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Bukawa Language
Bukawa (also known as Bukaua, Kawac, Bugawac, Gawac) is an Austronesian language of Papua New Guinea. Overview Bukawa is spoken by about 12,000 people (in 2011) on the coast of the Huon Gulf, Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. The most common spelling of the name in both community and government usage is Bukawa (Eckermann 2007:1), even though it comes from the Yabem language, which served as a church and school lingua franca in the coastal areas around the Gulf for most of the 20th century. This ethnonym, which now designates Bukawa-speakers in general, derives from the name of a prominent village Bugawac (literally 'River Gawac', though no such river seems to exist) at Cape Arkona in the center of the north coast. Ethnologue notes that 40% of Bukawa speakers are monolingual (or perhaps were in 1978). This claim is hard to credit unless one discounts both Tok Pisin, the national language of Papua New Guinea, and Yabem, the local Lutheran mission lingua franca. The anthropolog ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea (abbreviated PNG; , ; tpi, Papua Niugini; ho, Papua Niu Gini), officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea ( tpi, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niugini; ho, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niu Gini), is a country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and its offshore islands in Melanesia (a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean north of Australia). Its capital, located along its southeastern coast, is Port Moresby. The country is the world's third largest island country, with an area of . At the national level, after being ruled by three external powers since 1884, including nearly 60 years of Australian administration starting during World War I, Papua New Guinea established its sovereignty in 1975. It became an independent Commonwealth realm in 1975 with Elizabeth II as its queen. It also became a member of the Commonwealth of Nations in its own right. There are 839 known languages of Papua New Guinea, one of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Front Vowel
A front vowel is a class of vowel sounds used in some spoken languages, its defining characteristic being that the highest point of the tongue is positioned as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would otherwise make it a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also called bright vowels because they are perceived as sounding brighter than the back vowels. Near-front vowels are essentially a type of front vowel; no language is known to contrast front and near-front vowels based on backness alone. Rounded front vowels are typically centralized, that is, near-front in their articulation. This is one reason they are written to the right of unrounded front vowels in the IPA vowel chart. Partial list The front vowels that have dedicated symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet are: * close front unrounded vowel * close front compressed vowel * near-close front unrounded vowel * near-close front compressed vowel * close-mid front unroun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prenasalized Consonant
Prenasalized consonants are phonetic sequences of a nasal and an obstruent (or occasionally a non-nasal sonorant such as ) that behave phonologically like single consonants. The primary reason for considering them to be single consonants, rather than clusters as in English ''finger'' or ''member'', lies in their behaviour; however, there may also be phonetic correlates which distinguish prenasalized consonants from clusters. Because of the additional difficulty in both articulation and timing, prenasalized fricatives and sonorants are not as common as prenasalized stops or affricates, and the presence of the former implies the latter. In most languages, when a prenasalized consonant is described as "voiceless", it is only the oral portion that is voiceless, and the nasal portion is modally voiced. Thus, a language may have "voiced" and "voiceless" . However, in some Southern Min (including Taiwanese) dialects, voiced consonants are preceded by voiceless prenasalization: . Yeyi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plosive
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lips (, ), or glottis (). Plosives contrast with nasals, where the vocal tract is blocked but airflow continues through the nose, as in and , and with fricatives, where partial occlusion impedes but does not block airflow in the vocal tract. Terminology The terms ''stop, occlusive,'' and ''plosive'' are often used interchangeably. Linguists who distinguish them may not agree on the distinction being made. The terms refer to different features of the consonant. "Stop" refers to the airflow that is stopped. "Occlusive" refers to the articulation, which occludes (blocks) the vocal tract. "Plosive" refers to the release burst (plosion) of the consonant. Some object to the use of "plosive" for inaudibly released stops, which may then instead be ca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Labialization
Labialization is a secondary articulatory feature of sounds in some languages. Labialized sounds involve the lips while the remainder of the oral cavity produces another sound. The term is normally restricted to consonants. When vowels involve the lips, they are called rounded. The most common labialized consonants are labialized velars. Most other labialized sounds also have simultaneous velarization, and the process may then be more precisely called labio-velarization. In phonology, labialization may also refer to a type of assimilation process. Occurrence Labialization is the most widespread secondary articulation in the world's languages. It is phonemically contrastive in Northwest Caucasian (e.g. Adyghe), Athabaskan, and Salishan language families, among others. This contrast is reconstructed also for Proto-Indo-European, the common ancestor of the Indo-European languages; and it survives in Latin and some Romance languages. It is also found in the Cushitic and E ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Glottal Consonant
Glottal consonants are consonants using the glottis as their primary articulation. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the glottal fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have, while some do not consider them to be consonants at all. However, glottal consonants behave as typical consonants in many languages. For example, in Literary Arabic, most words are formed from a root ''C-C-C'' consisting of three consonants, which are inserted into templates such as or . The glottal consonants and can occupy any of the three root consonant slots, just like "normal" consonants such as or . The glottal consonants in the International Phonetic Alphabet are as follows: Characteristics In many languages, the "fricatives" are not true fricatives. This is a historical usage of the word. They instead represent transitional states of the glottis ( phonation) without a specific place of articulation, and may behave as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Velar Consonant
Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (known also as the velum). Since the velar region of the roof of the mouth is relatively extensive and the movements of the dorsum are not very precise, velars easily undergo assimilation, shifting their articulation back or to the front depending on the quality of adjacent vowels. They often become automatically ''fronted'', that is partly or completely palatal before a following front vowel, and ''retracted'', that is partly or completely uvular before back vowels. Palatalised velars (like English in ''keen'' or ''cube'') are sometimes referred to as palatovelars. Many languages also have labialized velars, such as , in which the articulation is accompanied by rounding of the lips. There are also labial–velar consonants, which are doubly articulated at the velum and at the lips, such as . This distinction disappears with the approx ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Coronal Consonant
Coronals are consonants articulated with the flexible front part of the tongue. Among places of articulation, only the coronal consonants can be divided into as many articulation types: apical (using the tip of the tongue), laminal (using the blade of the tongue), domed (with the tongue bunched up), or subapical (using the underside of the tongue) as well as different postalveolar articulations (some of which also involve the back of the tongue as an articulator): palato-alveolar, alveolo-palatal and retroflex. Only the front of the tongue (coronal) has such dexterity among the major places of articulation, allowing such variety of distinctions. Coronals have another dimension, grooved, to make sibilants in combination with the orientations above. Places of articulation Coronal places of articulation include the dental consonants at the upper teeth, the alveolar consonants at the upper gum (the alveolar ridge), the various postalveolar consonants (including domed palato-alv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bilabial Consonant
In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a labial consonant articulated with both lips. Frequency Bilabial consonants are very common across languages. Only around 0.7% of the world's languages lack bilabial consonants altogether, including Tlingit, Chipewyan, Oneida, and Wichita. Varieties The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) are: Owere Igbo has a six-way contrast among bilabial stops: . Other varieties The extensions to the IPA also define a () for smacking the lips together. A lip-smack in the non-percussive sense of the lips noisily parting would be .Heselwood (2013: 121) The IPA chart shades out ''bilabial lateral consonants'', which is sometimes read as indicating that such sounds are not possible. The fricatives and are often lateral, but since no language makes a distinction for centrality, the allophony is not noticeable. See also * Place of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Low Vowel
An open vowel is a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels (in U.S. terminology ) in reference to the low position of the tongue. In the context of the phonology of any particular language, a ''low vowel'' can be any vowel that is more open than a mid vowel. That is, open-mid vowels, near-open vowels, and open vowels can all be considered low vowels. Partial list The open vowels with dedicated symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet are: * open front unrounded vowel * open front rounded vowel This vowel is not known to occur as a phoneme distinct from in any language. * open back unrounded vowel * open back rounded vowel There also are central vowels that do not have dedicated symbols in the IPA: * open central unrounded vowel or (commonly written as if it were front) * open central rounded vowel There is no unambiguous way of transcribing the open central ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mid Vowel
A mid vowel (or a true-mid vowel) is any in a class of vowel sounds used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned midway between an open vowel and a close vowel. Other names for a mid vowel are lowered close-mid vowel and raised open-mid vowel, though the former phrase may also be used to describe a vowel that is as low as open-mid; likewise, the latter phrase may also be used to describe a vowel that is as high as close-mid. Vowels The only mid vowel with a dedicated symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is the mid central vowel with ambiguous rounding . The IPA divides the vowel space into thirds, with the close-mid vowels such as or and the open-mid vowels such as or equidistant in formant space between open or and close or . Thus a true mid front unrounded vowel can be transcribed as either a lowered (with a lowering diacritic) or as a raised (with a raising diacritic). Typical truly mid vow ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Near-close Vowel
A near-close vowel or a near-high vowel is any in a class of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a near-close vowel is that the tongue is positioned similarly to a close vowel, but slightly less constricted. Other names for a near-close vowel are lowered close vowel and raised close-mid vowel, though the former phrase may also be used to describe a vowel that is as low as close-mid (sometimes even lower); likewise, the latter phrase may also be used to describe a vowel that is as high as close. Near-close vowels are also sometimes described as lax variants of the fully close vowels, though, depending on the language, they may not necessarily be ''variants'' of close vowels at all. It is rare for languages to contrast a near-close vowel with a close vowel and a close-mid vowel based on height alone. An example of such language is Danish, which contrasts short and long versions of the close front unrounded , near-close front unrounded and c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
