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Voiced Retroflex Plosive
The voiced retroflex plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is d`. Like all the retroflex consonants, the IPA symbol is formed by adding a rightward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of a ''d'', the letter that is used for the corresponding alveolar consonant. Many South Asian languages, such as Hindi and Urdu, have a two-way contrast between plain and murmured (breathy voice) . Features Features of the voiced retroflex stop: Occurrence See also * African D * Index of phonetics articles A * Acoustic phonetics * Active articulator * Affricate * Airstream mechanism * Alexander John Ellis * Alexander Melville Bell * Alfred C. Gimson * Allophone * Alveolar approximant () * Alveolar click () * Alveolar consonant * Alveolar ej ... Notes References * * * * * * * * External links * {{IPA ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fon Language
Fon (, ) also known as Dahomean is the language of the Fon people. It belongs to the Gbe group within the larger Atlantic–Congo family. It is primarily spoken in Benin Republic, as well as in Nigeria and Togo by approximately 2.3 million speakers. Like the other Gbe languages, Fon is an isolating language with a SVO basic word order. Cultural and legal status In Benin, French is the official language, and Fon and other indigenous languages, including Yom and Yoruba, are classified as national languages. Dialects The standardized Fon language is part of the Fon cluster of languages inside the Eastern Gbe languages. Hounkpati B Christophe Capo groups Agbome, Kpase, Gun, Maxi and Weme (Ouémé) in the Fon dialect cluster, although other clusterings are suggested. Standard Fon is the primary target of language planning efforts in Benin, although separate efforts exists for Gun, Gen, and other languages of the country. Phonology Vowels Fon has seven oral vowel pho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ewe Language
Ewe (''Eʋe'' or ''Eʋegbe'' ) is a language spoken by approximately 5 million people in West Africa, mainly in Ghana and Togo. Ewe is part of a group of related languages commonly called the Gbe languages. The other major Gbe language is Fon, which is mainly spoken in Benin. Like many African languages, Ewe is tonal as well as a possible member of the Niger-Congo family. The German Africanist Diedrich Hermann Westermann published many dictionaries and grammars of Ewe and several other Gbe languages. Other linguists who have worked on Ewe and closely related languages include Gilbert Ansre (tone, syntax), Herbert Stahlke (morphology, tone), Nick Clements (tone, syntax), Roberto Pazzi (anthropology, lexicography), Felix K. Ameka (semantics, cognitive linguistics), Alan Stewart Duthie (semantics, phonetics), Hounkpati B. Capo (phonology, phonetics), Enoch Aboh (syntax), and Chris Collins (syntax). Dialects Some of the commonly named Ewe ('Vhe') dialects are ''Aŋ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
African Reference Alphabet
The African Reference Alphabet is a largely defunct continent-wide guideline for the creation of Latin alphabets for African languages. Two variants of the initial proposal (one in English and a second in French) were made at a 1978 UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger. They were based on the results of several earlier conferences on the harmonization of established Latin alphabets of individual languages. The 1978 conference recommended the use of single letters for speech sounds rather than of Digraph (orthography), letter sequences or of letters with diacritics. A substantial overhaul was proposed in 1982 but was rejected in a follow-up conference held in Niamey in 1984. Since then, continent-wide harmonization has been largely abandoned, because regional needs, practices and thus preferences differ greatly across Africa. Through the individual languages that were its basis, the African Reference Alphabet inherits from the Africa Alphabet, and like the latter uses ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aja Language (Niger-Congo)
The Aja language is a Gbe language spoken by the Aja people of Benin, Togo, Ghana, Nigeria and Gabon. In Gabon, they are mostly migrants. it is closely related to other Gbe languages The Gbe languages (pronounced ) form a cluster of about twenty related languages stretching across the area between eastern Ghana and western Nigeria. The total number of speakers of Gbe languages is between four and eight million. The most widel ... such as Ewe, Mina, Fon, and Phla Phera. Adja is the mother tribe from which the other Gbe people are descended. Phonology Consonants * Voiced consonants /, , / are heard as nasal sonorant sounds , when followed by a nasal vowel. * // is heard as a rhotic trill [] when after alveolar, retroflex or post-alveolar consonants. * Sounds // and // are heard as post-alveolar [], [] when preceding //. * Approximant sounds /, / may also be nasalized as [, ] when preceding or following nasal vowels. * Some linguists have also attested the nasal so ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
D With Dot Below
D, or d, is the fourth 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 ''dee'' (pronounced ), plural ''dees''. History The Semitic letter Dāleth may have developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are many different Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek and Latin, the letter represented ; in the Etruscan alphabet the letter was archaic but still retained. The equivalent Greek letter is delta, Δ. The minuscule (lower-case) form of 'd' consists of a lower-story left bowl and a stem ascender. It most likely developed by gradual variations on the majuscule (capital) form 'D', and is now composed as a stem with a full lobe to the right. In handwriting, it was common to start the arc to the left of the vertical stroke, resulting in a serif at the top of the arc. This serif was extended while the rest of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation for the sounds of speech. The IPA is used by linguists, lexicography, lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, speech–language pathology, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators. The IPA is designed to represent those qualities of speech that are part of lexical item, lexical (and, to a limited extent, prosodic) sounds in oral language: phone (phonetics), phones, Intonation (linguistics), intonation and the separation of syllables. To represent additional qualities of speechsuch as tooth wikt:gnash, gnashing, lisping, and sounds made with a cleft lip and cleft palate, cleft palatean extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet, extended set of symbols may be used ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
D With Stroke
Đ (lowercase: đ, Latin alphabet), known as crossed D or dyet, is a letter formed from the base character D, D/d overlaid with a bar (diacritic), crossbar. Crossing was used to create eth (ð), but eth has an uncial as its base whereas ''đ'' is based on the straight-backed roman ''d,'' like in the sámi language , Sámi languages and vietnamese language , Vietnamese. Crossed ''d'' is a letter in the alphabets of several languages and is used in linguistics as a voiced dental fricative. Appearance In the lowercase, the crossbar is usually drawn through the Ascender (typography), ascender, but when used as a phonetic symbol it may be preferred to draw it through the bowl (typography), bowl, in which case it is known as a barred ''d''. In some African languages' orthographies, such as that of Moro language, Moro, the barred ''d'' is preferred. In the uppercase, the crossbar normally crosses just the left stem, but in Vietnamese and Moro it may sometimes cross the entire le ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bassa Language
The Bassa language is a Kru language spoken by about 783,000 Bassa people in Liberia, Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone. Phonology Consonants * /ʄ/ can be heard as a glide intervocalically within compound words. * /ɡ͡b/ when followed by a nasal can be heard as . * /h/ only rarely occurs. Vowels Bassa alphabets It has an indigenous alphabet, Vah, first popularized by Thomas Flo Lewis, who has instigated publishing of limited materials in the language from the mid-1900s through the 1930s, with its height in the 1910s and 1920s. It has been reported that the alphabet was influenced by the Cherokee syllabary created by Sequoyah. The Vah alphabet has been described as one which, "like the system long in use among the Vai, consists of a series of phonetic characters standing for syllables." In fact, however, Vah is alphabetic. It includes 30 consonants, seven vowels, and five tones that are indicated by dots and lines inside each vowel. In the 1970s the United Bibl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Character (computing), characters and 168 script (Unicode), scripts used in various ordinary, literary, academic, and technical contexts. Unicode has largely supplanted the previous environment of a myriad of incompatible character sets used within different locales and on different computer architectures. The entire repertoire of these sets, plus many additional characters, were merged into the single Unicode set. Unicode is used to encode the vast majority of text on the Internet, including most web pages, and relevant Unicode support has become a common consideration in contemporary software development. Unicode is ultimately capable of encoding more than 1.1 million characters. The Unicode character repertoire is synchronized with Univers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Letter Case
Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally '' minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing systems that distinguish between the upper- and lowercase have two parallel sets of letters: each in the majuscule set has a counterpart in the minuscule set. Some counterpart letters have the same shape, and differ only in size (e.g. ), but for others the shapes are different (e.g., ). The two case variants are alternative representations of the same letter: they have the same name and pronunciation and are typically treated identically when sorting in alphabetical order. Letter case is generally applied in a mixed-case fashion, with both upper and lowercase letters appearing in a given piece of text for legibility. The choice of case is often denoted by the grammar of a language or by the conventions of a particular discipline. In ortho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Numeric Character Reference
A numeric character reference (NCR) is a common markup construct used in SGML and SGML-derived markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represents a single character. Since WebSgml, XML and HTML 4, the code points of the Universal Character Set (UCS) of Unicode are used. NCRs are typically used in order to represent characters that are not directly encodable in a particular document (for example, because they are international characters that do not fit in the 8-bit character set being used, or because they have special syntactic meaning in the language). When the document is interpreted by a markup-aware reader, each NCR is treated as if it were the character it represents. Examples In SGML, HTML, and XML, the following are all valid numeric character references for the Greek capital letter Sigma In SGML, HTML, and XML, the following are all valid numeric character references for the Latin capital letter AE In SG ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
