|
Ngiemboon Language
The Ngiemboon language, (autonym: ), is one of a dozen Bamileke languages spoken in Cameroon. Its speakers are located primarily within the department of Bamboutos in the West Region of Cameroon. Dialects are Batcham (Basham), Balatchi (Balaki) and Bamoungong (Bamongoun). Alphabet The alphabet is based on the General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages Phonology Consonants Anderson (2008) states the language allows roots of C(S)V(C)(V), with the above consonants being the underlying consonants allowed. do not occur naturally in the role of C, but are allowed as semivowels (S) where they are distinct from . As well, there is a possible syllabic nasal prefix, which assimilates to following consonants, and can carry a high or low tone. It is spelled as before labial consonants and otherwise. Phonemes are pronounced when word initial, intervocalically, and before the suffix and word finally. When word final, those are unreleased, as well as . are pronounced before ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cameroon
Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon, is a country in Central Africa. It shares boundaries with Nigeria to the west and north, Chad to the northeast, the Central African Republic to the east, and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo to the south. Its coastline lies on the Bight of Biafra, part of the Gulf of Guinea, and the Atlantic Ocean. Due to its strategic position at the crossroads between West Africa and Central Africa, it has been categorized as being in both camps. Cameroon's population of nearly 31 million people speak 250 native languages, in addition to the national tongues of English and French, or both. Early inhabitants of the territory included the Sao civilisation around Lake Chad and the Baka people (Cameroon and Gabon), Baka hunter-gatherers in the southeastern rainforest. Portuguese discoveries, Portuguese explorers reached the coast in the 15th century and named the area ''Rio dos Camarões'' (''Shrimp River''), which became ''C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
D (letter)
D, or d, is the fourth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''dee'' (pronounced ), plural ''dees''. History The Semitic letter Dāleth may have developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are many different Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek and Latin, the letter represented ; in the Etruscan alphabet the letter was archaic but still retained. The equivalent Greek letter is delta, Δ. The minuscule (lower-case) form of 'd' consists of a lower-story left bowl and a stem ascender. It most likely developed by gradual variations on the majuscule (capital) form 'D', and is now composed as a stem with a full lobe to the right. In handwriting, it was common to start the arc to the left of the vertical stroke, resulting in a serif at the top of the arc. This serif was extended while the rest of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
R (letter)
R, or r, is the eighteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''ar'' (pronounced ), plural ''ars''. The letter is the eighth most common letter in English and the fourth-most common consonant, after , , and . Name The name of the letter in Latin was (), following the pattern of other letters representing continuants, such as , , , , and . This name is preserved in French and many other languages. In Middle English, the name of the letter changed from to , following a pattern exhibited in many other words such as ''farm'' (compare French ) and ''star'' (compare German ). In Hiberno-English, the letter is called or , somewhat similar to ''oar'', ''ore'', ''orr''. The letter R is sometimes referred to as the 'canine letter', often rendered in English as the dog's letter. This Latin term referred to the Latin that was trilled to sound l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
P (letter)
P, or p, is the sixteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''pee'' (pronounced ), plural ''pees''. History The Semitic Pê (mouth), as well as the Greek Π or π ( Pi), and the Etruscan and Latin letters that developed from the former alphabet all symbolized , a voiceless bilabial plosive. Use in writing systems English In English orthography, represents the sound . A common digraph in English is , which represents the sound , and can be used to transliterate ''phi'' in loanwords from Greek. In German, the digraph is common, representing a labial affricate . Most English words beginning with are of foreign origin, primarily French, Latin and Greek; these languages preserve the Proto-Indo-European initial *p. Native English cognates of such words often start with , since English is a Germanic language and thus has undergone Grimm's l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
O (letter)
O, or o, is the fifteenth letter and the fourth vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''o'' (pronounced ), plural ''oes''. Name In English, the name of the letter is the "long O" sound, pronounced . In most other languages, its name matches the letter's pronunciation in open syllables. History Its graphic form has remained fairly constant from Phoenician times until today. The name of the Phoenician letter was '' ʿeyn'', meaning "eye", and its shape originates simply as a drawing of a human eye (possibly inspired by the corresponding Egyptian hieroglyph, Proto-Sinaitic script). Its original sound value was that of a consonant, probably , the sound represented by the cognate Arabic letter ع ''ʿayn''. The use of this Phoenician letter for a vowel sound is due to the early Greek alphabets, which adopted the letter "omicron" to represe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
N (letter)
N, or n, is the fourteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages, and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''en'' (pronounced ), plural ''ens''. History One of the most common hieroglyphs, snake, was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like the English , because the Egyptian word for "snake" was ''djet''. It is speculated by some, such as archeologist Douglas Petrovich, that Semitic speakers working in Egypt adapted hieroglyphs to create the first alphabet. Some hold that they used the same snake symbol to represent N, with a great proponent of this theory being Alan Gardiner, because their word for "snake" may have begun with n (an example of a possible word being ''nahash''). However, this theory has become disputed. The name for the letter in the Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic alphabets is ''nun'', which means "fish" in some of these languages. This possibly conne ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
M (letter)
M, or m, is the thirteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of several western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''em'' (pronounced ), plural ''ems''. History The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem via the Greek Mu (Μ, μ). Semitic Mem is most likely derived from a " Proto-Sinaitic" (Bronze Age) adoption of the "water" ideogram in Egyptian writing. The Egyptian sign had the acrophonic value , from the Egyptian word for "water", ''nt''; the adoption as the Semitic letter for was presumably also on acrophonic grounds, from the Semitic word for "water", '' *mā(y)-''. Use in writing systems English In English, represents the voiced bilabial nasal . The Oxford English Dictionary (first edition) says that is sometimes a vowel, such as in words like ''spasm'' and in the suffix ''-ism''. In modern terminology, this is described as a syllabic consonant (IPA: ). M is the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
L (letter)
L, or l, is the twelfth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''el'' (pronounced ), plural ''els''. History Lamedh may have come from a pictogram of an ox goad or cattle prod. Some have suggested that it represents a shepherd's staff. Typographic variants In most sans-serif typefaces, the lowercase letter ''ell'' , written as the glyph , may be difficult to distinguish from the uppercase letter "eye" (written as the glyph ); in some serif typefaces, the glyph may be confused with the glyph , the digit ''one''. To avoid such confusion, some newer computer fonts (such as Trebuchet MS) have a finial, a curve to the right at the bottom of the lowercase letter ''ell''. Other style variants are provided in script typefaces and display typefaces. All these variants of the letter are encoded in Unicode as or , allowing presentation to be chosen accord ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
K (letter)
K, or k, is the eleventh letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''kay'' (pronounced ), plural ''kays''. The letter K usually represents the voiceless velar plosive. History The letter K comes from the Greek letter Κ (kappa), which was taken from the Semitic kaph, the symbol for an open hand. This, in turn, was likely adapted by Semitic tribes who had lived in Egypt from the hieroglyph for "hand" representing /ḏ/ in the Egyptian word for hand, ⟨ ḏ-r-t⟩ (likely pronounced in Old Egyptian). The Semites evidently assigned it the sound value instead, because their word for hand started with that sound. K was brought into the Latin alphabet with the name ''ka'' /kaː/ to differentiate it from C, named ''ce'' (pronounced /keː/) and Q, named ''qu'' and pronounced /kuː/. In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all us ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
J (letter)
J, or j, is the tenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its usual name in English is ''jay'' (pronounced ), with a now-uncommon variant ''jy'' ."J", ''Oxford English Dictionary,'' 2nd edition (1989) When used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the voiced palatal approximant (the sound of "y" in "yes") it may be called ''yod'' or ''jod'' (pronounced or ). History The letter ''J'' used to be used as the swash letter ''I'', used for the letter I at the end of Roman numerals when following another I, as in XXIIJ or xxiij instead of XXIII or xxiii for the Roman numeral twenty-three. A distinctive usage emerged in Middle High German. Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478–1550) was the first to explicitly distinguish I and J as representing separate sounds, in his ''Ɛpistola del Trissino de le lettere nuωvamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana'' ("Trissino's epistle a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
I (letter)
I, or i, is the ninth letter and the third vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''i'' (pronounced ), plural ''ies''. Name In English, the name of the letter is the "long I" sound, pronounced . In most other languages, its name matches the letter's pronunciation in open syllables. History In the Phoenician alphabet, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative () in Egyptian, but was reassigned to (as in English "yes") by Semites because their word for "arm" began with that sound. This letter could also be used to represent , the close front unrounded vowel, mainly in foreign words. The Greeks adopted a form of this Phoenician ''yodh'' as their letter ''iota'' () to represent , the same as in the Old Italic alphabet. In Latin (as in Modern Greek), it was also used to represent ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
H (letter)
H, or h, is the eighth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, including the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''aitch'' (pronounced , plural ''aitches''), or regionally ''haitch'' (pronounced , plural ''haitches'')''.''"H" ''Oxford English Dictionary,'' 2nd edition (1989); ''Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged'' (1993); "aitch" or "haitch", op. cit. Name English For most English speakers, the name for the letter is pronounced as and spelled "aitch" or occasionally "eitch". The pronunciation and the associated spelling "haitch" are often considered to be h-adding and are considered non-standard in England. It is, however, a feature of Hiberno-English, and occurs sporadically in various other dialects. The perceived name of the letter affects the choice of indefinite article before initialisms beginning with H: for example "an H-bomb" ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
