|
Labiodental Approximant
The voiced labiodental approximant is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. It is something between an English / w/ and / v/, pronounced with the teeth and lips held in the position used to articulate the letter V. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is P ''or'' v\. With an advanced diacritic, , this letter also indicates a bilabial approximant, though the diacritic is frequently omitted because no contrast is likely.Joyce Thambole Mogatse Mathangwane (1996), ''Phonetics and Phonology of Ikalanga: A Diachronic and Synchronic Study'', vol. 1, p. 79 The labiodental approximant is the typical realization of in the Indian South African variety of English. As the voiceless is also realized as an approximant (), it is also an example of a language contrasting voiceless and voiced labiodental approximants. Features Features of the voiced labiodental approximant: Occurrence ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; , and , pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (fricatives); and and , which have air flowing through the nose (nasals). Contrasting with consonants are vowels. Since the number of speech sounds in the world's languages is much greater than the number of letters in any one alphabet, linguists have devised systems such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to assign a unique and unambiguous symbol to each attested consonant. The English alphabet has fewer consonant letters than the English language has consonant sounds, so digraphs like , , , and are used to extend the alphabet, though some letters and digraphs represent more than one consonant. For exampl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Catalan Language
Catalan (; autonym: , ), known in the Valencian Community and Carche as '' Valencian'' (autonym: ), is a Western Romance language. It is the official language of Andorra, and an official language of three autonomous communities in eastern Spain: Catalonia, the Valencian Community, and the Balearic Islands. It also has semi-official status in the Italian comune of Alghero. It is also spoken in the Pyrénées-Orientales department of France and in two further areas in eastern Spain: the eastern strip of Aragon and the Carche area in the Region of Murcia. The Catalan-speaking territories are often called the or "Catalan Countries". The language evolved from Vulgar Latin in the Middle Ages around the eastern Pyrenees. Nineteenth-century Spain saw a Catalan literary revival, culminating in the early 1900s. Etymology and pronunciation The word ''Catalan'' is derived from the territorial name of Catalonia, itself of disputed etymology. The main theory suggests that ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Malé Latin
Dhivehi Latin or Maldivian Latin, known colloquially as Malé Latin or Nasiri Latin, is a Latin Maldivian alphabet briefly mandated in the Maldives from 1976, but the country reverted to the native Thaana and Arabic alphabets in 1978. Maldivian Latin is still widely used in non-academic literature for romanizing Maldivian place names. History Maldivians traditionally used two alphabets simultaneously, the Tāna script for Maldivian and the Arabic script for Arabic. All learned Maldivians were well versed in the Quran and Arabic was the first script they learned in childhood. This was followed by their local script, Thaana, in which there were not many books printed, but that was important for official use. Therefore, the primary knowledge of the letters was called Arabitāna. Toward the mid-1970s, during President Ibrahim Nasir's tenure, telex machines were introduced by the Maldivian Government in the local administration. The new telex equipment was viewed as a great progress, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thaana
Thaana, Taana or Tāna ( ) is the present writing system of the Maldivian language spoken in the Maldives. Thaana has characteristics of both an abugida (diacritic, vowel-killer strokes) and a true alphabet (all vowels are written), with consonants derived from indigenous and Arabic numerals, and vowels derived from the vowel diacritics of the Arabic abjad. Maldivian orthography in Thaana is largely phonemic. Name H. C. P. Bell, the first serious researcher of Maldivian documents, used the spelling ''Tāna,'' as the initial consonant is unaspirated. The spelling ''Thaana'' was adopted in the mid-1970s, when the government of the Maldives embarked on a short period of Romanization; /t/ was transcribed , as was used for the retroflex sound.. History The Thaana script first appeared in a Maldivian inscription towards the beginning of the 17th century in a crude initial form known as Gabulhi Thaana which was written ''scripta continua''. This early script slowly devel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Maldivian Language
Maldivian, also known by its endonym Dhivehi or Divehi ( ; '' dv, links=no, ދިވެހި'', ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the South Asian island country of Maldives and on Minicoy Island, Lakshadweep, union territory of India. The Maldivian language has notable dialects. The standard dialect is that of the capital city, Malé. The greatest dialectal variation is from the southern atolls Huvadu, Addu and Fuvahmulah of Maldives. Each of those atolls has its own dialect closely related to each other but very different from the northern atolls. The southern atoll dialects are so distinct that those only speaking northern dialects cannot understand them. The ethnic endonym for the language, ''Divehi'', is occasionally found in English as ''Dhivehi'' (spelled according to the locally used Malé Latin for romanisation of the Maldivian language), which is the official spelling as well as the common usage in the Maldives. Dhivehi is written in Thaana script. Dhivehi i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cyrillic Script
The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, North Asia, and East Asia. , around 250 million people in Eurasia use Cyrillic as the official script for their national languages, with Russia accounting for about half of them. With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union, following the Latin and Greek alphabets. The Early Cyrillic alphabet was developed during the 9th century AD at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire during the reign of tsar Simeon I the Great, probably by disciples of the two Byzantine brothers Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius, who had previously created the Gla ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chuvash Language
Chuvash ( , ; , , ) is a Turkic language spoken in European Russia, primarily in the Chuvash Republic and adjacent areas. It is the only surviving member of the Oghur branch of Turkic languages, one of the two principal branches of the Turkic family. The writing system for the Chuvash language is based on the Cyrillic script, employing all of the letters used in the Russian alphabet and adding four letters of its own: Ӑ, Ӗ, Ҫ and Ӳ. Usage Chuvash is the native language of the Chuvash people and an official language of Chuvashia. It is spoken by 1,640,000 persons in Russia and another 34,000 in other countries. 86% of ethnic Chuvash and 8% of the people of other ethnicities living in Chuvashia claimed knowledge of Chuvash language during the 2002 census. Despite that and although Chuvash is taught at schools and sometimes used in the media, it is considered endangered, because Russian dominates in most spheres of life and few children learning the language ar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese form, to learners already familiar with the Latin alphabet. The system includes four diacritics denoting tones, but pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Chinese names and words in languages written in the Latin script, and is also used in certain computer input methods to enter Chinese characters. The word ' () literally means " Han language" (i.e. Chinese language), while ' () means "spelled sounds". The pinyin system was developed in the 1950s by a group of Chinese linguists including Zhou Youguang and was based on earlier forms of romanizations of Chinese. It was published by the Chinese Government in 1958 and revised several times. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted pinyin as an international st ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Characters
Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji''. Chinese characters in South Korea, which are known as ''hanja'', retain significant use in Korean academia to study its documents, history, literature and records. Vietnam once used the '' chữ Hán'' and developed chữ Nôm to write Vietnamese before turning to a romanized alphabet. Chinese characters are the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. By virtue of their widespread current use throughout East Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as their profound historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users. The total number of Chinese characters ever to appear in a dictionary is in the tens of thousands, though most are graph ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of China. Because Mandarin originated in North China and most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as Northern Chinese (). Many varieties of Mandarin, such as those of the Southwest (including Sichuanese) and the Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the standard language (or are only partially intelligible). Nevertheless, Mandarin as a group is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers (with nearly one billion). Mandarin is by far the largest of the seven or ten Chinese dialect groups; it is spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretches from Yunnan in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongji ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Language
Chinese (, especially when referring to written Chinese) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. About 1.3 billion people (or approximately 16% of the world's population) speak a variety of Chinese as their first language. Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be variants of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered separate languages in a family. Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin (with about 800 million speakers, or 66%), followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min), Wu (74 million, e.g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Valencian
Valencian () or Valencian language () is the official, historical and traditional name used in the Valencian Community (Spain), and unofficially in the El Carche comarca in Murcia (Spain), to refer to the Romance language also known as Catalan.«Otra sentencia equipara valenciano y catalán en las oposiciones, y ya van 13.» ''20 minutos'', 7 January 2008.Decreto 84/2008, de 6 de junio, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
_170.jpg "Click for more on -> Maldivian Language")
.jpg "Click for more on -> Chuvash Language")
