Arabic

Arabic (/ˈærəbɪk/;Arabic: العَرَبِية‎, al-ʻarabiyyah [alʕaraˈbijja] or Arabic: عربي ,عربى‎ ʻarabī [ˈʕarabiː]) is the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century and its modern descendants excluding Maltese. Arabic is spoken in a wide arc stretching across Western Asia, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa. Arabic belongs to the Afroasiatic family.

The literary language, called Modern Standard Arabic or Literary Arabic, is the only official form of Arabic. It is used in most written documents as well as in formal spoken occasions, such as lectures and news broadcasts.

Arabic is a Central Semitic language, closely related to Aramaic, Hebrew, Ugaritic and Phoenician. Standard Arabic is distinct from and more conservative than all of the spoken varieties, and the two exist in a state known as diglossia, used side-by-side for different societal functions.

Some of the spoken varieties are mutually unintelligible, both written and orally, and the varieties as a whole constitute a sociolinguistic language. This means that on purely linguistic grounds they would likely be considered to constitute more than one language, but are commonly grouped together as a single language for political or religious reasons (see below). If considered multiple languages, it is unclear how many languages there would be, as the spoken varieties form a dialect chain with no clear boundaries. If Arabic is considered a single language, it is perhaps spoken by as many as 422 million speakers (native and non-native) in the Arab world, making it one of the six most-spoken languages in the world. If considered separate languages, the most-spoken variety would most likely be Egyptian Arabic with 89 million native speakers—still greater than any other Afroasiatic language. Arabic also is a liturgical language of 1.6 billion Muslims. It is one of six official languages of the United Nations.

Thirty Days

Thirty Days or 30 Days may refer to:

Film and TV

Film

TV

Publications

Music

Songs

Hindustani language

Hindustani (Hindustani: हिन्दुस्तानी,ہندوستانی[ɦɪn̪ˈd̪uːsˌt̪aːni], lit. "of Hindustan") historically also known as Hindavi, Dehlvi, and Rekhta, is the lingua franca of North India and Pakistan. It is an Indo-Aryan language, deriving primarily from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi, and incorporates a large amount of vocabulary from Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic and Chagatai. It is a pluricentric language, with two official forms, Modern Standard Hindi and Modern Standard Urdu, which are its standardised registers, and which may be called Hindustani or Hindi-Urdu when taken together. The colloquial languages are all but indistinguishable, and even though the official standards are nearly identical in grammar, they differ in literary conventions and in academic and technical vocabulary, with Urdu adopting stronger Persian, Turkic and Arabic influences, and Hindi relying more heavily on Sanskrit. Before the Partition of India, the terms Hindustani, Urdu, and Hindi were synonymous; all covered what would be called Urdu and Hindi today. The term Hindustani is still used for the colloquial language and lingua franca of North India and Pakistan, for example for the language of Bollywood films, as well as for several quite different varieties of Hindi spoken outside the Subcontinent, such as Fiji Hindi and the Caribbean Hindustani of Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, Jamaica and South Africa.

Ira Glass

Ira Jeffrey Glass (/ˈaɪrə/, born March 3, 1959) is an American public radio personality and the host and producer of the radio and television show This American Life.

Early life

Glass was born in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, to Jewish parents Barry Glass, an accountant, and Shirley Glass, a psychologist, infidelity researcher, and author whom the New York Times called "the godmother of infidelity research."

He is the first cousin once removed of composer Philip Glass, who has appeared on Glass' show and whose music can often be heard on the program.

Education

Glass attended Milford Mill High School in Baltimore County where he was active in student theater, student government, and yearbook; he was also the co-editor of the student literary magazine. He played the part of Captain George Brackett in Milford's 1975 production of South Pacific, Lowe in their 1976 production of Damn Yankees, and Bud Frump in their 1977 production of How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying; along with his involvement on stage, he was a member of the Thespian Society. Glass was involved in student government during his junior and senior years, as a member of the executive board. His involvement in yearbook started in tenth grade and continued until his graduation in 1977. A rather popular and outgoing student, Glass also was involved with the morning announcements, as well as being a member of the Milford Mill Honor Society in 1977. While in high school, he wrote jokes for Baltimore radio personality Johnny Walker.

Language

Language is the ability to acquire and use complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so, and a language is any specific example of such a system. The scientific study of language is called linguistics.

Questions concerning the philosophy of language, such as whether words can represent experience, have been debated since Gorgias and Plato in Ancient Greece. Thinkers such as Rousseau have argued that language originated from emotions while others like Kant have held that it originated from rational and logical thought. 20th-century philosophers such as Wittgenstein argued that philosophy is really the study of language. Major figures in linguistics include Ferdinand de Saussure, Noam Chomsky and William C. Stokoe.

Estimates of the number of languages in the world vary between 5,000 and 7,000. However, any precise estimate depends on a partly arbitrary distinction between languages and dialects. Natural languages are spoken or signed, but any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli – for example, in graphic writing, braille, or whistling. This is because human language is modality-independent. Depending on philosophical perspectives regarding the definition of language and meaning, when used as a general concept, "language" may refer to the cognitive ability to learn and use systems of complex communication, or to describe the set of rules that makes up these systems, or the set of utterances that can be produced from those rules. All languages rely on the process of semiosis to relate signs to particular meanings. Oral and sign languages contain a phonological system that governs how symbols are used to form sequences known as words or morphemes, and a syntactic system that governs how words and morphemes are combined to form phrases and utterances.