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Beckford, William

(Encyclopedia)Beckford, William, 1760–1844, English author. A wealthy dilettante, Beckford had a great desire to ascend to the nobility. Unfortunately his erratic and strange behavior often worked against his amb...

Ticknor, George

(Encyclopedia)Ticknor, George tĭkˈnər [key], 1791–1871, American author and teacher, b. Boston, grad. Dartmouth, 1807. In 1815 he went to Germany to study at the Univ. of Göttingen. While abroad he was appoin...

inflection

(Encyclopedia)inflection, in grammar. In many languages, words or parts of words are arranged in formally similar sets consisting of a root, or base, and various affixes. Thus walking, walks, walker have in common ...

Esperanto

(Encyclopedia)Esperanto ĕspəränˈtō [key], an artificial language introduced in 1887 and intended by its inventor, Dr. Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof (1859–1917), a Polish oculist and linguist, to ease communication ...

pidgin

(Encyclopedia)pidgin pĭjˈən [key], a lingua franca that is not the mother tongue of anyone using it and that has a simplified grammar and a restricted, often polyglot vocabulary. The earliest documented pidgin i...

Hittite

(Encyclopedia)Hittite: see Anatolian languages. ...

Khoisan

(Encyclopedia)Khoisan: see African languages. ...

Slavonic

(Encyclopedia)Slavonic: see Slavic languages.

Niger-Kordofanian

(Encyclopedia)Niger-Kordofanian: see African languages. ...

Nilo-Saharan

(Encyclopedia)Nilo-Saharan: see African languages. ...