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Greek - Learn to speak - audio cd book - language learning |
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Greek has a documented history of 3,400 years, the longest of any single natural language in the Indo-European language family. It is also one of the earliest attested Indo-European languages, with fragmentary records in Mycenaean dating back to the 15th or 14th century BC, making it the world's oldest recorded living language. Today, it is spoken by approximately 17–25 million people in Greece (official), Cyprus (official), Albania, Bulgaria, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Italy, Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Egypt, Jordan and emigrant communities around the world, including Australia, United States, Canada, Germany and elsewhere.
Greek has been written in the Greek alphabet (the oldest continuously used alphabet, and the first to introduce vowels) since the 9th century BC in Greece (before that in Linear B), and the 4th century BC in Cyprus (before that in Cypriot syllabary). Greek literature has a continuous history of nearly three thousand years. Greek is a language distinguished by an extraordinarily rich vocabulary. In respect to the roots of words, ancient Greek vocabulary was essentially of Indo-European origin, but with a significant number of borrowings from the idioms of the populations that inhabited Greece before the arrival of Proto-Greeks. Words of non-Indo-European origin can be traced into Greek from as early as Mycenaean times; they include a large number of Greek toponyms. The vast majority of Modern Greek vocabulary is directly inherited from ancient Greek, although in certain cases words have changed meanings. Words of foreign origin have entered the language mainly from Latin, Italian and Ottoman Turkish. During older periods of the Greek language, loan words into Greek acquired Greek inflections, leaving thus only a foreign root word. Modern borrowings (from the 20th century on), especially from French and English, are typically not inflected. Like most Indo-European languages, Greek is highly inflected. Greek grammar has come down through the ages fairly intact, though with some simplifications. For example, Modern Greek features two numbers: singular and plural. The dual number of Ancient times was abandoned at a very early stage. The instrumental case of Mycenaean Greek disappeared in the Archaic period, and the dative-locative of Ancient Greek disappeared in the late Hellenistic. Four cases, nominative, genitive, accusative and vocative, remain in Modern Greek. The three ancient gender noun categories (masculine, feminine and neuter) never fell out of use, while adjectives agree in gender, number, and case with their respective nouns, as do their articles. Greek verbs have synthetic inflectional forms for: * mood — Ancient Greek: indicative, subjunctive, imperative, and optative; Modern Greek: indicative and imperative (other modal functions are expressed by periphrastic constructions) * number — singular, plural (archaic Greek also had a dual) * voice — Ancient Greek: active, middle, and passive; Modern Greek: active and medio-passive * tense — Ancient Greek: present, past, future; Modern Greek: past and non-past (future is expressed by a periphrastic construction) * person — first, second, third * aspect — Ancient Greek: imperfective, perfective (traditionally called aorist), perfect (sometimes also called perfective, see note about terminology); Modern Greek: perfective and imperfective Learn to speak Greek in New Zealand
Learn to speak Greek in the UK
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Last Updated on Tuesday, 27 January 2009 09:28 |
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About The Language Tagalog
Tagalog is one of the major languages of the Republic of the Philippines. It is the most spoken Philippine language in terms of the number of speakers.
Tagalog, as its de facto standardized counterpart, Filipino, is the principal language of the national media in the Philippines. It is the primary language of public education. As Filipino, it is, along with English, a co-official language and the sole national language. Tagalog is widely used as a lingua franca throughout the country, and in overseas Filipino communities. However, while Tagalog may be prevalent in those fields, English, to varying degrees of fluency, is more prevalent in the fields of government and business.
Tagalog History
The word Tagalog derived from tagá-ílog, from tagá- meaning "native of" and ílog meaning "river", thus, it means "river dweller." There are no surviving written samples of Tagalog before the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century. Very little is known about the history of the language. However, according to linguists such as Dr. David Zorc and Dr. Robert Blust, the Tagalogs originated, along with their Central Philippine cousins, from northeastern Mindanao or eastern Visayas
The first known book to be written in Tagalog is the Doctrina Cristiana (Christian Doctrine) of 1593. It was written in Spanish and two versions of Tagalog; one written in Baybayin and the other in the Latin alphabet.
Throughout the 333 years of Spanish occupation, there have been grammars and dictionaries written by Spanish clergymen such as Vocabulario de la Lengua Tagala by Pedro de San Buenaventura (Pila, Laguna, 1613), Vocabulario de la lengua tagala (1835) and Arte de la lengua tagala y manual tagalog para la adminstración de los Santos Sacramentos (1850).
Poet Francisco "Balagtas" Baltazar (1788-1862) is regarded as the foremost Tagalog writer. His most famous work is the early 19th-century Florante at Laura.
In 1937, Tagalog was selected as the basis of the national language by the National Language Institute. In 1959, Tagalog, which had been renamed Wikang Pambansa ("National Language") by President Manuel L. Quezon in 1939, was renamed by the Secretary of Education, Jose Romero, as Pilipino to give it a national rather than ethnicity label and connotation. The changing of the name did not, however, result in better acceptance at the conscious level among non-Tagalogs, especially Cebuanos who had not accepted the selection. In 1971, the language issue was revived once more,and a compromise solution was worked out a universalist approach to the national language, to be called Filipino rather than Pilipino. When a new constitution was drawn up in 1987, it named Filipino as the national language. The constitution specified that as that Filipino language evolves, it shall be further developed and enriched on the basis of existing Philippine and other languages.
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How humans build language skills
Audio recordings of language programsstreaminghave an advantage over print or academic classes because hearing is how humans learn to speak. That is how we learned our native tongues, and how we effectively learn second languages. As babies, we listened to our parents speaking. In our hard-wired desire to communicate, we learned our native language by imitating them. According to linguists, babies begin by distinguishing basic syllables, and around 3 months, start to babble, making simple sounds (ba-ba-ba or ma-ma-ma). They also imitate the tonal changes of their parents language. By sixmonths, they can distinguish the sounds of their native language fromthose of foreign languages and begin to practice its sounds, intonations, and rhythms.Most children by the age of 1 year can say a few simple words, even if they arent clear on theirmeanings. At 18months, most children have a speaking vocabulary of eight to ten words. By 2, they begin forming simple sentences. And then language fluency begins to soar.
In the early 1900s, European linguists proposed that language learning would be better if it were conducted in the target language. In this approachcalled the Direct Method (or Natural Method)all directions, explanations, and definitions
are given in the language being taught. In a French class, French and only French is spoken or read. All grammar is learned inductively. While this method most closely imitates the way we learn our first language, it is difficult to teach and can be frustrating and discouraging to learners. Most audio-based language learning programs combine both native and target languages into talking phrasebooks.
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