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creole language

(Encyclopedia)creole language krēōlˈ [key], any language that began as a pidgin but was later adopted as the mother tongue by a people in place of the original mother tongue or tongues. Examples are the Gullah o...

English language

(Encyclopedia)English language, member of the West Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Germanic languages). Spoken by about 470 million people throughout the world...

Provençal literature

(Encyclopedia)Provençal literature, vernacular literature of S France. Provençal, or Occitan, as the language is now often called, appears to have been the first vernacular tongue used in French commerce and lite...

Marathi

(Encyclopedia)Marathi məräˈtē [key], language belonging to the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Indo-Iranian. ...

J

(Encyclopedia)J, 10th letter of the alphabet, a Western European medieval development of I, with which it was formerly quite interchangeable in writing. It is pronounced as a consonant in English and often as a y i...

Norris, Edwin

(Encyclopedia)Norris, Edwin, 1795–1872, English philologist. Norris wrote a number of articles on little-known languages of Asia and Africa. His most important work was his uncompleted Assyrian Dictionary (3 vol....

Sindhi

(Encyclopedia)Sindhi sĭnˈdē [key], language belonging to the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Indo-Iranian. ...

Serbo-Croatian

(Encyclopedia)Serbo-Croatian sûrˈbō-krōāˈshən [key], language belonging to the South Slavic group of the Slavic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Slavic languages). Serbo-Croatian compr...

Fuller, Margaret

(Encyclopedia)Fuller, Margaret, 1810–50, American writer, lecturer, and public intellectual, b. Cambridgeport (now part of Cambridge), Mass. She was one of the most influential personalities in the American liter...

Auerbach, Erich

(Encyclopedia)Auerbach, Erich, 1892–1957, German-American philologist, literary scholar, and critic, b. Berlin, Ph.D. Univ. of Greifswald, 1921. He is known primarily for Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in...