ABC

ABC are the first three letters of the Latin script known as the alphabet.

ABC or abc may refer to:

Broadcasting

Nursery rhyme

A nursery rhyme is a traditional poem or song for young children in Britain and many other countries, but usage only dates from the late 18th /early 19th century. In North America the term Mother Goose Rhymes, introduced in the mid-18th century, is still often used.

History

Lullabies

The oldest children's songs of which we have records are lullabies, intended to help a child sleep. Lullabies can be found in every human culture. The English term lullaby is thought to come from "lu, lu" or "la la" sound made by mothers or nurses to calm children, and "by by" or "bye bye", either another lulling sound, or a term for good night. Until the modern era lullabies were usually only recorded incidentally in written sources. The Roman nurses' lullaby, "Lalla, Lalla, Lalla, aut dormi, aut lacta", is recorded in a scholium on Persius and may be the oldest to survive.

Many medieval English verses associated with the birth of Jesus take the form of a lullaby, including "Lullay, my liking, my dere son, my sweting" and may be versions of contemporary lullabies. However, most of those used today date from the 17th century. For example, a well known lullaby such as "Rock-a-bye, baby on a tree top", cannot be found in records until the late-18th century when it was printed by John Newbery (c. 1765).

Alphabet

An alphabet is a standard set of letters (basic written symbols or graphemes) which is used to write one or more languages based on the general principle that the letters represent phonemes (basic significant sounds) of the spoken language. This is in contrast to other types of writing systems, such as syllabaries (in which each character represents a syllable) and logographies (in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic unit).

The Proto-Canaanite script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is the first fully phonemic script. Thus the Phoenician alphabet is considered to be the first alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and possibly Brahmic. According to terminology introduced by Peter T. Daniels, an "alphabet" is a script that represents both vowels and consonants as letters equally. In this narrow sense of the word the first "true" alphabet was the Greek alphabet, which was developed on the basis of the earlier Phoenician alphabet. In other alphabetic scripts such as the original Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic, letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants; such a script is also called an abjad. A third type, called abugida or alphasyllabary, is one where vowels are shown by diacritics or modifications of consonantal base letters, as in Devanagari and other South Asian scripts.

BabyFirst

BabyFirst is a media company that produces and distributes content for babies through television, the internet and mobile apps. The content is intended to develop a baby's skills, such as color recognition, counting and vocabulary. There are about 90 BabyFirst TV shows and 41 apps for mobile devices. As of 2014, the network is distributed to 81 million homes, and is based in Los Angeles, California.

BabyFirst was founded in 2004 by Guy Oranim and Sharon Rechter. Its first broadcast was through DirectTV in 2006. It was funded by Regency Enterprises, Kardan, and Bellco Capital. Distribution expanded through agreements with the Echostar Dish Network, Comcast, AT&T U-verse and others. It also developed a premium BabyFirst YouTube channel, and mobile apps. One app developed with AT&T U-verse allows babies to interact with the television programming by drawing on a mobile device.

History

Origins

BabyFirst was founded in 2004 by Guy Oranim and Sharon Rechter. The network was launched on May 11, 2006 on DirecTV and was later made available through EchoStar's Dish Network that June. It was made available through EchoStar's Dish Network that June. The BabyFirst network is based in Los Angeles and was initially funded by Regency Enterprises (a Hollywood movie studio), Kardan (a holding company) & Bellco Capital (a private fund). BabyFirst was controversial when it was introduced, because it was the first 24-hour channel for children six months to three years in age. However, the channel was popular among parents and grew quickly.

Sign language

A sign language (also signed language) is a language which chiefly uses manual communication and body language to convey meaning, as opposed to acoustically conveyed sound patterns. This can involve simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to fluidly express a speaker's thoughts. They share many similarities with spoken languages (sometimes called "oral languages", which depend primarily on sound), which is why linguists consider both to be natural languages, but there are also some significant differences between signed and spoken languages.

Wherever communities of deaf people exist, sign languages have been developed. Signing is not only used by the deaf, it is also used by people who can hear, but cannot physically speak. While they use space for grammar in a way that spoken languages do not, sign languages show the same linguistic properties and use the same language faculty as do spoken languages. Hundreds of sign languages are in use around the world and are at the cores of local deaf cultures. Some sign languages have obtained some form of legal recognition, while others have no status at all.