Americanist phonetic notationAmericanist phonetic notation, also known as the North American Phonetic Alphabet (NAPA), the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet or the American Phonetic Alphabet (APA), is a system of phonetic notation originally developed by European and American anthropologists and language scientists (many of whom were students of Neogrammarians) for the phonetic and phonemic transcription of indigenous languages of the Americas and for languages of Europe.
Cyrillic alphabetsNumerous Cyrillic alphabets are based on the Cyrillic script. The early Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the 9th century AD and replaced the earlier Glagolitic script developed by the Byzantine theologians Cyril and Methodius. It is the basis of alphabets used in various languages, past and present, Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Russian. As of 2011, around 252 million people in Eurasia use it as the official alphabet for their national languages. About half of them are in Russia.
Lydian languageLydian is an extinct Indo-European Anatolian language spoken in the region of Lydia, in western Anatolia (now in Turkey). The language is attested in graffiti and in coin legends from the late 8th century or the early 7th century to the 3rd century BCE, but well-preserved inscriptions of significant length are so far limited to the 5th century and the 4th century BCE, during the period of Persian domination. Thus, Lydian texts are effectively contemporaneous with those in Lycian.
IotacismIotacism (ἰωτακισμός, iotakismos) or itacism is the process of vowel shift by which a number of vowels and diphthongs converged towards the pronunciation i in post-classical Greek and Modern Greek. The term "iotacism" refers to the letter iota, the original sign for i, with which these vowels came to merge. The alternative term itacism refers to the new pronunciation of the name of the letter eta as ˈita after the change. Koine Greek phonology Ancient Greek had a broader range of vowels (see Ancient Greek phonology) than Modern Greek has.
Lemnian languageThe Lemnian language was spoken on the island of Lemnos, Greece, in the second half of the 6th century BC. It is mainly attested by an inscription found on a funerary stele, termed the Lemnos stele, discovered in 1885 near Kaminia. Fragments of inscriptions on local pottery show that it was spoken there by a community. In 2009, a newly discovered inscription was reported from the site of Hephaistia, the principal ancient city of Lemnos. Lemnian is largely accepted as being a Tyrsenian language, and as such related to Etruscan and Raetic.
Tsakonian languageTsakonian or Tsaconian (also Tzakonian or Tsakonic, τσακώνικα and Tsakonian: τσακώνικα, α τσακώνικα γρούσσα) is a highly divergent modern variety of Greek, spoken in the Tsakonian region of the Peloponnese, Greece. Tsakonian derives from Doric Greek, being its only extant variant. Although it is conventionally treated as a dialect of Greek, some compendia treat it as a separate language. Tsakonian is critically endangered, with only a few hundred/thousand, mostly elderly, fluent speakers left.
Cypriot syllabaryThe Cypriot or Cypriote syllabary is a syllabic script used in Iron Age Cyprus, from about the 11th to the 4th centuries BCE, when it was replaced by the Greek alphabet. A pioneer of that change was King Evagoras of Salamis. It is descended from the Cypro-Minoan syllabary, in turn, a variant or derivative of Linear A. Most texts using the script are in the Arcadocypriot dialect of Greek, but also one bilingual (Greek and Eteocypriot) inscription was found in Amathus.
Alphabets of AnatoliaVarious alphabetic writing systems were in use in Iron Age Anatolia to record Anatolian languages and Phrygian. Several of these languages had previously been written with logographic and syllabic scripts. The alphabets of Asia Minor proper share characteristics that distinguish them from the earliest attested forms of the Greek alphabet. Many letters in these alphabets resemble Greek letters but have unrelated readings, most extensively in the case of Carian.
Iberian languageThe Iberian language was the language of an indigenous western European people identified by Greek and Roman sources who lived in the eastern and southeastern regions of the Iberian Peninsula in the pre-Migration Era (before about 375 AD). An ancient Iberian culture can be identified as existing between the 7th and 1st centuries BC, at least. Iberian, like all the other Paleohispanic languages except Basque, was extinct by the 1st to 2nd centuries AD. It had been replaced gradually by Latin, following the Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.
