A New Orthography in Tera
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The Lexicographical Contribution to Welsh
Coping with an expanding vocabulary: the lexicographical contribution to Welsh Abstract The Welsh language, as a lesser-used language with English as an immediate neighbour, has inevitably borrowed much of its vocabulary from that language (or its precursors) as well as inheriting a considerable vocabulary from Latin via Brythonic. Welsh lexicography dates back to at least the 15th-century bardic glossaries and the first Welsh dictionary was printed in the mid-16th century. Most Welsh dictionaries are bilingual with either Latin or English, and Welsh lexicographers have been surprisingly influential in the development of the lexicon with many of their neologisms being adopted into the modern lexicon. Modern prescriptive lexicography and terminology have tended to promote what some linguists deride as a ‘purist’ approach but which has in fact proved to be a practical solution which has succeeded in expanding the vocabulary in a way acceptable to many speakers. Inevitably, since all are fully bilingual, Welsh speakers in Wales have continued to borrow vocabulary extensively from English. 1. Introduction Yr ydym wedi bod yn rhy selog o lawer, yn y dyddiau a fu, yn dyfeisio geiriau newydd am bob dim …, gan dybied mai iaith bur yw iaith a’i geiriau’n perthyn dim i eiriau’r un iaith arall. Ffolineb yw hynny: y mae gan bob iaith allu i fabwysiadu geiriau estronol yn eiriau iddi ei hun. Ac y mae yr iaith Gymraeg wedi mabwysiadu cannoedd o eiriau Lladin a geiriau Saesneg erioed, ac y maent yn eitha-geiriau Cymraeg erbyn hyn. Y prawf o air Cymraeg yw, a arferir ef gan y bobl ai peidio? os y gwneir, y mae yn air Cymraeg; os na wneir, nid yw. -
Some Principles of the Use of Macro-Areas Language Dynamics &A
Online Appendix for Harald Hammarstr¨om& Mark Donohue (2014) Some Principles of the Use of Macro-Areas Language Dynamics & Change Harald Hammarstr¨om& Mark Donohue The following document lists the languages of the world and their as- signment to the macro-areas described in the main body of the paper as well as the WALS macro-area for languages featured in the WALS 2005 edi- tion. 7160 languages are included, which represent all languages for which we had coordinates available1. Every language is given with its ISO-639-3 code (if it has one) for proper identification. The mapping between WALS languages and ISO-codes was done by using the mapping downloadable from the 2011 online WALS edition2 (because a number of errors in the mapping were corrected for the 2011 edition). 38 WALS languages are not given an ISO-code in the 2011 mapping, 36 of these have been assigned their appropri- ate iso-code based on the sources the WALS lists for the respective language. This was not possible for Tasmanian (WALS-code: tsm) because the WALS mixes data from very different Tasmanian languages and for Kualan (WALS- code: kua) because no source is given. 17 WALS-languages were assigned ISO-codes which have subsequently been retired { these have been assigned their appropriate updated ISO-code. In many cases, a WALS-language is mapped to several ISO-codes. As this has no bearing for the assignment to macro-areas, multiple mappings have been retained. 1There are another couple of hundred languages which are attested but for which our database currently lacks coordinates. -
Running Head: ORTHOGRAPHIC DEPTH and ORTHOGRAPHIC PROCESSING 1
Running head: ORTHOGRAPHIC DEPTH AND ORTHOGRAPHIC PROCESSING 1 This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article accepted in "Reading and Writing". The final authenticated version will be available at link.springer.com. The Effect of Orthographic Depth on Letter String Processing: The Case of Visual Attention Span and Rapid Automatized Naming Alexia Antzaka (ORCID iD: 0000-0002-3975-1122) Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 20009, San Sebastián, Spain Departamento de Lengua Vasca y Comunicación, UPV/EHU, 48940, Leioa, Spain Clara Martin (ORCID iD: 0000-0003-2701-5045) Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 20009, San Sebastián, Spain Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, 48013, Bilbao, Spain Sendy Caffarra (ORCID iD: 0000-0003-3667-5061) Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 20009, San Sebastián, Spain Sophie Schlöffel Running head: ORTHOGRAPHIC DEPTH AND ORTHOGRAPHIC PROCESSING 1 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 20009, San Sebastián, Spain Departamento de Lengua Vasca y Comunicación, UPV/EHU, 48940, Leioa, Spain Manuel Carreiras (ORCID iD: 0000-0001-6726-7613) Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 20009, San Sebastián, Spain Departamento de Lengua Vasca y Comunicación, UPV/EHU, 48940, Leioa, Spain Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, 48013, Bilbao, Spain Marie Lallier (ORCID iD: 0000-0003-4340-1296) Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 20009, San Sebastián, Spain Author note The authors acknowledge financial support from the Basque Government (PRE_2015_2_0049 to A.A, PI_2015_1_25 to C.M, PRE_2015_2_0247 to S.S), the European Research Council (ERC-2011-ADG-295362 to M.C.), the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PSI20153653383P to M.L., PSI20153673533R to M. -
Old and Middle Welsh David Willis ([email protected]) Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge
Old and Middle Welsh David Willis ([email protected]) Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge 1 INTRODUCTION The Welsh language emerged from the increasing dialect differentiation of the ancestral Brythonic language (also known as British or Brittonic) in the wake of the withdrawal of the Roman administration from Britain and the subsequent migration of Germanic speakers to Britain from the fifth century. Conventionally, Welsh is treated as a separate language from the mid sixth century. By this time, Brythonic speakers, who once occupied the whole of Britain apart from the north of Scotland, had been driven out of most of what is now England. Some Brythonic-speakers had migrated to Brittany from the late fifth century. Others had been pushed westwards and northwards into Wales, western and southwestern England, Cumbria and other parts of northern England and southern Scotland. With the defeat of the Romano-British forces at Dyrham in 577, the Britons in Wales were cut off by land from those in the west and southwest of England. Linguistically more important, final unstressed syllables were lost (apocope) in all varieties of Brythonic at about this time, a change intimately connected to the loss of morphological case. These changes are traditionally seen as having had such a drastic effect on the structure of the language as to mark a watershed in the development of Brythonic. From this period on, linguists refer to the Brythonic varieties spoken in Wales as Welsh; those in the west and southwest of England as Cornish; and those in Brittany as Breton. A fourth Brythonic language, Cumbric, emerged in the north of England, but died out, without leaving written records, in perhaps the eleventh century. -
•Chadic Classification Master
Paul Newman 2013 ò ê ž ŋ The Chadic Language Family: ɮ Classification and Name Index ɓ ō ƙ Electronic Publication © Paul Newman This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License CC BY-NC Mega-Chad Research Network / Réseau Méga-Tchad http://lah.soas.ac.uk/projects/megachad/misc.html http://lah.soas.ac.uk/projects/megachad/divers.html The Chadic Language Family: Classification and Name Index Paul Newman I. CHADIC LANGUAGE CLASSIFICATION Chadic, which is a constituent member of the Afroasiatic phylum, is a family of approximately 170 languages spoken in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger. The classification presented here is based on the one published some twenty-five years ago in my Nominal and Verbal Plurality in Chadic, pp. 1–5 (Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1990). This current paper contains corrections and updates reflecting the considerable amount of empirical research on Chadic languages done since that time. The structure of the classification is as follows. Within Chadic the first division is into four coordinate branches, indicated by Roman numerals: I. West Chadic Branch (W-C); II. Biu-Mandara Branch (B-M), also commonly referred to as Central Chadic; III. East Chadic Branch (E-C); and IV. Masa Branch (M-S). Below the branches are unnamed sub-branches, indicated by capital letters: A, B, C. At the next level are named groups, indicated by Arabic numerals: 1, 2.... With some, but not all, groups, subgroups are distinguished, these being indicated by lower case letters: a, b…. Thus Miya, for example, is classified as I.B.2.a, which is to say that it belongs to West Chadic (I), to the B sub-branch of West Chadic, to the Warji group (2), and to the (a) subgroup within that group, which consists of Warji, Diri, etc., whereas Daba, for example, is classified as II.A.7, that is, it belongs to Biu-Mandara (II), to the A sub-branch of Biu-Mandara, and within Biu-Mandara to the Daba group (7). -
Y in Medieval Welsh Orthography Sims-Williams, Patrick
Aberystwyth University ‘Dark’ and ‘Clear’ Y in Medieval Welsh Orthography Sims-Williams, Patrick Published in: Transactions of the Philological Society DOI: 10.1111/1467-968X.12205 Publication date: 2021 Citation for published version (APA): Sims-Williams, P. (2021). ‘Dark’ and ‘Clear’ Y in Medieval Welsh Orthography: Caligula versus Teilo. Transactions of the Philological Society, 1191, 9-47. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-968X.12205 Document License CC BY-NC-ND General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the Aberystwyth Research Portal (the Institutional Repository) are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the Aberystwyth Research Portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the Aberystwyth Research Portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. tel: +44 1970 62 2400 email: [email protected] Download date: 28. Sep. 2021 Transactions of the Philological Society Volume 1191 (2021) 9–47 doi: 10.1111/1467-968X.12205 ‘DARK’ AND ‘CLEAR’ Y IN MEDIEVAL WELSH ORTHOGRAPHY: CALIGULA VERSUS TEILO By PATRICK SIMS-WILLIAMS Aberystwyth University (Submitted: 26 May, 2020; Accepted: 20 January, 2021) ABSTRACT A famous exception to the ‘phonetic spelling system’ of Welsh is the use of <y> for both /ǝ/ and the retracted high vowel /ɨ(:)/. -
Why Learning to Read Is Easier in Welsh Than in English: Orthographic Transparency Effects Evinced with Frequency-Matched Tests
Applied Psycholinguistics 22 (2001), 571–599 Printed in the United States of America Why learning to read is easier in Welsh than in English: Orthographic transparency effects evinced with frequency-matched tests NICK C. ELLIS and A. MARI HOOPER University of Wales, Bangor ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Nick C. Ellis, School of Psychology, University of Wales, Bangor, Gwynedd LL57 2DG, United Kingdom. E-mail: [email protected] ABSTRACT This study compared the rate of literacy acquisition in orthographically transparent Welsh and ortho- graphically opaque English using reading tests that were equated for frequency of written exposure. Year 2 English-educated monolingual children were compared with Welsh-educated bilingual chil- dren, matched for reading instruction, background, locale, and math ability. Welsh children were able to read aloud accurately significantly more of their language (61% of tokens, 1821 types) than were English children (52% tokens, 716 types), allowing them to read aloud beyond their compre- hension levels (168 vs. 116%, respectively). Various observations suggested that Welsh readers were more reliant on an alphabetic decoding strategy: word length determined 70% of reading latency in Welsh but only 22% in English, and Welsh reading errors tended to be nonword mispro- nunciations, whereas English children made more real word substitutions and null attempts. These findings demonstrate that the orthographic transparency of a language can have a profound effect on the rate of acquisition and style of reading adopted by its speakers. Systems that are noisy and inconsistent are harder to sort out than systems that are reliable and categorical. There is now a large body of research demonstrating that greater ambiguity in the mappings between the forms and functions of a particular language causes less successful learning because of a larger degree of competition among the cues in the learning set (Bates & MacWhinney, 1987; MacWhinney, 1987). -
Welsh on The
Technical Report No: 2003/16 Issues in Creating HTML Pages with Welsh or bilingual Content John Dyke 26 November 2003 Department of Computing Faculty of Mathematics and Computing The Open University Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA United Kingdom http://computing.open.ac.uk l Issues in Creating HTML Pages with Welsh or bilingual Content John Dyke Summary Using utf-8 encoding web pages in HTML, XHTML or XML can contain all the letters used in Welsh including all of the diacritical marks used. These pages are rendered and display correctly on Microsoft's Internet Explorer from version 4 onwards and Netscape's browser from version 4. Opera supports all of the characters correctly from version 6 albeit with font substitution occurring for some of the less frequently used diacritical marks on w and y: the acen grom, the most frequently used diacritical mark, is rendered correctly. Opera's version 5.12 provides a reasonably good coverage. It displays the vowels a,e,i,o and u correctly with all diacritical marks but renders w, W, y and Y without an acen grom but produces blanks for the other less frequently used diacritical marks used over these characters. For wider support on older browsers, named character entities should be used for the characters a, e, i, o and u with diacritical marks. The remaining vowels w and y should coded either without diacritical marks or by some other representation e.g. the character followed by the diacritical mark (w^ in place of ŵ) The language used on a page should be denoted by using the lang attribute in the HTML mark up. -
A History of Domestic Animals in Northeastern Nigeria
A history of domestic animals in Northeastern Nigeria Roger M. BLENCH * PREFATORY NOTES Acronyms, toponyms, etc. Throughout this work, “Borna” and “Adamawa” are taken ta refer to geographical regions rather than cunent administrative units within Nigeria. “Central Africa” here refers to the area presently encompas- sed by Chad, Cameroun and Central African Republic. Orthography Since this work is not wrîtten for specialised linguists 1 have adopted some conventions to make the pronunciation of words in Nigerian lan- guages more comprehensible to non-specialists. Spellings are in no way “simplified”, however. Spellings car-rbe phonemic (where the langua- ge has been analysed in depth), phonetic (where the form given is the surface form recorded in fieldwork) or orthographie (taken from ear- lier sources with inexplicit rules of transcription). The following table gives the forms used here and their PA equivalents: This Work Other Orthographie IPA 11989) j ch tî 4 d3 zl 13 hl, SI Q Words extracted from French sources have been normalised to make comparison easier. * Anthropologue, African Studies Cenfer, Universify of Cambridge 15, Willis Road, Cambridge CB7 ZAQ, Unifed Kingdom. Cah. Sci. hum. 37 (1) 1995 : 787-237 182 Roger BLENCH Tone marks The exact significance of tone-marks varies from one language to ano- ther and 1 have used the conventions of the authors in the case of publi- shed Ianguages. The usual conventions are: High ’ Mid Unmarked Low \ Rising ” Falling A In Afroasiatic languages with vowel length distinctions, only the first vowel of a long vowel if tone-marked. Some 19th Century sources, such as Heinrich Barth, use diacritics to mark stress or length. -
The Evolution of Linguistic Diversity
The Evolution of Linguistic Diversity Daniel Nettle Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD University College London 1996 ProQuest Number: 10044366 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10044366 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the causes and consequences of diversity in human language. It is divided into three sections, each of which addresses a different aspect of the topic. The first section uses computer simulations to examine various mechanisms which may produce diversity in language: imperfect learning, geographical isolation, selection on the basis of social affiliation, and functional selection amongst linguistic variants. It is concluded that social and functional selection by speakers provide the main motive forces for the divergence of languages. The second section examines the factors influencing the geographical distribution of languages in the world. By far the most important is the ecological regime in which people live. Seasonal climates produce large ethnolinguistic groups because people form large networks of exchange to mitigate the subsistence risk to which they are exposed. -
Appendix 1 Vernacular Names
Appendix 1 Vernacular Names The vernacular names listed below have been collected from the literature. Few have phonetic spellings. Spelling is not helped by the difficulties of transcribing unwritten languages into European syllables and Roman script. Some languages have several names for the same species. Further complications arise from the various dialects and corruptions within a language, and use of names borrowed from other languages. Where the people are bilingual the person recording the name may fail to check which language it comes from. For example, in northern Sahel where Arabic is the lingua franca, the recorded names, supposedly Arabic, include a number from local languages. Sometimes the same name may be used for several species. For example, kiri is the Susu name for both Adansonia digitata and Drypetes afzelii. There is nothing unusual about such complications. For example, Grigson (1955) cites 52 English synonyms for the common dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) in the British Isles, and also mentions several examples of the same vernacular name applying to different species. Even Theophrastus in c. 300 BC complained that there were three plants called strykhnos, which were edible, soporific or hallucinogenic (Hort 1916). Languages and history are linked and it is hoped that understanding how lan- guages spread will lead to the discovery of the historical origins of some of the vernacular names for the baobab. The classification followed here is that of Gordon (2005) updated and edited by Blench (2005, personal communication). Alternative family names are shown in square brackets, dialects in parenthesis. Superscript Arabic numbers refer to references to the vernacular names; Roman numbers refer to further information in Section 4. -
Kanuri and Its Neighbours: When Saharan and Chadic Languages Meet
3 KANURI AND ITS NEIGHBOURS: WHEN SAHARAN AND CHADIC LANGUAGES MEET Norbert Cyffer 1. Introduction' Relations between languages are determined by their degree of similarity or difference. When languages share a great amount of lexical or grammatical similarity, we assume, that these languages are either genetically related or else they have been in close contact for a long time. In addition to genetic aspects, we also have to consider phenomena which may lead to common structural features in languages of different genetic affiliation. We are aware, e.g., through oral traditions, that aspects of social, cultural or language change are not only a phenomenon of our present period, we should also keep in mind that our knowledge about the local history in many parts of Africa is still scanty. The dynamic processes of social, cultural and linguistic change have been an ongoing development. In our area of investigation we can confirm this from the 11 th century. Here, the linguistic landscape kept changing throughout time. The wider Lake Chad area provides a good example for these developments. For example, Hausa, which is today the dominant language in northern Nigeria, played a lesser role as a language of wider communication (L WC) in the past. This becomes obvious when we assess the degree of lexical borrowing in the languages that are situated between Hausa and Kanuri. However, during the past decades, we observed a decrease of Kanuri influence and an increase of Hausa . • Research on linguistic contact and conceptualization in the wider Lake Chad area was carried out in the project Linguistic Innovation and Conceptual Change in West Africa.