Portal:Language/Language topic

Please do not add new items here. Nominate a language of the month here.

/December 2005

a e i o u

vowels

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by an open configuration of the vocal tract where there is no build-up of air pressure above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, which are characterized by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tract. The additional requirement is that vowels function as syllabic units: it is this criterion that distinguishes vowels from semivowels (and approximants, which in some languages may be slightly more constricted). Find out more...

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/January 2006

Thou is a second person singular pronoun of the English language. Thou is the nominative case; the oblique/objective (functioning as both accusative and dative) is thee, and the genitive is thy or thine.

In modern English thou continues to be used only in some of the regional dialects of England, some religious contexts (referring to God when capitalized) and in certain specific phrases, e.g. "holier than thou", "fare thee well". Otherwise, its contemporary use is an archaism. Find out more...

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/May 2006

Robert Lowth was the first grammarian to prohibit the split infinitive in English

A split infinitive is a construction in the English language made by inserting an adverb or adverbial phrase between "to" and a verb in its infinitive form. One famous example is from the science fiction series Star Trek: "To boldly go where no man has gone before." Here, the infinitive verb form of "go" is "to go", and the adverb "boldly" has been inserted, creating a split infinitive. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some grammatical authorities argued that split infinitives should not be allowed in English, by an analogy with Latin, where they are usually impossible. Most authorities from the last 100 years, however, agree that this rule was mistaken, and indeed that splitting an infinitive can sometimes reduce ambiguity. Find out more...

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/June 2006

Stuttering is a speech disorder in which the normal flow of speech is frequently disrupted by repetitions (sounds, syllables, words, or phrases), pauses, and prolongations that differ both in frequency and severity from those of normally fluent individuals. The term stuttering is most commonly associated with the involuntary repetition, but it also encompasses the abnormal hesitation or pausing before speech, referred to by stutterers as blocks, and the prolongation of certain sounds, usually vowels. Much of what constitutes “stuttering” cannot be observed by the listener; this includes such things as sound and word fears, situational fears, anxiety, tension, shame, and a feeling of "loss of control" during speech. The emotional state of the individual who stutters in response to the stuttering often constitutes the most difficult aspect of the disorder. Find out more...

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/July 2006

An alphabet is a complete standardized set of letters — basic written symbols — each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past. There are other systems of writing such as logographies, in which each symbol represents a morpheme, or word, and syllabaries, in which each symbol represents a syllable. Find out more...

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/August 2006

Vulgar Latin (in Latin, sermo vulgaris, "common speech") is a blanket term covering the vernacular dialects of the Latin language spoken mostly in the western provinces of the Roman Empire until those dialects, diverging still further, evolved into the early Romance languages. This spoken Latin differed from the literary language of classical Latin in its pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. Find out more...

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/September 2006

The Sanskrit language (संस्कृतं saṃskṛtam, संस्कृता वाक् saṃskṛtā vāk) is a classical language of India, a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and one of the 22 official languages of India. Sanskrit is also known as "The Mother of all Languages", although it, like Latin, Greek and Persian, actually descends from Proto-Indo-European (PIE). It has a position in India and Southeast Asia similar to that of Latin and Greek in Europe. The oldest type of Sanskrit, called Vedic Sanskrit, is the language of the Vedas, the oldest known scriptures in Hinduism.

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/October 2006

A split infinitive is a grammatical construction in the English language where a word or phrase, usually an adverb or adverbial phrase, occurs between the marker to and the bare infinitive (uninflected) form of the verb. The construction is particularly notable because of some controversy (see below) as to whether it is "grammatically correct". Descriptively speaking, split infinitives are common in most varieties of English. However, their status as part of the standard language is controversial. In the 19th century, some grammatical authorities sought to introduce a prescriptive rule that split infinitives should not be used in English. Find out more...

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/November 2006

Language timing is the rhythmic quality of a particular type of speech, in particular how syllables are distributed across time. There are two types of language timing: stress timing and syllable timing. If a language has a simple syllable structure with few consonants per syllable (such as Spanish and French), the language will usually have a syllable-timed rhythm. However, if a language has complex syllables with consonant clusters, (such as the syllables in English and Russian) the language will probably have an alternating stress-timed rhythm. Find out more...

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/December 2006

Olmec hieroglyphs (or Olmec script) refers to the putative writing system associated with the Olmec archaeological culture which flourished in the Gulf Coast region of Mexico, ca. 1250–400 BCE. The evidence for Olmec writing is based mainly on a single inscription on a stone tablet, which was recovered from an Olmec archaeological site in the late 1990s. Details of the find (dubbed the "Cascajal block") were published by researchers in the 15 September 2006 issue of the journal Science. Find out more...

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/January 2007

A sign language (also signed language) is a language which uses manual communication instead of sound to convey meaning - simultaneously combining handshapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to express fluidly a speaker's thoughts. Sign languages commonly develop in deaf communities, which can include interpreters and friends and families of deaf people as well as people who are deaf or hard of hearing themselves. They are also used by people with speech impairments such as Aphasia. When people using different sign languages meet, communication is significantly easier than when people of different oral languages meet. However, contrary to popular belief, sign language is not universal. Wherever communities of deaf people exist, sign languages develop, but as with oral languages, these vary from region to region. Find out more...

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/February 2007

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation devised by linguists. It is intended to provide a standardized, accurate and unique way of representing the sounds of any spoken language, and is used, often on a day-to-day basis, by linguists, speech pathologists and therapists, foreign language teachers, lexicographers, and translators. In its unextended form (as of 2005) it has approximately 107 base symbols and 55 modifiers. Find out more...

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/March 2007

In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) to reflect grammatical (that is, relational) information, such as gender, tense, number or person. The concept of a "word" independent of the different inflections is called a lexeme, and the form of a word that is considered to have no or minimal inflection is called a lemma. In English many nouns are inflected for number with the inflectional plural affix -s (as in "dog" → "dog-s"), and most English verbs are inflected for tense with the inflectional past tense affix -ed (as in "call" → "call-ed"). Find out more...

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/April 2007

日本語文法 (Japanese grammar)

The grammar of the Japanese language has a highly regular agglutinative verb morphology, with both productive and fixed elements. Typologically, its most prominent feature is topic creation: Japanese is neither topic-prominent, nor subject-prominent; indeed, it is common for sentences to have distinct topics and subjects. Grammatically, Japanese is an SOV dependent-marking language, with verbs always constrained to the sentence-final position, except in some rhetorical and poetic usage. The word order is fairly free as long as the order of dependent-head is maintained among all constituents: the modifier or relative clause precedes the modified noun, the adverb precedes the modified verb, the genitive nominal precedes the possessed nominal, and so forth. Thus, Japanese is a strongly left-branching language; to contrast, Romance languages like Spanish are strongly right-branching, and Germanic languages like English are weakly right-branching. Find out more...

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/September 2007

Well the topic for September for 2007 is . . . How in the heck do you do infintives. . . who knows huh lol'

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