Elgon
Sebei
Ethnicity: Sebei people
Geographic
distribution:
western Kenya, eastern Uganda
Linguistic classification: Nilo-Saharan?
Subdivisions:
Ethnologue code: 1758-16

The Elgon languages are languages of the Southern Nilotic Kalenjin family spoken in the Mount Elgon area in western Kenya and eastern Uganda. According to the Ethnologue, there are two main Elgon languages: Kupsabiny (spoken by about 120 000 people) and Sabaot (spoken by about 134 000 people). Sabaot is a common name assumed by various related peoples, including the Kony, Pok, and Bong'om (after whom the Western Kenyan town of Bungoma is named), whose respective languages are considered separate languages by Rottland (1982).

The Terik people, living east of Lake Victoria wedged in between the Nandi, Luo and Luyia, spoke or speak a dialect closely related to Pok and Bong'om. According to their own oral history they are "people of Mount Elgon"; this is confirmed by Bong'om traditions that "the people who later called themselves Terik were still Bong'om when they left Elgon and moved away in a southern direction" (Roeder 1986:142). Recently many of them have assimilated to neighbouring Nandi, leading to a decline in the use of the Terik language in favor of Nandi. Although they live in two different countries, both groups speak the same language but with slightly different pronunciations.

External links [link]



https://wn.com/Elgon_languages

Mount Elgon

Mount Elgon is an extinct shield volcano on the border of Uganda and Kenya, north of Kisumu and west of Kitale. The mountain's highest point, named "Wagagai", is located entirely within the country of Uganda. At 4,321 m (14,177 ft), Elgon is the seventeenth-highest mountain of Africa. Although there is no verifiable evidence of its earliest volcanic activity, geologists estimate that Mount Elgon is at least 24 million years old, making it the oldest extinct volcano in East Africa. It covers an area around 3,500 square kilometres (1,400 sq mi).

Physical features

Mount Elgon is a massive solitary volcanic mountain on the border of eastern Uganda and western Kenya. Its vast form, 80 kilometres (50 mi) in diameter, rises 3,070 metres (10,070 ft) above the surrounding plains. Its cooler heights offer respite for humans from the hot plains below, and its higher altitudes provide a refuge for flora and fauna.

Mt. Elgon consists of five major peaks:

  • Wagagai (4,321 metres (14,177 ft)), in Uganda
  • 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.

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    In mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language is a set of strings of symbols that may be constrained by rules that are specific to it.

    The alphabet of a formal language is the set of symbols, letters, or tokens from which the strings of the language may be formed; frequently it is required to be finite. The strings formed from this alphabet are called words, and the words that belong to a particular formal language are sometimes called well-formed words or well-formed formulas. A formal language is often defined by means of a formal grammar such as a regular grammar or context-free grammar, also called its formation rule.

    The field of formal language theory studies primarily the purely syntactical aspects of such languages—that is, their internal structural patterns. Formal language theory sprang out of linguistics, as a way of understanding the syntactic regularities of natural languages. In computer science, formal languages are used among others as the basis for defining the grammar of programming languages and formalized versions of subsets of natural languages in which the words of the language represent concepts that are associated with particular meanings or semantics. In computational complexity theory, decision problems are typically defined as formal languages, and complexity classes are defined as the sets of the formal languages that can be parsed by machines with limited computational power. In logic and the foundations of mathematics, formal languages are used to represent the syntax of axiomatic systems, and mathematical formalism is the philosophy that all of mathematics can be reduced to the syntactic manipulation of formal languages in this way.

    Language (disambiguation)

    Language is the human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, and a language is any specific example of such a system.

    Language may also refer to:

    Publishing

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  • See also

  • Artificial language, a language created for a specific purpose
  • Formal language in mathematics or other fields, a set of strings of symbols that may be constrained by rules that are specific to it
  • Natural language, a language used naturally by humans for communication
  • Programming language, a language created for the writing of computer programs
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