Nafaanra is a Senufo language spoken in northwest Ghana, along the border with Côte d'Ivoire, east of Bondouko. It is spoken by approximately 61,000 people who call themselves Nafana; others call them Banda or Mfantera. Like other Senufo languages, Nafaanra is a tonal language with three distinct tones. It is somewhat of an outlier in the Senufo language group, with the geographically closest relatives, the Southern Senufo Tagwana-Djimini languages, approximately 200 kilometres (120 mi) to the west, on the other side of Comoé National Park. The basic word order is Subject Object Verb, similar to Latin and Japanese. Like other Niger-Congo languages it has a noun class system where nouns are classified according to five different genders, which also affects pronouns, adjectives and copulas. The phonology features a distinction between the length of vowels and whether they are oral or nasal (as in French or Portuguese). Nafaanra grammar features both tense and aspect which are marked with particles.

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_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1500:

Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral and his crew became the first Europeans to sight Brazil when they spotted Monte Pascoal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_%C3%81lvares_Cabral

1864:

The U.S. Congress passed the Coinage Act, authorizing the minting of a two-cent coin, the first U.S. coin to bear the phrase "In God We Trust". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_God_We_Trust

1915:

The Germans released chlorine gas as a chemical weapon in the Second Battle of Ypres, killing over 5,000 soldiers within ten minutes by asphyxiation in the first large-scale successful use of poison gas in World War I. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_gas_in_World_War_I

1951:

Korean War: The People's Volunteer Army of China attacked positions occupied mainly by Australian and Canadian forces, starting the Battle of Kapyong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kapyong

2000:

In a predawn raid, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agents seized six-year-old Elián González from his relatives' home in Miami, Florida, and returned him to his Cuban father. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli%C3%A1n_Gonz%C3%A1lez_affair

_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:

apparatchik (n): A blindly loyal bureaucrat http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apparatchik

___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. ... We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it. --Wendell Berry http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry