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Piedmontese Language
Piedmontese (; autonym: or , in it, piemontese) is a language spoken by some 2,000,000 people mostly in Piedmont, northwestern region of Italy. Although considered by most linguists a separate language, in Italy it is often mistakenly regarded as an Italian dialect. It is linguistically included in the Gallo-Italic languages group of Northern Italy (with Lombard, Emilian, Ligurian and Romagnolo), which would make it part of the wider western group of Romance languages, which also includes French, Occitan, and Catalan. It is spoken in the core of Piedmont, in northwestern Liguria, near Savona and in Lombardy (some municipalities in the westernmost part of Lomellina near Pavia). It has some support from the Piedmont regional government but is considered a dialect rather than a separate language by the Italian central government. Due to the Italian diaspora Piedmontese has spread in the Argentinian Pampas, where many immigrants from Piedmont settled. The Piedmontese la ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Albanian Alphabet
The Albanian alphabet ( sq, alfabeti shqip) is a variant of the Latin alphabet used to write the Albanian language. It consists of 36 letters: ''Note:'' The vowels are shown in bold. The letters are named simply by their sounds, followed by ë for consonants (e.g. fë). to the pronunciation of the 36 letters. History The earliest known mention of Albanian writings comes from a French Catholic church document from 1332. Written either by archbishop Guillaume Adam or the monk Brocardus Monacus the report notes that ''Licet Albanenses aliam omnino linguam a latina habeant et diversam, tamen litteram latinam habent in usu et in omnibus suis libris'' ("Though the Albanians have a language entirely their own and different from Latin, they nevertheless use Latin letters in all their books"). Scholars warn that this could mean Albanians also wrote in the Latin language, not necessarily just Albanian with a Latin script. The history of the later Albanian alphabet is closely linked w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Trema (diacritic)
The diaeresis ( ; is a diacritical mark used to indicate the separation of two distinct vowels in adjacent syllables when an instance of diaeresis (or hiatus) occurs, so as to distinguish from a digraph or diphthong. It consists of two dots placed over a letter, generally a vowel; when that letter is an , the diacritic replaces the tittle: . The diaeresis diacritic indicates that two adjoining letters that would normally form a digraph and be pronounced as one sound, are instead to be read as separate vowels in two syllables. For example, in the spelling "coöperate", the diaeresis reminds the reader that the word has four syllables ''co-op-er-ate'', not three, ''*coop-er-ate''. In British English this usage has been considered obsolete for many years, and in US English, although it persisted for longer, it is now considered archaic as well. Nevertheless, it is still used by the US magazine ''The New Yorker''. In English language texts it is perhaps most familiar in the sp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Umlaut (diacritic)
The umlaut () is the diacritical mark used to indicate in writing (as part of the letters , , and ) the result of the historical sound shift due to which former back vowels are now pronounced as front vowels (for example , , and as , , and ). (The term ermanicumlaut is also used for the underlying historical sound shift process.) In its contemporary printed form, the mark consists of two dots placed over the letter to represent the changed vowel sound. It looks identical to the diaeresis mark used in other European languages and is represented by the same Unicode code point. The word '' trema'' (french: tréma), used in linguistics and also classical scholarship, describes the form of both the umlaut diacritic and the diaeresis rather than their function and can therefore be used to refer to both. German origin and current usage (literally "changed sound") is the German name of the sound shift phenomenon also known as ''i-mutation''. In German, this term is also used ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Turoyo Language
Turoyo ( syr, ܛܘܪܝܐ) (''Ṭūr ‘Abdinian Aramaic''), also referred to as modern Surayt ( syr, ܣܘܪܝܬ), or modern Suryoyo ( syr, ܣܘܪܝܝܐ), is a Central Neo-Aramaic language traditionally spoken in the Tur Abdin region in southeastern Turkey and in northern Syria. Turoyo speakers are mostly adherents of the Syriac Orthodox Church, but there are also some Turoyo-speaking adherents of the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean Catholic Church, especially from the towns of Midyat and Qamishli. The language is also spoken throughout diaspora, among modern Syriacs. It is classified as a vulnerable language. Most speakers use the Classical Syriac language for literature and worship. Turoyo is not mutually intelligible with Western Neo-Aramaic, having been separated for over a thousand years; its closest relatives are Mlaḥsô and western varieties of Northeastern Neo-Aramaic like Suret. Etymology Term comes from the word ', meaning 'mountain', thus designat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Uyghur Language
The Uyghur or Uighur language (; , , , or , , , , CTA: Uyğurçä; formerly known as Eastern Turki), is a Turkic language written in a Uyghur Perso-Arabic script with 8-11 million speakers, spoken primarily by the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Western China. Significant communities of Uyghur speakers are located in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, and various other countries have Uyghur-speaking expatriate communities. Uyghur is an official language of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region; is widely used in both social and official spheres, as well as in print, television, and radio; and is used as a common language by other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. Uyghur belongs to the Karluk branch of the Turkic language family, which includes languages such as Uzbek. Like many other Turkic languages, Uyghur displays vowel harmony and agglutination, lacks noun classes or grammatical gender, and is a left-branching language with subject–obj ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Afrikaans
Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans gradually began to develop distinguishing characteristics during the course of the 18th century. Now spoken in South Africa, Namibia and (to a lesser extent) Botswana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, estimates circa 2010 of the total number of Afrikaans speakers range between 15 and 23 million. Most linguists consider Afrikaans to be a partly creole language. An estimated 90 to 95% of the vocabulary is of Dutch origin with adopted words from other languages including German and the Khoisan languages of Southern Africa. Differences with Dutch include a more analytic-type morphology and grammar, and some pronunciations. There is a large degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages, especially in written form. About 13.5% of the South ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kashubian Language
Kashubian or Cassubian (Kashubian: ', pl, język kaszubski) is a West Slavic language belonging to the Lechitic subgroup along with Polish and Silesian.Stephen Barbour, Cathie Carmichael, ''Language and Nationalism in Europe'', Oxford University Press, 2000, p.199, Although often classified as a language in its own right, it is sometimes viewed as a dialect of Pomeranian or as a dialect of Polish. In Poland, it has been an officially recognized ethnic-minority language since 2005. Approximately 108,000 people use mainly Kashubian at home. It is the only remnant of the Pomeranian language. It is close to standard Polish with influence from Low German and the extinct Polabian (West Slavic) and Old Prussian (West Baltic) languages. The Kashubian language exists in two different forms: vernacular dialects used in rural areas, and literary variants used in education. Origin Kashubian is assumed to have evolved from the language spoken by some tribes of Pomeranians called Kas ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diphthong
A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech organ, speech apparatus) moves during the pronunciation of the vowel. In most International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects, varieties of English language, English, the phrase "no highway cowboy" () has five distinct diphthongs, one in every syllable. Diphthongs contrast with monophthongs, where the tongue or other speech organs do not move and the syllable contains only a single vowel sound. For instance, in English, the word ''ah'' is spoken as a monophthong (), while the word ''ow'' is spoken as a diphthong in most varieties (). Where two adjacent vowel sounds occur in different syllables (e.g. in the English word ''re-elect'') the result is described as hiatus (linguistics), hiatus, not as a diphthong. (The English word ''h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Taiwanese Hokkien
Taiwanese Hokkien () (; Tâi-lô: ''Tâi-uân-uē''), also known as Taigi/Taigu (; Pe̍h-ōe-jī/Tâi-lô: ''Tâi-gí / Tâi-gú''), Taiwanese, Taiwanese Minnan, Hoklo and Holo, is a variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively by about 70%+ of the population of Taiwan. It is spoken by a significant portion of Taiwanese people descended from immigrants of southern Fujian during the Qing dynasty. It is one of the national languages of Taiwan. Taiwanese is generally similar to spoken Amoy dialect, Amoy Hokkien, Quanzhou dialect, Quanzhou Hokkien, and Zhangzhou dialect, Zhangzhou Hokkien, as well as their dialectal forms used in Southeast Asia, such as Singaporean Hokkien, Penang Hokkien, Philippine Hokkien, Medan Hokkien, & Southern Peninsular Malaysian Hokkien. It is Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible with Amoy dialect, Amoy Hokkien and Zhangzhou dialects, Zhangzhou Hokkien at the mouth of the Jiulong River (九龍) immediately to the west in mainland China and wit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Etymology
Etymology ()The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) – p. 633 "Etymology /ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi/ the study of the class in words and the way their meanings have changed throughout time". is the study of the history of the Phonological change, form of words and, by extension, the origin and evolution of their semantic meaning across time. It is a subfield of historical linguistics, and draws upon comparative semantics, Morphology_(linguistics), morphology, semiotics, and phonetics. For languages with a long recorded history, written history, etymologists make use of texts, and texts about the language, to gather knowledge about how words were used during earlier periods, how they developed in Semantics, meaning and Phonological change, form, or when and how they Loanword, entered the language. Etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about forms that are too old for any direct information to be available. By analyzing related ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mid Central Vowel
The mid central vowel (also known as schwa) is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a ə, rotated lowercase letter e. While the ''Handbook of the International Phonetic Association'' does not define the roundedness of , it is more often unrounded than rounded. The phonetician Jane Setter describes the pronunciation of the unrounded variant as follows: "a sound which can be produced by basically relaxing the articulators in the oral cavity and vocalising." To produce the rounded variant, all that needs to be done in addition to that is to round the lips. Afrikaans contrasts unrounded and rounded mid central vowels; the latter is usually transcribed with . The contrast is not very stable, and many speakers use an unrounded vowel in both cases. Danish language, Danish and Luxembourgish language, Luxembourgish have a mid central vowel that is variably rounded. In other languages, the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
