in the
British Museum.
Quran
–
Quran − in
Mashhad, Iran − written by
Ali.
2.
Cursive
–
Cursive, is any style of penmanship in which some characters are written joined together in a flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster. Formal cursive is generally joined, but casual cursive is a combination of joins, the writing style can be further divided as looped, italic, or connected. The cursive method is used with a number of alphabets due to its improved writing speed, in some alphabets, many or all letters in a word are connected sometimes making a word two single complex strokes. Cursive is any style of penmanship in which the symbols of the language are written in a conjoined and/or flowing manner and this writing style is distinct from printscript using block letters, in which the letters of a word are unconnected and in Roman/Gothic letterform rather than joined-up script. Not all cursive copybooks join all letters, formal cursive is generally joined, in the Arabic, Syriac, Latin, and Cyrillic alphabets, many or all letters in a word are connected, sometimes making a word one single complex stroke. In Hebrew cursive and Roman cursive, the letters are not connected, in Maharashtra there is a version of Cursive called Modi In looped cursive penmanship, some ascenders and descenders have loops which provide for joins. Cursive italic penmanship—derived from chancery cursive—uses non-looped joins or no joins, in italic cursive, there are no joins from g, j, q or y, and a few other joins are discouraged. Italic penmanship became popular in the 15th-century Italian Renaissance, the term italic as it relates to handwriting is not to be confused with italic typed letters that slant forward. Many, but not all, letters in the handwriting of the Renaissance were joined, the origins of the cursive method is associated with practical advantages of writing speed and infrequent pen lifting to accommodate the limitations of the quill. Quills are fragile, easily broken, and will spatter unless used properly, steel dip pens followed quills, they were sturdier, but still had some limitations. The individuality of the provenance of a document was a factor also, the term cursive derives from the 18th century Italian corsivo from Medieval Latin cursivus, which literally means running. This term in turn derives from Latin currere, Modi is a script used to write the Marathi language, which is the primary language spoken in the state of Maharashtra, India. There are at least two different theories concerning its origin, modI was an official script used to write Marathi until the 20th century when the Balbodh style of the Devanagari script was promoted as the standard writing system for Marathi. Although Modi was primarily used to write Marathi, other such as Urdu, Kannada, Gujarati, Rajasthani, Hindi. In Bengali cursive script the letters are more likely to be more curvy in appearance than in standard Bengali handwriting, also, the horizontal supporting bar on each letter runs continuously through the entire word, unlike in standard handwriting. Roman cursive is a form of handwriting used in ancient Rome and it is customarily divided into old cursive, and new cursive. New Roman cursive, also called minuscule cursive or later Roman cursive, the Greek alphabet has had several cursive forms in the course of its development. In antiquity, a form of handwriting was used in writing on papyrus
Cursive
–
Example of classic American business cursive handwriting known as
Spencerian script from 1884.
Cursive
–
Looped cursive as taught in Britain in mid-twentieth century
Cursive
–
Verses from the
Qur'an in Classical Arabic, written in the cursive
Arabic script.
Cursive
–
half of the
National Anthem of Bangladesh written in Cursive
Bengali.
3.
Arabic alphabet
–
The Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjadiyah is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written right to left, in a cursive style. Originally, the alphabet was an abjad consisting only of consonants, as with other abjads, such as the Hebrew alphabet, scribes later devised means of indicating vowel sounds by separate vowel points. The basic Arabic alphabet contains 28 letters, there are no distinct upper and lower case letter forms. Many letters look similar but are distinguished from one another by dots above or below their central part and these dots are an integral part of a letter, since they distinguish between letters that represent different sounds. For example, the Arabic letters transliterated as b and t have the basic shape, but b has one dot below, ب. Both printed and written Arabic are cursive, with most of the letters within a word connected to the adjacent letters. There are two main collating sequences for the Arabic alphabet, abjad and hija, in this order, letters are also used as numbers, Abjad numerals, and possess the same alphanumeric code/cipher as Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy. The hijā’ī or alifbā’ī order, used where lists of names and words are sorted, as in phonebooks, classroom lists, and dictionaries, groups letters by similarity of shape. Loss of sameḵ was compensated for by the split of shin ש into two independent Arabic letters, ش and ﺱ which moved up to take the place of sameḵ, the six other letters that do not correspond to any north Semitic letter are placed at the end. This is commonly vocalized as follows, abjad hawwaz ḥuṭṭī kalaman sa‘faṣ qarashat thakhadh ḍaẓagh, the hijā’ī order is never used as numerals. Another kind of order was used widely in the Maghreb until recently when it was replaced by the Mashriqi order. The Arabic alphabet is always cursive and letters vary in shape depending on their position within a word, letters can exhibit up to four distinct forms corresponding to an initial, medial, final, or isolated position. While some letters show considerable variations, others remain almost identical across all four positions, generally, letters in the same word are linked together on both sides by short horizontal lines, but six letters can only be linked to their preceding letter. For example, أرارات has only isolated forms because each letter cannot be connected to its following one, in addition, some letter combinations are written as ligatures, notably lām-alif. Notes See the article Romanization of Arabic for details on various schemes, however. Also names are transcribed as pronounced locally, not as pronounced in Literary Arabic. Regarding pronunciation, the values given are those of Modern Standard Arabic
Arabic alphabet
–
Calligraphy
Arabic alphabet
–
as the sole official script
4.
Middle East
–
The Middle East is a transcontinental region centered on Western Asia and Egypt. The corresponding adjective is Middle-Eastern and the noun is Middle-Easterner. The term has come into usage as a replacement of the term Near East beginning in the early 20th century. Arabs, Turks, Persians, Kurds, and Azeris constitute the largest ethnic groups in the region by population. Indigenous minorities of the Middle East include Jews, Assyrians and other Arameans, Baloch, Berbers, Copts, Druze, Lurs, Mandaeans, Samaritans, Shabaks, Tats, in the Middle East, there is also a Romani community. European ethnic groups form a diaspora in the region include Albanians, Bosniaks, Circassians, Crimean Tatars, Franco-Levantines. Among other migrant populations are Bengalis as well as other Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, Indonesians, Pakistanis, the history of the Middle East dates back to ancient times, with the importance of the region being recognized for millennia. Most of the countries border the Persian Gulf have vast reserves of crude oil. The term Middle East may have originated in the 1850s in the British India Office, however, it became more widely known when American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan used the term in 1902 to designate the area between Arabia and India. During this time the British and Russian Empires were vying for influence in Central Asia, Mahan realized not only the strategic importance of the region, but also of its center, the Persian Gulf. Mahan first used the term in his article The Persian Gulf and International Relations, published in September 1902 in the National Review, a British journal. The Middle East, if I may adopt a term which I have not seen, will some day need its Malta, as well as its Gibraltar, it does not follow that either will be in the Persian Gulf. The British Navy should have the facility to concentrate in force if occasion arise, about Aden, India, mahans article was reprinted in The Times and followed in October by a 20-article series entitled The Middle Eastern Question, written by Sir Ignatius Valentine Chirol. During this series, Sir Ignatius expanded the definition of Middle East to include regions of Asia which extend to the borders of India or command the approaches to India. After the series ended in 1903, The Times removed quotation marks from subsequent uses of the term, in the late 1930s, the British established the Middle East Command, which was based in Cairo, for its military forces in the region. After that time, the term Middle East gained broader usage in Europe, the description Middle has also led to some confusion over changing definitions. Before the First World War, Near East was used in English to refer to the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire, while Middle East referred to Iran, the Caucasus, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Turkestan. The first official use of the term Middle East by the United States government was in the 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine, the Associated Press Stylebook says that Near East formerly referred to the farther west countries while Middle East referred to the eastern ones, but that now they are synonymous
Middle East
–
The
Temple Mount in
Jerusalem
Middle East
–
Map of the Middle East (green).
Middle East
–
The
Kaaba, located in
Mecca,
Saudi Arabia
Middle East
–
Islam is the largest religion in the Middle East. Here, Muslim men are
prostrating during prayer in a mosque.
5.
Islam
–
Islam is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion which professes that there is only one and incomparable God and that Muhammad is the last messenger of God. It is the worlds second-largest religion and the major religion in the world, with over 1.7 billion followers or 23% of the global population. Islam teaches that God is merciful, all-powerful, and unique, and He has guided mankind through revealed scriptures, natural signs, and a line of prophets sealed by Muhammad. The primary scriptures of Islam are the Quran, viewed by Muslims as the word of God. Muslims believe that Islam is the original, complete and universal version of a faith that was revealed many times before through prophets including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses. As for the Quran, Muslims consider it to be the unaltered, certain religious rites and customs are observed by the Muslims in their family and social life, while social responsibilities to parents, relatives, and neighbors have also been defined. Besides, the Quran and the sunnah of Muhammad prescribe a comprehensive body of moral guidelines for Muslims to be followed in their personal, social, political, Islam began in the early 7th century. Originating in Mecca, it spread in the Arabian Peninsula. The expansion of the Muslim world involved various caliphates and empires, traders, most Muslims are of one of two denominations, Sunni or Shia. Islam is the dominant religion in the Middle East, North Africa, sizable Muslim communities are also found in Horn of Africa, Europe, China, Russia, Mainland Southeast Asia, Philippines, Northern Borneo, Caucasus and the Americas. Converts and immigrant communities are found in almost every part of the world, Islam is a verbal noun originating from the triliteral root s-l-m which forms a large class of words mostly relating to concepts of wholeness, submission, safeness and peace. In a religious context it means voluntary submission to God, Islām is the verbal noun of Form IV of the root, and means submission or surrender. Muslim, the word for an adherent of Islam, is the active participle of the verb form. The word sometimes has connotations in its various occurrences in the Quran. In some verses, there is stress on the quality of Islam as a state, Whomsoever God desires to guide. Other verses connect Islām and dīn, Today, I have perfected your religion for you, I have completed My blessing upon you, still others describe Islam as an action of returning to God—more than just a verbal affirmation of faith. In the Hadith of Gabriel, islām is presented as one part of a triad that also includes imān, Islam was historically called Muhammadanism in Anglophone societies. This term has fallen out of use and is said to be offensive because it suggests that a human being rather than God is central to Muslims religion
Islam
–
The
Kaaba, in
Mecca,
Hejaz region, today's
Saudi Arabia, is the
center of Islam.
Muslims from all over the world gather there to
pray in unity.
Islam
–
The dome of the
Carol I Mosque in
Constanța,
Romania, topped by the
Islamic crescent
Islam
–
Medallion showing "
Allah " (
God) in
Hagia Sophia,
Istanbul,
Turkey.
Islam
–
An
angel presenting
Muhammad and his companions with a miniature city. In the
Topkapi Palace Library,
Istanbul.
6.
Modern Standard Arabic
–
Modern Standard Arabic, Standard Arabic, or Literary Arabic is the standardized and literary variety of Arabic used in writing and in most formal speech. It is considered a pluricentric language, MSA is based on classical Arabic, and differences between the two varieties of the language are directly related to modernizing and simplification, both in speaking and writing styles. Classical Arabic, also known as Quranic Arabic, is the used in the Quran as well as in numerous literary texts from Umayyad. Many Muslims study Classical Arabic in order to read the Quran in its original language, Modern Standard Arabic is the literary standard across the Middle East, North Africa, Horn of Africa and is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Most printed matter in the Arab League—including most books, newspapers, magazines, official documents and they are not normally written, although a certain amount of literature exists in many of them. Literary Arabic is the language of all Arab League countries and is the only form of Arabic taught in schools at all stages. Additionally, some Christian Arabic speakers recite prayers in it, as it is considered the literary language and this diglossic situation facilitates code-switching in which a speaker switches back and forth between the two dialects of the language, sometimes even within the same sentence. People speak MSA as a language if they speak other languages native to a country as their first language. Modern Standard Arabic is also spoken by people of Arab descent outside the Arab world when people of Arab descent speaking different dialects communicate each other, as there is a prestige or standard dialect of vernacular Arabic, speakers of standard colloquial dialects code-switch between these particular dialects and MSA. For these reasons, Modern Standard Arabic is generally treated separately in non-Arab sources, Arabic sources generally tend to regard MSA and Classical Arabic as different registers of one and the same language. Speakers of Modern Standard Arabic do not always observe the rules of Classical Arabic grammar. On the whole, Modern Standard Arabic is not homogeneous, there are authors who write in a very close to the classical models. As MSA is a revised and simplified form of Classical Arabic, as diglossia is involved, various Arabic dialects freely borrow words from MSA, this situation is similar to Romance languages, wherein scores of words were borrowed directly from formal Latin. It depends on the knowledge and attitude to the grammar of Classical Arabic, as well as the region. Pronunciation of foreign names in MSA is loose, names can be pronounced or even spelled differently in different regions, pronunciation also depends on the persons education, linguistic knowledge and abilities. Modern languages have also influenced pronunciation or word order. Examples are Turkish and English in Egypt, French in North Africa, Lebanon and Syria, English and Hebrew in Israel, notes, the marginal phoneme /ɫ/ only occurs in the word الله /aɫːaːh/ and words derived from it. /u/ can also have different realizations, i. e and they are distinct phonemes in loan words
Modern Standard Arabic
–
Distribution of Modern Standard Arabic as an official language in the Arab World. The only official language (green); one of the official languages (blue).
7.
Language family
–
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. Linguists therefore describe the languages within a language family as being genetically related. Estimates of the number of living languages vary from 5,000 to 8,000, depending on the precision of ones definition of language, the 2013 edition of Ethnologue catalogs just over 7,000 living human languages. A living language is one that is used as the primary form of communication of a group of people. There are also dead and extinct languages, as well as some that are still insufficiently studied to be classified. Membership of languages in a family is established by comparative linguistics. Sister languages are said to have a genetic or genealogical relationship, speakers of a language family belong to a common speech community. The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, individuals belonging to other speech communities may also adopt languages from a different language family through the language shift process. Genealogically related languages present shared retentions, that is, features of the proto-language that cannot be explained by chance or borrowing, for example, Germanic languages are Germanic in that they share vocabulary and grammatical features that are not believed to have been present in the Proto-Indo-European language. These features are believed to be innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, conventionally referred to as branches of the family because the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram. A family is a unit, all its members derive from a common ancestor. Some taxonomists restrict the term family to a level. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups, a top-level family is often called a phylum or stock. The closer the branches are to other, the closer the languages will be related. For example, the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Romance, there is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry that was verified statistically. Languages interpreted in terms of the phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically as opposed to horizontally. A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations, thus, different sources give sometimes wildly different accounts of the number of languages within a family. Classifications of the Japonic family, for example, range from one language to nearly twenty, most of the worlds languages are known to be related to others
Language family
–
Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families). For greater detail, see
Distribution of languages in the world.
8.
Afroasiatic languages
–
Afroasiatic, also known as Afrasian and traditionally as Hamito-Semitic, is a large language family of several hundred related languages and dialects. It comprises about 300 or so living languages and dialects, according to the 2009 Ethnologue estimate and it includes languages spoken predominantly in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel. Afroasiatic languages have 350+ million native speakers, the fourth largest number of any language family, the phylum has six branches, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic and Semitic. By far the most widely spoken Afroasiatic language is Arabic, including literary Arabic and it has around 200 to 230 million native speakers concentrated primarily in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and Malta. Modern Aramaic, spoken by about 550,000 people worldwide and this is not just one language — It includes a number of subdivisions, with Assyrian Neo-Aramaic being the most spoken variety. In addition to languages spoken today, Afroasiatic includes several important ancient languages, such as Ancient Egyptian, Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew and it is uncertain when or where the original homeland of the Afroasiatic family existed. Proposed locations include North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Eastern Sahara, the terms Hamitic and Semitic were etymologically derived from the Book of Genesis, which describes various Biblical tribes descended from Ham and Shem, two sons of Noah. By the 1860s, the constituent elements within the broader Afroasiatic family had been worked out. The scholar Friedrich Müller introduced the name Hamito-Semitic for the family in his Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft. Maurice Delafosse later coined the term Afroasiatic, however, it did not come into general use until Joseph Greenberg formally proposed its adoption. In doing so, Greenberg sought to emphasize the fact that Afroasiatic spanned the continents of both Africa and Asia, individual scholars have also called the family Erythraean and Lisramic. The term Hamito-Semitic remains in use in the traditions of some European countries. Greenberg and others considered it a subgroup of Cushitic, whereas others have raised doubts about it being part of Afroasiatic at all, Harold Fleming proposes that Ongota constitutes a separate branch of Afroasiatic. Bonny Sands believes the most convincing proposal is by Savà and Tosco, Beja is sometimes listed as a separate branch of Afroasiatic but is more often included in the Cushitic branch, which has a high degree of internal diversity. Whether the various branches of Cushitic actually form a family is sometimes questioned. There is no consensus on the interrelationships of the five branches of Afroasiatic. This situation is not unusual, even among long-established language families, there are also many disagreements concerning the classification of the Indo-European languages. Meroitic has been proposed as an unclassified Afroasiatic language, because it shares the characteristic of the family
Afroasiatic languages
–
Afroasiatic
9.
Semitic languages
–
The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family originating in the Middle East. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History, the most widely spoken Semitic languages today are Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya, Hebrew, Aramaic and Maltese. Among them are the Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Maltese is the only Semitic language written in the Latin script and the only Semitic language to be an official language of the European Union. The Semitic languages are notable for their nonconcatenative morphology and that is, word roots are not themselves syllables or words, but instead are isolated sets of consonants. Words are composed out of not so much by adding prefixes or suffixes. For example, in Arabic, the root meaning write has the form k-t-b, the similarity of the Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic languages was accepted by Jewish and Islamic scholars since medieval times. Almost two centuries later, Hiob Ludolf described the similarities between these three languages and the Ethiopian Semitic languages, however, neither scholar named this grouping as Semitic. Viewed from this too, with respect to the alphabet used. Previously these languages had been known as the Oriental languages in European literature. In the 19th century, Semitic became the name, however. There are several locations proposed as sites for prehistoric origins of Semitic-speaking peoples, Mesopotamia, The Levant, Mediterranean, the Arabian Peninsula. Both the Near East and North Africa saw an influx of Muslim Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula, followed later by non-Semitic Muslim Iranian and Turkic peoples. The Arabs spread their Central Semitic language to North Africa where it gradually replaced Coptic and many Berber languages, with the patronage of the caliphs and the prestige of its liturgical status, Arabic rapidly became one of the worlds main literary languages. Its spread among the masses took much longer, however, as many of the populations outside the Arabian Peninsula only gradually abandoned their languages in favour of Arabic. As Bedouin tribes settled in conquered areas, it became the language of not only central Arabia, but also Yemen, the Fertile Crescent. Most of the Maghreb followed, particularly in the wake of the Banu Hilals incursion in the 11th century, and Arabic became the native language of many inhabitants of al-Andalus. After the collapse of the Nubian kingdom of Dongola in the 14th century, Arabic began to spread south of Egypt into modern Sudan, soon after, the Beni Ḥassān brought Arabization to Mauritania. Meanwhile, Semitic languages were diversifying in Ethiopia and Eritrea, where, under heavy Cushitic influence, they split into a number of languages, including Amharic, Arabic languages and dialects are currently the native languages of majorities from Mauritania to Oman, and from Iraq to the Sudan
Semitic languages
–
11th-century manuscript of the
Hebrew Bible with
Targum
Semitic languages
–
Approximate historical distribution of Semitic languages.
Semitic languages
–
Page from a 15th-century Bible in
Ge'ez (Ethiopia & Eritrea)
Semitic languages
–
9th century
Syriac manuscript
10.
International Phonetic Alphabet
–
The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark
International Phonetic Alphabet
–
The official chart of the IPA as of 2005. Click to enlarge. The proper symbols for upstep and downstep are not available in this font, and have been substituted.
International Phonetic Alphabet
–
X-ray photos show the sounds [i, u, a, ɑ]
11.
Replacement character
–
Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, five are assigned as of Unicode 9, U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the sense. They can be used to guess a texts encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The replacement character � is a found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol and it is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character, Consider a text file containing the German word für in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This file is now opened with an editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this, f�r, a poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form, the text file data will then look like this, 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as f�r. Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character, a better design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence and it has become increasingly common for software to interpret invalid UTF-8 by guessing the bytes are in another byte-based encoding such as ISO-8859-1. This allows correct display of both valid and invalid UTF-8 pasted together, Unicode control characters UTF-8 Mojibake Unicodes Specials table Decodeunicodes entry for the replacement character
Replacement character
–
Replacement character
12.
Unicode
–
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters
Unicode
–
Logo of the
Unicode Consortium
13.
Arabic script
–
The Arabic script is a writing system used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa, such as Arabic, dialects of Mandinka, Central Kurdish, Luri, Persian, Urdu, Pashto, and others. Until the 16th century, it was used to write some texts in Spanish. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by the number of countries using it, the Arabic script is written from right to left in a cursive style. In most cases the letters transcribe consonants, or consonants and a few vowels, the script was first used to write texts in Arabic, most notably the Qurʼān, the holy book of Islam. It is also the basis for the tradition of Arabic calligraphy, the Arabic script has been adopted for use in a wide variety of languages besides Arabic, including Persian, Malay and Urdu which are not Semitic. Such adaptations may feature altered or new characters to represent phonemes that do not appear in Arabic phonology, the modified version of the Arabic script originally devised for use with Persian is known as the Perso-Arabic script by scholars. In the cases of Bosnian, Kurdish, Kashmiri, and Uyghur writing systems, the Arabic script can therefore be used in both abugida and abjad, although it is often strongly, erroneously connected to the latter. Use of the Arabic script in West African languages, especially in the Sahel, to a certain degree the style and usage tends to follow those of the Maghreb. Additional diacritics have come into use to facilitate writing of sounds not represented in the Arabic language, the term ʻAjamī, which comes from the Arabic root for foreign, has been applied to Arabic-based orthographies of African languages. There is evidence that writing Arabic in this set of letters influenced the style of modern Arabic script. After this initial period, Garshuni writing has continued to the present day among some Syriac Christian communities in the Arabic-speaking regions of the Levant, Kazakh in China Kurdish in Northern Iraq and Northwest Iran. It is mainly used in Sri Lanka and the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu for religious purposes, arwi language is the language of Tamil Nadu Muslims. Malayalam language represented by Arabic script variant is known as Arabi Malayalam, the script has particular letters to represent the peculiar sounds of Malayalam. This script is used in madrasas of the South Indian state of Kerala. It is similar to Chittagonian language in neighboring Bangladesh and sometimes using the Roman script. Malay in the Arabic script known as Jawi, in some cases it can be seen in the signboards of shops or market stalls. In addition, some television programming uses Jawi, such as announcements, advertisements, news, social programs, Berber languages have often been written in an adaptation of the Arabic alphabet. The use of the Arabic alphabet, as well as the competing Latin, West Africa Zarma language of the Songhay family
Arabic script
–
Basic Arabic alphabet
Arabic script
–
Calligraphy
14.
Specials (Unicode block)
–
Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, five are assigned as of Unicode 9, U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the sense. They can be used to guess a texts encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The replacement character � is a found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol and it is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character, Consider a text file containing the German word für in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This file is now opened with an editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this, f�r, a poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form, the text file data will then look like this, 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as f�r. Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character, a better design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence and it has become increasingly common for software to interpret invalid UTF-8 by guessing the bytes are in another byte-based encoding such as ISO-8859-1. This allows correct display of both valid and invalid UTF-8 pasted together, Unicode control characters UTF-8 Mojibake Unicodes Specials table Decodeunicodes entry for the replacement character
Specials (Unicode block)
–
Replacement character
15.
Arabic language
–
Arabic is a Central Semitic language that was first spoken in Iron Age northwestern Arabia and is now the lingua franca of the Arab world. Arabic is also the language of 1.7 billion Muslims. It is one of six languages of the United Nations. The modern written language is derived from the language of the Quran and it is widely taught in schools and universities, and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, government, and the media. The two formal varieties are grouped together as Literary Arabic, which is the language of 26 states. Modern Standard Arabic largely follows the standards of Quranic Arabic. Much of the new vocabulary is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the post-Quranic era, Arabic has influenced many languages around the globe throughout its history. During the Middle Ages, Literary Arabic was a vehicle of culture in Europe, especially in science, mathematics. As a result, many European languages have borrowed many words from it. Many words of Arabic origin are found in ancient languages like Latin. Balkan languages, including Greek, have acquired a significant number of Arabic words through contact with Ottoman Turkish. Arabic has also borrowed words from languages including Greek and Persian in medieval times. Arabic is a Central Semitic language, closely related to the Northwest Semitic languages, the Ancient South Arabian languages, the Semitic languages changed a great deal between Proto-Semitic and the establishment of the Central Semitic languages, particularly in grammar. Innovations of the Central Semitic languages—all maintained in Arabic—include, The conversion of the suffix-conjugated stative formation into a past tense, the conversion of the prefix-conjugated preterite-tense formation into a present tense. The elimination of other prefix-conjugated mood/aspect forms in favor of new moods formed by endings attached to the prefix-conjugation forms, the development of an internal passive. These features are evidence of descent from a hypothetical ancestor. In the southwest, various Central Semitic languages both belonging to and outside of the Ancient South Arabian family were spoken and it is also believed that the ancestors of the Modern South Arabian languages were also spoken in southern Arabia at this time. To the north, in the oases of northern Hijaz, Dadanitic and Taymanitic held some prestige as inscriptional languages, in Najd and parts of western Arabia, a language known to scholars as Thamudic C is attested
Arabic language
–
The Galland Manuscript of
One Thousand and One Nights, 14th century
Arabic language
–
al-ʿArabiyyah in written Arabic (
Naskh script)
Arabic language
–
Bilingual traffic sign in
Qatar.
Arabic language
–
Examples of how the Arabic root and form system works.
16.
Umayyad Caliphate
–
The Umayyad Caliphate, also spelled Omayyad, was the second of the four major caliphates established after the death of Muhammad. This caliphate was centred on the Umayyad dynasty, hailing from Mecca, Syria remained the Umayyads main power base thereafter, and Damascus was their capital. The Umayyads continued the Muslim conquests, incorporating the Caucasus, Transoxiana, Sindh, the Maghreb and the Iberian Peninsula into the Muslim world. At its greatest extent, the Umayyad Caliphate covered 11,100,000 km2 and 62 million people, the Umayyad Caliphate was secular by nature. At the time, the Umayyad taxation and administrative practice were perceived as unjust by some Muslims, Muhammad had stated explicitly during his lifetime that Abrahamic religious groups, should be allowed to practice their own religion, provided that they paid the jizya taxation. The welfare state of both the Muslim and the poor started by Umar ibn al Khattab had also continued, financed by the zakat tax levied only on Muslims. Muawiyas wife Maysum was also a Christian, the relations between the Muslims and the Christians in the state were stable in this time. Prominent positions were held by Christians, some of whom belonged to families that had served in Byzantine governments, the employment of Christians was part of a broader policy of religious assimilation that was necessitated by the presence of large Christian populations in the conquered provinces, as in Syria. This policy also boosted Muawiyas popularity and solidified Syria as his power base, the rivalries between the Arab tribes had caused unrest in the provinces outside Syria, most notably in the Second Muslim Civil War of AD 680–692 and the Berber Revolt of 740–743. During the Second Civil War, leadership of the Umayyad clan shifted from the Sufyanid branch of the family to the Marwanid branch. A branch of the family fled across North Africa to Al-Andalus, where they established the Caliphate of Córdoba, according to tradition, the Umayyad family and Muhammad both descended from a common ancestor, Abd Manaf ibn Qusai, and they originally came from the city of Mecca. Muhammad descended from Abd Manāf via his son Hashim, while the Umayyads descended from Abd Manaf via a different son, Abd-Shams, the two families are therefore considered to be different clans of the same tribe. However Muslim Shia historians suspect that Umayya was a son of Abd Shams so he was not a blood relative of Abd Manaf ibn Qusai. Umayya was later discarded from the noble family, Sunni historians disagree with this and view Shia claims as nothing more than outright polemics due to their hostility to the Umayyad family in general. While the Umayyads and the Hashimites may have had bitterness between the two clans before Muhammad, the rivalry turned into a case of tribal animosity after the Battle of Badr. The battle saw three top leaders of the Umayyad clan killed by Hashimites in a three-on-three melee and this fueled the opposition of Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, the grandson of Umayya, to Muhammad and to Islam. Abu Sufyan sought to exterminate the adherents of the new religion by waging another battle with Muslims based in Medina only a year after the Battle of Badr and he did this to avenge the defeat at Badr. The Battle of Uhud is generally believed by scholars to be the first defeat for the Muslims, as they had incurred greater losses than the Meccans
Umayyad Caliphate
–
Umayyad Caliphate in 750
Umayyad Caliphate
–
Flag
Umayyad Caliphate
–
History of Afghanistan
17.
Abbasid Caliphate
–
The Abbasid Caliphate was the third of the Islamic caliphates to succeed the Islamic prophet Muhammad. The Abbasid dynasty descended from Muhammads youngest uncle, Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib and they ruled as caliphs, for most of their period from their capital in Baghdad in modern-day Iraq, after assuming authority over the Muslim empire from the Umayyads in 750 CE. The Abbasid caliphate first centered its government in Kufa, but in 762 the caliph Al-Mansur founded the city of Baghdad, the political power of the caliphs largely ended with the rise of the Buyids and the Seljuq Turks. Although Abbasid leadership over the vast Islamic empire was reduced to a ceremonial religious function. The capital city of Baghdad became a center of science, culture, philosophy and this period of cultural fruition ended in 1258 with the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols under Hulagu Khan. The Abbasid line of rulers, and Muslim culture in general, though lacking in political power, the dynasty continued to claim authority in religious matters until after the Ottoman conquest of Egypt. The Abbasid caliphs were Arabs descended from Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, one of the youngest uncles of Muhammad, the Abbasids claimed to be the true successors of Prophet Muhammad in replacing the Umayyad descendants of Banu Umayya by virtue of their closer bloodline to Muhammad. The Abbasids also distinguished themselves from the Umayyads by attacking their moral character, according to Ira Lapidus, The Abbasid revolt was supported largely by Arabs, mainly the aggrieved settlers of Marw with the addition of the Yemeni faction and their Mawali. The Abbasids also appealed to non-Arab Muslims, known as mawali, Muhammad ibn Ali, a great-grandson of Abbas, began to campaign for the return of power to the family of Prophet Muhammad, the Hashimites, in Persia during the reign of Umar II. During the reign of Marwan II, this culminated in the rebellion of Ibrahim the Imam. On 9 June 747, Abu Muslim successfully initiated a revolt against Umayyad rule. Close to 10,000 soldiers were under Abu Muslims command when the hostilities began in Merv. General Qahtaba followed the fleeing governor Nasr ibn Sayyar west defeating the Umayyads at the Battle of Nishapur, the Battle of Gorgan, after this loss, Marwan fled to Egypt, where he was subsequently assassinated. The remainder of his family, barring one male, were also eliminated, immediately after their victory, As-Saffah sent his forces to Central Asia, where his forces fought against Tang expansion during the Battle of Talas. Barmakids, who were instrumental in building Baghdad, introduced the worlds first recorded paper mill in Baghdad, As-Saffah focused on putting down numerous rebellions in Syria and Mesopotamia. The Byzantines conducted raids during these early distractions, the first change the Abbasids, under Al-Mansur, made was to move the empires capital from Damascus, in Syria, to Baghdad in Iraq. Baghdad was established on the Tigris River in 762, a new position, that of the vizier, was also established to delegate central authority, and even greater authority was delegated to local emirs. During Al-Mansurs time control of Al-Andalus was lost, and the Shiites revolted and were defeated a year later at the Battle of Bakhamra, the Abbasids had depended heavily on the support of Persians in their overthrow of the Umayyads
Abbasid Caliphate
–
The Black Banner of the Abbasids.
Abbasid Caliphate
–
Coin of the Abbasids,
Baghdad, Iraq, 765
Abbasid Caliphate
–
Image of the
Amir of
Khorasan Isma'il ibn Ahmad on the
Tajikistani somoni who exercised independent authority from the Abassids
18.
Arab world
–
The Arab world, also known as the Arab nation or the Arab states, consists of the 22 Arabic-speaking countries of the Arab League. The contemporary Arab world has a population of around 422 million inhabitants. In the Middle Ages, the Arab world was synonymous with the historic Arab empires and caliphates, Arab nationalism arose in the second half of the 19th century along with other nationalist movements within the Ottoman Empire. The Arab League was formed in 1945 to represent the interests of Arab people and especially to pursue the political unification of the Arab countries, the linguistic and political denotation inherent in the term Arab is generally dominant over genealogical considerations. In Arab states, Modern Standard Arabic is the language used by the government. The language of a nation is called Darija, which means everyday/colloquial language. Although no globally accepted definition of the Arab world exists, all countries that are members of the Arab League are generally acknowledged as being part of the Arab world. This standard territorial definition is seen to be inappropriate or problematic. These parameters may be applied to the states and territories of the Arab League, typical parameters that may be applied include, whether Arabic is widely spoken, whether Arabic is an official or national language, or whether an Arabic cognate language is widely spoken. While Arabic dialects are spoken in a number of Arab League states, several states have declared Arabic to be an official or national language, although Arabic is today not as widely spoken there. As members of the Arab League, however, they are considered part of the Arab world under the territorial definition. Somalia has two official languages today, Arabic and Somali, both of which belong to the larger Afro-Asiatic language family, although Arabic is widely spoken by many people in the north, Somali is the most widely used language, and contains many Arabic loan words. Similarly, Djibouti has two languages, Arabic and French. It also has several formally recognized national languages, besides Somali, many people speak Afar, the majority of the population speaks Somali and Afar, although Arabic is also widely used for trade and other activities. Comoros has three languages, Arabic, Comorian and French. Comorian is the most widely spoken language, with Arabic having a religious significance, Israel is not part of the Arab world. By some definitions, Arab citizens of Israel may concurrently be considered a constituent part of the Arab world, Iran has about 1.5 million Arabic speakers. Iranian Arabs are mainly found in Ahvaz, a region in the Khuzestan Province, others inhabit the Bushehr Qushasha and Hipi-Lipi Hormozgan provinces
Arab world
–
The
Great Mosque of Kairouan (also called the Mosque of Uqba), was founded in 670 by the Arab general and conqueror Uqba ibn Nafi. The
Great Mosque of Kairouan is located in the historic city of
Kairouan in
Tunisia.
Arab world
–
A map of the Arab world. This is based on the
standard territorial definition of the Arab world, which comprises the states of the Arab League plus
Western Sahara.
Comoros is not shown.
19.
Umayyad
–
The Umayyad Caliphate, also spelled Omayyad, was the second of the four major caliphates established after the death of Muhammad. This caliphate was centred on the Umayyad dynasty, hailing from Mecca, Syria remained the Umayyads main power base thereafter, and Damascus was their capital. The Umayyads continued the Muslim conquests, incorporating the Caucasus, Transoxiana, Sindh, the Maghreb and the Iberian Peninsula into the Muslim world. At its greatest extent, the Umayyad Caliphate covered 11,100,000 km2 and 62 million people, the Umayyad Caliphate was secular by nature. At the time, the Umayyad taxation and administrative practice were perceived as unjust by some Muslims, Muhammad had stated explicitly during his lifetime that Abrahamic religious groups, should be allowed to practice their own religion, provided that they paid the jizya taxation. The welfare state of both the Muslim and the poor started by Umar ibn al Khattab had also continued, financed by the zakat tax levied only on Muslims. Muawiyas wife Maysum was also a Christian, the relations between the Muslims and the Christians in the state were stable in this time. Prominent positions were held by Christians, some of whom belonged to families that had served in Byzantine governments, the employment of Christians was part of a broader policy of religious assimilation that was necessitated by the presence of large Christian populations in the conquered provinces, as in Syria. This policy also boosted Muawiyas popularity and solidified Syria as his power base, the rivalries between the Arab tribes had caused unrest in the provinces outside Syria, most notably in the Second Muslim Civil War of AD 680–692 and the Berber Revolt of 740–743. During the Second Civil War, leadership of the Umayyad clan shifted from the Sufyanid branch of the family to the Marwanid branch. A branch of the family fled across North Africa to Al-Andalus, where they established the Caliphate of Córdoba, according to tradition, the Umayyad family and Muhammad both descended from a common ancestor, Abd Manaf ibn Qusai, and they originally came from the city of Mecca. Muhammad descended from Abd Manāf via his son Hashim, while the Umayyads descended from Abd Manaf via a different son, Abd-Shams, the two families are therefore considered to be different clans of the same tribe. However Muslim Shia historians suspect that Umayya was a son of Abd Shams so he was not a blood relative of Abd Manaf ibn Qusai. Umayya was later discarded from the noble family, Sunni historians disagree with this and view Shia claims as nothing more than outright polemics due to their hostility to the Umayyad family in general. While the Umayyads and the Hashimites may have had bitterness between the two clans before Muhammad, the rivalry turned into a case of tribal animosity after the Battle of Badr. The battle saw three top leaders of the Umayyad clan killed by Hashimites in a three-on-three melee and this fueled the opposition of Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, the grandson of Umayya, to Muhammad and to Islam. Abu Sufyan sought to exterminate the adherents of the new religion by waging another battle with Muslims based in Medina only a year after the Battle of Badr and he did this to avenge the defeat at Badr. The Battle of Uhud is generally believed by scholars to be the first defeat for the Muslims, as they had incurred greater losses than the Meccans
Umayyad
–
Umayyad Caliphate in 750
Umayyad
–
Flag
Umayyad
–
History of Afghanistan
20.
Abbasid
–
The Abbasid Caliphate was the third of the Islamic caliphates to succeed the Islamic prophet Muhammad. The Abbasid dynasty descended from Muhammads youngest uncle, Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib and they ruled as caliphs, for most of their period from their capital in Baghdad in modern-day Iraq, after assuming authority over the Muslim empire from the Umayyads in 750 CE. The Abbasid caliphate first centered its government in Kufa, but in 762 the caliph Al-Mansur founded the city of Baghdad, the political power of the caliphs largely ended with the rise of the Buyids and the Seljuq Turks. Although Abbasid leadership over the vast Islamic empire was reduced to a ceremonial religious function. The capital city of Baghdad became a center of science, culture, philosophy and this period of cultural fruition ended in 1258 with the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols under Hulagu Khan. The Abbasid line of rulers, and Muslim culture in general, though lacking in political power, the dynasty continued to claim authority in religious matters until after the Ottoman conquest of Egypt. The Abbasid caliphs were Arabs descended from Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, one of the youngest uncles of Muhammad, the Abbasids claimed to be the true successors of Prophet Muhammad in replacing the Umayyad descendants of Banu Umayya by virtue of their closer bloodline to Muhammad. The Abbasids also distinguished themselves from the Umayyads by attacking their moral character, according to Ira Lapidus, The Abbasid revolt was supported largely by Arabs, mainly the aggrieved settlers of Marw with the addition of the Yemeni faction and their Mawali. The Abbasids also appealed to non-Arab Muslims, known as mawali, Muhammad ibn Ali, a great-grandson of Abbas, began to campaign for the return of power to the family of Prophet Muhammad, the Hashimites, in Persia during the reign of Umar II. During the reign of Marwan II, this culminated in the rebellion of Ibrahim the Imam. On 9 June 747, Abu Muslim successfully initiated a revolt against Umayyad rule. Close to 10,000 soldiers were under Abu Muslims command when the hostilities began in Merv. General Qahtaba followed the fleeing governor Nasr ibn Sayyar west defeating the Umayyads at the Battle of Nishapur, the Battle of Gorgan, after this loss, Marwan fled to Egypt, where he was subsequently assassinated. The remainder of his family, barring one male, were also eliminated, immediately after their victory, As-Saffah sent his forces to Central Asia, where his forces fought against Tang expansion during the Battle of Talas. Barmakids, who were instrumental in building Baghdad, introduced the worlds first recorded paper mill in Baghdad, As-Saffah focused on putting down numerous rebellions in Syria and Mesopotamia. The Byzantines conducted raids during these early distractions, the first change the Abbasids, under Al-Mansur, made was to move the empires capital from Damascus, in Syria, to Baghdad in Iraq. Baghdad was established on the Tigris River in 762, a new position, that of the vizier, was also established to delegate central authority, and even greater authority was delegated to local emirs. During Al-Mansurs time control of Al-Andalus was lost, and the Shiites revolted and were defeated a year later at the Battle of Bakhamra, the Abbasids had depended heavily on the support of Persians in their overthrow of the Umayyads
Abbasid
–
The Black Banner of the Abbasids.
Abbasid
–
Coin of the Abbasids,
Baghdad, Iraq, 765
Abbasid
–
Image of the
Amir of
Khorasan Isma'il ibn Ahmad on the
Tajikistani somoni who exercised independent authority from the Abassids
21.
Syntax
–
In linguistics, syntax is the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given language, specifically word order. The term syntax is used to refer to the study of such principles and processes. The goal of many syntacticians is to discover the syntactic rules common to all languages, in mathematics, syntax refers to the rules governing the behavior of mathematical systems, such as formal languages used in logic. The word syntax comes from Ancient Greek, σύνταξις coordination, which consists of σύν syn, together, and τάξις táxis, a basic feature of a languages syntax is the sequence in which the subject, verb, and object usually appear in sentences. Over 85% of languages usually place the subject first, either in the sequence SVO or the sequence SOV, the other possible sequences are VSO, VOS, OVS, and OSV, the last three of which are rare. In the West, the school of thought came to be known as traditional grammar began with the work of Dionysius Thrax. For centuries, work in syntax was dominated by a known as grammaire générale. This system took as its premise the assumption that language is a direct reflection of thought processes and therefore there is a single. It became apparent that there was no such thing as the most natural way to express a thought, the Port-Royal grammar modeled the study of syntax upon that of logic. Syntactic categories were identified with logical ones, and all sentences were analyzed in terms of Subject – Copula – Predicate, initially, this view was adopted even by the early comparative linguists such as Franz Bopp. The central role of syntax within theoretical linguistics became clear only in the 20th century, there are a number of theoretical approaches to the discipline of syntax. One school of thought, founded in the works of Derek Bickerton, sees syntax as a branch of biology, other linguists take a more Platonistic view, since they regard syntax to be the study of an abstract formal system. Yet others consider syntax a taxonomical device to reach broad generalizations across languages, the hypothesis of generative grammar is that language is a structure of the human mind. The goal of grammar is to make a complete model of this inner language. This model could be used to all human language and to predict the grammaticality of any given utterance. This approach to language was pioneered by Noam Chomsky, most generative theories assume that syntax is based upon the constituent structure of sentences. Generative grammars are among the theories that focus primarily on the form of a sentence and this complex category is notated as instead of V. NP\S is read as a category that searches to the left for an NP and outputs a sentence. The category of verb is defined as an element that requires two NPs to form a sentence
Syntax
–
A syntactic parse of "Alfred spoke" under the dependency formalism
22.
Bedouin
–
The term contrasts against Hathar which refers to the city or town dwellers in the Arabic language. Bedouin means Badiyah dwellers in the Arabic language, as Badyah means literally the visible land, the Bedouins identify themselves as Arabs or by the names of their tribes. City dwellers in Arabia who descended from known tribes refer to themselves as Bedouins to recognize their origin to Arabia. Bedouin territory stretches from the vast deserts of North Africa to the sands of the Middle East. They are traditionally divided into tribes, or clans and share a culture of herding camels. The Bedouin form a part of, but are not synonymous with, Bedouins have been referred to by various names throughout history, including Qedarites in the Old Testament and Arabaa by the Assyrians. They are referred to as the Araab in the Koran, traditions like camel riding and camping in the deserts are also popular leisure activities for urbanised Bedouins who live within close proximity to deserts or other wilderness areas. The term Bedouin derives from a form of the Arabic word badu. The Arabic term badu literally translates in Arabic as Badiyah dwellers, the word bādiyah means visible land such as plain or desert. The term Bedouin therefore means those in bādiyah or those in the desert, in English usage, however, the form Bedouin is commonly used for the singular term, the plural being Bedouins, as indicated by the Oxford English Dictionary, second edition. The term Bedouin also uses the root word as the Arabic noun for the beginning, بداية. The Arabs believe the Bedouins to be the predecessors to the settled Arabs, disputes are settled, interests are pursued, and justice and order are maintained by means of this frame, according to an ethic of self-help and collective responsibility. The individual family unit typically consisted of three or four adults and any number of children, when resources were plentiful, several tents would travel together as a goum. These groups were linked by patriarchal lineage, but were just as likely linked by marriage, acquaintance, or no clearly defined relation. The next scale of interaction within groups was the ibn ʿamm or descent group, whilst the phrase descent group suggests purely a lineage-based arrangement, in reality these groups were fluid and adapted their genealogies to take in new members. The largest scale of tribal interactions is the tribe as a whole, the tribe often claims descent from one common ancestor—as mentioned above. The tribal level is the level that mediated between the Bedouin and the governments and organizations. Distinct structure of the Bedouin society leads to lasting rivalries between different clans
Bedouin
–
A Bedouin family in
Syria
Bedouin
Bedouin
–
A Bedouin girl in Nuweiba - Egypt 2015
Bedouin
–
Weaving lengths of fabric for tent making using ground loom. Palestine, circa 1900
23.
Najd
–
Najd or Nejd is the geographical central region of Saudi Arabia in which twenty-eight percent of Saudis live. Najd consists of the regions of Riyadh, al-Qassim, and Hail, Najdis were sometimes referred to in the past as the dominant minority in Saudi Arabia. Unlike Hejaz, Najd is very remote and had largely avoided falling under foreign control, in pre-Islamic times the region of Nejd was settled by many tribes like the Kindites, Tayy and many others. Led by Usma bin Luai the Tayy invaded the mountains of Aja and these mountains are now known as Jabal Shammar. The Tayy became nomadic camel herders and horse breeders in northern Najd for centuries, in the 5th century CE, the tribes of North Arabia became a major threat to the trade line between Yemen and Syria. The Ḥimyarites decided to establish a state that controlled Central. The Kindites gained strength and numbers to play that role, and their first capital was Qaryat Dhāt Kāhil, today known as Qaryat al-Fāw. In the 5th and 6th centuries CE the Kindites made the first real concerted effort to all the tribes of Central Arabia through alliances. Al-Ḥārith ibn Amr, the most famous of their kings, finally succeeded in capturing the Lakhmid capital of al-Ḥirah in southern modern day Iraq, later however in about 529, al-Mundhir recaptured the city and put King Ḥārith and about fifty members of his family to death. In 525 CE, the Aksumites invaded Ḥimyar, and this Kindites, had an effect with the Kindites who lost the support of the Ḥimyarites. Within three years the Kindite kingdom had split into four groups, Asad, Taghlib, Qays and Kinānah and these small principalities were then overthrown in the 530s and 540s in a series of uprisings of the Adnānī tribes of Najd and Ḥijāz. In 540 CE, the Lakhmids destroyed all the Kindite settlements in Nejd, the Kindites and most of the Arab tribes switched their alliances to the Lakhmids. During the Islamic Prophet Muhammads era, Muhammad carried out expeditions in the area. The first was the Nejd Caravan Raid against the Quraysh, which place in 624. The Meccans led by Safwan ibn Umayyah, who lived on trade, after Muhammad received intelligence about the Caravans route, Muhammad ordered Zayd ibn Haritha to go after the Caravan, and they successfully raided it and captured 100,000 dirhams worth of booty. The Invasion of Nejd, happened in Rabi‘ Ath-Thani or Jumada Al-Ula,4 A. H i. e. in October,625 AD, Muhammad led his fighters to Nejd to scare off some tribes he believed had suspicious intentions. Some scholars say the Expedition of Dhat al-Riqa took place in Nejd as part of this invasion, the most authentic opinion according to Saifur Rahman al Mubararakpuri, however, is that Dhat Ar-Riqa‘ campaign took place after the fall of Khaibar. This is supported by the fact that Abu Hurairah and Abu Musa Al-Ash‘ari witnessed the battle, Abu Hurairah embraced Islam only some days before Khaibar, and Abu Musa Al-Ash‘ari came back from Abyssinia and joined Muhammad at Khaibar
Najd
–
A view of the Tweig (Tuwaiq) Escarpment from the west. The
Saudi capital
Riyadh lies just beyond the horizon.
Najd
–
Map detailing the route of Khalid ibn Walid's conquest of Arabia.
Najd
–
Najd was the next step after
Hijaz in the campaigns of the
Nejd Expedition.
24.
Lakhmid
–
The Lakhmids or Banu Lakhm were an Arab kingdom of southern Iraq with al-Hirah as their capital, from about 300 to 602 CE. They were generally but intermittently the allies and clients of the Sassanian Empire, the Lakhmid Kingdom was founded by the Lakhum tribe that emigrated from Yemen in the second century and ruled by the Banu Lakhm, hence the name given it. The founder of the dynasty was Amr, whose son Imru al-Qais is claimed to have converted to Christianity according to Western authors, Imru al-Qais dreamt of a unified and independent Arab kingdom and, following that dream, he seized many cities in the Arabian Peninsula. He then formed an army and developed the Kingdom as a naval power. In 325, the Persians, led by Shapur II, began a campaign against the Arab kingdoms, when Imru al-Qais realised that a mighty Persian army composed of 60,000 warriors was approaching his kingdom, he asked for the assistance of the Byzantine Empire. Constantius II promised to assist him but was unable to provide that help when it was needed, the Persians advanced toward Hira and a series of vicious battles took place around and in Hira and the surrounding cities. Shapur IIs army defeated the Lakhmid army and captured Hira, in this, the young Shapur acted much more violently. He installed Aws ibn Qallam and retreated his army, with him ended the dream of a united Arab kingdom until after the advent of Islam. When he died he was entombed at al-Nimarah in the Syrian desert, Imru al-Qais funerary inscription is written in an extremely difficult type of script. Recently there has been a revival of interest in the inscription, two years after his death, in the year 330, a revolt took place where Aws ibn Qallam was killed and succeeded by the son of Imru al-Qais, Amr. Thereafter, the Lakhmids main rivals were the Ghassanids, who were vassals of the Sasanians arch-enemy, the Lakhmid kingdom could have been a major centre of the Church of the East, which was nurtured by the Sasanians, as it opposed the Eastern Orthodox Church of the Byzantines. The Lakhmids remained influential throughout the sixth century, at that point, the city was abandoned and its materials were used to reconstruct Kufa, its exhausted twin city. The Battle of Dhi Qar pitted the Arabs of southern Iraq against the Sasanian army around 609. According to the Arab historian Abu ʿUbaidah, Khosrow II was angry with the king, al-Numan III ibn al-Mundhir, for refusing to give him his daughter in marriage, Hira stood just south of what is now the Iraqi city of Kufa. Al-Hirah became the cradle of the Arabic alphabet, poets born in the Kingdom included, al-Nabigha, Laqete ibn Yaamur al-Ayadi, Alqama ibn Abada and Uday ibn Zaid al-Abbadi. Other great poets visited, like Tarafa and Amr ibn Kulthum, the military of the Sasanian Empire, along with al-Mundhir III ibn al-Numan himself and his army, defeated the famed Byzantine general Belisarius at the Battle of Callinicum. After the death of al-Numan III, the Arabs defeated the Persians in the Battle of Dhi Qar, bahram V lived in Hira and was educated at the court of al-Mundhir I, whose support helped him gain the throne after the assassination of his father. The founder and most of the rulers of the kingdom were from the Banu Lakhm dynasty
Lakhmid
–
A
Persian manuscript from the 15th century describing the constructing of Al-Khornaq castle In
Al-Hira, the Lakhmids' capital city.
Lakhmid
–
Map of the Lakhmid kingdom.
Lakhmid
–
Near East in 565, showing the Lakhmids and their neighbors.
25.
Al-Hirah
–
Al-Hirah was an ancient city in Mesopotamia located south of what is now Kufa in south-central Iraq. Al-Hirah was a significant city in pre-Islamic Arab history, al-Hirah was a vassal of the Sasanian Empire, whom it helped in containing the nomadic Arabs to the south. The Lakhmid rulers of al-Hirah were recognized by Shapur II, the tenth Sasanian emperor, Ḥīrā was a Christian centre, being a diocese of the Church of the East between the fourth and eleventh centuries. A particular Mār Abdīšo was born in Maysan and moved to Ḥīrā after studying elsewhere under Mār Abdā, there he gained widespread respect as he built a monastery and lived a pious life. The Sasanian emperor Bahram V won the throne with support of al-Mundhir I ibn al-Numan, king of Ḥīrā and he was amazed and showed great respect as he encountered the saint near the village of Bēṯ Arbī on his way back from the imperial capital Seleucia-Ctesiphon. 527, al-Hirah was opposed by the Ghassanids, a Byzantine-sponsored Arab state in Syria, the two powers engaged in a long conflict of their own that functioned as a proxy war for the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires. In 531, the Sasanians defeated the Byzantine general Belisarius at the Battle of Callinicum south of Edessa, in 602, Khosrow II deposed al-Numan III ibn al-Mundhir and annexed al-Hirah. The Muslim conquest of Persia occurred in the 7th century, following the Battle of Hira, the city was captured by army of the Rashidun Caliphate under the command of Khalid ibn al-Walid in May 633. Abda of Hira Lakhmids Bosworth, Clifford Edmund, ed, the History of Al-Ṭabarī, Volume V, The Sāsānids, the Byzantines, the Lakhmids, and Yemen. State University of New York Press, morris, John, The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, Volume III, AD 527–641, Cambridge University Press, p.258, ISBN 0-521-20160-8
Al-Hirah
–
A
Persian manuscript from the 15th century describing the constructing of Al-Khornaq castle in Al-Hira, the
Lakhmids capital city, miniature painting by
Behzad
26.
Sibawayh
–
Abū Bishr ʻAmr ibn ʻUthmān ibn Qanbar Al-Baṣrī, commonly known as Sībawayh, was an influential linguist and grammarian of Arabic. His seminal work, Al-Kitab, was the first written grammar of the language and he has been referred to as the greatest of all Arabic linguists and one of the greatest linguists of all time in any language. He was of Persian origin, born ca.760 in Hamadan, Sibawayhi was a student of Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi and Yunus ibn Habib, two eminent grammarians. Whenever Sibawayh used the phrase I asked him or he said without mentioning a name, while he never met Abu ʻAmr ibn al-ʻAlāʼ, he quoted from him 57 times in the Kitab, mainly by transmission via Ibn Habib and al-Farahidi. Sibawayhi was also a student of Harun ibn Musa, though he only quoted the latter five times in the Kitab and he died in Shiraz, Fars, around AH180. At issue was the form of the last word in the Arabic sentence, Sibawayh proposed fa-ida huwa hiya, literally sure-enough he she, meaning sure-enough he is she, Arabic does not need or use any verb-form like is in such situations. Al-Kisai argued instead for fa-ida huwa iyyaha, literally sure-enough he her, all of them testified that huwa iyyaha was the way they always said it and therefore Sibawayh was wrong. According to some accounts, Sibawayh returned to Shīrāz after the debate and died of anger at the result of the hornet debate. In any case the incident became famous, Ibn Qutaybah, the earliest extant source, in his biographical entry under Sibawayhi has simply, He is ʻAmr ibn ʻUthman, and he was mainly a grammarian. He arrived in Baghdad, fell in with the local grammarians, was humiliated and went back to town in Fars. Upon his untimely death, Al-Akhfash al-Akbar, one of his teachers, Al-Akhfash al-Asghar, another one of Sibawayhs students, accosted al-Kisai after his teachers death and asked him 100 grammatical questions, proving al-Kisais answers wrong every single time. When the student revealed who he was and what had happened, al-Kisai approached the Caliph Harun al-Rashid, Sibawayh, a non-Arab, was the first to write on Arabic grammar and in passing the first one to explain Arabic grammar from a non-Arab perspective. Both Sibawayh and his teacher al-Farahidi are historically the earliest and most significant figures in respect to the recording of the Arabic language. Since Sibawayhs death, subsequent scholars of Arabic grammar are often compared to him, niftawayh received his name as a combination of nift, or asphalt due to his dark complexion, and wayh because of his love for Sibawayhs works. Abu Turab al-Zahiri was referred to as the Sibawayh of the modern era due to the fact that, although he was of Arab descent, Sibawayhs al-Kitab was the first book on Arabic grammar ever written. The formula begins with syntax and then finishes with morphology, with phonetics included as an appendix, each chapter started with the definitions of the new concepts which were to be introduced. Sibawayh would most often support his claims and points with verses from Arabic poetry, while a great deal of the quotes were from the poems of Pre-Islamic Arabia and the Bedouins, he would also quote poets up into the era of the early Umayyad Caliphate. While predominantly a book of grammar, Sibawayh did touch on the topic of Arabic phonology and he even disagrees with al-Farahidi, one of his teachers and the author of the first Arabic dictionary, contradicting the latters classification of Arabic letters into groups
Sibawayh
–
Entrance to Sibawayh's tomb
27.
Varieties of Arabic
–
There are many varieties of Arabic in existence. Arabic is a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family that originated on the Arabian Peninsula, the largest divisions occur between the spoken languages of different regions. Some varieties of Arabic in North Africa, for example, are incomprehensible to an Arabic speaker from the Levant or the Persian Gulf, within these broad regions further and considerable geographic distinctions exist, within countries, across country borders, even between cities and villages. The regionally prevalent variety is learned as the speakers first language while the language is subsequently learned in school. Many Arabic dialects, North African Arabic in particular also have significant vowel shifts, unlike other dialects, in Moroccan Arabic first person singular verbs begin with a n-. Further substantial differences exist between Bedouin and sedentary speech, the countryside and major cities, ethnicities, religious groups, social classes, men and women, and the young and these differences are to some degree bridgeable. Arabic is characterized by a number of varieties, however. An important factor in the mixing or changing of Arabic is the concept of a prestige dialect and this refers to the level of respect accorded to a language or dialect within a speech community. The formal Arabic language carries a considerable prestige in most Arabic-speaking communities and this is not the only source of prestige, though. Many studies have shown that for most speakers, there is a variety of vernacular Arabic. In Egypt, for non-Cairenes, the dialect is Cairo Arabic. For Jordanian women from Bedouin or rural background, it may be the urban dialects of the big cities, especially including the capital Amman. Moreover, in contexts, a dialect relatively different from formal Arabic may carry more prestige than a dialect closer to the formal language—this is the case in Bahrain. Language mixes and changes in different ways, Arabic speakers often use more than one variety of Arabic within a conversation or even a sentence. This process is referred to as code-switching, for example, a woman on a TV program could appeal to the authority of the formal language by using elements of it in her speech in order to prevent other speakers from cutting her off. Another process at work is leveling, the elimination of very localised dialectical features in favour of more general ones. This can affect all linguistic levels—semantic, syntactic, phonological, etc and this process of accommodation sometimes appeals to the formal language, but often does not. Moreover, given the prevalence of movies and TV shows in Egyptian Arabic, the greatest variations between kinds of Arabic are those between regional language groups
Varieties of Arabic
–
Different Arabic dialects in the
Arab world
28.
First language
–
A first language is a language that a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period. If there are multiple L1, the designation first language is used for the L1 spoken the best or the one that is the basis for sociolinguistic identity. In some countries, the native language or mother tongue refers to the language of ones ethnic group rather than ones first language. Children brought up speaking more than one language can have more than one native language, by contrast, a second language is any language that one speaks other than ones first language. Native speakers are considered to be an authority on their language because of their natural acquisition process regarding the language. That is achieved by interaction with the language and speakers of the language. Native speakers will not necessarily be knowledgeable about every rule of the language. Sometimes, the mother tongue or mother language is used for the language that a person learned as a child at home. Children growing up in homes can, according to this definition, have more than one mother tongue or native language. It is quite possible that the first language learned is no longer a dominant language. According to Ivan Illich, the mother tongue was first used by Catholic monks to designate a particular language they used, instead of Latin. That is, the mother the Church introduced this term. J. R. R. Tolkien, in his 1955 lecture English and Welsh, on 17 November 1999, UNESCO designated 21 February as International Mother Language Day. The first language of a child is part of the personal, social and cultural identity, another impact of the first language is that it brings about the reflection and learning of successful social patterns of acting and speaking. It is basically responsible for differentiating the linguistic competence of acting and that has implications on the education of non-native speakers. The topic of native speaker also gives way to discussion about what exactly bilingualism is, one definition is that a person is bilingual by being equally proficient in both languages. A person who grows up speaking English and begins learning Spanish for four years is not necessarily bilingual unless he speaks the two languages with equal fluency, one can have two or more native languages, thus being a native bilingual or indeed multilingual. The order in which languages are learned is not necessarily the order of proficiency
First language
–
The monument for the mother tongue in
Nakhchivan,
Azerbaijan
First language
–
International Mother Language Day Monument in Sydney, Australia, unveiling ceremony, 19 February 2006
29.
Second language
–
A persons second language or L2, is a language that is not the native language of the speaker, but that is used in the locale of that person. In contrast, a language is a language that is learned in an area where that language is not generally spoken. Some languages, often called auxiliary languages, are used primarily as second languages or linguas franca, more informally, a second language can be said to be any language learned in addition to ones native language, especially in the context of second language acquisition. A persons first language is not necessarily their dominant language, the one they use most or are most comfortable with and this can happen when young children move, with or without their family, to a new language environment. The distinction between acquiring and learning was made by Stephen Krashen as part of his Monitor Theory, according to Krashen, the acquisition of a language is a natural process, whereas learning a language is a conscious one. In the former, the student needs to partake in natural communicative situations, in the latter, error correction is present, as is the study of grammatical rules isolated from natural language. Not all educators in second language agree to this distinction, however, research in SLA. focuses on the developing knowledge and use of a language by children and adults who already know at least one other language. SLA has been influenced by linguistic and psychological theories. One of the dominant linguistic theories hypothesizes that a device or module of sorts in the brain contains innate knowledge, many psychological theories, on the other hand, hypothesize that cognitive mechanisms, responsible for much of human learning, process language. These theories have all influenced second-language teaching and pedagogy, there are many different methods of second-language teaching, many of which stem directly from a particular theory. Some of these approaches are more popular than others, and are viewed to be more effective, most language teachers do not use one singular style, but will use a mix in their teaching. This provides a balanced approach to teaching and helps students of a variety of learning styles succeed. The defining difference between a first language and a language is the age the person learned the language. For example, linguist Eric Lenneberg used second language to mean a language consciously acquired or used by its speaker after puberty, in most cases, people never achieve the same level of fluency and comprehension in their second languages as in their first language. These views are closely associated with the critical period hypothesis, in acquiring an L2, Hyltenstam found that around the age of six or seven seemed to be a cut-off point for bilinguals to achieve native-like proficiency. After that age, L2 learners could get near-native-like-ness but their language would, the inability of some subjects to achieve native-like proficiency must be seen in relation to the age of onset. “The age of 6 or 8 does seem to be an important period in distinguishing between near-native and native-like ultimate attainment, more specifically, it may be suggested that AO interacts with frequency and intensity of language use”. Furthermore, they discuss a number of cases where a native-like L2 was acquired during adulthood, as we are learning more and more about the brain, there is a hypothesis that when a child is going through puberty, that is the time that accents start
Second language
–
Blackboard used in
class at
Harvard shows
students ' efforts at placing the
diaeresis and
acute accent diacritics used in
Spanish orthography.
Second language
–
A German student learning French.
English (1.5 billion learners),
French (82 million learners) and
Chinese (30 million learners) are the three most commonly studied foreign languages.
Second language
–
High school Spanish taught as a second
language to a class of native
English speakers at an
American private school in
Massachusetts.
30.
North Africa
–
North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of Africa. The United Nationss definition of Northern Africa is, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, the countries of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya are often collectively referred to as the Maghreb, which is the Arabic word for sunset. Egypt lies to the northeast and encompasses part of West Asia, while Sudan is situated on the edge of the Sahel, Egypt is a transcontinental country because of the Sinai Peninsula, which geographically lies in Western Asia. North Africa also includes a number of Spanish possessions, the Canary Islands and Madeira in the North Atlantic Ocean northwest of the African mainland are included in considerations of the region. From 3500 BC, following the abrupt desertification of the Sahara due to changes in the Earths orbit. The Islamic influence in the area is significant, and North Africa is a major part of the Muslim world. Some researchers have postulated that North Africa rather than East Africa served as the point for the modern humans who first trekked out of the continent in the Out of Africa migration. The Atlas Mountains extend across much of Morocco, northern Algeria and Tunisia, are part of the mountain system that also runs through much of Southern Europe. They recede to the south and east, becoming a steppe landscape before meeting the Sahara desert, the sediments of the Sahara overlie an ancient plateau of crystalline rock, some of which is more than four billion years old. Sheltered valleys in the Atlas Mountains, the Nile Valley and Delta, a wide variety of valuable crops including cereals, rice and cotton, and woods such as cedar and cork, are grown. Typical Mediterranean crops, such as olives, figs, dates and citrus fruits, the Nile Valley is particularly fertile, and most of the population in Egypt and Sudan live close to the river. Elsewhere, irrigation is essential to improve yields on the desert margins. The inhabitants of Saharan Africa are generally divided in a manner corresponding to the principal geographic regions of North Africa, the Maghreb, the Nile valley. The edge of the Sahel, to the south of Egypt has mainly been inhabited by Nubians, Ancient Egyptians record extensive contact in their Western desert with people that appear to have been Berber or proto-Berber, as well as Nubians from the south. They have contributed to the Arabized Berber populations, the official language or one of the official languages in all of the countries in North Africa is Arabic. The people of the Maghreb and the Sahara regions speak Berber languages and several varieties of Arabic, the Arabic and Berber languages are distantly related, both being members of the Afroasiatic language family. The Tuareg Berber languages are more conservative than those of the coastal cities. Over the years, Berbers have been influenced by contact with cultures, Greeks, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Romans, Vandals, Arabs, Europeans
North Africa
–
Market of
Biskra in Algeria, 1899
North Africa
–
Northern Africa (UN subregion)
North Africa
–
The
kasbah of
Aït Benhaddou in Morocco
North Africa
–
The first
Roman emperor native to North Africa was
Septimius Severus, born in Leptis Magna in present-day Libya.
31.
Horn of Africa
–
The Horn of Africa is a peninsula in Northeast Africa. It juts hundreds of kilometers into the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, the area is the easternmost projection of the African continent. The Horn of Africa denotes the region containing the countries of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia and it covers approximately 2,000,000 km2 and is inhabited by roughly 115 million people. Regional studies on the Horn of Africa are carried out, among others, shell middens 125,000 years old have been found in Eritrea, indicating the diet of early humans included seafood obtained by beachcombing. According to both genetic and fossil evidence, archaic Homo sapiens evolved to modern humans solely in Africa between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago. Evidence to support the theory that recent modern humans originated in East Africa is not conclusive, today at the Bab-el-Mandeb straits, the Red Sea is about 12 miles wide, but 50,000 years ago it was much narrower and sea levels were 70 meters lower. Though the straits were never closed, there may have been islands in between which could be reached using simple rafts. It has been estimated that from a population of 2,000 to 5,000 individuals in Africa, according to linguists, the first Afro-Asiatic-speaking populations arrived in the region during the ensuing Neolithic era from the familys proposed urheimat in the Nile Valley, or the Near East. Other scholars propose that the Afro-Asiatic family developed in situ in the Horn, genetic analysis also indicates that, beginning in the pre-agricultural period, settlers from the Near East founded communities in Northeast Africa. These early settlements eventually gave rise to the Afro-Asiatic-speaking populations in the Horn, dʿmt was a kingdom located in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, which existed during the 8th and 7th centuries BCE. With its capital at Yeha, the kingdom developed irrigation schemes, used plows, grew millet, the Kingdom of Aksum was an ancient state located in the highlands of present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea, which thrived between the 1st and 7th centuries CE. A major player in the commerce between the Roman Empire and Ancient India, Aksums rulers facilitated trade by minting their own currency. Under Ezana, the kingdom of Aksum became the first major empire to adopt Christianity, northern Somalia was an important link in the Horn, connecting the regions commerce with the rest of the ancient world. Somali sailors and merchants were the suppliers of frankincense, myrrh and spices. The Romans consequently began to refer to the region as Regio Aromatica, in the classical era, several flourishing Somali city-states such as Opone, Mosylon and Malao also competed with the Sabaeans, Parthians and Axumites for the rich Indo-Greco-Roman trade. The city of Mogadishu came to be known as the City of Islam, the Sultanate of Showa, established in 896, was one of the oldest local Muslim states. It was centered in the former Shewa province in central Ethiopia, the polity was succeeded by the Sultanate of Ifat around 1285. Ifat was governed from its capital at Zeila in northern Somalia and was the easternmost district of the former Shewa Sultanate, the Adal Sultanate was a medieval multi-ethnic Muslim state centered in the Horn region
Horn of Africa
–
Ancient trading centers in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian peninsula according to the
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea
Horn of Africa
–
Horn of Africa
Horn of Africa
–
Ezana 's
obelisk at
Aksum, symbol of the
Aksumite civilization
Horn of Africa
–
Ruins of the
Sultanate of Adal in
Zeila
32.
Classical Latin
–
Classical Latin is the modern term used to describe the form of the Latin language recognized as standard by writers of the late Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. In some later periods, it was regarded as good Latin, the word Latin is now taken by default as meaning Classical Latin, so that, for example, modern Latin textbooks describe classical Latin. Latinitas was spoken as well as written, moreover, it was the language taught by the schools. Prescriptive rules therefore applied to it, and where a subject was concerned, such as poetry or rhetoric. No authors are noted for the type of rigidity evidenced by stylized art, except possibly the repetitious abbreviations, good Latin in philology is classical Latin literature. The term classicus was devised by the Romans themselves to translate Greek ἐγκριθέντες, select, before then, classis, in addition to being a naval fleet, was a social class in one of the diachronic divisions of Roman society according to property ownership by the Roman constitution. The word is a transliteration of Greek κλῆσις calling, used to rank army draftees by property from first to fifth class, classicus is anything primae classis, first class, such as the authors of the polished works of Latinitas, or sermo urbanus. It had nuances of the certified and the authentic, testis classicus and it was in this sense that Marcus Cornelius Fronto in the 2nd century AD used scriptores classici, first-class or reliable authors whose works could be relied upon as model of good Latin. This is the first known reference, possibly innovated at this time, aulus Gellius includes many authors, such as Plautus, who are currently considered writers of Old Latin and not strictly in the period of classical Latin. The classical Romans distinguished Old Latin as prisca Latinitas and not sermo vulgaris, each author in the Roman lists was considered equivalent to one in the Greek, for example Ennius was the Latin Homer, the Aeneid was a new Iliad, and so on. The lists of authors were as far as the Roman grammarians went in developing a philology. The Renaissance brought a revival of interest in restoring as much of Roman culture as could be restored and with it the return of the concept of classic, the best. Thomas Sébillet in 1548 referred to les bons et classiques poètes françois, meaning Jean de Meun and Alain Chartier, according to Merriam Websters Collegiate Dictionary, the term classical, from classicus, entered modern English in 1599, some 50 years after its re-introduction on the continent. In 1715 Laurence Echards Classical Geographical Dictionary was published, in 1736 Robert Ainsworths Thesaurus Linguae Latinae Compendarius turned English words and expressions into proper and classical Latin. In 1768 David Ruhnken recast the mold of the view of the classical by applying the word canon to the pinakes of orators, Ruhnken had a kind of secular catechism in mind. The practice and Teuffels classification, with modifications, are still in use and his work was translated into English as soon as published in German by Wilhelm Wagner, who corresponded with Teuffel. Wagner published the English translation in 1873, Teuffel divides the chronology of classical Latin authors into several periods according to political events, rather than by style. Regarding the style of the literary Latin of those periods he had, Teuffel was to go on with other editions of his history, but meanwhile it had come out in English almost as soon as it did in German and found immediate favorable reception
Classical Latin
–
Latin inscription in the
Colosseum
Classical Latin
–
David Ruhnken
Classical Latin
–
Wilhelm Sigismund Teuffel
Classical Latin
–
At Maecenas' Reception, oil, Stepan Bakalovich, 1890. An artist's view of the classical. Maecenas knew and entertained everyone literary in the Golden Age, especially Augustus.
33.
Romance languages
–
Today, around 800 million people are native speakers worldwide, mainly in Europe, Africa and the Americas, but also elsewhere. Additionally, the major Romance languages have many speakers and are in widespread use as lingua francas. This is especially the case for French, which is in use throughout Central and West Africa, Madagascar, Mauritius. The five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of speakers are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian. Because of the difficulty of imposing boundaries on a continuum, various counts of the modern Romance languages are given, for example, Dalby lists 23 based on mutual intelligibility. Between 350 BC and 150 AD, the expansion of the Empire, together with its administrative and educational policies, Latin also exerted a strong influence in southeastern Britain, the Roman province of Africa, western Germany and the Balkans north of the Jireček Line. Despite other influences, the phonology, morphology, and lexicon of all Romance languages consist mainly of evolved forms of Vulgar Latin, however, some notable differences occur between todays Romance languages and their Roman ancestor. With only one or two exceptions, Romance languages have lost the system of Latin and, as a result, have SVO sentence structure. From this adverb the noun romance originated, which applied initially to anything written romanice, the word romance with the modern sense of romance novel or love affair has the same origin. In the medieval literature of Western Europe, serious writing was usually in Latin, while popular tales, often focusing on love, were composed in the vernacular, for example, the Portuguese word fresta is descended from Latin fenestra window, but now means skylight and slit. Cognates may exist but have become rare, such as finiestra in Spanish, the Spanish and Portuguese terms defenestrar meaning to throw through a window and fenestrado meaning replete with windows also have the same root, but are later borrowings from Latin. Galician has both fiestra and the frequently used ventá and xanela. As an alternative to lei, Italian has the pronoun ella, a cognate of the words for she. Sardinian balcone comes from Old Italian and is similar to other Romance languages such as French balcon, Portuguese balcão, Romanian balcon, Spanish balcón, Catalan balcó and Corsican balconi. Documentary evidence is limited about Vulgar Latin for the purposes of research. Many of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples, other scholars argue that the distinctions are more rightly viewed as indicative of sociolinguistic and register differences normally found within any language. Both were mutually intelligible as one and the language, which was true until the second half of the 7th century. Central Europe and the Balkans were occupied by the Germanic and Slavic tribes, as well as by the Huns, over the course of the fourth to eighth centuries, Vulgar Latin, by this time highly dialectalized, broke up into discrete languages that were no longer mutually intelligible
Romance languages
34.
Third language
–
A persons second language or L2, is a language that is not the native language of the speaker, but that is used in the locale of that person. In contrast, a language is a language that is learned in an area where that language is not generally spoken. Some languages, often called auxiliary languages, are used primarily as second languages or linguas franca, more informally, a second language can be said to be any language learned in addition to ones native language, especially in the context of second language acquisition. A persons first language is not necessarily their dominant language, the one they use most or are most comfortable with and this can happen when young children move, with or without their family, to a new language environment. The distinction between acquiring and learning was made by Stephen Krashen as part of his Monitor Theory, according to Krashen, the acquisition of a language is a natural process, whereas learning a language is a conscious one. In the former, the student needs to partake in natural communicative situations, in the latter, error correction is present, as is the study of grammatical rules isolated from natural language. Not all educators in second language agree to this distinction, however, research in SLA. focuses on the developing knowledge and use of a language by children and adults who already know at least one other language. SLA has been influenced by linguistic and psychological theories. One of the dominant linguistic theories hypothesizes that a device or module of sorts in the brain contains innate knowledge, many psychological theories, on the other hand, hypothesize that cognitive mechanisms, responsible for much of human learning, process language. These theories have all influenced second-language teaching and pedagogy, there are many different methods of second-language teaching, many of which stem directly from a particular theory. Some of these approaches are more popular than others, and are viewed to be more effective, most language teachers do not use one singular style, but will use a mix in their teaching. This provides a balanced approach to teaching and helps students of a variety of learning styles succeed. The defining difference between a first language and a language is the age the person learned the language. For example, linguist Eric Lenneberg used second language to mean a language consciously acquired or used by its speaker after puberty, in most cases, people never achieve the same level of fluency and comprehension in their second languages as in their first language. These views are closely associated with the critical period hypothesis, in acquiring an L2, Hyltenstam found that around the age of six or seven seemed to be a cut-off point for bilinguals to achieve native-like proficiency. After that age, L2 learners could get near-native-like-ness but their language would, the inability of some subjects to achieve native-like proficiency must be seen in relation to the age of onset. “The age of 6 or 8 does seem to be an important period in distinguishing between near-native and native-like ultimate attainment, more specifically, it may be suggested that AO interacts with frequency and intensity of language use”. Furthermore, they discuss a number of cases where a native-like L2 was acquired during adulthood, as we are learning more and more about the brain, there is a hypothesis that when a child is going through puberty, that is the time that accents start
Third language
–
Blackboard used in
class at
Harvard shows
students ' efforts at placing the
diaeresis and
acute accent diacritics used in
Spanish orthography.
Third language
–
A German student learning French.
English (1.5 billion learners),
French (82 million learners) and
Chinese (30 million learners) are the three most commonly studied foreign languages.
Third language
–
High school Spanish taught as a second
language to a class of native
English speakers at an
American private school in
Massachusetts.
35.
Coptic language
–
Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the latest stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afroasiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Several distinct Coptic dialects are identified, the most prominent of which are Sahidic, originating in parts of Upper Egypt, Coptic and Demotic are grammatically closely related to Late Egyptian, which was written with Egyptian hieroglyphs. Coptic flourished as a language from the second to thirteenth centuries. It was supplanted by Egyptian Arabic as a spoken language toward the modern period. The native Coptic name for the language is ϯⲙⲉⲧⲣⲉⲙⲛ̀ⲭⲏⲙⲓ /timetremenˈkʰeːmi/ in the Bohairic dialect, the particle prefix met- from the verb ⲙⲟⲩϯ mouti forms all abstract nouns in Coptic. Thus, the whole expression literally means language of the people of Egypt, another name by which the language has been called is ⲧⲙⲛ̄ⲧⲕⲩⲡⲧⲁⲓⲟⲛ /timentkuptaion/ from the Copto-Greek form ⲧⲙⲛ̄ⲧⲁⲓⲅⲩⲡⲧⲓⲟⲛ /timentaiguption/. The term logos ən aiguptios is also attested in Sahidic, in the liturgy of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, the name is more officially ϯⲁⲥⲡⲓ ⲛ̀ⲣⲉⲙⲛ̀ⲭⲏⲙⲓ ti aspi ən rem ən kēmi, the Egyptian language, aspi being the Egyptian word for language. Coptic is today spoken liturgically in the Coptic Orthodox and Coptic Catholic Church, the language is spoken only in Egypt and historically has had little influence outside of the territory, except for monasteries located in Nubia. It should be noted, however, that Coptic ⲉⲙⲥⲁϩ is grammatically masculine, hence it is unclear why the word should have entered Arabic with an initial t, which would have required the word to be grammatically feminine. ṭūbah طوبة brick, Sahidic ⲧⲱⲃⲉ to, be, Bohairic ⲧⲱⲃⲓ to, bi, this subsequently entered Catalan and Spanish as tova and adobe respectively, the latter of which was borrowed by American English. However, most words of Egyptian origin that entered into Greek and subsequently into other European languages came directly from Ancient Egyptian, an example is the Greek ὄασις oasis, which comes directly from Egyptian wḥ3. t or demotic wḥỉ. However, Coptic reborrowed some words of Ancient Egyptian origin into its lexicon, for example, both Sahidic and Bohairic use the word ebenos, which was taken directly from Greek ἔβενος ebony, originally from Egyptian hbny. It was adapted into Arabic as Babnouda, which remains a name among Egyptian Copts to this day. It was also borrowed into Greek as the name Παφνούτιος and that, in turn, is the source of the Russian name Пафнутий, like the mathematician Pafnuty Chebyshev. The Old Nubian language and the modern Nobiin language borrowed many words of Coptic origin, the Egyptian language may have the longest documented history of any language, from Old Egyptian that appeared just before 3200 BC to its final phases as Coptic in the Middle Ages. Coptic belongs to the Later Egyptian phase, which started to be written in the New Kingdom of Egypt, Later Egyptian represented colloquial speech of the later periods. It had analytic features like definite and indefinite articles and periphrastic verb conjugation, Coptic, therefore, is a reference to both the most recent stage of Egyptian after Demotic and the new writing system that was adapted from the Greek alphabet. The earliest attempts to write the Egyptian language using the Greek alphabet are Greek transcriptions of Egyptian proper names, scholars frequently refer to this phase as pre-Coptic
Coptic language
–
5th–6th century Coptic liturgic inscription from
Upper Egypt.
Coptic language
–
8th century Coptic manuscript of
Luke 5.5–9
Coptic language
–
Stone with Coptic inscription
36.
Berber languages
–
Berber or the Berber languages or the Amazigh language are a family of similar and closely related languages and dialects indigenous to North Africa. Large Berber-speaking migrant communities, numbering today about 4 million, have been living in Western Europe, about half of this population was born in Europe. Berber constitutes a branch of the Afroasiatic language family, and has been attested since ancient times, the number of Berbers is much higher than the number of Berber speakers. The bulk of the populations of the Maghreb countries are considered to have Berber ancestors, in Algeria, for example, a majority of the population consists of Arabized Berbers. There is a cultural and political movement among speakers of the closely related varieties of Northern Berber to promote and unify them under a standard language, called. The name Tamaziɣt is the current native name of the Berber language in the Moroccan Middle-Atlas region, the Rif regions, in other Berber-speaking area this name was lost. There is historical evidence, from medieval Berber manusctipts, that all native North Africans from Libya to Morocco have called their language, Tamaziɣt. The name Tamaziɣt is currently being used by educated Berbers to refer to the written Berber language. Around 90 percent of the Berber-speaking population speak one of six major varieties of Berber and they are, in the order of demographic weight, Tashelhit, Kabyle, Atlas Tamazight, Riffian, Shawi and Tuareg. The Berber languages and dialects have had a tradition, on and off, for about 2,500 years, although the tradition has been frequently disrupted by cultural shifts. They were first written in the Libyco-Berber and Tifinagh abjad, still used by the Tuareg, the oldest dated inscription is from about 200 BCE. The Berber Latin alphabet was used by most European and Berber linguists during the 19th and 20th centuries. In the 19th and 20th century European and native Berber linguists, a modernized form of the Tifinagh alphabet, called Neo-Tifinagh, was adopted in Morocco in 2003 for writing Berber, but many Moroccan Berber publications still use the Berber Latin alphabet. Algerians mostly use the Berber Latin alphabet in Berber language education at public schools, Mali and Niger recognize a Tuareg-Berber Latin alphabet customized to the Tuareg phonological system. However, traditional Tifinagh is still used in those countries, the term Berber has been used in Europe since at least the 17th century, and is still used today. It was borrowed from Latin Barbari, the Latin word is also found in the Arabic designation for these populations, البربر, al-Barbar, see names of the Berber people. Etymologically, the Berber root Mazigh means free man, noble man, the feminine Tamazight traditionally referred specifically to the Riffian and Central Atlas Tamazight languages. European languages distinguish between the words Berber and barbaric, while Arabic has the same word al-barbari for both meanings, some other Berber writers, especially in Morocco, prefer to refer to Berber with Amazigh when writing about it in French or English
Berber languages
–
Berber language poetry in Arabic script with its translation in French
Berber languages
–
Tarifit (Riffian)
Berber languages
–
Kabylian manuscript on the 18th century
37.
Phoenician language
–
Phoenician was a language originally spoken in the coastal region then called Canaan in Phoenician, Arabic, Greek, and Aramaic, Phoenicia in Greek and Latin, and Pūt in the Egyptian language. It is a part of the Canaanite subgroup of the Northwest Semitic languages, other members of the family are Hebrew, Ammonite, Moabite and Edomite. The area where Phoenician was spoken includes modern-day Lebanon, coastal Syria, coastal northern Israel, parts of Cyprus and, at least as a prestige language, some adjacent areas of Anatolia. Phoenician, together with Punic, is known from approximately 10,000 surviving inscriptions. In addition to their inscriptions, the Phoenicians are believed to have left numerous other types of written sources. In their cities by the sea, the air and soil were damp, thus disappeared the literature of the people who taught a large portion of the earth’s population to write. The only written documents of Phoenicians and Carthaginians are monumental inscriptions on stone, a few letters or notes on pieces of broken pottery. Thus, no Tyrian primary sources dating from Hiram I’s time are available, roman authors, such as Sallust, allude to some books written in the Punic language, but none have survived except occasionally in translation or in snippets. Even as late as 1837 only 70 Phoenician inscriptions were known to scholars and these were compiled in Wilhelm Geseniuss Scripturae linguaeque Phoeniciae monumenta, which comprised all that was known of Phoenician by scholars at that time. Basically, its core consists of the edition, or re-edition of 70 Phoenician. However, just to note the advances made in the century, it is noteworthy that Gesenius’ precursor Hamaker. On the other hand only 30 years later the amount of Phoenician inscribed monuments had grown so enormously that Schröder in his compendium Die phönizische Sprache. Entwurf einer Grammatik nebst Sprach- und Schriftproben of 1869 could state that Gesenius knew only a quarter of the material Schröder had at hand himself, the Phoenicians were the first state-level society to make extensive use of the Semitic alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is the oldest verified consonantal alphabet, or abjad and it has become conventional to refer to the script as Proto-Canaanite until the mid-11th century BCE, when it is first attested on inscribed bronze arrowheads, and as Phoenician only after 1050 BCE. The Phoenician phonetic alphabet is believed to be at least the partial ancestor of almost all modern alphabets. From a traditional perspective, Phoenician was a variety of the Canaanite languages. Through their maritime trade, the Phoenicians spread the use of the alphabet to North Africa and Europe, later, the Etruscans adopted a modified version for their own use, which, in turn, was modified and adopted by the Romans and became the Latin alphabet. Carthaginian colonisation spread Phoenician to the western Mediterranean, where the distinct Punic language developed, Punic also died out, although it seems to have survived slightly longer than the original Phoenician, perhaps into the fifth century CE
Phoenician language
–
Distribution of the Phoenician language, shown as yellow outline.
38.
Modern South Arabian
–
The Modern South Arabian languages are spoken mainly by small populations inhabiting the Arabian Peninsula, in Yemen and Oman. Together with the modern Ethiopian Semitic languages, they form the South Semitic sub-branch of the Afro-Asiatic familys Semitic branch and they are no longer considered to be descendants of the Old South Arabian language, as was once thought, but instead nephews. Modern South Arabian languages are known for their apparent archaic Semitic features, for example, they preserve the lateral fricatives of Proto-Semitic. According to Václav Blažek, this suggests that Semitic peoples assimilated their original Cushitic neighbours to the south who did not later emigrate to the Horn of Africa. He argues that the Levant would thus have been the Proto-Afro-Asiatic Urheimat, mehri, the largest Modern South Arabian language, with more than 70,000 speakers in Yemen. In addition to these, more than 50,000 live in Oman, the population total for all countries is 135,764. Mehri people are referred to as Mahra, Soqotri, another relatively numerous example, with speakers on the island of Socotra isolated from the pressures of Arabic on the Yemeni mainland. According to the 1990 census in Yemen, the number of speakers there was 57,000, the population total for all countries is estimated at 64,000. Harsusi, 1000–2000 speakers est. in Oman, hobyót,100 speakers est. in Oman. Afroasiatic Linguistics 1/5, 93-121 [1-29 Johnstone, T. M, london, School of Oriental and African Studies. Comparative Vocabulary of Southern Arabic, Mahri, Gibbali, and Soqotri, tokyo, Institute for the Study of *Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa. Tokyo, Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, the Jibbali Language of Oman, Grammar and Texts. The Modern South Arabian Languages, by M. C. Simeone-Senelle
Modern South Arabian
–
Modern South Arabian
39.
Old South Arabian
–
Old South Arabian is a group of four closely related extinct languages spoken in the far southern portion of the Arabian Peninsula. There were a number of other Old South Arabian languages, of very little evidence has survived. One of the most important isoglosses retained in all four languages is the definite article - n. There are however significant differences between the languages, the four main Sayhadic languages were, Sabaean, Minaeic, Qatabanic, and Hadramitic. According to Alice Faber, together with Ethiopian Semitic languages and the Modern South Arabian languages, Inscriptions in another minuscule cursive script written on wooden sticks have also been discovered. The last inscription of these dates back to 554 CE,60 years before the appearance of Islam. Old South Arabian comprised a number of languages, the following are those that have preserved in writing. Besides these, at least Jabal Razih survives today, middle Sabaean, 1st century BC until the 4th century AD Ḥaramitic, the language of the area to the north of Maīn Central Sabaean, the language of the inscriptions from the Sabaean heartland. South Sabaean, the language of the inscriptions from Radman and Ḥimyar Pseudo-Sabaean, minaean language, the language of the city states in al-Jawf − with the exception of Ḥaram − especially the later sparsely populated state of Main. Inscriptions have also been found also outside Maīn in the colonies of Dedan and Madāin Ṣāliḥ, in Egypt. Qatabānian, the language of the kingdom of Qatabān, recorded from the 5th century BC until the 2nd century Awsānian, other varieties such as the language of the tribe of Radmān Ḥaḑramitic, the language of Ḥaḑramaut, with an additional inscription from the Greek island of Delos. 5th century BC until the 4th century AD, with ca.1000 inscriptions, Old South Arabian was written in the Old South Arabian script, a consonantal abjad deriving from the Phoenician alphabet. Compared with other parts of the ancient world, Palestine for instance, something in the region of 10,000 inscriptions exist. The Sabaean lexicon contains about 2,500 words, there are about 1000 so far, very few published, mostly from Nashshān, in Wādī Madhāb. Then in the half of the 19th century Joseph Halévy and Eduard Glaser brought hundreds of Old South Arabian inscriptions, possible tracings. On the basis of large amount of material Fritz Hommel prepared a selection of texts in 1893 along with an attempt at a grammar. Later on the Sabaean expert Nikolaus Rhodokanakis made especially important steps towards understanding Old South Arabic, a completely new field of Old South Arabian script and texts has been opened up since the 1970s by the discovery of wooden cylinders on which Sabaean has been written with a pen. The unknown script and numerous incomprehensible words presented Sabaean studies with new problems, in the German-speaking world, Old South Arabian is taught in the framework of Semitic Studies, and no independent university chair has been dedicated to Old South Arabian Studies
Old South Arabian
–
South Arabian alphabet inscribed in a rock in
Bariq province
40.
Aramaic language
–
Aramaic is a language or group of languages belonging to the Semitic subfamily of the Afroasiatic language family. More specifically, it is part of the Northwest Semitic group, the Aramaic alphabet was widely adopted for other languages and is ancestral to the Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic alphabets. During its approximately 3000 years of history, Aramaic has served variously as a language of administration of empires, therefore, there is not one singular, static Aramaic language, each time and place rather has had its own variation. The Aramaic languages are now considered endangered, Aram is used as a proper name of several people in the Torah including descendants of Shem, Nahor, and Jacob. Ancient Aram, bordering northern Israel and now called Syria, is considered the epicenter of Aramaic. The language is often considered to have originated within Assyria. Interestingly, the Christian New Testament, for which the constituent texts are written in Koine Greek. The Hellenized Jewish community of Alexandria instead translated Aramaic to the Syrian tongue, a related language, Mlahsô, has recently become extinct. Mandaeans living in the Khuzestan Province of Iran and scattered throughout Iraq and it is quite distinct from any other Aramaic variety. Central Neo-Aramaic consists of Turoyo and the recently extinct Mlahsô, very little remains of Western Aramaic. All these speakers of Modern Western Aramaic are fluent in Arabic, Jewish Palestinian Aramaic and Samaritan Aramaic are preserved in liturgical and literary usage. Each dialect of Aramaic has its own pronunciation, and it would not be feasible here to go into all these properties. Aramaic has a palette of 25 to 40 distinct phonemes. The open vowel is an open near-front unrounded vowel and it usually has a back counterpart, and a front counterpart. There is much correspondence between these vowels between dialects, there is some evidence that Middle Babylonian dialects did not distinguish between the short a and short e. In West Syriac dialects, and possibly Middle Galilean, the long a became the o sound, the open e and back a are often indicated in writing by the use of the letters א alaph or ה he. The close front vowel is the long i and it has a slightly more open counterpart, the long e, as in the final vowel of café. Both of these have shorter counterparts, which tend to be pronounced more open
Aramaic language
–
Arāmāyā in Syriac Esṭrangelā script
Aramaic language
–
Syriac Aramaic inscription at
Syro-Malabar Catholic Major Archbishop's House in
India.
Aramaic language
–
Syriac-Aramaic alphabet
Aramaic language
–
Amen in
East Syriac Aramaic
41.
Labial consonant
–
Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. The two common labial articulations are bilabials, articulated using both lips, and labiodentals, articulated with the lip against the upper teeth, both of which are present in English. A third labial articulation is dentolabials, articulated with the lip against the lower teeth. Generally precluded are linguolabials, in which the tip of the contacts the posterior side of the upper lip, making them coronals, though sometimes. The most common distribution between bilabials and labiodentals is the English one, in which the stops, and, are bilabial and the fricatives, bilabial fricatives and the bilabial approximant do not exist in English, but they occur in many languages. For example, the Spanish consonant written b or v is pronounced, lip rounding, or labialization, is a common approximant-like co-articulatory feature. English /w/ is a labialized velar approximant, which is far more common than the purely labial approximant. In the languages of the Caucasus, labialized dorsals like /kʷ/ and /qʷ/ are very common, very few languages, however, make a distinction purely between bilabials and labiodentals, making labial usually a sufficient specification of a languages phonemes. One exception is Ewe, which has both kinds of fricatives, but the labiodentals are produced with greater articulatory force, while most languages make use of purely labial phonemes, a few generally lack them. Examples are Tlingit, Eyak, Wichita, and the Iroquoian languages except Cherokee, all of these languages have seen labials introduced under the influence of English. Many of these languages are transcribed with /w/ and with labialized consonants, however, it is not always clear to what extent the lips are involved in such sounds. In the Iroquoian languages, for example, /w/ involved little apparent rounding of the lips, see the Tillamook language for an example of a language with rounded consonants and vowels that do not have any actual labialization. Labialization List of phonetics topics Ladefoged, Peter, Maddieson, Ian, the Sounds of the Worlds Languages. McDorman, Richard E. Labial Instability in Sound Change, Explanations for the Loss of /p/
Labial consonant
42.
Dental consonant
–
A dental consonant is a consonant articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth, such as /t/, /d/, /n/, and /l/ in some languages. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the diacritic for dental consonant is U+032A ◌̪ COMBINING BRIDGE BELOW, sanskrit, Hindi and all other Indic languages have an entire set of dental stops that occur phonemically as voiced and voiceless, and with or without aspiration. The nasal /n/ also exists in languages, but is quite alveolar. To the Indian speaker, the alveolar /t/ and /d/ of English sound more like the corresponding retroflex consonants of his own language than like the dentals. Spanish /t/ and /d/ are laminal denti-alveolar, whereas /l/ and /n/ are prototypically alveolar, likewise, Italian /t/, /d/, /t͡s/, /d͡z/ are denti-alveolar and /l/ and /n/ become denti-alveolar before a following dental consonant. In the case of French, the rear-most contact is alveolar or sometimes slightly pre-alveolar, the Sounds of the Worlds Languages
Dental consonant
