1.
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
2.
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
3.
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
4.
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
5.
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
6.
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
7.
Low Franconian languages
–
The Frankish language, also Old Frankish, was the language of the Franks. It is a West Germanic language and was spoken in Merovingian times, the Franks first established themselves in the Netherlands and Flanders before they started to fight their way down south and east. The language had a significant impact on Old French and it evolved into Old Dutch in the north and it was replaced step by step by the langues doïl in the south. Old Frankish is not directly attested except in glosses and small phrases and it has been reconstructed using the comparative method from loanwords in Old French and from Old Dutch. One known phrase in Old Frankish is found in the Salic law of the sixth century. It was a language of the Old Frankish language. Old Low Franconian is sometimes divided in two groups, Old Dutch and Old East Low Franconian, Dutch, like other Germanic languages, is conventionally divided into three phases. During the 19th and 20th centuries these dialects have partly and gradually replaced by todays Standard German. Sometimes, Low Franconian is grouped together with Low German, the contemporary continental Low Franconian language area is decreasing in size. French Flanders has become more and more francophone during the last century, brussels Capital Region is officially bilingual, but largely francophone. In Germany, Low Franconian only exists as Meuse-Rhenish regiolects and dialects, at the Rhine near Duisburg, it adjoins a smaller strip of other Low Franconian varieties called Bergisch. Together these distinct varieties, now combined with the Kleve dialects as Meuse-Rhenish. Limburgish straddles the borderline between Low Franconian and Middle Franconian varieties and they are more-or-less mutually intelligible with the Ripuarian dialects, but show fewer High German shifts. Afrikaans originated from the Dutch language, the dialect became known as Cape Dutch. Later, Afrikaans was sometimes referred to as African Dutch or Kitchen Dutch. Dutch remained an official language until the new 1961 constitution finally stipulated the two languages in South Africa to be Afrikaans and English. It is the only Indo-European language of significance that underwent distinct development on the African continent, the South African Constitution of post 1994 considers Afrikaans as one of 11 official languages. The majority of Afrikaans speakers in South Africa are coloureds of mixed European/Black African/Khoisan/Indonesian descent, Afrikaans Dutch dialects Dutch language Franconian languages Istvaeones History of Dutch Low Dietsch Meuse-Rhenish Middle Dutch Euler, Wolfram
8.
Dutch language
–
It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language, after English and German. Dutch is one of the closest relatives of both German and English and is said to be roughly in between them, Dutch vocabulary is mostly Germanic and incorporates more Romance loans than German but far fewer than English. In both Belgium and the Netherlands, the official name for Dutch is Nederlands, and its dialects have their own names, e. g. Hollands, West-Vlaams. The use of the word Vlaams to describe Standard Dutch for the variations prevalent in Flanders and used there, however, is common in the Netherlands, the Dutch language has been known under a variety of names. It derived from the Old Germanic word theudisk, one of the first names used for the non-Romance languages of Western Europe. It literarily means the language of the people, that is. The term was used as opposed to Latin, the language of writing. In the first text in which it is found, dating from 784, later, theudisca appeared also in the Oaths of Strasbourg to refer to the Germanic portion of the oath. This led inevitably to confusion since similar terms referred to different languages, owing to Dutch commercial and colonial rivalry in the 16th and 17th centuries, the English term came to refer exclusively to the Dutch. A notable exception is Pennsylvania Dutch, which is a West Central German variety called Deitsch by its speakers, Jersey Dutch, on the other hand, as spoken until the 1950s in New Jersey, is a Dutch-based creole. In Dutch itself, Diets went out of common use - although Platdiets is still used for the transitional Limburgish-Ripuarian Low Dietsch dialects in northeast Belgium, Nederlands, the official Dutch word for Dutch, did not become firmly established until the 19th century. This designation had been in use as far back as the end of the 15th century, one of them was it reflected a distinction with Hoogduits, High Dutch, meaning the language spoken in Germany. The Hoog was later dropped, and thus, Duits narrowed down in meaning to refer to the German language. g, in English, too, Netherlandic is regarded as a more accurate term for the Dutch language, but is hardly ever used. Old Dutch branched off more or less around the same time Old English, Old High German, Old Frisian and Old Saxon did. During that period, it forced Old Frisian back from the western coast to the north of the Low Countries, on the other hand, Dutch has been replaced in adjacent lands in nowadays France and Germany. The division in Old, Middle and Modern Dutch is mostly conventional, one of the few moments linguists can detect somewhat of a revolution is when the Dutch standard language emerged and quickly established itself. This is assumed to have taken place in approximately the mid-first millennium BCE in the pre-Roman Northern European Iron Age, the Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three groups, East, West, and North Germanic. They remained mutually intelligible throughout the Migration Period, Dutch is part of the West Germanic group, which also includes English, Scots, Frisian, Low German and High German
9.
West Flemish
–
West Flemish is a dialect of the Dutch language spoken in western Belgium and adjoining parts of the Netherlands and France. Some of the cities where West Flemish is widely spoken are Bruges, Kortrijk, Ostend, Roeselare. The dialects of the rest of the Dutch province of Zeeland, Zeelandic, are included in West Flemish. West Flemish is listed as a language in UNESCOs online Red Book of Endangered Languages. West Flemish phonology differs a lot from the standard Dutch phonology, the best known are the velar fricatives g and ch in Dutch, being realised as glottal h -, and the overall lack of diphthongs compared to Dutch. The following differences are listed by their Dutch spelling, as different letters have evolved to the same sound in Dutch. Pronunciations can also differ a bit from region to region, sch - /sx/ is realised as, or. Ei - /ɛi/ is realised as or, ij - /ɛi/ is realised as. Au - /ʌu/ is realised as ou - /ʌu/ is realised as, it resembles a lot the long oe that is used in Dutch. Ie - /i/ is more stressed towards aa - /aː/ is realised as, due to the non-existent /x/ and /ɣ/ sounds in West Flemish, native speakers of the dialect have to concentrate a lot to pronounce these sounds. This often results in hyper-correction of the /h/ sounds to a /x/ or /ɣ/, the Dutch language also has many words with an -en suffix. While standard Dutch and most Dutch dialects dont pronounce the final n, West Flemish typically drops the e, for base words already ending with n, the final n sound is often prolonged to make the suffix clear. This mute-e is similar to many English words, beaten, listen, the short o in words can also be pronounced as a short u. This happens spontaneously on some words, but other words keep their original short o sounds, similarly, the short a can turn into a short o in some words without apparent reason. The diftong ui doesnt exist in West Flemish, and is pronounced as a u or a long ie. Similar to the ui, the o can turn into an on some words. This transition often shows similarities with English and this phenomenon is shared with the Lower Saxon Germanic dialects, and even more prominent in English. Under influence of Standard Dutch, the number of people that uses the -s suffix for the form on these words diverging from Dutch is diminishing
10.
Writing system
–
A writing system is any conventional method of visually representing verbal communication. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a form of information storage. The processes of encoding and decoding writing systems involve shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning behind the sets of characters that make up a script, the general attributes of writing systems can be placed into broad categories such as alphabets, syllabaries, or logographies. Any particular system can have attributes of more than one category, in the alphabetic category, there is a standard set of letters of consonants and vowels that encode based on the general principle that the letters represent speech sounds. In a syllabary, each symbol correlates to a syllable or mora, in a logography, each character represents a word, morpheme, or other semantic units. Other categories include abjads, which differ from alphabets in that vowels are not indicated, alphabets typically use a set of 20-to-35 symbols to fully express a language, whereas syllabaries can have 80-to-100, and logographies can have several hundreds of symbols. Systems will also enable the stringing together of these groupings in order to enable a full expression of the language. The reading step can be accomplished purely in the mind as an internal process, writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, which used pictograms, ideograms and other mnemonic symbols. Proto-writing lacked the ability to capture and express a range of thoughts. Soon after, writing provided a form of long distance communication. With the advent of publishing, it provided the medium for a form of mass communication. Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that a system is always associated with at least one spoken language. In contrast, visual representations such as drawings, paintings, and non-verbal items on maps, such as contour lines, are not language-related. Some other symbols, such as numerals and the ampersand, are not directly linked to any specific language, every human community possesses language, which many regard as an innate and defining condition of humanity. However, the development of writing systems, and the process by which they have supplanted traditional oral systems of communication, have been sporadic, uneven, once established, writing systems generally change more slowly than their spoken counterparts. Thus they often preserve features and expressions which are no current in the spoken language. One of the benefits of writing systems is that they can preserve a permanent record of information expressed in a language. In the examination of individual scripts, the study of writing systems has developed along partially independent lines, thus, the terminology employed differs somewhat from field to field
11.
Latin script
–
Latin script is used as the standard method of writing in most Western and Central European languages, as well as in many languages in other parts of the world. Latin script is the basis for the largest number of alphabets of any writing system and is the most widely adopted writing system in the world, Latin script is also the basis of the International Phonetic Alphabet. The 26 most widespread letters are the contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The script is either called Roman script or Latin script, in reference to its origin in ancient Rome, in the context of transliteration, the term romanization or romanisation is often found. Unicode uses the term Latin as does the International Organization for Standardization, the numeral system is called the Roman numeral system, and the collection of the elements, Roman numerals. The numbers 1,2,3. are Latin/Roman script numbers for the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, the Latin alphabet spread, along with Latin, from the Italian Peninsula to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The Latin script also came into use for writing the West Slavic languages and several South Slavic languages, the speakers of East Slavic languages generally adopted Cyrillic along with Orthodox Christianity. The Serbian language uses both scripts, with Cyrillic predominating in official communication and Latin elsewhere, as determined by the Law on Official Use of the Language and Alphabet. As late as 1500, the Latin script was limited primarily to the languages spoken in Western, Northern, the Orthodox Christian Slavs of Eastern and Southeastern Europe mostly used Cyrillic, and the Greek alphabet was in use by Greek-speakers around the eastern Mediterranean. The Arabic script was widespread within Islam, both among Arabs and non-Arab nations like the Iranians, Indonesians, Malays, and Turkic peoples, most of the rest of Asia used a variety of Brahmic alphabets or the Chinese script. It is used for many Austronesian languages, including the languages of the Philippines, Latin letters served as the basis for the forms of the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah, however, the sound values are completely different. In the late 19th century, the Romanians returned to the Latin alphabet, under French rule and Portuguese missionary influence, a Latin alphabet was devised for the Vietnamese language, which had previously used Chinese characters. In 1928, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürks reforms, the new Republic of Turkey adopted a Latin alphabet for the Turkish language, kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Iranian-speaking Tajikistan, and the breakaway region of Transnistria kept the Cyrillic alphabet, chiefly due to their close ties with Russia. In the 1930s and 1940s, the majority of Kurds replaced the Arabic script with two Latin alphabets, although the only official Kurdish government uses an Arabic alphabet for public documents, the Latin Kurdish alphabet remains widely used throughout the region by the majority of Kurdish-speakers. In 2015, the Kazakh government announced that the Latin alphabet would replace Cyrillic as the system for the Kazakh language by 2025. In the course of its use, the Latin alphabet was adapted for use in new languages, sometimes representing phonemes not found in languages that were written with the Roman characters. These new forms are given a place in the alphabet by defining an alphabetical order or collation sequence, a digraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters in sequence. Examples are ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ng⟩, ⟨rh⟩, ⟨sh⟩ in English, a trigraph is made up of three letters, like the German ⟨sch⟩, the Breton ⟨c’h⟩ or the Milanese ⟨oeu⟩
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
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
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
15.
Languages of the Netherlands
–
The official national language of the Netherlands is Dutch, spoken by almost all people in the Netherlands. Dutch is also spoken and official in Aruba, Belgium, Curaçao, Sint Maarten and it is a West Germanic, Low Franconian language that originated in the Early Middle Ages and was standardised in the 16th century. There are also some recognised provincial languages and regional dialects, Frisian is a co-official language in the province of Friesland. Frisian is spoken by 453,000 speakers English is a language in the special municipalities of Saba. It is widely spoken on Saba and Sint Eustatius, a large majority of primary and secondary education in Amsterdam remains in Dutch only, but there are some bilingual Dutch-English schools. On Saba and St. Eustatius, the majority of the education is in English only, papiamento is an official language in the special municipality of Bonaire. Several dialects of Dutch Low Saxon are spoken in much of the north-east of the country and are recognised as regional languages according to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, Low Saxon is spoken by 1,798,000 speakers. Another Low Franconian dialect is Limburgish, which is spoken in the province of Limburg. Limburgish is spoken by 825,000 speakers, however, both Low Saxon and Limburgish spread across the Dutch-German border and belong to a common Dutch-German dialect continuum. The Netherlands also has its separate Dutch Sign Language, called Nederlandse Gebarentaal and it is still waiting for recognition and has 17,500 users. There is a trend of learning languages in the Netherlands, between 90% and 93% of the total population are able to converse in English, 71% in German, 29% in French. West Frisian is a language in the Dutch province of Friesland. The government of the Frisian province is bilingual, Luxembourgish is divided into Moselle Luxembourgish, West Luxembourgish, East Luxembourgish, North Luxembourgish and City Luxembourgish. The Oïl dialects in the Benelux are Walloon, Lorrain, Champenois and Picard
16.
Dutch dialects
–
Dutch dialects are primarily the dialects that are both cognate with the Dutch language and are spoken in the same language area as the Dutch standard language. Dutch dialects are diverse and are found in the Netherlands. The province of Friesland is bilingual, the West Frisian language, distinct from Dutch, is spoken here along with standard Dutch and the Stadsfries dialect. A Frisian standard language has also been developed, in the east, there is a Dutch Low Saxon dialect area, in Groningen, Drenthe, Overijssel, and major parts of Gelderland, Low Saxon is spoken. The IJssel river roughly forms the watershed here. South Guelderish is a dialect spoken in Gelderland and in adjacent parts of North Rhine-Westphalia, Brabantian is a dialect spoken in Antwerp, Flemish Brabant and North Brabant. Limburgish is spoken in Limburg as well as in Limburg and extends across the German border, West Flemish is spoken in West Flanders, the western part of Zeelandic Flanders and historically also in French Flanders. East Flemish is spoken in East Flanders and the part of Zeelandic Flanders. In Holland, Hollandic is spoken, though the forms of this dialect are now relatively rare. In some rural Hollandic areas more authentic Hollandic dialects are still being used, another group of dialects based on Hollandic is that spoken in the cities and larger towns of Friesland, where it partially displaced West Frisian in the 16th century and is known as Stadsfries. Limburgish has the status of regional language in the Netherlands. It receives protection by chapter 2 of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, Limburgish has been influenced by the Rhinelandic dialects like the Cologne dialect Kölsch, and has had a somewhat different development since the late Middle Ages. Dutch Low Saxon has also been elevated by the Netherlands to the status of streektaal according to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Dutch dialects and regional languages are not spoken as often as they used to be, recent research by Geert Driessen shows that the use of dialects and regional languages among both Dutch adults and youth is in heavy decline. In 1995,27 percent of the Dutch adult population spoke a dialect or regional language on a regular basis, in 1995,12 percent of the primary school aged children spoke a dialect or regional language, while in 2011 this had declined to 4 percent. Of the three officially recognized regional languages Limburgish is spoken most and Dutch Low Saxon least, Frisian occupies a middle position, in Belgium, however, dialects are very much alive, many senior citizens there are unable to speak standard Dutch. Some of these dialects, especially West and East Flemish, have incorporated some French loanwords in everyday language, an example is fourchette in various forms, instead of vork. Brussels is especially influenced by French because roughly 85% of the inhabitants of Brussels speak French
17.
Gronings dialect
–
Gronings and the strongly related varieties in East Frisia have a strong Frisian influence and take a remarkable position within West Low German. The dialect is characterized by an accent and vocabulary, which differ strongly from the other Low Saxon dialects. The name Gronings can almost be defined geographically, as can be seen on the map below and this is especially true for the northern part of Drenthe. The Drents, spoken in the north of the province of Drenthe is somewhat related with the Groninger language, but the core linguistics is Drents. For the dialects in the southeast, called Veenkoloniaals, its a bit different on both sides of the Groningen-Drenthe border, as the dialect spoken there is more related to Gronings. In the Frisian municipality of Kollumerland en Nieuwkruisland, the dialect called Westerkwartiers is also spoken. The latter is spoken in the Frisian village of Kollumerpomp and has more West Frisian influences, most words are written the same way, but the pronunciation can differ. North German Low Saxon, Dat eenzige, dat wi nich doot, is Snabbelkraam uutdeeln, Standard Dutch, Het enige wat we niet doen is snoep uitdelen. Standard German, Das einzige, was wir nicht machen, ist Süßigkeiten austeilen, scots, The anerly thing we dinnae dae is gie oot snashters. English, The only thing we dont do is hand out sweets, there are many uncertainties about the classification and categorization of Gronings. Some linguists see it as a variety of Low German, also called Nedersaksisch in the Netherlands and these words are actually more political than linguistic, because they unite a large group of very differing varieties. Categorizing Gronings as Low German could be considered correct, but there is controversy surrounding the existence of the unity of Low German. Others, especially German linguists, see Gronings-East Frisian as a group of German dialects. The Frisian influence, the sounds ou, ai and ui, Gronings-East Frisian would be categorized as Friso-Saxon dialects instead of Low German. Other linguists categorize all Gronings-East Frisian dialects as North Low German, in that case, all the other Low German varieties in the Netherlands are categorized as Westphalian. Dutch linguists in particular classify Gronings as Dutch Low Saxon, in Germany also called Westplatt, in this case the Dutch influence is crucial, while the dialects on the other side of the national border are strongly influenced by High German languages. In this case there is no separation between Groningen-East Frisian and Westphalian, but rather a difference between Groningen and East Frisian, the national border would equal the linguistic border. The Gronings dialects are a kind of mix between two languages, Old Frisian and Middle Low German, Frisian was spoken in the Ommelanden, while the city, the surrounding rural area called Gorecht and the eastern lordship of Westerwolde were Low Saxon
18.
French Flemish
–
French Flemish is a West Flemish dialect spoken in the north of contemporary France. Place names attest to Flemish having been spoken since the 8th century in the area that was ceded to France in the 17th century, french-Flemish has about 20,000 daily users, and twice that number of occasional speakers. The languages status appears to be moribund, but there has been an active movement to retain French Flemish in the region. French Flemish is taught in a few schools in the French Westhoek, the ANVT-ILRF was given permission to carry out experimental lessons in four public schools for the school years of 2007-08 until 2010-11, after which it would be evaluated. Afterwards, all requirements were met but it was allowed to continue them. On the other hand, the private Catholic education began teaching Dutch in collèges in Gravelines, though generally seen as a dialect of Dutch, some of its speakers prefer to call it a regional language. Jean-Paul Couché, chairman of the Akademie voor Nuuze Vlaemsche Taele, argues, Linguistically and that does not apply to French Flemish. We are not connected to standard Dutch because it is a language that was created based on the dialects of North Holland. Research shows that the distance between French Flemish and Dutch is greater than that between Dutch and German
19.
East Flemish
–
Though due to their intermediary position between West Flemish and Brabantian, the East Flemish dialects have also been grouped with the latter. They are mainly spoken in the province of East Flanders and a strip in the southeast of West Flanders in Belgium. Even though the dialects of the Dender area are discussed together with the East Flemish dialects due to their location. As the Scheldt formed a barrier in the North, these traits were mainly introduced from South Brabant. Having been dominated by the French, Austrians and Spaniards, their languages also have had influence on the vocabulary of East Flemish. A special mention should go to continental West Flemish, which, despite being a West Flemish dialect, has some East Flemish colouring, as Kortrijk was historically governed under Ghent. In Brabantian these vowels are a long and, while in West Flemish the ancient diphthongs and have retained, though the sound does occur in front of velars. The latter sound can also be heard in Central Flemish in front of velars, the so-called sharp oo in boom is pronounced, monophthongized to in de city dialects of Ghent and Ronse, while surrounding dialects have, or. The old Dutch long vowels in ijs en huis are pronounced as the diphthongs and respectively. West Flemish has retained the old monophthongs and, while western Brabantian uses very dark, in Maldegem and in continental West Flemish intermediary monophthongs can be observed, and, and and respectively. Exceptions are the city dialects of Ghent and Ronse, as well as the Central Flemish dialects, plural pronouns usually end in ulder, like wulder, gulder and zulder. These pronouns are used in continental West Flemish, while Maldegem appears to use the coastal pronouns. The past tense of verbs is formed with the suffix -tege or -dege, as opposed to -te and -de in standard Dutch. While present in most East Flemish dialects, as well as continental West Flemish and some Dender Brabantian dialects, final n in plurals and infinitives is usually retained, as it is in West Flemish, while in Brabantian it is lost. It is lost however in the dialects of Ghent and some Waaslaandic towns on the banks of the Scheldt, dat ze. would in East Flemish be. Da ze. pronounced /dɑ sə/, in singular and, dan ze. pronounced /dɑn zə/, in plural. It shares this trait with West-Flemish and Zeelandic, as in West Flemish and Brabantian the subject is doubled, or even tripled, compare Dutch ik ga to East Flemish k goa-kik. In the dialects of Ghent and its surroundings, this duplication can even occur after nouns, as in West Flemish, Zeelandic and Brabantian, infinitive clusters are always ordered V1-V2-V3, i. e. with the auxiliary verb first
20.
Hollandic dialect
–
Hollandic or Hollandish is, together with Brabantian, the most frequently used dialect of Dutch language. Other important Low Franconian language varieties spoken in the area are Zeelandic, East Flemish. Originally in the county of Holland, Old Frisian was spoken. Low Franconian settlers did not come until the 12th century and 13th centuries and they mixed with the original inhabitants, and a Hollandic dialect was created that was partly Franconian, partly Frisian. In the 16th century, Dutch was standardized, the Brabantian Dutch of Antwerp being the most influential, the written language of the county of Holland, then the most urbanised province in Europe, began to imitate the Brabantish standard. The new language perhaps locally destroyed most of the original Hollandic dialects, replacing it with Brabantian influences and it certainly slowed linguistic change by the influence on spoken language of the very conservative written standard. As a result, Standard Dutch still has many similarities with the Brabantian of the late 16th century, the colloquial Dutch in Holland proper, particularly the Hollandic spoken in some urban areas today, is closer to the standard than any Dutch anywhere else. In Friesland, there are areas and cities where Hollandic is spoken, in Zaanstreek, which is an old and traditional region, the old Hollandic dialect can also still be found, Zaans, with little Frisian influence. Some words are similar because of influence of migrating West Frisian farmers in the 13th to 15th centuries. Zaans can be seen as one of the few and oldest original Hollandic dialects and is spoken today, like old Waterlands dialect. Both Zaans and Waterlands are unintelligible for someone who does not come from that region in North Holland, however, people who speak Zaans, West Frisian and Waterlands are able to understand one another better than outsiders because all three dialects use similar words. On the South Holland island of Goeree-Overflakkee, West Flemish is spoken, in the east and south, the Hollandic dialects gradually become Brabantian forms like the South Guelderish. Utrechts-Alblasserwaards, spoken in the area immediately east of the districts, is considered either a subdialect of Hollandic or a separate dialect
21.
Brabantian dialect
–
Brabantian or Brabantish, also Brabantic, is a dialect group of the Dutch language. Brabantian expands into small parts in the west of Limburg while its influence on the Flemish dialects in East-Flanders weakens towards the west. In a small area in the northwest of North Brabant, Hollandic is spoken, conventionally, the South Guelderish dialects are distinguished from Brabantian, but there are no objective criteria apart from geography to do so. East Brabantian, spoken in the area east of the river Donge, in the middle and east of North Brabant, the east of the Province of Antwerp, South Brabantian, spoken in the province of Flemish Brabant and the south of Antwerp. Over 5 million people live in an area with some form of Brabantian being the predominant colloquial language out of the areas 22 million Dutch-speakers, compared to the other dialects and sublanguages of Dutch, Brabantian has historically been a major influence on the development of Dutch. In the second if the 14th century, the societal emphasis shifted to Brabant. In the 16th century, when the Low Countries were in turmoil, the migration made the cultural elite move from the oppressive Spanish/Roman Catholic region to the more liberal north. She says that Standard Dutch is a standardized Hollands dialect, the first major formation of Standard Dutch also took place in Antwerp, where a Brabantian dialect is spoken. The default language being developed around then thus mainly Brabantian influences, the early modern Dutch written language was initially influenced primarily by Brabantian, with strong influence from the Hollandic dialect after the 16th century. Since then, it has diverged from Standard Dutch, evolving in its own way, about one quarter of the Dutch-speaking population lives in the Brabantian dialect zone. In the Netherlands, rural areas still retain their original Brabantian dialects. In large Dutch cities, such as Breda and Eindhoven, where the Industrial Revolution drew many people other parts of the country. However, some cities, such as Tilburg and s-Hertogenbosch. In Brussels-Capital Region, French largely replaced Dutch in the mid-20th century, moreover, use of Dutch is reviving because of young Dutch-speaking families moving back from the suburbs to the old city centre, the City of Brussels. The Brabantian is rather close to and contributed to the development of Standard Dutch, a characteristic phrase, houdoe, derives from houd u goed, but colloquial Dutch/Hollandic uses doei. In South Brabantian, Ale, salu e, a calque from French Allez. and Salut. is a common greeting. Brabantian dialects have a characteristic historical tendency towards accusativism, the use of the case instead of the nominative case as well. While the cases themselves have fallen out of use in the modern language, as the accusative case had different forms for masculine and feminine nouns, that allowed the two genders to remain distinguished, and speakers of Brabantian dialects still keep them separate
22.
South Guelderish
–
South Guelderish refers to the easternmost group of Dutch dialects spoken along the lower Rhine. South Guelderish — especially Rivierenlands — is sometimes included as part of Brabantic, a widely spoken Dutch dialect. Alternatively, it is considered to extend southward into Northern Limburg until the Uerdingen line and it is arguably more appropriate to group South Guelderish, North Limburgish, Kleverlander, and East Bergish into one dialect group—East Dutch. The status of East Dutch differs greatly between the Netherlands and Germany, on the Dutch side, East Dutch is subject to the influence of standard Dutch. Since it is a Dutch dialect, it is similar enough to the standard language. In Germany, however, Kleverlander and East Bergish are in retreat under the pressure of standard German, to which they are distantly related. Furthermore, large-scale industrialization in the Cleves–Duisburg area in Germany during the late 19th and 20th century has reduced its use today. For example, in Duisburg it has died out. As noted before, South Guelderish is sometimes included within Brabantic and this is done because there exists no tight isogloss bundle between the Brabantic and South Guelderish dialects. Instead, change occurs in two steps, the alt-oud isogloss between Groesbeek and Nijmegen and the ies-ijs isogloss west of Nijmegen. A dialect of South Guelderish origin spoken in the United States is Pella Dutch, the Limburgish band Rowwen Hèze sings in North Limburgish, a subdialect of South Gelderish. Meuse-Rhenish THE LOWER RHINE AND SOUTH SLESWICK, TWO BORDER REGIONS AND THEIR RELATION TO THEIR NEIGHBOURS AND MINORITIES
23.
Meuse-Rhenish
–
Meuse-Rhenish is a modern term that refers to the literature written in the Middle Ages in the greater Meuse-Rhine area. This area stretches in the triangle roughly between the rivers Meuse and Rhine. It also applies to the Low Franconian dialects that have spoken in that area in continuation from mediaeval times up to now. It includes varieties of South Guelderish and Limburgish in the Belgian and Dutch provinces of Limburg, with regard to this German part only, Meuse-Rhenish equals the total of Low Rhenish vernaculars. Low Rhenish is the name in German for the regional Low Franconian language varieties spoken alongside the so-called Lower Rhine in the west of Germany. Low Franconian is a language or dialect group that has developed in the parts of the Frankish Empire. From this group both the Dutch and later the Afrikaans standard languages have arisen, the differences between Low Rhenish and Low Saxon are smaller than between Low Rhenish and High German. Yet, Low Rhenish does not belong to Low German, therefore, it could properly be called German Dutch. Indeed, Deutschniederländisch was the term under the Prussian Reign of the 19th century. Low Rhenish differs strongly from High German, the more to the north it approaches the Netherlands, the more it sounds like Dutch. As it crosses the Dutch-German as well as the Dutch-Belgian borders, in two of them Dutch is the standard language. The eastmost varieties of the latter, east of the Rhine from Düsseldorf to Wuppertal, are referred to as Low Bergish, Limburgish is recognised as a regional language in the Netherlands. As such, it receives protection under chapter 2 of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The area in which Limburgish is spoken roughly fits within a circle from Venlo to Düsseldorf to Aachen to Maastricht to Hasselt. In German sources, the dialects linguistically counting as Limburgish spoken east of the river Rhine are often called Bergish, west of the river Rhine they are called Low Rhenish, Limburgish or Ripuarian. Limburgish is not recognised by the German government as an official language, Low Rhenish is considered as a group of dialects in Germany. Together all these belong to a greater continuum, this superordinating group is called Meuse-Rhenish. These insights are rather new among dialectologists on both sides of the national Dutch-German border, German population in the Meuse-Rhine area are used to let the geographic Lower Rhine area begin approximately with the Benrath line, coincidentally
24.
Limburgish language
–
Limburgish, also called Limburgian or Limburgic, is a group of East Low Franconian varieties spoken in the Limburg and Rhineland regions, along the Dutch–Belgian–German border. The area in which it is spoken roughly fits within a circle from Venlo to Düsseldorf to Aachen to Maastricht to Tienen. In some parts of area it is generally used as the colloquial language in daily speech. It shares many characteristics both with German and Dutch and is considered as a variant of one of these languages. The name Limburgish derives only indirectly from the now Belgian town of Limbourg, more directly it is derived from the more modern name of the Province of Limburg in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which has been split today into a Belgian Limburg and a Dutch Limburg. In the area around the old Duchy of Limburg the main language today is French, people from Limburg usually call their language Plat, the same as Low German speakers do. The word can also be associated with platteland, the general Dutch term for the language of ordinary people in former ages was Dietsch or Duutsch, as it still exists in the term Low Dietsch. This term is derived from Proto-Germanic þiudiskaz, meaning of the people. In Dutch the word plat means flat, but also refers to the way a language is spoken, Limburgish has partially overlapping definition areas, depending on the criteria used, All dialects spoken within the political boundary of the two Limburg provinces. Limburgish according to Jo Daan, the associative arrow method of Meertens Institute, South Lower Franconian, isogloss definition between the Uerdingen and Benrath lines by Wenker, Schrijnen and Goossens. Western limit of Limburgish pitch accent Southeast Limburgish dialect, this includes a part of the Ripuarian language in Germany, under the influence of the Merovingian and especially the Carolingian dynasty, Eastern Low Franconian underwent much influence from the neighbouring High German languages. It is especially this trait which distinguishes Limburgish from Western Low Franconian, in the past, all Limburgish dialects were therefore sometimes seen as West Central German, part of High German. It is nevertheless most common in linguistics to consider Limburgish as Low Franconian, from the 13th century on, however, the Duchy of Brabant extended its power. As a consequence, at first the western and then also the variants of Limburgish underwent great influence of Brabantian. As a result, Limburgish – although being essentially a variety of Low Franconian – still has a distance from Standard Dutch with regards to phonology, morphology. In German sources, the dialects linguistically counting as Limburgish spoken to the east of the river Rhine are called Bergish, West of the river Rhine they are called Low Rhenish, which is considered a transitional zone between Low Franconian and Ripuarian. Thus, formerly German linguists tended to call these dialects Low German, Limburgish is spoken in a considerable part of the German Lower Rhine area, in what linguistically could be called German Limburg. This area extends from the regions of Cleves, Aachen, Viersen and Heinsberg
25.
Southeast Limburgish dialect
–
Southeast Limburgish, also referred to as Southern Meuse-Rhenish, is a subdivision of what recently has been named Meuse-Rhenish. Both terms denote a rather compact grouping of Low Franconian varieties, spoken in the Limburg and Lower Rhineland regions, near the common Dutch/Flemish and these dialectal varieties differ notably from Dutch and Flemish at the one side, and no less from German at the other. In the Netherlands and Belgium this group is included in the generic term Limburgish. Limburgish was recently recognised as a language in the Netherlands. The linguistic border of the Limburgish varieties to the South is the Benrath line and this means Southeast Limburgish is different in nature from the other Limburgish varieties. A lot of subgroupings can be made here, East Geteland, West Geteland and Bilzerland are transitional subdialects between Limburgish and South Brabantian. At least the majority of these are non-tonal, East Geteland is spoken around St Truiden in Belgium. West Geteland is spoken up to the Uerdingen Line, which reaches the Dutch-Walloon language border at Bierbeek in Belgium, other minor varieties include Bilzerland spoken around Genk in Belgium and Tongerland spoken around Tongeren in Belgium. West Limburgish is the variety of Limburgish spoken around Hasselt, in Germany West Limburgish is a concept including areas in Dutch Limburg and part of Dutch Brabant. The border between West Limburgish and East Limburgish starts near the area between the villages of s-Gravenvoeren and Sint-Martens-Voeren in the Belgian municipality of Voeren, central Limburgish is a variety of Limburgish around Maastricht and Heerlen in the Netherlands and Genk in Belgium. Central Limburgish is a used in Germany, which includes the area around Maastricht. In Germany there is also a concept of a variety of Limburgish around Genk, East Limburgish as a concept is also used in Germany, which includes an area from Belgian Voeren South of Maastricht in the Netherlands, to an area in Germany including Dülken and central Krefeld. The southeasternmost variety is referred to as Southeast Limburgish and the northeasternmost variety is referred to as Low Bergish, Southeast Limburgish is spoken around Kerkrade, Bocholtz and Vaals in the Netherlands, Aachen in Germany and Raeren and Eynatten in Belgium. In Germany it is considered as Ripuarian, not always as Limburgish. This explains why it is not distinctly marked on both maps and these pictures, however, have to be fine-tuned for the transitional zone between Limburgish and Ripuarian. In Belgium, the boundary between Meuse-Rhenish and Ripuarian is formed by the so-called Low Dietsch language area. This variety still possesses interesting syntactic idiosyncrasies, probably dating from the period in which the old Duchy of Limburg existed. If only tonality is to be taken as to define this variety and this tonal language group stretches rather deep into Germany, even across the Rhine up to Siegen
26.
Low Dietsch dialects
–
Low Dietsch refers to a handful of transitional Limburgish–Ripuarian dialects spoken in a number of towns and villages in the southeastern Belgian canton of Eupen. This area, located in the Belgian tri-state area from Voeren, to Plombières, classified by German dialectologists as Ripuarian Franconian and by Dutch-language dialectologists as Southeast Limburgish, Low Dietsch is more precisely a transitional dialect between both. Low Dietsch is one of several Meuse-Rhenish varieties that make the part of the dialect continuum known as the Rhenish fan. As the southernmost dialect of Limburgish, the Low-Dietsch speech area corresponds to the core of the old Duchy of Limburg. In French, the term francique carolingien Carolingian Franconian is also used, because it is thought to be the language of the Carolingian dynasty and court, although that would be an anachronism. Low Dietsch is thought to have spoken from Tongeren to Cologne. However, this expression is controversial since there is no way to prove that hypothesis, nor is it possible that the current dialectal map was the same 1,500 years ago. Of those early documents that have survived, one, the Strasbourg Oaths, is in Rhine Franconian, and the other, the Wachtendonck Psalms, is in a form of southern Limburgish. In 1963 the Low Dietsch zone was incorporated to Wallonia, and since 1992 the dialect has been recognized as a language by the Walloon authority, affording it certain rights. It is not, however, related to Walloon, but French is the language of officialdom in the area and it forms the northwestern border of Ripuarian Franconian and the southeastern portion of the Meuse-Rhenish area. It is adjacent to the border of the Meuse-Rhenish language area. Limburgish straddles the borderline between Low Franconian and West Central German varieties and they are more-or-less mutually intelligible with the Ripuarian dialects, but show fewer High German shifts. Dialects belonging to the Ripuarian group almost always call themselves Platt like Öcher Platt or Eischwiele Platt, the reason behind this is, that most of the far more than hundred Ripuarian dialects are bound to a village or municipality. Usually there are distinctive differences between neighboring dialects, and increasingly bigger ones between the more distant ones. These are described by a set of isoglosses called the Rhenish fan, the way someone talks, even if he is not using Ripuarian, quite often makes it possible to trace him precisely to the village or city quarter where he learned to speak. This variety still possesses interesting syntactic idiosyncrasies, probably dating from the period when the old Duchy of Limburg existed, projet babel Notre patois, notre Platdutch Dictionnaire du patois de Gemmenich
27.
Zeeland
–
Zeeland is the westernmost province of the Netherlands. The province, located in the south-west of the country, consists of a number of islands and peninsulas and its area is about 2,930 square kilometres, of which almost 1,140 square kilometres is water, and it has a population of about 380,000. Large parts of Zeeland are below sea level, the last great flooding of the area was in 1953. Tourism is an important economic activity, in the summer, its beaches make it a popular destination for tourists, especially German tourists. In some areas, the population can be two to four times higher during the summer season. The coat of arms of Zeeland shows a lion half-emerged from water, the country of New Zealand is named after Zeeland - not Zealand in Denmark, as sometimes claimed. Nehalennia is a goddess of the ancient religion known around the province of Zeeland and her worship dates back at least to the 2nd century BC, and flourished in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. She was possibly a goddess, either Celtic or pre-Germanic – sources differ on the culture that first worshipped her. During the Roman Era, her main function appeared to be the protection of travelers, most of what is known about her comes from the remains of over 160 carved stone offerings which have been dredged up from the Eastern Scheldt since 1970. Two more Nehalennia offering stones have also found in Cologne. Zeeland was an area between the counts of Holland and Flanders until 1299, when the last count of Holland died. Followed by the counts of Bavaria, Burgundy and Habsburg, after 1585 Zeeland followed, as one of the 7 independent provinces, the fate of the Northern part of The Netherlands. In 1432 it became part of the Low Countries possessions of Philip the Good of Burgundy, through marriage, the Seventeen Provinces became the property of the Habsburgs in 1477. In the Eighty Years War, Zeeland was on the side of the Union of Utrecht, the area now called Zeeuws-Vlaanderen was not part of Zeeland, but a part of the county of Flanders that was conquered by the United Provinces, hence called Staats-Vlaanderen. After the French occupation and the formation of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1815, during World War II, Zeeland was occupied by Nazi Germany between June 1940 and November 1944. In 1944, Zeeland was devastated by the Battle of the Scheldt, the catastrophic North Sea flood of 1953, which killed over 1800 people in Zeeland, led to the construction of the protective Delta Works. The province of Zeeland is a river delta situated at the mouth of several major rivers, namely Scheldt, Rhine. Most of the province lies below sea level and was reclaimed from the sea by inhabitants over time, what used to be a muddy landscape, flooding at high tide and reappearing at low tide, became a series of small man-made hills that stayed dry at all times
28.
South Holland
–
South Holland is a province in the midwestern Netherlands. It has a population of just over 3.6 million, situated on the North Sea in the west of the Netherlands, South Holland covers an area of 3,403 km2, of which 585 km2 is water. It borders North Holland to the north, Utrecht and Gelderland to the east, the provincial capital is The Hague, while its largest city is Rotterdam. Archaeological discoveries in Hardinxveld-Giessendam indicate that the area of South Holland has been inhabited since at least ca.7,500 years before present, agriculture and permanent settlements probably originated around 2,000 years later, based on excavations near Vlaardingen. In the classical antiquity, South Holland was part of the Roman Province of Germania Inferior, the Romans built fortresses along the border, such as Praetorium Agrippinae near modern-day Valkenburg, Matilo near modern-day Leiden, and Albaniana near modern-day Alphen aan den Rijn. A city was founded near modern-day Voorburg, Forum Hadriani and it was built according to the grid plan, and facilitated a square, a court, a bathhouse and several temples. After the departure of the Romans, the area belonged to the Frisian Kingdom, in 690, the Anglo-Saxon monk Willibrord arrived near Katwijk and was granted permission to spread Roman Catholicism by the Frankish king Pepin II. He accordingly founded a church in Oegstgeest, after which the area was gradually Christianised. The area was appointed to East Francia in the Treaty of Verdun in 843, after which the king granted lands to Gerolf and this was the birth of the County of Holland. Gerolf was later succeeded by Dirk I, who continued to rule Holland under the Frankish king, in 1248, count William II ordered the construction of the Ridderzaal, which was later finished by his son and successor Floris V. The first city in South Holland to receive city rights was Dordrecht, the city retained a dominant position in the area until it was struck by a series of floods in the late 14th century. The same century saw a series of civil wars, the Hook and Cod wars. Both his daughter Jaqueline and his brother John, the supported by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. The conflict ended in 1490, with John victorious, overall, the area of South Holland remained largely agrarian throughout the late Middle Ages. This changed around 1500, when Holland became Europes most urbanised area, during the Eighty Years War, the area of South Holland was the scene of the Capture of Brielle, the Siege of Leiden and the assassination of William the Silent. The United Netherlands declared their independence in 1581, and Holland quickly emerged as the dominant province, with important trading cities such as Leiden, Delft, Gouda. In 1575, the Netherlands first university was founded in Leiden by William the Silent, the Hague, which had originated around the castle of the counts of Holland, became its new political centre. Both the States of Holland and the States General seated in the Binnenhof, the Dutch Golden Age blossomed in the 17th century
29.
Goeree-Overflakkee
–
Goeree-Overflakkee is the southernmost delta island of the province of South Holland, Netherlands. It is separated from Voorne-Putten and Hoeksche Waard by the Haringvliet, from the mainland of North Brabant by the Volkerak, since 2013, Goeree-Overflakke has also been a municipality, consisting from west to east of the former municipalities of Goedereede, Dirksland, Middelharnis, and Oostflakkee. The largest towns are Sommelsdijk, Middelharnis, Ouddorp, and Dirksland, despite being part of the province of South Holland, the islands scenery and dialect are more closely related to Zeeland than to Holland. On the island they speak a form of Zeelandic, namely Goereês in the west, the municipal council of Goeree-Overflakkee consists of 29 seats, which are divided as follows, The former municipality of Goedereede consisted of a number of places. From west to east, they were Ouddorp, Goedereede, income consists mainly of tourism and fishery. Because of the extended and beautiful beach close by, Ouddorp has a number of camping grounds which are a big attraction for other inland Europeans. Goedereede and Stellendam both have a fishing fleet. Entering the town of Goedereede is like entering a different time, a town that takes you back a few centuries with its beautifully shaped buildings and tall church tower. Goedereede is one of two towns on the island that ever obtained city rights, Stellendam was hit hard in the 1953 storm flood and several monuments in the town commemorate this tragic event. Next to Stellendam lies the Haringvlietdam which shelters the Haringvliet from the North Sea, on the islands side of the dam a Delta Expo can be found with informative tours that guide you through the dam. The former municipality of Dirksland consisted of Melissant, Herkingen, the 1953 flood did not have such an enormous effect on these places, because the lands they are on lay generally higher than the rest of the island. Dirksland was the biggest of the three and also has the hospital on the island. The Van Weel-Bethesda hospital is one of the smallest in the country, Dirksland is recognizable from a distance by the biggest water tower of the country. The towns are agriculturally focused and have several camping grounds for people who prefer a quiet locality in contrast to the busy Ouddorp area, Dirksland has an inland harbor with a newly restored gate complex. The Grevelingenmeer is a large area with the main recreational areas on Schouwen-Duiveland. Herkingen is trying to join in with the industry and has quite a large yachting harbor. The town of Herkingen currently hosts several of the biggest modern windmills in the country, the former municipality of Middelharnis, forming the center of the island, was the biggest of the four with over 17,000 inhabitants. It consisted of Sommelsdijk, Middelharnis, Nieuwe-Tonge, and Stad aan t Haringvliet, Middelharnis has a shopping area called Dn Diek
30.
Middle Ages
–
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or Medieval Period lasted from the 5th to the 15th century. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance, the Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history, classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern period. The medieval period is subdivided into the Early, High. Population decline, counterurbanisation, invasion, and movement of peoples, the large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the seventh century, North Africa and the Middle East—once part of the Byzantine Empire—came under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate, although there were substantial changes in society and political structures, the break with classical antiquity was not complete. The still-sizeable Byzantine Empire survived in the east and remained a major power, the empires law code, the Corpus Juris Civilis or Code of Justinian, was rediscovered in Northern Italy in 1070 and became widely admired later in the Middle Ages. In the West, most kingdoms incorporated the few extant Roman institutions, monasteries were founded as campaigns to Christianise pagan Europe continued. The Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty, briefly established the Carolingian Empire during the later 8th, the Crusades, first preached in 1095, were military attempts by Western European Christians to regain control of the Holy Land from Muslims. Kings became the heads of centralised nation states, reducing crime and violence, intellectual life was marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasised joining faith to reason, and by the founding of universities. Controversy, heresy, and the Western Schism within the Catholic Church paralleled the conflict, civil strife. Cultural and technological developments transformed European society, concluding the Late Middle Ages, the Middle Ages is one of the three major periods in the most enduring scheme for analysing European history, classical civilisation, or Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Modern Period. Medieval writers divided history into periods such as the Six Ages or the Four Empires, when referring to their own times, they spoke of them as being modern. In the 1330s, the humanist and poet Petrarch referred to pre-Christian times as antiqua, leonardo Bruni was the first historian to use tripartite periodisation in his History of the Florentine People. Bruni and later argued that Italy had recovered since Petrarchs time. The Middle Ages first appears in Latin in 1469 as media tempestas or middle season, in early usage, there were many variants, including medium aevum, or middle age, first recorded in 1604, and media saecula, or middle ages, first recorded in 1625. The alternative term medieval derives from medium aevum, tripartite periodisation became standard after the German 17th-century historian Christoph Cellarius divided history into three periods, Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. The most commonly given starting point for the Middle Ages is 476, for Europe as a whole,1500 is often considered to be the end of the Middle Ages, but there is no universally agreed upon end date. English historians often use the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 to mark the end of the period
31.
Holland
–
Holland is a region and former province on the western coast of the Netherlands. The name Holland is also used informally to refer to the whole of the country of the Netherlands. From the 10th to the 16th century, Holland proper was a political region within the Holy Roman Empire as a county ruled by the Counts of Holland. By the 17th century, Holland had risen to become a maritime and economic power, the name Holland first appeared in sources in 866 for the region around Haarlem, and by 1064 was being used as the name of the entire county. By this time, the inhabitants of Holland were referring to themselves as Hollanders, Holland is derived from the Middle Dutch term holtland. This spelling variation remained in use until around the 14th century, a popular folk etymology holds that Holland is derived from hol land and was inspired by the low-lying geography of Holland. The proper name of the area in both Dutch and English is Holland, Holland is a part of the Netherlands. Holland is informally used in English and other languages, including sometimes the Dutch language itself, the people of Holland are referred to as Hollanders in both Dutch and English. Today this refers specifically to people from the current provinces of North Holland, strictly speaking, the term Hollanders does not refer to people from the other provinces in the Netherlands, but colloquially Hollanders is sometimes used in this wider sense. In Dutch, the Dutch word Hollands is the form for Holland. In English, Dutch refers to the Netherlands as a whole, the word Hollandish is no longer in common use. Hollandic is the name give to the dialect spoken in Holland, and is occasionally also used by historians. Initially, Holland was a corner of the Holy Roman Empire. Gradually, its importance increased until it began to have a decisive. Until the start of the 12th century, the inhabitants of the area that became Holland were known as Frisians, the area was initially part of Frisia. At the end of the 9th century, West-Frisia became a county in the Holy Roman Empire. The first Count known about with certainty was Dirk I, who ruled from 896 to 931 and he was succeeded by a long line of counts in the House of Holland. When John I, count of Holland, died childless in 1299, by the time of William V the count of Holland was also the count of Hainaut and Zealand
32.
Flanders
–
Flanders is the Dutch-speaking northern portion of Belgium, although there are several overlapping definitions, including ones related to culture, language, politics and history. It is one of the communities, regions and language areas of Belgium, the demonym associated with Flanders is Fleming, while the corresponding adjective is Flemish. The official capital of Flanders is Brussels, although Brussels itself has an independent regional government, in historical contexts, Flanders originally refers to the County of Flanders, which around AD1000 stretched from the Strait of Dover to the Scheldt estuary. In accordance with late 20th century Belgian state reforms the area was made two political entities, the Flemish Community and the Flemish Region. These entities were merged, although geographically the Flemish Community, which has a cultural mandate, covers Brussels. Flanders has figured prominently in European history, as a consequence, a very sophisticated culture developed, with impressive achievements in the arts and architecture, rivaling those of northern Italy. Belgium was one of the centres of the 19th century industrial revolution, geographically, Flanders is generally flat, and has a small section of coast on the North Sea. Much of Flanders is agriculturally fertile and densely populated, with a density of almost 500 people per square kilometer. It touches France to the west near the coast, and borders the Netherlands to the north and east, the Brussels Capital Region is an enclave within the Flemish Region. Flanders has exclaves of its own, Voeren in the east is between Wallonia and the Netherlands and Baarle-Hertog in the consists of 22 exclaves surrounded by the Netherlands. It comprises 6.5 million Belgians who consider Dutch to be their mother tongue, the political subdivisions of Belgium, the Flemish Region and the Flemish Community. The first does not comprise Brussels, whereas the latter does comprise the Dutch-speaking inhabitants of Brussels, the political institutions that govern both subdivisions, the operative body Flemish Government and the legislative organ Flemish Parliament. The two westernmost provinces of the Flemish Region, West Flanders and East Flanders, forming the central portion of the historic County of Flanders, a feudal territory that existed from the 8th century until its absorption by the French First Republic. Until the 1600s, this county also extended over parts of France, one of the regions conquered by the French in Flanders, namely French Flanders in the Nord department. French Flanders can be divided into two regions, Walloon Flanders and Maritime Flanders. The first region was predominantly French-speaking already in the 1600s, the latter became so in the 20th century, the city of Lille identifies itself as Flemish, and this is reflected, for instance, in the name of its local railway station TGV Lille Flandres. The region conquered by the Dutch Republic in Flanders, now part of the Dutch province of Zeeland, the significance of the County of Flanders and its counts eroded through time, but the designation remained in a very broad sense. In the Early modern period, the term Flanders was associated with the part of the Low Countries
33.
Isogloss
–
An isogloss, also called a heterogloss, is the geographic boundary of a certain linguistic feature, such as the pronunciation of a vowel, the meaning of a word, or the use of some syntactic feature. However, an individual isogloss may or may not have any coincidence with a language border, for example, the front-rounding of /y/ cuts across France and Germany, while the /y/ is absent from Italian and Spanish words that are cognates with the /y/-containing French words. One of the most well-known isoglosses is the centum-satem isogloss, similar to an isogloss, an isograph is a distinguishing feature of a writing system. Both concepts are used in historical linguistics. The centum-satem isogloss of the Indo-European language family relates to the different evolution of the consonants of Proto-Indo-European. They are known as branches, named after the Latin word for hundred. In other branches, the merged with the velars, PIE *keup- became Vedic Sanskrit kopáyati shaken. They are known as branches, after the Avestan word for hundred. A feature of the ancient Northwest Semitic languages is w becoming y at the beginning of a word, thus, in Proto-Semitic and subsequent non-Northwest Semitic languages and dialects, the root letters for a word for child were w-l-d. However, in the ancient Northwest Semitic languages, the word was y-l-d, similarly, Proto-Semitic ā becomes ō in the Canaanite dialects of Northwest Semitic. Within the Aramaic languages and dialects of Northwest Semitic, the historic ā is preserved, thus, an ancient Northwest Semitic language whose historic ā became ō can be classed as part of the Canaanite branch of Northwest Semitic. Such features can be used as data of fundamental importance for the purposes of linguistic classification, just as there are distinguishing features of related languages, there are also distinguishing features of related scripts. For example, a feature of the Iron Age Old Hebrew script is that the letters bet, dalet, ayin and resh do not have an open head. Similarly, the bet of Old Hebrew has a distinctive stance, the term isogloss is inspired by contour lines, or isopleths, such as isobars. However, the isogloss separates rather than connects points, consequently, it has been proposed for the term heterogloss to be used instead. Dialect Dialectology Dialect continuum Cultural boundary Joret line Uerdingen line Chambers, the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Worlds Ancient Languages. An example of an isogloss in Southern England, beyond the Isogloss, The Isograph in Dialect Topography, A discussion of the shortcomings and oversimplifications of using isoglosses. On Some Acoustic Correlates of Isoglossy, A humorous analysis of Russian isoglossy
34.
Standard Dutch
–
The Dutch Language Union is an international institution that governs issues regarding the Dutch language. It was founded on 9 September 1980 by the Netherlands and Belgium, Suriname has been an associate member of the Taalunie since 2005. The Dutch Language Union was established by a treaty between Belgium and the Netherlands, signed on 9 September 1980 in Brussels and it succeeded the Cultural Agreement between the two countries signed just after the Second World War. This agreement was redone in 1995, after the federalization of Belgium, the accession was ratified by the National Assembly of Suriname in 2004 and came into force in 2005. Standard Dutch is the language as it is taught in schools and used by authorities in the Netherlands, Flanders, Suriname. The Dutch Language Union defines what is AN and what is not, the implicit insinuation that people speaking dialects or with an accent were not civilised was thus removed. An important change that was carried out by the Dutch Language Union was the modification of Dutch orthography in 1995, among the Union’s publications is the well-known Word list of the Dutch language, commonly known as the “Groene boekje”. The green booklet is the orthographic and grammatical reference of the Dutch language. It is laid out like a dictionary, including forms and spelling. The most recent version of the Green Booklet appeared on 13 October 2015, in December 2005, most of the Dutch mainstream media announced a boycott. In August 2006, they released a White book as their own, currently these two spellings are both in use, sometimes confusing people, the green one is used by schools and officials, the white one by papers, magazines and television stations. In Belgium, on the hand, the spelling reform was generally accepted without protest. The Van Dale dictionary is commonly accepted as the most authoritative Dutch dictionary, commonly named the Dikke Van Dale the dictionary is split into three tomes and is usually updated every 7–8 years. The 15th edition was published on 23 September 2015, the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal is a historic dictionary that includes all words used from 1500 to the present day. Work began in 1864 and was finished in 1998 when the last volume was published and it has 43 volumes, needing about 3m if placed on a shelf, with about 400,000 words on 49,255 pages. In 2001, three volumes were published containing mostly words from the 20th century that were not included in the previous 43 volumes. This dictionary is published by Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie and can be found online, the binational Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie in Leiden, works under the auspices of the Dutch Language Union, and is responsible for the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal. The Spoken Dutch Corpus has contemporary Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands and Flanders, the P. J. Meertens Institute, formerly the Dialectenbureau, is a research institute associated with the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and studies and indexes dialects
35.
Schwa
–
In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa is the mid central vowel sound in the middle of the vowel chart, denoted by the IPA symbol ə, or another vowel sound close to that position. An example in English is the sound of the a in the word about. Schwa in English is mainly found in unstressed positions, but in other languages it occurs more frequently as a stressed vowel. In relation to languages, the name schwa and the symbol ə may be used for some other unstressed and toneless neutral vowel. The word schwa is from the Hebrew word shva, designating the Hebrew niqqud vowel sign shva, in Modern Hebrew, the term was introduced into European linguistics by Jacob Grimm in the early 19th century, and so the spelling sch is German in origin. It was first used in English texts between 1890 and 1895, the symbol ⟨ə⟩ was used first by Johann Andreas Schmeller for the reduced vowel at the end of the German name Gabe. Alexander John Ellis, in his alphabet, used it for the similar English sound in. Sometimes the term schwa is used for any vowel. In English, schwa is the most common vowel sound and it is a reduced vowel in many unstressed syllables especially if syllabic consonants are not used. In most varieties of English, schwa occurs almost exclusively in unstressed syllables, in New Zealand English, the high front lax vowel has shifted open and back to sound like schwa, and both stressed and unstressed schwas exist. To a certain extent, that is true for South African English as well, in General American, schwa and ɜː are the two vowel sounds that can be r-colored, r-colored schwa is used in words with unstressed er syllables, such as dinner. See also stress and vowel reduction in English, quite a few languages have a sound similar to schwa. It is similar to a short French unaccented ⟨e⟩, which is rounded and less central and it is almost always unstressed, but Albanian, Bulgarian, Slovene and Afrikaans are some of the languages that allow stressed schwas. In most dialects of Russian an unstressed ⟨a⟩ or ⟨o⟩ reduces to a schwa, in dialects of Kashubian a schwa occurs in place of the Old Polish short consonants u, i, y. Many Caucasian languages and some Uralic languages also use phonemic schwa, in the Eastern dialects of Catalan, including the standard variety, based in the dialect spoken in and around Barcelona, an unstressed ⟨a⟩ or ⟨e⟩ is pronounced as a schwa. In the dialects of Catalan spoken in the Balearic Islands, a stressed schwa can occur, stressed schwa can occur in Romanian, as in mătură. In European and some African dialects of Portuguese, the schwa occurs in unstressed syllables that end in ⟨e⟩, such as noite, tarde, pêssego. However, that is rare in Brazilian Portuguese except in areas as Curitiba in Paraná
36.
English Language
–
English /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/ is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and is now the global lingua franca. Named after the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that migrated to England, English is either the official language or one of the official languages in almost 60 sovereign states. It is the third most common language in the world, after Mandarin. It is the most widely learned second language and a language of the United Nations, of the European Union. It is the most widely spoken Germanic language, accounting for at least 70% of speakers of this Indo-European branch, English has developed over the course of more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the century, are called Old English. Middle English began in the late 11th century with the Norman conquest of England, Early Modern English began in the late 15th century with the introduction of the printing press to London and the King James Bible, and the start of the Great Vowel Shift. Through the worldwide influence of the British Empire, modern English spread around the world from the 17th to mid-20th centuries, English is an Indo-European language, and belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages. Most closely related to English are the Frisian languages, and English, Old Saxon and its descendent Low German languages are also closely related, and sometimes Low German, English, and Frisian are grouped together as the Ingvaeonic or North Sea Germanic languages. Modern English descends from Middle English, which in turn descends from Old English, particular dialects of Old and Middle English also developed into a number of other English languages, including Scots and the extinct Fingallian and Forth and Bargy dialects of Ireland. English is classified as a Germanic language because it shares new language features with other Germanic languages such as Dutch, German and these shared innovations show that the languages have descended from a single common ancestor, which linguists call Proto-Germanic. Through Grimms law, the word for foot begins with /f/ in Germanic languages, English is classified as an Anglo-Frisian language because Frisian and English share other features, such as the palatalisation of consonants that were velar consonants in Proto-Germanic. The earliest form of English is called Old English or Anglo-Saxon, in the fifth century, the Anglo-Saxons settled Britain and the Romans withdrew from Britain. England and English are named after the Angles, Old English was divided into four dialects, the Anglian dialects, Mercian and Northumbrian, and the Saxon dialects, Kentish and West Saxon. Through the educational reforms of King Alfred in the century and the influence of the kingdom of Wessex. The epic poem Beowulf is written in West Saxon, and the earliest English poem, Modern English developed mainly from Mercian, but the Scots language developed from Northumbrian. A few short inscriptions from the period of Old English were written using a runic script. By the sixth century, a Latin alphabet was adopted, written with half-uncial letterforms and it included the runic letters wynn ⟨ƿ⟩ and thorn ⟨þ⟩, and the modified Latin letters eth ⟨ð⟩, and ash ⟨æ⟩
37.
Walcheren
–
Walcheren is a former island in the province of Zeeland in the Netherlands at the mouth of the Scheldt estuary. It lies between the Oosterschelde in the north and the Westerschelde in the south and is roughly the shape of a rhombus, the two sides facing the North Sea consist of dunes, the rest of its coastline is made up of dykes. Middelburg lies at its centre, this city is the provincial capital, originally, Walcheren was an island, but polders and a dam across the Oosterschelde have connected it to the island of Zuid-Beveland, which in turn has been connected to the North Brabant mainland. The Romans called it Wallacra, a term most likely associated with Walha, Walcheren became the seat of the Danish Viking Harald, who conquered what would become the Netherlands together with his brother Rorik in the ninth century. One fringe theory has it that Ibn Rustah described Walcheren when reporting on the seat of the khagan of the Rus, another fringe theory mentions Walcheren as the seat of Hades, described by Homer. The expedition turned into a disaster – although Flushing surrendered the Austrians had already been defeated at the Battle of Wagram in early July and were suing for peace. The French suffered some 4000 dead, wounded and captured, with the strategic reasons for the campaign gone and the worsening conditions, the British force was withdrawn in December. On 3 October 1944 the RAF bombed the sea wall at Westkapelle causing flooding, the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division cleared South Beveland to the east and approached the island on 31 October 1944. The plan was to cross the Sloe Channel, but leading troops of the 5th Canadian Infantry Brigade found that assault boats were useless in the mud of the channel. The only route open was the 40 metre wide Walcheren Causeway, the Canadian Black Watch sent a company across on the evening of 31 October, but were stopped. The Calgary Highlanders sent two companies over in succession, the second attack opening up a bridgehead on the island, the Highlanders were eventually thrown back, having lost 64 killed and wounded. Le Régiment de Maisonneuve relieved them on the causeway, followed by the 1st Battalion, meanwhile, on 1 November 1944, the British Commandos landed in the village of Westkapelle in order to silence the German coastal batteries looking out over the Scheldt. The amphibious assault proved a success and by 8 November, all German resistance on the island had ceased
38.
Zuid-Beveland
–
Zuid-Beveland is part of the province of Zeeland in the Netherlands north of the Westerschelde and south of the Oosterschelde. It is an island, now peninsula, crossed by the Canal through Zuid-Beveland on the west. It consists of four municipalities, Borsele Goes Kapelle Reimerswaal Goes is Zuid-Bevelands principal urban center, Zuid-Beveland is a former island which was joined to the mainland by a railway embankment in 1903 and to Noord-Beveland by the Delta Works. A shipping canal connecting the Belgian port of Antwerp with the Rhine River traverses Zuid-Beveland and this was the period during which most of Zeeland appears to have been submerged. The area was and for several centuries would remain almost unpeopled, during the eleventh century the area began to be drained, as little by little polders and channels were developed to protect the fields between them. Once drained, salt levels began to reduce and the soil very fertile. In the thirteenth century villages and towns began to appear, people lived chiefly from farming and fishing. The commercial centre of Zuid-Beveland was Goes, but Reimerswaal to the east, as a result of the St. Felix Days floods in November 1530, much of the island disappeared under water. Towns and villages were lost to what became known as the land of Zuid-Beveland. The island was badly impacted forty years later in November 1570 by the “All Saints’ Day floods. Between 1568 and 1648, during the course of what by its end had become the War of Dutch Independence. During most of this period the economy of the Netherlands slowed or contracted, however, the region benefitted from advances in transportation, connected in 1868 to Roosendaal by railroad with the inauguration of the Zeeland Line. In 1850 work began on the Zuid-Beveland Canal which linked the Western Scheldt, the construction in 1871 of the Sloedam, topped off with a roadway and a railway track, across the old Sloe Channel, connected Zuid-Beveland with Walcheren. On 16 May 1940, heavy fighting occurred near Kapelle between German and French motorized troops, who came to the rescue of the Dutch, the next day 65 French soldiers were buried by the local people. After World War II every French soldier, who was killed in the Netherlands during the war, was brought to Kapelle, on 16 May 1950, the military cemetery on the edge of town was officially opened. 217 French soldiers,20 Moroccan soldiers in French service and 1 Belgian soldier were buried here, the area was liberated by British and Canadians during the Battle of the Scheldt in November 1944. In the night of 31 January and the morning of 1 February 1953 a heavy flood occurred in the southwest of the Netherlands, because of the relative high altitude, the most part of Zuid-Beveland was relatively safe. In particular the eastern part of the peninsula suffered from floods, to prevent future floods, the Delta Works were started in 1950
Languages and dialects of Benelux
