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Luganda Tones
Luganda, the language spoken by the Baganda people from Central Uganda, is a tonal language of the Bantu family. It is traditionally described as having three tones: high ('), low (') and falling ('). Rising tones are not found in Luganda, even on long vowels, since a sequence such as automatically becomes ''Luganda Basic Course'', p. xiii. Tones perform various functions in Luganda: they help to distinguish one word from another, they distinguish one verb tense from another, and they are also used in sentence intonation, for example, to distinguish a statement from a question. The complexity of the Luganda tonal system has attracted the attention of numerous scholars, who have sought ways of describing Luganda tones most economically according to different linguistic models. Overview In Luganda some words have a lexical tone: 'city', 'teacher'. The tone can be a falling one: 'country', 'child', 'hospital'. Some words have a double tone or a tone spread across three syllabl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Luganda
The Ganda language or Luganda (, , ) is a Bantu language spoken in the African Great Lakes region. It is one of the major languages in Uganda and is spoken by more than 10 million Baganda and other people principally in central Uganda including the capital Kampala of Uganda. Typologically, it is an agglutinative, tonal language with subject–verb–object word order and nominative–accusative morphosyntactic alignment. With at least more than 16 million first-language speakers in the Buganda region and 5 million others fluent elsewhere in different regions especially in major urban areas like Mbale, Tororo, Jinja, Gulu, Mbarara, Hoima, Kasese etc. Luganda is Uganda's defacto language of national identity as it's the most widely spoken Ugandan language used mostly in trade in urban areas, the language is also the most unofficial spoken language in Rwanda's capital Kigali. As a second language, it follows English and precedes Swahili in Uganda. Luganda is used in some ... [...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] |
Languages Of Uganda
In Uganda the most spoken local language is Luganda as the Baganda tribe occupies the southern central part of Uganda and the capital city of the country, followed by English (also the official language since 1962), as all schools in Uganda use it in their studies due to the introduction of English during the colonial period. English is also the language of business and judicial matters. Most spoken after Luganda and English is Swahili. This language is more common in neighbouring Kenya and Tanzania. Swahili is taught in schools as an optional additional language and it is mostly spoken by the Ugandan army. In 2005, there were talks to include Swahili into as the second official language as it was seen as neutral, however this is still not ratified by the government. Uganda is a multilingual country with over 70 generally estimated languages spoken. 43 of its living languages fall into four main families— Bantu, Nilotic and Central Sudanic and Kuliak. Of these, 41 are indigeno ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chichewa Tones
Chichewa (a Bantu language of Central Africa, also known as Chewa, Nyanja, or Chinyanja) is the main language spoken in south and central Malawi, and to a lesser extent in Zambia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Like most other Bantu languages, it is tonal; that is to say, pitch patterns are an important part of the pronunciation of words. Thus, for example, the word (high-low-low) 'maize' can be distinguished from (low-low-high) 'cassava' not only by its consonants but also by its pitch pattern. These patterns remain constant in whatever context the nouns are used. Tonal patterns also play an important grammatical role in Chichewa verbs, helping to distinguish one tense from another, and relative clause verbs from main clause verbs. Tones are also used in intonation and phrasing. Conventionally Chichewa is said to have high tones (H) and low tones (L). However, it has been argued that it is more accurate to think of it as having high-toned syllables versus toneless ones.Myers (1998). ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Near Future (grammar)
Some languages have grammatical categories to represent near future, a subcategory of the future tense. *Going-to future in English may express near future. *Similarly to English, the French verb (''to go'') can be used as an auxiliary verb to create a near-future tense (''le futur proche''). Whereas English uses the continuous aspect (''to be going''), French uses the simple present tense; for example, the English sentence "I am going to do it tomorrow" would in French be « Je ''vais'' le ''faire'' demain ». As in English, this form can generally be replaced by the present or future tense: "I am doing it tomorrow", "I shall do it tomorrow", « Je le ''fais'' demain », « Je le ferai demain ». *Chichewa tenses can be divided into present, recent past, remote past, near future, and remote future. The dividing line between near and remote tenses is not exact, however. Remote tenses cannot be used of events of today, but near tenses can be used of events earlier or later than tod ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diphone
In phonetics, a diphone is an adjacent pair of phones in an utterance. For example, in aɪfəʊn the diphones are a ɪ f ə ʊ n The term is usually used to refer to a recording of the transition between two phones. In the following diagram, a stream of phones are represented by P1, P2, etc., and the corresponding diphones are represented by D1-2, D2-3, etc.: , P1, P2, P3, P4, P5, P6, , D1-2=, D2-3=, D3-4=, D4-5=, D5-6=, If the number of phones in a language is P, the theoretical number of possible diphones is P2. However, since all languages have restrictions about what sounds can occur next to each other (see ''phonotactics''), the number of diphones in each language is usually much smaller than P2. Spanish has about 800 diphones and German about 2,500. Diphones are useful in speech synthesis. When pre-recorded diphones are combined to create synthesized speech, the resulting sounds are much more natural than just combining simple phones. That is because the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Meeussen's Rule
Meeussen's rule is a special case of tone reduction in Bantu languages. The tonal alternation it describes is the lowering, in some contexts, of the last tone of a pattern of two adjacent High tones (HH), resulting in the pattern HL. The phenomenon is named after its first observer, the Belgian Bantu specialist A. E. Meeussen (1912–1978). In phonological terms, the phenomenon can be seen as a special case of the Obligatory Contour Principle. The term "Meeussen's Rule" (the spelling with a capital R is more common) first appeared in a paper by John Goldsmith in 1981. It is based on an observation made by Meeussen in his 1963 article on the Tonga verb stating that "in a sequence of determinants, only the first is treated as a determinant". It was John Goldsmith who reformulated this as the rule HH > HL (or, as he expressed it, H → L / H ) which later became well known as Meeussen's Rule. Meeussen's rule is one of a number of processes in Bantu languages by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Soga Language
Soga, or Lusoga, is a Bantu language spoken by the Soga people of the Busoga region in Eastern Uganda. With over three million speakers, it is one of the major languages of Uganda, after English, Swahili, and Luganda. However, it is largely restricted to the Busoga region, which is mainly within the natural boundaries of Lake Victoria to the south, Lake Kyoga to the north, the Nile river to the west and the Mpologoma ('Lion') river to the east of Namutumba district. It is tonal. History and development The Soga language is very similar to the neighbouring languages Luganda and Gwere as all 3 descend from a common ancestor language (Proto-North Nyanza). The written form of Soga is only as recent as the arrival of the Arab and European traders and missionaries. It first appeared in print in the second half of the nineteenth century. Soga is used in some primary schools in Busoga as pupils begin to learn English, an official language of Uganda. It is also taught in secondary s ... [...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] |
Boundary Tone
The term boundary tone refers to a rise or fall in pitch that occurs in speech at the end of a sentence or other utterance, or, if a sentence is divided into two or more Prosodic unit, intonational phrases, at the end of each intonational phrase. It can also refer to a low or high intonational tone at the beginning of an utterance or intonational phrase. The term was first introduced in a Doctor of Philosophy, PhD thesis on English Intonation (linguistics), intonation by Mark Liberman in 1975 but without being developed further. It was taken up again in 1980 in another PhD thesis on English intonation by Janet Pierrehumbert. In Pierrehumbert's model, which later developed into the ToBI system of intonational transcription, every Prosodic unit, intonational phrase is marked as ending in a boundary tone, written either H% when the speaker's voice rises up or remains high, or L% when it falls or remains low. In modern intonational studies the term 'boundary tone' replaces the notion o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Baganda
The Ganda people, or Baganda (endonym: ''Baganda''; singular ''Muganda''), are a Bantu ethnic group native to Buganda, a subnational kingdom within Uganda. Traditionally composed of 52 clans (although since a 1993 survey, only 46 are officially recognised), the Baganda are the largest people of the bantu ethnic group in Uganda, comprising 16.5 percent of the population at the time of the 2014 census. Sometimes described as "The King's Men" because of the importance of the king, or Kabaka, in their society, the Ganda number an estimated 5.56 million in Uganda. In addition, there is a significant diaspora abroad, with organised communities in Canada, South Africa, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Traditionally, they speak Luganda. History Early history The early history of the Ganda is unclear, with various conflicting traditions as to their origins. One tradition holds that they are descendants of the legendary figure of Kintu, the first human accordi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Earl Stevick
Earl Wilson Stevick (; October 23, 1923 – August 13, 2013)Woodson, Daryl "Earl Stevick passed on Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2013, at the Mayflower in Lexington, where he had been residing. He was 89 years old." The News Gazette. Retrieved 2013-08-16 was an expert in language learning and teaching. Stevick was influential in developing the communicative approach to language learning. He was a practicing Christian and his approach to education was very much influenced by his faith. Academic career Earl Stevick studied government at Harvard University, earned a Master of Arts in Teaching English as a Foreign Language at Columbia University, and a PhD in linguistics at Cornell University. After he received his PhD, Stevick began teaching at Scarritt College for Christian Workers in Nashville, Tennessee. He applied for and received a Ford Fellowship and went to teach in Angola, Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) for two years. He ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
