Moro Language

	Moro Language Moro is a Kordofanian language spoken in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan, Sudan. It is part of the Western group of West Central Heiban Kordofonian languages and belongs to the Niger-Congo phylum.Gibbard, George, Rohde, Hannah, and Rose, Sharon (2009). 'Moro Noun Class Morphology'. In Masangu Matonodo et al. (eds.) ''Selected Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference on African Linguistics'', pp. 106-117. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings, p. 117. Project. http://www.lingref.com/cpp/acal/38/paper2139.pdf?q=moro In 1982 there were an estimated 30,000 Moro-speakers. This was before the second Sudan civil war and therefore the recent number of speakers might differ. There can be noted an influence of Arabic and it is suspected that today approximately a fourth of all Moro vocabulary has a relation or an origin in the Arabic language.SUDAN LOCAL LANGUAGE CENTRE: Notes on Language Use in the Moro Community in Khartoum. p. 1. Phonology There are different intonations in the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon]
	East Kainji Languages The East Kainji languages are spoken in a compact area of the Jos Plateau in Nigeria, near Jos. There are more than 20 of them, most of which are poorly studied. History East Kainji languages are less internally diverse than some of the other Plateau branches in the Nigerian Middle Belt (Blench 2007). Historically, the East Kainji branch had been influenced by Chadic languages that no longer exist in the region.Blench, Roger. 2007. Language families of the Nigerian Middle Belt and the historical implications of their distribution'. Presented to the Jos Linguistic Circle in Jos, Nigeria, July 25, 2007. Today, there are at most 100,000 speakers of East Kainji languages, with almost all languages of the languages being threatened by larger languages such as Hausa and English. Although they are morphologically simple, they have 4-level tones instead of the 3-level tones typical of the region. At the time of the British conquest, several of these languages were in the process of shift ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon]
	Mid Vowel A mid vowel (or a true-mid vowel) is any in a class of vowel sounds used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned approximately midway between an open vowel and a close vowel. Other names for a mid vowel are lowered close-mid vowel and raised open-mid vowel, though the former phrase may also be used to describe a vowel that is as low as open-mid; likewise, the latter phrase may also be used to describe a vowel that is as high as close-mid. Vowels The only mid vowel with a dedicated symbol in the 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 standard written representation ... is the mid central vowel with ambiguous rounding . The IPA divides the vowel space into thirds, with the close-mid vowels such as or and t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon]
	Palatal Consonant Palatals are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate (the middle part of the roof of the mouth). Consonants with the tip of the tongue curled back against the palate are called retroflex. Characteristics The most common type of palatal consonant is the extremely common approximant , which ranks among the ten most common sounds in the world's languages. The nasal is also common, occurring in around 35 percent of the world's languages, in most of which its equivalent obstruent is not the stop , but the affricate . Only a few languages in northern Eurasia, the Americas and central Africa contrast palatal stops with postalveolar affricates—as in Hungarian, Czech, Latvian, Macedonian, Slovak, Turkish and Albanian. Consonants with other primary articulations may be palatalized, that is, accompanied by the raising of the tongue surface towards the hard palate. For example, English (spelled ''sh'') has such a palatal componen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon]
picture info	Retroflex Consonant A retroflex () or cacuminal () consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consonants—especially in Indology. The Latin-derived word ''retroflex'' means "bent back"; some retroflex consonants are pronounced with the tongue fully curled back so that articulation involves the underside of the tongue tip ( subapical). These sounds are sometimes described as "true" retroflex consonants. However, retroflexes are commonly taken to include other consonants having a similar place of articulation without such extreme curling of the tongue; these may be articulated with the tongue tip ( apical) or the tongue blade ( laminal). When apical, they have been called apico-domal consonants. Types Retroflex consonants, like other coronal consonants, come in several varieties, depending on the shape of the tongue. The tongue may be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon]
	Alveolar Consonant Alveolar consonants (; UK also ) are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli (the sockets) of the upper teeth. Alveolar consonants may be articulated with the tip of the tongue (the apical consonants), as in English, or with the flat of the tongue just above the tip (the "blade" of the tongue; called laminal consonants), as in French and Spanish. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) does not have separate symbols for the alveolar consonants. Rather, the same symbol is used for all coronal places of articulation that are not palatalized like English palato-alveolar ''sh'', or retroflex. To disambiguate, the ''bridge'' (, ''etc.'') may be used for a dental consonant, or the under-bar (, ''etc.'') may be used for the postalveolars. differs from dental in that the former is a sibilant and the latter is not. differs from postalveolar in being unpalatalized. The bare letter ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon]
	Dental Consonant A dental consonant is a consonant articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth, such as , . In some languages, dentals are distinguished from other groups, such as alveolar consonants, in which the tongue contacts the gum ridge. Dental consonants share acoustic similarity and in the Latin script are generally written with consistent symbols (e.g. ''t'', ''d'', ''n''). In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the diacritic for dental consonant is . When there is no room under the letter, it may be placed above, using the character , such as in / p͆/. Cross-linguistically Languages, such as Albanian, Irish and Russian, velarization is generally associated with more dental articulations of coronal consonants. Thus, velarized consonants, such as Albanian , tend to be dental or denti-alveolar, and non-velarized consonants tend to be retracted to an alveolar position. Sanskrit, Hindustani and all other Indo-Aryan languages have an entire set of dental stops that occu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon]
	Labial Consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. The two common labial articulations are bilabials, articulated using both lips, and labiodentals, articulated with the lower lip against the upper teeth, both of which are present in English. A third labial articulation is dentolabials, articulated with the upper lip against the lower teeth (the reverse of labiodental), normally only found in pathological speech. Generally precluded are linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue contacts the posterior side of the upper lip, making them coronals, though sometimes, they behave as labial consonants. The most common distribution between bilabials and labiodentals is the English one, in which the nasal and the stops, , , and , are bilabial and the fricatives, , and , are labiodental. The voiceless bilabial fricative, voiced bilabial fricative, and the bilabial approximant do not exist as the primary realizations of any sounds in E ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon]
	Vowel Length In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived or actual length (phonetics), duration of a vowel sound when pronounced. Vowels perceived as shorter are often called short vowels and those perceived as longer called long vowels. On one hand, many languages do not distinguish vowel length phoneme, phonemically, meaning that vowel length alone does not change the meanings of words. However, the amount of time a vowel is uttered can change based on factors such as the phonetic characteristics of the sounds around it: the phonetic environment. An example is that vowels tend to be pronounced longer before a voiced consonant and shorter before a voiceless consonant in the standard accents of General American English, American and Received Pronunciation, British English. On the other hand, vowel length is indeed an important phonemic factor in certain languages, meaning vowel length can change word-meanings, for example in Arabic phonology#Vowels, Arabic, Czech phonology, Czech, Dravidia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon]
picture info	Diphthong A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech apparatus) moves during the pronunciation of the vowel. In most varieties of English, the phrase "no highway cowboys" ( ) has five distinct diphthongs, one in every syllable. Diphthongs contrast with monophthongs, where the tongue or other speech organs do not move and the syllable contains only a single vowel sound. For instance, in English, the word ''ah'' is spoken as a monophthong (), while the word ''ow'' is spoken as a diphthong in most varieties (). Where two adjacent vowel sounds occur in different syllables (e.g. in the English word ''re-elect'') the result is described as hiatus, not as a diphthong. Diphthongs often form when separate vowels are run together in rapid speech during a conversation. However, there ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon]
picture info	Open Front Unrounded Vowel The open front unrounded vowel, or low front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. It is one of the eight primary cardinal vowels, not directly intended to correspond to a vowel sound of a specific language but rather to serve as a fundamental reference point in a phonetic measuring system. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that represents this sound is , a double-story lowercase a. In the IPA vowel chart it is positioned at the lower-left corner. However, the accuracy of the quadrilateral vowel chart is disputed, and the sound has been analyzed acoustically as extra-open at a position where the front/back distinction has lost its significance. There are also differing interpretations of the exact quality of the vowel: the classic sound recording of by Daniel Jones is slightly more front but not quite as open as that by John Wells. In practice, the symbol is often used to represent an open ''central'' unrounded vo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon]
	Low Vowel An open vowel is a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned approximately as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels (in U.S. terminology ) in reference to the low position of the tongue. In the context of the phonology of any particular language, a ''low vowel'' can be any vowel that is more open than a mid vowel. That is, open-mid vowels, near-open vowels, and open vowels can all be considered low vowels. Partial list The open vowels with dedicated symbols in the 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 standard written representation ... are: * open front unrounded vowel * open front rounded vowel This vowel is not known to occur as a phoneme distinct from in any language. * open back unrounded vowel * ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon]
	Close-mid Back Rounded Vowel The close-mid back rounded vowel, or high-mid back rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is . Close-mid back protruded vowel The close-mid back protruded vowel is the most common variant of the close-mid back rounded vowel. It is typically transcribed in IPA simply as , and that is the convention used in this article. As there is no dedicated diacritic for protrusion in the IPA, the symbol for the close-mid back rounded vowel with an old diacritic for labialization, , can be used as an ''ad hoc'' symbol for the close-mid back protruded vowel. Another possible transcription is or (a close-mid back vowel modified by endolabialization), but this could be misread as a diphthong. In English, the symbol is typically associated with the vowel in the "goat", but in Received Pronunciation and General American, that vowel is a diphthong whose starting point may be unrounded ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon]