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Africa Alphabet
The Africa Alphabet (also International African Alphabet or IAI alphabet) was developed by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures in 1928, with the help of some Africans led by Diedrich Hermann Westermann, who served as director of the organization from 1926 until 1939. Meanwhile, the aim of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, later known as International African Institute (IAI), was to enable people to write all the African languages for practical and scientific purposes without the need of diacritics. It is based on the International Phonetic Alphabet with a few differences, such as ''j'' (IPA ) and ''y'' (IPA ), which represent the same (consonant) sound values as in English. This alphabet has influenced development of orthographies of many African languages (serving "as the basis for the transcription" of about 60, by one countSow, Alfa I., and Mohamed H. Abdulaziz, "Language and Social Change," Ch. 18 in Ali A. Mazrui (ed.) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
African Languages
The languages of Africa are divided into several major language families: * Niger–Congo or perhaps Atlantic–Congo languages (includes Bantu and non-Bantu, and possibly Mande and others) are spoken in West, Central, Southeast and Southern Africa. *Afroasiatic languages are spread throughout Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and parts of the Sahel. *Indo-European languages are spoken in South Africa and Namibia (Afrikaans, English, German) and are used as lingua francas in the former colonies of Britain and Liberia that was part of American Colonization Society (English), former colonies of France and of Belgium ( French), former colonies of Portugal (Portuguese), former colonies of Italy (Italian), former colonies of Spain (Spanish) and the current Spanish territories of Ceuta, Melilla and the Canary Islands and the current French territories of Mayotte and La Réunion. *Various families of Nilo-Saharan languages (unity debated) are spoken from Tanzania to E ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dinka Alphabet
The Dinka alphabet is used by South Sudanese Dinka people. The written Dinka language is based on the ISO basic Latin alphabet, but with some added letters adapted from the International Phonetic Alphabet. The current orthography is derived from the alphabet developed for the southern Sudanese languages at the Rejaf language conference in 1928. Prior to this, several attempts at adapting the Arabic and Latin scripts to the Dinka language were made, but neither effort was met with large success. Christian missionaries were essential to the development of what became the Dinka alphabet. Alphabet Dinka does not use ''f, q, s, v, x'', and ''z''; and ''h'' is used in digraphs only. Note that ''ɛ̈'' (open ''e'' with trema/umlaut) and ''ɔ̈'' (open ''o'' with trema/umlaut) do not exist as precomposed characters in Unicode and must therefore be generated using U+0308, the diaeresis combining diacritic. Dental consonants are distinguished from alveolar by adding a following ''h''. Oth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Writing Systems Of Africa
The writing systems of Africa refer to the current and historical practice of writing systems on the African continent, both indigenous and those introduced. Today, the Latin script is commonly encountered across Africa, especially in the Western, Central and Southern Africa regions. Arabic script is mainly used in North Africa and Ge'ez script is widely used in the Horn of Africa. Regionally and in some localities, other scripts may be of significant importance. Indigenous writing systems Ancient African orthographies Ancient Egyptian Perhaps the most famous African writing system is ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. These developed later into forms known as Hieratic, Demotic and, through Phoenician and Greek, Coptic. The Coptic language is still used today as the liturgical language in the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria and the Coptic Catholic Church of Alexandria. As mentioned above, the Bohairic dialect of Coptic is used currently in the Coptic Orthodox Church. Other ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latin Alphabets
The lists and tables below summarize and compare the letter inventories of some of the Latin-script alphabets. In this article, the scope of the word "alphabet" is broadened to include letters with tone marks, and other diacritics used to represent a wide range of orthographic traditions, without regard to whether or how they are sequenced in their alphabet or the table. Parentheses indicate characters not used in modern standard orthographies of the languages, but used in obsolete and/or dialectal forms. Letters contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet Alphabets that contain only ISO basic Latin letters Among alphabets for natural languages the English, 6/sup> Indonesian, and Malay alphabets only use the 26 letters in both cases. Among alphabets for constructed languages the Ido and Interlingua alphabets only use the 26 letters. Extended by ligatures * German (ß), French (æ, œ) Extended by diacritical marks * Spanish (ñ), German (ä, ö, and ü), Dutch (ë) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
General History Of Africa
The General History of Africa (GHA) is a two-phase project launched by UNESCO in 1964. The 1964 General Conference of UNESCO, during its 13th Session, instructed the Organization to undertake this initiative after the newly independent African Member States expressed a strong desire to reclaim their cultural identity, to rectify widespread ignorance about their Continent's history, and to break free of discriminatory prejudices. Phase One, which began in 1964 and was completed in 1999, consisted of writing and publishing eight volumes which highlight the shared heritage of the peoples of Africa. Phase Two, which began in 2009, focuses on the elaboration of history curricula and pedagogical materials for primary and secondary schools on the basis of the eight volumes of the GHA. Phase Two also focuses on the promotion of the use and harmonization of the teaching of this collection in higher education institutions throughout the Continent. Phase Two also concerns the implementation of t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Standard Alphabet By Lepsius
The Standard Alphabet is a Latin-script alphabet developed by Karl Richard Lepsius. Lepsius initially used it to transcribe Egyptian hieroglyphs in his ''Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien'' and extended it to write African languages, published in 1854 and 1855, and in a revised edition in 1863. The alphabet was comprehensive but was not used much as it contained a lot of diacritic marks and was difficult to read and typeset at that time. It was, however, influential in later projects such as Ellis's Paleotype, and diacritics such as the acute accent for palatalization, under-dot for retroflex, underline for Arabic emphatics, and the click letters continue in modern use. Vowels Vowel length is indicated by a macron (''ā'') or a breve (''ă'') for long and short vowels, respectively. Open vowels are marked by a line under the letter (''e̱''), while a dot below the letter makes it a close vowel (''ẹ''). Rounded front vowels are written with an umlaut (''ö'' and '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pan-Nigerian Alphabet
The Pan-Nigerian alphabet is a set of 33 Latin letters standardised by the National Language Centre of Nigeria in the 1980s. It is intended to be sufficient to write all the languages of Nigeria without using digraphs. History Several hundred different languages are spoken in Nigeria. The different Latin alphabets made the use of typewriters impractical. In the 1980s the National Language Centre (NLC) undertook to develop a single alphabet suitable for writing all the languages of the country and replacing use of Arabic script in some Nigerian languages that were proposed in the colonial era, taking as its starting point a model proposed by linguist Kay Williamson in 1981. The font family was developed in 1985-86 by Edward Oguejofor and Victor Manfredi, in co-operation with the NLC, with technical assistance from Hermann Zapf. Characters If a Unicode font is installed with the Pan-Nigerian glyphs, then a table, such as the one below, should be seen: The acute ( ´ ), gr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ISO 6438
ISO 6438:1983, ''Documentation — African coded character set for bibliographic information interchange'', is an ISO standard for an 8-bit character encoding for African languages. It has had little use (such as being available through UNIMARC). In practice it is now superseded by Unicode. Character set * Prior to Unicode 7.0, mapped to .Prior to Unicode 8.0, mapped to . See also *Africa Alphabet *African reference alphabet *Dinka alphabet *Pan-Nigerian alphabet The Pan-Nigerian alphabet is a set of 33 Latin letters standardised by the National Language Centre of Nigeria in the 1980s. It is intended to be sufficient to write all the languages of Nigeria without using digraphs. History Several hundred ... * Standard Alphabet by Lepsius Notes References"Coded Character Set for African Languages" (June 15, 1979)ISO 6438:1983 "Documentation -- African coded character set for bibliographic information interchange" [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latin-script Alphabet
A Latin-script alphabet (Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet) is an alphabet that uses letters of the Latin script. The 21-letter archaic Latin alphabet and the 23-letter classical Latin alphabet belong to the oldest of this group. The 26-letter modern Latin alphabet is the newest of this group. Encoding The 26-letter ISO basic Latin alphabet (adopted from the earlier ASCII) contains the 26 letters of the English alphabet. To handle the many other alphabets also derived from the classical Latin one, ISO and other telecommunications groups "extended" the ISO basic Latin multiple times in the late 20th century. More recent international standards (e.g. Unicode) include those that achieved ISO adoption. Key types of differences Apart from alphabets for modern spoken languages, there exist phonetic alphabets and spelling alphabets in use derived from Latin script letters. Historical languages may also have used (or are now studied using) alphabets that are derived but still dist ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
International African Institute
The International African Institute (IAI) was founded (as the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures - IIALC) in 1926 in London for the study of African languages. Frederick Lugard was the first chairman (1926 to his death in 1945); Diedrich Hermann Westermann (1926 to 1939) and Maurice Delafosse (1926) were the initial co-directors. Since 1928, the IAI has published a quarterly journal, ''Africa''. For some years during the 1950s and 1960s, the assistant editor was the novelist Barbara Pym. The IAI's mission is "to promote the education of the public in the study of Africa and its languages and cultures". Its operations includes seminars, journals, monographs, edited volumes and stimulating scholarship within Africa. Publications The IAI has been involved in scholarly publishing since 1927. Scholars whose work has been published by the institute include Emmanuel Akeampong, Samir Amin, Karin Barber, Alex de Waal, Patrick Chabal, Mary Douglas, E. E. Evans P ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kpelle Language
The Kpelle language (endonym: "Kpɛlɛɛ") is spoken by the Kpelle people of Liberia, Guinea and Ivory Coast and is part of the Mande family of languages. Guinean Kpelle (also known as ''Guerze'' in French), spoken by half a million people, concentrated primarily, but not exclusively, in the forest regions of Guinea, whose capital, Nzérékoré, is the third largest city in Guinea and the largest city in the Guinée forestière region of south-eastern Guinea bordering Liberia, Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone. Half a million Liberians speak Liberian Kpelle, which is taught in Liberian schools. Sample The Lord's Prayer The Lord's Prayer, also called the Our Father or Pater Noster, is a central Christian prayer which Jesus taught as the way to pray. Two versions of this prayer are recorded in the gospels: a longer form within the Sermon on the Mount in the Gosp ... in Kpelle: :Kunâŋ gáa ŋele sui, :Tɔɔ ku iláai siɣe a maa waa. :Tɔɔ Ikâloŋ-laai é pá, :Tɔɔ ínîa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dan Language
Dan is a Southern Mande language spoken primarily in Ivory Coast (~800,000 speakers) and Liberia (150,000–200,000 speakers). There is also a population of about 800 speakers in Guinea Guinea ( ),, fuf, 𞤘𞤭𞤲𞤫, italic=no, Gine, wo, Gine, nqo, ߖߌ߬ߣߍ߫, bm, Gine officially the Republic of Guinea (french: République de Guinée), is a coastal country in West Africa. It borders the Atlantic Ocean to the we .... Dan is a tonal language, with around 9-11 contour and register tones depending on the dialect. Alternative names for the language include Yacouba or Yakubasa, Gio, Gyo, Gio-Dan, and Da. Dialects are Gio (Liberian Dan), Gweetaawu (Eastern Dan), Blowo (Western Dan), and Kla. Kla is evidently a distinct language. Phonology Vowels ¹Only in Liberian Dan ²Only in Eastern Dan Consonants ¹Only in Liberian Dan ²Not in Liberian Dan ³Not in western Dan Writing system The orthography of Liberia includes this alphabet: The capital ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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