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Ossetian Language
Ossetian (, , ), commonly referred to as Ossetic and rarely as Ossete (), is an Eastern Iranian language that is spoken predominantly in Ossetia, a region situated on both sides of the Greater Caucasus. It is the native language of the Ossetian people, and is one of the few Iranian languages spoken in Europe; it is a relative and possibly a descendant of the extinct Scythian, Sarmatian, and Alanic languages. The northern half of the Ossetia region is part of Russia and is known as North Ossetia–Alania, while the southern half is part of the ''de facto'' country of South Ossetia (recognized by the United Nations as Russian-occupied territory that is ''de jure'' part of Georgia). Ossetian-speakers number about 614,350, with 451,000 recorded in Russia per the 2010 Russian census. History and classification Ossetian is the spoken and literary language of the Ossetians, an Iranian ethnic group living in the central part of the Caucasus and constituting the basic popu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old Swedish
Old Swedish (Modern Swedish: ) is the name for two distinct stages of the Swedish language that were spoken in the Middle Ages: Early Old Swedish (), spoken from about 1225 until about 1375, and Late Old Swedish (), spoken from about 1375 until about 1526. Old Swedish developed from Old East Norse, the eastern dialect of Old Norse. The earliest forms of the Swedish and Danish languages, spoken between the years 800 and 1100, were dialects of Old East Norse and are referred to as ''Runic Swedish'' and ''Runic Danish'' because at the time all texts were written in the runic alphabet. The differences were only minute, however, and the dialects truly began to diverge around the 12th century, becoming Old Swedish and Old Danish in the 13th century. It is not known when exactly Old Gutnish and Elfdalian began to diverge from Swedish, but Old Gutnish diverged long before Old Danish did. Early Old Swedish was markedly different from modern Swedish in that it had a more complex cas ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anglo-Saxon Runes
Anglo-Saxon runes ( ang, rūna ᚱᚢᚾᚪ) are runes used by the early Anglo-Saxons as an alphabet in their writing system. The characters are known collectively as the futhorc (ᚠᚢᚦᚩᚱᚳ ''fuþorc'') from the Old English sound values of the first six runes. The futhorc was a development from the 24-character Elder Futhark. Since the futhorc runes are thought to have first been used in Frisia before the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, they have also been called Anglo-Frisian runes. They were likely to have been used from the 5th century onward, recording Old English and Old Frisian. They were gradually supplanted in Anglo-Saxon England by the Old English Latin alphabet introduced by Irish missionaries. Futhorc runes were no longer in common use by the eleventh century, but The Byrhtferth's Manuscript (MS Oxford St John's College 17) indicates that fairly accurate understanding of them persisted into at least the twelfth century. History There are competi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Near-open Front Unrounded Vowel
The near-open front unrounded vowel, or near-low front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a lowercase of the ligature. Both the symbol and the sound are commonly referred to as "ash". The rounded counterpart of , the near-open front rounded vowel (for which the IPA provides no separate symbol) has been reported to occur allophonically in Danish; see open front rounded vowel The (near) open front rounded vowel, or (near) low front rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound that has not been confirmed to be phonemic in any spoken language. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ... for more information. In practice, is sometimes used to represent the open front unrounded vowel; see the introduction to that page for more information. In IPA transcriptions of Hungarian and Valencian, this vowel is typically writ ... [...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 apparatus) moves during the pronunciation of the vowel. In most varieties of 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, not as a diphthong. (The English word ''hiatus'' () is itself an example of both hiatus and diphthongs.) Diphthongs often form when separate vowels are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Icelandic Orthography
Icelandic orthography is the way in which Icelandic words are spelled and how their spelling corresponds with their pronunciation. Alphabet The Icelandic alphabet is a Latin-script alphabet including some letters duplicated with acute accents; in addition, it includes the letter eth (), transliterated as ''d'', and the runic letter thorn (), transliterated as ''th'' (see picture); and are considered letters in their own right and not a ligature or diacritical version of their respective letters. Icelanders call the ten extra letters (not in the English alphabet), especially thorn and eth, ("specifically Icelandic" or "uniquely Icelandic"), although they are not. Eth is also used in Faroese and Elfdalian, and while thorn is no longer used in any other living language, it was used in many historical languages, including Old English. Icelandic words never start with , which means the capital version is mainly just used when words are spelled using all capitals. The alphabe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Faroese Language
Faroese ( ; ''føroyskt mál'' ) is a North Germanic language spoken as a first language by about 72,000 Faroe Islanders, around 53,000 of whom reside on the Faroe Islands and 23,000 in other areas, mainly Denmark. It is one of five languages descended from Old West Norse spoken in the Middle Ages, the others being Norwegian, Icelandic, and the extinct Norn and Greenlandic Norse. Faroese and Icelandic, its closest extant relative, are not mutually intelligible in speech, but the written languages resemble each other quite closely, largely owing to Faroese's etymological orthography. History Around 900 AD, the language spoken in the Faroes was Old Norse, which Norse settlers had brought with them during the time of the settlement of Faroe Islands () that began in 825. However, many of the settlers were not from Scandinavia, but descendants of Norse settlers in the Irish Sea region. In addition, women from Norse Ireland, Orkney, or Shetland often married native Scandinav ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ansuz (rune)
Ansuz is the conventional name given to the ''a''-rune of the Elder Futhark, . The name is based on Proto-Germanic ''*ansuz'', denoting a deity belonging to the principal pantheon in Germanic paganism. The shape of the rune is likely from Neo-Etruscan ''a'' (), like Latin A ultimately from Phoenician aleph. Name In the Norwegian rune poem, ''óss'' is given a meaning of "estuary" while in the Anglo-Saxon one, takes the Latin meaning of "mouth". The Younger Futhark rune is transliterated as ''ą'' to distinguish it from the new ár rune (ᛅ), which continues the '' jēran'' rune after loss of prevocalic ''*j-'' in Proto-Norse ''*jár'' (Old Saxon ). Since the name of ''a'' is attested in the Gothic alphabet as or , the common Germanic name of the rune may thus either have been ''*ansuz'' "god", or ''*ahsam'' "ear (of wheat)". Development in Anglo-Saxon runes The Anglo-Saxon futhorc split the Elder Futhark ''a'' rune into three independent runes due to the developme ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Danish Alphabet
The Danish and Norwegian alphabets, together called the Dano-Norwegian alphabet, is the set of symbols, forming a variant of the Latin alphabet, used for writing the Danish and Norwegian languages. It has consisted of the following 29 letters since 1917 (Norwegian) and 1948 (Danish): The letters ''c'', ''q'', ''w'', ''x'' and ''z'' are not used in the spelling of indigenous words. They are rarely used in Norwegian, where loan words routinely have their orthography adapted to the native sound system. Conversely, Danish has a greater tendency to preserve loan words' original spellings. In particular, a ''c'' that represents is almost never normalized to ''s'' in Danish, as would most often happen in Norwegian. Many words originally derived from Latin roots retain ''c'' in their Danish spelling, for example Norwegian ''sentrum'' vs Danish ''centrum''. The "foreign" letters also sometimes appear in the spelling of otherwise-indigenous family names. For example, many of the Danis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Norwegian Alphabet
The Danish and Norwegian alphabets, together called the Dano-Norwegian alphabet, is the set of symbols, forming a variant of the Latin alphabet, used for writing the Danish and Norwegian languages. It has consisted of the following 29 letters since 1917 (Norwegian) and 1948 (Danish): The letters ''c'', ''q'', ''w'', ''x'' and ''z'' are not used in the spelling of indigenous words. They are rarely used in Norwegian, where loan words routinely have their orthography adapted to the native sound system. Conversely, Danish has a greater tendency to preserve loan words' original spellings. In particular, a ''c'' that represents is almost never normalized to ''s'' in Danish, as would most often happen in Norwegian. Many words originally derived from Latin roots retain ''c'' in their Danish spelling, for example Norwegian ''sentrum'' vs Danish ''centrum''. The "foreign" letters also sometimes appear in the spelling of otherwise-indigenous family names. For example, many of the Danish ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Typographic Ligature
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters æ and œ used in English and French, in which the letters 'a' and 'e' are joined for the first ligature and the letters 'o' and 'e' are joined for the second ligature. For stylistic and legibility reasons, 'f' and 'i' are often merged to create 'fi' (where the tittle on the 'i' merges with the hood of the 'f'); the same is true of 's' and 't' to create 'st'. The common ampersand (&) developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters 'E' and 't' (spelling , Latin for 'and') were combined. History The earliest known script Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieratic both include many cases of character combinations that gradually evolve from ligatures into separately recognizable characters. Other notable ligatures, such as the Brahmic abugidas and the Germanic bind rune, figure prominently throughout ancient ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rune
Runes are the letters in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were used to write various Germanic languages (with some exceptions) before they adopted the Latin alphabet, and for specialised purposes thereafter. In addition to representing a sound value (a phoneme), runes can be used to represent the concepts after which they are named ( ideographs). Scholars refer to instances of the latter as ('concept runes'). The Scandinavian variants are also known as ''futhark'' or ''fuþark'' (derived from their first six letters of the script: '' F'', '' U'', '' Þ'', '' A'', '' R'', and '' K''); the Anglo-Saxon variant is '' futhorc'' or ' (due to sound-changes undergone in Old English by the names of those six letters). Runology is the academic study of the runic alphabets, runic inscriptions, runestones, and their history. Runology forms a specialised branch of Germanic philology. The earliest secure runic inscriptions date from ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
