1.
Germany
–
Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a federal parliamentary republic in central-western Europe. It includes 16 constituent states, covers an area of 357,021 square kilometres, with about 82 million inhabitants, Germany is the most populous member state of the European Union. After the United States, it is the second most popular destination in the world. Germanys capital and largest metropolis is Berlin, while its largest conurbation is the Ruhr, other major cities include Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf and Leipzig. Various Germanic tribes have inhabited the northern parts of modern Germany since classical antiquity, a region named Germania was documented before 100 AD. During the Migration Period the Germanic tribes expanded southward, beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation, in 1871, Germany became a nation state when most of the German states unified into the Prussian-dominated German Empire. After World War I and the German Revolution of 1918–1919, the Empire was replaced by the parliamentary Weimar Republic, the establishment of the national socialist dictatorship in 1933 led to World War II and the Holocaust. After a period of Allied occupation, two German states were founded, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, in 1990, the country was reunified. In the 21st century, Germany is a power and has the worlds fourth-largest economy by nominal GDP. As a global leader in industrial and technological sectors, it is both the worlds third-largest exporter and importer of goods. Germany is a country with a very high standard of living sustained by a skilled. It upholds a social security and universal health system, environmental protection. Germany was a member of the European Economic Community in 1957. It is part of the Schengen Area, and became a co-founder of the Eurozone in 1999, Germany is a member of the United Nations, NATO, the G8, the G20, and the OECD. The national military expenditure is the 9th highest in the world, the English word Germany derives from the Latin Germania, which came into use after Julius Caesar adopted it for the peoples east of the Rhine. This in turn descends from Proto-Germanic *þiudiskaz popular, derived from *þeudō, descended from Proto-Indo-European *tewtéh₂- people, the discovery of the Mauer 1 mandible shows that ancient humans were present in Germany at least 600,000 years ago. The oldest complete hunting weapons found anywhere in the world were discovered in a mine in Schöningen where three 380, 000-year-old wooden javelins were unearthed
Germany
–
The
Nebra sky disk is dated to c. 1600 BC.
Germany
–
Flag
Germany
–
Martin Luther (1483–1546) initiated the
Protestant Reformation.
Germany
–
Foundation of the
German Empire in
Versailles, 1871.
Bismarck is at the center in a white uniform.
2.
Saterland
–
Saterland is a municipality in the district of Cloppenburg, in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is situated between the cities of Leer, Cloppenburg, and Oldenburg and it is home to the ethnic group the Saterland Frisians whose language is still used. The municipality of Saterland was formed in 1974, when the smaller municipalities Strücklingen, Ramsloh, Sedelsberg, in medieval times, Saterland was a sandy region occupying an area of about 15 km long by 1–4 km wide surrounded by marshes. It was settled between the 10th and 13th centuries by Frisians from East Frisia, being relatively isolated, the inhabitants developed their own form of the East Frisian language, Saterland Frisian, which survives to this day. The Saterfriesen, as the speakers of language are called in German, are the smallest minority recognized by the federal government. On the area of the municipality of Saterland is the VLF transmitter DHO38, a large VLF transmitter of the German Navy for sending commands to submarines
Saterland
–
A bilingual German-Saterland Frisian roadsign
Saterland
3.
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.
4.
Indo-European languages
–
The Indo-European languages are a language family of several hundred related languages and dialects. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to the estimate by Ethnologue, the most widely spoken Indo-European languages by native speakers are Spanish, English, Hindustani, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, and Punjabi, each with over 100 million speakers. Today, 46% of the population speaks an Indo-European language as a first language. The Indo-European family includes most of the languages of Europe, and parts of Western, Central. It was also predominant in ancient Anatolia, the ancient Tarim Basin and most of Central Asia until the medieval Turkic migrations, all Indo-European languages are descendants of a single prehistoric language, reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic era. Several disputed proposals link Indo-European to other language families. In the 16th century, European visitors to the Indian subcontinent began to notice similarities among Indo-Aryan, Iranian, in 1583, English Jesuit missionary Thomas Stephens in Goa wrote a letter to his brother in which he noted similarities between Indian languages and Greek and Latin. Another account to mention the ancient language Sanskrit came from Filippo Sassetti, a merchant born in Florence in 1540, writing in 1585, he noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian. However, neither Stephens nor Sassettis observations led to further scholarly inquiry and he included in his hypothesis Dutch, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German, later adding Slavic, Celtic, and Baltic languages. However, Van Boxhorns suggestions did not become known and did not stimulate further research. Ottoman Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi visited Vienna in 1665–1666 as part of a diplomatic mission, gaston Coeurdoux and others made observations of the same type. Coeurdoux made a comparison of Sanskrit, Latin and Greek conjugations in the late 1760s to suggest a relationship among them. Thomas Young first used the term Indo-European in 1813, deriving from the extremes of the language family. A synonym is Indo-Germanic, specifying the familys southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches, a number of other synonymous terms have also been used. Franz Bopps Comparative Grammar appeared between 1833 and 1852 and marks the beginning of Indo-European studies as an academic discipline, the classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics leads from this work to August Schleichers 1861 Compendium and up to Karl Brugmanns Grundriss, published in the 1880s. Brugmanns neogrammarian reevaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussures development of the theory may be considered the beginning of modern Indo-European studies. This led to the laryngeal theory, a major step forward in Indo-European linguistics. Isolated terms in Luwian/Hittite mentioned in Semitic Old Assyrian texts from the 20th and 19th centuries BC, Hittite texts from about 1650 BC, Armenian, writing known from the beginning of the 5th century AD
Indo-European languages
–
Franz Bopp, pioneer in the field of comparative linguistic studies.
Indo-European languages
5.
Germanic languages
–
It is the third most spoken Indo-European subdivision, behind Italic and Indo-Iranian, and ahead of Balto-Slavic languages. Limburgish varieties have roughly 1.3 million speakers along the Dutch–Belgian–German border, the main North Germanic languages are Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese, which have a combined total of about 20 million speakers. The East Germanic branch included Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic, the last to die off was Crimean Gothic, spoken in the late 18th century in some isolated areas of Crimea. The total number of Germanic languages throughout history is unknown, as some of them—especially East Germanic languages—disappeared during or after the Migration Period. Proto-Germanic, along all of its descendants, is characterized by a number of unique linguistic features. Early varieties of Germanic enter history with the Germanic tribes moving south from Scandinavia in the 2nd century BC, to settle in the area of todays northern Germany, furthermore, it is the de facto language of the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. It is also a language in Nicaragua and Malaysia. German is a language of Austria, Belgium, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Switzerland and has regional status in Italy, Poland, Namibia. German also continues to be spoken as a minority language by immigrant communities in North America, South America, Central America, Mexico, a German dialect, Pennsylvania Dutch, is still present amongst Anabaptist populations in Pennsylvania in the United States. Dutch is a language of Aruba, Belgium, Curaçao. The Netherlands also colonised Indonesia, but Dutch was scrapped as a language after Indonesian independence. Dutch was until 1925 an official language in South Africa, but evolved in and was replaced by Afrikaans, Afrikaans is one of the 11 official languages in South Africa and is a lingua franca of Namibia. It is used in other Southern African nations as well, low German is a collection of sometimes very diverse dialects spoken in the northeast of the Netherlands and northern Germany. Scots is spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster, frisian is spoken among half a million people who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. Luxembourgish is mainly spoken in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, though it extends into small parts of Belgium, France. Limburgish varieties are spoken in the Limburg and Rhineland regions, along the Dutch–Belgian–German border, Swedish is also one of the two official languages in Finland, along with Finnish, and the only official language in the Åland Islands. Danish is also spoken natively by the Danish minority in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, Norwegian is the official language of Norway. Icelandic is the language of Iceland, and is spoken by a significant minority in the Faroe Islands
Germanic languages
–
Countries where a Germanic language is the
first language of the majority of the population
6.
West Germanic languages
–
The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three branches of the Germanic family of languages. The three most prevalent West Germanic languages are English, German, and Dutch, additionally, several creoles, patois, and pidgins are based on Dutch and English as they were languages of colonial empires. The West Germanic languages share many lexemes not existing in North Germanic and/or East Germanic—archaisms as well as common neologisms, most scholars doubt that there was a Proto-West-Germanic proto-language common to the West Germanic languages and no others, though a few maintain that Proto-West-Germanic existed. Although there is quite a bit of knowledge about North Sea Germanic or Anglo-Frisian, linguists know almost nothing about Weser-Rhine Germanic, in fact, these two terms were coined in the 1940s to refer to groups of archeological findings rather than linguistic features. Only later were these terms applied to hypothetical dialectal differences within both regions, the rhotacism of /z/ to /r/. The development of the demonstrative pronoun ancestral to English this, rhotacism, for example, was largely complete in West Germanic at a time when North Germanic runic inscriptions still clearly distinguished the two phonemes. However, there are also a number of common archaisms in West Germanic shared by neither Old Norse nor Gothic, the debate on the existence of a Proto-West-Germanic clade was recently summarized, That North Germanic is. A unitary subgroup is completely obvious, as all of its dialects shared a series of innovations. Several scholars have published reconstructions of Proto-West-Germanic morphological paradigms and many authors have reconstructed individual Proto-West-Germanic morphological forms or lexemes, the first comprehensive reconstruction of the Proto-West-Germanic language was published in 2013 by Wolfram Euler. If indeed Proto-West-Germanic existed, it must have been between the 3rd and 7th centuries, after that, the split into West and North Germanic occurred. It has been argued that, judging by their nearly identical syntax, over the course of this period, the dialects diverged successively. Bordering dialects very probably continued to be mutually intelligible even beyond the boundaries of the consonant shift, in fact, many dialects of Limburgish and Ripuarian are still mutually intelligible today. The High German consonant shift distinguished the High German languages from the other West Germanic languages, by early modern times, the span had extended into considerable differences, ranging from Highest Alemannic in the South to Northern Low Saxon in the North. Although both extremes are considered German, they are not mutually intelligible, the southernmost varieties have completed the second sound shift, whereas the northern dialects remained unaffected by the consonant shift. Of modern German varieties, Low German is the one that most resembles modern English, the district of Angeln, from which the name English derives, is in the extreme northern part of Germany between the Danish border and the Baltic coast. The area of the Saxons lay south of Anglia, the Anglo-Saxons, two Germanic tribes, were a combination of a number of peoples from northern Germany and the Jutland Peninsula. Note that divisions between subfamilies of Germanic are rarely defined, most form dialect continua, with adjacent dialects being mutually intelligible. Also note that English is part of the North Sea Germanic branch of the West Germanic languages, some may only appear in the older languages but are no longer apparent in the modern languages
West Germanic languages
–
Icelandic
7.
Ingvaeonic
–
Ingvaeonic is named after the Ingaevones, a West Germanic cultural group or proto-tribe along the North Sea coast. It is not thought of as a monolithic proto-language, but rather as a group of related dialects that underwent several areal changes in relative unison. The other groupings are Istvaeonic, from the Istvaeones, including Dutch, Afrikaans, and related languages and it did not generally undergo the nasal spirant law, it kept the three plural endings distinct and it did not have the -s plural. However, it underwent near-full monophthongization, lost the reflexive pronoun and had the same four relic verbs in weak class 3, amsterdam, John Benjamins B. V. ISBN 978-90-272-3255-7. Das Westgermanische - von der Herausbildung im 3,244 p. in German with English summary, London/Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-9812110-7-8. Maurer, Friedrich Nordgermanen und Alemannen, Studien zur germanischen und frühdeutschen Sprachgeschichte, Stammes- und Volkskunde, ringe, Donald R. and Taylor, Ann. The Development of Old English - A Linguistic History of English, band I, Einführung – Genealogie – Konstanten. Early Germanic Grammar, Pre-, Proto-, and Post-Germanic
Ingvaeonic
–
North Germanic
8.
Anglo-Frisian languages
–
The Anglo-Frisian languages is the group of West Germanic languages that includes Anglic and Frisian. For additional detail, see Phonological history of Old English, ingvaeonic, also known as North Sea Germanic, is a postulated grouping of the West Germanic languages that comprises Old Frisian, Old English and Old Saxon. It is not thought of as a monolithic proto-language, but rather as a group of related dialects that underwent several areal changes in relative unison. High German languages Low Franconian languages Friedrich Maurer, Nordgermanen und Alemannen, Studien zur Sprachgeschichte, Stammes- und Volkskunde,244 p. in German with English summary, Verlag Inspiration Un Ltd. Ringe, Donald R. and Taylor, Ann, the Development of Old English - A Linguistic History of English, vol
Anglo-Frisian languages
–
English
9.
Frisian languages
–
The Frisian languages are the closest living language group to the Anglic languages, the two groups make up the Anglo-Frisian languages group. However, modern English and Frisian are not mutually intelligible, nor are Frisian languages intelligible among themselves, due to indepedent linguistic innovations, the three Frisian languages have been heavily influenced by and bear similarities to Dutch, Low German and/or Danish, depending upon their location. There are three varieties of Frisian, West Frisian, Saterland Frisian, and North Frisian, West Frisian is strongly influenced by Dutch, and, similar to Dutch, is described as being between English and German. The other Frisian varieties, meanwhile, have influenced by German, Low German. The North Frisian language especially is further segmented into several strongly diverse dialects, stadsfries is not Frisian, but a Dutch dialect influenced by Frisian. Frisian is called Frysk in West Frisian, Fräisk in Saterland Frisian, and Frasch, Fresk, Freesk and this local language is now, in turn, being replaced by standard Dutch. An increasing number of native Dutch speakers in the province are learning Frisian as a second language, in the North Frisia region of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, there were 10,000 North Frisian speakers in the 1970s. Although many of live on the mainland, most are found on the islands, notably Sylt, Föhr, Amrum. The local corresponding North Frisian dialects are still in use, as a regional language in the Netherlands, Frisian is only spoken by a certain demographic, specifically rural, lower-class people in contrast with the Dutch speaking upper-class. Speakers who had Frisian as their first language often maintained the Frisian system of no homophony when speaking Frisian, speakers of the many dialects of Frisian may also be found in the United States and Canada. Saterland and North Frisian are officially recognised and protected as minority languages in Germany, ISO 639-1 code fy and ISO 639-2 code fry were assigned to Frisian, but that was changed in November 2005 to Western Frisian. According to the ISO639 Registration Authority the previous usage of code has been for Western Frisian, the new ISO639 code stq is used for the Saterland Frisian language, a variety of Eastern Frisian. The new ISO639 code frr is used for the North Frisian language variants spoken in parts of Schleswig-Holstein, the Ried fan de Fryske Beweging is an organization which works for the preservation of the Frisian language and culture in the Dutch province of Friesland. The Fryske Academy also plays a role, since its foundation in 1938, to conduct research on Frisian language, history. Recent attempts have allowed Frisian be used more in some of the domains of education, media. Nevertheless, Saterland Frisian and most dialects of North Frisian are seriously endangered, moreover, Frisian runs the risk of dissolving into Dutch, especially in Friesland, where both languages are used. In the Early Middle Ages the Frisian lands stretched from the area around Bruges, in what is now Belgium, to the river Weser, at that time, the Frisian language was spoken along the entire southern North Sea coast. Old Frisian, however, was similar to Old English
Frisian languages
–
Bilingual sign in German and
North Frisian, respectively, in
Husum,
Germany
Frisian languages
–
West Frisian
Frisian languages
–
Old Frisian text from 1345.
Frisian languages
–
Bilingual signs
Hindeloopen in
Friesland (Netherlands) with the West Frisian name above and the Dutch below
10.
West Frisian language
–
West Frisian, or simply Frisian is a West Germanic language spoken mostly in the province of Friesland in the north of the Netherlands, mostly by those of Frisian ancestry. It is the most widely spoken of the three Frisian languages, the name West Frisian is only used outside the Netherlands, to distinguish this language from the closely related Frisian languages of Saterland Frisian and North Frisian spoken in Germany. Most speakers of West Frisian live in the province of Friesland in the north of the Netherlands, Friesland has 643,000 inhabitants, of whom 94% can understand spoken Frisian, 74% can speak Frisian, 75% can read Frisian, and 27% can write it. For over half of the inhabitants of the province of Friesland, 55%, also, many Frisians have left their province in the last sixty years for more prosperous parts of the Netherlands. In addition, there is a Frisian diaspora abroad, with Friesland having sent, in relative terms, the largest concentrations of Frisian speakers outside the Netherlands are located in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Apart from the use of Frisian as a first language, it is spoken as a second language by about 120,000 people in the province of Friesland. One part of Friesland, Stellingwerf in the south-east, does not speak Frisian, the least-used dialect of West Frisian is Skiermûntseagersk, the island dialect of Schiermonnikoog, which is actually on the verge of extinction, because it is spoken by no more than 50–100 people. The Amelansk dialect is spoken on the island Ameland and is the only Frisian variety that does not devoice final obstruants, Hindeloopen Frisian, the archaic Frisian dialect of the peninsular harbour town of Hindeloopen on the west coast, is still spoken by some 300 people at the most. Skylgersk and Aastersk are the dialects of the western and eastern parts of the island of Terschelling and have about 800 and 400 speakers respectively and they are separated from each other by the Dutch dialect of Midslands, which is spoken in the central part of Terschelling. Because of their insular nature these four less-used dialects are also those that have deviated the most from mainstream Frisian, in fact, three of the four widely used mainland dialects are so much alike that a non-Frisian could probably not make out any differences. The Noardhoeksk dialect is spoken in the eastern corner of the province. By far the two most widely spoken West Frisian dialects are Clay Frisian and Wood Frisian, both these names are derived from the Frisian landscape. In the western and north-western parts of the province, the region where Clay Frisian is spoken, the dialect spoken in the eastern area is thus called Wood Frisian. Although Klaaifrysk and Wâldfrysk are mutually very easily intelligible, there are, at least to native Frisian speakers and these include the pronunciation of the words my, dy, hy, sy, wy and by, and the diphthongs ei and aai. In the early Middle Ages the Frisian lands stretched from the area around Bruges, in what is now Belgium, to the river Weser, at that time, the Frisian language was spoken along the entire southern North Sea coast. Old Frisian bore a similarity to Old English. This similarity was reinforced in the late Middle Ages by the Ingvaeonic sound shift, which affected Frisian and English, both English and Frisian are marked by the suppression of the Germanic nasal in a word like us, soft or goose, see Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law. Also, when followed by some vowels the Germanic k developed into a ch sound, for example, the Frisian for cheese and church is tsiis and tsjerke, whereas in Dutch it is kaas and kerk
West Frisian language
–
Doutzen Kroes speaks West Frisian
West Frisian language
–
West Frisian
West Frisian language
–
Frisian-Dutch signs in
Hindeloopen
11.
North Frisian language
–
North Frisian is a minority language of Germany, spoken by about 10,000 people in North Frisia. The language is part of the group of the West Germanic Frisian languages. The language comprises 10 dialects which are divided into an insular. North Frisian is closely related to the Saterland Frisian language of Northwest Germany, all of these are also closely related to the English language forming the Anglo-Frisian group. The phonological system of the North Frisian dialects is strongly being influenced by Standard German and is adapting to that of the German language. With a number of native speakers probably even less than 10,000 and decreasing use in mainland North Frisia and it is protected as a minority language and has become an official language in the Nordfriesland district and on Heligoland island. Together these three form the group of Frisian languages. The English language is closely related to Frisian. The two languages are classified in a common Anglo-Frisian group, Anglo-Frisian is grouped among the Ingvaeonic languages together with Low German. The related Low German has developed differently since Old Saxon times and has lost many Ingvaeonic characteristics, the North Frisian dialects can be grouped into two main dialectal divisions, those of the mainland and the insular dialects. All in all these two groups comprise 10 dialects, the dialect spoken on the Halligen is one of the mainland dialects though. Typically one distinguishes between the ten dialects that have been spoken since the beginning of Frisian linguistic studies in the 19th century. The islands of Sylt, Föhr and Amrum were colonised around 800 while the mainland was settled by Frisians in AD1100, add to this the various influences of neighbouring languages on the dialects. The sentence displayed below in many variants reads, Shine, old moon, cried Häwelmann, but the moon was nowhere to be seen and the stars neither, they had all already gone to bed. Insular Sölring „Ljucht, ual Muun, ljucht. ”Skriilt Häwelmann, man di Muun wiar narigen tö sen en uk di Stiaren ek, rep Heewelmaan, man a muun wiar nochhuaren tu sen an a stäären uk ei, jo wiar al altermaal tu baad gingen. Rüp Heäwelman, oawers de Muun wear naarni tu sin’n en uk de Steern ni, dja wear al allemoal tu Baad gingen. Mainland Northern Goesharde Frisian, Hoorninger Fräisch variety of Langenhorn „Jocht, uule moune, jocht. ”Biilked Hääwelmoon, ors e moune waas närngs to schüns än da steere ok ai, ja weern al aal to beede gingen. Wiedingharde Frisian „Ljocht, uuile moone, ljocht. ”Biilked Hääwelmuon, män e moone was näärgen to schüns än uk e steere ai, jä würn al altomoale to beerd gingen
North Frisian language
–
Bilingual sign in German and North Frisian, respectively, in
Husum,
Germany
North Frisian language
–
North Frisian dialects
12.
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]
13.
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
14.
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
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Logo of the
Unicode Consortium
15.
Netherlands
–
The Netherlands is the main constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It is a densely populated country located in Western Europe with three territories in the Caribbean. The European part of the Netherlands borders Germany to the east, Belgium to the south, and the North Sea to the northwest, sharing borders with Belgium, the United Kingdom. The three largest cities in the Netherlands are Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague, Amsterdam is the countrys capital, while The Hague holds the Dutch seat of parliament and government. The port of Rotterdam is the worlds largest port outside East-Asia, the name Holland is used informally to refer to the whole of the country of the Netherlands. Netherlands literally means lower countries, influenced by its low land and flat geography, most of the areas below sea level are artificial. Since the late 16th century, large areas have been reclaimed from the sea and lakes, with a population density of 412 people per km2 –507 if water is excluded – the Netherlands is classified as a very densely populated country. Only Bangladesh, South Korea, and Taiwan have both a population and higher population density. Nevertheless, the Netherlands is the worlds second-largest exporter of food and agricultural products and this is partly due to the fertility of the soil and the mild climate. In 2001, it became the worlds first country to legalise same-sex marriage, the Netherlands is a founding member of the EU, Eurozone, G-10, NATO, OECD and WTO, as well as being a part of the Schengen Area and the trilateral Benelux Union. The first four are situated in The Hague, as is the EUs criminal intelligence agency Europol and this has led to the city being dubbed the worlds legal capital. The country also ranks second highest in the worlds 2016 Press Freedom Index, the Netherlands has a market-based mixed economy, ranking 17th of 177 countries according to the Index of Economic Freedom. It had the thirteenth-highest per capita income in the world in 2013 according to the International Monetary Fund, in 2013, the United Nations World Happiness Report ranked the Netherlands as the seventh-happiest country in the world, reflecting its high quality of life. The Netherlands also ranks joint second highest in the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index, the region called Low Countries and the country of the Netherlands have the same toponymy. Place names with Neder, Nieder, Nether and Nedre and Bas or Inferior are in use in all over Europe. They are sometimes used in a relation to a higher ground that consecutively is indicated as Upper, Boven, Oben. In the case of the Low Countries / the Netherlands the geographical location of the region has been more or less downstream. The geographical location of the region, however, changed over time tremendously
Netherlands
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The Netherlands in 5500 BC
Netherlands
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Flag
Netherlands
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The Netherlands in 500 BC
Netherlands
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An oak figurine found in
Willemstad, North Brabant (4500 BC).
16.
East Frisia
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East Frisia or Eastern Friesland is a coastal region in the northwest of the German federal state of Lower Saxony. It is the section of Frisia between West Frisia in the Netherlands and North Frisia in Schleswig-Holstein. Administratively Ostfriesland belongs to three districts, namely Aurich, Leer, Wittmund and to the city of Emden, there are 465,000 people living in an area of 3,144.26 square kilometres. There is a chain of islands off the coast, called the East Frisian Islands and these islands are Borkum, Juist, Norderney, Baltrum, Langeoog, Spiekeroog and Wangerooge. The geographical region of East Frisia was inhabited in Paleolithic times by reindeer hunters of the Hamburg culture, later there were Mesolithic and Neolithic settlements of various cultures. The period after prehistory can only be reconstructed from archaeological evidence, access to the early history of East Frisia is possible in part through archaeology and in part through the studying of external sources such as Roman documents. The first proven historical event was the arrival of a Roman fleet under Drusus in 12 BC, the earlier settlements, known solely through material remnants but whose peoples name for themselves remains unknown, led up to the invasion of Germanic tribes belonging to the Ingvaeonic group. Those were Chauci mentioned by Tacitus, and Frisians, the region between the rivers Ems and Weser was thereupon inhabited by the Chauci, however, after the second century AD there is no mention of the Chauci. They were partly displaced by Frisian expansion after about 500, and were partially absorbed into the Frisian society. Saxons also settled the region and the East Frisian population of medieval times is based on a mixture of Frisian, nevertheless, the Frisian element is predominant in the coastal area, while the population of the higher Geest area expresses more Saxon influence. Historical information becomes clearer by early Carolingian time, when a Frisian kingdom united the area from present-day West Frisia throughout East Frisia up to the river Weser. It was ruled by kings like the famous Radbod whose known names were mentioned in folk tales until recent times. Frisia was a kingdom, and it was crushed by Pippin of Herstal in 689. East Frisia then became part of the Frankish Empire, charles the Great then divided East Frisia into two counties. At this time, Christianization by the missionaries Liudger and Willehad started, one part of East Frisia became a part of the diocese of Bremen, with the decay of the Carolingian empire, East Frisia lost its former bindings, and a unity of independent self-governed districts was established. Their elections were held every year to choose the Redjeven, who had to be judges as well as administrators or governors and this system prevented the establishment of a feudalistic system in East Frisia during mediaeval times. Frisians regarded themselves as people not obliged to any foreign authority. This period is called the time of the Friesische Freiheit and is represented by the still well-known salute Eala Frya Fresena that affirmed the non-existence of any feudality
East Frisia
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Birds on “Watt” (mudflat)
East Frisia
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Map of East Frisia in Germany
East Frisia
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Morning fog in East Frisia, 2003
East Frisia
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A cup of East Frisian tea with cream
17.
Lauwers
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The Lauwers is a river in the Netherlands. It forms part of the border between the provinces of Friesland and Groningen, from the 730s to Widukinds defeat in 785 it was part of the border of the Frankish Empire. The former Lauwerszee and the present-day Lauwersmeer are both named after the river, which as a stream has its source southeast of the village of Surhuisterveen. Near Gerkesklooster/Stroobos it crosses the Prinsesmargrietkanaal/van Starkenborghkanaal, the Lauwers achieves the width of a true river at the point where it gains its tributary, the Oude Vaart, near the Schalkendam. Further along its course, the Lauwers splits into two branches, the Frisian Oude Lauwers and the Zijldiep, in Groningen province. The Lauwers meets the sea at the Wadden Sea, emptying into a channel between the islands of Schiermonnikoog and Rottumerplaat/Rottumeroog, which can be viewed as the continuation of the river
Lauwers
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Lauwers River
Lauwers
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For other uses, see
Lauwers (surname).
18.
Weser
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The Weser is a river in Northwestern Germany. On the opposite bank is the town of Nordenham at the foot of the Butjadingen Peninsula, thus, the Weser has an overall length of 452 kilometres. Together with its Werra tributary, which originates in Thuringia, its length is 744 kilometres, the Weser river is the longest river whose course reaches the sea and lies entirely within German national territory. The upper part of its course leads through a region called the Weserbergland. Between Minden and the North Sea, humans have largely canalised the river, eight hydroelectric dams stand along its length. It is linked to the Dortmund-Ems Canal via the Coastal Canal, a large reservoir on the Eder river, the main tributary of the Fulda, is used to regulate water levels on the Weser so as to ensure adequate depth for shipping throughout the year. The dam, built in 1914, was bombed and severely damaged by British aircraft in May 1943, causing destruction and approximately 70 deaths downstream. As of 2013 the Edersee reservoir, a summer resort area. The Weser enters the North Sea in the southernmost part of the German Bight, in the North Sea, it splits up into two arms representing the ancient riverbed at the end of the last ice age. These sea-arms are called Alte Weser and Neue Weser and they represent the major waterways for ships heading for the harbors of Bremerhaven, Nordenham and Bremen. The Alte Weser lighthouse marks the northernmost point of the Weser and this lighthouse replaced the historic and famous Roter Sand lighthouse in 1964. The largest tributary of the Weser is the Aller, which south of Bremen. Dieter Berger, Geographische Namen in Deutschland, karsten Meinke, Die Entwicklung der Weser im Nordwestdeutschen Flachland während des jüngeren Pleistozäns. Ludger Feldmann und Klaus-Dieter Meyer, Quartär in Niedersachsen, exkursionsführer zur Jubiläums-Hauptversammlung der Deutschen Quartärvereinigung in Hannover. Hans Heinrich Seedorf und Hans-Heinrich Meyer, Landeskunde Niedersachsen, band 1, Historische Grundlagen und naturräumliche Ausstattung. Ludger Feldmann, Das Quartär zwischen Harz und Allertal mit einem Beitrag zur Landschaftsgeschichte im Tertiär, papierflieger, Clausthal-Zellerfeld 2002, Seite 133ff und passim. Heinz Conradis, Der Kampf um die Weservertiefung in alter Zeit, J. W. A. Hunichs, Practische Anleitung zum Deich-, Siel- und Schlengenbau. Herausgegeben von der Mittelweser AG, Carl Schünemann Verlag, Bremen 1960, kuratorium für Forschung im Küsteningenieurswesen, Die Küste
Weser
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The Weser near Bad Oeynhausen
Weser
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Mittelland Canal / River Weser Lock in Minden taken in 1977
Weser
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View north of the River Weser and the road bridge at Minden
Weser
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Southern view of the River Weser from the road bridge at Minden in 1977
19.
Ems (river)
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The Ems is a river in northwestern Germany. It runs through the states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony and its total length is 371 kilometres. The source of the river is in the southern Teutoburg Forest in North Rhine-Westphalia, in Lower Saxony the brook becomes a comparatively large river. Here the swampy region of Emsland is named after the river, in Meppen the Ems is joined by its largest tributary, the Hase River. It then flows northwards, close to the Dutch border, into East Frisia, near Emden it flows into the Dollart bay and then continues as a tidal river towards the Dutch city of Delfzijl. As the parties are now friendly states with an open border and it became an active issue in late July,1914, when the Imperial German government began plans to mine the whole of the estuary that they claimed, in preparation for the launching of the Great War. The Dutch government endorsed the declaration, thus relieving itself of an obligation to declare war on Germany for violating its neutrality. After the war, the dispute was resumed, past Delfzijl, the Ems discharges into the Wadden Sea, part of the North Sea. The two straits that separate the German island of Borkum from its neighbours Rottumeroog and Memmert continue the name Ems, ptolemys name for it was the Amisios potamos, and in Latin Amisius fluvius. The others used the same, or Amisia, or Amasia or Amasios, the identification is certain, as it always is listed between the Rhine and the Weser, and was the only river leading to the Teutoburg Forest. The Amisius flowed from the Teutoburg Forest, home of the Cherusci, with the Bructeri and these tribes were among the initial Franks. The Romans were quite interested in adding them to the empire, as the river was navigable to their ships, they hoped to use it to access the tribes at its upper end. Surrounding the river for most of its length, however, were swamps, bogs and marshes. The Romans found they had no place to stand, could not pick the most favourable ground, because there was none and they were stopped at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest,9 AD, and were checked again 6 years later. The Ems became a road leading nowhere for them, nor were they able to bridge the swamps satisfactorily with causeways. Construction of canals in more modern times connected the Ems to other waterways, opening it as a highway of industrial transportation
Ems (river)
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The Ems near
Lingen
Ems (river)
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The Ems only a few hundred yards from its spring in
Schloß Holte-Stukenbrock
Ems (river)
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Ems near Telgte
Ems (river)
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Ems in Meppen
20.
Low German
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Low German or Low Saxon is a West Germanic language spoken mainly in northern Germany and the eastern part of the Netherlands. It is descended from Old Saxon in its earliest form, as an Ingvaeonic language, Low German is quite distinct from the Irminonic languages like Standard German. It is closely related to Anglo-Frisian group of languages and more distantly to Dutch and this difference resulted from the High German consonant shift, with the Uerdingen and Benrath lines being two notable linguistic borders. Dialects of Low German are widely spoken in the area of the Netherlands and are written there with an orthography based on Standard Dutch orthography. Small portions of northern Hesse and northern Thuringia are traditionally Low Saxon-speaking too, historically, Low German was also spoken in formerly German parts of Poland as well as in East Prussia and the Baltic States of Estonia and Latvia. Under the name Low Saxon, there are speakers in the Dutch north-eastern provinces of Groningen, Drenthe, Stellingwerf, Overijssel, German speakers in this area fled the Red Army or were forcibly expelled after the border changes at the end of World War II. Today, there are still speakers outside Germany and the Netherlands to be found in the areas of present-day Poland. In some of these countries, the language is part of the Mennonite religion, there are Mennonite communities in Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, and Minnesota which use Low German in their religious services and communities. The type of Low German spoken in communities and in the Midwest region of the United States has diverged since emigration. The survival of the language is tenuous in many places and has died out in places where assimilation has occurred. Mennonite colonies in Paraguay, Belize, and Chihuahua, Mexico have made Low German a co-official language of the community, in Germany, native speakers of Low German call it Platt, Plattdüütsch or Nedderdüütsch. In the Netherlands, native speakers refer to their language as dialect, plat, nedersaksies, or the name of their village, officially, Low German is called Niederdeutsch by the German authorities and Nedersaksisch by the Dutch authorities. Plattdeutsch/Niederdeutsch and Platduits/Nedersaksisch are seen in texts from the German. In Danish it is called Plattysk, Nedertysk or, rarely, Mennonite Low German is called Plautdietsch. Etymologically Platt meant clear in the sense of a language the people could understand. In Dutch, the word Plat can also mean improper, or rude, the ISO 639-2 language code for Low German has been nds since May 2000. The question of whether Low German should be considered a separate language, linguistics offers no simple, generally accepted criterion to decide this question. Scholarly arguments have been put forward in favour of classifying Low German as a German dialect, as said, these arguments are not linguistic but rather socio-political and build mainly around the fact that Low German has no official standard form or use in sophisticated media
Low German
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City limits sign: this city is called
Emlichheim in
Standard German and Emmelkamp in Low German (and Dutch)
Low German
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Approximate area in which Low German/Low Saxon dialects are spoken in Europe.
Low German
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A public school in Witmarsum Colony (
Paraná,
Southern Brazil), teaches in the
Portuguese language and in Plautdietsch.
21.
Wangerooge
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Wangerooge is one of the 32 Frisian Islands in the North Sea located close to the coasts of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. It is also a municipality in the district of Friesland in Lower Saxony in Germany, Wangerooge is one of the East Frisian Islands. As of the census of 2004, the island has 1,055 inhabitants, especially in summer the island accommodates more than 7,000 visitors a day. Wangerooge is separated from the island of Spiekeroog by a gat known as the Harle, the island is attractive to tourists due to the beaches, various recreation facilities and its relaxed atmosphere. The islands slogan, visible on a sign at the harbor, emphasizes this, God created time, in addition, windsurfing, kite-surfing and board-riding activities attract younger people. In order to guarantee a relaxed atmosphere, cars are prohibited on the island, the island can be reached by ship from Harlesiel, or it can be reached by plane via its airfield, regular service being offered from Harlesiel, Bremen, or Hamburg. The ferries leave at different times every day according to the tide, as on most East Frisian Islands, a small narrow gauge railway line, the Wangerooge Island Railway, connects the harbor to the main village. As for historical sites and other places of interest, the island has one active lighthouse, one old lighthouse, since the whole island used to be shifting constantly eastwards until sea defenses were built a century ago, old buildings were gradually lost to the sea. The Western Tower was built in 1597 and was originally in the east of the island, Wangerooge is also known as the site of a historic World War II B-17 Flying Fortress crash, or rather a double crash. During a bombing mission on Hamburg on New Years Eve,1944, while in tight formation, one plane was shot down and became entangled with the plane below it. One of the managed to take control of the two aircraft and steer them back towards the German coast for an emergency landing. At the time, the two entangled aircraft were described as resembling breeding dragonflies as the turrets of each plane were caught in the chassis of the other. Most of the bailed out, while two remained and successfully made a crash landing in a field. East Frisian Islands List of ferry boats of the East Frisian Islands Official website Interactive picture walk Ferry schedules
Wangerooge
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Wangerooge from the air, approaching the island from the south
Wangerooge
Wangerooge
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Aerial view of Wangerooge
Wangerooge
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Old Lighthouse
22.
Language shift
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Language shift, also known as language transfer or language replacement or language assimilation, is the process whereby a speech community of a language shifts to speaking another language. Often, languages that are perceived to be higher status stabilise or spread at the expense of other languages that are perceived by their own speakers to be lower-status. For prehistory, Forster et al. and Forster and Renfrew observe that there is a correlation of language shift with intrusive male Y chromosomes but not necessarily with intrusive female mtDNA. They conclude that technological innovation or military prowess causes immigration of at least some males, the process whereby a community of speakers of one language becomes bilingual in another language, and gradually shifts allegiance to the second language is called assimilation. When a linguistic community ceases to use their language, language death is said to occur. The rate of assimilation is the percentage of individuals with a mother tongue who speak another language more often in the home. The data are used to measure the use of a language in the lifetime of a person. In the context of the Indo-European migrations, it has noted that small groups can change a larger cultural area. Michael Witzel refers to Ehret’s model which stresses the osmosis, or a ball, or Mallory’s Kulturkugel. According to Ehret, ethnicity and language can shift with relative ease in small societies, due to the cultural, economic, the group bringing new traits may initially be small, contributing features that can be fewer in number than those of the already local culture. The emerging combined group may then initiate a recurrent, expansionist process of ethnic, ethnohistorical cases demonstrate that small elite groups have successfully imposed their languages in non-state situations. Anthony gives the example of the Luo-speaking Acholi in northern Uganda in the 17th and 18th century, anthony notes that elite recruitment may be a suitable term for this system. Historical examples for status shift are the early Welsh and Lutheran Bible translations, leading to the liturgical languages Welsh, in the course of the 19th century, this number dropped significantly. By 1920, already a third of the population of the area had shifted to German as their language of communication. After the Carinthian Plebiscite in the 1920s, and especially after World War II, in the same region, today only some 13% of the people still speaks Slovene, while more than 85% of the population speaks German. The figures for the region are equally telling, in 1818, around 35% of the population of Carinthia spoke Slovene, by 1910. These changes were almost entirely the result of a shift in the population, with emigration. Despite the withdrawal of Belarus from the USSR proclaimed in 1991, according to a study done by the Belarusian government in 2009, 72% of Belarusians speak Russian at home, and Belarusian is used by only 11. 9% of Belarusians
Language shift
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"Speak French, Be Clean", written on the wall of the Aiguatébia-Talau school prohibiting to speak Catalan
Language shift
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Proportion of languages used at home by residents aged 6 or over in Taiwan in 2010, sorted by birth year. The chart shorts the tendency that speech communities of
Taiwanese local languages are shifting to speak
Mandarin.
23.
German language
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German is a West Germanic language that is mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, South Tyrol, the German-speaking Community of Belgium and it is also one of the three official languages of Luxembourg. Major languages which are most similar to German include other members of the West Germanic language branch, such as Afrikaans, Dutch, English, Luxembourgish and it is the second most widely spoken Germanic language, after English. One of the languages of the world, German is the first language of about 95 million people worldwide. The German speaking countries are ranked fifth in terms of publication of new books. German derives most of its vocabulary from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, a portion of German words are derived from Latin and Greek, and fewer are borrowed from French and English. With slightly different standardized variants, German is a pluricentric language, like English, German is also notable for its broad spectrum of dialects, with many unique varieties existing in Europe and also other parts of the world. The history of the German language begins with the High German consonant shift during the migration period, when Martin Luther translated the Bible, he based his translation primarily on the standard bureaucratic language used in Saxony, also known as Meißner Deutsch. Copies of Luthers Bible featured a long list of glosses for each region that translated words which were unknown in the region into the regional dialect. Roman Catholics initially rejected Luthers translation, and tried to create their own Catholic standard of the German language – the difference in relation to Protestant German was minimal. It was not until the middle of the 18th century that a widely accepted standard was created, until about 1800, standard German was mainly a written language, in urban northern Germany, the local Low German dialects were spoken. Standard German, which was different, was often learned as a foreign language with uncertain pronunciation. Northern German pronunciation was considered the standard in prescriptive pronunciation guides though, however, German was the language of commerce and government in the Habsburg Empire, which encompassed a large area of Central and Eastern Europe. Until the mid-19th century, it was essentially the language of townspeople throughout most of the Empire and its use indicated that the speaker was a merchant or someone from an urban area, regardless of nationality. Some cities, such as Prague and Budapest, were gradually Germanized in the years after their incorporation into the Habsburg domain, others, such as Pozsony, were originally settled during the Habsburg period, and were primarily German at that time. Prague, Budapest and Bratislava as well as cities like Zagreb, the most comprehensive guide to the vocabulary of the German language is found within the Deutsches Wörterbuch. This dictionary was created by the Brothers Grimm and is composed of 16 parts which were issued between 1852 and 1860, in 1872, grammatical and orthographic rules first appeared in the Duden Handbook. In 1901, the 2nd Orthographical Conference ended with a standardization of the German language in its written form
German language
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Old Frisian (Alt-Friesisch)
German language
–
The widespread popularity of the
Bible translated into German by
Martin Luther helped establish modern German
German language
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Examples of German language in
Namibian everyday life
German language
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German-language newspapers in the U.S. in 1922
24.
Free State of Oldenburg
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The Free State of Oldenburg was a state of the Weimar Republic. It was established in 1918 following the abdication of the Grand Duke Frederick Augustus II following the German Revolution. By the beginning of World War II in 1939, as a result of territorial changes. After World War II, Oldenburg was merged into the newly founded state of Lower Saxony as the region of Oldenburg. The two enclaves became part of the States of Schleswig-Holstein and Rheinland-Pfalz respectively, duchy of Oldenburg Rulers of Oldenburg
Free State of Oldenburg
–
Flag
25.
Bilingual sign
–
A bilingual sign is the representation on a panel of texts in more than one language. The use of signs is usually reserved for situations where there is legally administered bilingualism or where there is a relevant tourist or commercial interest. However, more informal uses of bilingual signs are found on businesses in areas where there is a high degree of bilingualism. Beyond bilingualism, there is a tendency toward the substitution of internationally standardized symbols. The use of signs has experienced a remarkable expansion in recent times. The increase in bilingualism there has been paralleled by increases in international travel, as a result, all street signs in the Brussels Capital Region are bilingual in Dutch and French. Another example is the German-speaking South Tyrol, which was annexed to Italy during World War I, in observance of international treaties, Italy was eventually compelled to acknowledge and accommodate its German-speaking citizens through the use of bilingual signs and countless other measures. In Greece, virtually all signs are bilingual, with the Greek text in yellow font, if the sign is Greek only, an equivalent sign in English will often be situated nearby. Bilingual signs are used in the Republic of Ireland, with all roads, towns. The Irish appears on the top of the sign with the English underneath, the exception to this is in Gaeltacht regions, where only Irish language signage tends to be used. In Finland, the multilingual signs appeared at the end of the 19th century, the signs were in the official languages Swedish, Finnish and, during that period, also Russian. After the independence of Finland, the signs became bilingual Finnish - Swedish in the bilingual areas of the country. Bilingual signs are used in the United Kingdom, in Wales, Welsh and English are official languages and most road signs are bilingual. Each local authority decides which language is shown first, in Scotland, Scottish Gaelic is increasingly visible on road signs, not only in the north-west and on the islands, but also on main primary routes. Railway station signs and signs on buildings such as the Scottish Parliament are increasingly bilingual. In parts of Slovenia, where languages other than Slovene are official and this regulation is not always strictly enforced, but nevertheless all road signs in these areas are bilingual. In Turkey bilingual village signs are used in Eastern Anatolia Region Airports, european airports have signs that are generally bilingual with the local language and English, although there are significant variations between countries. In multilingual countries such as Belgium and Switzerland, airports generally have signs in three or four languages, provincial road signs are also bilingual in French-designated areas of Manitoba and Ontario
Bilingual sign
–
Warning sign at the fence of the military area in
Turkey, in
Turkish,
English,
French and
German.
Bilingual sign
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Bilingual sign in a Quebec supermarket with markedly predominant French text
Bilingual sign
–
English –
Chinese bilingual traffic sign in
Hong Kong
Bilingual sign
–
Bilingual Welcome sign at
Newry in
Northern Ireland in
Irish and
English.
26.
Endangered language
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An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use as its speakers die out or shift to speaking another language. Language loss occurs when the language has no native speakers. If eventually no one speaks the language at all, it becomes an extinct language, a dead language may still be observed and studied through recordings or written text, but it is still dead or extinct unless there are fluent speakers. More-commonly spoken languages dominate the less-commonly spoken languages and so the latter eventually disappear, the total number of languages in the world is not known. Estimates vary depending on many factors, the general consensus is that there are between 6000 and 7000 languages currently spoken, and that between 50 and 90% of them will have become extinct by 2100. To recognize an endangered languages, the stages of language extinction follow five steps, the first step is potential endangerment. This is when a language faces endangerment, but there are still a few speakers who are keeping the language current, once a language has reached the endangerment stage, there are only a few speakers left, risking the chances of the language surviving much longer. The third stage of language extinction is seriously endangered, during this stage, a language is unlikely to survive another generation and will soon be extinct. The fourth stage is moribund, followed by the fifth stage extinction, UNESCO operates with four levels of language endangerment beyond safe, based on intergenerational transfer, vulnerable, definitely endangered, severely endangered, and critically endangered. Using an alternative scheme of classification, linguist Michael E, There is a general consensus that the loss of languages harms the cultural diversity of the world. Many projects are under way aimed at preventing or slowing this loss by revitalizing endangered languages and promoting education, across the world, many countries have enacted specific legislation aimed at protecting and stabilizing the language of indigenous speech communities. A few linguists have argued that loss is a natural process that should not be counteracted. The total number of languages in the world is not known. Estimates vary depending on the extent and means of the research undertaken, and the definition of a distinct language, the number of known languages varies over time as some of them become extinct and others are newly discovered. An accurate amount of languages in the world was not yet known until the use of universal, the majority of linguists in the early twentieth century refrained from making estimates. Before then, estimates were frequently the product of guesswork and very low, one of the most active research agencies is SIL International, which maintains a database, Ethnologue, kept up to date by the contributions of linguists globally. Ethnologues 2005 count of languages in its database, excluding duplicates in different countries, was 6,912, of which 32. 8% were in Asia and this contemporary tally must be regarded as a variable number within a range. Areas with a large number of languages that are nearing extinction include, Eastern Siberia, Central Siberia, Northern Australia, Central America
Endangered language
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The world language hierarchy (adapted from Graddol, 1997)
Endangered language
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Language shift can be the result of
linguicide, in which ethnic group members no longer learn their heritage language as their
first language.
Endangered language
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Dolly Pentreath, last native speaker of the
Cornish language, in an engraved portrait published in 1781.
27.
Moribund language
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An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use as its speakers die out or shift to speaking another language. Language loss occurs when the language has no native speakers. If no one can speak the language at all, it becomes an extinct language, a dead language may still be studied through recordings or writings, but it is still dead or extinct unless there are fluent speakers. Although languages have become extinct throughout human history, they are currently dying at an accelerated rate because of globalization. Language shift most commonly occurs when speakers switch to an associated with economic power or spoken more widely. The general consensus is that there are between 6000 and 7000 languages currently spoken, and that between 50 and 90% of them will have become extinct by 2100. The 20 most common languages, spoken by more than 50 million speakers each, are spoken by 50% of the worlds population, the first step is in language death is potential endangerment. This is when a language faces strong external pressure, but there are communities of speakers who pass the language to their children. Once a language has reached the endangerment stage, there are only a few left and children are, for the most part. The third stage of language extinction is seriously endangered, during this stage, a language is unlikely to survive another generation and will soon be extinct. The fourth stage is moribund, followed by the fifth stage extinction, across the world, many countries have enacted specific legislation aimed at protecting and stabilizing the language of indigenous speech communities. The total number of languages in the world is not known. Estimates vary depending on the extent and means of the research undertaken, and the definition of a distinct language, the number of known languages varies over time as some of them become extinct and others are newly discovered. An accurate amount of languages in the world was not yet known until the use of universal, the majority of linguists in the early twentieth century refrained from making estimates. Before then, estimates were frequently the product of guesswork and very low, one of the most active research agencies is SIL International, which maintains a database, Ethnologue, kept up to date by the contributions of linguists globally. Ethnologues 2005 count of languages in its database, excluding duplicates in different countries, was 6,912, of which 32. 8% were in Asia and this contemporary tally must be regarded as a variable number within a range. Areas with a large number of languages that are nearing extinction include, Eastern Siberia, Central Siberia, Northern Australia, Central America. Other hotspots are Oklahoma and the Southern Cone of South America, almost all of the study of language endangerment has been with spoken languages
Moribund language
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The world language hierarchy (adapted from Graddol, 1997)
Moribund language
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More than 50% of the world's languages are located in just eight countries (denoted in red on the map):
India,
Brazil,
Mexico,
Australia,
Indonesia,
Nigeria,
Papua New Guinea, and
Cameroon. In these countries and around them are the areas that are the most linguistically diverse in the world (denoted in blue on the map)
Moribund language
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Dolly Pentreath, last native speaker of the
Cornish language, in an engraved portrait published in 1781.
28.
Bible
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The Bible is a collection of sacred texts or scriptures that Jews and Christians consider to be a product of divine inspiration and a record of the relationship between God and humans. Many different authors contributed to the Bible, what is regarded as canonical text differs depending on traditions and groups, a number of Bible canons have evolved, with overlapping and diverging contents. The Christian Old Testament overlaps with the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Septuagint, the New Testament is a collection of writings by early Christians, believed to be mostly Jewish disciples of Christ, written in first-century Koine Greek. These early Christian Greek writings consist of narratives, letters, among Christian denominations there is some disagreement about the contents of the canon, primarily the Apocrypha, a list of works that are regarded with varying levels of respect. Attitudes towards the Bible also differ amongst Christian groups and this concept arose during the Protestant Reformation, and many denominations today support the use of the Bible as the only source of Christian teaching. With estimated total sales of over 5 billion copies, the Bible is widely considered to be the book of all time. It has estimated sales of 100 million copies, and has been a major influence on literature and history, especially in the West. The English word Bible is from the Latin biblia, from the word in Medieval Latin and Late Latin. Medieval Latin biblia is short for biblia sacra holy book, while biblia in Greek and it gradually came to be regarded as a feminine singular noun in medieval Latin, and so the word was loaned as a singular into the vernaculars of Western Europe. Latin biblia sacra holy books translates Greek τὰ βιβλία τὰ ἅγια ta biblia ta hagia, the word βιβλίον itself had the literal meaning of paper or scroll and came to be used as the ordinary word for book. It is the diminutive of βύβλος byblos, Egyptian papyrus, possibly so called from the name of the Phoenician sea port Byblos from whence Egyptian papyrus was exported to Greece, the Greek ta biblia was an expression Hellenistic Jews used to describe their sacred books. Christian use of the term can be traced to c.223 CE, bruce notes that Chrysostom appears to be the first writer to use the Greek phrase ta biblia to describe both the Old and New Testaments together. The division of the Hebrew Bible into verses is based on the sof passuk cantillation mark used by the 10th-century Masoretes to record the verse divisions used in oral traditions. The oldest extant copy of a complete Bible is an early 4th-century parchment book preserved in the Vatican Library, the oldest copy of the Tanakh in Hebrew and Aramaic dates from the 10th century CE. The oldest copy of a complete Latin Bible is the Codex Amiatinus and he states that it is not a magical book, nor was it literally written by God and passed to mankind. In Christian Bibles, the New Testament Gospels were derived from traditions in the second half of the first century CE. Riches says that, Scholars have attempted to reconstruct something of the history of the oral traditions behind the Gospels, the period of transmission is short, less than 40 years passed between the death of Jesus and the writing of Marks Gospel. This means that there was time for oral traditions to assume fixed form
Bible
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The
Gutenberg Bible, the first printed Bible
Bible
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The Kennicott Bible, by
Benjamin Kennicott, with illustration, Jonah being swallowed by the fish, 1476
Bible
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Tanakh
29.
Old Frisian
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Old Frisian is a West Germanic language spoken between the 8th and 16th centuries in the area between the Rhine and Weser on the European North Sea coast. The Frisian settlers on the coast of South Jutland also spoke Old Frisian, the language of the earlier inhabitants of the region between the Zuiderzee and Ems River is attested in only a few personal names and place-names. Old Frisian evolved into Middle Frisian, spoken from the 16th to the 19th century, in the early Middle Ages, Frisia stretched from the area around Bruges, in what is now Belgium, to the Weser River in northern Germany. At the time, the Frisian language was spoken along the entire southern North Sea coast and this region is referred to as Greater Frisia or Frisia Magna, and many of the areas within it still treasure their Frisian heritage. However, by 1300, their territory had been pushed back to the Zuiderzee, hence, a close relationship exists between Old Frisian and Old English. Generally, Old Frisian phonologically resembles Old English, in particular, it shares the palatalisation of velar consonants also found in Old English. For example, whereas the closely related Old Saxon and Old Dutch retain the velar in dag, Old Frisian has dei, when followed by front vowels the Germanic /k/ changed to a /tʃ/ sound. The Old Frisian for church was tzirke or tzerke, in Old English it was ċiriċe, while Old Saxon, another feature shared between the two is Anglo-Frisian brightening, which fronted a to e under some circumstances. In unstressed syllables, o merges into a, and i into e as in Old English, the old Germanic diphthongs *ai and *au become ē/ā and ā, respectively, in Old Frisian, as in ēn/ān from Proto-Germanic *ainaz, and brād from *braudą. In comparison, these diphthongs become ā and ēa in Old English, the diphthong *eu generally becomes ia, and Germanic *iu is retained. These diphthongs initially began with a i, but the stress later shifts to the second component, giving to iā. For example, thiād and liūde from Proto-Germanic *þeudō and *liudīz, between vowels, h generally disappears, as in Old English and Old Dutch. Word-initial h- on the hand is retained. Some of the texts that are preserved from this period are from the 12th or 13th centuries, generally, all these texts are restricted to legal writings. These runic writings however usually consist of no more than inscriptions of a single or few words, amsterdam and Philadelphia, John Benjamins,2009. They show a degree of linguistic uniformity. Westeremden yew-stick Fon Alra Fresena Fridome Hunsigo MSS H1, H2, Ten Commandements,17 petitiones Londriucht Thet Freske Riim Skeltana Riucht law code
Old Frisian
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The Kodeks Roarda (fy) is a medieval document with
Latin and Old Frisian law texts.
30.
Syllable coda
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A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the water is composed of two syllables, wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a nucleus with optional initial and final margins. Syllables are often considered the building blocks of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic meter, syllabic writing began several hundred years before the first letters. The earliest recorded syllables are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur and this shift from pictograms to syllables has been called the most important advance in the history of writing. A word that consists of a syllable is called a monosyllable. Syllable is an Anglo-Norman variation of Old French sillabe, from Latin syllaba, συλλαβή means what is taken together, referring to letters that are taken together to make a single sound. συλλαβή is a noun from the verb συλλαμβάνω syllambánō, a compound of the preposition σύν sýn with. The noun uses the root λαβ-, which appears in the aorist tense, the present tense stem λαμβάν- is formed by adding a nasal infix ⟨μ⟩ ⟨m⟩ before the β b and a suffix -αν -an at the end. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the period ⟨. ⟩ marks syllable breaks, in practice, however, IPA transcription is typically divided into words by spaces, and often these spaces are also understood to be syllable breaks. When a word comes in the middle of a syllable. The liaison tie is used to join lexical words into phonological words. In the typical theory of structure, the general structure of a syllable consists of three segments. e. Nucleus and coda are grouped together as a rime and onset are only distinguished at the second level, the nucleus is usually the vowel in the middle of a syllable. The onset is the sound or sounds occurring before the nucleus, and they are sometimes collectively known as the shell. The term rime covers the nucleus plus coda, in the one-syllable English word cat, the nucleus is a, the onset c, the coda t, and the rime at. This syllable can be abstracted as a consonant-vowel-consonant syllable, abbreviated CVC, languages vary greatly in the restrictions on the sounds making up the onset, nucleus and coda of a syllable, according to what is termed a languages phonotactics
Syllable coda
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Syllable components as a directed graph
