Comma
The comma is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages. Some typefaces render it as a small line, slightly curved or straight, but inclined from the vertical; others give it the appearance of a miniature filled-in figure placed on the baseline. In many typefaces it is the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark . The comma is used in many contexts and languages, mainly to separate parts of a sentence such as clauses, and items in lists mainly when there are three or more items listed. The word ''comma'' comes from the Greek (), which originally meant a cut-off piece, specifically in grammar, a short clause. A comma-shaped mark is used as a diacritic in several writing systems and is considered distinct from the cedilla. In Byzantine and modern copies of Ancient Greek, the " rough" and " smooth breathings" () appear above the letter. In Latvian, Romanian, and Livonian, the comma diacritic appears below the lette ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Romanian Orthography
The Romanian alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet used for writing the Romanian language. It consists of 31 letters, five of which (Ă, Â, Î, Ș, and Ț) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language. The letters Q (''chiu''), W (''dublu ve''), and Y (''igrec'' or ''i grec,'' meaning "Greek i") were formally introduced in the Romanian alphabet in 1982, although they had been used earlier. They occur only in foreign words and their Romanian derivatives, such as ''quasar'', ''watt'', and ''yoga''. The letter ''K'', although relatively older, is also rarely used and appears only in proper names and international neologisms such as ''kilogram'', ''broker'', ''karate''. These four letters are still perceived as foreign, which explains their usage for stylistic purposes in words such as ''nomenklatură'' (normally ''nomenclatură'', meaning "nomenclature", but sometimes spelled with ''k'' instead of ''c'' if referring to member ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Quotation Mark
Quotation marks are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to identify direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same glyph. Quotation marks have a variety of forms in different languages and in different media. History The single quotation mark is traced to Ancient Greek practice, adopted and adapted by monastic copyists. Isidore of Seville, in his seventh century encyclopedia, , described their use of the Greek ''diplé'' (a Angle bracket, chevron): The double quotation mark derives from a marginal notation used in fifteenth-century manuscript annotations to indicate a passage of particular importance (not necessarily a quotation); the notation was placed in the outside margin of the page and was repeated alongside each line of the passage. In his edition of the works of Aristotle, which appeared in 1483 or 1484, the Milanese Renaissance humanis ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Punctuation
Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of writing, written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections. The alphabet-based writing began with no spaces, no capitalization, no vowels (see abjad), and with only a few punctuation marks, as it was mostly aimed at recording business transactions. Only with the Greek playwrights (such as Euripides and Aristophanes) did the ends of sentences begin to be marked to help actors know when to make a pause during performances. Punctuation includes Space (punctuation), space between words and both obsolete and modern signs. By the 19th century, the punctuation marks were used hierarchically, according to their weight. Six marks, proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin, could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and e ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Slash (punctuation)
The slash is a slanting line punctuation mark . It is also known as a stroke, a solidus, a forward slash and #Alternative names, several other historical or technical names. Once used as the equivalent of the modern full stop, period and comma, the slash is now used to represent #Division, division and #Fractions, fractions, as a #Dating, date separator, or to connect alternative terms. A slash in the reverse direction is known as a backslash. History Slashes may be found in early writing as a variant form of dash (typography), dashes, vertical bar, vertical strokes, etc. The present use of a slash distinguished from such other marks derives from the medieval European #virgule, virgule (, which was used as a full stop, period, #scratch, scratch comma, and caesura mark. (The first sense was eventually lost to the full stop, low dot and the other two developed separately into the comma and caesura mark ) Its use as a comma became especially widespread in Kingdom of France, Fr ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Cedilla
A cedilla ( ; from Spanish language, Spanish ', "small ''ceda''", i.e. small "z"), or cedille (from French , ), is a hook or tail () added under certain letters (as a diacritic, diacritical mark) to indicate that their pronunciation is modified. In Catalan language, Catalan (where it is called ), French language, French, and Portuguese language, Portuguese (where it is called a ) it is used only under the letter (to form ), and the entire letter is called, respectively, (i.e. "broken C"), , and (or , colloquially). It is used to mark vowel nasalization in many languages of Sub-Saharan Africa, including Vute language, Vute from Cameroon. This diacritic is not to be confused with the ''ogonek'' (◌̨), which resembles the cedilla but mirrored. It looks also very similar to the Comma#Diacritical_usage, diacritical comma, which is used in the Romanian and Latvian alphabet, and which is misnamed "cedilla" in the Unicode standard. There is substantial overlap between the cedil ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Diacritical Usage
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 , grave , and circumflex (all shown above an 'o'), 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 indicate ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Interpunct
An interpunct , also known as an interpoint, middle dot, middot, centered dot or centred dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in Classical Latin. ( Word-separating spaces did not appear until some time between 600 and 800 CE.) It appears in a variety of uses in some modern languages. The multiplication dot or "dot operator" is frequently used in mathematical and scientific notation, and it may differ in appearance from the interpunct. In written language Various dictionaries use the interpunct (in this context, sometimes called a hyphenation point) to indicate where to split a word and insert a hyphen if the word doesn't fit on the line. There is also a separate Unicode character, . English In British typography, the space dot was once used as the formal decimal point. Its use was advocated by laws and can still be found in some UK-based academic journals such as ''The Lancet''. When the pound sterling was de ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sentence (linguistics)
In linguistics and grammar, a sentence is a Expression (linguistics), linguistic expression, such as the English example "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." In traditional grammar, it is typically defined as a string of words that expresses a complete thought, or as a unit consisting of a Subject (grammar), subject and Predicate (grammar), predicate. In non-functional linguistics it is typically defined as a maximal unit of syntactic structure such as a Constituent_(linguistics), constituent. In functional linguistics, it is defined as a unit of written texts delimited by writing, graphological features such as upper-case letters and markers such as periods, question marks, and exclamation marks. This notion contrasts with a curve, which is delimited by phonologic features such as pitch and loudness and markers such as pauses; and with a clause, which is a sequence of words that represents some process going on throughout time. A sentence can include words grouped meaning ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Livonian Orthography
Livonian ( or ) is a Finnic language whose native land is the Livonian Coast of the Gulf of Riga, located in the north of the Kurzeme peninsula in Latvia but also used to be spoken in the Salaca River valley. Although its last known native speaker died in 2013, a child, Kuldi Medne, born in 2020, is reported to be a native speaker of Livonian. Her parents are Livonian language revival activists Jānis Mednis and Renāte Medne. Also, there are about 40 reported L2 speakers and 210 having reported some knowledge of the language. Possibly uniquely among the Uralic languages but similarly to Latvian and Lithuanian, Livonian has been described as a pitch-accent language (or ''restricted tone language'', see below). Some ethnic Livonians are learning or have learned Livonian in an attempt to revive it, but because ethnic Livonians are a small minority, opportunities to use Livonian are limited. The Estonian newspaper erroneously announced that Viktors Bertholds, who died on ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Apostrophe
The apostrophe (, ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for two basic purposes: * The marking of the omission of one or more letters, e.g. the contraction (grammar), contraction of "do not" to "don't" * The marking of Possessive, possessive case of nouns (as in "the eagle's feathers", "in one month's time", "the twins' coats") It is also used in a few exceptional cases for the #Use in forming some plurals, marking of plurals, e.g. "p's and q's" or Oakland A's. The same mark is used as a single quotation mark. It is also substituted informally for other marks for example instead of the prime symbol to indicate the units of foot (unit), foot or minutes of arc. The word ''apostrophe'' comes from the Ancient Greek language, Greek (hē apóstrophos [prosōidía], '[the accent of] turning away or elision'), through Latin language, Latin and French language, ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Prosody (linguistics)
In linguistics, prosody () is the study of elements of speech, including intonation, stress, rhythm and loudness, that occur simultaneously with individual phonetic segments: vowels and consonants. Often, prosody specifically refers to such elements, known as ''suprasegmentals'', when they extend across more than one phonetic segment. Prosody reflects the nuanced emotional features of the speaker or of their utterances: their obvious or underlying emotional state, the form of utterance (statement, question, or command), the presence of irony or sarcasm, certain emphasis on words or morphemes, contrast, focus, and so on. Prosody displays elements of language that are not encoded by grammar, punctuation or choice of vocabulary. Attributes of prosody In the study of prosodic aspects of speech, it is usual to distinguish between auditory measures ( subjective impressions produced in the mind of the listener) and objective measures (physical properties of the sound wave and ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |