FACTOID # 140: In Switzerland, the average person has to work for 102 minutes to buy a kilogram of beef - one of the longest times in the developed world. On the other hand, they only have work 14 hours to buy a refrigerator for it.
 
 Home   Encyclopedia   Statistics   Countries A-Z   Flags   Maps   Education   Forum   FAQ   About 
 
WHAT'S NEW
RECENT ARTICLES
More Recent Articles »
 

FACTS & STATISTICS    Simple view

  1. Select countries to view: (hold down Control key and click to select several)

     

     

    Compare:

     

     
  1. Select fact or statistic: (* = graphable)

     

     

     

  2. (OPTIONAL) Compare to statistic: (both need to be graphable)

     

     

     

  3. View result as:

     

       
(OR) SEARCH ALL encyclopedia, stats & forums:   

Ð (capital Ð, lower-case ð) (or eth, eð or edh, Faroese is a West Nordic or West Scandinavian language spoken by about 48,000 people in the Faroe Islands and about 25,000 in Denmark. In total, about 80,000 people speak it. It is one of two insular Scandinavian languages which have their origins in the Old Norse language... Faroese: edd) is a This article is about letter, a written message from one party to another. For other uses, see Letter (disambiguation). A letter is a written message from one party to another. Letters are usually intended to be received by someone far away. Before widespread availability of typewriters and computers, letters were... letter used in Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. See IPA in Unicode if you have display problems. Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) is an early form of the English language which was spoken in England around the year 1000. It is a... Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and present-day The Icelandic alphabet consists of the following letters: A Á B (C) D Ð E É F G H I Í J K L M N O Ó P (Q) R S T U Ú V (W) X Y Ý (Z) Þ Æ Ö The modern Icelandic alphabet has developed from a standard established in the 19th century, by the... Icelandic and Faroese is a West Nordic or West Scandinavian language spoken by about 48,000 people in the Faroe Islands and about 25,000 in Denmark. In total, about 80,000 people speak it. It is one of two insular Scandinavian languages which have their origins in the Old Norse language... Faroese. The letter had its origin as a d with a cross-stroke added. The lowercase version has retained the curved shape of a The Middle Ages formed the middle period in a traditional schematic division of European history into three ages: the classical civilization of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times, beginning with the Renaissance. The Middle Ages of Western Europe are commonly dated from the end of the Western Roman Empire... medieval scribe's d, which d itself has not.


In Icelandic, ð represents a voiced dental Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. See IPA in Unicode if you have display problems. Fricative consonants are produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together (e.g. the upper teeth and lower lip... fricative, as in th in English "them". (As a point of curiosity, however, the name of the letter is pronounced eþ, i. e. voiceless, unless followed by a vowel.) In Faroese, ð is never pronounced, except ð before r as [g] in a few words. In the Icelandic and Faroese An alphabet is a complete standardized set of letters—basic written symbols—each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past. There are other systems of writing such as ideograms, in which... alphabets, ð follows d. In Anglo-Saxon, ð may represent the same sound as in Icelandic, or the voiceless th of "thread", both of which were also represented by Þ (capital Þ, lower-case þ) or Thorn or Þorn is a letter in the Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic alphabets. The letter originated from the rune ᚦ, called thorn in Anglo-Saxon and Thurs (giant) in Scandinavia. It has the sound of either a voiceless interdental fricative, like th (such as in the... thorn (þ). Eth was usually used when the diagraph was voiced (as in "the" or "that"). In Middle English is the name given to an early form of the English language that was in common use from roughly the 12th to the 15th centuries— from after the Norman invasion by William the Conqueror in 1066 to around the introduction of the printing press by William Caxton... Middle English, ð was no longer used; the This article talks about the Norman people. There is also a city named Norman, Oklahoma in the United States. The Normans (adapted from the name Northmen or Norsemen) were Scandinavian invaders (especially Danish Vikings) who began to occupy the northern area of France now known as Normandy in the latter... Normans did not like characters in English which did not exist in the Latin alphabet. Ð was replaced with th, unfortunately making the voiced consonant indistinguishable from the unvoiced one, as the letter þ was also replaced by this Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. See IPA in Unicode if you have display problems. A digraph or bigraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound. This is often, but not necessarily, a sound (or more precisely a... digraph.


Lower-case eth is used as a symbol in the This article is about the alphabet officially used in linguistics. The NATO phonetic alphabet (alpha bravo) had informally been called the International Phonetic Alphabet. The International Phonetic Alphabet is a phonetic alphabet used by linguists to accurately and uniquely represent each of the wide variety of sounds (phones or phonemes... International Phonetic Alphabet, again for a The voiced dental fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is D. The voiced dental fricative occurs in English, and it is the sound denoted by the... voiced dental fricative, and in IPA usage, the name of the symbol is pronounced with the same voiced sound, as [ɛð].

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world, the standard script of the English language and most of the languages of western and central Europe, and of those areas settled by Europeans. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the... Latin alphabet: The letter A is the first letter in the Latin alphabet. History The letter A probably started as a pictogram of an ox head in Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Proto-semitic alphabet. By 1600 BC, the Phoenicians had given the letter a linear form that served as the basis for... Aa | The letter B is the second letter of the modern Latin alphabet. History The letter B probably started as a pictogram of the floorplan of a house in Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Proto-semitic alphabet. By 1500 BC, the Phoenicians had given the letter a linear form that served as... Bb | If you were looking for the C, C++, or C# programming languages then see C programming language, C Plus Plus, or C Sharp programming language C is the third letter of the Roman alphabet. In the Etruscan language, plosive consonants had no distinctive voicing, so they took over Greek Γ... Cc | The letter D is the fourth letter of the Latin alphabet. History The Semitic letter Dâlet probably developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. In Semitic, Ancient Greek (Modern Greek /ð/) and Latin the letter was pronounced /d/, in the Etruscan alphabet the letter was... Dd | The letter E is the fifth letter in the Latin alphabet. History E is derived from the Greek letter epsilon which is much the same in appearance (Ε, ε) and function. The Semitic hê probably first represented a praying or calling human figure. In Semitic, the letter was pronounced /h... Ee | The letter F is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet. History F developed from the digraph FH that stood for /f/. The Etruscans were the inventors of this digraph; F on its own stood for /w/ in Etruscan as in Greek (where the letter F,called Digamma in Greek... Ff | G is the seventh letter in the Roman alphabet. History The letter G was created by the Romans because they felt that C was not an adequate letter to represent both /k/ and /g/. Fascinatingly, the alleged inventor is a known historical figure, Spurius Carvilius Ruga (who flourished around 230... Gg | H is the eighth letter of the Latin alphabet. History The Semitic letter ח (khêt) probably represented the phoneme /X/ (pharyngeal voiceless fricative) (IPA [ħ]). The form of the letter probably stood for a fence. Early Greek H stood for /h/, but later on Η or η (Êta>... Hh | I is the 9th letter in the Latin alphabet. History The letter I derived from the Greek iota (Ι, ι). It stood for the vowel /i/, the same as in the Old Italic alphabet. In Latin (as in Modern Greek) /j/ (as English Y in YOKE) was added. In Semitic... Ii | J is the tenth letter of the Latin alphabet. History J was originally only a capital letter, therefore, some people still write their names as Jsabel, Jnes instead of Isabel, Ines in the German-speaking world, and in Italy, in pre-modern use one also sometimes encounters J as a... Jj | The eleventh letter of the Latin alphabet, K comes from the Greek Κ or κ (Kappa) developed from the Semitic Kap, symbol for an open hand. The Semitic sound value /k/ was maintained in most Classic as well as Modern Languages, although Latin abandoned K almost completely, preferring C. Therefore... Kk | L is the twelfth letter of the Latin alphabet. History The letter L is derived ultimately from the Semitic Lamed which stood for the phonetic value /l/ as did the Greek letter Lambda Λ (upper case) or λ (lower case), as well as the equivalent Etruscan and Latin letters. In... Ll | M is the thirteenth letter of the Latin alphabet. History The letter M represents the bilabial nasal consonant sound [m] in Classical languages as well as the modern languages. It derives its shape from the Greek Μ or μ. Semitic Mem originally pictured water, in all probability. The Oxford English... Mm | N is the fourteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Semitic Nûn was probably the picture of a snake; the sound value of the letter was /n/ - as in Greek, Etruscan, Latin and all modern languages. Greek name: Nυ, Ny. November represents the letter N in the NATO... Nn | O is the fifteenth letter of the Latin alphabet. In Greek (Omikron), Etruscan and Latin O stood for the vowel /o/. Although Semitic Ajin was used in some alphabets to transcribe [o], the sound value was usually consonantic: [?/] (as the Arabic letter ع called Ajn). Oscar represents the letter O... Oo | P is the 16th letter of the Latin alphabet. Semitic Pê (mouth) as well as Greek Π or π (Pi) and the Etruscan and Latin letters that developed from the former alphabet all symbolized /p/, a plosive, unvoiced consonant. Those who speak Arabic usually have difficulty pronouncing this sound; they... Pp | Q is the 17th letter of the Latin alphabet. The Semitic sound value of Qôp was /q/ (voiceless uvular plosive). In Greek this sign (called Qoppa in Greek) probably came to represent several labialized velar plosives, among them /k_w/ and /k_w_h/. These sounds changed to /p/ and /p_h/ respectively... Qq | R is the eighteenth letter of the Latin alphabet. Semitic Rêš (the head) developed into Greek Ρω (Rô). The sound value /r/ however was maintained in Greek as well as Etruscan and Latin. The finishing stroke was added to the Greek Rho to distinguish it from a later... Rr | S is the nineteenth letter in the modern Latin alphabet. In most writing systems that use the Latin alphabet, the letter s corresponds to a coronal fricative consonant. Semitic Šîn (bow) was pronounced as the voiceless postalveolar fricative (like the sound of the letters sh in ship). Greek did... Ss | T is the twentieth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Tâw was the last letter of the Western Semitic alphabet - and of the Hebrew alphabet. The sound value of Semitic Taw, Greek alphabet Tαυ (Tau), and Old Italic alphabet and Latin T was /t/. Tango represents the... Tt | U is the twenty-first letter of the modern Latin alphabet. U was originally a capital letter like J and it was only Pierre de la Ramée who made the distinction between capital and small letter. See V. Uniform represents the letter U in the NATO phonetic alphabet. Meanings... Uu | V is the twenty-second letter in the modern Latin alphabet. Like F, Greek Ypsilon has Semitic Waw as its letter of origin. The Etruscans somehow simplified the letter to V. Its Etruscan sound value was /u/; but since Latin lacked a letter for /w/, Romans used V for both... Vv | W is the twenty-third letter of the modern Latin alphabet. W was invented in the 7th century by Anglo-Saxon writers, it was originally a double V (which also represented U—hence its English name Double U, because the /w/ sound was spelled vv). The sound /w/, the... Ww | X is the twenty-fourth letter of the Latin alphabet. It is also the form of St Andrews Cross. /ks/ was in Ancient Greece written as Chi Χ (Western Greek) or Xi Ξ (Eastern Greek). In the end, Chi was standardized as /k_h/ (/x/ in Modern Greek) as well... Xx | Y is the twenty-fifth letter of the Latin alphabet. See V. In Ancient Greek Υψιλον (Ypsilon) was pronounced IPA [u] (later on [y], now [i]; see English myth and gift which both have ). The Romans borrowed Y directly from the Greek, because they felt... Yy | Z is the twenty-sixth and last letter of the English alphabet. In almost all forms of Commonwealth English, the letter is named zed, reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta (see below). Other European languages use a similar form, e.g. the French zède, Spanish and Italian zeta... Zz
A diacritic mark or accent mark is an additional mark added to a basic letter. The word derives from Greek διακρητικός, distinguishing and diacritical is used to mean distinguishing or distinctive. The mark can be added over, under, or through... Modified characters:

Àà | Áá | Ââ | Ää | Å, or å, is a letter, representing a vowel, in the Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Walloon and Chamorro alphabets. Other alphabets are Greenlandic, Lule Sámi, Skolt Sámi and South Sámi alphabet. The letter Å is often perceived as an A with a ring, interpreting... Åå | Āā | Ąą | Çç | The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. The correct title is Ĉ. Ĉ or ĉ is a consonant in the Esperanto orthography. Its sound is represented by [tS] in SAMPA and [ʧ] in IPA. See also Ĝ Ĥ Ĵ Ŝ Ŭ Categories: Esperanto ... Ĉĉ | HACEK organisms are a subgroup of bacteria. A háček (ˇ, pronounced /haːʧɛk/), also known as a caron, is a diacritic placed over certain letters to indicate palatalization or iotation in the orthography of some Slavic and Baltic languages. It looks similar to a breve... Čč | Ćć | Đđ | Ęę | Ëë | The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. The correct title is Ĝ. Ĝ or ĝ is a consonant in the Esperanto alphabet. Its sound is represented by [dZ] in SAMPA and [ʤ] in IPA. The letter is also used in Unangam Tunuu, where it represents... Ĝĝ | The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. The correct title is Ğ. Ğ, or ğ, is a letter, known as g-breve in English, used in the Turkish, Azerbaijani and Tatar languages. The unicode code point is U+011E for the capital letter and U... Ğğ | The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. The correct title is Ĥ. Ĥ, or ĥ, is a consonant in the Esperanto alphabet. Its sound is represented by [x] in SAMPA and IPA. In the case of the minuscule, some fonts place the circumflex over the... Ĥĥ | Įį | Ïï | The current Turkish alphabet used for the Turkish language replaced the earlier arabic alphabet and was created at the initative of Kemal Atatürk by borrowing different Latin characters in 1928. The letter Ö was taken from the Swedish alphabet because the Swedish interpreter from the Dragoman House (ambassador house) was... ı | The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. The correct title is Ĵ. Ĵ or ĵ is a consonant in the Esperanto alphabet. Its sound is represented by [Z] in SAMPA and [ʒ] in IPA. See also Ĉ Ĝ Ĥ Ŝ Ŭ Categories: Esperanto ... Ĵĵ | The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. The correct title is Ł. Ł or ł, known in English as L with stroke, is a letter of Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, and Łacinka (Latin Belarusian) alphabet. It represents the Lekhitic/East Slavic continuation of Proto-Slavic... Łł | Ññ | Õõ | Ö, or ö, is a glyph which represents either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, the letter O with umlaut, or a letter O with diaeresis. Letter Ö The letter Ö occurs in the Finnish, Swedish, Icelandic, Estonian, Hungarian, Sámi, and Turkish alphabets, where it represents the... Öö | Őő | Ø ø Ø, ø is a vowel and a letter used in the Danish, Faroese and Norwegian alphabets. Amongst the English vowels it sounds the most like the ir in bird [1] or the ur in hurt [2], as pronounced in a non-rhotic accent, like Received Pronunciation. The name... Øø | Ǫǫ | Ş ş (S-cedilla) is a letter used in Turkish, Azeri, Tatar, Kurdish and Turkmenian languages. This letter is pronounced similarly to sh (IPA: [ʃ]). Example words: Eskişehir, Şımarık It is sometimes used to represent the Romanian letter Ș/ș (S with comma) on... Şş | Șș | HACEK organisms are a subgroup of bacteria. A háček (ˇ, pronounced /haːʧɛk/), also known as a caron, is a diacritic placed over certain letters to indicate palatalization or iotation in the orthography of some Slavic and Baltic languages. It looks similar to a breve... Šš | The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. The correct title is Ŝ. Ŝ or ŝ is a consonant in the Esperanto alphabet. Its sound is represented by [S] in SAMPA and [ʃ] in IPA. See also Ĉ Ĝ Ĥ Ĵ Ŭ Categories: Esperanto ... Ŝŝ | Țț | The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. The correct title is Ŭ. Ŭ or ŭ is a letter in the Belarusian language, when written in the Łacinka alphabet (based on the Latin alphabet), and is also a letter in the Esperanto alphabet. Belarusian The... Ŭŭ | Üü | Ųų | Ůů | Űű | HACEK organisms are a subgroup of bacteria. A háček (ˇ, pronounced /haːʧɛk/), also known as a caron, is a diacritic placed over certain letters to indicate palatalization or iotation in the orthography of some Slavic and Baltic languages. It looks similar to a breve... Žž
Alphabet extensions: Æ æ For the article on Æ, the Irish writer, see: George William Russell Æ, or æ, is a vowel and a grapheme used in the Icelandic, Danish, Faroese, and Norwegian alphabets. It was also used in Old English and in medieval and early modern Latin. Modern English still contains... Ææ | Ðð | DZdz | DŽdž | See Schwa (art) for the underground artist. In linguistics and phonology, schwa is the neutral, mid central unrounded vowel sound, exactly in the middle of the International Phonetic Alphabet vowel chart. In phonetic transcriptions, it is written as (rotated e). Schwa is the most common vowel sound in English, the... Əə | Yogh (Ȝ ȝ) is a letter used in Middle English and Middle Scots, representing y (IPA /j/) and various velar phonemes. Velars are sounds that are usually made when the back of the tongue is pressed against the soft palate. They include the k in cat, the g in girl... Ȝȝ | Hwair (lowercase , uppercase ) is a letter from various medieval Latin alphabets, which is currently still used in the transcription of the Gothic alphabet. It somewhat resembles a Hv ligature, and was mainly designed to transcribe the Gothic letter of the same name. Its sound is a breathy w. As with... Ƕƕ | ĸ | LJlj | Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. See IPA in Unicode if you have display problems. In Spanish and Catalan, the Ll combination stands for the sound /ʎ/ (a palatal /l/). In Spanish it is pronounced /j/ in many regions, or more... LLll | NJnj | This page is about the ligature, not the simple combination of the letters O and E. For initialisms and the word Oe, see Oe. Œ, œ is a vowel and a letter used in medieval and early modern Latin, and in modern French. The origin of the letter is a... Œœ | Ȣȣ | Between the middle ages and today, many ways of writing alphabetical characters were lost. Besides a variety of ligatures, conjoined letters, scribal abbreviations, and swash characters, and the long s with its own ligatures, one was the half r. Like many of the practices listed, this variant form of that... | The long or medial s (ſ) is a form of the minuscule letter s that was formerly used when the s occurred within or at the beginning of the word, for example ſinfulneſs (sinfulness). The modern letterform was called the terminal or short s. The medial s... ſ | The ß — Eszett ( IPA ) in German or scharfes S (sharp S) if spelled out — is a letter used only in the German alphabet. It alternates with ss under certain conditions, and it is replaced by ss when there is no ß available. ß is nearly unique among the... ß | Þþ | Categories: Language stubs | Old English language | Runes | Uncommon Latin letters ... Ƿƿ | IJij


 

COMMENTARY     


Share your thoughts, questions and commentary here
Your name
Your comments
Please enter the 5-letter protection code

Want to know more?
Search encyclopedia, statistics and forums:
 


Lesson Plans | Student Area | Student FAQ | Reviews | Press Releases |  Feeds | Contact
The Wikipedia article included on this page is licensed under the GFDL.
Images may be subject to relevant owners' copyright.
All other elements are (c) copyright NationMaster.com 2003-5. All Rights Reserved.
Usage implies agreement with terms.