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Zaghawa Alphabet
The Zaghawa or Beria script, ''Beria Giray Erfe'' ('Zaghawa Writing Marks'), is an indigenous alphabetic script proposed for the Zaghawa language (also known as Beria) of Darfur and Chad. In the 1950s, a Sudanese Zaghawa schoolteacher named Adam Tajir created an alphabet for the Zaghawa language, sometimes known as the camel alphabet, deriving its glyphs from the clan brands used for camels and other livestock. He copied the inventory of the Arabic script, so the system was not ideal for Zaghawa. In 2000, a Zaghawa veterinarian named Siddick Adam Issa adapted Tajir's script to a form which has proven popular in the Zaghawa community. The typography is somewhat innovative in that capital letters have descenders which drop ''below'' the baseline of the lower-case letters and punctuation, contrasting with the capital letters which rise above most lower-case letters in the Latin alphabet. ''Beria Giray Erfe'' is a full alphabet, with independent letters for vowels; however, diacr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Beria Giray Erfe
The Zaghawa or Beria script, ''Beria Giray Erfe'' ('Zaghawa Writing Marks'), is an indigenous alphabetic script proposed for the Zaghawa language (also known as Beria) of Darfur and Chad. In the 1950s, a Sudanese Zaghawa schoolteacher named Adam Tajir created an alphabet for the Zaghawa language, sometimes known as the camel alphabet, deriving its glyphs from the clan brands used for camels and other livestock. He copied the inventory of the Arabic script, so the system was not ideal for Zaghawa. In 2000, a Zaghawa veterinarian named Siddick Adam Issa adapted Tajir's script to a form which has proven popular in the Zaghawa community. The typography is somewhat innovative in that capital letters have descenders which drop ''below'' the baseline of the lower-case letters and punctuation, contrasting with the capital letters which rise above most lower-case letters in the Latin alphabet. ''Beria Giray Erfe'' is a full alphabet, with independent letters for vowels; however, diacr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grave Accent
The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian and many other western European languages, as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other languages using the Latin alphabet, such as Mohawk and Yoruba, and with non-Latin writing systems such as the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets and the Bopomofo or Zhuyin Fuhao semi-syllabary. It has no single meaning, but can indicate pitch, stress, or other features. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed characters are available. For less-used and compound diacritics, a combining character facility is available. A free-standing version of the symbol, commonly called a backtick, also exists and has acquired other uses. Uses Pitch The grave accent first appeared in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek to mark a lower pitch than the high pitch of the acute accent. In modern practice, it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alphabets
An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllable, and logographic systems use characters to represent words, morphemes, or other semantic units. The first fully phonemic script, the Proto-Sinaitic script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is considered to be the first alphabet and is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and possibly Brahmic. It was created by Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in the Sinai Peninsula (as the Proto-Sinaitic script), by selecting a small number of hieroglyphs commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values of the Canaanite languages. However, Peter T. Daniels distinguishes an abugida, a set of graphemes that represent consonantal base le ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Saharan Languages
The Saharan languages are a small family of languages across parts of the eastern Sahara, extending from northwestern Darfur to southern Libya, north and central Chad, eastern Niger and northeastern Nigeria. Noted Saharan languages include Kanuri language, Kanuri (4 million speakers, around Lake Chad in Chad, Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon), Daza language, Daza (330,000 speakers, Chad), Teda language, Teda (49,000 speakers, northern Chad), and Zaghawa language, Zaghawa (170,000 speakers, eastern Chad and Darfur). They are a part of the proposed Nilo-Saharan languages, Nilo-Saharan family. A comparative word list of the Saharan languages has been compiled by Václav Blažek (2007). Internal classification External classification Roger Blench argues that the Saharan and Songhay languages form a Songhay-Saharan branch with each other within the wider Nilo-Saharan linguistic phylum. Reconstruction Cyffer (2020:385) gives the following Proto-Saharan reconstructions: Comparative v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Macron (diacritic)
A macron () is a diacritical mark: it is a straight bar placed above a letter, usually a vowel. Its name derives from Ancient Greek (''makrón'') "long", since it was originally used to mark long or heavy syllables in Greco-Roman metrics. It now more often marks a long vowel. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the macron is used to indicate a mid-tone; the sign for a long vowel is instead a modified triangular colon . The opposite is the breve , which marks a short or light syllable or a short vowel. Uses Syllable weight In Greco-Roman metrics and in the description of the metrics of other literatures, the macron was introduced and is still widely used in dictionaries and educational materials to mark a long (heavy) syllable. Even relatively recent classical Greek and Latin dictionaries are still concerned with indicating only the length (weight) of syllables; that is why most still do not indicate the length of vowels in syllables that are otherwise metrically d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Advanced Tongue Root
In phonetics, advanced tongue root (ATR) and retracted tongue root (RTR) are contrasting states of the root of the tongue during the pronunciation of vowels in some languages, especially in Western and Eastern Africa, but also in Kazakh and Mongolian. ATR vs RTR was once suggested to be the basis for the distinction between tense and lax vowels in European languages such as German, but that no longer seems tenable. Advanced tongue root Advanced tongue root, abbreviated ATR or +ATR, also called expanded, involves the expansion of the pharyngeal cavity by moving the base of the tongue forward and often lowering the larynx during the pronunciation of a vowel. The lowering of the larynx sometimes adds a breathy quality to the vowel. Voiced stops such as can often involve non-contrastive tongue root advancement whose results can be seen occasionally in sound changes relating stop voicing and vowel frontness such as voicing stop consonants before front vowels in the Oghu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rising Tone
A tone contour, or contour tone, is a tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East, Southeast Asia, West Africa, Nilo-Saharan languages, Khoisan languages, Oto-Manguean languages and some languages of South America. Contours When the pitch descends, the contour is called a ''falling tone;'' when it ascends, a ''rising tone;'' when it descends and then returns, a ''dipping'' or ''falling-rising tone;'' and when it ascends and then returns, it is called a ''peaking'' or ''rising-falling tone.'' A tone in a contour-tone language which remains at approximately an even pitch is called a ''level tone.'' Tones which are too short to exhibit much of a contour, typically because of a final plosive consonant, may be called '' checked, abrupt, clipped,'' or ''stopped tones.'' It has been theorized that the relative timing of a contour tone is not distinctive. That is, in some accen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Acute Accent
The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed characters are available. Uses History An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels. Pitch Ancient Greek The acute accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, where it indicated a syllable with a high pitch. In Modern Greek, a stress accent has replaced the pitch accent, and the acute marks the stressed syllable of a word. The Greek name of the accented syllable was and is (''oxeîa'', Modern Greek ''oxía'') "sharp" or "high", which was calqued (loan-translated) into Latin as "sharpened". Stress The acute accent marks the stressed vowel of a word in several languages: * Blackfoot uses acute accents to show the place of stress in a word: soyópokists ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Falling Tone
A tone contour, or contour tone, is a tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East, Southeast Asia, West Africa, Nilo-Saharan languages, Khoisan languages, Oto-Manguean languages and some languages of South America. Contours When the pitch descends, the contour is called a ''falling tone;'' when it ascends, a ''rising tone;'' when it descends and then returns, a ''dipping'' or ''falling-rising tone;'' and when it ascends and then returns, it is called a ''peaking'' or ''rising-falling tone.'' A tone in a contour-tone language which remains at approximately an even pitch is called a ''level tone.'' Tones which are too short to exhibit much of a contour, typically because of a final plosive consonant, may be called '' checked, abrupt, clipped,'' or ''stopped tones.'' It has been theorized that the relative timing of a contour tone is not distinctive. That is, in some accents or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacritic'' is a noun, though it is sometimes used in an attributive sense, whereas ''diacritical'' is only an adjective. Some diacritics, such as the acute ( ◌́ ) and grave ( ◌̀ ), are often called ''accents''. Diacritics may appear above or below a letter or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters. The main use of diacritics in Latin script is to change the sound-values of the letters to which they are added. Historically, English has used the diaeresis diacritic to indicate the correct pronunciation of ambiguous words, such as "coöperate", without which the letter sequence could be misinterpreted to be pronounced . Other examples are the acute and grave accents, which can indi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Descender
In typography and handwriting, a descender is the portion of a letter that extends below the baseline of a font. For example, in the letter ''y'', the descender is the "tail", or that portion of the diagonal line which lies below the ''v'' created by the two lines converging. In the letter ''p'', it is the stem reaching down past the ''o''. In most fonts, descenders are reserved for lowercase characters such as ''g'', ''j'', ''q'', ''p'', ''y'', and sometimes ''f''. Some fonts, however, also use descenders for some numerals (typically ''3'', ''4'', ''5'', ''7'', and ''9''). Such numerals are called old-style numerals. (Some italic fonts, such as Computer Modern italic, put a descender on the numeral ''4'' but not on any other numerals. Such fonts are not considered old-style.) Some fonts also use descenders for the tails on a few uppercase letters such as ''J'' and ''Q''. The parts of characters that extend above the x-height of a font are called ascenders. Descenders a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
