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History Of The Latin Alphabet
The Latin script is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. It is the standard script of the English language and is often referred to simply as "the alphabet" in English. It is a true alphabet which originated in the 7th century BC in Italy and has changed continually over the last 2,500 years. It has roots in the Semitic alphabet and its offshoot alphabets, the Phoenician, Greek, and Etruscan. The phonetic values of some letters changed, some letters were lost and gained, and several writing styles ("hands") developed. Two such styles, the minuscule and majuscule hands, were combined into one script with alternate forms for the lower and upper case letters. Modern uppercase letters differ only slightly from their classical counterparts, and there are few regional variants. Summary of evolution The Latin alphabet started out as uppercase serifed letters known as Roman square capitals. The lowercase letters evolved through cursive styles that developed to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Duenos Inscription
The Duenos inscription is one of the earliest known Old Latin texts, variously dated from the 7th to the 5th century BC. It is inscribed on the sides of a ''kernos'', in this case a trio of small globular vases adjoined by three clay struts. It was found by Heinrich Dressel in 1880 in the valley between Quirinale and Viminale (today Via Nazionale) in Rome. The ''kernos'' is part of the collection of the Staatliche Museen in Berlin (inventory no. 30894,3). The inscription is written right to left in three units, without spaces to separate words. It is difficult to translate, as some letters are hard to distinguish, particularly since they cannot always be deduced by context. The absence of spaces causes additional difficulty in assigning the letters to the respective words. Text and translations There have been many proposed translations advanced by scholars since the discovery of the ''kernos''; by 1983, more than fifty different explanations of the meaning had been put forward ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Classical Revival
Neoclassical architecture is an architectural style produced by the Neoclassical movement that began in the mid-18th century in Italy and France. It became one of the most prominent architectural styles in the Western world. The prevailing styles of architecture in most of Europe for the previous two centuries, Renaissance architecture and Baroque architecture, already represented partial revivals of the Classical architecture of ancient Rome and (much less) ancient Greek architecture, but the Neoclassical movement aimed to strip away the excesses of Late Baroque and return to a purer and more authentic classical style, adapted to modern purposes. The development of archaeology and published accurate records of surviving classical buildings was crucial in the emergence of Neoclassical architecture. In many countries, there was an initial wave essentially drawing on Roman architecture, followed, from about the start of the 19th century, by a second wave of Greek Revival archi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voiceless Postalveolar Fricative
A voiceless postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The International Phonetic Association uses the term ''voiceless postalveolar fricative'' only for the sound , but it also describes the voiceless postalveolar non-sibilant fricative , for which there are significant perceptual differences. Voiceless palato-alveolar fricative A voiceless palato-alveolar fricative or voiceless domed postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in many languages, including English. In English, it is usually spelled , as in ''ship''. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , the letter esh introduced by Isaac Pitman (not to be confused with the integral symbol ). The equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is S. An alternative symbol is , an ''s'' with a caron or ''háček'', which is used in the Americanist phonetic notation and the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, as well as in the scientific and ISO 9 transl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram (from the grc, δίς , "double" and , "to write") is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme (distinct sound), or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined. Some digraphs represent phonemes that cannot be represented with a single character in the writing system of a language, like the English '' sh'' in ''ship'' and ''fish''. Other digraphs represent phonemes that can also be represented by single characters. A digraph that shares its pronunciation with a single character may be a relic from an earlier period of the language when the digraph had a different pronunciation, or may represent a distinction that is made only in certain dialects, like the English '' wh''. Some such digraphs are used for purely etymological reasons, like '' rh'' in English. Digraphs are used in some Romanization schemes, like the '' zh'' often used to represent t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Heterography And Homography
A homograph (from the el, ὁμός, ''homós'', "same" and γράφω, ''gráphō'', "write") is a word that shares the same written form as another word but has a different meaning. However, some dictionaries insist that the words must also be pronounced differently, while the Oxford English Dictionary says that the words should also be of "different origin". In this vein, ''The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography'' lists various types of homographs, including those in which the words are discriminated by being in a different ''word class'', such as ''hit'', the verb ''to strike'', and ''hit'', the noun ''a blow''. If, when spoken, the meanings may be distinguished by different pronunciations, the words are also heteronyms. Words with the same writing ''and'' pronunciation (i.e. are both homographs and homophones) are considered homonyms. However, in a looser sense the term "homonym" may be applied to words with the same writing ''or'' pronunciation. Homograph disambiguat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Portuguese Language
Portuguese ( or, in full, ) is a western Romance language of the Indo-European language family, originating in the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. It is an official language of Portugal, Brazil, Cape Verde, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe, while having co-official language status in East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, and Macau. A Portuguese-speaking person or nation is referred to as "Lusophone" (). As the result of expansion during colonial times, a cultural presence of Portuguese speakers is also found around the world. Portuguese is part of the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia and the County of Portugal, and has kept some Celtic phonology in its lexicon. With approximately 250 million native speakers and 24 million L2 (second language) speakers, Portuguese has approximately 274 million total speakers. It is usually listed as the sixth-most spoken language, the third-mos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Great Vowel Shift
The Great Vowel Shift was a series of changes in the pronunciation of the English language that took place primarily between 1400 and 1700, beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English. Through this vowel shift, the pronunciation of all Middle English long vowels was changed. Some consonant sounds changed as well, particularly those that became silent; the term ''Great Vowel Shift'' is sometimes used to include these consonantal changes. The standardization of English spelling began in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Great Vowel Shift is the major reason English spellings now often deviate considerably from how they represent pronunciations. The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), a Danish linguist and Anglicist, who coined the term. Causes The causes of the Great Vowel Shift are unknown and have been a source of intense scholarly debate; as yet, there is no firm consensus. The greatest ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
French Orthography
French orthography encompasses the spelling and punctuation of the French language. It is based on a combination of phonemic and historical principles. The spelling of words is largely based on the pronunciation of Old French c. 1100–1200 AD, and has stayed more or less the same since then, despite enormous changes to the pronunciation of the language in the intervening years. Even in the late 17th century, with the publication of the first French dictionary by the Académie française, there were attempts to reform French orthography. This has resulted in a complicated relationship between spelling and sound, especially for vowels; a multitude of silent letters; and many homophones—e.g., ''/////'' (all pronounced ) and ''//'' (all pronounced ). This is conspicuous in verbs: ' (you speak), ' (I speak) and ' (they speak) all sound like . Later attempts to respell some words in accordance with their Latin etymologies further increased the number of silent letters (e.g., ' vs. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dutch Orthography
Dutch orthography uses the Latin alphabet. The spelling system is issued by government decree and is compulsory for all government documentation and educational establishments. Legal basis In the Netherlands, the official spelling is regulated by the Spelling Act of 15 September 2005. This came into force on 22 February 2006, replacing the Act on the Spelling of the Dutch Language of 14 February 1947. The Spelling Act gives the Committee of Ministers of the Dutch Language Union the authority to determine the spelling of Dutch by ministerial decision. In addition, the law requires that this spelling be followed "at the governmental bodies, at educational institutions funded from the public purse, as well as at the exams for which legal requirements have been established". In other cases, it is recommended, but it is not mandatory to follow the official spelling. The Decree on the Spelling Regulations 2005 of 2006 contains the annexed spelling rules decided by the Committee of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English Orthography
English orthography is the writing system used to represent spoken English, allowing readers to connect the graphemes to sound and to meaning. It includes English's norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Like the orthography of most world languages, English orthography has a broad degree of standardisation. This standardisation began to develop when movable type spread to England in the late 15th century. However, unlike with most languages, there are multiple ways to spell every phoneme, and most letters also have multiple pronunciations depending on their position in a word and the context. This is partly due to the large number of words that have been borrowed from a large number of other languages throughout the history of English, without successful attempts at complete spelling reforms, and partly due to accidents of history, such as some of the earliest mass-produced English publications being typeset by hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Italian Orthography
Italian orthography (writing) uses a variant of the Latin alphabet consisting of 21 letters to write the Italian language. This article focuses on the writing of Standard Italian, based historically on the Florentine dialect. Italian orthography is very regular and has an almost one-to-one correspondence between letters or sequences of letters and sounds or sequences of sounds, that is, it is almost a phonemic orthography. The main exceptions are that stress placement and vowel quality (for and ) are not notated, and may be voiced or not, and may represent vowels or semivowels, and a silent is used in a very few cases other than the digraphs and used for the hard and sounds before and . Alphabet The base alphabet consists of 21 letters: five vowels (A, E, I, O, U) and 16 consonants. The letters J, K, W, X and Y are not part of the proper alphabet, and appear only in loanwords (e.g. 'jeans', 'weekend'), foreign names, and in a handful of native words—such as the na ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Orthography
An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and most of these systems have undergone substantial standardization, thus exhibiting less dialect variation than the spoken language. These processes can fossilize pronunciation patterns that are no longer routinely observed in speech (e.g., "would" and "should"); they can also reflect deliberate efforts to introduce variability for the sake of national identity, as seen in Noah Webster's efforts to introduce easily noticeable differences between American and British spelling (e.g., "honor" and "honour"). Some nations (e.g. France and Spain) have established language academies in an attempt to regulate orthography officially. For most languages (including English) however, there are no such authorities and a sense of 'correct' orthography e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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