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Discontinuous Past
Discontinuous past is a category of past tense of verbs argued to exist in some languages which have a meaning roughly characterizable as "past and not present" or "past with no present relevance". The phrase "discontinuous past" was first used in English in 1969, though not in the same sense; its use in the sense described here dates to an article by the linguists Vladimir Plungian and Johan von der Auwera published in 2006. Typology of discontinuous past markers Plungian and von der Auwera distinguish three possibilities of marking the discontinuous past in various languages: * The discontinuous past marker may be the only marker of tense within a basically non-tensed verbal system. Such systems are found in the Pacific Ocean languages, east and west Africa, and in languages of North America and the Amazon. “Atemporal” systems with discontinuous past marking are also typical for many Creole languages. * The discontinuous past marker may be one among several tense markers in a s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Past Tense
The past tense is a grammatical tense whose function is to place an action or situation in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs ''sang'', ''went'' and ''washed''. Most languages have a past tense, with some having several types in order to indicate how far back the action took place. Some languages have a compound past tense which uses auxiliary verbs as well as an imperfect tense which expresses continuous or repetitive events or actions. Some languages inflect the verb, which changes the ending to indicate the past tense, while non-inflected languages may use other words, such as "yesterday" or "last week" etc to indicate that something took place in the past. Introduction In some languages, the grammatical expression of past tense is combined with the expression of other categories such as grammatical aspect (see tense–aspect). Thus a language may have several types of past tense form, their use depending on what aspectual or other addi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chewa Language
Chewa (also known as Nyanja, ) is a Bantu language spoken in much of Southern, Southeast and East Africa, namely the countries of Malawi , where it is an official language, and Mozambique and Zambia. The noun class prefix ''chi-'' is used for languages, so the language is usually called and (spelled in Portuguese). In Malawi, the name was officially changed from Chinyanja to Chichewa in 1968 at the insistence of President Hastings Kamuzu Banda (himself of the Chewa people), and this is still the name most commonly used in Malawi today. In Zambia, the language is generally known as Nyanja or '(language) of the lake' (referring to Lake Malawi). Chewa belongs to the same language group ( Guthrie Zone N) as Tumbuka, Sena and Nsenga. Distribution Chewa is the most widely known language of Malawi, spoken mostly in the Central and Southern Regions of that country. "It is also one of the seven official African languages of Zambia, where it is spoken mostly in the Eastern P ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latin Tenses
Latin has six main tenses: three non-perfect tenses (the present, future, and imperfect) and three perfect tenses (the perfect, future perfect, and pluperfect). In technical language, the first three tenses are known as the tenses, while the three perfect tenses are known as tenses. The two sets of tenses are made using different stems. For example, from the verb 'I lead' the three non-perfect tenses are 'I lead, I am leading', I will lead, I will be leading}, and 'I was leading', made with the stem , and the three perfect tenses are 'I led, I have led', 'I will have led', and 'I had led', made with the stem . To these six main tenses can be added various periphrastic or compound tenses, made using either the future participle, such as 'I am going to lead', or the perfect participle, e.g. 'I have led'. However, these are less commonly used than the six basic tenses. Latin tenses do not have exact English equivalents, so that often the same tense can be translated in d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chichewa Tenses
Chichewa (also but less commonly known as Chinyanja, Chewa or Nyanja) is the main lingua franca of central and southern Malawi and neighbouring regions. Like other Bantu languages it has a wide range of tenses. In terms of time, Chichewa tenses can be divided into present, recent past, remote past, near future, and remote future. The dividing line between near and remote tenses is not exact, however. Remote tenses cannot be used of events of today, but near tenses can be used of events earlier or later than today. The Chichewa tense system also incorporates aspectual distinctions. Except for the Present Simple, nearly every tense in Chichewa is either perfective (for example, "I went") or imperfective in aspect (for example "I was going", "I used to go"). In the present tense only, there is a distinction between habitual ("I usually go") and progressive ("I am going now"). Another aspectual distinction in Chichewa is that between perfect and past. A perfect tense is one which ca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tanaquil
Tanaquil (Etruscan: ''Thanchvil'') was the queen of Rome by marriage to Tarquinius Priscus, fifth king of Rome. Life The daughter of a powerful Etruscan family in Tarquinii, Etruria, Tanaquil thought her husband would make a good leader, but since he was the son of an immigrant, he would not be able to gain power in Tarquinii, where they lived. Knowing this, Tanaquil encouraged him to move to Rome, which was not at the time dominated by a strong local aristocracy. Her prophetic abilities helped her to install Tarquin as king and later Servius Tullius as the next king. While on the road to Rome, an eagle flew off with Tarquin's hat and then returned it to his head. Tanaquil interpreted this as a sign that the gods wanted him to become a king. Tanaquil's prophecy was eventually realized for Tarquin - he eventually became friends with King Ancus Marcius, who made Tarquin guardian of his children. When the king died before his children were old enough to become successors to the t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latin (language)
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the Roman Republic it became the dominant language in the Italian region and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. Even after the fall of Western Rome, Latin remained the common language of international communication, science, scholarship and academia in Europe until well into the 18th century, when other regional vernaculars (including its own descendants, the Romance languages) supplanted it in common academic and political usage, and it eventually became a dead language in the modern linguistic definition. Latin is a highly inflected language, with three distinct genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), six or seven noun cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, and vocative), five declensions, four verb conjuga ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hodiernal Tense
A hodiernal tense (abbreviated ) is a grammatical tense for the current day. (''Hodie'' or ''hodierno die'' is Latin for 'today'.) Hodiernal tenses refer to events of today (in an absolute tense system) or of the day under consideration (in a relative tense system). Hodiernal past tense refers to events of earlier today (or earlier than the reference point of the day under consideration), while hodiernal future tense refers to events of later today (or later than the reference point of the day under consideration). A post-hodiernal tense is a future tense for events that will occur after today or the day under consideration, while pre-hodiernal is a past tense for events that occurred before today or the day under consideration. Languages which include or included hodiernal tenses include Mwera and Classical French (it is suggested that in 17th-century French, the ''passé composé'' served as a hodiernal past). Mwotlap (Vanuatu) has a hodiernal future, which is the only absolute ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hastings Banda
Hastings Kamuzu Banda (1898 – 25 November 1997) was the Prime Minister of Malawi, prime minister and later President of Malawi, president of Malawi from 1964 to 1994 (from 1964 to 1966, Malawi was an independent Dominion / Commonwealth realm). In 1966, the country became a republic and he became the first president as a result. After receiving much of his education in ethnography, linguistics, history, and medicine overseas, Banda returned to Nyasaland to speak against colonialism and advocate independence from the United Kingdom. He was formally appointed Prime Minister of Nyasaland, and led the country to independence in 1964. Two years later, he proclaimed Malawi a republic with himself as the first president. He consolidated power and later declared Malawi a one-party state under the Malawi Congress Party (MCP). In 1970, the MCP made him the party's President for Life. In 1971, he became President for Life of Malawi itself. A renowned anti-communist leader in Africa, h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mark Hanna Watkins
Mark Hanna Watkins (November 23, 1903 – February 24, 1976) was an Afro-American linguist and anthropologist. He was born in Huntsville, Texas, the youngest of fourteen children of a Baptist minister. He obtained a Bachelor of Science from Prairie View State College in 1926, remaining there for a further two years as assistant registrar.Wade-Lewis (2005). In 1929, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he became a pupil of Edward Sapir and wrote a Master's thesis entitled ''Terms of Relationship in Aboriginal Mexico'' (1930), dealing with seven genetically unrelated language groups: Otomian, Tarascan, Aztecan, Mixtecan, Zapotecan, Mixean, and Mayan.Spears (2018). Turning from American to African languages for his Ph.D. thesis, between 1930 and 1932 he wrote ''A Grammar of Chichewa: A Bantu Language of British Central Africa'', in cooperation with Kamuzu Banda, a young student from Nyasaland (as Malawi was then known), who in 1966 was to become the first President of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Malawi
Malawi (; or aláwi Tumbuka: ''Malaŵi''), officially the Republic of Malawi, is a landlocked country in Southeastern Africa that was formerly known as Nyasaland. It is bordered by Zambia to the west, Tanzania to the north and northeast, and Mozambique to the east, south and southwest. Malawi spans over and has an estimated population of 19,431,566 (as of January 2021). Malawi's capital (and largest city) is Lilongwe. Its second-largest is Blantyre, its third-largest is Mzuzu and its fourth-largest is its former capital, Zomba. The name ''Malawi'' comes from the Maravi, an old name for the Chewa people who inhabit the area. The country is nicknamed "The Warm Heart of Africa" because of the friendliness of its people. The part of Africa now known as Malawi was settled around the 10th century by migrating Bantu groups . Centuries later, in 1891, the area was colonised by the British and became a protectorate of the United Kingdom known as Nyasaland. In 1953, it became ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bantu Languages
The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu people of Central, Southern, Eastern africa and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages. The total number of Bantu languages ranges in the hundreds, depending on the definition of "language" versus "dialect", and is estimated at between 440 and 680 distinct languages."Guthrie (1967-71) names some 440 Bantu 'varieties', Grimes (2000) has 501 (minus a few 'extinct' or 'almost extinct'), Bastin ''et al.'' (1999) have 542, Maho (this volume) has some 660, and Mann ''et al.'' (1987) have ''c.'' 680." Derek Nurse, 2006, "Bantu Languages", in the ''Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics'', p. 2:Ethnologue report for Southern Bantoid" lists a total of 535 languages. The count includes 13 Mbam languages, which are not always included under "Narrow Bantu". For Bantuic, Linguasphere has 260 outer languages (which are equivalent to languages ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Verb
A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle ''to'', is the infinitive. In many languages, verbs are inflected (modified in form) to encode tense, aspect, mood, and voice. A verb may also agree with the person, gender or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object. Verbs have tenses: present, to indicate that an action is being carried out; past, to indicate that an action has been done; future, to indicate that an action will be done. For some examples: * I ''washed'' the car yesterday. * The dog ''ate'' my homework. * John ''studies'' English and French. * Lucy ''enjoys'' listening to music. *Barack Obama ''became'' the President of the United States in 2009. ''(occurrence)'' * Mike Trout ''is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
