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Koussassé Language
Kusaal is a Gur language spoken primarily in northern Ghana, and Burkina Faso. It is spoken by about 121,000 people and takes its name from the Kusaal people, or ''Kusasi''. There is a distinctive dialect division between Agole, to the East of the Volta river, and Toende, to the West. Agole has more speakers. The 6 district capital; Bawku West with Zebilla as capital (mainly inhabited by the speakers of Atoende Kusaal) and the rest; Binduri, Bawku, Tempane, Garu and Pusiga districts mostly Agole dialect speakers. The complete Bible translation is in the Agole dialect. Names The general and accepted name for the language is Kusaal. The name Kusasi Is mostly used to refer to the people who speak the language, and it is not accepted by native speakers to refer to the language. Grammar The language is a fairly typical representative of the Western Oti–Volta low-level grouping within Gur, which includes several of the more widely spoken languages of Northern Ghana, and also Moor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ghana
Ghana (; tw, Gaana, ee, Gana), officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It abuts the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, sharing borders with Ivory Coast in the west, Burkina Faso in the north, and Togo in the east.Jackson, John G. (2001) ''Introduction to African Civilizations'', Citadel Press, p. 201, . Ghana covers an area of , spanning diverse biomes that range from coastal savannas to tropical rainforests. With nearly 31 million inhabitants (according to 2021 census), Ghana is the List of African countries by population, second-most populous country in West Africa, after Nigeria. The capital and List of cities in Ghana, largest city is Accra; other major cities are Kumasi, Tamale, Ghana, Tamale, and Sekondi-Takoradi. The first permanent state in present-day Ghana was the Bono state of the 11th century. Numerous kingdoms and empires emerged over the centuries, of which the most powerful were the Kingdom of Dagbon in the north and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Consonant Cluster
In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education field it is variously called a consonant cluster or a consonant blend. Some linguists argue that the term can be properly applied only to those consonant clusters that occur within one syllable. Others claim that the concept is more useful when it includes consonant sequences across syllable boundaries. According to the former definition, the longest consonant clusters in the word ''extra'' would be and , whereas the latter allows , which is phonetically in some accents. Phonotactics Each language has an associated set of phonotactic constraints. Languages' phonotactics differ as to what consonant clusters they permit. Many languages are more restrictive than English in terms of consonant clusters, and some forbid consonant clusters ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mora (linguistics)
A mora (plural ''morae'' or ''moras''; often symbolized μ) is a basic timing unit in the phonology of some spoken languages, equal to or shorter than a syllable. For example, a short syllable such as ''ba'' consists of one mora (''monomoraic''), while a long syllable such as ''baa'' consists of two (''bimoraic''); extra-long syllables with three moras (''trimoraic'') are relatively rare. Such metrics are also referred to as syllable weight. The term comes from the Latin word for "linger, delay", which was also used to translate the Greek word χρόνος : ''chrónos'' (time) in its metrical sense. Formation The general principles for assigning moras to segments are as follows (see Hayes 1989 and Hyman 1985 for detailed discussion): # A syllable onset (the first consonant or consonants of the syllable) does not represent any mora. # The syllable nucleus represents one mora in the case of a short vowel, and two morae in the case of a long vowel or diphthong. Consonants se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Downstep
Downstep is a phenomenon in tone languages in which if two syllables have the same tone (for example, both with a high tone or both with a low tone), the second syllable is lower in pitch than the first. Two main kinds of downstep can be distinguished. The first, more usually called automatic downstep, downdrift or catathesis, occurs when high and low tones come in the sequence H L (L) H; the second high tone tends to be lower than the first because of the intervening low toned syllable. That phenomenon is common in African languages, such as Chichewa. It has also been argued that the same phenomenon is heard in English sentences, if these sentences are pronounced with a falling intonation, for example ''I really believe Ebenezer was a dealer in magnesium'', or ''I bought blueberries, bayberries, raspberries, mulberries, and brambleberries''. Downstep proper, or non-automatic downstep, is another phenomenon found in many African languages such as Igbo. for an overview of downst ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tonal Language
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with ''phoneme''. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific. Tonal languages are different from pitch-accent languages in that tonal languages can have each syllable with an independent tone whilst pitch-accent languages may have one syllable in a word or morpheme that is more prominent than the others. Mechanics Most languages use pitch as intonation to convey ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nasal Stop
In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast majority of consonants are oral consonants. Examples of nasals in English are , and , in words such as ''nose'', ''bring'' and ''mouth''. Nasal occlusives are nearly universal in human languages. There are also other kinds of nasal consonants in some languages. Definition Nearly all nasal consonants are nasal occlusives, in which air escapes through the nose but not through the mouth, as it is blocked (occluded) by the lips or tongue. The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound. Rarely, non-occlusive consonants may be nasalized. Most nasals are voiced, and in fact, the nasal sounds and are among the most common sounds cross-linguistically. Voiceless nasals occur in a few languages such as Burmese, Welsh, Icelandic and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nasalization
In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . In the International Phonetic Alphabet, nasalization is indicated by printing a tilde diacritic above the symbol for the sound to be nasalized: is the nasalized equivalent of , and is the nasalized equivalent of . A subscript diacritic , called an ogonek or ''nosinė'', is sometimes seen, especially when the vowel bears tone marks that would interfere with the superscript tilde. For example, are more legible in most fonts than . Nasal vowels Many languages have nasal vowels to different degrees, but only a minority of world languages around the world have nasal vowels as contrasting phonemes. That is the case, among others, of French, Portuguese, Hindustani, Nepali, Breton, Gheg Albanian, Hmong, Hokkien, Yoruba, and Cherokee. Those nasal vowels con ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Glottal Stop
The glottal plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is . As a result of the obstruction of the airflow in the glottis, the glottal vibration either stops or becomes irregular with a low rate and sudden drop in intensity. Features Features of the glottal stop: * It has no phonation, as there is no airflow through the glottis. It is voiceless, however, in the sense that it is produced without vibration of the vocal cords. Writing In the traditional Romanization of many languages, such as Arabic, the glottal stop is transcribed with the apostrophe or the symbol ʾ, which is the source of the IPA character . In many Polynesian languages that use the Latin alphabet, however, the glottal stop is written with a rotated apostrophe, (called '' ‘okina'' in Hawaiian and Sam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diphthong
A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech organ, speech apparatus) moves during the pronunciation of the vowel. In most International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects, varieties of English language, English, the phrase "no highway cowboy" () has five distinct diphthongs, one in every syllable. Diphthongs contrast with monophthongs, where the tongue or other speech organs do not move and the syllable contains only a single vowel sound. For instance, in English, the word ''ah'' is spoken as a monophthong (), while the word ''ow'' is spoken as a diphthong in most varieties (). Where two adjacent vowel sounds occur in different syllables (e.g. in the English word ''re-elect'') the result is described as hiatus (linguistics), hiatus, not as a diphthong. (The English word ''h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
