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Johan Vandewalle
Johan Vandewalle (born 15 February 1960) is a Belgian linguist. He teaches at Ghent University and specializes in Turkic languages. Life Vandewalle first became interested in Turkish at the age of thirteen, during a family holiday to Turkey. He initially studied civil engineering and architecture, before deciding to focus on languages. In 1987, at the age of twenty-six, he won the ''Polyglot of Flanders/Babel Prize'', after demonstrating communicative competence in nineteen languages (Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Kyrgyz, Persian, Russian, Swahili, Tajik, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, Tuvan, Uyghur, and Uzbek). Seven old languages that he had studied (such as Latin and Old Church Slavonic Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic () was the first Slavic literary language. Historians credit the 9th-century Byzantine missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius with standardizing the language and using it in translating the Bible and other ... ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bruges
Bruges ( , nl, Brugge ) is the capital and largest city A city is a human settlement of notable size.Goodall, B. (1987) ''The Penguin Dictionary of Human Geography''. London: Penguin.Kuper, A. and Kuper, J., eds (1996) ''The Social Science Encyclopedia''. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. It can be def ... of the Provinces of Belgium, province of West Flanders in the Flemish Region of Belgium, in the northwest of the country, and the sixth-largest city of the country by population. The area of the whole city amounts to more than 13,840 hectares (138.4 km2; 53.44 sq miles), including 1,075 hectares off the coast, at Zeebrugge (from , meaning 'Bruges by the Sea'). The historic city centre is a prominent World Heritage Site of UNESCO. It is oval in shape and about 430 hectares in size. The city's total population is 117,073 (1 January 2008), [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Italian Language
Italian (''italiano'' or ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. Together with Sardinian, Italian is the least divergent language from Latin. Spoken by about 85 million people (2022), Italian is an official language in Italy, Switzerland ( Ticino and the Grisons), San Marino, and Vatican City. It has an official minority status in western Istria (Croatia and Slovenia). Italian is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia.Ethnologue report for language code:ita (Italy) – Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Online version ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1960 Births
Year 196 ( CXCVI) was a leap year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Dexter and Messalla (or, less frequently, year 949 ''Ab urbe condita''). The denomination 196 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years. Events By place Roman Empire * Emperor Septimius Severus attempts to assassinate Clodius Albinus but fails, causing Albinus to retaliate militarily. * Emperor Septimius Severus captures and sacks Byzantium; the city is rebuilt and regains its previous prosperity. * In order to assure the support of the Roman legion in Germany on his march to Rome, Clodius Albinus is declared Augustus by his army while crossing Gaul. * Hadrian's wall in Britain is partially destroyed. China * First year of the '' Jian'an era of the Chinese Han Dynasty. * Em ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old Church Slavonic
Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic () was the first Slavic literary language. Historians credit the 9th-century Byzantine missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius with standardizing the language and using it in translating the Bible and other Ancient Greek ecclesiastical texts as part of the Christianization of the Slavs. It is thought to have been based primarily on the dialect of the 9th-century Byzantine Slavs living in the Province of Thessalonica (in present-day Greece). Old Church Slavonic played an important role in the history of the Slavic languages and served as a basis and model for later Church Slavonic traditions, and some Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches use this later Church Slavonic as a liturgical language to this day. As the oldest attested Slavic language, OCS provides important evidence for the features of Proto-Slavic, the reconstructed common ancestor of all Slavic languages. Nomenclature The name of the language in Old Church Slavoni ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the Roman Republic it became the dominant language in the Italian region and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. Even after the fall of Western Rome, Latin remained the common language of international communication, science, scholarship and academia in Europe until well into the 18th century, when other regional vernaculars (including its own descendants, the Romance languages) supplanted it in common academic and political usage, and it eventually became a dead language in the modern linguistic definition. Latin is a highly inflected language, with three distinct genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), six or seven noun cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, and vocative), five declensions, four ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Uzbek Language
Uzbek (''Oʻzbekcha, Oʻzbek tili or Ўзбекча, Ўзбек тили''), formerly known as Chagatai language, ''Turki'' or ''Western Turki'', is a Turkic languages, Turkic language spoken by Uzbeks. It is the official, and national language of Uzbekistan. Uzbek is spoken as either native or second language by 44 million people around the world (L1+L2), having some 34 million speakers in Uzbekistan, 4.5 million in Afghanistan, and around 5 million in the rest of Central Asia, making it the second-most widely spoken Turkic language after Turkish language, Turkish. Uzbek belongs to the Eastern Turkic or Karluk languages, Karluk branch of the Turkic languages, Turkic language family. External influences include Arabic, Persian language, Persian and Russian language, Russian. One of the most noticeable distinctions of Uzbek from other Turkic languages is the rounding of the vowel to , a feature that was influenced by Persian. Unlike other Turkic languages, vowel harmony is nigh-c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Uyghur Language
The Uyghur or Uighur language (; , , , or , , , , CTA: Uyğurçä; formerly known as Eastern Turki), is a Turkic language written in a Uyghur Perso-Arabic script with 8-11 million speakers, spoken primarily by the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Western China. Significant communities of Uyghur speakers are located in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, and various other countries have Uyghur-speaking expatriate communities. Uyghur is an official language of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region; is widely used in both social and official spheres, as well as in print, television, and radio; and is used as a common language by other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. Uyghur belongs to the Karluk branch of the Turkic language family, which includes languages such as Uzbek. Like many other Turkic languages, Uyghur displays vowel harmony and agglutination, lacks noun classes or grammatical gender, and is a left-branching language with subject–obj ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tuvan Language
Tuvan or Tyvan (Tuvan: , ''tyva dyl'', ) is a Turkic language spoken in the Republic of Tuva in South-Central Siberia in Russia. The language has borrowed a great number of roots from the Mongolian language, Tibetan and the Russian language. There are small diaspora groups of Tuvan people that speak distinct dialects of Tuvan in the People's Republic of China and in Mongolia. History While this history focuses on mostly the people of Tuva, many linguists argue that language is inevitably intertwined with the socio-historical situation of a language itself. The earliest record of Tuvan is from the early 19th century by ''Wūlǐyǎsūtái zhìlüè'' (), Julius Klaproth 1823, Matthias Castrén 1857, Katanov and Vasily Radlov, etc. The name Tuva goes back as early as the publication of ''The Secret History of the Mongols''. The Tuva (as they refer to themselves) have historically been referred to as Soyons, Soyots or Uriankhais. The Tuvan people have been ruled by Ch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Turkmen Language
Turkmen (, , , or , , , ), sometimes referred to as "Turkmen Turkic" or "Turkmen Turkish", is a Turkic language spoken by the Turkmens of Central Asia, mainly of Turkmenistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. It has an estimated 5 million native speakers in Turkmenistan, a further 719,000 speakers in northeastern Iran, 1.5 million people in northwestern Afghanistan and 155,000 in Pakistan. Turkmen has official status in Turkmenistan, but it does not have official status in Iran, Afghanistan, or Pakistan, where big communities of ethnic Turkmens live. Turkmen is also spoken to lesser varying degrees in Turkmen communities of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and by diaspora communities, primarily in Turkey and Russia. Turkmen is a member of the Oghuz languages, Oghuz branch of the Turkic languages. The Standard language, standardized form of Turkmen (spoken in Turkmenistan) is based on the Teke (Turkmen tribe), Teke dialect, while Iranian Turkmens, Iranian Turkmen use mostly the Yomud dialect, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tatar Language
Tatar ( or ) is a Turkic language spoken by Tatars mainly located in modern Tatarstan (European Russia), as well as Siberia. It should not be confused with Crimean Tatar or Siberian Tatar, which are closely related but belong to different subgroups of the Kipchak languages. Geographic distribution The Tatar language is spoken in Russia (about 5.3 million people), Ukraine, China, Finland, Turkey, Uzbekistan, the United States of America, Romania, Azerbaijan, Israel, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Lithuania, Latvia and other countries. There are more than 7 million speakers of Tatar in the world. Tatar is also native for several thousand Maris. Mordva's Qaratay group also speak a variant of Kazan Tatar. In the 2010 census, 69% of Russian Tatars who responded to the question about language ability claimed a knowledge of the Tatar language. In Tatarstan, 93% of Tatars and 3.6% of Russians did so. In neighbouring Bashkortostan, 67% of Tatars, 27% of Bashkirs, and 1.3% of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tajik Language
Tajik (Tajik: , , ), also called Tajiki Persian (Tajik: , , ) or Tajiki, is the variety of Persian spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan by Tajiks. It is closely related to neighbouring Dari with which it forms a continuum of mutually intelligible varieties of the Persian language. Several scholars consider Tajik as a dialectal variety of Persian rather than a language on its own. The popularity of this conception of Tajik as a variety of Persian was such that, during the period in which Tajik intellectuals were trying to establish Tajik as a language separate from Persian, prominent intellectual Sadriddin Ayni counterargued that Tajik was not a "bastardised dialect" of Persian.Shinji ldoTajik Published by UN COM GmbH 2005 (LINCOM EUROPA) The issue of whether Tajik and Persian are to be considered two dialects of a single language or two discrete languages has political sides to it. By way of Early New Persian, Tajik, like Iranian Persian and Dari Persian, is a continuatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Swahili Language
Swahili, also known by its local name , is the native language of the Swahili people, who are found primarily in Tanzania, Kenya and Mozambique (along the East African coast and adjacent litoral islands). It is a Bantu language, though Swahili has borrowed a number of words from foreign languages, particularly Arabic, but also words from Portuguese, English and German. Around forty percent of Swahili vocabulary consists of Arabic loanwords, including the name of the language ( , a plural adjectival form of an Arabic word meaning 'of the coast'). The loanwords date from the era of contact between Arab slave traders and the Bantu inhabitants of the east coast of Africa, which was also the time period when Swahili emerged as a lingua franca in the region. The number of Swahili speakers, be they native or second-language speakers, is estimated to be approximately 200 million. Due to concerted efforts by the government of Tanzania, Swahili is one of three official languag ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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