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Romanian Alphabet
The Romanian alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet used for writing the Romanian language. It is a modification of the classical Latin alphabet and consists of 31 letters, five of which (Ă, Â, Î, Ș, and Ț) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language: The letters Q (''chiu''), W (''dublu v''), and Y (''igrec'' or ''i grec,'' meaning "Greek i") were formally introduced in the Romanian alphabet in 1982, although they had been used earlier. They occur only in foreign words and their Romanian derivatives, such as ''quasar'', ''watt'', and ''yacht''. The letter ''K'', although relatively older, is also rarely used and appears only in proper names and international neologisms such as ''kilogram'', ''broker'', ''karate''. These four letters are still perceived as foreign, which explains their usage for stylistic purposes in words such as ''nomenklatură'' (normally ''nomenclatură'', meaning "nomenclature", but sometimes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllable, and logographic systems use characters to represent words, morphemes, or other semantic units. The first fully phonemic script, the Proto-Sinaitic script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is considered to be the first alphabet and is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and possibly Brahmic. It was created by Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in the Sinai Peninsula (as the Proto-Sinaitic script), by selecting a small number of hieroglyphs commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values of the Canaanite languages. However, Peter T. Daniels distinguishes an abugida, a set of graphemes that represent consonantal base let ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nomenklatura
The ''nomenklatura'' ( rus, номенклату́ра, p=nəmʲɪnklɐˈturə, a=ru-номенклатура.ogg; from la, nomenclatura) were a category of people within the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries who held various key administrative positions in the bureaucracy, running all spheres of those countries' activity: government, industry, agriculture, education, etc., whose positions were granted only with approval by the communist party of each country or region. Virtually all members of the nomenklatura were members of a communist party. Critics of Stalin, such as Milovan Đilas, critically defined them as a " new class". Richard Pipes, a Harvard historian, claimed that the nomenklatura system mainly reflected a continuation of the old Tsarist regime, as many former Tsarist officials or " careerists" joined the Bolshevik government during and after the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922. The ''nomenklatura'' formed a ''de facto'' elite of public powers in the f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Close Front Rounded Vowel
The close front rounded vowel, or high front 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 /y/, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is y. Across many languages, it is most commonly represented orthographically as (in German, Turkish, Estonian and Hungarian) or (in Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Albanian) but also as (in French and Dutch and the Kernewek Kemmyn standard of Cornish); / (in the romanization of various Asian languages); (in Cyrillic-based writing systems such as that for Chechen); or (in Cyrillic-based writing systems such as that for Tatar). Short and long occurred in pre-Modern Greek. In the Attic and Ionic dialects of Ancient Greek, front developed by fronting from back around the 6th to 7th century BC. A little later, the diphthong when not before another vowel monophthongized and merged with long . In Koine Greek, the diphthong chang ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Comma (punctuation)
The comma is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark () in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline of the text. Some typefaces render it as a small line, slightly curved or straight, but inclined from the vertical. Other fonts give it the appearance of a miniature filled-in figure on the baseline. The comma is used in many contexts and languages, mainly to separate parts of a sentence such as clauses, and items in lists mainly when there are three or more items listed. The word ''comma'' comes from the Greek (), which originally meant a cut-off piece, specifically in grammar, a short clause. A comma-shaped mark is used as a diacritic in several writing systems and is considered distinct from the cedilla. In Byzantine and modern copies of Ancient Greek, the " rough" and "smooth breathings" () appear above the letter. In Latvian, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alveolar Tap
Alveolus (; pl. alveoli, adj. alveolar) is a general anatomical term for a concave cavity or pit. Uses in anatomy and zoology * Pulmonary alveolus, an air sac in the lungs ** Alveolar cell or pneumocyte ** Alveolar duct ** Alveolar macrophage * Mammary alveolus, a milk sac in the mammary glands * Alveolar gland * Dental alveolus, also known as "tooth socket", a socket in the jaw that holds the roots of teeth ** Alveolar ridge, the jaw structure that contains the dental alveoli ** Alveolar canals ** Alveolar process * Arteries: ** Superior alveolar artery (other) *** Anterior superior alveolar arteries *** Posterior superior alveolar artery ** Inferior alveolar artery * Nerves: ** Anterior superior alveolar nerve ** Middle superior alveolar nerve ** Inferior alveolar nerve Uses in botany, microbiology and related disciplines * Surface cavities or pits, such as on the stem of Myrmecodia species * Pits on honeycombed surfaces such as receptacles of many angiosperms * ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alveolar Trill
The voiced alveolar trill is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar trills is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is r. It is commonly called the rolled R, rolling R, or trilled R. Quite often, is used in phonemic transcriptions (especially those found in dictionaries) of languages like English and German that have rhotic consonants that are not an alveolar trill. That is partly for ease of typesetting and partly because is the letter used in the orthographies of such languages. In many Indo-European languages, a trill may often be reduced to a single vibration in unstressed positions. In Italian, a simple trill typically displays only one or two vibrations, while a geminate trill will have three or more. Languages where trills always have multiple vibrations include Albanian, Spanish, Cypriot Greek, and a number of Armenian and Portuguese dialects ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Palatalization (phonetics)
In phonetics, palatalization (, also ) or palatization is a way of pronouncing a consonant in which part of the tongue is moved close to the hard palate. Consonants pronounced this way are said to be palatalized and are transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet by affixing the letter ⟨ʲ⟩ to the base consonant. Palatalization cannot minimally distinguish words in most dialects of English, but it may do so in languages such as Russian, Mandarin, and Irish. Types In technical terms, palatalization refers to the secondary articulation of consonants by which the body of the tongue is raised toward the hard palate and the alveolar ridge during the articulation of the consonant. Such consonants are phonetically palatalized. "Pure" palatalization is a modification to the articulation of a consonant, where the middle of the tongue is raised, and nothing else. It may produce a laminal articulation of otherwise apical consonants such as and . Phonetically palatalized cons ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Close Central Unrounded Vowel
The close central unrounded vowel, or high central unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound used in some languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , namely the lower-case letter ''i'' with a horizontal bar. Both the symbol and the sound are commonly referred to as barred i. Occasionally, this vowel is transcribed ( centralized ) or (centralized ). The close central unrounded vowel is the vocalic equivalent of the rare post-palatal approximant . Some languages feature the near-close central unrounded vowel (), which is slightly lower. It is most often transcribed in IPA with and , but other transcriptions such as and are also possible. In many British dictionaries, this vowel has been transcribed , which captures its height; in the American tradition it is more often , which captures its centrality, or , which captures both. is also used in a number of other publications, such as ''Accents of English'' by John C. Wells. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Circumflex
The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around"a translation of the el, περισπωμένη (). The circumflex in the Latin script is chevron-shaped (), while the Greek circumflex may be displayed either like a tilde () or like an inverted breve (). For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin alphabet, precomposed characters are available. In English, the circumflex, like other diacritics, is sometimes retained on loanwords that used it in the original language (for example, '' crème brûlée''). In mathematics and statistics, the circumflex diacritic is sometimes used to denote a function and is called a '' hat operator''. A free-standing version of the circumflex symbol, , has become known as '' caret'' and has acquired special uses, particularly in co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Breve
A breve (, less often , neuter form of the Latin "short, brief") is the diacritic mark ˘, shaped like the bottom half of a circle. As used in Ancient Greek, it is also called , . It resembles the caron (the wedge or in Czech, in Slovak) but is rounded, in contrast to the angular tip of the caron. In many forms of Latin, ˘ is used for a shorter, softer variant of a vowel, such as "Ĭ", where the sound is nearly identical to the English /i/. (See: Latin IPA) Length The breve sign indicates a short vowel, as opposed to the macron ¯, which indicates long vowels, in academic transcription. It is often used that way in dictionaries and textbooks of Latin, Ancient Greek, Tuareg and other languages. However, there is a frequent convention of indicating only the long vowels. It is then understood that a vowel with no macron is short. If the vowel length is unknown, a breve as well as a macron are used in historical linguistics (Ā̆ ā̆ Ē̆ ē̆ Ī̆ ī̆ Ō ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semivowel
In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel, glide or semiconsonant is a sound that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary, rather than as the nucleus of a syllable. Examples of semivowels in English are the consonants ''y'' and ''w'', in ''yes'' and ''west'', respectively. Written in IPA, ''y'' and ''w'' are near to the vowels ''ee'' and ''oo'' in ''seen'' and ''moon,'' written in IPA. The term ''glide'' may alternatively refer to any type of transitional sound, not necessarily a semivowel. Classification Semivowels form a subclass of approximants. Although "semivowel" and "approximant" are sometimes treated as synonymous, most authors use the term "semivowel" for a more restricted set; there is no universally agreed-upon definition, and the exact details may vary from author to author. For example, do not consider the labiodental approximant to be a semivowel, while proposes that it should be considered one. In the International Phonet ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Allophone
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in ''stop'' ) and the aspirated form (as in ''top'' ) are allophones for the phoneme , while these two are considered to be different phonemes in some languages such as Thai. On the other hand, in Spanish, (as in ''dolor'' ) and (as in ''nada'' ) are allophones for the phoneme , while these two are considered to be different phonemes in English. The specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable from the phonetic context, with such allophones being called positional variants, but some allophones occur in free variation. Replacing a sound by another allophone of the same phoneme usually does not change the meaning of a word, but the result may sound non-native or even unintelligible. Native speakers of a given langu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
