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African Reference Alphabet
An African reference alphabet was first proposed in 1978 by a UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger, and the proposed alphabet was revised in 1982. The conference recommended the use of single letters for a sound (that is, a phoneme) instead of using two or three-letter combinations, or letters with diacritical marks. The African Reference Alphabet is clearly related to the Africa Alphabet and reflected practice based on the latter (including use of IPA characters). The Niamey conference also built on work of a previous UNESCO-organized meeting on harmonization of transcriptions of African languages, that was held in Bamako, Mali, in 1966. 1978 version Separate versions of the conference's report were produced in English and French. Different images of the alphabet were used in the two versions, and there are a number of differences between the two. The English version proposed an alphabet of 57 letters, given in both upper and lower-case forms. Eight of these are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It has 193 member states and 12 associate members, as well as partners in the non-governmental, intergovernmental and private sector. Headquartered at the World Heritage Centre in Paris, France, UNESCO has 53 regional field offices and 199 national commissions that facilitate its global mandate. UNESCO was founded in 1945 as the successor to the League of Nations's International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation.English summary). Its constitution establishes the agency's goals, governing structure, and operating framework. UNESCO's founding mission, which was shaped by the Second World War, is to advance peace, sustainable development and human rights by facilitating collaboration and dialogue among nations. It pursues this objective t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Acute Accent
The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed characters are available. Uses History An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels. Pitch Ancient Greek The acute accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, where it indicated a syllable with a high pitch. In Modern Greek, a stress accent has replaced the pitch accent, and the acute marks the stressed syllable of a word. The Greek name of the accented syllable was and is (''oxeîa'', Modern Greek ''oxía'') "sharp" or "high", which was calqued (loan-translated) into Latin as "sharpened". Stress The acute accent marks the stressed vowel of a word in several languages: * Blackfoot uses acute accents to show the place of stress in a word: soyópokists ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Esh (letter)
Esh ( majuscule: Ʃ Unicode U+01A9, minuscule: ʃ Unicode U+0283) is a character used in conjunction with the Latin script, which represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative (English ''sh''). Form, usage, and history Its lowercase form ʃ is similar to a long s ſ or an integral sign ∫; in 1928 the Africa Alphabet borrowed the Greek letter sigma for the uppercase form Ʃ, but more recently the African reference alphabet discontinued it, using the lowercase esh only. The lowercase form was introduced by Isaac Pitman in his 1847 Phonotypic Alphabet to represent the voiceless postalveolar fricative (English ''sh''). It is today used in the alphabets of some African languages, as well as in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) uses to represent a voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant. Related obsolete IPA characters include , , and . is used in the Teuthonista phonetic transcription system. Variations of esh are used for other ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eng (letter)
Eng or engma ( capital: Ŋ, lowercase: ŋ) is a letter of the Latin alphabet, used to represent a voiced velar nasal (as in English ''sii'') in the written form of some languages and in the International Phonetic Alphabet. In Washo, lower-case represents a typical sound, while upper-case represents a voiceless sound. This convention comes from Americanist phonetic notation. History The ''First Grammatical Treatise'', a 12th-century work on the phonology of the Old Icelandic language, uses a single grapheme for the eng sound, shaped like a g with a stroke . Alexander Gill the Elder uses an uppercase G with a hooked tail and a lowercase n with the hooked tail of a script g for the same sound in ''Logonomia Anglica'' in 1619. William Holder uses the letter in ''Elements of Speech: An Essay of Inquiry into the Natural Production of Letters'', published in 1669, but it was not printed as intended; he indicates in his errata that “there was intended a character for Ng, viz., ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latin Gamma
The Latin letter gamma, Ɣ (minuscule: ɣ), is a letter used in some orthographies based on the Latin alphabet. Its uppercase and lowercase shape is based on the lowercase shape of the Greek letter gamma (γ). Unlike the Greek gamma, the Latin gamma may have serifs. Latin gamma is used to represent a voiced velar fricative, in the International Phonetic Alphabet, and in the alphabets of several African languages such as Yom, Dagbani, Dinka, Kabiyé, and Ewe, some Berber languages using the Berber Latin alphabet, and sometimes in the romanization of Pashto. Lowercase Latin gamma is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent the voiced velar fricative. A lowercase Latin gamma that lies above the baseline rather than crossing it () represents the close-mid back unrounded vowel The close-mid back unrounded vowel, or high-mid back unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. Its symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
African Reference Alphabet As Presented 1978 On The Niamey Meeting
African or Africans may refer to: * Anything from or pertaining to the continent of Africa: ** People who are native to Africa, descendants of natives of Africa, or individuals who trace their ancestry to indigenous inhabitants of Africa *** Ethnic groups of Africa *** Demographics of Africa *** African diaspora ** African, an adjective referring to something of, from, or related to the African Union ** Citizenship of the African Union ** Demographics of the African Union **Africanfuturism ** African art ** *** African jazz (other) ** African cuisine ** African culture ** African languages ** African music ** African Union ** African lion, a lion population in Africa Books and radio * ''The African'' (essay), a story by French author J. M. G. Le Clézio * ''The African'' (Conton novel), a novel by William Farquhar Conton * ''The African'' (Courlander novel), a novel by Harold Courlander * ''The Africans'' (radio program) Music * "African", a song by Peter Tosh f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Click Consonant
Click consonants, or clicks, are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa. Examples familiar to English-speakers are the '' tut-tut'' (British spelling) or '' tsk! tsk!'' (American spelling) used to express disapproval or pity, the '' tchick!'' used to spur on a horse, and the '' clip-clop!'' sound children make with their tongue to imitate a horse trotting. Anatomically, clicks are obstruents articulated with two closures (points of contact) in the mouth, one forward and one at the back. The enclosed pocket of air is rarefied by a sucking action of the tongue (in technical terminology, clicks have a lingual ingressive airstream mechanism). The forward closure is then released,This is the case for all clicks used as consonants in words. Paralinguistically, however, there are other methods of making clicks: ''under'' the tongue or as above but by releasing the rear occlusion first. See #Places of articul ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Emphatic Consonant
In Semitic linguistics, an emphatic consonant is an obstruent consonant which originally contrasted with series of both voiced and voiceless obstruents. In specific Semitic languages, the members of this series may be realized as uvularized or pharyngealized, velarized, ejective, or plain voiced or voiceless consonants. It is also used, to a lesser extent, to describe cognate series in other Afro-Asiatic languages, where they are typically realized as ejective, implosive, or pharyngealized consonants. In Semitic studies, they are commonly transcribed using the convention of placing a dot under the closest plain obstruent consonant in the Latin alphabet. With respect to particular Semitic and Afro-Asiatic languages, this term describes the particular phonetic feature which distinguishes these consonants from other consonants. Thus, in Arabic emphasis is synonymous with a secondary articulation involving retraction of the dorsum or root of the tongue, which has variously been des ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Overdot
When used as a diacritic mark, the term dot is usually reserved for the ''interpunct'' ( · ), or to the glyphs "combining dot above" ( ◌̇ ) and "combining dot below" ( ◌̣ ) which may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in use in Central European languages and Vietnamese. Dots Overdot Language scripts or transcription schemes that use the dot above a letter as a diacritical mark: * In some forms of Arabic romanization, stands for ''ghayin'' (غ); stands for qāf (ق). * The Latin orthography for Chechen includes ċ, ç̇, ġ, q̇, and ẋ. * In Emilian-Romagnol, ''ṅ ṡ ż'' are used to represent . * Traditional Irish typography, where the dot denotes lenition, and is called a or "dot of lenition": ''ḃ ċ ḋ ḟ ġ ṁ ṗ ṡ ṫ''. Alternatively, lenition may be represented by a following letter ''h'', thus: ''bh ch dh fh gh mh ph sh th''. In Old Irish orthography, the dot was used only for ''ḟ ṡ'', while the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Umlaut (diacritic)
The umlaut () is the diacritical mark used to indicate in writing (as part of the letters , , and ) the result of the historical sound shift due to which former back vowels are now pronounced as front vowels (for example , , and as , , and ). (The term ermanicumlaut is also used for the underlying historical sound shift process.) In its contemporary printed form, the mark consists of two dots placed over the letter to represent the changed vowel sound. It looks identical to the diaeresis mark used in other European languages and is represented by the same Unicode code point. The word '' trema'' (french: tréma), used in linguistics and also classical scholarship, describes the form of both the umlaut diacritic and the diaeresis rather than their function and can therefore be used to refer to both. German origin and current usage (literally "changed sound") is the German name of the sound shift phenomenon also known as ''i-mutation''. In German, this term is also used ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tilde
The tilde () or , is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish, which in turn came from the Latin '' titulus'', meaning "title" or "superscription". Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) in combination with a base letter; but for historical reasons, it is also used in standalone form within a variety of contexts. History Use by medieval scribes The tilde was originally written over an omitted letter or several letters as a scribal abbreviation, or "mark of suspension" and "mark of contraction", shown as a straight line when used with capitals. Thus, the commonly used words ''Anno Domini'' were frequently abbreviated to ''Ao Dñi'', with an elevated terminal with a suspension mark placed over the "n". Such a mark could denote the omission of one letter or several letters. This saved on the expense of the scribe's labor and the cost of vellum and ink. Medieval European charters written in Latin are largely made up of such ab ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Macron (diacritic)
A macron () is a diacritical mark: it is a straight bar placed above a letter, usually a vowel. Its name derives from Ancient Greek (''makrón'') "long", since it was originally used to mark long or heavy syllables in Greco-Roman metrics. It now more often marks a long vowel. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the macron is used to indicate a mid-tone; the sign for a long vowel is instead a modified triangular colon . The opposite is the breve , which marks a short or light syllable or a short vowel. Uses Syllable weight In Greco-Roman metrics and in the description of the metrics of other literatures, the macron was introduced and is still widely used in dictionaries and educational materials to mark a long (heavy) syllable. Even relatively recent classical Greek and Latin dictionaries are still concerned with indicating only the length (weight) of syllables; that is why most still do not indicate the length of vowels in syllables that are otherwise metrically d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
