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Khengkha
The Khengkha language (Dzongkha ྨཕགལཔམཕ), or Kheng, is an East Bodish language spoken by ~40,000 native speakers worldwide, in the Zhemgang, Trongsa, and Mongar districts of south–central Bhutan. Classification Khengkha is a dialect found in the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Khengkha is part of the larger branch of Sino-Tibetan language family but falls into the subcategories of: Tibetio-Burman, Western Tubeto-Burman, Bodish, East Bodish, Bumthang, and Khengkha. Language codes ISO 639-3 xkf Glotolog khen1241 Geographical distribution Khengkha is an East Bodish language spoken in the south-central districts of Bhutan. Khengkha is mainly found in the Sarpang district but can also be found in southwest Mongar district, rural areas in southeast Trongsa district and in Zhemgang district. Dialects The three main dialects in Bumthang district are Bumthap (Lower Kheng), Khempa (Middle Kheng), and Kurtop (Upper Kheng). Comprehension between the three dia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bumthang District
Bumthang District (Dzongkha: བུམ་ཐང་རྫོང་ཁག་; Wylie: ''Bum-thang rzong-khag'') is one of the 20 dzongkhag (districts) comprising Bhutan. It is the most historic dzongkhag if the number of ancient temples and sacred sites is counted. Bumthang consists of the four mountain valleys of Ura, Chumey, Tang and Choekhor ("Bumthang"), although occasionally the entire district is referred to as Bumthang Valley. ''Bumthang'' directly translates as "beautiful field" – ''thang'' means field or flat place, and ''bum'' is said be an abbreviation of either ''bumpa'' (a vessel for holy water, thus describing the shape and nature of the valley), or simply ''bum'' ("girl," indicating this is the valley of beautiful girls). The name is said to have arisen after the construction of Jambay Lhakhang. Economy Bumthang farms yield buckwheat, dairy products, honey, apples, potato, rice, woolen products and many other products. Bumthang is rich in producing wheat, buc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zhemgang District
Zhemgang District (Dzongkha: གཞམས་སྒང་རྫོང་ཁག་; Wylie transliteration: ''Gzhams-sgang rdzong-khag''; previously "Shemgang"), is one of the 20 dzongkhags (districts) comprising Bhutan. It is bordered by Sarpang, Trongsa, Bumthang, Mongar and Pemagatshel Districts, and borders Assam in India to the south. The administrative center of the district is Zhemgang. Languages The dominant language in Zhemgang is Khengkha. Historically, Khengkha and its speakers have had close contact with speakers of Kurtöpkha, Nupbikha, and Bumthangkha to the north, to the extent that they may be considered part of a wider collection of "Bumthang languages." The term Ngalop may subsume several related linguistic and cultural groups, such as the Kheng people and speakers of Bumthang language. S.R. Chakravarty asserts that Kheng are one of the earliest inhabitants that language spread upwards from Kheng into Bumthang and Kurtöp. By all accounts the Kheng are more ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Trongsa District
Trongsa District (Dzongkha: ཀྲོང་གསར་རྫོང་ཁག་; Wylie transliteration: ''Krong-gsar rdzong-khag'') is one of the districts of Bhutan. It is the most central district of Bhutan and the geographic centre of Bhutan is located within it at Trongsa Dzong. Languages Trongsa is a linguistically diverse district. In the north and east inhabitants speak Bumthangkha, and in the extreme southeast Khengkha is spoken. Nyenkha is spoken in the western half of the district, straddling the border with Wangdue Phodrang District. To the north, along and across the same border, live speakers of Lakha. In the extreme south, the national language Dzongkha is spoken. Across the mid-south, tiny communities of autochthonous 'Olekha (Black Mountain Monpa) speakers have all but disappeared. Historically, Bumthangkha and its speakers have had close contact with speakers of Kurtöpkha, Mangduepikha and Khengkha, nearby languages of central and eastern Bhutan, to the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kheng People
The Kheng people are found primarily in the Zhemgang, Trongsa, Bumthang, Dagana, and Mongar Districts of central Bhutan. They speak the Kheng language, a member of the extended Tibetan language family belonging to the East Bodish languages group; it is mutually intelligible with the Bumthang language and Kurtöp language to the north. The Kheng people are ethnolinguistically same as the Bumthang people and Kurtöp people of central Bhutan and are more closely related to Ngalop people of western Bhutan than to their neighbors in eastern Bhutan, who are primarily Sharchops and speak Tshangla language. SIL International estimates there are 50,000 Kheng speakers as of 2009. Like most of Bhutan, the people living in the Kheng areas are devoted followers of Tibetan Buddhism, particularly of the Nyingma tradition. The cultural practices of people of central Bhutan typically mirror those of the dominant Ngalop people culture of the country. The term "Ngalop" may subsume sev ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mongar District
Mongar District (Dzongkha: མོང་སྒར་རྫོང་ཁག་; Wylie: ''Mong-sgar rdzong-khag'') is one of the 20 dzongkhags (districts) comprising Bhutan. Mongar is the fastest-developing dzongkhag in eastern Bhutan. A regional hospital has been constructed and the region is bustling with many economic activities. Mongar is noted for its lemon grass, a plant that can be used to produce an essential oil. It also has a hydroelectric power-plant on the Kuri Chhu river. Mongar is notable for having the longest work time in all the dzongkhags of Bhutan. Languages Mongar is home to a variety of Bhutanese languages and dialects. In the east, the East Bodish Tshangla (Sharchopkha) is the dominant language, also used as a regional ''lingua franca''. Central Mongar is the only region where the East Bodish Chali language is spoken, by about at total of 8,200 people in Wangmakhar, Gorsum and Tormazhong villages, mainly in and around Chhali Gewog on the east bank of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bhutan
Bhutan (; dz, འབྲུག་ཡུལ་, Druk Yul ), officially the Kingdom of Bhutan,), is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is situated in the Eastern Himalayas, between China in the north and India in the south. A mountainous country, Bhutan is known as "Druk Yul," or "Land of the Thunder Dragon". Nepal and Bangladesh are located near Bhutan but do not share a land border. The country has a population of over 727,145 and territory of and ranks 133rd in terms of land area and 160th in population. Bhutan is a Constitutional Democratic Monarchy with King as head of state and Prime Minister as head of government. Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism is the state religion and the Je Khenpo is the head of state religion. The subalpine Himalayan mountains in the north rise from the country's lush subtropical plains in the south. In the Bhutanese Himalayas, there are peaks higher than above sea level. Gangkhar Puensum is Bhutan's highest peak and is the high ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stop Consonant
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lips (, ), or glottis (). Plosives contrast with nasals, where the vocal tract is blocked but airflow continues through the nose, as in and , and with fricatives, where partial occlusion impedes but does not block airflow in the vocal tract. Terminology The terms ''stop, occlusive,'' and ''plosive'' are often used interchangeably. Linguists who distinguish them may not agree on the distinction being made. The terms refer to different features of the consonant. "Stop" refers to the airflow that is stopped. "Occlusive" refers to the articulation, which occludes (blocks) the vocal tract. "Plosive" refers to the release burst (plosion) of the consonant. Some object to the use of "plosive" for inaudibly released stops, which may then instead ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nasal Consonant
In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast majority of consonants are oral consonants. Examples of nasals in English are , and , in words such as ''nose'', ''bring'' and ''mouth''. Nasal occlusives are nearly universal in human languages. There are also other kinds of nasal consonants in some languages. Definition Nearly all nasal consonants are nasal occlusives, in which air escapes through the nose but not through the mouth, as it is blocked (occluded) by the lips or tongue. The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound. Rarely, non-occlusive consonants may be nasalized. Most nasals are voiced, and in fact, the nasal sounds and are among the most common sounds cross-linguistically. Voiceless nasals occur in a few languages such as Burmese, Welsh, Icelandic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voiceless
In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, it is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word phonation implies voicing and that voicelessness is the lack of phonation. The International Phonetic Alphabet has distinct letters for many voiceless and modally voiced pairs of consonants (the obstruents), such as . Also, there are diacritics for voicelessness, and , which is used for letters with a descender. Diacritics are typically used with letters for prototypically voiced sounds, such as vowels and sonorant consonants: . In Russian use of the IPA, the voicing diacritic may be turned for voicelessness, e.g. . Voiceless vowels and other sonorants Sonorants are sounds such as vowels and nasals that are voiced in most of the world's languages. However, in some languages sonorants may be voiceless, usually allophonically. For example, the Japanese ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Velar Consonant
Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (known also as the velum). Since the velar region of the roof of the mouth is relatively extensive and the movements of the dorsum are not very precise, velars easily undergo assimilation, shifting their articulation back or to the front depending on the quality of adjacent vowels. They often become automatically ''fronted'', that is partly or completely palatal before a following front vowel, and ''retracted'', that is partly or completely uvular before back vowels. Palatalised velars (like English in ''keen'' or ''cube'') are sometimes referred to as palatovelars. Many languages also have labialized velars, such as , in which the articulation is accompanied by rounding of the lips. There are also labial–velar consonants, which are doubly articulated at the velum and at the lips, such as . This distinction disappears with the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aspirated Consonant
In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most South Asian languages (including Indian) and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive. In dialects with aspiration, to feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say ''spin'' and then ''pin'' . One should either feel a puff of air or see a flicker of the candle flame with ''pin'' that one does not get with ''spin''. Transcription In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), aspirated consonants are written using the symbols for voiceless consonants followed by the aspiration modifier letter , a superscript form of the symbol for the voiceless glottal fric ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voice (phonetics)
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts: *Voicing can refer to the ''articulatory process'' in which the vocal folds vibrate, its primary use in phonetics to describe phones, which are particular speech sounds. *It can also refer to a classification of speech sounds that tend to be associated with vocal cord vibration but may not actually be voiced at the articulatory level. That is the term's primary use in phonology: to describe phonemes; while in phonetics its primary use is to describe phones. For example, voicing accounts for the difference between the pair of sounds associated with the English letters "s" and "z". The two sounds are transcribed as and to distinguish them from the English letters, which have several possible pronunciatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
