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Nɨfe Language
Kwamera, or South Tanna, the endonym being Nafe (Nɨfe), is a language spoken on the southeastern coast of Tanna Island in Vanuatu Vanuatu ( or ; ), officially the Republic of Vanuatu (; ), is an island country in Melanesia located in the South Pacific Ocean. The archipelago, which is of volcanic origin, is east of northern Australia, northeast of New Caledonia, east o .... Writing system References * Languages of Vanuatu South Vanuatu languages {{SOceanic-lang-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vanuatu
Vanuatu ( or ; ), officially the Republic of Vanuatu (; ), is an island country in Melanesia located in the South Pacific Ocean. The archipelago, which is of volcanic origin, is east of northern Australia, northeast of New Caledonia, east of New Guinea, southeast of Solomon Islands, and west of Fiji. Vanuatu was first inhabited by Melanesians, Melanesian people. The first Europeans to visit the islands were a Spanish expedition led by Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, Fernandes de Queirós, who arrived on the largest island, Espíritu Santo, in 1606. Queirós claimed the archipelago for Spain, as part of the colonial Spanish East Indies and named it . In the 1880s, France and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, United Kingdom claimed parts of the archipelago, and in 1906, they agreed on a framework for jointly managing the archipelago as the New Hebrides through an Anglo-French condominium (international law), condominium. An independence movem ... [...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] |
V (letter)
V, or v, is the twenty-second 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 ''vee'' (pronounced ), plural ''vees''. Name * (); in dialects that lack contrast between and , the letter is called , "low B/V". * * * * or *Japanese: is called a variety of names originating in English, most commonly or , but less nativized variants, violating to an extent the phonotactics of Japanese, of ー , or , and are also used. The phoneme in Japanese is used properly only in loanwords, where the preference for either or depends on many factors; in general, words that are perceived to be in common use tend toward . * * * is recommended, but is traditional. If is referred to as the latter, it would have the same pronunciation as the letter in Spanish (i.e. after pause or nasal sound, otherwise ); thus further terms are needed to distinguish from . In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
U (letter)
U, or u, is the twenty-first letter and the fifth vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet and the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''u'' (pronounced ), plural ''ues''. Name In English, the name of the letter is the "long U" sound, pronounced . In most other languages, its name matches the letter's pronunciation in open syllables. History U derives from the Semitic waw, as does F, and later, Y, W, and V. Its oldest ancestor goes back to Egyptian hieroglyphs, and is probably from a hieroglyph of a mace or fowl, representing the sound or the sound . This was borrowed to Phoenician, where it represented the sound , and seldom the vowel . In Greek, two letters were adapted from the Phoenician waw. The letter was adapted, but split in two, with Digamma or wau being adapted to represent , and the second one being Upsilon , which was originally adapted to represent , later fronte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
T (letter)
T, or t, is the twentieth 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 ''tee'' (pronounced ), plural ''tees''. It is derived from the Semitic Taw 𐤕 of the Phoenician and Paleo-Hebrew script (Aramaic and Hebrew Taw ת/𐡕/, Syriac Taw ܬ, and Arabic ت Tāʼ) via the Greek letter τ (tau). In English, it is most commonly used to represent the voiceless alveolar plosive, a sound it also denotes in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second-most commonly used letter in English-language texts. History '' Taw'' was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew alphabets. The sound value of Semitic ''Taw'', the Greek alphabet Tαυ (''Tau''), Old Italic and Latin T has remained fairly constant, representing in each of these, and it has also kept its original basic shape in most of these alphabets. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
S (letter)
S, or s, is the nineteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and other latin alphabets worldwide. Its name in English is ''ess'' (pronounced ), plural ''esses''. History Northwest Semitic šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative (as in 'ip'). It originated most likely as a pictogram of a tooth () and represented the phoneme via the acrophonic principle. Ancient Greek did not have a "sh" phoneme, so the derived Greek letter Sigma () came to represent the voiceless alveolar sibilant . While the letter shape Σ continues Phoenician ''šîn'', its name ''sigma'' is taken from the letter ''Samekh'', while the shape and position of ''samekh'' but name of ''šîn'' is continued in the '' xi''. Within Greek, the name of ''sigma'' was influenced by its association with the Greek word (earlier ), "to hiss". The original name of the letter "Sigma" may have been ''san'', but due to the earl ... [...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] |
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] |
