|
Pan-Nigerian Alphabet
The Pan-Nigerian alphabet is a set of 33 Latin letters standardised by the National Language Centre of Nigeria in the 1980s. It is intended to be sufficient to write all the languages of Nigeria without using digraphs. History Several hundred different languages are spoken in Nigeria. The different Latin alphabets made the use of typewriters impractical. In the 1980s the National Language Centre (NLC) undertook to develop a single alphabet suitable for writing all the languages of the country and replacing use of Arabic script in some Nigerian languages that were proposed in the colonial era, taking as its starting point a model proposed by linguist Kay Williamson in 1981. The font family was developed in 1985-86 by Edward Oguejofor and Victor Manfredi, in co-operation with the NLC, with technical assistance from Hermann Zapf. Characters If a Unicode font is installed with the Pan-Nigerian glyphs, then a table, such as the one below, should be seen: The acute ( ´ ), g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
National Language Centre (Nigeria)
National may refer to: Common uses * Nation or country ** Nationality – a ''national'' is a person who is subject to a nation, regardless of whether the person has full rights as a citizen Places in the United States * National, Maryland, census-designated place * National, Nevada, ghost town * National, Utah, ghost town * National, West Virginia, unincorporated community Commerce * National (brand), a brand name of electronic goods from Panasonic * National Benzole (or simply known as National), former petrol station chain in the UK, merged with BP * National Car Rental, an American rental car company * National Energy Systems, a former name of Eco Marine Power * National Entertainment Commission, a former name of the Media Rating Council * National Motor Vehicle Company, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA 1900-1924 * National Supermarkets, a defunct American grocery store chain * National String Instrument Corporation, a guitar company formed to manufacture the first resonator gu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Multilingual Orthographies
Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all Europeans claim to speak at least one language other than their mother tongue; but many read and write in one language. Multilingualism is advantageous for people wanting to participate in trade, globalization and cultural openness. Owing to the ease of access to information facilitated by the Internet, individuals' exposure to multiple languages has become increasingly possible. People who speak several languages are also called polyglots. Multilingual speakers have acquired and maintained at least one language during childhood, the so-called first language (L1). The first language (sometimes also referred to as the mother tongue) is usually acquired without formal education, by mechanisms about which scholars disagree. Children acqu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Languages Of Nigeria
There are over 525 native languages spoken in Nigeria. The Nigerian official language is English, the language of former colonial British Nigeria. As reported in 2003, Nigerian Pidgin was spoken as a second language by 60 million people in Nigeria. The major native languages, in terms of population, are Hausa (over 80 million when including second-language, or L2, speakers), Yoruba (over 50 million including L2 speakers), Igbo (over 30 million, including L2 speakers), Efik-Ibibio cluster (over 15 million), Fulfulde (13 million), Kanuri (8 million), Tiv (5 million), Nupe (3 million) and approx. 2 to 3 million each of Karai-Karai Kupa, Kakanda, Edo, Igala, Idoma and Izon. Nigeria's linguistic diversity is a microcosm of much of Africa as a whole, and the country contains languages from the three major African language families: Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan and Niger–Congo. Nigeria also has several as-yet unclassified languages, such as Centúúm, which may represent ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Writing Systems Of Africa
The writing systems of Africa refer to the current and historical practice of writing systems on the African continent, both indigenous and those introduced. Today, the Latin script is commonly encountered across Africa, especially in the Western, Central and Southern Africa regions. Arabic script is mainly used in North Africa and Ge'ez script is widely used in the Horn of Africa. Regionally and in some localities, other scripts may be of significant importance. Indigenous writing systems Ancient African orthographies Ancient Egyptian Perhaps the most famous African writing system is ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. These developed later into forms known as Hieratic, Demotic and, through Phoenician and Greek, Coptic. The Coptic language is still used today as the liturgical language in the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria and the Coptic Catholic Church of Alexandria. As mentioned above, the Bohairic dialect of Coptic is used currently in the Coptic Orthodox Church. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latin Alphabets
The lists and tables below summarize and compare the letter inventories of some of the Latin-script alphabets. In this article, the scope of the word "alphabet" is broadened to include letters with tone marks, and other diacritics used to represent a wide range of orthographic traditions, without regard to whether or how they are sequenced in their alphabet or the table. Parentheses indicate characters not used in modern standard orthographies of the languages, but used in obsolete and/or dialectal forms. Letters contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet Alphabets that contain only ISO basic Latin letters Among alphabets for natural languages the English, 6/sup> Indonesian, and Malay alphabets only use the 26 letters in both cases. Among alphabets for constructed languages the Ido and Interlingua alphabets only use the 26 letters. Extended by ligatures * German (ß), French (æ, œ) Extended by diacritical marks * Spanish (ñ), German (ä, ö, and ü), Dutc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vietnamese Alphabet
The Vietnamese alphabet ( vi, chữ Quốc ngữ, lit=script of the National language) is the modern Latin writing script or writing system for Vietnamese. It uses the Latin script based on Romance languages originally developed by Portuguese missionary Francisco de Pina (1585 – 1625). The Vietnamese alphabet contains 29 letters, including seven letters using four diacritics: ''ă'', ''â''/''ê''/''ô'', ''ơ''/''ư'', ''đ''. There are an additional five diacritics used to designate tone (as in ''à'', ''á'', ''ả'', ''ã'', and ''ạ''). The complex vowel system and the large number of letters with diacritics, which can stack twice on the same letter (e.g. ''nhất'' meaning "first"), makes it easy to distinguish the Vietnamese orthography from other writing systems that use the Latin script. The Vietnamese system's use of diacritics produces an accurate transcription for tones despite the limitations of the Roman alphabet. On the other hand, sound changes in the spok ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Standard Alphabet By Lepsius
The Standard Alphabet is a Latin-script alphabet developed by Karl Richard Lepsius. Lepsius initially used it to transcribe Egyptian hieroglyphs in his '' Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien'' and extended it to write African languages, published in 1854 and 1855, and in a revised edition in 1863. The alphabet was comprehensive but was not used much as it contained a lot of diacritic marks and was difficult to read and typeset at that time. It was, however, influential in later projects such as Ellis's Paleotype, and diacritics such as the acute accent for palatalization, under-dot for retroflex, underline for Arabic emphatics, and the click letters continue in modern use. Vowels Vowel length is indicated by a macron (''ā'') or a breve (''ă'') for long and short vowels, respectively. Open vowels are marked by a line under the letter (''e̱''), while a dot below the letter makes it a close vowel (''ẹ''). Rounded front vowels are written with an umlaut (''ö'' and ''ü'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ISO 6438
ISO 6438:1983, ''Documentation — African coded character set for bibliographic information interchange'', is an ISO standard for an 8-bit character encoding for African languages. It has had little use (such as being available through UNIMARC). In practice it is now superseded by Unicode. Character set * Prior to Unicode 7.0, mapped to .Prior to Unicode 8.0, mapped to . See also *Africa Alphabet *African reference alphabet * Dinka alphabet *Pan-Nigerian alphabet The Pan-Nigerian alphabet is a set of 33 Latin letters standardised by the National Language Centre of Nigeria in the 1980s. It is intended to be sufficient to write all the languages of Nigeria without using digraphs. History Several hundred ... * Standard Alphabet by Lepsius Notes References"Coded Character Set for African Languages" (June 15, 1979)ISO 6438:1983 "Documentation -- African coded character set for bibliographic information interchange" [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dinka Alphabet
The Dinka alphabet is used by South Sudanese Dinka people. The written Dinka language is based on the ISO basic Latin alphabet, but with some added letters adapted from the International Phonetic Alphabet. The current orthography is derived from the alphabet developed for the southern Sudanese languages at the Rejaf language conference in 1928. Prior to this, several attempts at adapting the Arabic and Latin scripts to the Dinka language were made, but neither effort was met with large success. Christian missionaries were essential to the development of what became the Dinka alphabet. Alphabet Dinka does not use ''f, q, s, v, x'', and ''z''; and ''h'' is used in digraphs only. Note that ''ɛ̈'' (open ''e'' with trema/umlaut) and ''ɔ̈'' (open ''o'' with trema/umlaut) do not exist as precomposed characters in Unicode and must therefore be generated using U+0308, the diaeresis combining diacritic. Dental consonants are distinguished from alveolar by adding a following ''h''. Oth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
African Reference Alphabet
An African reference alphabet was first proposed in 1978 by a UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger, and the proposed alphabet was revised in 1982. The conference recommended the use of single letters for a sound (that is, a phoneme) instead of using two or three-letter combinations, or letters with diacritical marks. The African Reference Alphabet is clearly related to the Africa Alphabet and reflected practice based on the latter (including use of IPA characters). The Niamey conference also built on work of a previous UNESCO-organized meeting on harmonization of transcriptions of African languages, that was held in Bamako, Mali, in 1966. 1978 version Separate versions of the conference's report were produced in English and French. Different images of the alphabet were used in the two versions, and there are a number of differences between the two. The English version proposed an alphabet of 57 letters, given in both upper and lower-case forms. Eight of these ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Africa Alphabet
The Africa Alphabet (also International African Alphabet or IAI alphabet) was developed by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures in 1928, with the help of some Africans led by Diedrich Hermann Westermann, who served as director of the organization from 1926 until 1939. Meanwhile, the aim of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, later known as International African Institute (IAI), was to enable people to write all the African languages for practical and scientific purposes without the need of diacritics. It is based on the International Phonetic Alphabet with a few differences, such as ''j'' (IPA ) and ''y'' (IPA ), which represent the same (consonant) sound values as in English. This alphabet has influenced development of orthographies of many African languages (serving "as the basis for the transcription" of about 60, by one countSow, Alfa I., and Mohamed H. Abdulaziz, "Language and Social Change," Ch. 18 in Ali A. Mazrui (ed.) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
