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Japanese Phonology
The phonology of Japanese features about 15 consonant phonemes, the cross-linguistically typical five-vowel system of , and a relatively simple phonotactic distribution of phonemes allowing few consonant clusters. It is traditionally described as having a mora as the unit of timing, with each mora taking up about the same length of time, so that the disyllabic ("Japan") may be analyzed as and dissected into four moras, , , , and . Standard Japanese is a pitch-accent language, wherein the position or absence of a pitch drop may determine the meaning of a word: "chopsticks", "bridge", "edge" (see Japanese pitch accent). Unless otherwise noted, the following describes the standard variety of Japanese based on the Tokyo dialect. Consonants *Voiceless stops are slightly aspirated: less aspirated than English stops, but more so than Spanish. *, a remnant of Old Japanese, now occurs almost always medially in compounds, typically as a result of gemination (as in 切符 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Female Human
A woman is an adult female human. Prior to adulthood, a female human is referred to as a girl (a female child or adolescent). The plural ''women'' is sometimes used in certain phrases such as "women's rights" to denote female humans regardless of age. Typically, women inherit a pair of X chromosomes, one from each parent, and are capable of pregnancy and giving birth from puberty until menopause. More generally, sex differentiation of the female fetus is governed by the lack of a present, or functioning, SRY-gene on either one of the respective sex chromosomes. Female anatomy is distinguished from male anatomy by the female reproductive system, which includes the ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, vagina, and vulva. A fully developed woman generally has a wider pelvis, broader hips, and larger breasts than an adult man. Women have significantly less facial and other body hair, have a higher body fat composition, and are on average shorter and less muscular than men. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Long S
The long s , also known as the medial s or initial s, is an archaic form of the lowercase letter . It replaced the single ''s'', or one or both of the letters ''s'' in a 'double ''s''' sequence (e.g., "ſinfulneſs" for "sinfulness" and "poſſeſs" or "poſseſs" for "possess"—but never *"poſſeſſ"). The modern letterform is known as the 'short', 'terminal', or 'round' s. In typography, it is known as a type of swash letter, commonly referred to as a "swash s". The long s is the basis of the first half of the grapheme of the German alphabet ligature letter , ('' eszett'' or harp s. Rules This list of rules for the long s is not exhaustive, and it applies only to books printed during the 17th and 18th centuries in English-speaking countries. Similar rules exist for other European languages. * A round s is always used at the end of a word ending with s: "his", "complains", "ſucceſs" ** However, long s is maintained in abbreviations such as "ſ." for "ſubſtantiv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Letter (alphabet)
A letter is a segmental symbol A symbol is a mark, sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, object, or relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by creating linkages between otherwise very different conc ... of a Phonemic orthography, phonemic writing system. The inventory of all letters forms an alphabet. Letters broadly correspond to phonemes in the spoken language, spoken form of the language, although there is rarely a consistent and exact correspondence between letters and phonemes. The word ''letter'', borrowed from Old French ''letre'', entered Middle English around 1200 AD, eventually displacing the Old English term (wikt:bookstaff, bookstaff). ''Letter'' is descended from the Latin ''wikt:littera, littera'', which may have descended from the Greek "διφθέρα" (, writing tablet), via Etruscan language, Etruscan. Definition and usage A letter is a type of grapheme, which is a functional u ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Digamma
Digamma or wau (uppercase: Ϝ, lowercase: ϝ, numeral: ϛ) is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It originally stood for the sound but it has remained in use principally as a Greek numeral for 6. Whereas it was originally called ''waw'' or ''wau'', its most common appellation in classical Greek is ''digamma''; as a numeral, it was called ''episēmon'' during the Byzantine era and is now known as '' stigma'' after the Byzantine ligature combining σ-τ as ϛ. Digamma or wau was part of the original archaic Greek alphabet as initially adopted from Phoenician. Like its model, Phoenician waw, it represented the voiced labial-velar approximant and stood in the 6th position in the alphabet between epsilon and zeta. It is the consonantal doublet of the vowel letter upsilon (), which was also derived from waw but was placed near the end of the Greek alphabet. Digamma or wau is in turn the ancestor of the Latin letter F. As an alphabetic letter, it is attested in arc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Upsilon
Upsilon (, ; uppercase Υ, lowercase υ; el, ''ýpsilon'' ) or ypsilon is the 20th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, grc, Υʹ, label=none has a value of 400. It is derived from the Phoenician waw . Etymology The name of the letter was originally just "υ" (''y;'' also called ''hy'', hence " hyoid", meaning "shaped like the letter υ"), but the name changed to "υ ψιλόν" ''u psilon'' 'simple u' to distinguish it from οι, which had come to have the same pronunciation. Pronunciation In early Attic Greek (6th century BCE), it was pronounced (a close back rounded vowel like the English "long o͞o"). In Classical Greek, it was pronounced (a close front rounded vowel), at least until 1030. In Modern Greek, it is pronounced ; in the digraphs and , as or ; and in the digraph as . In ancient Greek, it occurred in both long and short versions, but Modern Greek does not have a length distinction. As an initial letter in Classic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phoenician Alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet (more specifically, an abjad) known in modern times from the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. The name comes from the Phoenician civilization. The Phoenician alphabet is also called the Early Linear script (in a Semitic context, not connected to Minoan writing systems), because it is an early development of the Proto- or Old Canaanite or Proto-Sinaitic script, into a linear, purely alphabetic script, also marking the transfer from a multi-directional writing system, where a variety of writing directions occurred, to a regulated horizontal, right-to-left script. Its immediate predecessor, the Proto-Canaanite, Old Canaanite or Proto-Sinaitic script, used in the final stages of the Late Bronze Age, first in either Egypt or Canaan and then in the Syro-Hittite kingdoms, is the oldest fully matured alphabet, and it was derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Phoenician alphabet was used to write ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Egyptian Hieroglyph
Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.There were about 1,000 graphemes in the Old Kingdom period, reduced to around 750 to 850 in the classical language of the Middle Kingdom, but inflated to the order of some 5,000 signs in the Ptolemaic period. Antonio Loprieno, ''Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction'' (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), p. 12. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. Through the Phoenician alphabet's major child systems (the Greek and Aramaic scripts), the Egyptian hieroglyphic script is ancestral to the majority of scripts in modern use, most prominently the L ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
History Of The Alphabet
The history of the alphabet goes back to the conwriting system used for Semitic languages in the Levant in the 2nd millennium BCE. Most or nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic proto-alphabet. Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language. This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs.Himelfarb, Elizabeth J.First Alphabet Found in Egypt, ''Archaeology'' 53, Issue 1 (Jan./Feb. 2000): 21. The Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of mult ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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