The Latin alphabet , also known as the Roman alphabet , is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language . Largely unaltered excepting several letters splitting—i.e. ⟨J⟩ from ⟨I⟩ , and ⟨U⟩ from ⟨V⟩ —additions such as ⟨W⟩ , and extensions such as letters with diacritics , it forms the Latin script that is used to write most languages of modern Europe , Africa , America and Oceania . Its basic modern inventory is standardised as the ISO basic Latin alphabet .
50-533: The Joe Gqabi District Municipality ( Xhosa : uMasipala weSithili sase Joe Gqabi ; Sotho : Masepala wa Setereke wa Joe Gqabi ) is one of the seven districts of the Eastern Cape province of South Africa . The seat is Barkly East . As of 2011, the majority of its 349,768 inhabitants spoke isiXhosa . Before 1 February 2010, it was known as the Ukhahlamba District Municipality ; its name
100-455: A majuscule script commonly used from the 3rd to 8th centuries AD by Latin and Greek scribes. Tironian notes were a shorthand system consisting of thousands of signs. New Roman cursive script, also known as minuscule cursive, was in use from the 3rd century to the 7th century, and uses letter forms that are more recognizable to modern eyes; ⟨a⟩ , ⟨b⟩ , ⟨d⟩ , and ⟨e⟩ had taken
150-457: A noun must agree with the noun according to its gender. Agreements usually reflect part of the original class with which the word agrees. The word order is subject–verb–object , like in English. The verb is modified by affixes to mark subject, object, tense, aspect and mood. The various parts of the sentence must agree in both class and number. The Xhosa noun consists of two essential parts,
200-470: A click. Xhosa is part of the branch of Nguni languages , which also include Zulu , Southern Ndebele and Northern Ndebele , called the Zunda languages. Zunda languages effectively form a dialect continuum of variously mutually intelligible varieties. Xhosa is, to a large extent, mutually intelligible with Zulu and with other Nguni languages to a lesser extent. Nguni languages are, in turn, classified under
250-494: A diminishing extent ), and Xhosa is taught as a subject, both for native and for non-native speakers. Literary works, including prose and poetry, are available in Xhosa, as are newspapers and magazines. The South African Broadcasting Corporation broadcasts in Xhosa on both radio (on Umhlobo Wenene FM) and television, and films, plays and music are also produced in the language. The best-known performer of Xhosa songs outside South Africa
300-560: A more familiar shape, and the other letters were proportionate to each other. This script evolved into a variety of regional medieval scripts (for example, the Merovingian , Visigothic and Benevantan scripts), to be later supplanted by the Carolingian minuscule . It was not until the Middle Ages that the letter ⟨ W ⟩ (originally a ligature of two ⟨ V ⟩ s)
350-483: A region whose primary language is Xhosa: (said to a group of people) Xhosa-speaking people have inhabited coastal regions of southeastern Africa since before the 16th century. They refer to themselves as the amaXhosa and their language as isiXhosa . Ancestors of the Xhosa migrated to the east coast of Africa and came across Khoisan -speaking people; "as a result of this contact, the Xhosa people borrowed some Khoisan words along with their pronunciation, for instance,
400-445: A vowel, e.g. is andla / iz andla (hand/hands). The placeholder N in the prefixes iN - and iiN - is a nasal consonant which assimilates in place to the following consonant (producing an im- before vowels), but is typically absent in loanwords. Before monosyllabic stems in some words. Verbs use the following prefixes for the subject and object: The following is a list of phrases that can be used when one visits
450-640: Is a hymn written in Xhosa by Enoch Sontonga in 1897. The single original stanza was: Additional stanzas were written later by Sontonga and other writers, and the original verse was translated into Sotho and Afrikaans, as well as English. In The Lion King and its reboot , Rafiki the sagely mandrill chants in Xhosa. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe films Captain America: Civil War , Black Panther , Avengers: Infinity War , Avengers: Endgame , and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever ,
500-417: Is feature-matching its noun: /iN- + ɬɛ/ → intle"beautiful" (of a class 9 word like inja "dog") When aspirated clicks ( ⟨ch, xh, qh⟩ ) are prenasalised, the silent letter ⟨k⟩ is added ( ⟨nkc, nkx, nkq⟩ ) to prevent confusion with the nasal clicks ⟨nc, nx, nq⟩ , and are actually distinct sounds. The prenasalized versions have a very short voicing at
550-644: Is long in the penultimate syllable and short in the last syllable. Xhosa is a tonal language with two inherent phonemic tones: low and high. Tones are rarely marked in the written language, but they can be indicated ⟨a⟩ [à] , ⟨á⟩ [á] , ⟨â⟩ [áà] , ⟨ä⟩ [àá] . Long vowels are phonemic but are usually not written except for ⟨â⟩ and ⟨ä⟩ , which are each sequence of two vowels with different tones that are realized as long vowels with contour tones ( ⟨â⟩ high–low = falling, ⟨ä⟩ low–high = rising). Xhosa
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#1732890944053600-489: Is rich in uncommon consonants . Besides pulmonic egressive sounds, which are found in all spoken languages, it has a series of ejective stops and one implosive stop. It has 18 click consonants (in comparison, Juǀʼhoan , spoken in Botswana and Namibia , has 48, and Taa , with roughly 4,000 speakers in Botswana , has 83). There is a series of six dental clicks , represented by the letter ⟨c⟩ , similar to
650-475: Is spoken as a first language by approximately 8 million people and as a second language in South Africa, particularly in Eastern Cape , Western Cape , Northern Cape and Gauteng , and also in parts of Zimbabwe and Lesotho . It has perhaps the heaviest functional load of click consonants in a Bantu language (approximately tied with Yeyi ), with one count finding that 10% of basic vocabulary items contained
700-509: Is still productive, as is shown by palatalization before the passive suffix /-w/ and before diminutive suffix /-ana/. This process can skip rightwards to non-local syllables (i.e. uku-sebenz-is-el + wa -> ukusetyenziselwa "be used for"), but does not affect morpheme-initial consonants (i.e. uku-bhal+wa -> ukubhalwa "to be written", instead of illicit *ukujalwa). The palatalization process only applies once, as evidenced by ukuphuphumisa+wa -> ukuphuphunyiswa "to be made to overflow", instead of
750-573: Is today transcribed Lūciī a fīliī was written ⟨ lv́ciꟾ·a·fꟾliꟾ ⟩ in the inscription depicted. Some letters have more than one form in epigraphy . Latinists have treated some of them especially such as ⟨ Ꟶ ⟩ , a variant of ⟨H⟩ found in Roman Gaul . The primary mark of punctuation was the interpunct , which was used as a word divider , though it fell out of use after 200 AD. Old Roman cursive script, also called majuscule cursive and capitalis cursive,
800-524: The African reference alphabet . Although Latin did not use diacritical marks, signs of truncation of words (often placed above or at the end of the truncated word) were very common. Furthermore, abbreviations or smaller overlapping letters were often used. This was due to the fact that if the text was engraved on stone, the number of letters to be written was reduced, while if it was written on paper or parchment, it saved precious space. This habit continued even in
850-488: The Bantu Education Act, 1953 . At present, Xhosa is used as the main language of instruction in many primary schools and some secondary schools, but is largely replaced by English after the early primary grades, even in schools mainly serving Xhosa-speaking communities. The language is also studied as a subject in such schools. The language of instruction at universities in South Africa is English (or Afrikaans, to
900-666: The Free State (246,192), KwaZulu-Natal (219,826), North West (214,461), Mpumalanga (46,553), the Northern Cape (51,228), and Limpopo (14,225). There is a small but significant Xhosa community of about 200,000 in Zimbabwe . Also, a small community of Xhosa speakers (18,000) live in Quthing District , Lesotho . The Xhosa language employs 26 letters from the Latin alphabet ; some of
950-721: The Rotokas alphabet , or add new letters, like the Danish and Norwegian alphabets. Letter shapes have evolved over the centuries, including the development in Medieval Latin of lower-case , forms which did not exist in the Classical period alphabet. The Latin alphabet evolved from the visually similar Etruscan alphabet , which evolved from the Cumaean Greek version of the Greek alphabet , which
1000-474: The South African general election, 2004 . Xhosa language Xhosa ( / ˈ k ɔː s ə / KAW -sə , / ˈ k oʊ s ə / KOH -sə ; Xhosa pronunciation: [kǁʰóːsa] ), formerly spelled Xosa and also known by its local name isiXhosa , is a Nguni language, indigenous to Southern Africa and one of the official languages of South Africa and Zimbabwe . Xhosa
1050-577: The age of colonialism and Christian evangelism , the Latin script spread beyond Europe , coming into use for writing indigenous American , Australian , Austronesian , Austroasiatic and African languages . More recently, linguists have also tended to prefer the Latin script or the International Phonetic Alphabet (itself largely based on the Latin script) when transcribing or creating written standards for non-European languages, such as
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#17328909440531100-795: The Middle Ages. Hundreds of symbols and abbreviations exist, varying from century to century. It is generally believed that the Latin alphabet used by the Romans was derived from the Old Italic alphabet used by the Etruscans . That alphabet was derived from the Euboean alphabet used by the Cumae , which in turn was derived from the Phoenician alphabet . Latin included 21 different characters. The letter ⟨C⟩
1150-541: The Romans did not use the traditional ( Semitic -derived) names as in Greek: the names of the plosives were formed by adding /eː/ to their sound (except for ⟨K⟩ and ⟨Q⟩ , which needed different vowels to be distinguished from ⟨C⟩ ) and the names of the continuants consisted as a rule either of the bare sound, or the sound preceded by /e/ . The letter ⟨Y⟩ when introduced
1200-570: The alphabet. From then on, ⟨G⟩ represented the voiced plosive /ɡ/ , while ⟨C⟩ was generally reserved for the voiceless plosive /k/ . The letter ⟨K⟩ was used only rarely, in a small number of words such as Kalendae , often interchangeably with ⟨C⟩ . After the Roman conquest of Greece in the 1st century BC, Latin adopted the Greek letters ⟨Y⟩ and ⟨Z⟩ (or readopted, in
1250-522: The click sounds of the Khoisan languages". The Bantu ancestor of Xhosa did not have clicks, which attests to a strong historical contact with a Khoisan language that did. An estimated 15% of Xhosa vocabulary is of Khoisan origin. John Bennie was a Scottish Presbyterian missionary and early Xhosa linguist. Bennie, along with John Ross (another missionary), set up a printing press in the Tyhume Valley and
1300-651: The first printed works in Xhosa came out in 1823 from the Lovedale Press in the Alice region of the Eastern Cape. But, as with any language, Xhosa had a rich history of oral traditions from which the society taught, informed, and entertained one another. The first Bible translation was in 1859, produced in part by Henry Hare Dugmore . The role of indigenous languages in South Africa is complex and ambiguous. Their use in education has been governed by legislation, beginning with
1350-436: The following vowel. Fricatives become affricated and, if voiceless, they become ejectives as well: mf is pronounced [ɱp̪fʼ] , ndl is pronounced [ndɮ] , n+hl becomes ntl [ntɬʼ] , n+z becomes ndz [ndz] , n + q becomes [n͡ŋǃʼ] etc. The orthographic b in mb is the voiced plosive [mb] . Prenasalisation occurs in several contexts, including on roots with the class 9 prefix /iN-/, for example on an adjective which
1400-529: The fragmentation of political power, the style of writing changed and varied greatly throughout the Middle Ages, even after the invention of the printing press . Early deviations from the classical forms were the uncial script , a development of the Old Roman cursive , and various so-called minuscule scripts that developed from New Roman cursive , of which the insular script developed by Irish literati and derivations of this, such as Carolingian minuscule were
1450-463: The illicit alternative, *ukuphutshunyiswa. In keeping with many other Bantu languages , Xhosa is an agglutinative language, with an array of prefixes and suffixes that are attached to root words . As in other Bantu languages, nouns in Xhosa are classified into morphological classes , or genders (15 in Xhosa), with different prefixes for both singular and plural. Various parts of speech that qualify
1500-429: The language spoken in the fictional African nation of Wakanda is Xhosa. This came about because South African actor John Kani , a native of the Eastern Cape province who plays Wakandan King T'Chaka, speaks Xhosa and suggested that the directors of the fictional Civil War incorporate a dialogue in the language. For Black Panther , director Ryan Coogler "wanted to make it a priority to use Xhosa as much as possible" in
1550-457: The latter case) to write Greek loanwords, placing them at the end of the alphabet. An attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three additional letters did not last. Thus it was during the classical Latin period that the Latin alphabet contained 21 letters and 2 foreign letters: The Latin names of some of these letters are disputed; for example, ⟨H⟩ may have been called [ˈaha] or [ˈaka] . In general
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1600-424: The letters have different pronunciations from English. Phonemes not represented by one of the 26 letters are written as multiple letters. Tone, stress, and vowel length are parts of the language but are generally not indicated in writing. Xhosa has an inventory of ten vowels: [a] , [ɛ~e] , [i] , [ɔ~o] and [u] written a , e , i , o and u in order, all occurring in both long and short . The /i/ vowel
1650-426: The most influential, introducing the lower case forms of the letters, as well as other writing conventions that have since become standard. The languages that use the Latin script generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and proper nouns . The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization. Old English , for example,
1700-496: The much larger abstraction of Bantu languages . Xhosa is the most widely distributed African language in South Africa, though the most commonly spoken South African language is Zulu. Xhosa is the second most common Bantu home language in South Africa. As of 2003 approximately 5.3 million Xhosa-speakers, the majority, live in the Eastern Cape , followed by the Western Cape (approximately 1 million), Gauteng (671,045),
1750-511: The onset which then releases in an ejective, like the prenasalized affricates, while the phonemically nasal clicks have a very long voicing through the consonant. When plain voiceless clicks ( ⟨c, x, q⟩ ) are prenasalized, they become slack voiced nasal ( ⟨ngc, ngx, ngq⟩ ). /ǀ̃/ , /ǁ̃/ , /ǃ̃/ /ǀ̃/ , /ǁ̃/ , /ǃ̃/ Palatalisation is a change that affects labial consonants whenever they are immediately followed by /j/ . While palatalisation occurred historically, it
1800-441: The oral occlusion is then very short in stops, and it usually does not occur at all in clicks. Therefore, the absolute duration of voicing is the same as in tenuis stops. (They may also be voiced between vowels in some speaking styles.) The more notable characteristic is their depressor effect on the tone of the syllable. When consonants are prenasalised , their pronunciation and spelling may change. The murmur no longer shifts to
1850-472: The prefix and the stem. Using the prefixes, nouns can be grouped into noun classes, which are numbered consecutively, to ease comparison with other Bantu languages. Which they call 'amahlelo' The following table gives an overview of Xhosa noun classes, arranged according to singular-plural pairs. Before monosyllabic stems, e.g. ili so (eye), ulu hlu (list). is - and iz - replace isi - and izi - respectively before stems beginning with
1900-557: The pronunciation in IPA on the left and the orthography on the right: In addition to the ejective affricate [tʃʼ] , the spelling ⟨tsh⟩ may also be used for either of the aspirated affricates [tsʰ] and [tʃʰ] . The breathy voiced glottal fricative [ɦ] is sometimes spelled ⟨h⟩ . The ejectives tend to be ejective only in careful pronunciation or in salient positions and, even then, only for some speakers. Otherwise, they tend to be tenuis (plain) stops. Similarly,
1950-497: The script, and provided dialect coaches for the film's actors. Latin alphabet The term Latin alphabet may refer to either the alphabet used to write Latin (as described in this article) or other alphabets based on the Latin script , which is the basic set of letters common to the various alphabets descended from the classical Latin alphabet, such as the English alphabet . These Latin-script alphabets may discard letters, like
2000-401: The sound represented in English by "tut-tut" or "tsk-tsk"; a series of six alveolar lateral clicks , represented by the letter ⟨x⟩ , similar to the sound used to call horses; and a series of alveolar clicks , represented by the letter ⟨q⟩ , that sounds somewhat like a cork pulled from a bottle. The following table lists the consonant phonemes of the language, with
2050-416: The tenuis (plain) clicks are often glottalised, with a long voice onset time , but that is uncommon. The murmured clicks, plosives and affricates are only partially voiced, with the following vowel murmured for some speakers. That is, da may be pronounced [dʱa̤] (or, equivalently, [d̥a̤] ). They are better described as slack voiced than as breathy voiced. They are truly voiced only after nasals, but
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2100-431: The various letters see Latin spelling and pronunciation ; for the names of the letters in English see English alphabet . Diacritics were not regularly used, but they did occur sometimes, the most common being the apex used to mark long vowels , which had previously sometimes been written doubled. However, in place of taking an apex, the letter i was written taller : ⟨ á é ꟾ ó v́ ⟩ . For example, what
2150-420: Was Miriam Makeba , whose Click Song #1 (Xhosa Qongqothwane ) and "Click Song #2" ( Baxabene Ooxam ) are known for their large number of click sounds. In 1996 , the literacy rate for first-language Xhosa speakers was estimated at 50%. Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika is part of the national anthem of South Africa , national anthem of Tanzania and Zambia , and the former anthem of Zimbabwe and Namibia . It
2200-516: Was added to the Latin alphabet, to represent sounds from the Germanic languages which did not exist in medieval Latin, and only after the Renaissance did the convention of treating ⟨ I ⟩ and ⟨ U ⟩ as vowels , and ⟨ J ⟩ and ⟨ V ⟩ as consonants , become established. Prior to that, the former had been merely allographs of the latter. With
2250-592: Was changed in recognition of Joe Gqabi (1929–1981), an African National Congress member who was a journalist for the New Age , a member of the Umkhonto we Sizwe , and one of the Pretoria Twelve . The district contains the following local municipalities : Joe Gqabi is surrounded by the following districts: The following statistics are from the 2011 census : Election results for Joe Gqabi (prev. Ukhahlamba) in
2300-508: Was itself descended from the Phoenician alphabet , which in turn derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs . The Etruscans ruled early Rome ; their alphabet evolved in Rome over successive centuries to produce the Latin alphabet. During the Middle Ages , the Latin alphabet was used (sometimes with modifications) for writing Romance languages , which are direct descendants of Latin , as well as Celtic , Germanic , Baltic and some Slavic languages . With
2350-419: Was probably called "hy" /hyː/ as in Greek, the name upsilon not being in use yet, but this was changed to i Graeca ("Greek i") as Latin speakers had difficulty distinguishing its foreign sound /y/ from /i/ . ⟨Z⟩ was given its Greek name, zeta . This scheme has continued to be used by most modern European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet. For the Latin sounds represented by
2400-637: Was rarely written with even proper nouns capitalized, whereas Modern English writers and printers of the 17th and 18th century frequently capitalized most and sometimes all nouns; for example, from the preamble of the United States Constitution : We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote
2450-445: Was the everyday form of handwriting used for writing letters, by merchants writing business accounts, by schoolchildren learning the Latin alphabet, and even emperors issuing commands. A more formal style of writing was based on Roman square capitals , but cursive was used for quicker, informal writing. It was most commonly used from about the 1st century BC to the 3rd century, but it probably existed earlier than that. It led to Uncial ,
2500-439: Was the western form of the Greek gamma , but it was used for the sounds /ɡ/ and /k/ alike, possibly under the influence of Etruscan , which might have lacked any voiced plosives . Later, probably during the 3rd century BC, the letter ⟨Z⟩ – not needed to write Latin properly – was replaced with the new letter ⟨G⟩ , a ⟨C⟩ modified with a small vertical stroke, which took its place in
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