Heritage languageA heritage language is a minority language (either immigrant or indigenous) learned by its speakers at home as children, and difficult to be fully developed because of insufficient input from the social environment. The speakers grow up with a different dominant language in which they become more competent. Polinsky and Kagan label it as a continuum (taken from Valdés definition of heritage language) that ranges from fluent speakers to barely speaking individuals of the home language.
SyllableA syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre and its stress patterns. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ignite is made of two syllables: ig and nite.
TauTau 'tɔː,_'taʊ (uppercase Τ, lowercase τ, or ; ταυ taf) is the nineteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiceless dental or alveolar plosive t. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 300. The name in English is pronounced taʊ or tɔː, but in Greek it is taf. This is because the pronunciation of the combination of Greek letters αυ can have the pronunciation of either [ai], [av] or [af], depending on what follows and if a diaeresis is present on the second vowel (see Greek orthography).
ThetaTheta (UKˈθiːtə, USˈθeɪtə; uppercase: Θ or ; lowercase: θ or ; thē̂ta thɛ̂ːta; Modern: thī́ta ˈθita) is the eighth letter of the Greek alphabet, derived from the Phoenician letter Teth . In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 9. In Ancient Greek, θ represented the aspirated voiceless dental plosive t̪h, but in Modern Greek it represents the voiceless dental fricative θ. In its archaic form, θ was written as a cross within a circle (as in the Etruscan or ), and later, as a line or point in circle ( or ).
Old EnglishOld English (Englisċ, ˈeŋɡliʃ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th century, and the first Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century. After the Norman conquest of 1066, English was replaced, for a time, by Anglo-Norman (a relative of French) as the language of the upper classes.
Spanish orthographySpanish orthography is the orthography used in the Spanish language. The alphabet uses the Latin script. The spelling is fairly phonemic, especially in comparison to more opaque orthographies like English, having a relatively consistent mapping of graphemes to phonemes; in other words, the pronunciation of a given Spanish-language word can largely be predicted from its spelling and to a slightly lesser extent vice versa. Spanish punctuation includes the use of inverted question and exclamation marks: .
CircumflexThe circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from circumflexus "bent around"a translation of the περισπωμένη (perispōménē). The circumflex in the Latin script is chevron-shaped (), while the Greek circumflex may be displayed either like a tilde () or like an inverted breve (). For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin alphabet, precomposed characters are available.
Ancient GreekAncient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (1400–1200 BC), Dark Ages (1200–800 BC), the Archaic or Epic period (800–500 BC), and the Classical period (500–300 BC). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers.
DictionaryA dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical and stroke for logographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, pronunciations, translation, etc. It is a lexicographical reference that shows inter-relationships among the data. A broad distinction is made between general and specialized dictionaries.
EtaEta 'iːtə,_'eɪtə (uppercase , lowercase ; ἦτα ē̂ta ɛ̂ːta or ήτα ita ˈita) is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the close front unrounded vowel i. Originally denoting the voiceless glottal fricative h in most dialects, its sound value in the classical Attic dialect of Ancient Greek was a long open-mid front unrounded vowel ɛː, raised to i in hellenistic Greek, a process known as iotacism or itacism.
