|
Mandaic Alphabet
The Mandaic alphabet is thought to have evolved between the 2nd and 7th century CE from either a cursive form of Aramaic (as did Syriac) or from the Parthian chancery script. The exact roots of the script are difficult to determine. It was developed by members of the Mandaean faith of southern Mesopotamia to write the Mandaic language for liturgical purposes. Classical Mandaic and its descendant Neo-Mandaic are still in limited use. The script has changed very little over centuries of use. The Mandaic name for the script is ''Abagada'' or ''Abaga'', after the first letters of the alphabet. Rather than the traditional Semitic letter names (''aleph'', ''beth'', ''gimel''), they are known as ''a'', ''ba'', ''ga'' and so on. It is written from right to left in horizontal lines. It is a cursive script, but not all letters connect within a word. Spaces separate individual words. During the past few decades, Majid Fandi al-Mubaraki, a Mandaean living in Australia, has digitized ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mandaic Language
Mandaic is a southeastern Aramaic variety in use by the Mandaean community, traditionally based in southern parts of Iraq and southwest Iran, for their religious books. Classical Mandaic is still employed by Mandaean priests in liturgical rites. The modern descendant of Classical Mandaic, known as Neo-Mandaic or Modern Mandaic, is spoken by a small section of Mandaeans around Ahvaz and Khorramshahr in the southern Iranian Khuzestan province. Liturgical use of Classical Mandaic is found in Iran (particularly the southern portions of the country), in Baghdad, Iraq and in the diaspora (particularly in the United States, Sweden, Australia and Germany). It is an Eastern Aramaic language notable for its abundant use of vowel letters (''mater lectionis'' with ''aleph'', ''he'' only in final position, ''‘ayin'', ''waw'', ''yud'')) in writing, so-called ''plene'' spelling ( Mandaic alphabet) and the amount of Iranian and AkkadianStephen A. Kaufman, ''The Akkadian Influences on Arama ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of speech sounds in written form.International Phonetic Association (IPA), ''Handbook''. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators. The IPA is designed to represent those qualities of speech that are part of lexical (and, to a limited extent, prosodic) sounds in oral language: phones, phonemes, intonation, and the separation of words and syllables. To represent additional qualities of speech—such as tooth gnashing, lisping, and sounds made with a cleft lip and cleft palate—an extended set of symbols may be used. Segments are transcribed by one or more IPA symbols of two basic types ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ayin
''Ayin'' (also ''ayn'' or ''ain''; transliterated ) is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic scripts, including Phoenician , Hebrew , Aramaic , Syriac ܥ, and Arabic (where it is sixteenth in abjadi order only). The letter represents a voiced pharyngeal fricative () or a similarly articulated consonant. In some Semitic languages and dialects, the phonetic value of the letter has changed, or the phoneme has been lost altogether (thus, in the revived Modern Hebrew it is reduced to a glottal stop or is omitted entirely in part due to European influence). The Phoenician letter is the origin of the Greek, Latin and Cyrillic letter O, O and O. It is the origin of letter Ƹ. Origins The letter name is derived from Proto-Semitic "eye", and the Phoenician letter had the shape of a circle or oval, clearly representing an eye, perhaps ultimately (via Proto-Sinaitic) derived from the ''ı͗r'' hieroglyph ( Gardiner D4). The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lenition
In linguistics, lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them more sonorous. The word ''lenition'' itself means "softening" or "weakening" (from Latin 'weak'). Lenition can happen both synchronically (within a language at a particular point in time) and diachronically (as a language changes over time). Lenition can involve such changes as voicing a voiceless consonant, causing a consonant to relax occlusion, to lose its place of articulation (a phenomenon called '' debuccalization'', which turns a consonant into a glottal consonant like or ), or even causing a consonant to disappear entirely. An example of synchronic lenition is found in most varieties of American English, in the form of flapping: the of a word like ''wait'' is pronounced as the more sonorous in the related form ''waiting'' . Some varieties of Spanish show debuccalization of to at the end of a syllable, so that a word like "we are" is pronounced . An example of diachronic lenition ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Affricate Consonant
An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair. English has two affricate phonemes, and , often spelled ''ch'' and ''j'', respectively. Examples The English sounds spelled "ch" and "j" ( broadly transcribed as and in the IPA), German and Italian ''z'' and Italian ''z'' are typical affricates, and sounds like these are fairly common in the world's languages, as are other affricates with similar sounds, such as those in Polish and Chinese. However, voiced affricates other than are relatively uncommon. For several places of articulation they are not attested at all. Much less common are labiodental affricates, such as in German and Izi, or velar affricates, such as in Tswana (written ''kg'') or in High Alemannic Swiss German dialects. Worldwide, relatively few language ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Persian Alphabet
The Persian alphabet ( fa, الفبای فارسی, Alefbâye Fârsi) is a writing system that is a version of the Arabic script used for the Persian language spoken in Iran (Western Persian) and Afghanistan ( Dari Persian) since the 7th century after the Muslim conquest of Persia. The Persian dialect spoken in Tajikistan ( Tajiki Persian) is written in the Tajik alphabet, a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet which has been in use since the Soviet era. The Persian alphabet is directly derived and developed from the Arabic alphabet. After the Muslim conquest of Persia and the fall of the Sasanian Empire in the 7th century, Arabic became the language of government and especially religion in Persia for two centuries. The replacement of the Pahlavi scripts with the Persian alphabet to write the Persian language was done by the Saffarid dynasty and Samanid dynasty in 9th-century Greater Khorasan. The script is mostly but not exclusively right-to-left; mathematica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Persian Language
Persian (), also known by its endonym Farsi (, ', ), is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken and used officially within Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan in three mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Iranian Persian (officially known as ''Persian''), Dari Persian (officially known as ''Dari'' since 1964) and Tajiki Persian (officially known as ''Tajik'' since 1999).Siddikzoda, S. "Tajik Language: Farsi or not Farsi?" in ''Media Insight Central Asia #27'', August 2002. It is also spoken natively in the Tajik variety by a significant population within Uzbekistan, as well as within other regions with a Persianate history in the cultural sphere of Greater Iran. It is written officially within Iran and Afghanistan in the Persian alphabet, a derivation of the Arabic script, and within Tajikistan in the Tajik alphabet, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Typographic Ligature
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters æ and œ used in English and French, in which the letters 'a' and 'e' are joined for the first ligature and the letters 'o' and 'e' are joined for the second ligature. For stylistic and legibility reasons, 'f' and 'i' are often merged to create 'fi' (where the tittle on the 'i' merges with the hood of the 'f'); the same is true of 's' and 't' to create 'st'. The common ampersand (&) developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters 'E' and 't' (spelling , Latin for 'and') were combined. History The earliest known script Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieratic both include many cases of character combinations that gradually evolve from ligatures into separately recognizable characters. Other notable ligatures, such as the Brahmic abugidas and the Germanic bind rune, figure prominently throughout ancient ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ampersand
The ampersand, also known as the and sign, is the logogram , representing the conjunction "and". It originated as a ligature of the letters ''et''—Latin for "and". Etymology Traditionally in English, when spelling aloud, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A", "I", and, " O") was prefixed with the Latin expression ('by itself'), as in "per se A". It was also common practice to add the sign at the end of the alphabet as if it were the 27th letter, pronounced as the Latin ''et'' or later in English as ''and''. As a result, the recitation of the alphabet would end in "X, Y, Z, ''and per se and''". This last phrase was routinely slurred to "ampersand" and the term had entered common English usage by 1837. It has been falsely claimed that André-Marie Ampère used the symbol in his widely read publications and that people began calling the new shape "Ampère's and". History The ampersand can be traced back to the 1st century A.D. and the old Roman ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Coptic Language
Coptic (Bohairic Coptic: , ) is a language family of closely related dialects, representing the most recent developments of the Egyptian language, and historically spoken by the Copts, starting from the third-century AD in Roman Egypt. Coptic was supplanted by Arabic as the primary spoken language of Egypt following the Muslim conquest of Egypt and was slowly replaced over the centuries. Coptic has no native speakers today, although it remains in daily use as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church and of the Coptic Catholic Church. Innovations in grammar, phonology, and the influx of Greek loanwords distinguish Coptic from earlier periods of the Egyptian language. It is written with the Coptic alphabet, a modified form of the Greek alphabet with several additional letters borrowed from the Demotic Egyptian script. The major Coptic dialects are Sahidic, Bohairic, Akhmimic, Fayyumic, Lycopolitan, and Oxyrhynchite. Sahidic Coptic was spoken between the cit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tāʾ Marbūṭah
Taw, tav, or taf is the twenty-second and last letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Tāw , Hebrew Tav , Aramaic Taw , Syriac Taw ܬ, and Arabic ت Tāʼ (22nd in abjadi order, 3rd in modern order). In Arabic, it is also gives rise to the derived letter Ṯāʼ. Its original sound value is . The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek ''tau'' (Τ), Latin T, and Cyrillic Т. Origins of taw Taw is believed to be derived from the Egyptian hieroglyph representing a tally mark (viz. a decussate cross) Z9 Arabic tāʼ The letter is named '. It is written in several ways depending on its position in the word: Final ('' fatha'', then with a sukun on it, pronounced , though diacritics are normally omitted) is used to mark feminine gender for third-person perfective/past tense verbs, while final (, ) is used to mark past-tense second-person singular masculine verbs, final (, ) to mark past-tense second-person singular feminine verbs, and final (, ) to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gemination
In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from ''gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from stress. Gemination is represented in many writing systems by a doubled letter and is often perceived as a doubling of the consonant.William Ham, ''Phonetic and Phonological Aspects of Geminate Timing'', p. 1-18 Some phonological theories use "doubling" as a synonym for gemination, others describe two distinct phenomena. Consonant length is a distinctive feature in certain languages, such as Arabic, Berber, Danish, Estonian, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Punjabi, Polish and Turkish. Other languages, such as English, do not have word-internal phonemic consonant geminates. Consonant gemination and vowel length are independent in languages like Arabic, Japanese, Finnish and Estonian; however, in languages like Itali ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
.svg "Click for more on -> Ampersand")
