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lingua franca
lingua franca , an auxiliary language, generally of a hybrid and partially developed nature, that is employed over an extensive area by people speaking different and mutually unintelligible tongues in order to communicate with one another. Such a language frequently is used primarily for commercial ...
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Chinook jargon
Chinook jargon lingua franca of early traders on the Northwest Coast of the United States and Canada. It included Chinook, Nootka, English, and French words, with various borrowings.
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Corpus Christi
Corpus Christi [Lat.,=body of Christ], feast of the Western Church, observed on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday (or on the following Sunday). The feast, which celebrates the founding of the sacrament of the Eucharist, was established generally in 1264 with an office by St. Thomas Aquinas, which i...
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Saint Venantius Fortunatus
Saint Venantius Fortunatus (Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus) , d. c.600, Latin poet, b. near Treviso, Italy. A priest in Gaul and later bishop of Poitiers, he wrote a long poem on St. Martin of Tours and also the hymn Vexilla Regis prodeunt, sung on Good Friday in the Roman Catholic C...
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Julius Caesar Scaliger
Julius Caesar Scaliger 1484-1558, Italian philologist and physician in France. Scaliger studied medicine and settled in France (1526), where he worked as a physician. A scholar of profound erudition, Scaliger was nevertheless contentious and arrogant and made many enemies, including Erasmus and Jer...
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pidgin
pidgin , a lingua franca that is not the mother tongue of anyone using it and that has a simplified grammar and a restricted, often polyglot vocabulary. The earliest documented pidgin is the Lingua Franca (or Sabir) that developed among merchants and traders in the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages...
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Hausa
Hausa or Haussa , black African ethnic group, numbering about 23 million, chiefly in N Nigeria and S Niger. The Hausa are almost exclusively Muslim and practice agriculture. Their widespread trading activities have contributed to making their language a lingua franca in much of W Africa. In earl...
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Swahili language
Swahili language member of the Bantu group of African languages (see African languages and Bantu languages ). Swahili is spoken by 30 million people, chiefly in Tanzania, Kenya, Congo (Kinshasa), Burundi, and Uganda, and serves as a lingua franca for additional millions in E Africa, including Eu...
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Marcus Terentius Varro
Marcus Terentius Varro 116 BC-27? BC, Roman man of letters. Known as the most erudite man and the most prolific writer of his times, Varro is estimated to have written about 620 volumes. He served as Pompey's legate in Spain and fought at Pharsalus, but was reconciled with Caesar, who made him dire...
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Hindustani
Hindustani , subdivision of the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian languages, which themselves form a subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. Some authorities define Hindustani as the spoken form of Hindi and Urdu . Others prefer to call Hindi and Urdu written varieties of Hindustani. Th...
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