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English Orthography
English orthography comprises the set of rules used when writing the English language, allowing readers and writers to associate written graphemes with the sounds of spoken English, as well as other features of the language. English's orthography includes norms for spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word, word breaks, Emphasis (typography), emphasis, and punctuation. As with the orthographies of most other world languages, written English is broadly standardised. This standardisation began to develop when movable type spread to England in the late 15th century. However, unlike with most languages, there are multiple ways to spell every phoneme, and most grapheme, letters also represent multiple pronunciations depending on their position in a word and the context. This is partly due to the large number of words that have been Loanword, loaned from a large number of other languages throughout the history of English, without successful attempts at complete English-language spe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Possessive Apostrophe
The apostrophe (, ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for two basic purposes: * The marking of the omission of one or more letters, e.g. the contraction of "do not" to "don't" * The marking of possessive case of nouns (as in "the eagle's feathers", "in one month's time", "the twins' coats") It is also used in a few exceptional cases for the marking of plurals, e.g. "p's and q's" or Oakland A's. The same mark is used as a single quotation mark. It is also substituted informally for other marks for example instead of the prime symbol to indicate the units of foot or minutes of arc. The word ''apostrophe'' comes from the Greek (hē apóstrophos rosōidía ' he accent ofturning away or elision'), through Latin and French. Usage in English Historical development The apostrophe was first used by Pietro Bembo in his edition of '' De Aetna'' (14 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
French Language
French ( or ) is a Romance languages, Romance language of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European family. Like all other Romance languages, it descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. French evolved from Northern Old Gallo-Romance, a descendant of the Latin spoken in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives are the other langues d'oïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, which French (Francien language, Francien) largely supplanted. It was also substratum (linguistics), influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul and by the Germanic languages, Germanic Frankish language of the post-Roman Franks, Frankish invaders. As a result of French and Belgian colonialism from the 16th century onward, it was introduced to new territories in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and numerous French-based creole languages, most notably Haitian Creole, were established. A French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Fra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Contraction (grammar)
A contraction is a shortened version of the spoken and written forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters and sounds. In linguistic analysis, contractions should not be confused with crasis, abbreviations and initialisms (including acronyms), with which they share some semantic and phonetic functions, though all three are connoted by the term "abbreviation" in layman’s terms. Contraction is also distinguished from morphological clipping, where beginnings and endings are omitted. The definition overlaps with the term portmanteau (a linguistic '' blend''), but a distinction can be made between a portmanteau and a contraction by noting that contractions are formed from words that would otherwise appear together in sequence, such as ''do'' and ''not'', whereas a portmanteau word is formed by combining two or more existing words that all relate to a singular concept that the portmanteau describes. English English has a number of cont ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inflection
In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, tense, grammatical case, case, grammatical voice, voice, grammatical aspect, aspect, grammatical person, person, grammatical number, number, grammatical gender, gender, grammatical mood, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called ''grammatical conjugation, conjugation'', while the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc. can be called ''declension''. An inflection expresses grammatical categories with affixation (such as prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix, and transfix), apophony (as Indo-European ablaut), or other modifications. For example, the Latin verb ', meaning "I will lead", includes the suffix ', expressing person (first), number (singular), and tense-mood (future indicative or present subjunctive). Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacritic'' is a noun, though it is sometimes used in an attributive sense, whereas ''diacritical'' is only an adjective. Some diacritics, such as the acute , grave , and circumflex (all shown above an 'o'), are often called ''accents''. Diacritics may appear above or below a letter or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters. The main use of diacritics in Latin script is to change the sound-values of the letters to which they are added. Historically, English has used the diaeresis diacritic to indicate the correct pronunciation of ambiguous words, such as "coöperate", without which the letter sequence could be misinterpreted to be pronounced . Other examples are the acute and grave accents, which can indica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Genitive Case
In grammar, the genitive case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can also serve purposes indicating other relationships. For example, some verbs may feature arguments in the genitive case; and the genitive case may also have adverbial uses (see adverbial genitive). The genitive construction includes the genitive case, but is a broader category. Placing a modifying noun in the genitive case is one way of indicating that it is related to a head noun, in a genitive construction. However, there are other ways to indicate a genitive construction. For example, many Afroasiatic languages place the head noun (rather than the modifying noun) in the construct state. Possessive grammatical constructions, including the possessive case, may be regarded as subsets of the genitive construction. For example, t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Possessive
A possessive or ktetic form (Glossing abbreviation, abbreviated or ; from ; ) is a word or grammatical construction indicating a relationship of possession (linguistics), possession in a broad sense. This can include strict ownership, or a number of other types of relation to a greater or lesser degree analogous to it. Most European languages feature possessive forms associated with personal pronouns, like the English grammar, English ''my'', ''mine'', ''your'', ''yours'', ''his'' and so on. There are two main ways in which these can be used (and a #Terminology, variety of terminologies for each): * Together with a noun, as in ''my car'', ''your sisters'', ''his boss''. Here the possessive form serves as a ''possessive determiner''. * Without an accompanying noun, as in ''mine is red'', ''I prefer yours'', ''this book is his''. A possessive used in this way is called a ''substantive possessive pronoun'', a possessive pronoun or an ''absolute pronoun''. Some languages, including ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latin Language
Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area around Rome, Italy. Through the expansion of the Roman Republic, it became the dominant language in the Italian Peninsula and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. It has greatly influenced many languages, Latin influence in English, including English, having contributed List of Latin words with English derivatives, many words to the English lexicon, particularly after the Christianity in Anglo-Saxon England, Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons and the Norman Conquest. Latin Root (linguistics), roots appear frequently in the technical vocabulary used by fields such as theology, List of Latin and Greek words commonly used in systematic names, the sciences, List of medical roots, suffixes and prefixes, medicine, and List of Latin legal terms ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syllable
A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are most often consonants). In phonology and studies of languages, syllables are often considered the "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre; properties such as stress, tone and reduplication operate on syllables and their parts. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ''ignite'' is made of two syllables: ''ig'' and ''nite''. Most languages of the world use relatively simple syllable structures that often alternate between vowels and consonants. Despite being present in virtually all human languages, syllables still have no precise definition that is valid for all known languages. A common criterion for finding syllable bound ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Single Quotation Mark
Quotation marks are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to identify direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same glyph. Quotation marks have a variety of forms in different languages and in different media. History The single quotation mark is traced to Ancient Greek practice, adopted and adapted by monastic copyists. Isidore of Seville, in his seventh century encyclopedia, , described their use of the Greek ''diplé'' (a chevron): The double quotation mark derives from a marginal notation used in fifteenth-century manuscript annotations to indicate a passage of particular importance (not necessarily a quotation); the notation was placed in the outside margin of the page and was repeated alongside each line of the passage. In his edition of the works of Aristotle, which appeared in 1483 or 1484, the Milanese Renaissance humanist Francesco ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elision
In linguistics, an elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds (such as a vowel, a consonant, or a whole syllable) in a word or phrase. However, these terms are also used to refer more narrowly to cases where two words are run together by the omission of a final sound. An example is the elision of word-final /t/ in English if it is preceded and followed by a consonant: "first light" is often pronounced "firs' light" (). Many other terms are used to refer to specific cases where sounds are omitted. Citation forms and contextual forms A word may be spoken individually in what is called the citation form. This corresponds to the pronunciation given in a dictionary. However, when words are spoken in context, it often happens that some sounds that belong to the citation form are omitted. Elision is not an all-or-nothing process: elision is more likely to occur in some styles of speaking and less likely in others. Many writers have described the styles of speech in wh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
