The Literary Language
N'Ko is evolving as a standard language of several Manding or N'Ko languages. It is a literary language based on a compromise dialect, which Mandens from different sub-groups use to talk to each other. They switch from their own dialect to a conventional dialect known as N'Ko. N'Ko is also known as Kangbe – the clear language.
For example, the word for 'name' in Bamanan is tɔgɔ and in Maninka it is toh. In written communications each person will write it as tô in N’Ko, and yet read and pronounce it differently.
Read more about this topic: N'Ko Alphabet
Famous quotes containing the words literary and/or language:
“I went to a literary gathering once.... The place was filled with people who looked as if they had been scraped up out of drains. The ladies ran to draped plush dresses—for Art; to wreaths of silken flowerets in the hair—for Femininity; and, somewhere between the two adornments, to chain-drive pince-nez—for Astigmatism. The gentlemen were small and somewhat in need of dusting.”
—Dorothy Parker (1893–1967)
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)