Portal:Language/Selected topic

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Instructions

The layout design for these subpages is at Portal:Language/Selected topic/Layout.

  1. Add a new topic to the next available subpage.
  2. The "blurb" for each topic should be approximately 10 lines, for appropriate formatting in the portal main page.
  3. Update "max=" to the new total for its {{Random portal component}} on the main page.

Language list

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Selected topic 1

Portal:Language/Selected topic/1

A split infinitive is a grammatical construction in which an adverb or adverbial phrase separates the "to" and "infinitive" constituents of what was traditionally called the "full infinitive", but is more commonly known in modern linguistics as the to-infinitive (e.g. to go). In the history of English language aesthetics, the split infinitive was often deprecated, despite its prevalence in colloquial speech. The opening sequence of the Star Trek television series contains a well-known example, "to boldly go where no man has gone before", wherein the adverb boldly was said to split the full infinitive, to go.

Multiple words may split a to-infinitive, such as: "The population is expected to more than double in the next ten years."

In the 19th century, some

linguistic prescriptivists sought to disallow the split infinitive, and the resulting conflict had considerable cultural importance. The construction still renders disagreement, but modern English usage guides have largely dropped the objection to it. (Full article...
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Selected topic 2

Portal:Language/Selected topic/2 Stuttering, also known as stammering, is a speech disorder characterized externally by involuntary repetitions and prolongations of sounds, syllables, words, or phrases as well as involuntary silent pauses or blocks in which the person who stutters is unable to produce sounds.

The term stuttering as defined by listeners is most commonly associated with involuntary sound repetition, but it also encompasses the abnormal hesitation or pausing before speech, referred to by people who stutter as blocks, and the prolongation of certain sounds, usually vowels or semivowels. According to adults who stutter, stuttering is defined as a "constellation of experiences" expanding beyond the external disfluencies that are apparent to the listener. In fact, most of the experience of stuttering is internal and encompasses more experiences beyond the external speech disfluencies that are not observable by the listener. The moment of stuttering often begins before the disfluency is produced, described as a moment of anticipation - where the person who stutters knows which word they are going to stutter on. The sensation of losing control and anticipation of a stutter can lead people who stutter to react in different ways including behavioral and cognitive reactions. Some behavioral reactions can manifest outwardly and be observed as physical tension or struggle anywhere in the body. Almost 80 million people worldwide stutter, about 1% of the world's population. (Full article...)

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Selected topic 3

Portal:Language/Selected topic/3 A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (length). They are usually voiced and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and stress.

The word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning "vocal" (i.e. relating to the voice). In English, the word vowel is commonly used to refer both to vowel sounds and to the written symbols that represent them (⟨a⟩, ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨u⟩, and sometimes ⟨w⟩ and ⟨y⟩). (Full article...)

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Selected topic 4

Portal:Language/Selected topic/4

paralinguistic
sounds in English are not full click consonants, as they only involve the front of the tongue, without the release of the back of the tongue that is required for clicks to combine with vowels and form syllables.

Anatomically, clicks are obstruents articulated with two closures (points of contact) in the mouth, one forward and one at the back. The enclosed pocket of air is rarefied by a sucking action of the tongue (in technical terminology, clicks have a lingual ingressive airstream mechanism). The forward closure is then released, producing what may be the loudest consonants in the language, although in some languages such as Hadza and Sandawe, clicks can be more subtle and may even be mistaken for ejectives. (Full article...)

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Selected topic 5

Portal:Language/Selected topic/5

Interactive totems in the museum allow access to multimedia information about the languages that influenced the formation of the present day Portuguese language.
The
Secretary of Culture in conjunction with the Roberto Marinho Foundation, at a cost of around 37 million reais
.

The objective of the museum is to create a living representation of the Portuguese language, where visitors may be surprised and educated by unusual and unfamiliar aspects of their own

native language. Secondly, the caretakers of the museum, as expressed on the official website, "desire that, in this museum, the public has access to new knowledge and reflection in an intense and pleasurable manner," as it notices the relationship of the language with others, as well as its proto-languages. The museum targets the Portuguese speaking population, made up of peoples from many regions and social backgrounds, but who still have not had the opportunity to gain a broader understanding of the origins, the history and the continuous evolution of the language. (Full article...
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Archive

The portal was originally configured to display a new topic each month. An archive of the selections is at Portal:Language/Language topic, or this link lists all the selections.

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