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Scandinavian Language
The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages—a sub-family of the Indo-European languages—along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages. The language group is also referred to as the Nordic languages, a direct translation of the most common term used among Danish, Faroese, Icelandic,Elfdalian,Norwegian, Gutnish, and Swedish scholars and people. The term ''North Germanic languages'' is used in comparative linguistics, whereas the term Scandinavian languages appears in studies of the modern standard languages and the dialect continuum of Scandinavia. Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are close enough to form a strong mutual intelligibility where cross-border communication in native languages is very common. Approximately 20 million people in the Nordic countries speak a Scandinavian language as their native language,Holmberg, Anders and Christer Platzack (2005). "The Scandinavian languages" ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chamorro Alphabet
Chamorro (; ch, Finuʼ Chamorro, links=no (CNMI), (Guam)) is an Austronesian language spoken by about 58,000 people (about 25,800 people on Guam and about 32,200 in the rest of the Mariana Islands and elsewhere). It is the native and spoken language of the Chamorro people, the indigenous people of the Marianas (Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. Guam is a US territory while the CNMI has greater autonomy as a US commonwealth). There are three different dialects of Chamorro — Guamanian, Rotanese, and the general NMI (Saipan and Tinian) dialects. Classification Unlike most of its neighbors, Chamorro is not classified as a Micronesian or Polynesian language. Rather, like Palauan, it possibly constitutes an independent branch of the Malayo-Polynesian language family. At the time the Spanish rule over Guam ended, it was thought that Chamorro was a semi-creole language, with a substantial amount of the vocabulary of Spanish origin and beginning to have ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Swedish Alphabet
The Swedish alphabet ( sv, Svenska alfabetet) is a basic element of the Latin writing system used for the Swedish language. The 29 letters of this alphabet are the modern 26-letter basic Latin alphabet (A through Z) plus Å, Ä, and Ö, in that order. It contains 20 consonants and 9 vowels (a e i o u y å ä ö). The Latin alphabet was brought to Sweden along with the Christianization of the population, although runes continued in use throughout the first centuries of Christianity, even for ecclesiastic purposes, despite their traditional relation to the Old Norse religion. The runes underwent partial "latinization" in the Middle Ages, when the Latin alphabet was completely accepted as the Swedish script system, but runes still occurred, especially in the countryside, until the 18th century, and were used decoratively until mid 19th century. Popular literacy is thought to have been higher (nearly universal) with the simplified Younger Futhark runes, than in the first centuries ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Austro-Bavarian
Bavarian (german: Bairisch , Bavarian: ''Boarisch'') or alternately Austro-Bavarian, is a West Germanic language, part of the Upper German family, together with Alemannic and East Franconian. Bavarian is spoken by approximately 12 million people in an area of around , making it the largest of all German dialects. It can be found in the German state of Bavaria (especially Old Bavaria), most of the Republic of Austria (excluding Vorarlberg) and the Italian region of South Tyrol.Rowley (2011), p. 300; In 2008, 45 percent of Bavarians claimed to use only dialect in everyday communication. Prior to 1945, Bavarian was also prevalent in parts of the southern Czech Republic and western Hungary. The difference between Bavarian and Standard High German is larger than the difference between Danish and Norwegian or between Czech and Slovak (Prof Dr. Robert Hinderling); as such, there is disagreement regarding its classification. The International Organization for Standardization classifie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old Norse
Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and their Viking expansion, overseas settlements and chronologically coincides with the Viking Age, the Christianization of Scandinavia and the consolidation of Scandinavian kingdoms from about the 7th to the 15th centuries. The Proto-Norse language developed into Old Norse by the 8th century, and Old Norse began to develop into the modern North Germanic languages in the mid-to-late 14th century, ending the language phase known as Old Norse. These dates, however, are not absolute, since written Old Norse is found well into the 15th century. Old Norse was divided into three dialects: Old West Norse, ''Old West Norse'' or ''Old West Nordic'' (often referred to as ''Old Norse''), Old East Norse, ''Old East Norse'' or ''Old East Nordic'', and ''Ol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Danish Alphabet
The Danish language, Danish and Norwegian language, Norwegian alphabets, together called the Dano-Norwegian alphabet, is the set of symbols, forming a variant of the Latin alphabet, used for writing the Danish and Norwegian languages. It has consisted of the following 29 letters since 1917 (Norwegian) and 1948 (Danish): The letters ''c'', ''q'', ''w'', ''x'' and ''z'' are not used in the spelling of indigenous words. They are rarely used in Norwegian, where loan words routinely have their orthography adapted to the native sound system. Conversely, Danish has a greater tendency to preserve loan words' original spellings. In particular, a ''c'' that represents is almost never normalized to ''s'' in Danish, as would most often happen in Norwegian. Many words originally derived from Latin roots retain ''c'' in their Danish spelling, for example Norwegian ''sentrum'' vs Danish ''centrum''. The "foreign" letters also sometimes appear in the spelling of otherwise-indigenous family nam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Norwegian Alphabet
The Danish and Norwegian alphabets, together called the Dano-Norwegian alphabet, is the set of symbols, forming a variant of the Latin alphabet, used for writing the Danish and Norwegian languages. It has consisted of the following 29 letters since 1917 (Norwegian) and 1948 (Danish): The letters ''c'', ''q'', ''w'', ''x'' and ''z'' are not used in the spelling of indigenous words. They are rarely used in Norwegian, where loan words routinely have their orthography adapted to the native sound system. Conversely, Danish has a greater tendency to preserve loan words' original spellings. In particular, a ''c'' that represents is almost never normalized to ''s'' in Danish, as would most often happen in Norwegian. Many words originally derived from Latin roots retain ''c'' in their Danish spelling, for example Norwegian ''sentrum'' vs Danish ''centrum''. The "foreign" letters also sometimes appear in the spelling of otherwise-indigenous family names. For example, many of the Danish f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old Swedish
Old Swedish (Swedish language, Modern Swedish: ) is the name for two distinct stages of the Swedish language that were spoken in the Middle Ages: Early Old Swedish (), spoken from about 1225 until about 1375, and Late Old Swedish (), spoken from about 1375 until about 1526. Old Swedish developed from Old Norse#Old East Norse, Old East Norse, the eastern dialect of Old Norse. The earliest forms of the Swedish and Danish languages, spoken between the years 800 and 1100, were dialects of Old East Norse and are referred to as ''Runic Swedish'' and ''Runic Danish'' because at the time all texts were written in the runic alphabet. The differences were only minute, however, and the dialects truly began to diverge around the 12th century, becoming Old Swedish and Old Danish in the 13th century. It is not known when exactly Old Gutnish and Elfdalian began to diverge from Swedish, but Old Gutnish diverged long before Old Danish did. Early Old Swedish was markedly different from modern Sw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
North Frisian Language
North Frisian (''nordfriisk'') is a minority language of Germany, spoken by about 10,000 people in North Frisia. The language is part of the larger group of the West Germanic Frisian languages. The language comprises 10 dialects which are themselves divided into an insular and a mainland group. North Frisian is closely related to the Saterland Frisian language of Northwest Germany and West Frisian which is spoken in the Netherlands. All of these are also closely related to the English language forming the Anglo-Frisian group. The phonological system of the North Frisian dialects is strongly being influenced by Standard German and is slowly adapting to that of the German language. With a number of native speakers probably even less than 10,000 and decreasing use in mainland North Frisia, the North Frisian language is endangered. It is protected as a minority language and has become an official language in the Nordfriesland district and on Heligoland island. Classification The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greenlandic Alphabet
Greenlandic ( kl, kalaallisut, link=no ; da, grønlandsk ) is an Eskimo–Aleut language with about 56,000 speakers, mostly Greenlandic Inuit in Greenland. It is closely related to the Inuit languages in Canada such as Inuktitut. It is the most widely spoken Eskimo–Aleut language. Greenlandic has been the sole official language of the Greenlandic autonomous territory since June 2009, which is a move by the Naalakkersuisut, the government of Greenland, to strengthen the language in its competition with the colonial language, Danish. The main variety is Kalaallisut, or West Greenlandic. The second variety is Tunumiit oraasiat, or East Greenlandic. The language of the Thule Inuit of Greenland, Inuktun or Polar Eskimo, is a recent arrival and a dialect of Inuktitut. Greenlandic is a polysynthetic language that allows the creation of long words by stringing together roots and suffixes. The language's morphosyntactic alignment is ergative, treating both the argument (subject) of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Walloon Alphabet
The Walloon language has employed various alphabets over its history, most notably the Feller system () and Unified Walloon ( or ). The Feller system was developed to transcribe Walloon dialects by Jules Feller and was first published in 1900. It is a phonemic orthography, where each letter is associated with a sound in a consistent manner. The same word can be spelled differently depending on dialect, so the word "fish" would be spelled by a speaker who pronounces the word as ɛʃɔ̃(with an 'sh' sound), but would be spelled by a speaker who pronounces the word as ɛhɔ̃(with an 'h' sound). In Unified Walloon, however, the same word "fish" is always spelled , regardless of the speakers pronunciation. The Unified Walloon alphabet, developed through the 1980s and 90s, attempts to unify spellings across dialects, and revives some older digraphs (such as ) which were abandoned by Feller in favor of spellings which resembled standard French. Diacritics Diacritics used in this ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ligature (typography)
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters æ and œ used in English and French, in which the letters 'a' and 'e' are joined for the first ligature and the letters 'o' and 'e' are joined for the second ligature. For stylistic and legibility reasons, 'f' and 'i' are often merged to create 'fi' (where the tittle on the 'i' merges with the hood of the 'f'); the same is true of 's' and 't' to create 'st'. The common ampersand (&) developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters 'E' and 't' (spelling , Latin for 'and') were combined. History The earliest known script Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieratic both include many cases of character combinations that gradually evolve from ligatures into separately recognizable characters. Other notable ligatures, such as the Brahmic abugidas and the Germanic bind rune, figure prominently throughout ancient m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
