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Cyrillic Alphabets
Numerous Cyrillic alphabets are based on the Cyrillic script. The early Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the 9th century AD and replaced the earlier Glagolitic script developed by the theologians Saints Cyril and Methodius, Cyril and Methodius. It is the basis of alphabets used in various languages, past and present, Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Russian. As of 2011, around 252 million people in Eurasia use it as the official alphabet for their national languages. About half of them are in Russia. Cyrillic is one of the most-used writing systems in the world. The creator is Saint Clement of Ohrid from the Preslav literary school in the First Bulgarian Empire. Some of these are illustrated below; for others, and for more detail, see the links. Sounds are transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet, IPA. While these languages largely have Phonemic orthography, phonemic orthographies, there are occasional exceptions—for example, Russian is prono ...
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Phonetic
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. The field of phonetics is traditionally divided into three sub-disciplines on questions involved such as how humans plan and execute movements to produce speech (articulatory phonetics), how various movements affect the properties of the resulting sound (acoustic phonetics) or how humans convert sound waves to linguistic information (auditory phonetics). Traditionally, the minimal linguistic unit of phonetics is the phone (phonetics), phone—a speech sound in a language which differs from the phonological unit of phoneme; the phoneme is an abstract categorization of phones and it is also defined as the smallest unit that discerns meaning between sounds in any given language. Phonetics deals with two aspects of human speech: production ( ...
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Bantu Languages
The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu language, Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀), or Ntu languages are a language family of about 600 languages of Central Africa, Central, Southern Africa, Southern, East Africa, Eastern and Southeast Africa, Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages. The total number of Bantu languages is estimated at between 440 and 680 distinct languages, depending on the definition of Dialect#Dialect or language, "language" versus "dialect"."Guthrie (1967–71) names some 440 Bantu 'varieties', Grimes (2000) has 501 (minus a few 'extinct' or 'almost extinct'), Bastin ''et al.'' (1999) have 542, Maho (this volume) has some 660, and Mann ''et al.'' (1987) have ''c.'' 680." Derek Nurse, 2006, "Bantu Languages", in the ''Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics'', p. 2:Ethnologue report for Southern Bantoid" lists a total of 535 languages. The count includes 13 Mbam languages, which are not always included under "Narrow Bantu". ...
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Mari People
The Mari ( ), also formerly known as the Cheremis or Cheremisses, are a Finno-Ugric peoples, Finno-Ugric people in Eastern Europe, who have traditionally lived along the Volga and Kama River, Kama rivers in Russia. They live mostly in the Mari El republic, with significant minorities in Bashkortostan, Perm Krai, Tatarstan and Udmurtia. Name The ethnic name ''mari'' derives from the Proto-Indo-Iranian root *''márya''-, meaning 'human', literally 'mortal', which indicates early contacts between Finno-Ugric languages, Finno-Ugric and Indo-Iranian languages. Subgroups There are two main ethnographic subgroups of Mari people: Meadow Mari people, Meadow Mari, who live on the right bank of the Volga river, and Hill Mari people, Hill (or Mountain) Mari, who live on the left bank. The ethnogenesis of these two subgroups, and formation of distinct dialects, probably took place in the 14th century. Meadow Mari comprise the majority of Mari, and Meadow Mari language, their language va ...
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Idel-Ural
Idel-Ural (, ), literally Volga-Ural, is a historical region in Eastern Europe, in what is today Russia. The name literally means ''Volga-Urals'' in the Tatar language. The frequently used Russian variant is ''Volgo-Uralye'' (). The term Idel-Ural is often used to designate 6 republics of Russia of this region: Bashkortostan, Chuvashia, Mari El, Mordovia, Tatarstan and Udmurtia, especially in Tatar-language literature or in the context of minority languages. Idel-Ural is at the center of the Volga Federal District (Поволжье, ''Povolzhye''). The major religions in the region are Islam and Orthodox Christianity. History Before being conquered by the Tsardom of Russia in the 16th century, the region was dominated by native Uralic tribes and a succession of Turkic-led empires, such as Volga Bulgaria, the Khazars, the Golden Horde and the Khanate of Kazan. At the time of Peter the Great's death, in the early 18th century, the region had been made up of roughly 1 million p ...
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Caucasian Languages
The Caucasian languages comprise a large and extremely varied array of languages spoken by more than ten million people in and around the Caucasus Mountains, which lie between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Linguistic comparison allows the classification of these languages into several different language families, with little or no discernible affinity to each other. However, the languages of the Caucasus are sometimes mistakenly referred to as a ''family'' of languages.Tuite, Kevin. (1999). The myth of the Caucasian Sprachbund: The case of ergativity. Lingua. 108. 1-29/ref> According to Asya Pereltsvaig, "grammatical differences between the three groups of languages are considerable. ..These differences force the more conservative historical linguistics to treat the three language families of the Caucasus as unrelated." Families indigenous to the Caucasus Three of these families have no current indigenous members outside the Caucasus, and are considered indigenous to ...
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Russian Alphabet
The Russian alphabet (, or , more traditionally) is the script used to write the Russian language. The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters: twenty consonants (, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ), ten vowels (, , , , , , , , , ), a semivowel / consonant (), and two modifier letters or "signs" (, ) that alter pronunciation of a preceding consonant or a following vowel. History Russian alphabet is derived from the Cyrillic script, which was invented in the 9th century to capture accurately the phonology of the first Slavic literary language, Old Church Slavonic. The early Cyrillic alphabet was adapted to Old East Slavic from Old Church Slavonic and was used in Kievan Rus' from the 10th century onward to write what would become the modern Russian language. The last major reform of Russian orthography took place in 1917–1918. Letters : An alternative form of the letter De () closely resembles the Greek letter delta (). : An alternative form of the l ...
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Judeo-Spanish
Judaeo-Spanish or Judeo-Spanish (autonym , Hebrew script: ), also known as Ladino or Judezmo or Spaniolit, is a Romance language derived from Castilian Old Spanish. Originally spoken in Spain, and then after the Edict of Expulsion spreading through the Ottoman Empire (the Balkans, Turkey, West Asia, and North Africa) as well as France, Italy, the Netherlands, Morocco, and England, it is today spoken mainly by Sephardic minorities in more than 30 countries, with most speakers residing in Israel. Although it has no official status in any country, it has been acknowledged as a minority language in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, and France. In 2017, it was formally recognised by the Royal Spanish Academy. The core vocabulary of Judaeo-Spanish is Old Spanish, and it has numerous elements from the other old Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula: Old Aragonese, Asturleonese, Old Catalan, Galician-Portuguese, and Andalusi Romance. The language has been further enric ...
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Hebrew Alphabet
The Hebrew alphabet (, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is a unicase, unicameral abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Judaeo-Spanish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic languages, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian. In modern Hebrew, vowels are increasingly introduced. It is also used informally in Israel to write Levantine Arabic, especially among Druze in Israel, Druze. It is an offshoot of the Aramaic alphabet, Imperial Aramaic alphabet, which flourished during the Achaemenid Empire and which itself derives from the Phoenician alphabet. Historically, a different abjad script was used to write Hebrew: the original, old Hebrew script, now known as the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, has been largely preserved in a variant form as the Samaritan script, Samaritan alphabet, and is still used by the Samaritans. The present ''Jewish script'' or ''square script'', on the cont ...
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Sephardi Jews
Sephardic Jews, also known as Sephardi Jews or Sephardim, and rarely as Iberian Peninsular Jews, are a Jewish diaspora population associated with the historic Jewish communities of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) and their descendants. The term "Sephardic" comes from '' Sepharad'', the Hebrew word for Iberia. These communities flourished for centuries in Iberia until they were expelled in the late 15th century. Over time, "Sephardic" has also come to refer more broadly to Jews, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, who adopted Sephardic religious customs and legal traditions, often due to the influence of exiles. In some cases, Ashkenazi Jews who settled in Sephardic communities and adopted their liturgy are also included under this term. Today, Sephardic Jews form a major component of world Jewry, with the largest population living in Israel. The earliest documented Jewish presence in the Iberian Peninsula dates to the Roman period, beginning in the fir ...
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Bosnian Jews
The history of the Jews in Bosnia and Herzegovina (; ''Jevrejski narod Bosne i Hercegovine'') spans from the arrival of the first Bosnian Jews as a result of the Spanish Inquisition to the survival of the Bosnian Jews through the Holocaust and the Yugoslav Wars. Jews are one of the minority peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to the country's constitution. The Bosnian Jewish community is composed of both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews. Judaism and the Jewish community in Bosnia and Herzegovina have one of the oldest and most diverse histories of all the former Yugoslav states, and is more than 400 years old, in terms of permanent settlement; records of Jewish presence in Bosnia and Herzegovina date back to the second century CE. Some scholars have argued that there has been a more or less continuous presence of Jews in Bosnia and Herzegovina since the Roman Empire. Bosnia, then a self-governing province of the Ottoman Empire, was one of the few territories in Europe t ...
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Bulgarian Jews
The history of the Jews in Bulgaria goes back almost 2,000 years. Jews have had a continuous presence in historic Bulgarian lands since before the 2nd century CE, and have often played an important part in the history of Bulgaria. Today, the majority of Bulgarian Jews live in Israel, while modern-day Bulgaria continues to host a modest Jewish population. Roman era Jews are believed to have settled in the region after the Roman conquest in 46 CE. Ruins of "sumptuous" second-century synagogues have been unearthed in Philipopolis (modern Plovdiv), Nicopolis ( Nikopol), Ulpia Oescus ( Gigen, Pleven Province), and Stobi (now in North Macedonia). The earliest written artifact attesting to the presence of a Jewish community in the Roman province of Moesia Inferior is a late 2nd-century CE Latin inscription found at Ulpia Oescus bearing a menorah and mentioning ''archisynagogos''. Josephus testifies to the presence of a Jewish population in the city. A decree of Roman Emper ...
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Breve
A breve ( , less often , grammatical gender, neuter form of the Latin "short, brief") is the diacritic mark , shaped like the bottom half of a circle. As used in Ancient Greek, it is also called , . It resembles the caron (, the wedge or in Czech language, Czech, in Slovak language, Slovak) but is rounded, in contrast to the angular tip of the caron. In many forms of Latin, is used for a shorter, softer variant of a vowel, such as "Ĭ", where the sound is nearly identical to the English /i/. (See: Help:IPA/Latin, Latin IPA) Length The breve sign indicates a short vowel, as opposed to the Macron (diacritic), macron (), which indicates long vowels, in academic transcription. It is often used that way in dictionaries and textbooks of Latin, Ancient Greek, Tuareg languages, Tuareg and other languages. However, there is a frequent convention of indicating only the long vowels. It is then understood that a vowel with no Macron (diacritic), macron is short. If the vowel length ...
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