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Toda Language
Toda is a Dravidian language noted for its many fricatives and trills. It is spoken by the Toda people, a population of about one thousand who live in the Nilgiri Hills of southern India. The Toda language originated from Toda-Kota subgroup of South Dravidian. Phonemic inventory Vowels For a Dravidian language, Toda's sixteen vowels is an unusually large number. There are eight vowel qualities, each of which may occur long or short. There is little difference in quality between the long and short vowels, except for , which occurs as when short and as when long. Consonants Toda has an unusually large number of fricatives and trills. Its seven places of articulation are the most for any Dravidian language. The voiceless laterals are true fricatives, not voiceless approximants; the retroflex lateral is highly unusual among the world's languages.Spajić et al. (1994) Voiceless fricatives are allophonically voiced intervocalically in Toda. There are also the invariably ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shona Language
Shona (; sn, chiShona) is a Bantu language of the Shona people of Zimbabwe. It was codified by the colonial government in the 1950s. According to ''Ethnologue'', Shona, comprising the Zezuru, Korekore and Karanga dialects, is spoken by about 7.5 million people. The Manyika dialect of Shona is listed separately by ''Ethnologue'', and is spoken by 1,025,000 people. The larger group of historically related languages—called Shona languages by linguists—also includes Ndau (Eastern Shona) and Kalanga (Western Shona). Instruction Shona is a written standard language with an orthography and grammar that was codified during the early 20th century and fixed in the 1950s. In the 1920s, the Rhodesian administration was faced with the challenge of preparing schoolbooks and other materials in the various languages and dialects and requested the recommendation of South African linguist Clement Doke. The first novel in Shona, Solomon Mutswairo's ''Feso'', was published in 1957. Sh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zv (digraph)
This is a list of digraphs used in various Latin alphabets. Capitalisation involves only the first letter (''ch'' becomes ''Ch'') unless otherwise stated (''ij'' becomes ''IJ''). Letters with diacritics are arranged in alphabetic order according to their base: is alphabetised with , not at the end of the alphabet, as it would be in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. Substantially-modified letters, such as (a variant of ) and (based on ), are placed at the end. Apostrophe (capital ) is used in Bari for . (capital ) is used in Bari for . is used in the Wu MiniDict Romanisation for when it appears in a dark or ''yin'' tone. It is also often written as . is used in the Wu MiniDict Romanisation for dark is used in the Wu MiniDict Romanisation for dark is used in the Wu MiniDict Romanisation for dark (capital ) is used in Bari and Hausa (in Nigeria) for , but in Niger, Hausa is replaced with . A is used in Taa, where it represents the glottalized or crea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
S With Swash Tail
Ȿ (lowercase: ȿ) is a Latin letter s with a "swash tail" (encoded by Unicode, at codepoints U+2C7E for uppercase and U+023F for lowercase) that was used as a phonetic symbol by linguists studying African languages to represent the sound . Lorna A. Priest, October 2, 2007. In 1931, it was adopted into the of for a 'whistled' ''s'', but it was dropped in 1955 due to the lack of the character on |
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, which is maintained by the Unicode Consortium, defines as of the current version (15.0) 149,186 characters covering 161 modern and historic scripts, as well as symbols, emoji (including in colors), and non-visual control and formatting codes. Unicode's success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread and predominant use in the internationalization and localization of computer software. The standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, and most modern programming languages. The Unicode character repertoire is synchronized with ISO/IEC 10646, each being code-for-code identical with the other. ''The Unicode Standard'', however, includes more than just the base code. Along ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phonetic Transcription
Phonetic transcription (also known as phonetic script or phonetic notation) is the visual representation of speech sounds (or ''phones'') by means of symbols. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet. Versus orthography The pronunciation of words in all languages changes over time. However, their written forms ( orthography) are often not modified to take account of such changes, and do not accurately represent the pronunciation. Words borrowed from other languages may retain the spelling from the original language, which may have a different system of correspondences between written symbols and speech sounds. Pronunciation can also vary greatly among dialects of a language. Standard orthography in some languages, such as English and Tibetan, is often irregular and makes it difficult to predict pronunciation from spelling. For example, the words ''bough'', ''chough'', ''cough'', ''though'' and ''through ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
African Languages
The languages of Africa are divided into several major language families: * Niger–Congo or perhaps Atlantic–Congo languages (includes Bantu and non-Bantu, and possibly Mande and others) are spoken in West, Central, Southeast and Southern Africa. *Afroasiatic languages are spread throughout Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and parts of the Sahel. * Indo-European languages are spoken in South Africa and Namibia (Afrikaans, English, German) and are used as lingua francas in the former colonies of Britain and Liberia that was part of American Colonization Society (English), former colonies of France and of Belgium (French), former colonies of Portugal (Portuguese), former colonies of Italy (Italian), former colonies of Spain (Spanish) and the current Spanish territories of Ceuta, Melilla and the Canary Islands and the current French territories of Mayotte and La Réunion. *Various families of Nilo-Saharan languages (unity debated) are spoken fro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Labial–coronal Consonant
A labial–coronal consonant is a consonant produced with two simultaneous articulators: With the lips ('labial'; a , , or sound), and with the tongue (at the gums, an 'alveolar' , , or sound, or further back, a 'post-alveolar' , sound). Several languages have been claimed to have such sounds, such as Margi and Bura in Nigeria. However, most researchers interpret them as having sequences of labial and coronal consonants, a rather common occurrence in Africa. The Yélî Dnye language of Rossel Island, Papua New Guinea, appears to be unique in having distinct labial–alveolar and labial–postalveolar places of articulation, as illustrated below. (The alveolars are fronted, and the post-alveolars only slightly retracted, so it may be best not to consider the latter to be retroflex as they are sometimes described.) Labial–coronal allophones In some Ghanaian languages such as Dagbani, and Nzema, there are palatalized allophones of labial–velars. These are sometim ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Orthography
An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and most of these systems have undergone substantial standardization, thus exhibiting less dialect variation than the spoken language. These processes can fossilize pronunciation patterns that are no longer routinely observed in speech (e.g., "would" and "should"); they can also reflect deliberate efforts to introduce variability for the sake of national identity, as seen in Noah Webster's efforts to introduce easily noticeable differences between American and British spelling (e.g., "honor" and "honour"). Some nations (e.g. France and Spain) have established language academies in an attempt to regulate orthography officially. For most languages (including English) however, there are no such authorities and a sense of 'correct' orthography ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Typewriter
A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an inked ribbon selectively against the paper with a type element. At the end of the nineteenth century, the term 'typewriter' was also applied to a ''person'' who used such a device. The first commercial typewriters were introduced in 1874, but did not become common in offices until after the mid-1880s. The typewriter quickly became an indispensable tool for practically all writing other than personal handwritten correspondence. It was widely used by professional writers, in offices, business correspondence in private homes, and by students preparing written assignments. Typewriters were a standard fixture in most offices up to the 1980s. Thereafter, they began to be largely supplanted by personal computers running word processing software. Nevertheless, typew ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Typeface
A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly. The art and craft of designing typefaces is called ''type design''. Designers of typefaces are called ''type designers'' and are often employed by ''type foundries''. In desktop publishing, type designers are sometimes also called ''font developers'' or ''font designers''. Every typeface is a collection of glyphs, each of which represents an individual letter, number, punctuation mark, or other symbol. The same glyph may be used for characters from different scripts, e.g. Roman uppercase A looks the same as Cyrillic uppercase А and Greek uppercase alpha. There are typefaces tailored for special applications, such as cartography, astrology or mathematics. Term ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram (from the grc, δίς , "double" and , "to write") is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme (distinct sound), or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined. Some digraphs represent phonemes that cannot be represented with a single character in the writing system of a language, like the English '' sh'' in ''ship'' and ''fish''. Other digraphs represent phonemes that can also be represented by single characters. A digraph that shares its pronunciation with a single character may be a relic from an earlier period of the language when the digraph had a different pronunciation, or may represent a distinction that is made only in certain dialects, like the English '' wh''. Some such digraphs are used for purely etymological reasons, like '' rh'' in English. Digraphs are used in some Romanization schemes, like the '' zh'' often used to represent t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
