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Roman Alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from —additions such as , and extensions such as letters with diacritics, it forms the Latin script that is used to write most languages of modern Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. Its basic modern inventory is standardized as the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Etymology The term ''Latin alphabet'' may refer to either the alphabet used to write Latin (as described in this article) or other alphabets based on the Latin script, which is the basic set of letters common to the various alphabets descended from the classical Latin alphabet, such as the English alphabet. These Latin-script alphabets may discard letters, like the Rotokas alphabet, or add new letters, like the Danish and Norwegian alphabets. Letter shapes have evolved over the centuries, incl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given language. Not all writing systems represent language in this way: a syllabary assigns symbols to spoken syllables, while logographies assign symbols to words, morphemes, or other semantic units. The first letters were invented in Ancient Egypt to serve as an aid in writing Egyptian hieroglyphs; these are referred to as Egyptian uniliteral signs by lexicographers. This system was used until the 5th century AD, and fundamentally differed by adding pronunciation hints to existing hieroglyphs that had previously carried no pronunciation information. Later on, these phonemic symbols also became used to transcribe foreign words. The first fully phonemic script was the Proto-Sinaitic script, also descending from Egyptian hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ancient Rome
In modern historiography, ancient Rome is the Roman people, Roman civilisation from the founding of Rome, founding of the Italian city of Rome in the 8th century BC to the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. It encompasses the Roman Kingdom (753–509 BC), the Roman Republic (50927 BC), and the Roman Empire (27 BC476 AD) until the fall of the western empire. Ancient Rome began as an Italic peoples, Italic settlement, traditionally dated to 753 BC, beside the River Tiber in the Italian peninsula. The settlement grew into the city and polity of Rome, and came to control its neighbours through a combination of treaties and military strength. It eventually controlled the Italian Peninsula, assimilating the Greece, Greek culture of southern Italy (Magna Graecia) and the Etruscans, Etruscan culture, and then became the dominant power in the Mediterranean region and parts of Europe. At its hei ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Letter (alphabet)
In a writing system, a letter is a grapheme that generally corresponds to a phoneme—the smallest functional unit of speech—though there is rarely total one-to-one correspondence between the two. An alphabet is a writing system that uses letters. Definition and usage A letter is a type of grapheme, the smallest functional unit within a writing system. Letters are graphemes that broadly correspond to phonemes, the smallest functional units of sound in speech. Similarly to how phonemes are combined to form spoken words, letters may be combined to form written words. A single phoneme may also be represented by multiple letters in sequence, collectively called a ''multigraph (orthography), multigraph''. Multigraphs include ''digraphs'' of two letters (e.g. English ''ch'', ''sh'', ''th''), and ''trigraphs'' of three letters (e.g. English ''tch''). The same letterform may be used in different alphabets while representing different phonemic categories. The Latin H, Greek eta , an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Norwegian Orthography
Norwegian orthography is the method of writing the Norwegian language, of which there are two written standards: Bokmål and Nynorsk. While Bokmål has for the most part derived its forms from the written Danish language and Dano-Norwegian, Danish-Norwegian speech, Nynorsk gets its word forms from Ivar Aasen, Aasen's reconstructed "base dialect", which is intended to represent the distinctive dialectal forms. Both standards use a 29-letter variant of the Latin alphabet and the same orthographic principles. Alphabet The Danish and Norwegian alphabet, Norwegian alphabet is based upon the Latin alphabet and is identical to the Danish alphabet. Since 1917 it has consisted of the following 29 letters. The letters , , , and are not used in the spelling of native Norwegian words. They are rarely used; loanwords routinely have their orthography adapted to the native sound system. Diacritics Norwegian (especially the Nynorsk variant) also uses several letters with diacritic signs: , ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Danish Orthography
Danish orthography is the system and norms used for writing the Danish language, including spelling and punctuation. Officially, the norms are set by the Danish language council through the publication of Retskrivningsordbogen. Danish currently uses a 29-letter Latin-script alphabet with three additional letters: , and . It is identical to the Norwegian alphabet. The orthography is characterized by a low degree of correspondence between writing and pronunciation. History There were spelling reforms in 1872, 1889 (with some changes in 1892), and 1948. These spelling reforms were based in the decisions of the Nordic spelling conference of 1869, whose goal was to abolish spellings that are justified by neither phonetics nor etymology and to bring Danish and Swedish orthographies closer. The reform of 1872 replaced the letter by in some words (> , > , > ; however, for words with the change was reverted in 1889), abolished the distinction of the homophonous words ''Thing ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rotokas Alphabet
The modern Rotokas alphabet is a Latin alphabet of the Rotokas people consisting of only 12 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet without diacritics: It is the smallest alphabet in use today. The majority of the Rotokas people are literate in their language. In the Rotokas writing system the vowel letters have their IPA values, though they may be written double, , for long vowels. The consonant letters have the following values In ethics and social sciences, value denotes the degree of importance of some thing or action, with the aim of determining which actions are best to do or what way is best to live ( normative ethics), or to describe the significance of different a ...: *''G'': or *''K'': *''P'': *''R'': , or *''S'': or (only occurs before ''I'') *''T'': (never occurs before ) *''V'': or Here is a sample of written Rotokas: : :"The old woman's eyes are shut." References Latin alphabets {{latin-script-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latin-script Alphabet
A Latin-script alphabet (Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet) is an alphabet that uses Letter (alphabet), letters of the Latin script. The 21-letter archaic Latin alphabet and the 23-letter classical Latin alphabet belong to the oldest of this group. The 26-letter modern Latin alphabet is the newest of this group. Encoding The 26-letter ISO basic Latin alphabet (adopted from the earlier ASCII) contains the 26 letters of the English alphabet. To handle the many other alphabets also derived from the classical Latin one, ISO and other telecommunications groups "extended" the ISO basic Latin multiple times in the late 20th century. More recent international standards (e.g. Unicode) include those that achieved ISO adoption. Key types of differences Apart from alphabets for modern spoken languages, there exist phonetic alphabets and spelling alphabets in use derived from Latin script letters. Historical languages may also have used (or are now studied using) alphabets that are deri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English Alphabet
Modern English is written with a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 Letter (alphabet), letters, with each having both uppercase and lowercase forms. The word ''alphabet'' is a Compound (linguistics), compound of ''alpha'' and ''beta'', the names of the first two letters in the Greek alphabet. The earliest Old English writing during the 5th century used a runic alphabet known as the Anglo-Saxon futhorc, futhorc. The Old English Latin alphabet was adopted from the 7th century onward—and over the following centuries, various letters entered and fell out of use. By the 16th century, the present set of 26 letters had largely stabilised: There are 5 vowel letters and 19 consonant letters—as well as Y and W, which may function as either type. Written English has a large number of Digraph (orthography), digraphs, such as , , , , and . Diacritics are generally not used to write native English words, which is unusual among orthographies used to write the languages of Eu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ISO Basic Latin Alphabet
The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard (beginning with ISO/IEC 646) for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets (uppercase and lowercase) of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and used widely in international communication. They are the same letters that comprise the current English alphabet. Since medieval times, they are also the same letters of the modern Latin alphabet. The order is also important for sorting words into alphabetical order. The two sets contain the following 26 letters each: History By the 1960s it became apparent to the computer and telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) encapsulated the Latin script in their ( ISO/IEC 646) 7-bit character-encoding standard. To achieve widespread acceptance, this encapsulation was based on popular usage. The standard was ba ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Languages Of Oceania
Native languages of Oceania fall into three major geographic groups: * The large Austronesian language family, with such languages as Malay ( Indonesian), Tagalog ( Filipino), and Polynesian languages such as Māori and Hawaiian * The various Aboriginal Australian language families, including the large Pama–Nyungan family * The various Papuan language families of New Guinea and neighbouring islands, including the large Trans–New Guinea family Contact between Austronesian and Papuan resulted in several instances in mixed languages such as Maisin. Non-indigenous languages include: * English in Australia, Hawaii, New Zealand, and other territories * French in French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, and Wallis and Futuna *Hindi in Fiji * Japanese in Palau * Spanish in Easter Island, Micronesia and Guam There are also creoles formed from the interaction of Malay or the colonial languages with indigenous languages, such as Tok Pisin, Bislama, Pijin, various Mal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Languages Of The Americas
The Americas, sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North America and South America.'' Webster's New World College Dictionary'', 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Cleveland, Ohio. When viewed as a single continent, the Americas or America is the 2nd largest continent by area after Asia, and is the 3rd largest continent by population. The Americas make up most of the land in Earth's Western Hemisphere and comprise the New World. Along with their associated islands, the Americas cover 8% of Earth's total surface area and 28.4% of its land area. The topography is dominated by the American Cordillera, a long chain of mountains that runs the length of the west coast. The flatter eastern side of the Americas is dominated by large river basins, such as the Amazon, St. Lawrence River–Great Lakes, Mississippi, and La Plata basins. Since the Americas extend from north to south, the climate and ecology vary widely, from the arctic tundra of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Languages Of Africa
The number of languages natively spoken in Africa is variously estimated (depending on the delineation of language vs. dialect) at between 1,250 and 2,100, and by some counts at over 3,000. Nigeria alone has over 500 languages (according to SIL Ethnologue), one of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in the world. The languages of Africa belong to many distinct language families, among which the largest are: * Niger–Congo, which include the large Atlantic-Congo and Bantu branches in West, Central, Southeast and Southern Africa. * Afroasiatic languages are spread throughout Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and parts of the Sahel. * Saharan, Nilotic and Central Sudanic languages (previously grouped under the hypothetical Nilo-Saharan macro-family), are present in East Africa and Sahel. * Austronesian languages are spoken in Madagascar and parts of the Comoros. * Khoe–Kwadi languages are spoken mostly in Namibia and Botswana. *Indo-Eu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
