|
IAI Alphabet
The Africa Alphabet (also International African Alphabet or IAI alphabet) was developed by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures in 1928, with the help of some Africans led by Diedrich Hermann Westermann, who served as director of the organization from 1926 until 1939. Meanwhile, the aim of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, later known as International African Institute (IAI), was to enable people to write all the African languages for practical and scientific purposes without the need of diacritics. It is based on the International Phonetic Alphabet with a few differences, such as ''j'' (IPA ) and ''y'' (IPA ), which represent the same (consonant) sound values as in English. This alphabet has influenced development of orthographies of many African languages (serving "as the basis for the transcription" of about 60, by one countSow, Alfa I., and Mohamed H. Abdulaziz, "Language and Social Change," Ch. 18 in Ali A. Mazrui (ed.) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
African Languages
The languages of Africa are divided into several major language families: * Niger–Congo or perhaps Atlantic–Congo languages (includes Bantu and non-Bantu, and possibly Mande and others) are spoken in West, Central, Southeast and Southern Africa. *Afroasiatic languages are spread throughout Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and parts of the Sahel. *Indo-European languages are spoken in South Africa and Namibia (Afrikaans, English, German) and are used as lingua francas in the former colonies of Britain and Liberia that was part of American Colonization Society (English), former colonies of France and of Belgium ( French), former colonies of Portugal (Portuguese), former colonies of Italy (Italian), former colonies of Spain (Spanish) and the current Spanish territories of Ceuta, Melilla and the Canary Islands and the current French territories of Mayotte and La Réunion. *Various families of Nilo-Saharan languages (unity debated) are spoken from Tanzania to E ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dinka Alphabet
The Dinka alphabet is used by South Sudanese Dinka people. The written Dinka language is based on the ISO basic Latin alphabet, but with some added letters adapted from the International Phonetic Alphabet. The current orthography is derived from the alphabet developed for the southern Sudanese languages at the Rejaf language conference in 1928. Prior to this, several attempts at adapting the Arabic and Latin scripts to the Dinka language were made, but neither effort was met with large success. Christian missionaries were essential to the development of what became the Dinka alphabet. Alphabet Dinka does not use ''f, q, s, v, x'', and ''z''; and ''h'' is used in digraphs only. Note that ''ɛ̈'' (open ''e'' with trema/umlaut) and ''ɔ̈'' (open ''o'' with trema/umlaut) do not exist as precomposed characters in Unicode and must therefore be generated using U+0308, the diaeresis combining diacritic. Dental consonants are distinguished from alveolar by adding a following ''h''. Oth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Writing Systems Of Africa
The writing systems of Africa refer to the current and historical practice of writing systems on the African continent, both indigenous and those introduced. Today, the Latin script is commonly encountered across Africa, especially in the Western, Central and Southern Africa regions. Arabic script is mainly used in North Africa and Ge'ez script is widely used in the Horn of Africa. Regionally and in some localities, other scripts may be of significant importance. Indigenous writing systems Ancient African orthographies Ancient Egyptian Perhaps the most famous African writing system is ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. These developed later into forms known as Hieratic, Demotic and, through Phoenician and Greek, Coptic. The Coptic language is still used today as the liturgical language in the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria and the Coptic Catholic Church of Alexandria. As mentioned above, the Bohairic dialect of Coptic is used currently in the Coptic Orthodox Church. Other ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latin Alphabets
The lists and tables below summarize and compare the letter inventories of some of the Latin-script alphabets. In this article, the scope of the word "alphabet" is broadened to include letters with tone marks, and other diacritics used to represent a wide range of orthographic traditions, without regard to whether or how they are sequenced in their alphabet or the table. Parentheses indicate characters not used in modern standard orthographies of the languages, but used in obsolete and/or dialectal forms. Letters contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet Alphabets that contain only ISO basic Latin letters Among alphabets for natural languages the English, 6/sup> Indonesian, and Malay alphabets only use the 26 letters in both cases. Among alphabets for constructed languages the Ido and Interlingua alphabets only use the 26 letters. Extended by ligatures * German (ß), French (æ, œ) Extended by diacritical marks * Spanish (ñ), German (ä, ö, and ü), Dutch (ë) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
