Venezuelan Sign Language
Venezuelan Sign Language (VSL; , LSV) is the national deaf sign language of Venezuela. The term, "Venezuelan Sign Language," began to be used in the 1930s. It is widely used, and Venezuela has a national bilingual education program for VSL and Spanish, though the language used by adults differs from that of the classroom. There is a large VSL dictionary published by the ''Federación Venezolana de Sordos''. VSL has been used in schools since 1937. Origin The first known references to a Deaf community which used a sign language in Venezuela date from the 1930s. In 1935, the first school for children who are deaf or hard of hearing, the ''Instituto Venezolano de Ciegos y Sordomudos'' (Venezuelan Blind and Deaf Institute), was founded in Caracas. That school served as the cradle for a small community of signers, who created a sign language out of many signs which the children had used at home. A few years later the administration of the institute decided to separate the instruction ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Venezuela
Venezuela, officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, is a country on the northern coast of South America, consisting of a continental landmass and many Federal Dependencies of Venezuela, islands and islets in the Caribbean Sea. It comprises an area of , and its population was estimated at 29 million in 2022. The capital and largest urban agglomeration is the city of Caracas. The continental territory is bordered on the north by the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Colombia, Brazil on the south, Trinidad and Tobago to the north-east and on the east by Guyana. Venezuela is a presidential republic consisting of States of Venezuela, 23 states, the Venezuelan Capital District, Capital District and Federal Dependencies of Venezuela, federal dependencies covering Venezuela's offshore islands. Venezuela is among the most urbanized countries in Latin America; the vast majority of Venezuelans live in the cities of the north and in the capital. The territory o ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Indigenous Peoples Of The Americas
In the Americas, Indigenous peoples comprise the two continents' pre-Columbian inhabitants, as well as the ethnic groups that identify with them in the 15th century, as well as the ethnic groups that identify with the pre-Columbian population of the Americas as such. These populations exhibit significant diversity; some Indigenous peoples were historically hunter-gatherers, while others practiced agriculture and aquaculture. Various Indigenous societies developed complex social structures, including pre-contact monumental architecture, organized city, cities, city-states, chiefdoms, state (polity), states, monarchy, kingdoms, republics, confederation, confederacies, and empires. These societies possessed varying levels of knowledge in fields such as Pre-Columbian engineering in the Americas, engineering, Pre-Columbian architecture, architecture, mathematics, astronomy, History of writing, writing, physics, medicine, Pre-Columbian agriculture, agriculture, irrigation, geology, minin ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sign Language Isolates
A sign is an Physical object, object, quality (philosophy), quality, event, or Non-physical entity, entity whose presence or occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else. A natural sign bears a causal relation to its object—for instance, thunder is a sign of storm, or medical symptoms a sign of disease. A Convention (norm), conventional sign signifies by agreement, as a full stop signifies the end of a sentence; similarly the words and expressions of a language, as well as bodily gestures, can be regarded as signs, expressing particular Meaning (linguistics), meanings. The Physical body, physical objects most commonly referred to as signs (notices, road signs, etc., collectively known as signage) generally inform or instruct using written text, symbols, pictures or a combination of these. The Philosophy, philosophical study of signs and symbols is called semiotics; this includes the study of semiosis, which is the way in which sign (semiotics), s ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Ethnolinguistics
Ethnolinguistics (sometimes called cultural linguistics) is an area of anthropological linguistics that studies the relationship between a language or group of languages and the cultural practices of the people who speak those languages. It examines how different cultures conceptualize and categorize their experiences, such as spatial orientation and environmental phenomena. Ethnolinguistics incorporates methods like ethnosemantics, which analyzes how people classify and label their world, and componential analysis, which dissects Semantics, semantic features of terms to understand cultural meanings. The field intersects with cultural linguistics to investigate how language encodes Cultural schema theory, cultural schemas and metaphors, influencing areas such as intercultural communication and language learning. Examples Ethnolinguists study the way perception and conceptualization influences language and show how that is linked to different cultures and societies. An example ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive, scientific study of how language is shaped by, and used differently within, any given society. The field largely looks at how a language changes between distinct social groups, as well as how it varies under the influence of assorted cultural norms, expectations, and contexts. Sociolinguistics combines the older field of dialectology with the social sciences in order to identify regional dialects, sociolects, ethnolects, and other sub-varieties and styles within a language, as well as the distinctions and variations inside each of these. A major branch of linguistics since the second half of the 20th century, sociolinguistics is closely related to and can partly overlap with pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, and sociology of language, the latter focusing on the effect of language back on society. Sociolinguistics' historical interrelation with anthropology can be observed in studies of how language varieties differ between groups ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain; that is, the psychology, psychological and neurobiology, neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language. Psycholinguistics is concerned with the cognitive faculties and processes that are necessary to produce the grammatical constructions of language. It is also concerned with the perception of these constructions by a listener. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were in the philosophical and educational fields, mainly due to their location in departments other than applied sciences (e.g., cohesive data on how the human brain functioned). Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and information science to study how the mind-brain process ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Argument
An argument is a series of sentences, statements, or propositions some of which are called premises and one is the conclusion. The purpose of an argument is to give reasons for one's conclusion via justification, explanation, and/or persuasion. Arguments are intended to determine or show the degree of truth or acceptability of another statement called a conclusion. The process of crafting or delivering arguments, argumentation, can be studied from three main perspectives: the logical, the dialectical and the rhetorical perspective. In logic, an argument is usually expressed not in natural language but in a symbolic formal language, and it can be defined as any group of propositions of which one is claimed to follow from the others through deductively valid inferences that preserve truth from the premises to the conclusion. This logical perspective on argument is relevant for scientific fields such as mathematics and computer science. Logic is the study of the form ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Grammatical Aspect
In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how a verbal action, event, or state, extends over time. For instance, perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to any flow of time during the event ("I helped him"). Imperfective aspect is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or habitually as time flows ("I was helping him"; "I used to help people"). Further distinctions can be made, for example, to distinguish states and ongoing actions ( continuous and progressive aspects) from repetitive actions ( habitual aspect). Certain aspectual distinctions express a relation between the time of the event and the time of reference. This is the case with the perfect aspect, which indicates that an event occurred prior to but has continuing relevance at the time of reference: "I have eaten"; "I had eaten"; "I will have eaten". Different languages make different grammatical aspectual disti ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Grammatical Mood
In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying (for example, a statement of fact, of desire, of command, etc.). The term is also used more broadly to describe the syntactic expression of modality – that is, the use of verb phrases that do not involve inflection of the verb itself. Mood is distinct from grammatical tense or grammatical aspect, although the same word patterns are used for expressing more than one of these meanings at the same time in many languages, including English and most other modern Indo-European languages. (See tense–aspect–mood for a discussion of this.) Some examples of moods are indicative, interrogative, imperative, subjunctive, injunctive, optative, and potential. These are all finite forms of the verb. Infinitives, gerunds, and participles, which are non-finite forms ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Classifier (linguistics)
A classifier (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated or ) is a word or affix that accompanies nouns and can be considered to "classify" a noun depending on some characteristics (e.g. humanness, animacy, sex, shape, social status) of its referent. Classifiers in this sense are specifically called noun classifiers because some languages in Papuan languages, Papua as well as the Indigenous languages of the Americas, Americas have verbal classifiers which categorize the referent of its Argument (linguistics), argument. In languages that have classifiers, they are often used when the noun is being counted, that is, when it appears with a numeral (linguistics), numeral. In such languages, a phrase such as "three people" is often required to be expressed as "three ''X'' (of) people", where ''X'' is a classifier appropriate to the noun for "people"; compare to "three blades of grass". Classifiers that appear next to a Numeral (linguistics), numeral or a Quantifier (linguistics), qua ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Spanish Language
Spanish () or Castilian () is a Romance languages, Romance language of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin spoken on the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. Today, it is a world language, global language with 483 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain, and about 558 million speakers total, including second-language speakers. Spanish is the official language of List of countries where Spanish is an official language, 20 countries, as well as one of the Official languages of the United Nations, six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the world's list of languages by number of native speakers, second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese; the world's list of languages by total number of speakers, fourth-most spoken language overall after English language, English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindustani language, Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu); and the world's most widely spoken Romance language ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Language Isolate
A language isolate is a language that has no demonstrable genetic relationship with any other languages. Basque in Europe, Ainu and Burushaski in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, Haida and Zuni in North America, Kanoê in South America, and Tiwi in Oceania are all examples of such languages. The exact number of language isolates is yet unknown due to insufficient data on several languages. One explanation for the existence of language isolates is that they might be the last remaining member of a larger language family. Such languages might have had relatives in the past that have since disappeared without being documented, leaving them an orphaned language. One example is the Ket language spoken in central Siberia, which belongs to the wider Yeniseian language family; had it been discovered in recent times independently from its now extinct relatives, such as Yugh and Kott, it would have been classified as an isolate. Another explanation for language isolates is that they aro ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |