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Korean

(Encyclopedia)Korean, language of uncertain ancestry. It is thought by some scholars to be akin to Japanese, by others to be a member of the Altaic subfamily of the Ural-Altaic family of languages (see Uralic and A...

Cornish

(Encyclopedia)Cornish, language belonging to the Brythonic group of the Celtic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Celtic languages. See P. B. Ellis, The Cornish Language and Its Literature (19...

Bantu languages

(Encyclopedia)Bantu languages, group of African languages forming a subdivision of the Benue-Niger division of the Niger-Congo branch of the Niger-Kordofanian language family (see African languages). Bantu contains...

Chinese

(Encyclopedia)Chinese, subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages (see Sino-Tibetan languages), which is also sometimes grouped with the Tai, or Thai, languages in a Sinitic subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan lan...

Hindi

(Encyclopedia)Hindi hĭnˈdē [key], language belonging to the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. The official language of India, Hindi is the written or literary va...

Afrikaans

(Encyclopedia)Afrikaans ăfˌrəkänsˈ [key], member of the West Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Germanic languages). Although its classification is still dis...

Whitney, William Dwight

(Encyclopedia)Whitney, William Dwight, 1827–94, American Sanskrit scholar and lexicographer, b. Northampton, Mass. After studying in Germany, Whitney became professor of Sanskrit and of comparative philology at Y...

Lithuanian

(Encyclopedia)Lithuanian lĭthˌo͞oāˈnēən [key], a language belonging to the Baltic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Baltic languages). The official language of Lithuania since 1918, Lit...

Backus, John Warner

(Encyclopedia)Backus, John Warner, 1924–2007, American computer scientist, b. Philadelphia, grad. Columbia (M.A. 1950). Trained as a mathematician, he was hired (1950) by IBM Corp. as a computer programmer. From ...

Quechua

(Encyclopedia)Quechua, Kechua kēchˈwä [key], linguistic family belonging to the Andean branch of the Andean-Equatorial stock of Native American languages (mainly in South America). Encompassing far more native ...