Standard Tibetan
Lhasa Tibetan or Standard Tibetan is a standardized dialect of Tibetan spoken by the people of Lhasa, the capital of the Tibetan Autonomous Region. It is an official language of the Tibet Autonomous Region. In the traditional "three-branched" classification of the Tibetic languages, the Lhasa dialect belongs to the Central Tibetan branch (the other two being Khams Tibetan and Amdo Tibetan). In terms of mutual intelligibility, speakers of Khams Tibetan are able to communicate at a basic level with Lhasa Tibetan, while Amdo speakers cannot. Both Lhasa Tibetan and Khams Tibetan evolved to become tonal and do not preserve the word-initial consonant clusters, which makes them very far from Classical Tibetan, especially when compared to the more conservative Amdo Tibetan. Registers Like many languages, Lhasa Tibetan has a variety of language registers: * ( Wylie: , literally " demotic language"): the vernacular speech. * ( Wylie: , "honorifics or deference, courtesy"): the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Lhasa
Lhasa, officially the Chengguan District of Lhasa City, is the inner urban district of Lhasa (city), Lhasa City, Tibet Autonomous Region, Southwestern China. Lhasa is the second most populous urban area on the Tibetan Plateau after Xining and, at an altitude of , Lhasa is one of the List of highest large cities, highest cities in the world. The city has been the religious and administrative capital of Tibet since the mid-17th century. It contains many culturally significant Tibetan Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhist sites such as the Potala Palace, Jokhang Temple and Norbulingka Palaces. Toponymy Lhasa literally translates to "place of gods" ( , god; , place) in the Lhasa Tibetan, Tibetan language. Chengguan literally translates to "urban gateway" ( zh, s=城关, p=Chéngguān) in the Chinese language. Ancient Tibetan documents and inscriptions demonstrate that the place was called Rasa (), which meant "goat's place", as it was a herding site. The name was changed to Lhasa, which ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Mutual Intelligibility
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intelligibility is sometimes used to distinguish languages from dialects, although sociolinguistic factors are often also used. Intelligibility between varieties can be asymmetric; that is, speakers of one variety may be able to better understand another than vice versa. An example of this is the case between Afrikaans and Dutch. It is generally easier for Dutch speakers to understand Afrikaans than for Afrikaans speakers to understand Dutch. In a dialect continuum, neighbouring varieties are mutually intelligible, but differences mount with distance, so that more widely separated varieties may not be mutually intelligible. Intelligibility can be partial, as is the case with Azerbaijani and Turkish, or significant, as is the case with Bul ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Constituent (linguistics)
In syntactic analysis, a constituent is a word or a group of words that function as a single unit within a hierarchical structure. The constituent structure of sentences is identified using ''tests for constituents''. These tests apply to a portion of a sentence, and the results provide evidence about the constituent structure of the sentence. Many constituents are phrases. A phrase is a sequence of one or more words (in some theories two or more) built around a head lexical item and working as a unit within a sentence. A word sequence is shown to be a phrase/constituent if it exhibits one or more of the behaviors discussed below. The analysis of constituent structure is associated mainly with phrase structure grammars, although dependency grammars also allow sentence structure to be broken down into constituent parts. Tests for constituents in English Tests for constituents are diagnostics used to identify sentence structure. There are numerous tests for constituents that are ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Subject–object–verb Word Order
In linguistic typology, a subject–object–verb (SOV) language is one in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence always or usually appear in that order. If English were SOV, "Sam apples ate" would be an ordinary sentence, as opposed to the actual Standard English "Sam ate apples" which is subject–verb–object (SVO). The term is often loosely used for ergative languages like Adyghe and Basque that in fact have agents instead of subjects. Incidence Among natural languages with a word order preference, SOV is the most common type (followed by subject–verb–object; the two types account for more than 87% of natural languages with a preferred order). Languages that have SOV structure include * most Indo-Iranian languages ( Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindustani, Kurdish, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Pāli, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Sindhi, Sinhala, Zaza) * Ainu * Akkadian * Armenian * Assyrian * Aymara * Basque * Burushaski * Cherokee * ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Sacred Language
A sacred language, liturgical language or holy language is a language that is cultivated and used primarily for religious reasons (like church service) by people who speak another, primary language in their daily lives. Some religions, or parts of them, regard the language of their sacred texts as in itself sacred. These include Ecclesiastical Latin in Roman Catholicism, Hebrew in Judaism, Arabic in Islam, Avestan in Zoroastrianism, Sanskrit in Hinduism, and Punjabi in Sikhism. By contrast Buddhism and Christian denominations outside of Catholicism do not generally regard their sacred languages as sacred in themselves. Concept A sacred language is often the language which was spoken and written in the society in which a religion's sacred texts were first set down; these texts thereafter become fixed and holy, remaining frozen and immune to later linguistic developments. (An exception to this is Lucumí, a ritual lexicon of the Cuban strain of the Santería religion, with no ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Literary Language
Literary language is the Register (sociolinguistics), register of a language used when writing in a formal, academic writing, academic, or particularly polite tone; when speaking or writing in such a tone, it can also be known as formal language. It may be the Standard language, standardized variety of a language. It can sometimes differ noticeably from the various spoken language, spoken Variety (linguistics), lects, but the difference between literary and non-literary forms is greater in some languages than in others. If there is a strong divergence between a written form and the spoken vernacular, the language is said to exhibit diglossia. The understanding of the term differs from one linguistic tradition to another and is dependent on the terminological conventions adopted. Literary English For much of its history, there has been a distinction in the English language between an elevated literary language (written) and a colloquialism, colloquial or vernacular language (sp ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Honorifics (linguistics)
In linguistics, an honorific (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a grammar, grammatical or morphosyntactic form that encodes the relative social status of the participants of the conversation. Distinct from honorific, honorific titles, linguistic honorifics convey formality , social distance, politeness , humility , deference, or respect through the choice of an alternate form such as an affix, clitic, grammatical case, change in person or number, or an entirely different lexical item. A key feature of an honorific system is that one can convey the same message in both honorific and familiar forms—i.e., it is possible to say something like (as in an oft-cited example from Brown and Levinson) "The soup is hot" in a way that confers honor or deference on one of the participants of the conversation. Honorific speech is a type of social deixis, as an understanding of the context—in this case, the social status of the speaker relative to the other participants or by ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Demotic
Demotic may refer to: * Demotic Greek, the modern vernacular form of the Greek language * Demotic (Egyptian), an ancient Egyptian script and version of the language * Chữ Nôm Chữ Nôm (, ) is a logographic writing system formerly used to write the Vietnamese language. It uses Chinese characters to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words, with other words represented by new characters ..., the demotic script for writing Vietnamese See also * * Demos (other) * Domotics * Territorial nationalism {{disambiguation ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Wylie Transliteration
Wylie transliteration is a method for Transliteration, transliterating Tibetan script using only the letters available on a typical English-language typewriter. The system is named for the American scholar Turrell V. Wylie, who created the system and published it in a 1959 ''Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies'' article. It has subsequently become a standard transliteration scheme in Tibetan studies, especially in the United States. Any Tibetic languages, Tibetan language romanization scheme faces the dilemma of whether it should seek to accurately reproduce the sounds of spoken Tibetan or the spelling of written Tibetan. These differ widely, as Tibetan orthography became fixed in the 11th century, while pronunciation continued to language change, evolve, comparable to the English orthography and French orthography, which reflect late medieval pronunciation. Previous transcription schemes sought to split the difference with the result that they achieved neither goal perfectly. Wyl ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Register (sociolinguistics)
In sociolinguistics, a register is a Variety (linguistics), variety of language used for a particular purpose or particular communicative situation. For example, when speaking officially or in a public setting, an English language, English speaker may be more likely to follow Linguistic prescription, prescriptive norms for formal usage than in a casual setting, for example, by pronouncing words ending in ''-ing'' with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal (e.g., ''walking'' rather than ''walkin''), choosing words that are considered more formal, such as ''father'' vs. ''dad'' or ''child'' vs. ''kid'', and refraining from using words considered Nonstandard dialect, nonstandard, such as ''ain't'' and ''y'all''. As with other types of language variation, there tends to be a spectrum of registers rather than a discrete set of obviously distinct varieties—numerous registers can be identified, with no clear boundaries between them. Discourse categorization is a complex problem, a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Georgetown University
Georgetown University is a private university, private Jesuit research university in Washington, D.C., United States. Founded by Bishop John Carroll (archbishop of Baltimore), John Carroll in 1789, it is the oldest Catholic higher education, Catholic institution of higher education in the United States, the oldest university in Washington, D.C., and the nation's first University charter#Federal, federally chartered university. The university has eleven Undergraduate education, undergraduate and Postgraduate education, graduate schools. Its main campus, located in the Georgetown (Washington, D.C.), Georgetown historic neighborhood, is on a hill above the Potomac River and identifiable by Healy Hall, a National Historic Landmark. It is Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, classified among List_of_research_universities_in_the_United_States#Universities_classified_as_"R1:_Doctoral_Universities_–_Very_high_research_activity", "R1: Doctoral Universities – V ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |