PinyinHanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the most common romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese. It is used in official contexts where Standard Chinese is an official language (Greater China and Singapore) as well as by the United Nations and in other international contexts. It is used principally to teach Mandarin, normally written with Chinese characters, to students already familiar with the Latin alphabet.
Hawaiian languageHawaiian (Ōlelo Hawaii, ʔoːˈlɛlo həˈvɐjʔi) is a Polynesian language of the Austronesian language family that takes its name from Hawaii, the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the US state of Hawaii. King Kamehameha III established the first Hawaiian-language constitution in 1839 and 1840. In 1896, the Republic of Hawaii established English as the official language in schools.
Norwegian languageNorwegian (norsk ˈnɔʂːk) is a North Germanic language spoken mainly in Norway, where it is an official language. Along with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a dialect continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional varieties; some Norwegian and Swedish dialects, in particular, are very close. These Scandinavian languages, together with Faroese and Icelandic as well as some extinct languages, constitute the North Germanic languages.
OmicronOmicron (ˈoʊmᵻkrɒn,_ˈɒmᵻkrɒn,_oʊˈmaɪkrɒn; uppercase Ο, lowercase ο, όμικρον) is the fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. This letter is derived from the Phoenician letter ayin: . In classical Greek, omicron represented the close-mid back rounded vowel o in contrast to omega which represented the open-mid back rounded vowel ɔː and the digraph ου which represented the long close-mid back rounded vowel oː. In modern Greek, both omicron and omega represent the mid back rounded vowel o̞ or ɔ̝.
RomanizationRomanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and transcription, for representing the spoken word, and combinations of both. Transcription methods can be subdivided into phonemic transcription, which records the phonemes or units of semantic meaning in speech, and more strict phonetic transcription, which records speech sounds with precision.
TildeThe tilde ("tIldeI,-di,-d@,_"tIld) or , is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish, which in turn came from the Latin titulus, meaning "title" or "superscription". Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) in combination with a base letter; but for historical reasons, it is also used in standalone form within a variety of contexts. The tilde was originally written over an omitted letter or several letters as a scribal abbreviation, or "mark of suspension" and "mark of contraction", shown as a straight line when used with capitals.
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.
UnicodeUnicode, formally The Unicode Standard, is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, which is maintained by the Unicode Consortium, defines as of the current version (15.0) 149,186 characters covering 161 modern and historic scripts, as well as symbols, thousands of emoji (including in colours), and non-visual control and formatting codes.
LoanwordA loanword (also a loan word, loan-word, or borrowing) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient language, also called the target language). This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because they share an etymological origin; and calques, which involve translation. Loanwords from languages with different scripts are usually transliterated (between scripts), but they are not translated.
AlphaAlpha 'ælfə (uppercase , lowercase ; ἄλφα, álpha, or álfa) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph , which is the West Semitic word for "ox". Letters that arose from alpha include the Latin letter A and the Cyrillic letter А. In Ancient Greek, alpha was pronounced ä and could be either phonemically long ([aː]) or short ([a]). Where there is ambiguity, long and short alpha are sometimes written with a macron and breve today: Ᾱᾱ, Ᾰᾰ.