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Moro Language
Moro is a Niger–Congo language in the Heiban family spoken by the Moro people in the Nuba Mountains of Kordofan, Sudan. Writing system A Moro orthography was developed by Christian missionaries in 1936 and a New Testament using it was published in 1960. This early spelling did not use capital letters. A revised spelling using capital letters is used in the 1993 New Testament publication. Dialects There are 7 dialects of Moro (Guest 1997a). Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' (stylized as ''Ethnoloɠue'') is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensiv ... names are given in parentheses. *Laiyənia or LayeniaBlench, Roger. 2005''A dictionary of the Moro language of the Nuba hills, Sudan'' m.s. (Laiyen) *Tobəɽelda or Thetogovela (Toberelda, Umm Gabralla) *Uləba (Ulba) *Lənəbwa (Nubwa) *Nḏərria or Ndërria (Nderre) *Ləmwarə ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
East Kainji Languages
The East Kainji languages are spoken in a compact area of the Jos Plateau in Nigeria, near Jos. There are more than 20 of them, most of which are poorly studied. History East Kainji languages are less internally diverse than some of the other Plateau languages, Plateau branches in the Nigerian Middle Belt (Blench 2007). Historically, the East Kainji branch had been influenced by Chadic languages that no longer exist in the region.Blench, Roger. 2007. Language families of the Nigerian Middle Belt and the historical implications of their distribution'. Presented to the Jos Linguistic Circle in Jos, Nigeria, July 25, 2007. Today, there are at most 100,000 speakers of East Kainji languages, with almost all languages of the languages being threatened by larger languages such as Hausa and English. Although they are morphologically simple, they have 4-level tones instead of the 3-level tones typical of the region. At the time of the Colonial Nigeria, British conquest, several of these l ... [...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] |
W (letter)
W, or w, is the twenty-third and fourth-to-last letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. It represents a consonant, but in some languages it represents a vowel. Its name in English is ''double-u'',Pronounced in formal situations, but colloquially often , , or , with a silent ''l''. plural ''double-ues''. History The classical Latin alphabet, from which the modern European alphabets derived, did not have the "W' character. The "W" sounds were represented by the Latin letter " V" (at the time, not yet distinct from " U"). The sounds (spelled ) and (spelled ) of Classical Latin developed into a bilabial fricative between vowels in Early Medieval Latin. Therefore, no longer adequately represented the labial-velar approximant sound of Germanic phonology. The Germanic phoneme was therefore written as or ( and becoming distinct only by the Early Modern period) by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
U (letter)
U or u, is the twenty-first and sixth-to-last letter and fifth 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 ''u'' (pronounced ), plural ''ues''. History U derives from the Semitic waw, as does F, and later, Y, W, and V. Its oldest ancestor goes to Egyptian hieroglyphics, and is probably from a hieroglyph of a mace or fowl, representing the sound v.html"_;"title="Voiced_labiodental_fricative.html"_;"title="nowiki/>Voiced_labiodental_fricative">v">Voiced_labiodental_fricative.html"_;"title="nowiki/>Voiced_labiodental_fricative">vor_the_sound_[Voiced_labial–velar_approximant.html" ;"title="Voiced_labiodental_fricative">v.html" ;"title="Voiced_labiodental_fricative.html" ;"title="nowiki/>Voiced labiodental fricative">v">Voiced_labiodental_fricative.html" ;"title="nowiki/>Voiced labiodental fricative">vor the sound [Voiced labial–velar approximant ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
T (letter)
T, or t, is the twentieth 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 ''tee'' (pronounced ), plural ''tees''. It is derived from the Semitic Taw 𐤕 of the Phoenician and Paleo-Hebrew script (Aramaic and Hebrew Taw ת/𐡕/, Syriac Taw ܬ, and Arabic ت Tāʼ) via the Greek letter τ (tau). In English, it is most commonly used to represent the voiceless alveolar plosive, a sound it also denotes in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most commonly used letter in English-language texts. History ''Taw'' was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew alphabets. The sound value of Semitic ''Taw'', Greek alphabet Tαυ (''Tau''), Old Italic and Latin T has remained fairly constant, representing in each of these; and it has also kept its original basic shape in most of these alphabets. Use in wr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
S (letter)
S, or s, is the nineteenth 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 ''ess'' (pronounced ), plural ''esses''. History Origin Northwest Semitic šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative (as in 'ip'). It originated most likely as a pictogram of a tooth () and represented the phoneme via the acrophonic principle. Ancient Greek did not have a phoneme, so the derived Greek letter sigma () came to represent the voiceless alveolar sibilant . While the letter shape Σ continues Phoenician ''šîn'', its name ''sigma'' is taken from the letter '' samekh'', while the shape and position of ''samekh'' but name of ''šîn'' is continued in the '' xi''. Within Greek, the name of ''sigma'' was influenced by its association with the Greek word (earlier ) "to hiss". The original name of the letter "sigma" may have been ''san'', but due to the compli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
R (letter)
R, or r, is the eighteenth 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 ''ar'' (pronounced ), plural ''ars'', or in Ireland ''or'' . The letter is the eighth most common letter in English and the fourth-most common consonant (after , , and ). The letter is used to form the ending "-re", which is used in certain words such as ''centre'' in some varieties of English spelling, such as British English. Canadian English also uses the "-re" ending, unlike American English, where the ending is usually replaced by "-er" (''center''). This does not affect pronunciation. Name The name of the letter in Latin was (), following the pattern of other letters representing continuants, such as F, L, M, N and S. This name is preserved in French and many other languages. In Middle English, the name of the letter changed from to , following a pattern exhibited in many ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
P (letter)
P, or p, is the sixteenth 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 ''pee'' (pronounced ), plural ''pees''. History The Semitic Pê (mouth), as well as the Greek Π or π ( Pi), and the Etruscan and Latin letters that developed from the former alphabet, all symbolized , a voiceless bilabial plosive. Use in writing systems In English orthography and most other European languages, represents the sound . A common digraph in English is , which represents the sound , and can be used to transliterate ''phi'' in loanwords from Greek. In German, the digraph is common, representing a labial affricate . Most English words beginning with are of foreign origin, primarily French, Latin and Greek; these languages preserve Proto-Indo-European initial *p. Native English cognates of such words often start with , since English is a Germanic language and thus has ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
O (letter)
O, or o, is the fifteenth letter and the fourth 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 ''o'' (pronounced ), plural ''oes''. History Its graphic form has remained fairly constant from Phoenician times until today. The name of the Phoenician letter was '' ʿeyn'', meaning "eye", and indeed its shape originates simply as a drawing of a human eye (possibly inspired by the corresponding Egyptian hieroglyph, cf. Proto-Sinaitic script). Its original sound value was that of a consonant, probably , the sound represented by the cognate Arabic letter ع ''ʿayn''. The use of this Phoenician letter for a vowel sound is due to the early Greek alphabets, which adopted the letter as O "omicron" to represent the vowel . The letter was adopted with this value in the Old Italic alphabets, including the early Latin alphabet. In Greek, a variation of the for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
N (letter)
N, or n, is the fourteenth 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 ''en'' (pronounced ), plural ''ens''. History One of the most common hieroglyphs, snake, was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like the English , because the Egyptian word for "snake" was ''djet''. It is speculated by many that Semitic people working in Egypt adapted hieroglyphics to create the first alphabet, and that they used the same snake symbol to represent N, because their word for "snake" may have begun with that sound. However, the name for the letter in the Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic alphabets is ''nun'', which means "fish" in some of these languages. The sound value of the letter was —as in Greek, Etruscan, Latin and modern languages. Use in writing systems represents a dental or alveolar nasal in virtually all languages that use the Latin alp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
M (letter)
M, or m, is the thirteenth 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 ''em'' (pronounced ), plural ''ems''. History The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu (Μ, μ). Semitic Mem is most likely derived from a " Proto-Sinaitic" (Bronze Age) adoption of the "water" ideogram in Egyptian writing. The Egyptian sign had the acrophonic value , from the Egyptian word for "water", ''nt''; the adoption as the Semitic letter for was presumably also on acrophonic grounds, from the Semitic word for "water", '' *mā(y)-''. Use in writing systems The letter represents the bilabial nasal consonant sound in the orthography of Latin as well as in that of many modern languages, and also in the International Phonetic Alphabet. In English, the Oxford English Dictionary (first edition) says that is sometimes a vowel, in words like ... [...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] |
