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A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός, from διακρίνω. The word diacritic is a noun, though it is sometimes used in an attributive sense, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritics, such as the acute and grave, are often called accents. Diacritics may appear above or below a letter or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters.
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers. All Germanic languages are derived from Proto-Germanic, spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia.
A macron is a diacritical mark: it is a straight bar (¯) placed above a letter, usually a vowel. Its name derives from Ancient Greek μακρόν (makrón) "long", since it was originally used to mark long or heavy syllables in Greco-Roman metrics. It now more often marks a long vowel. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the macron is used to indicate a mid-tone; the sign for a long vowel is instead a modified triangular colon ⟨ː⟩.
The Romance languages are the modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin between the third and eighth centuries. They are a subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language family. The six most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan. Italian is the closest national language to Latin, followed by Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese, and the most divergent being French. Taking into account all the Romance languages, including national and regional languages, Sardinian, Italian and Spanish are together the three least differentiated from Latin and Occitan is closer to Latin than French. However, all Romance languages are closer to each other than to classical Latin.
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (length). They are usually voiced and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and stress.
In phonology, vowel harmony is an assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain - typically a phonological word - have to be members of the same natural class. Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning that the affected vowels do not need to be immediately adjacent, and there can be intervening segments between the affected vowels. Generally one vowel will trigger a shift in other vowels, either progressively or regressively, within the domain, such that the affected vowels match the relevant feature of the trigger vowel. Common phonological features that define the natural classes of vowels involved in vowel harmony include vowel backness, vowel height, nasalization, roundedness, and advanced and retracted tongue root.
The circumflex is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from Latin: circumflexus "bent around"—a translation of the Greek: 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.
When used as a diacritic mark, the term dot is usually reserved for the interpunct, or to the glyphs 'combining dot above' ( ◌̇ ) and 'combining dot below' ( ◌̣ ) which may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in use in Central European languages and Vietnamese.
The Erzya language, or Erzian, is spoken by about 37,000 people in the northern, eastern and north-western parts of the Republic of Mordovia and adjacent regions of Nizhny Novgorod, Chuvashia, Penza, Samara, Saratov, Orenburg, Ulyanovsk, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan in Russia. A diaspora can also be found in Armenia, Estonia as well as in Kazakhstan and other states of Central Asia. Erzya is currently written using Cyrillic with no modifications to the variant used by the Russian language. In Mordovia, Erzya is co-official with Moksha and Russian.
A near-close vowel or a near-high vowel is any in a class of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a near-close vowel is that the tongue is positioned similarly to a close vowel, but slightly less constricted.
A mid vowel is any in a class of vowel sounds used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned midway between an open vowel and a close vowel.
A central vowel, formerly also known as a mixed vowel, is any in a class of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a central vowel is that the tongue is positioned halfway between a front vowel and a back vowel.
The Marshallese language (Marshallese: new orthography Kajin M̧ajeļ or old orthography Kajin Majōl, also known as Ebon, is a Micronesian language spoken in the Marshall Islands. The language is spoken by nearly all of the roughly 59,000 people in the Marshall Islands, making it the principal language of the country. There are also roughly 27,000 Marshallese residents living in the United States, nearly all of who speak Marshallese, as well as in other countries including Nauru.
Turkana is the language of the Turkana people of Kenya. It is spoken in northwestern Kenya, primarily in Turkana County, which lies west of Lake Turkana. It is one of the Eastern Nilotic languages, and is closely related to Karamojong, Jie and Teso of Uganda, to Toposa spoken in the extreme southeast of South Sudan, and to Nyangatom in the South Sudan/Ethiopia Omo valley borderland; these languages together form the cluster of Ateker Languages.
Dhatki, also known as Dhatti or Thari, is one of the Rajasthani languages of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. It is most closely related to Marwari.
Hajong is an Indo-Aryan language with a possible Tibeto-Burman language substratum. It is spoken by approximately 80,000 ethnic Hajongs across the northeast of the Indian subcontinent, specifically in the states of Assam, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, and West Bengal in present-day India, and the divisions of Mymensingh and Sylhet in present-day Bangladesh. It is written in Bengali-Assamese script and Latin script. It has many Sanskrit loanwords. The Hajongs originally spoke a Tibeto-Burman language, but it later mixed with Assamese and Bengali.
Ndrumbea, variously spelled Ndumbea, Dubea, Drubea and Païta, is a New Caledonian language that gave its name to the capital of New Caledonia, Nouméa, and the neighboring town of Dumbéa. It has been displaced to villages outside the capital, with fewer than a thousand speakers remaining. Gordon (1995) estimates that there may only be two or three hundred. The Dubea are the people; the language has been called Naa Dubea "language of Dubea".
Ngurimi (Ngoreme) is a Bantu language of Tanzania. Ngoreme is spoken in the Serengeti District of the Mara Region of north-west Tanzania by some 55, 000 people. There are two main dialects of Ngoreme - a northern dialect and a southern dialect - which maintain mutual intelligibility.
Siar, also known as Lak, Lamassa, or Likkilikki, is an Austronesian language spoken in New Ireland Province in the southern island point of Papua New Guinea. Lak is in the Patpatar-Tolai sub-group, which then falls under the New Ireland-Tolai group in the Western Oceanic language, a sub-group within the Austronesian family. The Siar people keep themselves sustained and nourished by fishing and gardening. The native people call their language ep warwar anun dat, which means "our language".
References
- ↑ Maiwala at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
- ↑ Nagai 2003:126