1.
Velar nasal
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The velar nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. It is the sound of ng in English sing, the symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ŋ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is N. Both the IPA symbol and the sound are commonly called eng or engma, while almost all languages have /m/ and /n/, /ŋ/ is rarer. Only half of the 469 languages surveyed in Anderson had a nasal phoneme, as a further curiosity. In many languages that do not have the velar nasal as a phoneme, an example of a language that lacks a phonemic or allophonic velar nasal is Russian, in which /n/ is pronounced as laminal denti-alveolar even before velar consonants. It also makes it more difficult to allow air to escape through the nose. Features of the nasal, Its manner of articulation is occlusive. Because the consonant is nasal, the blocked airflow is redirected through the nose. Its place of articulation is velar, which means it is articulated with the back of the tongue at the soft palate and its phonation is voiced, which means the vocal cords vibrate during the articulation. It is a consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the nose. Because the sound is not produced with airflow over the tongue, the airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air solely with the lungs and diaphragm, as in most sounds
2.
Letter case
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Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger upper case and smaller lower case in the written representation of certain languages. The writing systems that distinguish between the upper and lower case have two sets of letters, with each letter in one set usually having an equivalent in the other set. Basically, the two variants are alternative representations of the same letter, they have the same name and pronunciation. Letter case is generally applied in a fashion, with both upper- and lower-case letters appearing in a given piece of text. The choice of case is often prescribed by the grammar of a language or by the conventions of a particular discipline, in mathematics, letter case may indicate the relationship between objects, with upper-case letters often representing superior objects. In some contexts, it is conventional to use only one case, the terms upper case and lower case can be written as two consecutive words, connected with a hyphen, or as a single word. These terms originated from the layouts of the shallow drawers called type cases used to hold the movable type for letterpress printing. Traditionally, the letters were stored in a separate case that was located above the case that held the small letters. Majuscule, for palaeographers, is technically any script in which the letters have very few or very short ascenders and descenders, or none at all. By virtue of their impact, this made the term majuscule an apt descriptor for what much later came to be more commonly referred to as uppercase letters. The word is often spelled miniscule, by association with the word miniature. This has traditionally been regarded as a mistake, but is now so common that some dictionaries tend to accept it as a nonstandard or variant spelling. Miniscule is still less likely, however, to be used in reference to lower-case letters, the glyphs of lower-case letters can resemble smaller forms of the upper-case glyphs restricted to the base band or can look hardly related. There is more variation in the height of the minuscules, as some of them have higher or lower than the typical size. In Times New Roman, for instance, b, d, f, h, k, l, t are the letters with ascenders, and g, j, p, q, y are the ones with descenders. In addition, with old-style numerals still used by traditional or classical fonts,6 and 8 make up the ascender set. Writing systems using two separate cases are bicameral scripts, languages that use the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Coptic, Armenian, Adlam, Varang Kshiti, Cherokee, and Osage scripts use letter cases in their written form as an aid to clarity. Other bicameral scripts, which are not used for any modern languages, are Old Hungarian, Glagolitic, the Georgian alphabet has several variants, and there were attempts to use them as different cases, but the modern written Georgian language does not distinguish case
3.
Latin alphabet
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The Latin alphabet is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. It is the script of the English language and is often referred to simply as the alphabet in English. It is an alphabet which originated in the 7th century BC in Italy and has changed continually over the last 2500 years. It has roots in the Semitic alphabet and its offshoot alphabets, the Phoenician, Greek, the phonetic values of some letters changed, some letters were lost and gained, and several writing styles developed. Two such styles, the minuscule and majuscule hands, were combined into one script with alternate forms for the lower and upper case letters, due to classicism, modern uppercase letters differ only slightly from their classical counterparts. The Latin alphabet started out as uppercase serifed letters known as roman square capitals, the lowercase letters evolved through cursive styles that developed to adapt the formerly inscribed alphabet to being written with a pen. Throughout the ages, many stylistic variations of each letter have evolved that are still identified as being the same letter. From the Cumae alphabet, the Etruscan alphabet was derived, the Latins ultimately adopted 21 of the original 26 Etruscan letters. Gaius Julius Hyginus, who recorded much Roman mythology, mentions in Fab, the Parcae, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos invented seven Greek letters — A B H T I Y. Others say that Mercury invented them from the flight of cranes, which, palamedes, too, son of Nauplius, invented eleven letters, Simonides, too, invented four letters — Ó E Z PH, Epicharmus of Sicily, two — P and PS. The Greek letters Mercury is said to have brought to Egypt, Cadmus in exile from Arcadia, took them to Italy, and his mother Carmenta changed them to Latin to the number of 15. Apollo on the added the rest. The original Latin alphabet was, The oldest Latin inscriptions do not distinguish between /ɡ/ and /k/, representing both by C, K and Q according to position, K was used before A, Q was used before O or V, C was used elsewhere. This is explained by the fact that the Etruscan language did not make this distinction, C originated as a turned form of Greek Gamma and Q from Greek Koppa. In later Latin, K survived only in a few such as Kalendae, Q survived only before V. G was later invented to distinguish between /ɡ/ and /k/, it was simply a C with an additional diacritic. C stood for /ɡ/ I stood for both /i/ and /j/, V stood for both /u/ and /w/. K was marginalized in favour of C, which stood for both /ɡ/ and /k/
4.
International Phonetic Alphabet
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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
5.
Phonology
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Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in languages. Phonology also includes the study of equivalent organizational systems in sign languages, the word phonology can also refer to the phonological system of a given language. This is one of the systems which a language is considered to comprise, like its syntax. Phonology is often distinguished from phonetics, note that this distinction was not always made, particularly before the development of the modern concept of the phoneme in the mid 20th century. The word phonology comes from Ancient Greek φωνή, phōnḗ, voice, sound, according to Clark et al. it means the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. The history of phonology may be traced back to the Ashtadhyayi, Baudouin de Courtenays work, though often unacknowledged, is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology. He also worked on the theory of alternations, and may have had an influence on the work of Saussure according to E. F. K. Koerner. An influential school of phonology in the period was the Prague school. One of its members was Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, whose Grundzüge der Phonologie. Directly influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetzkoy is considered the founder of morphophonology, Trubetzkoy also developed the concept of the archiphoneme. Another important figure in the Prague school was Roman Jakobson, who was one of the most prominent linguists of the 20th century, in 1968 Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of English, the basis for generative phonology. In this view, phonological representations are sequences of segments made up of distinctive features and these features were an expansion of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle. The features describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from a fixed set. There are at least two levels of representation, underlying representation and surface phonetic representation, ordered phonological rules govern how underlying representation is transformed into the actual pronunciation. An important consequence of the influence SPE had on phonological theory was the downplaying of the syllable, furthermore, the generativists folded morphophonology into phonology, which both solved and created problems. Natural phonology is a based on the publications of its proponent David Stampe in 1969. In this view, phonology is based on a set of phonological processes that interact with one another, which ones are active. Rather than acting on segments, phonological processes act on distinctive features within prosodic groups, prosodic groups can be as small as a part of a syllable or as large as an entire utterance
6.
Grapheme
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In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest unit of a writing system of any given language. An individual grapheme may or may not carry meaning by itself, graphemes include alphabetic letters, typographic ligatures, Chinese characters, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and other individual symbols. The word grapheme, coined in analogy with phoneme, is derived from Greek γράφω, meaning write, the study of graphemes is called graphemics. The concept of graphemes is an one and similar to the notion in computing of a character. By comparison, a shape that represents any particular grapheme in a specific typeface is called a glyph. For example, the corresponding to the abstract concept of the Arabic numeral one has two distinct glyphs in the fonts Times New Roman and Helvetica. Graphemes are often notated within angle brackets, as ⟨a⟩, ⟨B⟩ and this is analogous to the slash notation used for phonemes, and the square bracket notation used for phonetic transcriptions. Hence a grapheme can be regarded as an abstraction of a collection of glyphs that are all semantically equivalent, for example, in written English, there are many different physical representations of the lowercase letter a, such as a, ɑ, etc. But because the substitution of any of these for any other cannot change the meaning of a word, they are considered to be allographs of the same grapheme, italic and bold face are also allographic. There is some disagreement as to whether capital and lower-case letters are allographs or distinct graphemes, some linguists consider digraphs like the ⟨sh⟩ in ship to be distinct graphemes, but these are generally analyzed as sequences of graphemes. Ligatures, however, such as ⟨æ⟩, are distinct graphemes, as are letters with distinctive diacritics. For a full discussion of the different types, see Writing system § Functional classification, there are additional graphemic components used in writing, such as punctuation marks, mathematical symbols, word dividers such as the space, and other typographic symbols. As mentioned in the section, in languages that use alphabetic writing systems. In practice, however, the orthographies of such languages entail at least an amount of deviation from the ideal of exact grapheme–phoneme correspondence. A phoneme may be represented by a multigraph, as the digraph sh represents a sound in English. Multigraphs representing a single phoneme are normally treated as combinations of separate letters, for more examples, see Alphabetical order § Language-specific conventions. Conversion of scripts Character Grapheme–color synesthesia Grapheme–color ideasthesia Sign
7.
G
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G is the 7th letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The letter G was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of C to distinguish voiced /ɡ/ from voiceless /k/, the recorded originator of G is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school, who taught around 230 BC. At this time, K had fallen out of favor, and C, rugas positioning of G shows that alphabetic order related to the letters values as Greek numerals was a concern even in the 3rd century BC. Hempl proposes that there never was such a space in the alphabet, zeta took shapes like ⊏ in some of the Old Italic scripts, the development of the monumental form G from this shape would be exactly parallel to the development of C from gamma. He suggests that the pronunciation /k/ > /ɡ/ was due to contamination from the also similar-looking K, because of French influence, English orthography shares this feature. The modern lowercase g has two variants, the single-story and the double-story. The double-story form had developed similarly, except that some ornate forms then extended the tail back to the right, the initial extension to the left was absorbed into the upper closed bowl. The double-story version became popular when printing switched to Roman type because the tail was effectively shorter, in the double-story version, a small top stroke in the upper-right, often terminating in an orb shape, is called an ear. Generally, the two forms are complementary, but occasionally the difference has been exploited to provide contrast. Most, if not all, in English, the letter appears either alone or in some digraphs. In words of Romance origin, ⟨g⟩ is mainly soft before ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩, or ⟨y⟩, and hard otherwise. There are many English words of non-Romance origin where ⟨g⟩ is hard though followed by ⟨e⟩ or ⟨i⟩, the double consonant ⟨gg⟩ has the value /ɡ/ as in nugget, with very few exceptions, /gd͡ʒ/ in suggest and /d͡ʒ/ in exaggerate and veggies. The digraph ⟨dg⟩ has the value /d͡ʒ/, as in badger, non-digraph ⟨dg⟩ can also occur, in compounds like floodgate and headgear. Non-trigraph ⟨ngh⟩ also occurs, in compounds like stronghold and dunghill, Most Romance languages and some Nordic languages also have two main pronunciations for ⟨g⟩, hard and soft. While the soft value of ⟨g⟩ varies in different Romance languages, in all except Romanian and Italian, in Italian and Romanian, ⟨gh⟩ is used to represent /ɡ/ before front vowels where ⟨g⟩ would otherwise represent a soft value. In Italian and French, ⟨gn⟩ is used to represent the palatal nasal /ɲ/, in Italian, the trigraph ⟨gli⟩, when appearing before a vowel or as the article and pronoun gli, represents the palatal lateral approximant /ʎ/. Other languages typically use ⟨g⟩ to represent /ɡ/ regardless of position, amongst European languages Czech, Dutch and Finnish are an exception as they do not have /ɡ/ in their native words. Nevertheless, word-finally it is always voiceless in all dialects, including the standard Dutch of Belgium, on the other hand, some dialects, may have a phonemic /ɡ/. Faroese uses ⟨g⟩ to represent /dʒ/, in addition to /ɡ/, in Maori, ⟨g⟩ is used in the digraph ⟨ng⟩ which represents the velar nasal /ŋ/ and is pronounced like the ⟨ng⟩ in singer
8.
Benjamin Franklin
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Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Franklin was a polymath and a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, freemason, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman. As a scientist, he was a figure in the American Enlightenment. As an inventor, he is known for the rod, bifocals. He facilitated many civic organizations, including Philadelphias fire department and the University of Pennsylvania, Franklin earned the title of The First American for his early and indefatigable campaigning for colonial unity, initially as an author and spokesman in London for several colonies. As the first United States Ambassador to France, he exemplified the emerging American nation, in the words of historian Henry Steele Commager, In a Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat. To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin the most accomplished American of his age, Franklin became a successful newspaper editor and printer in Philadelphia, the leading city in the colonies, publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette at the age of 23. He became wealthy publishing this and Poor Richards Almanack, which he authored under the pseudonym Richard Saunders, after 1767, he was associated with the Pennsylvania Chronicle, a newspaper that was known for its revolutionary sentiments and criticisms of the British policies. He pioneered and was first president of The Academy and College of Philadelphia which opened in 1751 and he organized and was the first secretary of the American Philosophical Society and was elected president in 1769. Franklin became a hero in America as an agent for several colonies when he spearheaded an effort in London to have the Parliament of Great Britain repeal the unpopular Stamp Act. An accomplished diplomat, he was widely admired among the French as American minister to Paris and was a figure in the development of positive Franco-American relations. His efforts proved vital for the American Revolution in securing shipments of crucial munitions from France, during the Revolution, he became the first US Postmaster General. He was active in community affairs and colonial and state politics, from 1785 to 1788, he served as governor of Pennsylvania. He initially owned and dealt in slaves but, by the 1750s, he argued against slavery from an economic perspective, Franklins father, Josiah Franklin, was a tallow chandler, a soap-maker and a candle-maker. Josiah was born at Ecton, Northamptonshire, England on December 23,1657, the son of Thomas Franklin, a blacksmith-farmer, and Jane White. His mother, Abiah Folger, was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, on August 15,1667, to Peter Folger, a miller and schoolteacher, and his wife, Mary Morrill, Josiah Franklin had seventeen children with his two wives. He married his first wife, Anne Child, in about 1677 in Ecton and emigrated with her to Boston in 1683, after her death, Josiah was married to Abiah Folger on July 9,1689 in the Old South Meeting House by Samuel Willard. Benjamin, their child, was Josiah Franklins fifteenth child and tenth
9.
Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet
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Benjamin Franklins phonetic alphabet was Benjamin Franklins proposal for a spelling reform of the English language. The alphabet was based on the Latin alphabet used in English and it was one of the earlier proposed spelling reforms to the English language. The alphabet consisted of 26 letters in the order, Other English phonemes are represented as follows. /eɪ/, at the time more probably, is represented as ee or e, /ɜːr/ and /ər/ are represented as ɥr. /iː/ is represented as ii or i, /ɔər/, at the time separate, is represented or. Unstressed vowels are represented by the letters used to represent their stressed equivalents. Franklins proposed alphabet included seven letters to represent vowels and this set consisted of two new letters, in addition to five letters from the existing English alphabet, a, e, i, o, u. The first new letter was a formed as a ligature of the o and a. The second, ɥ, was used for, franklin proposed the use of doubled letters to represent what he called long vowels. In this system, the doubled ee is used to represent the sound in late. Likewise, ii is used to represent the sound in degrees, pleased. One of Franklins correspondences written in the new alphabet is inconsistent in this regard, representing the sound in great. Franklins proposed alphabet included nineteen letters to represent consonants. This set consisted of four new letters, in addition to fifteen letters from the existing English alphabet, new letters were proposed to replace the English digraphs ng, sh, voiced th, and voiceless th. New consonant digraphs based on these new letters were used to represent the sounds of ch in cherry. The most influential of Franklins six new characters appears to have been the letter eng, ⟨ŋ⟩ and it was later incorporated into the IPA. Alexander Gill the Elder had used this letter in 1619. com,10 May 2013
10.
N
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N is the 14th letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. One of the most common hieroglyphs, snake, was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like the English ⟨J⟩, because the Egyptian word for snake was djet. However, the name for the letter in the Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic alphabets is nun, the sound value of the letter was /n/—as in Greek, Etruscan, Latin and modern languages. ⟨n⟩ represents a dental or alveolar nasal in all languages that use the Latin alphabet. A common digraph with ⟨n⟩ is ⟨ng⟩, which represents a nasal in a variety of languages. Often, before a plosive, ⟨n⟩ alone represents a velar nasal. In Italian and French, ⟨gn⟩ represents a palatal nasal /ɲ/, the Portuguese and Vietnamese spelling for this sound is ⟨nh⟩, while Spanish and a few other languages use the letter ⟨ñ⟩. In English, ⟨n⟩ is generally silent when it is preceded by an ⟨m⟩ at the end of words, as in hymn, however, it is pronounced in this combination when occurring word medially, as in hymnal. ⟨n⟩ is the sixth most common letter and the second-most commonly used consonant in the English language, in mathematics, the italic form n is a particularly common symbol for a variable quantity which represents an integer. The dictionary definition of n at Wiktionary
11.
J
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J is the tenth letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its normal name in English is jay /ˈdʒeɪ/ or, now uncommonly, when used for the palatal approximant, it may be called yod or yot. A distinctive usage emerged in Middle High German, gian Giorgio Trissino was the first to explicitly distinguish I and J as representing separate sounds, in his Ɛpistola del Trissino de le lettere nuωvamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana of 1524. In English, ⟨j⟩ most commonly represents the affricate /dʒ/, in Old English, the phoneme /dʒ/ was represented orthographically with ⟨cg⟩ and ⟨cȝ⟩. Under the influence of Old French, which had a similar phoneme deriving from Latin /j/, English scribes began to use ⟨i⟩ to represent word-initial /dʒ/ in Old English, later, many other uses of ⟨i⟩ were added in loanwords from French and other languages. The first English language book to make a distinction between ⟨i⟩ and ⟨j⟩ was published in 1633. In loan words such as raj, ⟨j⟩ may represent /ʒ/, occasionally, ⟨j⟩ represents the original /j/ sound, as in Hallelujah and fjord. In words of Spanish origin, where ⟨j⟩ represents the velar fricative. In English, ⟨j⟩ is the fourth-least-frequently used letter in words, being more frequent only than ⟨z⟩, ⟨q⟩ and it is, however, quite common in proper nouns, especially personal names. Notable exceptions are English, Scots and Luxembourgish, some related languages, such as Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian, also adopted ⟨j⟩ into the Cyrillic alphabet for the same purpose. Because of this standard, the lower case letter was chosen to be used in the IPA as the symbol for the sound. In the Romance languages, ⟨j⟩ has generally developed from its original palatal approximant value in Latin to some kind of fricative, in French, Portuguese, Catalan, and Romanian it has been fronted to the postalveolar fricative /ʒ/. In Spanish, by contrast, it has been both devoiced and backed from an earlier /ʝ/ to a present-day /x ~ h/, with the phonetic realization depending on the speakers dialect/s. In modern standard Italian spelling, only Latin words, proper nouns or those borrowed from foreign languages have ⟨j⟩. Until the 19th century, ⟨j⟩ was used instead of ⟨i⟩ in diphthongs, as a replacement for final -ii, and in vowel groups, ⟨j⟩ is also used to render /j/ in dialect, e. g. Romanesque ajo for standard aglio. The Italian novelist Luigi Pirandello used ⟨j⟩ in vowel groups in his works written in Italian, he wrote in his native Sicilian language. In Basque, the represented by ⟨j⟩ has a variety of realizations according to the regional dialect. Among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin script, ⟨j⟩ stands for /ʒ/ in Turkish and Azerbaijani, ⟨j⟩ stands for /dʒ/ in Indonesian, Somali, Malay, Igbo, Shona, Oromo, Turkmen, and Zulu
12.
African languages
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There are 1,250 to 2,100 and by some counts over 3,000 languages spoken natively in Africa. They are divided into six major language families, Afroasiatic languages are spread throughout the West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Austronesian languages are spoken in Madagascar. Indo-European languages are spoken on the tip of the continent, in the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in the north. Khoe languages are concentrated in the deserts of Namibia and Botswana, Niger–Congo covers West, Central, Southeast and Southern Africa. Nilo-Saharan languages are centered on Sudan and Chad, there are several other small families and language isolates, as well as languages that have yet to be classified. In addition, Africa has a variety of sign languages. Around a hundred languages are used for inter-ethnic communication. Arabic, Somali, Berber, Amharic, Oromo, Swahili, Hausa, Manding, Fulani and Yoruba are spoken by tens of millions of people. If clusters of up to a hundred languages are counted together, twelve are spoken by 75 percent. The high linguistic diversity of many African countries has made language policy an issue in the post-colonial era. In recent years, African countries have become aware of the value of their linguistic inheritance. Montagnard children are exposed to more than one language from birth. Because the montagnard convention of exogamy often leads to marriage outside ones ethnic/linguistic group, bilingual households, Language policies being developed nowadays are mostly aimed at multilingualism. For example, all African languages are considered official languages of the African Union,2006 was declared by the African Union as the Year of African Languages. Most languages spoken in Africa belong to one of three language families, Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Niger–Congo. In addition, the languages of Africa languages include several unclassified languages, more broadly, the Afroasiatic family is tentatively grouped within the Nostratic superfamily, and the Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo phyla form the Niger-Saharan macrophylum. Afroasiatic languages are spoken throughout North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Asia, there are approximately 375 Afroasiatic languages spoken by over 350 million people. The main subfamilies of Afroasiatic are the Berber languages, Semitic languages, Chadic languages, however, its most extensive sub-branch, the Semitic languages, seems to have developed in the Arabian peninsula
13.
Shona language
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Shona /ˈʃoʊnə/, or chiShona, is the most widely first spoken Bantu language, native to the Shona people of Zimbabwe. The term is used to identify peoples who speak one of the Shona language dialects, Zezuru, Karanga, Manyika and Korekore. Some researchers include Kalanga, others recognise it as a language in its own right, desmond Dales basic English–Shona and Shona–English dictionaries comprise special vocabulary of the Karanga, Korekore, Manyika and Zezuru dialects, but no Ndau or Kalanga. Shona is a language of Zimbabwe, along with Ndebele. Shona is spoken by a percentage of the people in Zimbabwe. Shona is the most spoken Bantu language by the criterion of number of native speakers, according to Ethnologue, Shona, comprising the Karanga, Zezuru, and Korekore dialects, is spoken by about 10.8 million people. The Manyika and Ndau dialects of Shona are listed separately by Ethnologue, the total figure of Shona speakers is then about 14.2 million people. Zulu is the second most widely spoken Bantu language with 10.3 million speakers according to Ethnologue, Shona is a written standard language with an orthography and grammar that was codified during the early 20th century and fixed in the 1950s. The first novel in Shona, Solomon Mutswairos Feso, was published in 1957, Shona is taught in the schools but is not the general medium of instruction in other subjects. It has a literature and is described through monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, modern Shona is based on the dialect spoken by the Karanga people of Masvingo Province, the region around Great Zimbabwe, and Zezuru people of central and northern Zimbabwe. However, all Shona dialects are considered to be of equal significance and are taught in local schools. Shona is a member of the family of Bantu languages. Shona speakers most likely moved into present day Zimbabwe from the Mapungubwe and K2 communities in Limpopo, South Africa, before the influx of European, primarily British, settlers. A common misconception is that the speakers of the Karanga dialect were absorbed into the Ndebele culture and this misconception is a direct result of the political bias in the national curriculum framework of Zimbabwe. The Kalanga language is spoken in Botswana where the Ndebele were never present. The Kalanga language is thought to have been the used by the Mapungubweans. If this is accurate it follows that the Karanga dialect of Shona is a derivative of Kalanga, Karanga is closer to Kalanga than the rest of the aforementioned dialects. Karanga and Kalanga are both closer to Venda than the other Shona dialects, Shona is used to refer to a standardised language based on the central dialects of the Shona region
14.
Gamilaraay language
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The Gamilaraay or Kamilaroi language is a Pama–Nyungan language of the Wiradhuric subgroup found mostly in south-east Australia. It was the language of the Kamilaroi people, but is now moribund—according to Ethnologue, there were only 35 speakers left in 2006, all mixing Gamilaraay. However, there are thousands of people of mixed descent both within the populations as well as immigrant populations, who identify themselves as Kamilaroi. Kamilaroi is also taught in some Australian schools, the name Gamilaraay means gamil-having, gamil being the word for no. Other dialects and languages are similarly named after their respective words for no. yaama means hello and they told him that the country there was Coomery Roy and more further a great way, meaning to the north-west, over the Liverpool Ranges. This is probably the first record of the name, a basic wordlist collected by Major Thomas Mitchell in February,1832 is the earliest written record of Gamilaraay. The Presbyterian missionary William Ridley studied the language from 1852 to 1856, initially, /wu/ and /ji/ may be simplified to and. All long vowels in a word get equal stress, if there are no long vowels, stress falls on the first syllable. Secondary stress falls on short vowels which are two syllables to the right or to the left of a stressed syllable, several loanwords have entered Australian English from Gamilaraay, including, Austin, Peter. A Reference Dictionary of Gamilaraay, northern New South Wales, dixon, R. M. W. Australian Languages, Their Nature and Development. Mathews, R. H. Languages of the Kamilaroi and Other Aboriginal Tribes of New South Wales, the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, on the Kamilaroi Tribe of Australians and Their Dialect. Journal of the Ethnological Society of London, Journal of the Ethnological Society of London, Vol.4. The Euahlayi Tribe, A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia, http, //yuwaalaraay. org/ has information about recent Gamilaraay and Yuwaalaraay language development and links to numerous language resources
15.
Turned g
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ᵷ or turned g is a letter of the Latin alphabet, formed by rotating g 180°. It is used to transliterate the Georgian letter ჹ, ჹ itself is the Georgian letter გ g rotated. It represents a in some East Caucasian languages, a rotated capital G has sometimes been used as a substitute for the similar-looking eng. It is encoded in Unicode at U+2141, ᵷ was added to Unicode 4.1 in 2005, as U+1D77. Fonts that can display the character include Code2000, Doulos SIL, lowercase B with hook, an IPA letter that resembles a turned one-story g, is more widely available as a substitute, at U+0253
16.
Greek alphabet
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It is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. In its classical and modern forms, the alphabet has 24 letters, Modern and Ancient Greek use different diacritics. In standard Modern Greek spelling, orthography has been simplified to the monotonic system, examples In both Ancient and Modern Greek, the letters of the Greek alphabet have fairly stable and consistent symbol-to-sound mappings, making pronunciation of words largely predictable. Ancient Greek spelling was generally near-phonemic, among consonant letters, all letters that denoted voiced plosive consonants and aspirated plosives in Ancient Greek stand for corresponding fricative sounds in Modern Greek. This leads to groups of vowel letters denoting identical sounds today. Modern Greek orthography remains true to the spellings in most of these cases. The following vowel letters and digraphs are involved in the mergers, Modern Greek speakers typically use the same, modern, in other countries, students of Ancient Greek may use a variety of conventional approximations of the historical sound system in pronouncing Ancient Greek. Several letter combinations have special conventional sound values different from those of their single components, among them are several digraphs of vowel letters that formerly represented diphthongs but are now monophthongized. In addition to the three mentioned above, there is also ⟨ου⟩, pronounced /u/, the Ancient Greek diphthongs ⟨αυ⟩, ⟨ευ⟩ and ⟨ηυ⟩ are pronounced, and respectively in voicing environments in Modern Greek. The Modern Greek consonant combinations ⟨μπ⟩ and ⟨ντ⟩ stand for and respectively, ⟨τζ⟩ stands for, in addition, both in Ancient and Modern Greek, the letter ⟨γ⟩, before another velar consonant, stands for the velar nasal, thus ⟨γγ⟩ and ⟨γκ⟩ are pronounced like English ⟨ng⟩. There are also the combinations ⟨γχ⟩ and ⟨γξ⟩ and these signs were originally designed to mark different forms of the phonological pitch accent in Ancient Greek. The letter rho, although not a vowel, also carries a rough breathing in word-initial position, if a rho was geminated within a word, the first ρ always had the smooth breathing and the second the rough breathing leading to the transiliteration rrh. The vowel letters ⟨α, η, ω⟩ carry an additional diacritic in certain words, the iota subscript. This iota represents the former offglide of what were originally long diphthongs, ⟨ᾱι, ηι, ωι⟩, another diacritic used in Greek is the diaeresis, indicating a hiatus. In 1982, a new, simplified orthography, known as monotonic, was adopted for use in Modern Greek by the Greek state. Although it is not a diacritic, the comma has a function as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό. There are many different methods of rendering Greek text or Greek names in the Latin script, the form in which classical Greek names are conventionally rendered in English goes back to the way Greek loanwords were incorporated into Latin in antiquity. In this system, ⟨κ⟩ is replaced with ⟨c⟩, the diphthongs ⟨αι⟩ and ⟨οι⟩ are rendered as ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩ respectively, and ⟨ει⟩ and ⟨ου⟩ are simplified to ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩ respectively
17.
Eta
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Eta is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet. Originally denoting a consonant /h/, its value in the classical Attic dialect of Ancient Greek was a long vowel, raised to in hellenistic Greek. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 8 and it was derived from the Phoenician letter heth. Letters that arose from eta include the Latin H and the Cyrillic letter И, the letter shape H was originally used in most Greek dialects to represent the sound /h/, a voiceless glottal fricative. In this function, it was borrowed in the 8th century BC by the Etruscan and other Old Italic alphabets and this also gave rise to the Latin alphabet with its letter H. Other regional variants of the Greek alphabet, in dialects that still preserved the sound /h/, in the southern Italian colonies of Heracleia and Tarentum, the letter shape was reduced to a half-heta lacking the right vertical stem. From this sign later developed the sign for rough breathing or spiritus asper, in 403 BC, Athens took over the Ionian spelling system and with it the vocalic use of H. This later became the standard orthography in all of Greece, itacism is continued into Modern Greek, where the letter name is pronounced and represents the sound /i/. It shares this function with other letters and digraphs, which are all pronounced alike. This phenomenon at large is called iotacism, Eta was also borrowed with the sound value of into the Cyrillic script, where it gave rise to the Cyrillic letter И. In Modern Greek the letter, pronounced, represents a close front unrounded vowel, in Classical Greek, it represented a long open-mid front unrounded vowel, /ɛː/. The upper-case letter Η is used as a symbol in textual criticism for the Alexandrian text-type, the lower-case letter η is used as a symbol in, Thermodynamics, the efficiency of a Carnot heat engine, or packing fraction. Chemistry, the hapticity, or the number of atoms of an attached to one coordination site of the metal in a coordination compound. For example, a group can coordinate to palladium in the η¹ mode or the η³ mode. Optics, the impedance of a medium, or the quantum efficiency of detectors. Particle physics, to represent the η mesons, experimental particle physics, η stands for pseudorapidity. Cosmology, η represents conformal time, dt = adη, relativity and Quantum field theory, η represents the metric tensor of Minkowski space. Statistics, η2 is the regression coefficient
18.
Horatio Hale
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Horatio Emmons Hale was an American-Canadian ethnologist, philologist and businessman who studied language as a key for classifying ancient peoples and being able to trace their migrations. He was the first to discover that the Tutelo language of Virginia belonged to the Siouan family, in addition, he published a work Iroquois Book of Rites, based on interpreting the Iroquois wampum belts, as well as his studies with tribal leaders. After his marriage to a Canadian woman in 1855, Hale moved to Ontario and he continued to publish articles in American scholarly journals, while living in Canada for the rest of his life. Entering Harvard College in 1833, Hale showed a marked faculty for languages and his first essay in original work appeared the next year, and attracted the attention of the college authorities. It consisted of an Algonkin vocabulary, which he gathered from a band of Indians who had camped on the college grounds. From 1838 to 1842, he was employed in the work of the expedition, visiting South America, Australasia, Polynesia, from this point he returned overland. The Hale Passages of Puget Sound were named in recognition of his service to the expedition, the expedition went on to Polynesia. Of the reports of that expedition, Hale prepared the sixth volume, Ethnography and Philology and he continued to travel and study abroad. Having taken his degree of M. A, Hale made a short tour of Europe, and, on his return, studied law. He was admitted to the Chicago bar in 1855, in 1856, the Hales moved to Clinton, Ontario, Canada, where he administered the estate of his father-in-law. He began to involve himself locally in real estate development and other business and he continued to reside in Clinton till his death, devoting much attention to the development of the Ontario school system. The vicinity of the Canadian reserves on the banks of the Thames and he discovered, and in 1883 published, under the title, The Iroquois Book of Rites, two Indian manuscripts, dating between 1714 and 1735, which is the only literary American-Indian work extant. His judicious introductions, careful translation and editing add much to the value of the work, in 1884, at its Montreal meeting, he reorganised the section of anthropology as an independent department of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He had already done a service for the American Association. At the request of the British committee, he undertook the supervision of the anthropological work in the Canadian North-west. The reports, which are elaborate, appeared in the published Proceedings from 1885 to 1897. Continuing a member of the committee, he was asked to accept the position of vice-president at the meeting in Toronto. Among other learned bodies Hale was a fellow of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain
19.
Uvular nasal
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The uvular nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɴ⟩, a capital version of the Latin letter n. The uvular nasal is a rare sound crosslingually, presumably due to the difficulty involved in articulating this sound. The very small oral cavity used to produce uvular consonants makes it difficult to sustain voicing, the uvular nasal most commonly occurs as a conditioned allophone of other sounds in specific environments. For example, as an allophone of /n/ before a uvular plosive as in Quechua, however, it occurs as an independent phoneme in a small number of languages, notably Klallam and the Papuan language Mapos Buang. In Mapos Buang, the nasal is phonemically distinct from three other phonemic dorsal nasals, a palatal nasal, a velar nasal, and a labialized velar nasal. This appears to be the language known to contain a phonemic contrast between the uvular nasal and other dorsal nasals. The International Phonetic Alphabet does not have a symbol for that sound, though it can be transcribed as ⟨ɴ̟⟩. The equivalent X-SAMPA symbols are N\_+ and N_-, respectively, features of the uvular nasal, Its manner of articulation is occlusive, which means it is produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract. Because the consonant is nasal, the blocked airflow is redirected through the nose. Its place of articulation is uvular, which means it is articulated with the back of the tongue at the uvula and its phonation is voiced, which means the vocal cords vibrate during the articulation. It is a consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the nose. Because the sound is not produced with airflow over the tongue, the airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air solely with the lungs and diaphragm, as in most sounds
20.
Transcription of Australian Aboriginal languages
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Prior to the arrival of Europeans, Australian Aboriginal languages had been purely spoken languages, and had no writing system. At first, Australian languages were written following English orthography as it sounded to the writer, most Aboriginal words used in English follow these early conventions, and therefore do not usually give a good idea of how the word was pronounced in the original language. Linguists working with Australian languages today purposely use unambiguous phonemic orthographies based on detailed analysis of the language in question. In orthographies of this kind each spoken word can only be one way. Usually, but not always, practical orthographies use just the letters of the basic Roman alphabet and this necessitates the use of digraphs for sounds that do not have a standard character. In some cases this can lead to ambiguities, for example where the single sound /ŋ/ and these are commonly distinguished by writing the cluster n. g, n’g, or nk. Most Australian languages distinguish just three vowels, which are written i, a and u, even though they may sound like e or o at times, they are not written e or o, e. g. the Martuthunira word wirrirri flame is roughly pronounced werrerree. Long vowels are represented by letters, i. e. ii /iː/, aa /aː/. The semivowels w and y are pronounced as in English. A handful of languages have a dental semivowel, which is written yh, most Australian languages have two rhotics or r-like sounds, a retroflex approximant, as in American English, written r, and a trill or flap, written rr. In languages that have one of the two rs, its simply written r. The bilabial, velar and alveolar consonants are written the same as in English, i. e. p /p/, b /b/, m /m/, k /k/, g /ɡ/, ng /ŋ/, t /t/, d /d/, n /n/. Ng may also be using the non-English letter ŋ, called eng. Note that ng sounds like the ng in singer, not as in finger, the latter would be written ngg. Palatal consonants are represented by a digraph made of an alveolar consonant + j or y, i. e. tj /c ɟ ɲ ʎ/ can be written tj/ty, dj/dy, nj/ny. C and j are other ways of writing the palatal stops. Dental consonants are represented by a made of an alveolar consonant + h, i. e. th /t̪/, dh /d̪/, nh /n̪/. Note that th is not a fricative as in Australian English, retroflex consonants are usually represented by a digraph made of r + an alveolar consonant, i. e. rt /ʈ/, rd /ɖ/, rn /ɳ/, rl /ɭ/, as in Swedish
21.
Uralic Phonetic Alphabet
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The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet or Finno-Ugric transcription system is a phonetic transcription or notational system used predominantly for the transcription and reconstruction of Uralic languages. It was first published in 1901 by Eemil Nestor Setälä, a Finnish linguist, for this reason, it is not possible to automatically convert a UPA transcription into an IPA one. The basic UPA characters are based on the Finnish alphabet where possible, with extensions taken from Cyrillic, small-capital letters and some novel diacritics are also used. Unlike the IPA, which is transcribed with upright characters. Although many of its characters are used in standard Latin, Greek, Cyrillic orthographies or the IPA. These have been encoded in the Phonetic Extensions and Phonetic Extensions Supplement blocks, font support for these extended characters is very rare, Code2000 and Fixedsys Excelsior are two fonts that do support them. A professional font containing them is Andron Mega, it supports UPA characters in Regular, a vowel to the left of a dot is illabial, to the right is labial. Other vowels are denoted using diacritics, however, in keeping with the principles of the UPA, the open-mid front labial and back illabial vowels are still transcribed with the addition of diacritics, as ⟨ɔ̈⟩ and ⟨ɛ̮⟩. The following table describes the consonants of the UPA, note that the UPA does not distinguish voiced fricatives from approximants, and does not contain many characters of the IPA such as. When there are two or more consonants in a column, the rightmost one is voiced, when there are three, the one is partially devoiced. A major difference is that IPA notation allows distinguishing between phonetic and phonemic transcription, by enclosing the transcription between either brackets or slashes /ai pi e/, UPA has no corresponding standard, and context must be relied upon to distinguish the closeness of transcription. For phonetic transcription, numerous differences from IPA come into relevance, UPA e, o denote mid vowels with no particular bias towards open or close. IPA, denote close-mid vowels in particular, common in Romance, being designed for languages largely featuring vowel harmony, UPA has no simple way to denote a basic, backness-ambiguous schwa sound, IPA. ə denotes a reduced form of e, corresponding with IPA, a further backing diacritic must be appended, resulting in ə̑. For the voiced fricative, UPA uses a Greek delta δ. In UPA, eth ð stands for a tap, IPA. UPA uses Greek chi χ for the velar fricative. In IPA, stands for a voiceless fricative, while the velar counterpart is
22.
Rheinische Dokumenta
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The Rheinische Dokumenta is a phonetic writing system developed in the early 1980s by a working group of academics, linguists, local language experts, and local language speakers of the Rhineland. It was presented to the public in 1986 by the Landschaftsverband Rheinland, vith, Wiesbaden, Wipperfürth, Wuppertal, Xanten, and many more. The German letters ⟨z⟩ and ⟨x⟩ are spelled ⟨ts⟩ and ⟨ks⟩, German ⟨ch⟩ is spelled ⟨k⟩ when it indicates a /k/ pronunciation and these spellings appear in other Germanic languages as well, but Rhinelanders are generally not accustomed to them. The Rheinische Dokumenta uses the letters of todays ISO basic Latin alphabet, without ⟨c⟩, ⟨q⟩, ⟨x⟩, ⟨y⟩, ⟨z⟩, though it has the digraphs ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ng⟩, trigraph ⟨sch⟩. Most letters represent the sounds for which they are used in the German alphabet or, slightly less so. Several letters are ambiguous in these languages, such as voiced consonants which lose their voice when appearing at the end of a word, as opposed to Dutch, the combination of ⟨s⟩ followed by ⟨ch⟩ does not occur in the languages for which Rheinische Dokumenta was made. Thus, since ⟨c⟩ is not otherwise used in Rheinische Dokumenta, only the digraph ⟨ng⟩ has some ambiguity. An ⟨n⟩ may occur at the end of a syllable, while ⟨ng⟩ at syllable joints is frequent in German, most languages that can use Rheinische Dokumenta have ⟨mg⟩ or ⟨nj⟩ instead in almost all instances. The authors of Rheinische Dokumenta suggest using the letter eng ⟨ŋ⟩ instead of the digraph ⟨ng⟩ when possible. Though not defined in the specification, upper case letters can be used. While some authors do not use them at all, others start sentences with capitals or capitalise names, stress and the tonal accents are usually ignored when writing in Rheinische Dokumenta. There are diacritics to indicate them, but since they are seen to considerably hamper readability, make prints ugly, some dialects do not have tonal accent anyway. For the other ones, there are only a few word pairs or triplets having identical unaccented Rheinische Dokumenta spellings. Also, other prosody, such as the melody of sentence, vowels come in two variants, short and long. That many dialects feature three distinct vowel lengths is ignored, as doing so does not create any ambiguities and makes reading easier, short vowels are represented by single letters, long vowels are represented by the same letters doubled to indicate lengthening. Rheinische Dokumenta can write 25 monophthongs, there are 14 short vowels in the languages that the script was designed for,13 of which are representable in Rheinische Dokumenta, The e̩ is, a schwa. There is no version of e̩. Although a schwa usually cannot carry word accent or stress, in dialects there are exceptions
23.
Meuse-Rhenish
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Meuse-Rhenish is a modern term that refers to the literature written in the Middle Ages in the greater Meuse-Rhine area. This area stretches in the triangle roughly between the rivers Meuse and Rhine. It also applies to the Low Franconian dialects that have spoken in that area in continuation from mediaeval times up to now. It includes varieties of South Guelderish and Limburgish in the Belgian and Dutch provinces of Limburg, with regard to this German part only, Meuse-Rhenish equals the total of Low Rhenish vernaculars. Low Rhenish is the name in German for the regional Low Franconian language varieties spoken alongside the so-called Lower Rhine in the west of Germany. Low Franconian is a language or dialect group that has developed in the parts of the Frankish Empire. From this group both the Dutch and later the Afrikaans standard languages have arisen, the differences between Low Rhenish and Low Saxon are smaller than between Low Rhenish and High German. Yet, Low Rhenish does not belong to Low German, therefore, it could properly be called German Dutch. Indeed, Deutschniederländisch was the term under the Prussian Reign of the 19th century. Low Rhenish differs strongly from High German, the more to the north it approaches the Netherlands, the more it sounds like Dutch. As it crosses the Dutch-German as well as the Dutch-Belgian borders, in two of them Dutch is the standard language. The eastmost varieties of the latter, east of the Rhine from Düsseldorf to Wuppertal, are referred to as Low Bergish, Limburgish is recognised as a regional language in the Netherlands. As such, it receives protection under chapter 2 of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The area in which Limburgish is spoken roughly fits within a circle from Venlo to Düsseldorf to Aachen to Maastricht to Hasselt. In German sources, the dialects linguistically counting as Limburgish spoken east of the river Rhine are often called Bergish, west of the river Rhine they are called Low Rhenish, Limburgish or Ripuarian. Limburgish is not recognised by the German government as an official language, Low Rhenish is considered as a group of dialects in Germany. Together all these belong to a greater continuum, this superordinating group is called Meuse-Rhenish. These insights are rather new among dialectologists on both sides of the national Dutch-German border, German population in the Meuse-Rhine area are used to let the geographic Lower Rhine area begin approximately with the Benrath line, coincidentally
24.
Descender
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In typography, a descender is the portion of a letter that extends below the baseline of a font. The line that descenders reach down to is known as the beard line, for example, in the letter y, the descender is the tail, or that portion of the diagonal line which lies below the v created by the two lines converging. In the letter p, it is the stem reaching down past the o, in most fonts, descenders are reserved for lowercase characters such as g, j, q, p, y, and sometimes f. Some fonts, however, also use descenders for some numerals, such numerals are called old-style numerals. Some fonts also use descenders for the tails on a few letters such as J and Q. The parts of characters that extend above the x-height of a font are called ascenders
25.
Cyrillic script
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The Cyrillic script /sᵻˈrɪlɪk/ is a writing system used for various alphabets across eastern Europe and north and central Asia. It is based on the Early Cyrillic, which was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 9th century AD at the Preslav Literary School. As of 2011, around 252 million people in Eurasia use it as the alphabet for their national languages. With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the official script of the European Union, following the Latin script. Cyrillic is derived from the Greek uncial script, augmented by letters from the older Glagolitic alphabet and these additional letters were used for Old Church Slavonic sounds not found in Greek. The script is named in honor of the two Byzantine brothers, Saints Cyril and Methodius, who created the Glagolitic alphabet earlier on, modern scholars believe that Cyrillic was developed and formalized by early disciples of Cyril and Methodius. In the early 18th century the Cyrillic script used in Russia was heavily reformed by Peter the Great, the new form of letters became closer to the Latin alphabet, several archaic letters were removed and several letters were personally designed by Peter the Great. West European typography culture was also adopted, Cyrillic script spread throughout the East and South Slavic territories, being adopted for writing local languages, such as Old East Slavic. Its adaptation to local languages produced a number of Cyrillic alphabets, capital and lowercase letters were not distinguished in old manuscripts. Yeri was originally a ligature of Yer and I, iotation was indicated by ligatures formed with the letter І, Ꙗ, Ѥ, Ю, Ѩ, Ѭ. Sometimes different letters were used interchangeably, for example И = І = Ї, there were also commonly used ligatures like ѠТ = Ѿ. The letters also had values, based not on Cyrillic alphabetical order. The early Cyrillic alphabet is difficult to represent on computers, many of the letterforms differed from modern Cyrillic, varied a great deal in manuscripts, and changed over time. Few fonts include adequate glyphs to reproduce the alphabet, the Unicode 5.1 standard, released on 4 April 2008, greatly improves computer support for the early Cyrillic and the modern Church Slavonic language. In Microsoft Windows, Segoe UI is notable for having complete support for the archaic Cyrillic letters since Windows 8, the development of Cyrillic typography passed directly from the medieval stage to the late Baroque, without a Renaissance phase as in Western Europe. Late Medieval Cyrillic letters show a tendency to be very tall and narrow. Peter the Great, Czar of Russia, mandated the use of westernized letter forms in the early 18th century, over time, these were largely adopted in the other languages that use the script. The development of some Cyrillic computer typefaces from Latin ones has also contributed to the visual Latinization of Cyrillic type, Cyrillic uppercase and lowercase letter forms are not as differentiated as in Latin typography
26.
Dagbani language
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Dagbani, also known as Dagbanli and Dagbanle, is a Gur language spoken in Ghana which is closely related to and mutually intelligible with the Mampelle language, also spoken in Northern Region, Ghana. Its native speakers are estimated around 830,000, Dagbani is also widely known as a second language in Northern Ghana especially among acephalous tribes overseen by Ya-Na. It is a subject in Primary and Junior High School in the Dagbon Kingdom. Dagbani has a major split between Eastern Dagbani, centred on the traditional capital town of Yendi, and Western Dagbani centred on the Administrative capital of the Northern Region. Language, and <Dagbanli>. to the life and culture”, in the spoken language each dialect used its form of the name for both functions. Dagbani has eleven phonemic vowels, six short and five vowels, Olawsky has the schwa in place of /ɨ/. Allophonic variation based on tongue-root advancement is well attested for 4 of these vowels, Dagbani is a tonal language in which pitch is used to distinguish words, as in gballi grave vs. gballi zana mat. The tone system of Dagbani is characterized by two level tones and downstep, Dagbani is written in a Latin alphabet, but the literacy rate used to be only 2–3%. This percentage is expected to rise as Dagbani is now a subject in primary. The orthography currently used represents a number of distinctions, tone is not marked. Dagbani is agglutinative, but with some fusion of affixes, the constituent order in Dagbani sentences is usually agent–verb–object. A more-modern glossary was published in 1934 by a southern Ghanaian officer of the government, E. Foster Tamakloe in 1934. Various editors added to the wordlist and a publication was produced in 2003 by a Dagomba scholar. Dagbanli Wikipedia Blench, Roger Dagbani plant names Olawsky, Knut J. Aspects of Dagbani grammar, what is a word in Dagbani. In R. M. W. Dixon and Alexandra Y, Olawsky, Knut Interaction of tone and morphology in Dagbani Hudu, Fusheini. Dagbani tongue-root harmony, an account with ultrasound investigation. Dagbani focus particles, a descriptive study, Dagbani vowel harmony, triggers, targets and blockers. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, what is a phonological word in Dagbani
27.
Ewe language
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Ewe is a Niger–Congo language spoken in southeastern Ghana by over three million people. Ewe is part of a cluster of related languages commonly called Gbe, like many African languages, Ewe is tonal. The German Africanist Diedrich Hermann Westermann published many dictionaries and grammars of Ewe, other linguists who have worked on Ewe and closely related languages include Gilbert Ansre, Herbert Stahlke, Nick Clements, Roberto Pazzi, Felix K. Ameka, Alan Stewart Duthie, Hounkpati B. Capo, Enoch Aboh, and Chris Collins, oral history tells of a migration of the Gbe people from Ketu in present-day Benin. It is believed that the Ewes settled first at Notsie in Togo, the Ewe went through several mass exoduses beginning in the 11th century and placing current Ewe peoples in Togo, Ghana, and Benin from 15th to 17th century. The most famous of these is their migration from Notsie under the reign of King Agorkoli I, in the oral stories passed down through storytelling traditions, King Agorkoli was very cruel, as such the Ewe devised a plan to escape. Every night, the women would throw water on the walls of the kingdom which was made of mud, glass, rock, eventually the wall softened and they were able to cut a hole through a section of it and escape during the night. The men soon followed and walked backwards so that their footsteps would seem to lead into the kingdom. Some of the commonly named Ewe dialects are Aŋlɔ, Tɔŋu, Avenor, Agave people, Evedome, Awlan, Gbín, Pekí, Kpándo, Vhlin, Hó, Avɛ́no, Vo, Kpelen, Vɛ́, Danyi, Agu, Fodome, Wancé, Wací, Adángbe. Ethnologue 16 considers Waci and Kpesi to be enough to be considered separate languages. Waci intervenes geographically between Ewe proper and Gen, Kpesi forms a Gbe island in the Kabye area, Ewe is itself a dialect cluster of Gbe. Gbe languages include Gen, Aja, and Xwla and are spoken in an area that spans the southern part of Ghana into Togo, Benin, all Gbe languages share a small degree of intelligibility with one another. Some coastal and southern dialects of Ewe include, Aŋlɔ, Tongu, Avenor, Dzodze, some inland dialects indigenously characterized as Ewedomegbe include, Ho, Kpedze, Hohoe, Peki, Kpando, Fódome, Danyi, and Kpele. Though there are many classifications, distinct variations exist between towns that are just miles away from one another, H is a voiced fricative which has been described as uvular, pharyngeal, or glottal. The nasal consonants are not distinctive, as they appear before nasal vowels. Ewe is therefore said to have no nasal consonants. However, it is economical to argue that nasal /m, n, ɲ, ŋ/ are the underlying form. Occurs before unrounded vowels and before rounded vowels, Ewe is one of the few languages known to contrast vs. and vs
28.
Manding languages
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The Manding languages are mutually intelligible dialects or languages in West Africa of the Mande family. The Manding languages, and what distinguishes one from the rest, in addition, the nomenclature - being a mixture of indigenous terms and words applied by English and French speakers since before colonization - makes the picture complex and even confusing. The Mandinka people speak varieties from the first two groups, the differences between the western and eastern branches manifest themselves primarily phonetically. The Manding languages have an oral tradition, but also have written forms - adaptations of Arabic and Latin alphabets. Arabic was introduced into the region with Islam, and the writing was adapted to write in the Manding languages, Arabic script or Ajami is still commonly used for Mandinka. The Latin alphabet was introduced into the region following European conquest and it is used fairly widely, with official versions in many countries, for teaching, literacy and publication. The NKo alphabet, developed in 1949 by Solomana Kante, is designed to write Manding using a common literary standard comprehensible to speakers of all these varieties, a lesser-known alphabet for Bambara was developed in the early 20th century but is not used. Mande languages NKo PanAfrican L10n page on Manding
29.
Wolof language
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Wolof is a language of Senegal, the Gambia, and Mauritania, and the native language of the Wolof people. Like the neighbouring languages Serer and Fula, it belongs to the Senegambian branch of the Niger–Congo language family, unlike most other languages of Sub-Saharan Africa, Wolof is not a tonal language. Wolof originated as the language of the Lebu people and it is the most widely spoken language in Senegal, spoken natively by the Wolof people but also by most other Senegalese as a second language. Wolof dialects vary geographically and between rural and urban areas, dakar-Wolof, for instance, is an urban mixture of Wolof, French, and Arabic. Wolof is the spelling and may refer to the Wolof people or to Wolof culture. Variants include the older French Ouolof and the principally Gambian Wollof, Jolof, jollof, etc. now typically refers either to the Jolof Empire or to jollof rice, a common West African rice dish. Now-archaic forms include Volof and Olof, the English language is believed to have adopted some Wolof words, such as banana, via Spanish or Portuguese, and yum/yummy, from Wolof nyam to taste, nyam in Barbadian English meaning to eat. Wolof is spoken by more than 10 million people and about 40 percent of Senegals population speak Wolof as their native language, in the whole region from Dakar to Saint-Louis, and also west and southwest of Kaolack, Wolof is spoken by the vast majority of the people. Typically when various groups in Senegal come together in cities and towns. It is therefore spoken in almost every regional and departmental capital in Senegal, nevertheless, the official language of Senegal is French. In Serekunda, the Gambias largest town, although only a minority are ethnic Wolofs. The official language of the Gambia is English, Mandinka, Wolof, in Mauritania, about seven percent of the population speak Wolof because of the river that is shared with Senegal. There, the language is used only around the coastal regions. Wolof is one of the Senegambian languages, which are characterized by consonant mutation and it is often said to be closely related to the Fula language because of a misreading by Wilson of the data in Sapir that have long been used to classify the Atlantic languages. Senegalese/Mauritanian Wolof and Gambian Wolof are distinct national standards, they use different orthographies, however, both the spoken and written languages are mutually intelligible. Lebu Wolof, on the hand, is unintelligible with standard Wolof. Note, Phonetic transcriptions are printed between square brackets following the rules of the International Phonetic Alphabet, the Latin orthography of Wolof in Senegal was set by government decrees between 1971 and 1985. The language institute Centre de linguistique appliquée de Dakar is widely acknowledged as an authority when it comes to spelling rules for Wolof, Wolof is most often written in this orthography, in which phonemes have a clear one-to-one correspondence to graphemes
30.
Indigenous languages of the Americas
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Indigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land masses that constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of language families, as well as many language isolates. Many proposals to group these into higher-level families have been made and this scheme is rejected by nearly all specialists. According to UNESCO, most of the indigenous American languages in North America are critically endangered, the most widely spoken indigenous language is Southern Quechua, with about 6 to 7 million speakers, primarily in South America. Thousands of languages were spoken by various peoples in North and South America prior to their first contact with Europeans and these encounters occurred between the beginning of the 11th century and the end of the 15th century. Several indigenous cultures of the Americas had also developed their own writing systems, after pre-Columbian times, several indigenous creole languages developed in the Americas, based on European, indigenous and African languages. The European colonizers and their states had widely varying attitudes towards Native American languages. In Brazil, friars learned and promoted the Tupi language, as a result, indigenous American languages suffered from cultural suppression and loss of speakers. Many indigenous languages have become endangered, but others are vigorous. Several indigenous languages have been official status in the countries where they occur. In other cases official status is limited to regions where the languages are most spoken. Although sometimes enshrined in constitutions as official, the languages may be used infrequently in de facto official use, examples are Quechua in Peru and Aymara in Bolivia, where in practice, Spanish is dominant in all formal contexts. In North America and the Arctic region, Greenland in 2009 adopted Kalaallisut as its official language. In the United States, the Navajo language is the most spoken Native American language, the US Marine Corps recruited Navajo men, who were established as code talkers during World War II, to transmit secret US military messages. Neither the Germans nor Japanese ever deciphered the Navajo code, which was a using the Navajo language. Today, governments, universities, and indigenous peoples are continuing to work for the preservation and revitalization of indigenous American languages, in American Indian Languages, The Historical Linguistics of Native America, Lyle Campbell lists several hypotheses for the historical origins of Amerindian languages. These proliferated in the New World, notes, Extinct languages or families are indicated by, †. The number of members is indicated in parentheses
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