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Daatsʼiin Language
Daatsʼiin is a B'aga languages, B'aga language of western Ethiopia. There are two communities of speakers in western Ethiopia, one in Mahadid, on the northeast border of Alitash National Park, and one in Inashemsh on the Sudan border, south of the park where the Rahad River crosses from Ethiopia into Sudan. Daatsʼiin was first reported in 2013 and described by Colleen Ahland in 2014. Ahland has described it further in 2016. A comparative word list of Daatsʼiin, Northern Gumuz, and Southern Gumuz is available in Ahland & Kelly (2014).Ahland, Colleen and Eliza Kelly. 2014. Daatsʼíin-Gumuz Comparative Word list'. Of the other B'aga languages, Daatsʼíin has the greatest lexical similarity to Southern Gumuz, but the two groups communicate in Arabic or Amharic. Phonology The consonant inventory of Daatsʼíin: The palatal stops , , can be also realized as Palatalization (phonetics), palatalized velar stops , , in free variation. and are rare, both recorded only from one wo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Kenya to the south, South Sudan to the west, and Sudan to the northwest. Ethiopia covers a land area of . , it has around 128 million inhabitants, making it the List of countries and dependencies by population, thirteenth-most populous country in the world, the List of African countries by population, second-most populous in Africa after Nigeria, and the most populous landlocked country on Earth. The national capital and largest city, Addis Ababa, lies several kilometres west of the East African Rift that splits the country into the African Plate, African and Somali Plate, Somali tectonic plates. Early modern human, Anatomically modern humans emerged from modern-day Ethiopia and set out for the Near East and elsewhere in the Middle Paleolithi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Palatalization (phonetics)
In phonetics, palatalization (, ) or palatization is a way of pronouncing a consonant in which part of the tongue is moved close to the hard palate. Consonants pronounced this way are said to be palatalized and are transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet by affixing a superscript ''j'' ⟨ʲ⟩ to the base consonant. Palatalization is not Phonemic contrast, phonemic in English, but it is in Slavic languages such as Russian language, Russian and Ukrainian language, Ukrainian, Finnic languages such as Estonian language, Estonian, Karelian language, Karelian, and Võro language, Võro, and other languages such as Irish language, Irish, Marshallese language, Marshallese, Kashmiri language, Kashmiri, and Japanese language, Japanese. Types In technical terms, palatalization refers to the secondary articulation of consonants by which the body of the tongue is raised toward the hard palate and the alveolar ridge during the articulation of the consonant. Such consonants are phon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Polysynthetic Language
In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to stand alone). They are very highly inflected languages. Polysynthetic languages typically have long "sentence-words" such as the Yupik word . Except for the morpheme "reindeer", none of the other morphemes can appear in isolation. Whereas isolating languages have a low morpheme-to-word ratio, polysynthetic languages have a very high ratio. There is no generally agreed upon definition of polysynthesis. Generally polysynthetic languages have polypersonal agreement, although some agglutinative languages that are not polysynthetic, such as Basque, Hungarian and Georgian, also have it. Some authors apply the term polysynthetic to languages with high morpheme-to-word ratios, but others use it for languages that are highly head-markin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Perfective And Imperfective
The imperfective (abbreviated , , or more ambiguously ) is a grammatical aspect used to describe ongoing, habitual, repeated, or similar semantic roles, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. Although many languages have a general imperfective, others have distinct aspects for one or more of its various roles, such as progressive, habitual, and iterative aspects. The imperfective contrasts with the perfective aspect, which is used to describe actions viewed as a complete whole. English English is an example of a language with no general imperfective. The English progressive is used to describe ongoing events, but can still be used in past tense, such as "The rain was beating down". Habitual situations do not have their own verb form (in most dialects), but the construction "used to" conveys past habitual action, as in ''I used to ski''. Unlike in languages with a general imperfective, in English the simple past tense can be used for situations presented ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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] |
Downstep
Downstep is a phenomenon in tone languages in which if two syllables have the same tone (for example, both with a high tone or both with a low tone), the second syllable is lower in pitch than the first. Two main kinds of downstep can be distinguished. The first, more usually called automatic downstep, downdrift or catathesis, occurs when high and low tones come in the sequence H L (L) H; the second high tone tends to be lower than the first because of the intervening low-toned syllable. It is common in African languages, such as Chichewa. It has also been argued that the same phenomenon is heard in English sentences, if these sentences are pronounced with a falling intonation, for example ''I really believe Ebenezer was a dealer in magnesium'', or ''I bought blueberries, bayberries, raspberries, mulberries, and brambleberries''. Downstep proper, or non-automatic downstep, is another phenomenon found in many African languages, such as Igbo (see for an overview of downstep in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tonal Language
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with ''phoneme''. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific. Tonal languages are different from pitch-accent languages in that tonal languages can have each syllable with an independent tone whilst pitch-accent languages may have one syllable in a word or morpheme that is more prominent than the others. Mechanics Most languages use pitch as intonation to convey ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vowel Length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived or actual length (phonetics), duration of a vowel sound when pronounced. Vowels perceived as shorter are often called short vowels and those perceived as longer called long vowels. On one hand, many languages do not distinguish vowel length phoneme, phonemically, meaning that vowel length alone does not change the meanings of words. However, the amount of time a vowel is uttered can change based on factors such as the phonetic characteristics of the sounds around it: the phonetic environment. An example is that vowels tend to be pronounced longer before a voiced consonant and shorter before a voiceless consonant in the standard accents of General American English, American and Received Pronunciation, British English. On the other hand, vowel length is indeed an important phonemic factor in certain languages, meaning vowel length can change word-meanings, for example in Arabic phonology#Vowels, Arabic, Czech phonology, Czech, Dravidia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diphthong
A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, 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 cowboys" ( ) 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. Diphthongs often form when separate vowels are run together in rapid speech during a conversation. However, there ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voiced Pharyngeal Fricative
The voiced pharyngeal approximant or fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ?\. Epiglottals and epiglotto-pharyngeals are often mistakenly taken to be pharyngeal. Although traditionally placed in the fricative row of the IPA chart, is usually an approximant. The IPA symbol itself is ambiguous, but no language is known to make a phonemic distinction between fricatives and approximants at this place of articulation. The IPA letter is caseless. Capital and lower-case are pending at Unicode U+A7CE and U+A7CF. Features Features of the voiced pharyngeal approximant fricative: Occurrence Pharyngeal consonants are not widespread. Sometimes, a pharyngeal approximant develops from a uvular approximant. Many languages that have been described as having pharyngeal fricatives or approximants turn out on closer inspection ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Allophone
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plosive (as in ''stop'' ) and the aspirated form (as in ''top'' ) are allophones for the phoneme , while these two are considered to be different phonemes in some languages such as Central Thai. Similarly, in Spanish, (as in ''dolor'' ) and (as in ''nada'' ) are allophones for the phoneme , while these two are considered to be different phonemes in English (as in the difference between ''dare'' and ''there''). The specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable from the phonetic context, with such allophones being called positional variants, but some allophones occur in free variation. Replacing a sound by another allophone of the same phoneme usually does not change the meaning of a word, but the result may sound ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free Variation
In linguistics, free variation is the phenomenon of two (or more) sounds or forms appearing in the same environment without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers. Sociolinguists argue that describing such variation as "free" is very often a misnomer, since variation between linguistic forms is usually constrained probabilistically by a range of systematic social and linguistic factors, not unconstrained as the term "free variation" suggests. The term remains in use, however, in studies focused primarily on language as systems (e.g. phonology, morphology, syntax). Effects When phonemes are in free variation, speakers are sometimes strongly aware of the fact (especially if such variation is noticeable only across a dialectal or sociolectal divide), and will note, for example, that ''tomato'' is pronounced differently in British and American English ( and respectively), or that ''either'' has two pronunciations that are distributed fairly r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
