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Fe'fe' Language
Fe'fe' or Fe'efe'e, also known as Nufi or Bafang ( fmp, Nufi), is a Bamileke language spoken in Cameroon, around the town of Bafang. It was one of the four languages selected for ''option'' at the Collège Libermann at Douala (along with Duala, Basaa and Banjun). Writing system Phonology Consonants Vowels Tone The language has a complex tone system, carefully described, along with other aspects of the phonology and morphology, in Hyman Surname Hyman is the surname of: * Alan Hyman (1910–1999), author and screenwriter * Alexander C. Hyman (Born 1993), American Businessman * Albert Hyman (1893–1972), co-inventor of the artificial pacemaker * Anthony Hyman (other), s ... (1972). References External links Language Museum [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cameroon
Cameroon (; french: Cameroun, ff, Kamerun), officially the Republic of Cameroon (french: République du Cameroun, links=no), is a country in west-central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the west and north; Chad to the northeast; the Central African Republic to the east; and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and the Republic of the Congo to the south. Its coastline lies on the Bight of Biafra, part of the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean. Due to its strategic position at the crossroads between West Africa and Central Africa, it has been categorized as being in both camps. Its nearly 27 million people speak 250 native languages. Early inhabitants of the territory included the Sao civilisation around Lake Chad, and the Baka hunter-gatherers in the southeastern rainforest. Portuguese explorers reached the coast in the 15th century and named the area ''Rio dos Camarões'' (''Shrimp River''), which became ''Cameroon'' in English. Fulani soldiers founded the Adamawa Emirate ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Banjun Language
The Bamileke are a Central African people who inhabit the Western High Plateau of Cameroon. Languages The Bamileke languages belong to the Grassfields branch of the Niger-Congo language family, which is sometimes labeled as a " Bantuoid language," rather than a Bantu language.Derek Nurse & Gérard Philippson, 2003, ''The Bantu Languages,'' p 227 History The Bamileke are said to have entered their current location from the Mbam region further north, They originally referred to themselves as ''Baliku''. ''Bamileke'' is thought to be a colonial corruption of their original names. They were later joined by the Tikar, Bali, Bamum and Bafia peoples, who migrated into their current region of Cameroon. This accounts for the use of the title ''Fon'' by all five of the ethnic groups. Like a king, the ''Fon'' is head of all authorities, from territory to civil and military, within a given kingdom. In the 17th century, the Bamileke migrated further south and west under the pressure of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
L (letter)
L, or l, is the twelfth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''el'' (pronounced ), plural ''els''. History Lamedh may have come from a pictogram of an ox goad or cattle prod. Some have suggested a shepherd's staff. Use in writing systems Phonetic and phonemic transcription In phonetic and phonemic transcription, the International Phonetic Alphabet uses to represent the lateral alveolar approximant. English In English orthography, usually represents the phoneme , which can have several sound values, depending on the speaker's accent, and whether it occurs before or after a vowel. The alveolar lateral approximant (the sound represented in IPA by lowercase ) occurs before a vowel, as in ''lip'' or ''blend'', while the velarized alveolar lateral approximant (IPA ) occurs in ''bell'' and ''milk''. This velarization does not occur in many European lang ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
K (letter)
K, or k, is the eleventh letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''kay'' (pronounced ), plural ''kays''. The letter K usually represents the voiceless velar plosive. History The letter K comes from the Greek letter Κ ( kappa), which was taken from the Semitic kaph, the symbol for an open hand. This, in turn, was likely adapted by Semitic tribes who had lived in Egypt from the hieroglyph for "hand" representing /ḏ/ in the Egyptian word for hand, ⟨ ḏ-r-t⟩ (likely pronounced in Old Egyptian). The Semites evidently assigned it the sound value instead, because their word for hand started with that sound. K was brought into the Latin alphabet with the name ''ka'' /kaː/ to differentiate it from C, named ''ce'' (pronounced /keː/) and Q, named ''qu'' and pronounced /kuː/. In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
J (letter)
J, or j, is the tenth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its usual name in English is ''jay'' (pronounced ), with a now-uncommon variant ''jy'' ."J", ''Oxford English Dictionary,'' 2nd edition (1989) When used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the ''y'' sound, it may be called ''yod'' or ''jod'' (pronounced or ). History The letter ''J'' used to be used as the swash letter ''I'', used for the letter I at the end of Roman numerals when following another I, as in XXIIJ or xxiij instead of XXIII or xxiii for the Roman numeral twenty-three. A distinctive usage emerged in Middle High German. Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478–1550) was the first to explicitly distinguish I and J as representing separate sounds, in his ''Ɛpistola del Trissino de le lettere nuωvamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana'' ("Trissino's epistle about the letters recently added in the It ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
I (letter)
I, or i, is the ninth letter and the third vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''i'' (pronounced ), plural '' ies''. History In the Phoenician alphabet, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative () in Egyptian, but was reassigned to (as in English "yes") by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound. This letter could also be used to represent , the close front unrounded vowel, mainly in foreign words. The Greeks adopted a form of this Phoenician ''yodh'' as their letter ''iota'' () to represent , the same as in the Old Italic alphabet. In Latin (as in Modern Greek), it was also used to represent and this use persists in the languages that descended from Latin. The modern letter ' j' originated as a variation of 'i', and both were used interchangeably for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
H (letter)
H, or h, is the eighth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''aitch'' (pronounced , plural ''aitches''), or regionally ''haitch'' ."H" ''Oxford English Dictionary,'' 2nd edition (1989); ''Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged'' (1993); "aitch" or "haitch", op. cit. History The original Semitic letter Heth most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (). The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts. The Greek Eta 'Η' in archaic Greek alphabets, before coming to represent a long vowel, , still represented a similar sound, the voiceless glottal fricative . In this context, the letter eta is also known as Heta to underline this fact. Thus, in the Old Italic alphabets, the letter Heta of the Euboean alphabet was adopted with its original sound value . While Etruscan and La ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gh (digraph)
Gh is a digraph found in many languages. In Latin-based orthographies Indo-European languages Germanic languages =English= In English historically represented (the voiceless velar fricative, as in the Scottish Gaelic word ), and still does in ''lough'' and certain other Hiberno-English words, especially proper nouns. In the dominant dialects of modern English, is almost always either silent or pronounced (see Ough). It is thought that before disappearing, the sound became partially or completely voiced to or , which would explain the new spelling — Old English used a simple — and the diphthongization of any preceding vowel. Alexander John Ellis reported it being pronounced as on the Yorkshire-Lancashire border and in close to the Scottish border in the late nineteenth century. It is also occasionally pronounced , such as in Edinburgh. When gh occurs at the beginning of a word in English, it is pronounced as in "ghost", "ghastly", "ghoul", "ghetto", "ghee" e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
G (letter)
G, or g, is the seventh letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''gee'' (pronounced ), plural ''gees''. History The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of ' C' to distinguish voiced from voiceless . The recorded originator of 'G' is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, who added letter G to the teaching of the Roman alphabet during the 3rd century BC: he was the first Roman to open a fee-paying school, around 230 BCE. At this time, ' K' had fallen out of favor, and 'C', which had formerly represented both and before open vowels, had come to express in all environments. Ruga's positioning of 'G' shows that alphabetic order related to the letters' values as Greek numerals was a concern even in the 3rd century BC. According to some records, the original seventh letter, 'Z', had been purged from the Latin alphabet somewhat e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
F (letter)
F, or f, is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''ef'' (pronounced ), and the plural is ''efs''. History The origin of 'F' is the Semitic letter ''waw'' that represented a sound like or . Graphically it originally probably depicted either a hook or a club. It may have been based on a comparable Egyptian hieroglyph such as that which represented the word ''mace'' (transliterated as ḥ(dj)): T3 The Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, ''upsilon'' (which resembled its descendant ' Y' but was also the ancestor of the Roman letters ' U', ' V', and ' W'); and, with another form, as a consonant, ''digamma'', which indicated the pronunciation , as in Phoenician. Latin 'F,' despite being pronounced differently, is ultimately descended from digamma and closely resembles it in form. After sound changes eliminated ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
E (letter)
E, or e, is the fifth letter and the second vowel letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''e'' (pronounced ); plural ''ees'', ''Es'' or ''E's''. It is the most commonly used letter in many languages, including Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Latvian, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish. History The Latin letter 'E' differs little from its source, the Greek letter epsilon, 'Ε'. This in turn comes from the Semitic letter '' hê'', which has been suggested to have started as a praying or calling human figure ('' hillul'' 'jubilation'), and was most likely based on a similar Egyptian hieroglyph that indicated a different pronunciation. In Semitic, the letter represented (and in foreign words); in Greek, ''hê'' became the letter epsilon, used to represent . The various forms of the Old Italic script and the Latin alp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
D (letter)
D, or d, is the fourth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''dee'' (pronounced ), plural ''dees''. History The Semitic letter Dāleth may have developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are many different Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek and Latin, the letter represented ; in the Etruscan alphabet the letter was archaic, but still retained (see letter B). The equivalent Greek letter is Delta, Δ. Architecture The minuscule (lower-case) form of 'd' consists of a lower-story left bowl and a stem ascender. It most likely developed by gradual variations on the majuscule (capital) form 'D', and today now composed as a stem with a full lobe to the right. In handwriting, it was common to start the arc to the left of the vertical stroke, resulting in a serif at the top of the arc. This serif w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
