1.
South Africa
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South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa, is the southernmost country in Africa. South Africa is the 25th-largest country in the world by land area and it is the southernmost country on the mainland of the Old World or the Eastern Hemisphere. About 80 percent of South Africans are of Sub-Saharan African ancestry, divided among a variety of ethnic groups speaking different Bantu languages, the remaining population consists of Africas largest communities of European, Asian, and multiracial ancestry. South Africa is a multiethnic society encompassing a variety of cultures, languages. Its pluralistic makeup is reflected in the recognition of 11 official languages. The country is one of the few in Africa never to have had a coup détat, however, the vast majority of black South Africans were not enfranchised until 1994. During the 20th century, the black majority sought to recover its rights from the dominant white minority, with this struggle playing a role in the countrys recent history. The National Party imposed apartheid in 1948, institutionalising previous racial segregation, since 1994, all ethnic and linguistic groups have held political representation in the countrys democracy, which comprises a parliamentary republic and nine provinces. South Africa is often referred to as the Rainbow Nation to describe the multicultural diversity. The World Bank classifies South Africa as an economy. Its economy is the second-largest in Africa, and the 34th-largest in the world, in terms of purchasing power parity, South Africa has the seventh-highest per capita income in Africa. However, poverty and inequality remain widespread, with about a quarter of the population unemployed, nevertheless, South Africa has been identified as a middle power in international affairs, and maintains significant regional influence. The name South Africa is derived from the geographic location at the southern tip of Africa. Upon formation the country was named the Union of South Africa in English, since 1961 the long form name in English has been the Republic of South Africa. In Dutch the country was named Republiek van Zuid-Afrika, replaced in 1983 by the Afrikaans Republiek van Suid-Afrika, since 1994 the Republic has had an official name in each of its 11 official languages. Mzansi, derived from the Xhosa noun umzantsi meaning south, is a name for South Africa. South Africa contains some of the oldest archaeological and human fossil sites in the world, extensive fossil remains have been recovered from a series of caves in Gauteng Province. The area is a UNESCO World Heritage site and has termed the Cradle of Humankind
2.
Botswana
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Botswana, officially the Republic of Botswana, is a landlocked country located in Southern Africa. The citizens refer to themselves as Batswana, formerly the British protectorate of Bechuanaland, Botswana adopted its new name after becoming independent within the Commonwealth on 30 September 1966. Since then, it has maintained a tradition of stable representative democracy. Botswana is topographically flat, with up to 70 percent of its territory being the Kalahari Desert and it is bordered by South Africa to the south and southeast, Namibia to the west and north, and Zimbabwe to the northeast. Its border with Zambia to the north near Kazungula is poorly defined, a mid-sized country of just over 2 million people, Botswana is one of the most sparsely populated nations in the world. Around 10 percent of the lives in the capital and largest city. The economy is dominated by mining, cattle, and tourism, Botswana boasts a GDP per capita of about $18,825 per year as of 2015, which is one of the highest in Africa. Its high gross national income gives the country a modest standard of living, Botswana is a member of the African Union, the Southern African Development Community, the Commonwealth of Nations, and the United Nations. The country has been among the hardest hit by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the death rate due to AIDS or AIDS-related causes has fallen sharply from 2005 to 2013, and the number of new infections in children has also fallen. As of 2014, Botswana has the third-highest prevalence rate for HIV/AIDS, the history of Botswana starts more than 100,000 years ago, when the first humans inhabited the region. The original inhabitants of southern Africa were the Bushmen and Khoi peoples, both speak Khoisan languages and lived as hunter-gatherers. About a thousand years ago, large chiefdoms emerged that were later eclipsed by the Great Zimbabwe empire, around 1300 CE, peoples in present-day Transvaal began to coalesce into three main linguistic and political groups, including the Batswana. The Batswana, a term used also to all citizens of Botswana. Prior to European contact, the Batswana lived as herders and farmers under tribal rule, as groups broke off and moved to new land, new tribes were created. Some human development occurred before the colonial period, during the 1700s, the slave and ivory trades were expanding. To resist these pressures, Shaka, the king of the Zulu Empire, conquered tribes began to move northwest into Botswana, destroying everything in their path. In their efforts to re-establish themselves at the end of period, tribes began to exchange ivory and skins for guns with European traders. Christian missionaries sent from Europe also spread to the interior, often at the invitation of tribal chiefs who wanted guns, by 1880 every major village had a resident missionary, and their influence became permanent
3.
Language family
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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
4.
Khoisan languages
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The Khoisan languages are the languages of Africa that have click consonants but do not belong to other language families. For much of the 20th century they were thought to have a relationship with each other. Ethnically, their speakers are the Khoikhoi and the San, two languages of east Africa, those of the Sandawe and Hadza, are also called Khoisan, although their speakers are ethnically neither Khoikhoi nor San. Before the Bantu expansion, Khoisan languages, or languages like them, were spread throughout southern and eastern Africa. They are currently restricted to the Kalahari Desert, primarily in Namibia and Botswana, most of the languages are endangered, and several are moribund or extinct. Language use is quite strong among the 20,000 speakers of Naro, Khoisan languages are best known for their use of click consonants as phonemes. These are typically written with such as ǃ and ǂ. Clicks are quite versatile as consonants, as they involve two articulations of the tongue which can operate partially independently, consequently, the languages with the greatest numbers of consonants in the world are Khoisan. The Juǀʼhoan language has 48 click consonants, among nearly as many non-click consonants, strident and pharyngealized vowels, the ǃXóõ and ǂHõã languages are even more complex. Grammatically, the southern Khoisan languages are generally fairly analytic, having several inflectional morphemes, Khoisan was proposed as one of the four families of African languages in Greenbergs classification. Westphal is known for his rejection of the Khoisan language family. Bonny Sands concluded that the family is not demonstrable with current evidence, dimmendaal summarized the general view with, it has to be concluded that Greenbergs intuitions on the genetic unity of Khoisan could not be confirmed by subsequent research. Today, the few scholars working on these languages treat the three as independent language families that cannot or can no longer be shown to be genetically related. Starostin accepts a relationship between Sandawe and Khoi is plausible, as is one between Tuu and Kxa, but sees no indication of a relationship between two groups or with Hadza. The putative branches of Khoisan are often considered independent families, in the absence of a demonstration that they are related according to the comparative method. See Khoe languages for speculations on the history of the region. With about 800 speakers in Tanzania, Hadza is no longer seen as a Khoisan language, genetically, the Hadza people are unrelated to the Khoisan peoples of Southern Africa, and their closest relatives may be among the Pygmies of Central Africa. Sandawe is not related to Hadza, despite their proximity, the Khoe family is both the most numerous and diverse family of Khoisan languages, with seven living languages and over a quarter million speakers
5.
Taa language
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Taa /ˈtɑː/, also known as ǃXóõ, is a Khoisan language notable for its large number of phonemes, perhaps the largest in the world. Most speakers live in Botswana, but a few hundred live in Namibia, the people call themselves ǃXoon or ʼNǀohan, depending on the dialect they speak. Taa is the word for human being, the name of the language is Taa ǂaan. ǃXoon is an ethnonym used at opposite ends of the Taa-speaking area, most living Taa speakers are ethnic ǃXoon or Nǀohan. Taa shares a number of features with West ǂ’Amkoe and Gǀui. Until the rediscovery of a few speakers of Nǁng in the 1990s. There is sufficient dialectal variation in Taa that it might be described as a dialect continuum than as a single language. ǀ’Auni and Kiǀhazi, previously considered dialects of Taa, were more divergent than the dialects here, Traill, for example, spent two chapters of his Compleat Guide to the Koon disentangling names and dialects. The name ǃXoon is only used at Aminius Reserve in Namibia, around Lone Tree where Traill primarily worked and it is, however, used by the ǃXoon for all Taa speakers. It has been variously spelled ǃxō, ǃkɔ̃ː, ǃko/ǃkõ, Khong, bleeks Nǀuǁʼen dialect has been spelled ǀNuǁen, ǀNuǁe, n, Ngǀuǁen, Nguen, Nǀhuǁéi, ŋǀuǁẽin, ŋǀuǁẽi, ŋǀuǁen, ǀuǁen. It has also called by the ambiguous Khoekhoe term Nǀusan, sometimes rendered Nusan or Noosan. A subgroup was known as Koon, bleek recorded another now-extinct variety at the town of Khakhea, and it is known in the literature as Kakia. Names with a tee, Katia, Kattea, Khatia, and Xatia, are apparently spelling variants of Kakia, vaalpens, ǀKusi, and ǀEikusi evidently refer to the same variety as Xatia. Westphal studied a variety rendered ǀŋamani, ǀnamani, Ngǀamani, ǀŋamasa and this dialect is apparently also now extinct. Westphal also studied ǂHuan dialect, and used this name for the entire language, however, the term is ambiguous between Taa and ǂ’Amkoe, and for this reason Traill chose to call the language ǃXóõ. Tsaasi dialect is similar to ǂHuan, and like ǂHuan. This is a Tswana name, variously rendered Tshasi, Tshase, Tʃase, Tsase, the Tswana term for Bushmen, Masarwa, is frequently encountered. More specific to the Taa are Magon and the Tshasi mentioned above, the Taa distinguish themselves along at least some of the groups above
6.
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
7.
National motto
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This page lists state and national mottos for the worlds nations. The mottos for some states lacking general international recognition, extinct states, non sovereign nations, and territories are listed, a state motto is used to describe the intent or motivation of the state in a short phrase. For example, it can be included on a flag, coat of arms. Some countries choose not to have a national motto, afghanistan, لا إله إلا الله، محمد رسول الله There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God. Formerly Advance Australia Austria, formerly AEIOU, with one possible meaning being Austriae est imperare orbi universo Austria-Hungary, Indivisibiliter ac Inseparabiliter Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, Bir kərə yüksələn bayraq bir daha enməz. Azores, Antes morrer livres que em paz sujeitos Bahamas, Forward, Upward, Onward Together Bahrain, nationalism, Secularism, Socialism, and Democracy Barbados, Pride and Industry Bavaria, formerly, In Treue fest Belarus, No official motto. Unofficial motto is, Long Live Belarus, byelorussian SSR, Пралетарыі ўсіх краін, яднайцеся. Belgium, Eendracht maakt macht, Lunion fait la force and Einigkeit gibt Stärke Belize, Sub umbra floreo Benin, Fraternité, Justice, Travail Bermuda, Quo fata ferunt Bhutan, No official motto. Republic of Biafra, Peace, Unity, Freedom Bolivia, La Unión es la Fuerza Bosnia and Herzegovina, botswana, Pula Brazil, Ordem e progresso Empire of Brazil, Independência ou Morte. Costa Rica, Vivan siempre el trabajo y la paz Croatia, equatorial Guinea, Unidad, Paz, Justicia Eritrea, دولة إرترݐا, Hagere Ertra Estonia, No official motto. Ethiopia, formerly ኢትዮጵያ ታበድ አደዊሃ ሃበ አግዚአብሐር, taken from Psalm 68,31, currently none. The Imperial motto, between 1930 and 1975, was ሞዓ አንበሰ ዘአምነባደ ይሁዳ. Falkland Islands, Desire the Right Faroe Islands, No official motto, fiji, Rerevaka na Kalou ka Doka na Tui Finland, No official motto. Åland, Islands of Peace Florentine Republic, Regna cadunt luxu surgunt virtutibus urbes, Germany, No official motto, commonly referred as Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit East Germany, Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt Euch. Grenada, Ever Conscious of God We Aspire, and Advance as One People Guam, guatemala, Libre Crezca Fecundo Guernsey, No official motto. from the National anthem of Hungary. India, सत्यमेव जयते Indonesia, Bhinneka Tunggal Ika Iran, de facto, استقلال، آزادى، جمهورى اسلامى de jure, الله اکبر Kingdom Of Iran, iraq, الله أكبر Iraqi Kurdistan, An azadî, an azadî Ireland, No official motto. Isle of Man, Quocunque Ieceris Stabit Israel, No official motto, Kingdom of Italy, Foedere et Religione Tenemur Italian Social Republic, Per lonore dItalia Jamaica, Out of many, One People Japan, No official motto. Ancient Japan, 養正之心ヲ弘ム, 積慶重暉, 掩ヒテ㆓八紘 ヲ㆒而為ス㆑宇 ト Empire of Japan, 開国進取 Charter Oath -> 大東亜新秩序建設 ja, 基本国策要綱 Jersey, jordan, الله، الوطن، الملك Kazakhstan, No official motto. Kenya, Harambee Kiribati, Te mauri, te raoi ao te tabomoa North Korea, 강성대국 South Korea, 홍익인간 Korean Empire, 광명천지 Let there be light across the land Kosovo, Atdheu, Nderi, Detyra
8.
Australia
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Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It is the worlds sixth-largest country by total area, the neighbouring countries are Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and East Timor to the north, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to the north-east, and New Zealand to the south-east. Australias capital is Canberra, and its largest urban area is Sydney, for about 50,000 years before the first British settlement in the late 18th century, Australia was inhabited by indigenous Australians, who spoke languages classifiable into roughly 250 groups. The population grew steadily in subsequent decades, and by the 1850s most of the continent had been explored, on 1 January 1901, the six colonies federated, forming the Commonwealth of Australia. Australia has since maintained a liberal democratic political system that functions as a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy comprising six states. The population of 24 million is highly urbanised and heavily concentrated on the eastern seaboard, Australia has the worlds 13th-largest economy and ninth-highest per capita income. With the second-highest human development index globally, the country highly in quality of life, health, education, economic freedom. The name Australia is derived from the Latin Terra Australis a name used for putative lands in the southern hemisphere since ancient times, the Dutch adjectival form Australische was used in a Dutch book in Batavia in 1638, to refer to the newly discovered lands to the south. On 12 December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office that it be formally adopted, in 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known officially as Australia. The first official published use of the term Australia came with the 1830 publication of The Australia Directory and these first inhabitants may have been ancestors of modern Indigenous Australians. The Torres Strait Islanders, ethnically Melanesian, were originally horticulturists, the northern coasts and waters of Australia were visited sporadically by fishermen from Maritime Southeast Asia. The first recorded European sighting of the Australian mainland, and the first recorded European landfall on the Australian continent, are attributed to the Dutch. The first ship and crew to chart the Australian coast and meet with Aboriginal people was the Duyfken captained by Dutch navigator, Willem Janszoon. He sighted the coast of Cape York Peninsula in early 1606, the Dutch charted the whole of the western and northern coastlines and named the island continent New Holland during the 17th century, but made no attempt at settlement. William Dampier, an English explorer and privateer, landed on the north-west coast of New Holland in 1688, in 1770, James Cook sailed along and mapped the east coast, which he named New South Wales and claimed for Great Britain. The first settlement led to the foundation of Sydney, and the exploration, a British settlement was established in Van Diemens Land, now known as Tasmania, in 1803, and it became a separate colony in 1825. The United Kingdom formally claimed the part of Western Australia in 1828. Separate colonies were carved from parts of New South Wales, South Australia in 1836, Victoria in 1851, the Northern Territory was founded in 1911 when it was excised from South Australia
9.
Consonant
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In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. For example, the sound spelled th in this is a different consonant than the th sound in thin, the word consonant comes from Latin oblique stem cōnsonant-, from cōnsonāns sounding-together, a calque of Greek σύμφωνον sýmphōnon. Dionysius Thrax calls consonants sýmphōna pronounced with because they can only be pronounced with a vowel, the word consonant is also used to refer to a letter of an alphabet that denotes a consonant sound. The 21 consonant letters in the English alphabet are B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Z, and usually W and Y. The letter Y stands for the consonant /j/ in yoke, the vowel /ɪ/ in myth, the vowel /i/ in funny, and the diphthong /aɪ/ in my. W always represents a consonant except in combination with a letter, as in growth, raw, and how. In some other languages, such as Finnish, y represents a vowel sound. Such syllables may be abbreviated CV, V, and CVC and this can be argued to be the only pattern found in most of the worlds languages, and perhaps the primary pattern in all of them. However, the distinction between consonant and vowel is not always clear cut, there are consonants and non-syllabic vowels in many of the worlds languages. One blurry area is in segments variously called semivowels, semiconsonants, on one side, there are vowel-like segments that are not in themselves syllabic, but form diphthongs as part of the syllable nucleus, as the i in English boil. On the other, there are approximants that behave like consonants in forming onsets, some phonologists model these as both being the underlying vowel /i/, so that the English word bit would phonemically be /bit/, beet would be /bii̯t/, and yield would be phonemically /i̯ii̯ld/. Likewise, foot would be /fut/, food would be /fuu̯d/, wood would be /u̯ud/, the other problematic area is that of syllabic consonants, segments articulated as consonants but occupying the nucleus of a syllable. Other languages use fricative and often trilled segments as syllabic nuclei, as in Czech and several languages in Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Mandarin, they are historically allophones of /i/, and spelled that way in Pinyin. Ladefoged and Maddieson call these fricative vowels and say that they can usually be thought of as syllabic fricatives that are allophones of vowels and that is, phonetically they are consonants, but phonemically they behave as vowels. Many Slavic languages allow the trill and the lateral as syllabic nuclei, in languages like Nuxalk, it is difficult to know what the nucleus of a syllable is, or if all syllables even have nuclei. If the concept of syllable applies in Nuxalk, there are consonants in words like /sx̩s/ seal fat. Miyako in Japan is similar, with /f̩ks̩/ to build and /ps̩ks̩/ to pull, each spoken consonant can be distinguished by several phonetic features, The manner of articulation is how air escapes from the vocal tract when the consonant or approximant sound is made. Manners include stops, fricatives, and nasals, the place of articulation is where in the vocal tract the obstruction of the consonant occurs, and which speech organs are involved
10.
Vowel
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In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, with two competing definitions. There is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis and this contrasts with consonants, such as the English sh, which have a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal tract. In the other, phonological definition, a vowel is defined as syllabic, a phonetically equivalent but non-syllabic sound is a semivowel. In oral languages, phonetic vowels normally form the peak of many to all syllables, whereas consonants form the onset and coda. Some languages allow other sounds to form the nucleus of a syllable, the word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning vocal. In English, the vowel is commonly used to mean both vowel sounds and the written symbols that represent them. The phonetic definition of vowel does not always match the phonological definition, the approximants and illustrate this, both are produced without much of a constriction in the vocal tract, but they occur at the onset of syllables. A similar debate arises over whether a word like bird in a dialect has an r-colored vowel /ɝ/ or a syllabic consonant /ɹ̩/. The American linguist Kenneth Pike suggested the terms vocoid for a vowel and vowel for a phonological vowel, so using this terminology. Nonetheless, the phonetic and phonemic definitions would still conflict for the syllabic el in table, or the syllabic nasals in button, daniel Jones developed the cardinal vowel system to describe vowels in terms of the features of tongue height, tongue backness and roundedness. These three parameters are indicated in the schematic quadrilateral IPA vowel diagram on the right, there are additional features of vowel quality, such as the velum position, type of vocal fold vibration, and tongue root position. This conception of vowel articulation has been known to be inaccurate since 1928, Peter Ladefoged has said that early phoneticians. Thought they were describing the highest point of the tongue, and they were actually describing formant frequencies. The IPA Handbook concedes that the quadrilateral must be regarded as an abstraction. Vowel height is named for the position of the tongue relative to either the roof of the mouth or the aperture of the jaw. However, it refers to the first formant, abbreviated F1. Height is defined by the inverse of the F1 value, The higher the frequency of the first formant, however, if more precision is required, true-mid vowels may be written with a lowering diacritic. Although English contrasts six heights in its vowels, they are interdependent with differences in backness and it appears that some varieties of German have five contrasting vowel heights independently of length or other parameters
11.
Tone (linguistics)
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Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. Languages that do have this feature are called tonal languages, the tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes /ˈtoʊniːm/. Tonal languages are common in Africa, East Asia, and Mexico. In many tonal African languages, such as most Bantu languages, tones are distinguished by their pitch relative to each other. In multisyllable words, a tone may be carried by the entire word rather than a different tone on each syllable. Often, grammatical information, such as past versus present, I versus you, many words, especially monosyllabic ones, are differentiated solely by tone. In a multisyllabic word, each syllable often carries its own tone, unlike in Bantu systems, tone plays little role in modern Chinese grammar though the tones descend from features in Old Chinese that had morphological significance. Contour systems are typical of languages of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, including Tai–Kadai, Vietic, the Afroasiatic, Khoisan, Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in Africa are dominated by register systems. Many languages use tone in a limited way. In Japanese, fewer than half of the words have a drop in pitch, such minimal systems are sometimes called pitch accent since they are reminiscent of stress accent languages, which typically allow one principal stressed syllable per word. However, there is debate over the definition of pitch accent, most languages of Sub-Saharan Africa are members of the Niger-Congo family, which is predominantly tonal, notably excepting Swahili, most languages spoken in the Senegambia, Koyra Chiini and Fulani. The Afroasiatic languages include both tonal and nontonal branches, numerous tonal languages are widely spoken in China and Mainland Southeast Asia. Sino-Tibetan and Tai-Kadai languages are tonal, including Thai, Lao. The Hmong–Mien languages are some of the most tonal languages in the world, Austroasiatic and Austronesian languages are mostly non tonal with the rare exception of Austroasiatic languages like Vietnamese, and Austronesian languages like Cèmuhî and Utsul. Tones in Vietnamese and Utsul may result from heavy Chinese influence on both languages, there were tones in Middle Korean. Other languages represented in the region, such as Mongolian, Uyghur, in Europe, Swedish, Norwegian, Serbo-Croat, Slovene, Lithuanian, Latvian and Luxemburgish have tonal characteristics. Among the Indo-European languages of Asia, three Indo-Aryan languages have tonality, Punjabi, Dogri and Lahnda, although the Austronesian language family has some tonal members such as New Caledonias Cèmuhî language, no tonal languages have been discovered in Australia. A large number of North, South and Central American languages are tonal, including many of the Athabaskan languages of Alaska and the American Southwest, among the Mayan languages, which are mostly non-tonal, Yucatec, Uspantek, and one dialect of Tzotzil have developed tone systems
