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Circumflex In French
The circumflex (ˆ) is one of the five diacritics used in French orthography. It may appear on the vowels a, e, i, o, and u, for example â in ''pâté''. The circumflex, called ''accent circonflexe'', has three primary functions in French: * It affects the pronunciation of ''a'', ''e'', and ''o.'' Although it is used on i and u as well, it does not affect their pronunciation. * It often indicates the historical presence of a letter, commonly ''s,'' that has become silent and fallen away in orthography over the course of linguistic evolution. * It is used, less frequently, to distinguish between two homophones. For example, ''sur'' ('on/about') versus ''sûr'' '(sure/safe'), and ''du'' ('of the') versus ''dû'' ('due') And in certain words, it is simply an orthographic convention. First usages The circumflex first appeared in written French in the 16th century. It was borrowed from Ancient Greek, and combines the acute accent and the grave accent. Grammarian Jacques Du ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Circumflex
The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from "bent around"a translation of the (). The circumflex in the Latin script is chevron-shaped (), while the Greek circumflex may be displayed either like a tilde () or like an inverted breve (). For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin alphabet, precomposed characters are available. In English, the circumflex, like other diacritics, is sometimes retained on loanwords that used it in the original language (for example '' entrepôt, crème brûlée''). In mathematics and statistics, the circumflex diacritic is sometimes used to denote a function and is called a '' hat operator''. A free-standing version of the circumflex symbol, , is encoded in ASCII and Unicode and has become known as '' caret'' and has acquired special uses, particularly i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Phoneme
A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages contain phonemes (or the spatial-gestural equivalent in sign languages), and all spoken languages include both consonant and vowel phonemes; phonemes are primarily studied under the branch of linguistics known as phonology. Examples and notation The English words ''cell'' and ''set'' have the exact same sequence of sounds, except for being different in their final consonant sounds: thus, versus in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a writing system that can be used to represent phonemes. Since and alone distinguish certain words from others, they are each examples of phonemes of the English language. Specifically they are consonant phonemes, along with , while is a vowel phoneme. The spelling of Engli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Pierre Corneille
Pierre Corneille (; ; 6 June 1606 – 1 October 1684) was a French tragedian. He is generally considered one of the three great 17th-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine. As a young man, he earned the valuable patronage of Cardinal Richelieu, who was trying to promote classical tragedy along formal lines, but later quarrelled with him, especially over his best-known play, '' Le Cid'', about a medieval Spanish warrior, which was denounced by the newly formed for breaching the unities. He continued to write well-received tragedies for nearly forty years. Biography Early years Corneille was born in Rouen, Normandy, France, to Marthe Le Pesant and Pierre Corneille, a distinguished lawyer. His younger brother, Thomas Corneille, also became a noted playwright. He was given a rigorous Jesuit education at the ''Collège de Bourbon'' ( Lycée Pierre-Corneille since 1873), where acting on the stage was part of the training. At 18 he began to study law, but ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Battle Of Hastings
The Battle of Hastings was fought on 14 October 1066 between the Norman-French army of William, Duke of Normandy, and an English army under the Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godwinson, beginning the Norman Conquest of England. It took place approximately northwest of Hastings, close to the present-day town of Battle, East Sussex, and was a decisive Norman victory. The background to the battle was the death of the childless King Edward the Confessor in January 1066, which set up a succession struggle between several claimants to his throne. Harold was crowned king shortly after Edward's death but faced invasions by William, his own brother Tostig, and the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada (Harold III of Norway). Hardrada and Tostig defeated a hastily gathered army of Englishmen at the Battle of Fulford on 20 September 1066. They were in turn defeated by Harold at the Battle of Stamford Bridge on 25 September. The deaths of Tostig and Hardrada at Stamford Bridge left William as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. The field of phonetics is traditionally divided into three sub-disciplines on questions involved such as how humans plan and execute movements to produce speech (articulatory phonetics), how various movements affect the properties of the resulting sound (acoustic phonetics) or how humans convert sound waves to linguistic information (auditory phonetics). Traditionally, the minimal linguistic unit of phonetics is the phone (phonetics), phone—a speech sound in a language which differs from the phonological unit of phoneme; the phoneme is an abstract categorization of phones and it is also defined as the smallest unit that discerns meaning between sounds in any given language. Phonetics deals with two aspects of human speech: production ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Contraction (linguistics)
A contraction is a shortened version of the spoken and written forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters and sounds. In linguistic analysis, contractions should not be confused with crasis, abbreviations and initialisms (including acronyms), with which they share some semantic and phonetic functions, though all three are connoted by the term "abbreviation" in layman’s terms. Contraction is also distinguished from morphological clipping, where beginnings and endings are omitted. The definition overlaps with the term portmanteau (a linguistic ''blend''), but a distinction can be made between a portmanteau and a contraction by noting that contractions are formed from words that would otherwise appear together in sequence, such as ''do'' and ''not'', whereas a portmanteau word is formed by combining two or more existing words that all relate to a singular concept that the portmanteau describes. English English has a number of contractio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Haplology
Haplology (from Greek "simple" and , "speech") is, in spoken language, the elision (elimination or deletion) of an entire syllable or a part of it through dissimilation (a differentiating shift that affects two neighboring similar sounds). The phenomenon was identified by American philologist Maurice Bloomfield in the 20th century. Linguists sometimes jokingly refer to the phenomenon as "haplogy", an autology. As a general rule, haplology occurs in English adverbs of adjectives ending in "le", for example ''gentlely'' → ''gently''; ''ablely'' → ''ably''. Examples * Basque: → ('apple cider') * German: → (female 'wizard' or 'magician'; male: der Zauberer; female ending -in); this is a productive pattern applied to other words ending in (spelt) ''-erer''. * Dutch: → ('narcissism') * French: → ('femininity') * English: ** Old English → ''Engle lond'' → ''England'' (expected form would be *''Engelland'') ** Old English ''cyning'' → English ''king'' ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Hiatus (linguistics)
In phonology, hiatus ( ) or diaeresis ( ; also spelled dieresis or diæresis) describes the occurrence of two separate vowel sounds in adjacent syllables with no intervening consonant. When two vowel sounds instead occur together as part of a single syllable, the result is called a diphthong. Preference Some languages do not have diphthongs, except sometimes in rapid speech, or they have a limited number of diphthongs but also numerous vowel sequences that cannot form diphthongs and so appear in hiatus. That is the case for Nuosu, Bantu languages like Swahili, and Lakota. An example is Swahili 'purify' with three syllables. Avoidance Many languages disallow or restrict hiatus and avoid it by deleting or assimilating the vowel sound or by adding an extra consonant sound. Epenthesis A consonant sound may be added between vowels (epenthesis) to prevent hiatus. That is most often a semivowel or a glottal, but all kinds of other consonants can be used as well, depending on the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Syncope (phonetics)
In phonology, syncope (; from ) is the loss of one or more sounds from the interior of a word, especially the loss of an unstressed vowel. It is found in both synchronic and diachronic analyses of languages. Its opposite, whereby sounds are added, is epenthesis. Synchronic analysis Synchronic analysis studies linguistic phenomena at one moment of a language's history, usually the present, in contrast to diachronic analysis, which studies a language's states and the patterns of change across a historical timeframe. In modern languages, syncope occurs in inflection, poetry, and informal speech. Inflections In languages such as Irish and Hebrew, the process of inflection can cause syncope: Verbs: * Irish: (to play) should become * (I play). However, the addition of the causes syncope and the second-last syllable vowel is lost so becomes . * Hebrew: (katav), (he) wrote, becomes (katvu), (they) wrote, when the third-person plural ending (-u) is added. Nouns: * Irish: ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Metaplasm
A metaplasm is almost any kind of alteration, whether intentional or unintentional, in the pronunciation or the orthography of a word. The change may be phonetic only, such as pronouncing ''Mississippi'' as ''Missippi'' in English, or acceptance of a new word structure, such as the transformation from ''calidus'' in Latin to ''caldo'' (hot) in Italian. Orthographic metaplasms have been used in philosophy to advance humanity's conceptual terrain, such as when Derrida adapted Heidegger's Destruktion into deconstruction or the French term ''différence'' into différance. Changes at either level may or may not be recognized in standard spelling, depending on the orthographic traditions of the language in question. Originally the term referred to techniques used in Ancient Greek and Latin poetry, or processes in those languages' grammar. Sound change Many phonological changes found frequently in the natural development of languages are metaplasms: * Epenthesis, addition of a sou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Étienne Dolet
Étienne Dolet (; 3 August 15093 August 1546) was a French scholar, translation, translator and printer (publisher), printer. He was a controversial figure throughout his lifetime, which was buffeted by the opposing forces of the Renaissance and the French Inquisition. His early attacks upon the Inquisition and the municipal authorities of Toulouse, together with his later publications in Lyon, caused the French Inquisition to monitor his activities closely. After several stays in prison, the combined efforts of the ''parlement'' of Paris, the Inquisition, and the theological faculty of the University of Paris, Sorbonne resulted in his conviction for heresy and a death sentence. He was hanged and burned with his books on the Place Maubert in Paris. In modern times, Dolet is remembered as a martyr for what is now known as freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Early life and education Born in 1509 to parents who are not known to modern historians, Dolet lived in Orléans unti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
