|
Sarikoli Language
The Sarikoli language (also Sariqoli, Selekur, Sarikul, Sariqul, Sariköli) is a member of the Pamir languages, Pamir subgroup of the Eastern Iranian languages, Southeastern Iranian languages spoken by Tajiks of Xinjiang, Tajiks in China. It is officially referred to in China as the "Tajik language", although it is different from the related Tajik language, Iranian language spoken in Tajikistan, which is considered a dialect of Persian. Nomenclature Sarikoli is officially referred to as "Tajik" ( zh, 塔吉克语, ''Tǎjíkèyǔ'') in China. However, it is not closely related to Tajik language, Tajik (a form of Persian) as spoken in Tajikistan because Sarikoli is an Eastern Iranian languages, Eastern Iranian language, closely related to other Pamir languages largely spoken in the Badakhshan, Badakshan regions of Tajikistan and Afghanistan, whereas the Western Iranian Persian language, Farsi-Dari-Tajik is a polycentric language of a related but distinctly and historically different ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and borders fourteen countries by land, the most of any country in the world, tied with Russia. Covering an area of approximately , it is the world's third largest country by total land area. The country consists of 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four municipalities, and two Special Administrative Regions (Hong Kong and Macau). The national capital is Beijing, and the most populous city and financial center is Shanghai. Modern Chinese trace their origins to a cradle of civilization in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. The semi-legendary Xia dynasty in the 21st century BCE and the well-attested Shang and Zhou dynasties developed a bureaucratic political system to serve hereditary monarchies, or dyna ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tashkurgan
Tashkurgan ( ug, تاشقورغان بازىرى; zh, s=塔什库尔干镇, p=Tǎshíkù'ěrgān Zhèn; ) is a town in the far northwest of China, close to the country's border with Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. It is the principal town and seat of Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County, in the autonomous region of Xinjiang. Name Tashkurgan means "Stone Fortress" or "Stone Tower" in the Turkic languages. The historical Chinese name for the town was a literal translation, Shitoucheng ( zh, s=石头城, p=Shítouchéng, labels=no). The official spelling (per the Chinese government) is Taxkorgan, while Tashkorgan and Tashkurghan appear occasionally in literature. The town's name is written in the Uyghur Arabic alphabet as and in the Uyghur Latin alphabet as ''Tashqurghan baziri''. Historically, the town was also called Sarikol (), also spelled Sariqol () or traditionally Sariq Qol (). History Pre-1900s Tashkurgan has a long history as a stop on the Silk Road. Major cara ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
D (digraph)
D, or d, is the fourth 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 ''dee'' (pronounced ), plural ''dees''. History The Semitic letter Dāleth may have developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are many different Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek and Latin, the letter represented ; in the Etruscan alphabet the letter was archaic, but still retained (see letter B). The equivalent Greek letter is Delta, Δ. Architecture The minuscule (lower-case) form of 'd' consists of a lower-story left bowl and a stem ascender. It most likely developed by gradual variations on the majuscule (capital) form 'D', and today now composed as a stem with a full lobe to the right. In handwriting, it was common to start the arc to the left of the vertical stroke, resulting in a serif at the top of the arc. This serif w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
C (letter)
C, or c, is the third 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 ''cee'' (pronounced ), plural ''cees''. History "C" comes from the same letter as "G". The Semites named it gimel. The sign is possibly adapted from an Egyptian hieroglyph for a staff sling, which may have been the meaning of the name ''gimel''. Another possibility is that it depicted a camel, the Semitic name for which was ''gamal''. Barry B. Powell, a specialist in the history of writing, states "It is hard to imagine how gimel = "camel" can be derived from the picture of a camel (it may show his hump, or his head and neck!)". In the Etruscan language, plosive consonants had no contrastive voicing, so the Greek ' Γ' (Gamma) was adopted into the Etruscan alphabet to represent . Already in the Western Greek alphabet, Gamma first took a '' form in Early Etruscan, then '' in Classical Et ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
B (letter)
B, or b, is the second letter of the Latin-script alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is '' bee'' (pronounced ), plural ''bees''. It represents the voiced bilabial stop in many languages, including English. In some other languages, it is used to represent other bilabial consonants. History Old English was originally written in runes, whose equivalent letter was beorc , meaning "birch". Beorc dates to at least the 2nd-century Elder Futhark, which is now thought to have derived from the Old Italic alphabets' either directly or via Latin . The uncial and half-uncial introduced by the Gregorian and Irish missions gradually developed into the Insular scripts' . These Old English Latin alphabets supplanted the earlier runes, whose use was fully banned under King Canute in the early 11th century. The Norman Conquest popularised the Carolingian half-uncial forms which ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A (letter)
A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel 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 ''a'' (pronounced ), plural ''aes''. It is similar in shape to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives. The uppercase version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. The lowercase version can be written in two forms: the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ. The latter is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children, and is also found in italic type. In English grammar, " a", and its variant " an", are indefinite articles. History The earliest certain ancestor of "A" is aleph (also written 'aleph), the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, which consisted entirely of consonants (for that reason, it is also called an abjad to distinguish it fro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese form, to learners already familiar with the Latin alphabet. The system includes four diacritics denoting tones, but pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Chinese names and words in languages written in the Latin script, and is also used in certain computer input methods to enter Chinese characters. The word ' () literally means "Han language" (i.e. Chinese language), while ' () means "spelled sounds". The pinyin system was developed in the 1950s by a group of Chinese linguists including Zhou Youguang and was based on earlier forms of romanizations of Chinese. It was published by the Chinese Government in 1958 and revised several times. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted pinyin as an international standard ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Medium Of Instruction
A medium of instruction (plural: media of instruction, or mediums of instruction) is a language used in teaching. It may or may not be the official language of the country or territory. If the first language of students is different from the official language, it may be used as the medium of instruction for part or all of schooling. Bilingual education or multilingual education may involve the use of more than one language of instruction. UNESCO considers that "providing education in a child's mother tongue is indeed a critical issue". In post secondary, university and special educational program settings, content may often be taught in a language that is not spoken in the students' homes. This is referred to as content based learning or content and language integrated learning (CLIL). In situations where the medium of instruction of academic disciplines is English in countries where the first language is not English, the phenomenon is referred to as English medium instruction or EM ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wakhi Language
Wakhi (Wakhi: /В̌aхi, ) is an Indo-European language in the Eastern Iranian branch of the language family spoken today in Wakhan District, Northern Afghanistan and also in Tajikistan, Northern Pakistan and China. Classification and distribution Wakhi is one of several languages that belong to the areal Pamir language group. It is believed to be a descendant of the Scytho-Khotanese language that was once spoken in the Kingdom of Khotan. The Wakhi people are occasionally called Pamiris and Guhjali. It is spoken by the inhabitants of the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan, parts of Gilgit-Baltistan (the former NAs) of Pakistan, Gorno-Badakhshan region of Tajikistan and Xinjiang in Western China. The Wakhi use the self-appellation 'X̌ik' (ethnic) and suffix it with 'wor'/'war' to denote their language as 'X̌ik-wor' themselves. The noun 'X̌ik' comes from ''*waxša-ī̆ka-'' (an inhabitant of ''*Waxša-'' 'Oxus', for Wakhan, in Wakhi 'Wux̌'. There are other equivalents for the n ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of speech sounds in written form.International Phonetic Association (IPA), ''Handbook''. The IPA is used by lexicography, lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguistics, linguists, speech–language pathology, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators. The IPA is designed to represent those qualities of speech that are part of wiktionary:lexical, lexical (and, to a limited extent, prosodic) sounds in oral language: phone (phonetics), phones, phonemes, Intonation (linguistics), intonation, and the separation of words and syllables. To represent additional qualities of speech—such as tooth wiktionary:gnash, gnashing, lisping, and sounds made wi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kashmir
Kashmir () is the northernmost geographical region of the Indian subcontinent. Until the mid-19th century, the term "Kashmir" denoted only the Kashmir Valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal Range. Today, the term encompasses a larger area that includes the Indian-administered territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, the Pakistani-administered territories of Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, and the Chinese-administered territories of Aksai Chin and the Trans-Karakoram Tract. Quote: "Kashmir, region of the northwestern Indian subcontinent. It is bounded by the Uygur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang to the northeast and the Tibet Autonomous Region to the east (both parts of China), by the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Punjab to the south, by Pakistan to the west, and by Afghanistan to the northwest. The northern and western portions are administered by Pakistan and comprise three areas: Azad Kashmir, Gilgit, and Baltistan, ... The southern and so ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ethnic Minorities In China
Ethnic minorities in China are the non-Han Chinese, Han population in the People's Republic of China (PRC). The PRC officially recognizes 55 minority group, ethnic minority groups within China in addition to the Han majority. As of 2010, the combined population of officially-recognized minority groups comprised 8.49% of the population of mainland China. In addition to these officially-recognized ethnic minority groups, there are Chinese nationals who privately classify themselves as members of unrecognized ethnic groups in China, unrecognized ethnic groups, such as the very small Chinese history of the Jews in China, Jewish, Tuvans, Tuvan, and Ili Turk people, Ili Turk communities, as well as the much larger Oirats, Oirat and Japanese people in China, Japanese communities. In Chinese, 'ethnic minority' has translated to (), wherein () means 'Nationalities (ethnic affiliations), nationality' or 'nation' (as in ethnic group)—in line with the Soviet concept of ethnicity—a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
_circa_650_CE.jpg "Click for more on -> Tashkurgan")
