Difference between revisions of "User:Cdalton2/Language selection"

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Ethnologue [https://www.ethnologue.com/language/bod]
 
Ethnologue [https://www.ethnologue.com/language/bod]
 
  
 
== Assyrian Neo-Aramaic ==
 
== Assyrian Neo-Aramaic ==

Revision as of 22:19, 24 January 2018

I would like to work with Emily Schalk, who I don't think has a user page yet.

Rohingya

Morphological Typology

Rohingya (ISO 639-3: rhg) seems to be a fusional language. A single "verb-form suffix" encodes person, tense, and aspect; that is, each grammatical person has its own set of tense/aspect suffixes.

Background

Rohingya is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by 1.7 to 1.8 million people worldwide. As of 2012, about 800,000 of these speakers live in the Rakhine state of Myanmar. Due to persecution and military crackdowns by Myanmar's government on the Rohingya ethnic group, an estimated 1 million Rohingyas have fled to Bangladesh and a number of other countries. As Ethnologue notes, the nature of the situation is such that the actual population numbers are very uncertain. Most Rohingya speakers also use Rakhine, and some use Burmese. I have also seen the term "Rohingyalish" used to refer to this language.

Rohingya has been written in several different scripts. It was first written in the 1800s using the Arabic script. In the mid to late 1900s, there were a couple of attempts to modify the Arabic or Urdu scripts to make them more suitable for Rohingya. One system that seems to have caught on a bit is the Hanifi script, which was developed by Molana Hanifi in the 1980s. It is based on the Arabic alphabet with borrowings from the Latin and Burmese scripts. It is not currently supported by Unicode, but language technologist Anshuman Pandey has been working on it [1], and it is expected to be incorporated into the 2018 Unicode standard. There is also a system for writing Rohingya in the Latin alphabet.

Textual Resources

The Rohingya Language Foundation [2] has a number of texts in Rohingya, including:

  • Several translations of the Quran and parts of the Quran
  • Dictionaries and textbooks
  • A document explaining Rohingya morphology with some example sentences

Sources

Wikipedia [3]

Ethnologue [4]

Omniglot [5]

Tibetan

Morphological Typology

As best as I can determine, Standard Tibetan (ISO 639-3: bod; ISO 639-2: bod/tib; ISO 639-1: bo) falls generally into the agglutinative category. It's similar to some isolating languages in that the number and gender of a noun is usually determined by context; however, nouns do receive case marking, and the case suffixes are just added onto the noun phrase without affecting the form of the noun itself.

Background

Tibetan is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by about 1.2 million people, mostly in the Tibetan Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China, but also in some parts of India and Nepal. Standard Tibetan is considered to be the dialect spoken in Lhasa, but there is a lot of variation within the Tibetic languages group, since the Tibetan people range across a very large area. Speakers of Tibetan may also speak Mandarin Chinese, as well as a whole host of other, smaller languages. Tibetan is the main language of instruction in primary schools in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, where it is considered an official language, and it does not appear to be having many issues in terms of transmission to younger generations.

The Tibetan alphabet is said to have been developed by Thonmi Sambhota in the middle of the 7th century. The script has not changed much over the years, so there is quite a large disparity between the spelling and the modern pronunciation of the language. When writing Tibetan in Latin script, most Western scholars use the Wylie transliteration, but the Chinese government officially uses Tibetan pinyin.

Textual Resources

The Tsadra Foundation [6] has links to databases of Buddhist texts in Tibetan. In particular, Lotsawa House [7] has a pretty large corpus.

Wikipedia [8] [9]

Omniglot [10]

Ethnologue [11]

Assyrian Neo-Aramaic

Morphological Typology

Assyrian Neo-Aramaic is a fusional language. As in most Semitic languages, the root of a word consists of a sequence of three consonants. In many cases, instead of adding prefixes or suffixes, different forms of a word are made by changing the vowels between these consonants. However, there are still some suffixes in Assyrian Neo-Aramaic.

Background

Assyrian Neo-Aramaic (ISO 639-3: aii), also called Assyrian, is a Semitic language spoken by a scattered population of about 200,000 people in several countries, including Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Speakers of Assyrian Neo-Aramaic will generally also speak the majority language of whatever region they live in. Also, even when speaking Assyrian, they may use loanwords from other languages, such as Persian, Arabic, or Turkish. Ethnologue considers it to be "Threatened," and Neo-Aramaic languages in general are not being fully learned by the younger generations, due in part to widespread migration by the speaker populations.

Assyrian was once written with the Esṭrangēlā version of the Syriac alphabet, but now it is usually written with the Madnhāyā variant. Latin and Cyrillic orthographies were devised in the 1930s.

Textual Resources

There is an Assyrian Neo-Aramaic Bible translation. [12]

Wikipedia [13] [14]

Ethnologue [15]

Omniglot [16]