Tuesday, March 16, 2010

J

Jacaltec
Are a group of Maya Indians living in the Western Guatemala highlands and adjoining part of Chiapas and southern Mexico. Jacaltec is also the name of their branch of the Mayan languages which is spoken by approximately 40,000 people, mainly in the Huehuetenango Department of Guatemala. It is known as Pobp’ al Ti’ to native speakers ("Jacaltec" is derived from the Nahuatl name for the people and their language). The Jacaltec language has a Verb Subject Object syntax. Like many Native American languages, Jacaltec has a lot of complex agglutinative morphology and uses ergative case. It is divided in two dialects, eastern and western Jacaltec, which are mutually intelligible in speech but not in writing. Owing to Jacaltec's dissimilarity with Indo-European languages, the reasonably healthy linguistic population and the relative ease of access to Guatemala, Jacaltec has become a favorite of students of linguistic typology.

Jalaa
Is an endangered language of northeastern Nigeria (Loojaa settlement in Balanga Local Government Area, Bauchi State), of uncertain (possibly Niger-Congo) origins. It is nearly extinct; the ethnic group has come to use the Bwilim dialect of Cham in daily life, and the few remaining speakers of Jalaa, all elderly, are much more fluent in Cham than in Jalaa. Traditionally, the Jalabe (as the ethnic group is called) are said to have come to Loojaa from an area a few miles south within the Muri Mountains, where they had shared a settlement with Tso and Kwa clans. (The name of this settlement, Cèntûm or Cùntûm, is used as a name for the language in some sources.) Later, during the nineteenth century, the Cham arrived in the area, fleeing attacks from the larger Waja to the north; the Cham intermarried with the Jalabe, and the Jalabe began to adopt the Cham language.

Japanese
is a language spoken by over 127 million people, mainly in Japan, but also by Japanese emigrant communities around the world. It is considered an agglutinative language and is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics reflecting the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary which indicate the relative status of speaker and listener. The sound inventory of Japanese is relatively small, and it has a lexically-distinctive pitch accent system. Its recorded history goes back to the 8th century, when the three major works of Old Japanese were compiled.

Javanese
Is the spoken language of the people in the central and eastern part of the island of Java, in Indonesia. It is the native language of more than 75,500,000 people. The Javanese language is part of the Austronesian family, and is therefore related to Indonesian and Malay. Many speakers of Javanese also speak Indonesian for official and business purposes, and to communicate with non-Javanese Indonesians. There are large communities of Javanese-speaking people in Malaysia, especially in the states of Selangor and Johore. (The Chief Minister of Selangor, Khir Toyo, is an ethnic Javanese.) However, the Javanese language is not mutually intelligible with Malay.

Jibbali
Is a dialect of Oman, interesting to philologists as one of the oldest of Semitic tongues.

Jicarilla Apache
Refers to an Apache people currently living in New Mexico and to the Southern Athabaskan language they speak. The term jicarilla comes from Mexican Spanish meaning 'little basket'. The Jicarilla Apache Indian Reservation is located within two northern New Mexico counties: Rio Arriba County and Sandoval County.

Judæo-Aramaic
is a collective term used to describe several Hebrew-influenced Aramaic and Neo-Aramaic languages. Aramaic, like Hebrew, is a Northwest Semitic language, and the two share many features. From the seventh century BCE, Aramaic became the lingua franca of the Middle East. It became the language of diplomacy and trade, but was not used by the Hebrew populace at this early date. As described in 2 Kings 18:26, Hezekiah, king of Judah, negotiates with Assyrian ambassadors in Aramaic rather than Hebrew so that the common people would not understand. During the sixth century BCE, the Babylonian captivity brought the working language of Mesopotamia much more into their daily life of ordinary Jews. Around 500 BCE, Darius I of Persia proclaimed that Aramaic would be the official language for the western half of his empire, and the Eastern Aramaic dialect of Babylon became the official standard.

Jurchens
Were a Tungus people who inhabited parts of Manchuria and northern Korea until the seventeenth century, when they became the Manchus. They established the Jin Dynasty, 1115–1234 (ancun gurun in ancient Jurchen and aisin gurun in Standard Manchu) between 1115 and 1122; it lasted until 1234.

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