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Ruhlen is the author of several books dealing with the languages of the world and their classifications. A Guide to the Languages of the World (1975) provides information on the phonological systems and classifications of 700 languages, prefaced by background information for linguists as well as non-linguists.
A first language (L1), native language, native tongue, or mother tongue is the first language a person has been exposed to from birth [1] or within the critical period. In some countries, the term native language or mother tongue refers to the language of one's ethnic group rather than the individual's actual first language. Generally, to state ...
Accented letters: â ç è é ê î ô û, rarely ë ï ; ù only in the word où, à only at the ends of a few words (including à).Never á í ì ó ò ú.; Angle quotation marks: « » (though "curly-Q" quotation marks are also used); dialogue traditionally indicated by means of dashes.
It presupposes a monogenetic origin of language, i.e. the derivation of all natural languages from a single origin, presumably at some time in the Middle Paleolithic period. As the predecessor of all extant languages spoken by modern humans ( Homo sapiens ), Proto-Human as hypothesised would not necessarily be ancestral to any hypothetical ...
This North American name is followed in a number of languages where the game is known by the local language's equivalent of "broken telephone", such in Malaysia as telefon rosak, in Israel as "טלפון שבור" - literally meaning "broken telephone" in Hebrew ("telefon shavur"), in Finland as rikkinäinen puhelin, and in Greece as halasmeno ...
Such languages might have had relatives in the past that have since disappeared without being documented, leaving them an orphaned language. One example is the Ket language spoken in central Siberia, which belongs to the wider Yeniseian language family; had it been discovered in recent times independently from its now extinct relatives, such as ...
Decipherment is possible with respect to languages and scripts. One can also study or try to decipher how spoken languages that no longer exist were once pronounced, or how living languages used to be pronounced in prior eras. Notable examples of decipherment include the decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts and the decipherment of cuneiform.
The reasons for the spelling variations are that some WDL dialects do not allow vowel-initial words—in these varieties the word begins with y; some orthographies use underlining (e.g. ṉ) to indicate a retroflex consonant, while others use a digraph (e.g. rn).