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Ebrié Language
Ebrié, or Cama (Caman, Kyama, Tchaman, Tsama, Tyama), is spoken by the Tchaman people in Ivory Coast and Ghana. It is a Potou language of the Kwa branch of the Niger–Congo family of languages. Phonology Phonemic Inventory The sounds and are marginal and occur only in loanwords. There are no nasal consonant phonemes in Ebrié. Instead, the nasal vowels cause the voiced lenis consonant series , ɗ, j, wto assimilate into , n, ɲ, ŋʷ Tones Ebrié has two level tones (H and L) and a falling tone (HL). It also has floating tones, and the voiced fortis consonants have a tendency to lower the pitch of the low tone. Morphology Nominal Prefixes The noun class prefixes in Ebrié distinguish between certain homophones and between singular and plural forms. Originally, this system would have been more robust, as seen in other Niger-Congo languages. The four nominal prefixes are ''á-, à-, ɛ̃́-'', and ''ɛ̃̀''-. The latter two, which are nasal vowels, ca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ivory Coast
Ivory Coast, also known as Côte d'Ivoire, officially the Republic of Côte d'Ivoire, is a country on the southern coast of West Africa. Its capital is Yamoussoukro, in the centre of the country, while its largest city and economic centre is the port city of Abidjan. It borders Guinea to Guinea–Ivory Coast border, the northwest, Liberia to Ivory Coast–Liberia border, the west, Mali to Ivory Coast–Mali border, the northwest, Burkina Faso to Burkina Faso–Ivory Coast border, the northeast, Ghana to Ghana–Ivory Coast border, the east, and the Gulf of Guinea (Atlantic Ocean) to the south. Its official language is French language, French, and indigenous languages are also widely used, including Bété languages, Bété, Baoulé language, Baoulé, Dyula language, Dioula, Dan language, Dan, Anyin language, Anyin, and Senari languages, Cebaara Senufo. In total, there are around 78 different Languages of Ivory Coast, languages spoken in Ivory Coast. The country has a Religion ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voice (phonetics)
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts: *Voicing can refer to the ''articulatory process'' in which the vocal folds vibrate, its primary use in phonetics to describe phones, which are particular speech sounds. *It can also refer to a classification of speech sounds that tend to be associated with vocal cord vibration but may not actually be voiced at the articulatory level. That is the term's primary use in phonology: to describe phonemes; while in phonetics its primary use is to describe phones. For example, voicing accounts for the difference between the pair of sounds associated with the English letters "s" and "z". The two sounds are transcribed as and to distinguish them from the English letters, which have several possible pronunciatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone are considered roots (such as the morpheme ''cat''); other morphemes, called affixes, are found only in combination with other morphemes. For example, the ''-s'' in ''cats'' indicates the concept of plurality but is always bound to another concept to indicate a specific kind of plurality. This distinction is not universal and does not apply to, for example, Latin, in which many roots cannot stand alone. For instance, the Latin root ''reg-'' (‘king’) must always be suffixed with a case marker: ''rex'' (''reg-s''), ''reg-is'', ''reg-i'', etc. For a language like Latin, a root can be defined as the main lexical morpheme of a word. These sample English words have the following morphological analyses: * "Unbreakable" is composed of three ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Verb
A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle ''to'', is the infinitive. In many languages, verbs are inflected (modified in form) to encode tense, aspect, mood, and voice. A verb may also agree with the person, gender or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object. Verbs have tenses: present, to indicate that an action is being carried out; past, to indicate that an action has been done; future, to indicate that an action will be done. For some examples: * I ''washed'' the car yesterday. * The dog ''ate'' my homework. * John ''studies'' English and French. * Lucy ''enjoys'' listening to music. *Barack Obama ''became'' the President of the United States in 2009. ''(occurrence)'' *Mike Trout ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tense–aspect–mood
Tense–aspect–mood (commonly abbreviated ) or tense–modality–aspect (abbreviated as ) is a group of grammatical categories that are important to understanding spoken or written content, and which are marked in different ways by different languages. TAM covers the expression of three major components of words which lead to or assist in the correct understanding of the speaker's meaning: * Tense—the position of the state or action in time, that is, whether it is in the past, present or future. * Aspect—the extension of the state or action in time, that is, whether it is unitary (perfective), continuous or repeated (imperfective). * Mood or Modality—the reality of the state or action, that is, whether it is actual (realis), a possibility or a necessity (irrealis). For example, in English the word "walk" would be used in different ways for the different combinations of TAM: * Tense: He walked (past), He walks (present), He will walk (future). * Aspect: He walked (uni ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syllabic Consonant
A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant that forms a syllable on its own, like the ''m'', ''n'' and ''l'' in some pronunciations of the English words ''rhythm'', ''button'' and ''bottle''. To represent it, the understroke diacritic in the International Phonetic Alphabet is used, . It may be instead represented by an overstroke, if the symbol that it modifies has a descender, such as in . Syllabic consonants in most languages are sonorants, such as nasals and liquids. Very few have syllabic obstruents, such as stops and fricatives in normal words, but English has syllabic fricatives in paralinguistic words like ''shh!'' and ''zzz''. Examples Germanic languages In many varieties of High and Low German, pronouncing syllabic consonants may be considered a shibboleth. In High German and Tweants (a Low Saxon dialect spoken in the Netherlands; more Low Saxon dialects have the syllabic consonant), all word-final syllables in infinite verbs and feminine plural nou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Niger–Congo Languages
Niger–Congo is a hypothetical language family spoken over the majority of sub-Saharan Africa. It unites the Mande languages, the Atlantic–Congo languages, Atlantic-Congo languages (which share a characteristic noun class system), and possibly several smaller groups of languages that are difficult to classify. If valid, Niger-Congo would be the world's largest in terms of member languages, the third-largest in terms of speakers, and Languages of Africa, Africa's largest in terms of geographical area.Irene Thompson"Niger-Congo Language Family" "aboutworldlanguages", March 2015 It is generally considered to be the world's largest language family in terms of the number of distinct languages, just ahead of Austronesian languages, Austronesian, although this is complicated by the Dialect#Dialect or language, ambiguity about what constitutes a distinct language; the number of named Niger–Congo languages listed by ''Ethnologue'' is 1,540. If valid, it would be the third-largest lang ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plural
The plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This default quantity is most commonly one (a form that represents this default quantity of one is said to be of ''Grammatical number, singular'' number). Therefore, plurals most typically denote two or more of something, although they may also denote fractional, zero or negative amounts. An example of a plural is the English word ''cats'', which corresponds to the singular ''cat''. Words of other types, such as verbs, adjectives and pronouns, also frequently have distinct plural forms, which are used in agreement (linguistics), agreement with the number of their associated nouns. Some languages also have a dual (grammatical number), dual (denoting exactly two of something) or other systems of n ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Homophone
A homophone () is a word that is pronounced the same (to varying extent) as another word but differs in meaning. A ''homophone'' may also differ in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example ''rose'' (flower) and ''rose'' (past tense of "rise"), or spelled differently, as in ''rain'', ''reign'', and ''rein''. The term ''homophone'' may also apply to units longer or shorter than words, for example a phrase, letter, or groups of letters which are pronounced the same as another phrase, letter, or group of letters. Any unit with this property is said to be ''homophonous'' (). Homophones that are spelled the same are also both homographs and homonyms, e.g. the word ''read'', as in "He is well ''read''" (he is very learned) vs. the sentence "I ''read'' that book" (I have finished reading that book). Homophones that are spelled differently are also called heterographs, e.g. ''to'', ''too'', and ''two''. Etymology "Homophone" derives from Greek ''homo-'' (ὁμο ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prefix
A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Adding it to the beginning of one word changes it into another word. For example, when the prefix ''un-'' is added to the word ''happy'', it creates the word ''unhappy''. Particularly in the study of languages, a prefix is also called a preformative, because it alters the form of the words to which it is affixed. Prefixes, like other affixes, can be either inflectional, creating a new form of the word with the same basic meaning and same lexical category (but playing a different role in the sentence), or derivational, creating a new word with a new semantic meaning and sometimes also a different lexical category. Prefixes, like all other affixes, are usually bound morphemes. In English, there are no inflectional prefixes; English uses suffixes instead for that purpose. The word ''prefix'' is itself made up of the stem ''fix'' (meaning "attach", in this case), and the prefix ''pre-'' (meaning "before"), bot ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Noun Class
In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", but others consider these different concepts. Noun classes should not be confused with noun classifiers. Notion There are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into noun classes: * according to similarities in their meaning (semantic criterion); * by grouping them with other nouns that have similar form (morphology); * through an arbitrary convention. Usually, a combination of the three types of criteria is used, though one is more prevalent. Noun classes form a system of grammatical agreement. A noun in a given class may require: * agreement affixes on adjectives, pronouns, numerals, etc. in the same noun phrase, * agreement affixes on the v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Assimilation (phonology)
Assimilation is a sound change in which some phonemes (typically consonants or vowels) change to become more similar to other nearby sounds. A common type of phonological process across languages, assimilation can occur either within a word or between words. It occurs in normal speech but becomes more common in more rapid speech. In some cases, assimilation causes the sound spoken to differ from the normal pronunciation in isolation, such as the prefix ''in-'' of English ''input'' pronounced with phonetic rather than In other cases, the change is accepted as canonical for that word or phrase, especially if it is recognized in standard spelling: ''implant'' pronounced with composed historically of ''in'' + ''plant''. English "handbag" (canonically ) is often pronounced in rapid speech because the and sounds are both bilabial consonants, and their places of articulation are similar. However, the sequence - has different places but similar manner of articulation ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
