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Mandaic Script
The Mandaic alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Mandaic language. It is thought to have evolved between the second and seventh century CE from either a cursive form of Aramaic (as did Syriac) or from Inscriptional Parthian. The exact roots of the script are difficult to determine. It was developed by members of the Mandaean faith of Lower 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, Ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mandaic Language
Mandaic, or more specifically Classical Mandaic, is the liturgical language of Mandaeism and a South Eastern Aramaic variety in use by the Mandaean community, traditionally based in southern parts of Iraq and southwest Iran, for their religious books. Mandaic, or Classical Mandaic, is still used by Mandaean priests in liturgical rites. The modern descendant of Mandaic or Classical Mandaic, known as Neo-Mandaic or Modern Mandaic, is spoken by a small group of Mandaeans around Ahvaz and Khorramshahr in the southern Iranian Khuzestan province. Liturgical use of Mandaic or 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'' spelli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Multilingual Support
Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. When the languages are just two, it is usually called bilingualism. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all Europeans claim to speak at least one language other than their first language, mother tongue; but many read and write in one language. Being multilingual is advantageous for people wanting to participate in trade, globalization and cultural openness. Owing to the ease of access to information facilitated by the Internet, individuals' exposure to multiple languages has become increasingly possible. People who speak several languages are also called ''#In individuals, polyglots''. Multilingual speakers have language acquisition, acquired and maintained at least one language during childhood, the so-called first language (L1). The first language (sometimes also referred to as the ... [...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, Kinyarwanda and Izi, or velar affricates, such as in Tswana (written ''kg'') or in High Alemannic Swiss German dialects. Worldwide, relati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Persian Alphabet
The Persian alphabet (), also known as the Perso-Arabic script, is the right-to-left alphabet used for the Persian language. It is a variation of the Arabic script with four additional letters: (the sounds 'g', 'zh', 'ch', and 'p', respectively), in addition to the obsolete that was used for the sound . This letter is no longer used in Persian, as the -sound changed to , e.g. archaic > 'language'. It was the basis of many Arabic-based scripts used in Central and South Asia. It is used for both Iranian and Dari: standard varieties of Persian; and is one of two official writing systems for the Persian language, alongside the Cyrillic-based Tajik alphabet. The script is mostly but not exclusively right-to-left; mathematical expressions, numeric dates and numbers bearing units are embedded from left to right. The script is cursive, meaning most letters in a word connect to each other; when they are typed, contemporary word processors automatically join adjacent letter f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Persian Language
Persian ( ), also known by its endonym and exonym, endonym Farsi (, Fārsī ), is a Western Iranian languages, Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian languages, Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, 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 mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible standard language, standard varieties, respectively Iranian Persian (officially known as ''Persian''), Dari, Dari Persian (officially known as ''Dari'' since 1964), and Tajik language, 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 society, Persianate history in the cultural sphere o ... [...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 and used in English and French, in which the letters and are joined for the first ligature and the letters and are joined for the second ligature. For stylistic and legibility reasons, and are often merged to create (where the tittle on the merges with the hood of the ); the same is true of and to create . The common ampersand, , developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters and (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 manuscripts. These new glyphs emerge alongside the p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ampersand
The ampersand, also known as the and sign, is the logogram , representing the grammatical conjunction, conjunction "and". It originated as a typographic ligature, ligature of the letters of the word (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 "Vocative case#English, O") was referred to by the Latin expression ('by itself'), as in "''per se'' A" or "A ''per se'' A". The character &, when used by itself as opposed to more extended forms such as ''&c.'', was similarly referred to as "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 false etymology, 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 AD and the old Roma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Coptic Language
Coptic () is a dormant language, dormant Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language. It is a group of closely related Egyptian dialects, representing the most recent developments of the Ancient Egyptian language, 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 Vernacular, spoken language of Egypt following the Arab conquest of Egypt and was slowly replaced over the centuries. Coptic has no native speakers today apart from a number of priests, although it remains in daily use as the Sacred language, liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church and of the Coptic Catholic Church. It is written with the Coptic alphabet, a modified form of the Greek alphabet with seven additional letters borrowed from the Demotic (Egyptian), Demotic Egyptian script. The major Coptic dialects are Sahidic, Bohairic, Akhmimic, Fayyumic, Lycopolitan (Asyutic), and Oxyrhynchite. Sahidic Coptic ... [...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 Arabic ''tāʾ'' , Aramaic ''taw'' 𐡕, Hebrew ''tav'' , Phoenician ''tāw'' 𐤕, and Syriac ''taw'' ܬ. In Arabic, it also gives rise to the derived letter ''ṯāʾ''. Its original sound value is . It is related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪉, South Arabian , and Ge'ez . The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek ''tau'' (Τ), Latin T, and Cyrillic Т. Origins Taw is believed to be derived from the Egyptian hieroglyph representing a tally mark. Arabic tāʾ 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 f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gemination
In phonetics and phonology, gemination (; from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), or consonant lengthening, 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, while others describe two distinct phenomena. Consonant length is a distinctive feature in certain languages, such as Japanese. Other languages, such as Greek, do not have word-internal phonemic consonant geminates. Consonant gemination and vowel length are independent in languages like Arabic, Japanese, Hungarian, Malayalam, and Finnish; however, in languages like Italian, Norwegian, and Swedish, vowel length and consonant length are interdependent. Fo ... [...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 ''ʿayin'' 𐤏, Hebrew ''ʿayin'' , Aramaic ''ʿē'' 𐡏, Syriac ''ʿē'' ܥ, and Arabic ''ʿayn'' (where it is sixteenth in abjadi order only). It is related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪒, South Arabian , and Ge'ez . 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. In the revived Modern Hebrew it is reduced to a glottal stop or is omitted entirely. The Phoenician letter is the origin of the Greek, Latin and Cyrillic letters O, O and O. It is also the origin of the Armenian letters Ո and Օ. The Arabic character is the origin of the Latin-script letter Ƹ. Origins The letter name is derived from Proto-Semitic "eye", and the Phoenician letter had the shape of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammatical Person
In linguistics, grammatical person is the grammatical distinction between deictic references to participant(s) in an event; typically, the distinction is between the speaker ( first person), the addressee ( second person), and others ( third person). A language's set of pronouns is typically defined by grammatical person. ''First person'' includes the speaker (English: ''I'', ''we''), ''second person'' is the person or people spoken to (English: ''your'' or ''you''), and ''third person'' includes all that are not listed above (English: ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). It also frequently affects verbs, and sometimes nouns or possessive relationships. Related classifications Number In Indo-European languages, first-, second-, and third-person pronouns are typically also marked for singular and plural forms, and sometimes dual form as well (grammatical number). Inclusive/exclusive distinction Some other languages use different classifying systems, especially in the p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
