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Soqotri
Soqotri (also spelt Socotri, Sokotri, or Suqutri; autonym: ماتڸ دسقطري, ''mɛ́taḷ di-saḳɔ́ṭri''; , ''al-luḡah al-suquṭriyyah'') is a South Semitic language spoken by the Soqotri people on the island of Socotra and the two nearby islands of Abd al Kuri and Samhah, in the Socotra archipelago, in the Guardafui Channel. Soqotri is one of six languages that form a group called Modern South Arabian languages (MSAL). These additional languages include Mehri, Shehri, Bathari, Harsusi and Hobyot. All are spoken in different regions of Southern Arabia. Classification Soqotri is often mistaken as a variety of Arabic but is officially classified as an Afro-Asiatic, Semitic, South Semitic and South Arabian language. Status Soqotra is still somewhat of a mystery. The island has had minimal contact with the outside world and the inhabitants of Socotra have no written history. What is known of the islands is gathered from references found in records from th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Soqotri People
The Soqotri people, sometimes referred to as Socotran, are a Semitic ethnic group native to the Gulf of Aden island of Socotra. They speak the Soqotri language, a Semitic language in the Afroasiatic family. General The Soqotri primarily inhabit the Socotra Archipelago, on Socotra island and the Abd al Kuri, Darsah and Samhah districts of the Amanat Al Asimah governorate, Yemen. According to Ethnologue, there are an estimated 71,400 Soqotri. As of the last 1990 Socotra census, they numbered around 57,000 individuals. Most Soqotri are Sunni Muslim. Historically, Soqotri were Nestorian Christians, ever since Christianisation of the island up until the 15th century, when the island was occupied by the Mehri Sultanate in 1480. This led to slow Islamisation of the Soqotri. Language The Soqotri speak the Soqotri language (also known as Saqatri, Socotri, Sokotri and Suqutri). It belongs to the Modern South Arabian languages which are closer to the Ethiopian Semitic languages th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Socotra
Socotra or Soqotra (; ar, سُقُطْرَىٰ ; so, Suqadara) is an island of the Republic of Yemen in the Indian Ocean, under the ''de facto'' control of the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council, a secessionist participant in Yemen’s ongoing civil war. Lying between the Guardafui Channel and the Arabian Sea and near major shipping routes, Socotra is the largest of the four islands in the Socotra archipelago. Since 2013, the archipelago has constituted the Socotra Governorate. The island of Socotra represents around 95% of the landmass of the Socotra archipelago. It lies south of the Arabian Peninsula, but is considered to be part of Africa. The island is isolated and home to a high number of endemic species. Up to a third of its plant life is endemic. It has been described as "the most alien-looking place on Earth." The island measures in length and in width. In 2008 Socotra was recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 2018, the United Arab Emirates invaded ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modern South Arabian Languages
The Modern South Arabian languages (MSALs), also known as Eastern South Semitic languages, are a group of endangered languages spoken by small populations inhabiting the Arabian Peninsula, in Yemen and Oman, and Socotra Island. Together with the modern Ethiopian Semitic languages, the Western branch, they form the South Semitic sub-branch of the Afroasiatic language family's Semitic branch. Classification In his glottochronology-based classification, Alexander Militarev presents the Modern South Arabian languages as a South Semitic branch opposed to a North Semitic branch that includes all the other Semitic languages. They are no longer considered to be descendants of the Old South Arabian language, as was once thought, but instead "nephews". Despite the name, they are not closely related to the Arabic language. Languages * Mehri: the largest Modern South Arabian language, with over 165,000 speakers. Most Mehri speakers, around 76,000, live in Oman, but around 50,000 live in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semitic Languages
The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, Chad, and in large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis. Semitic languages occur in written form from a very early historical date in West Asia, with East Semitic Akkadian and Eblaite texts (written in a script adapted from Sumerian cuneiform) appearing from the 30th century BCE and the 25th century BCE in Mesopotamia and the north eastern Levant respectively. The only earlier attested languages are Sumerian and Elamite (2800 BCE to 550 BCE), both language isolates, and Egyptian (a sister branch of the Afroasiatic family, related to the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yemen
Yemen (; ar, ٱلْيَمَن, al-Yaman), officially the Republic of Yemen,, ) is a country in Western Asia. It is situated on the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, and borders Saudi Arabia to the Saudi Arabia–Yemen border, north and Oman to the Oman–Yemen border, northeast and shares maritime borders with Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia. Yemen is the second-largest Arabs, Arab sovereign state in the peninsula, occupying , with a coastline stretching about . Its constitutionally stated Capital city, capital, and largest city, is Sanaa. As of 2021, Yemen has an estimated population of some 30.4 million. In ancient times, Yemen was the home of the Sabaeans, a trading state that included parts of modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea. Later in 275 AD, the Himyarite Kingdom was influenced by Judaism. Christianity arrived in the fourth century. Islam spread quickly in the seventh century and Yemenite troops were crucial in the early Islamic conquests. Several Dynasty, dynasties ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mehri Language
Mehri or Mahri ( مهريّت ) is the most spoken of the Modern South Arabian languages (MSALs), a subgroup of the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic family. It is spoken by the Mehri tribes, who inhabit isolated areas of the eastern part of Yemen, western Oman, particularly the Al Mahrah Governorate, with a small number in Saudi Arabia near the Yemeni and Omani borders. Up to the 19th century, speakers lived as far north as the central part of Oman. Mehri and its sister MSALs were spoken in the southern Arabian Peninsula before the spread of Arabic along with Islam in the 7th century CE. Today it is also spoken by Mehri residents in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as in Kuwait by guest workers originally from South Arabia, as well as nationals with a South Arabian heritage. Given the dominance of Arabic in the region over the past 1400 years and the frequent bilingualism with Arabic among Mehri speakers, Mehri is at some risk of extinction. It is primarily a spoke ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Labial Consonant
Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. The two common labial articulations are bilabials, articulated using both lips, and labiodentals, articulated with the lower lip against the upper teeth, both of which are present in English. A third labial articulation is dentolabials, articulated with the upper lip against the lower teeth (the reverse of labiodental), normally only found in pathological speech. Generally precluded are linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue contacts the posterior side of the upper lip, making them coronals, though sometimes, they behave as labial consonants. The most common distribution between bilabials and labiodentals is the English one, in which the nasal and the stops, , , and , are bilabial and the fricatives, , and , are labiodental. The voiceless bilabial fricative, voiced bilabial fricative, and the bilabial approximant do not exist as the primary realizations of any sounds in English, bu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alveolar Consonant
Alveolar (; UK also ) consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli (the sockets) of the upper teeth. Alveolar consonants may be articulated with the tip of the tongue (the apical consonants), as in English, or with the flat of the tongue just above the tip (the "blade" of the tongue; called laminal consonants), as in French and Spanish. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) does not have separate symbols for the alveolar consonants. Rather, the same symbol is used for all coronal places of articulation that are not palatalized like English palato-alveolar ''sh'', or retroflex. To disambiguate, the ''bridge'' (, ''etc.'') may be used for a dental consonant, or the under-bar (, ''etc.'') may be used for the postalveolars. differs from dental in that the former is a sibilant and the latter is not. differs from postalveolar in being unpalatalized. The bare letters , etc. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Palatal Consonant
Palatals are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate (the middle part of the roof of the mouth). Consonants with the tip of the tongue curled back against the palate are called retroflex. Characteristics The most common type of palatal consonant is the extremely common approximant , which ranks as among the ten most common sounds in the world's languages. The nasal is also common, occurring in around 35 percent of the world's languages, in most of which its equivalent obstruent is not the stop , but the affricate . Only a few languages in northern Eurasia, the Americas and central Africa contrast palatal stops with postalveolar affricates—as in Hungarian, Czech, Latvian, Macedonian, Slovak, Turkish and Albanian. Consonants with other primary articulations may be palatalized, that is, accompanied by the raising of the tongue surface towards the hard palate. For example, English (spelled ''sh'') has such a palatal component ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Velar Consonant
Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (known also as the velum). Since the velar region of the roof of the mouth is relatively extensive and the movements of the dorsum are not very precise, velars easily undergo assimilation, shifting their articulation back or to the front depending on the quality of adjacent vowels. They often become automatically ''fronted'', that is partly or completely palatal before a following front vowel, and ''retracted'', that is partly or completely uvular before back vowels. Palatalised velars (like English in ''keen'' or ''cube'') are sometimes referred to as palatovelars. Many languages also have labialized velars, such as , in which the articulation is accompanied by rounding of the lips. There are also labial–velar consonants, which are doubly articulated at the velum and at the lips, such as . This distinction disappears with the approx ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Glottal Consonant
Glottal consonants are consonants using the glottis as their primary articulation. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the glottal fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have, while some do not consider them to be consonants at all. However, glottal consonants behave as typical consonants in many languages. For example, in Literary Arabic, most words are formed from a root ''C-C-C'' consisting of three consonants, which are inserted into templates such as or . The glottal consonants and can occupy any of the three root consonant slots, just like "normal" consonants such as or . The glottal consonants in the International Phonetic Alphabet are as follows: Characteristics In many languages, the "fricatives" are not true fricatives. This is a historical usage of the word. They instead represent transitional states of the glottis ( phonation) without a specific place of articulation, and may behave as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pharyngeal Consonant
A pharyngeal consonant is a consonant that is articulated primarily in the pharynx. Some phoneticians distinguish upper pharyngeal consonants, or "high" pharyngeals, pronounced by retracting the root of the tongue in the mid to upper pharynx, from (ary)epiglottal consonants, or "low" pharyngeals, which are articulated with the aryepiglottic folds against the epiglottis at the entrance of the larynx, as well as from epiglotto-pharyngeal consonants, with both movements being combined. Stops and trills can be reliably produced only at the epiglottis, and fricatives can be reliably produced only in the upper pharynx. When they are treated as distinct places of articulation, the term ''radical consonant'' may be used as a cover term, or the term ''guttural consonants'' may be used instead. In many languages, pharyngeal consonants trigger advancement of neighboring vowels. Pharyngeals thus differ from uvulars, which nearly always trigger retraction. For example, in some dialects of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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