Tuesday, March 16, 2010

P

Pahari
(Also known as Pahaari), is a general term for various dialects spoken in the Indian part of the central Himalayan range. The word is derived from 'pahar' or 'pahad' meaning 'mountain'. The term 'Pahaari/Pahari' in Hindi, Urdu, or Punjabi means "language of the mountain people". Pahari dialects are found in the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal (traditionally called Uttarakhand). Western Pahari (Himachali) dialects include: Pothohari/Potwari, Kangri, Kullu, Mandyali, etc. The dialects spoken in Uttaranchal/Uttarakhand include Garhwali, Kumaoni and others. Garhwali itself has many dialects spoken in different parts of the state, like Jaunsari, Jadhi, etc. In the UK the language is referred to colloquially as "mawri twaree" (mine and yours).

Pahlavi
The Pahlavi script was used broadly in the Sassanid Empire to write down Middle Persian for secular, as well as religious purposes. The word Pahlavi, referring to the script of Middle Persian, itself is a borrowing from Parthian (parthau "Parthian" ? pahlaw; the semivowel glide r changes to l, a common occurrence in language evolution). The word originally referred to the language spoken by the Parthians, and later came to be applied to the script used to write Middle Persian, which was derived from the Aramaic alphabet. Middle Persian Pahlavi script was derived from Aramaic independently, although Inscriptional MP Pahlavi is quite similar to Inscriptional Parthian Pahlavi.

Palauan
(Also spelled Belauan) is the language spoken on Palau. It is a member of the Austronesian family of languages, and is considered to be one of two languages in Micronesia (the other being Chamorro) belonging to the Western Malayo-Polynesian group, all others considered to be members of the Micronesian subgroup of Eastern Malayo-Polynesian.

Pali
Is a Middle Indo-Aryan dialect or prakrit. It is most famous as the Liturgical language in which the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism (also known as the Pali Canon or in Pali the Tipitaka) were written down in Sri Lanka in the 1st century BCE. Pali has been written in a variety of scripts, from Brahmi, Devanagari and other Indic scripts through to a romanised (western) form devised by T. W. Rhys Davids of the Pali Text Society.

Pangasinan
Belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian languages branch of the Austronesian languages family. Pangasinan is spoken by more than two million people in the province of Pangasinan, in other Pangasinan communities in the Philippines, and by a significant number of Pangasinan immigrants in the United States. Pangasinan is the primary language in the province of Pangasinan, located on the west central area of the island of Luzon along the Lingayen Gulf. It is the dominant language in central Pangasinan.

Papiamento
Or Papiamentu is the primary language spoken on the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao (the so-called ABC islands). It is also well known by people in Saba, St Eustatius, and the Sint Maarten islands. Papiamento is a creole language whose lexicon is drawn firstly from Portuguese (about 60%) and some Spanish language and from Dutch (about 25%). The remainder (15%) comes from West African languages, Arawak, and other languages.

Pashto
Is the language spoken by the Pashtun people who inhabit Afghanistan and the western provinces of Pakistan.

Pecheneg
Is the extinct Oghuz Turkic language spoken by the Pechenegs in Eastern Europe. It went extinct by the 12th century.

Pemon
Or Pemong (in Spanish: Pemón) is a Cariban language spoken mainly in Venezuela, specifically in the regions Bolivar State, Gran Sabana, an estimated 4,800 people in Venezuela speak Pemon. To some extent Pemon is also spoken in Brazil and Guyana (1000+ people).

Pennsylvania German
Or more commonly (but less accurately) Pennsylvania Dutch, and increasingly Deitsch (Deitsch, Pennsilfaanisch-Deitsch, Pennsilfaani-Deitsch, Pennsilweni-Deitsch, Pennsilfaanisch), is a High German variety spoken by 150,000 to 250,000 people in North America. Speakers of the language can be found today mainly in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana in the United States, and Ontario, Canada. The majority of speakers are either Amish or Old Order Mennonite, although this was not the case a few generations ago.

Persian
Is a language spoken in Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Bahrain, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Southern Russia, neighboring countries, and elsewhere.

Palula
Also known as Phalura and as Ashretiwar, is spoken by 7,000 to 15,000 people in Ashret and Biori Valleys, in the Chitral District of the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan. A variety of this language is spoken in Village Sau in Afghanistan. The Phalura Language has had some documentation by George Morgenstierne (1926), Kendall Decker (1992), and Henrik Liljegrin (2005). It is classified as a Dardic Language but this is more of a geographical classification than a linguistic one. In some villages, Palula is believed to be a dying language, as most speakers are converting to the more widelty spoken Khowar language. However, in other areas Palula is a strong, vibrant and growing language, as the population in those areas increases.

Phoenician
Was a language originally spoken in the coastal region then called Put in Phoenician, Canaan in Phoenician, Hebrew and Aramaic, and Phoenicia in Greek and Latin. Phoenician is a Semitic language of the Canaanite subgroup, closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. This area includes modern-day Lebanon, coastal Syria and northern Israel.

Phrygian
Was the Indo-European language of the Phrygians, a people who probably migrated from Thrace to Asia Minor in the Bronze Age, possibly during the Sea Peoples migrations of ca 1200 BC. Phrygian is attested by two corpora, one from around 800 BC and later (Paleo-Phrygian), and then after a period of several centuries from around the beginning of the Common Era (Neo-Phrygian). The Palaeo-Phrygian corpus is further divided (geographically) into inscriptions of Midas-city (M, W), Gordion, Central (C), Bithynia (B), Pteria (P), Tyana (T), Daskyleion (Dask), Bayindir (Bay), and "various" (Dd, documents divers). The Mysian inscriptions seem to be in a separate dialect (in an alphabet with an additional letter, "Mysian s").

Phuthi
Is a Bantu Nguni language variety with Sotho influence spoken in scattered communities in the Eastern Cape / Lesotho borderland. It is part of the Swati dialect continuum. The origins of this language can be traced back for about 300 years. Their most notable leader was Chief Morisi (born in 1775) that died on Morisi mountain after a skirmish with the British, Boers and Basotho forces because of alleged stolen livestock. This event caused the people to disperse all over the mountainous region in order to escape capture by the colonial powers of the time. It is estimated that around 20 000 people in South Africa and Lesotho use Phuthi as their home language.

Picard
Is a language closely related to French, and as such is one of the larger group of Romance languages. It is spoken in two regions in the far north of France – Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Picardie – and in parts of the Belgian region Wallonia (but is clearly distinct from the Walloon language). Picard is known by several different names. Residents of Picardie call it picard; but in Nord-Pas-de-Calais and it is more commonly known as chti or chtimi, or in and around the town Valenciennes as rouchi; or simply as patois by Northerners in general. Linguists group all of these under the name Picard. Indeed, whether it is called patois, picard, or chti, it is the same language, and in general the variety spoken in Picardie is understood by speakers in Nord-Pas-de-Calais and vice versa.

Pictish
Is the extinct language of the Picts. Evidence of the language is limited to place names and to the names of people found on monuments and the contemporary records. At its height, it may have been spoken from Shetland down to Fife.

Pirahã
Is a language spoken by the Pirahã — an indigenous people of Amazonas, Brazil, who live along the Maici river, a tributary of the Amazon. The Pirahã language has a number of unusual linguistic features. One of them, a seeming lack of number words, makes Pirahã a fascinating test case of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, and more generally of the link between language and cognition.

Plautdietsch
Or Mennonite Low German, is a language spoken by the Mennonites who trace their roots to the Low Countries and north Germany, but who adopted an East Low German dialect while they were refugees in the Vistula delta area of Royal Prussia (later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), beginning in the early-to-mid 1500s. Beginning in the late 1700s, when the region became part of the Kingdom of Prussia, many Mennonites left and created new colonies north of the Black Sea (present-day Ukraine), in an area that Russia had recently acquired in one of the Russo-Turkish Wars (see Russian Mennonites). Many Mennonites migrated to North America — especially Canada and the United States — and Latin America — especially Paraguay and Mexico, — most of them live as rural settlers and added some Spanish and Portuguese words to their own language.

Polabian
Which became extinct in the 18th century, was a group of Slavic dialects spoken in present-day northern Germany: Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, eastern parts of Lower Saxony, and Schleswig-Holstein. It was one of the Lechitic languages. The name derives from the name of Polabian tribes, which in turn derives from the name of the Elbe river in Slavic languages: Laba in Polish and Labe in Czech.

Polish
Is the official language of Poland. Polish is the main representative of the Lechitic branch of the West Slavic languages. It originated in the areas of present-day Poland from several local Western Slavic dialects, most notably those spoken in Greater Poland and Lesser Poland.

Portuguese
Is an Indo-European language of the Romance branch. It originated in what is today Galicia (in Spain) and northern Portugal. It is the official language of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal and São Tomé and Príncipe, co-official with Chinese in the Chinese S.A.R. of Macau, and co-official with Tetum in East Timor.

Potiguara
Is a language which is spoken by 6000 Indian tribesmen in Paraíba, Pôsto Nísia Brasileira on the Baía da Traição, in the municipality of Mamanguape, Brazil. The language belongs to Tupi-Guarani language subfamily.

Proto-Indo-European
Is the hypothetical common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, believed to have been spoken around 4000 BC in Central Asia (according to the Kurgan hypothesis) or millennia before that in Anatolia (according to the Anatolian hypothesis). The existence of such a language is generally accepted by linguists, though there has been debate about many specific details. All Indo-European languages are inflected languages (although many modern Indo-European languages, including Modern English, have lost much of their inflection). By comparative reconstruction, it is quite likely that at least the latest stage of the common PIE mother languages (Late PIE) was an inflectional language, which was more suffixing than prefixing.

Provençal
Is one of several dialects of the Occitan language, which is spoken by a minority of people in southern France and other areas of France. In the English-speaking world, "Provençal" is often used to refer to all dialects of Occitan, but actually refers specifically to the dialect spoken in the former province of Provence as well as south of Dauphiné and the Nîmes region in Languedoc and the upper valleys of Piedmont, Italy (Val Maira, Val Varacha, Val d'Estura, Entraigas, Limon, Vinai, Pignerol, Sestriera). "Provençal" is also the customary name given to the older version of the langue d'oc used by the troubadours of medieval literature, corresponding to Old French or langue d'oil of the northern areas of France.

Pucikwar
Is an extinct language of the Andaman Islands, India, spoken by the A-Pucikwar people.

Punjabi
Is the language of the Punjabi people and the Punjab regions of India and Pakistan. It is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Iranian subfamily. Uniquely for an Indo-European language, Punjabi is a tonal language where the tones arose as a reinterpretation of different consonant series in terms of pitch. In terms of morphological complexity, it is an agglutinative language and words are usually ordered 'Subject Object Verb'.

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