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112-470: Terminology is a discipline that systematically studies the "labelling or designating of concepts" particular to one or more subject fields or domains of human activity. It does this through the research and analysis of terms in context for the purpose of documenting and promoting consistent usage. Terminology can be limited to one or more languages (for example, "multilingual terminology" and "bilingual terminology"), or may have an interdisciplinarity focus on

224-415: A multi-layered network of cooperating, distinct, or even competing social groups – from families and peer groups to corporations and political states . As such, social interactions between humans have established a wide variety of values, social norms , languages , and traditions (collectively termed institutions ), each of which bolsters human society . Humans are also highly curious , with

336-668: A theory of mind . The human mind is capable of introspection , private thought , imagination , volition , and forming views on existence . This has allowed great technological advancements and complex tool development through complex reasoning and the transmission of knowledge to subsequent generations through language . Humans have had a dramatic effect on the environment . They are apex predators , being rarely preyed upon by other species. Human population growth , industrialization, land development, overconsumption and combustion of fossil fuels have led to environmental destruction and pollution that significantly contributes to

448-443: A consequence of better nutrition, healthcare, and living conditions. The average mass of an adult human is 59 kg (130 lb) for females and 77 kg (170 lb) for males. Like many other conditions, body weight and body type are influenced by both genetic susceptibility and environment and varies greatly among individuals. Humans have a far faster and more accurate throw than other animals. Humans are also among

560-418: A construction-specific property rather than a language-specific property. Many languages show mixed accusative and ergative behaviour (for example: ergative morphology marking the verb arguments, on top of an accusative syntax). Other languages (called " active languages ") have two types of intransitive verbs—some of them ("active verbs") join the subject in the same case as the agent of a transitive verb, and

672-419: A few other places), saw the emergence of agriculture and permanent human settlement ; in turn, this led to the development of civilization and kickstarted a period of continuous (and ongoing) population growth and rapid technological change . Since then, a number of civilizations have risen and fallen, while a number of sociocultural and technological developments have resulted in significant changes to

784-401: A fox in-the woods seen"), Dutch ( Hans vermoedde dat Jan Marie zag leren zwemmen - *"Hans suspected that Jan Marie saw to learn to swim") and Welsh ( Mae 'r gwirio sillafu wedi'i gwblhau - *"Is the checking spelling after its to complete"). In this case, linguists base the typology on the non-analytic tenses (i.e. those sentences in which the verb is not split) or on the position of

896-463: A great capacity for altering their habitats by means of technology, irrigation , urban planning , construction, deforestation and desertification . Human settlements continue to be vulnerable to natural disasters , especially those placed in hazardous locations and with low quality of construction. Grouping and deliberate habitat alteration is often done with the goals of providing protection, accumulating comforts or material wealth, expanding

1008-612: A higher body fat percentage. At puberty , humans develop secondary sex characteristics . Females are capable of pregnancy , usually between puberty, at around 12 years old, and menopause , around the age of 50. As omnivorous creatures, they are capable of consuming a wide variety of plant and animal material, and have used fire and other forms of heat to prepare and cook food since the time of Homo erectus . Humans can survive for up to eight weeks without food and several days without water . Humans are generally diurnal , sleeping on average seven to nine hours per day. Childbirth

1120-475: A human can lose personhood (such as by going into a persistent vegetative state ). Humans are apes ( superfamily Hominoidea ). The lineage of apes that eventually gave rise to humans first split from gibbons (family Hylobatidae) and orangutans (genus Pongo ), then gorillas (genus Gorilla ), and finally, chimpanzees and bonobos (genus Pan ). The last split, between the human and chimpanzee–bonobo lineages, took place around 8–4 million years ago, in

1232-453: A language with cases , the classification depends on whether the subject (S) of an intransitive verb has the same case as the agent (A) or the patient (P) of a transitive verb. If a language has no cases, but the word order is AVP or PVA, then a classification may reflect whether the subject of an intransitive verb appears on the same side as the agent or the patient of the transitive verb. Bickel (2011) has argued that alignment should be seen as

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1344-406: A member of this set, while 51% of average languages (19-25) contain at least one member and 69% of large consonant inventories (greater than 25 consonants) contain a member of this set. It is then seen that complex consonants are in proportion to the size of the inventory. Vowels contain a more modest number of phonemes, with the average being 5–6, which 51% of the languages in the survey have. About

1456-581: A more barrel-shaped chests in contrast to the funnel shape of other apes, an adaptation for bipedal respiration. Apart from bipedalism and brain size, humans differ from chimpanzees mostly in smelling , hearing and digesting proteins . While humans have a density of hair follicles comparable to other apes, it is predominantly vellus hair , most of which is so short and wispy as to be practically invisible. Humans have about 2 million sweat glands spread over their entire bodies, many more than chimpanzees, whose sweat glands are scarce and are mainly located on

1568-499: A much clearer picture of life at the time. Between the 8th and 6th century BCE, Europe entered the classical antiquity age, a period when ancient Greece and ancient Rome flourished. Around this time other civilizations also came to prominence. The Maya civilization started to build cities and create complex calendars . In Africa, the Kingdom of Aksum overtook the declining Kingdom of Kush and facilitated trade between India and

1680-447: A result, humans are a cosmopolitan species found in almost all regions of the world, including tropical rainforest , arid desert , extremely cold arctic regions , and heavily polluted cities; in comparison, most other species are confined to a few geographical areas by their limited adaptability. The human population is not, however, uniformly distributed on the Earth 's surface, because

1792-632: A similar species. Migrating out of Africa , they gradually replaced and interbred with local populations of archaic humans. Multiple hypotheses for the extinction of archaic human species such as Neanderthals include competition, violence , interbreeding with Homo sapiens , or inability to adapt to climate change . Humans began exhibiting behavioral modernity about 160,000–60,000 years ago. For most of their history, humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers. The Neolithic Revolution , which began in Southwest Asia around 13,000 years ago (and separately in

1904-515: A simple linear or branched progression but involved interbreeding between related species . Genomic research has shown that hybridization between substantially diverged lineages was common in human evolution. DNA evidence suggests that several genes of Neanderthal origin are present among all non sub-Saharan-African populations, and Neanderthals and other hominins, such as Denisovans , may have contributed up to 6% of their genome to present-day non sub-Saharan-African humans. Human evolution

2016-411: A single dominant order. Though the reason of dominance is sometimes considered an unsolved or unsolvable typological problem, several explanations for the distribution pattern have been proposed. Evolutionary explanations include those by Thomas Givon (1979), who suggests that all languages stem from an SOV language but are evolving into different kinds; and by Derek Bickerton (1981), who argues that

2128-451: A successful labor increased significantly during the 20th century in wealthier countries with the advent of new medical technologies. In contrast, pregnancy and natural childbirth remain hazardous ordeals in developing regions of the world, with maternal death rates approximately 100 times greater than in developed countries. Both the mother and the father provide care for human offspring, in contrast to other primates, where parental care

2240-406: A wide variety of plant and animal material. Human groups have adopted a range of diets from purely vegan to primarily carnivorous . In some cases, dietary restrictions in humans can lead to deficiency diseases ; however, stable human groups have adapted to many dietary patterns through both genetic specialization and cultural conventions to use nutritionally balanced food sources. The human diet

2352-511: Is 38 weeks, but a normal pregnancy can vary by up to 37 days. Embryonic development in the human covers the first eight weeks of development; at the beginning of the ninth week the embryo is termed a fetus . Humans are able to induce early labor or perform a caesarean section if the child needs to be born earlier for medical reasons. In developed countries, infants are typically 3–4 kg (7–9 lb) in weight and 47–53 cm (19–21 in) in height at birth. However, low birth weight

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2464-409: Is a chart showing the breakdown of voicing properties among languages in the aforementioned sample. Languages worldwide also vary in the number of sounds they use. These languages can go from very small phonemic inventories ( Rotokas with six consonants and five vowels) to very large inventories ( !Xóõ with 128 consonants and 28 vowels). An interesting phonological observation found with this data

2576-485: Is a mixture of the two parental sets. Among the 23 pairs of chromosomes, there are 22 pairs of autosomes and one pair of sex chromosomes . Like other mammals, humans have an XY sex-determination system , so that females have the sex chromosomes XX and males have XY. Genes and environment influence human biological variation in visible characteristics, physiology, disease susceptibility and mental abilities. The exact influence of genes and environment on certain traits

2688-424: Is a population decline in the winter months of this realm. Humans established nation-states in the other seven realms, such as South Africa , India , Russia , Australia , Fiji , United States and Brazil (each located in a different biogeographical realm). By using advanced tools and clothing , humans have been able to extend their tolerance to a wide variety of temperatures, humidities , and altitudes. As

2800-430: Is by excluding the subject from consideration. It is a well-documented typological feature that languages with a dominant OV order (object before verb), Japanese for example, tend to have postpositions . In contrast, VO languages (verb before object) like English tend to have prepositions as their main adpositional type. Several OV/VO correlations have been uncovered. Several processing explanations were proposed in

2912-402: Is characterized by a number of morphological , developmental , physiological , and behavioral changes that have taken place since the split between the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees . The most significant of these adaptations are hairlessness , obligate bipedalism, increased brain size and decreased sexual dimorphism ( neoteny ). The relationship between all these changes

3024-456: Is common in developing countries, and contributes to the high levels of infant mortality in these regions. Compared with other species, human childbirth is dangerous, with a much higher risk of complications and death. The size of the fetus's head is more closely matched to the pelvis than in other primates. The reason for this is not completely understood, but it contributes to a painful labor that can last 24 hours or more. The chances of

3136-421: Is dangerous, with a high risk of complications and death . Often, both the mother and the father provide care for their children, who are helpless at birth . Humans have a large, highly developed, and complex prefrontal cortex , the region of the brain associated with higher cognition. Humans are highly intelligent and capable of episodic memory ; they have flexible facial expressions, self-awareness , and

3248-425: Is defined by position within a sentence or presence of a preposition. For example, in some languages with bound case markings for nouns, such as Language X, varying degrees of freedom in constituent order are observed. These languages exhibit more flexible word orders, allowing for variations like Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structure, as in 'The cat ate the mouse,' and Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) structure, as in 'The mouse

3360-472: Is generally aging, with the median age around 40 years. In the developing world , the median age is between 15 and 20 years. While one in five Europeans is 60 years of age or older, only one in twenty Africans is 60 years of age or older. In 2012, the United Nations estimated that there were 316,600 living centenarians (humans of age 100 or older) worldwide. Humans are omnivorous , capable of consuming

3472-443: Is inherited only from the mother, geneticists have concluded that the last female common ancestor whose genetic marker is found in all modern humans, the so-called mitochondrial Eve , must have lived around 90,000 to 200,000 years ago. Most human reproduction takes place by internal fertilization via sexual intercourse , but can also occur through assisted reproductive technology procedures. The average gestation period

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3584-408: Is mostly done by the mother. Helpless at birth , humans continue to grow for some years, typically reaching sexual maturity at 15 to 17 years of age. The human life span has been split into various stages ranging from three to twelve. Common stages include infancy , childhood , adolescence , adulthood and old age . The lengths of these stages have varied across cultures and time periods but

3696-513: Is not well understood. While no humans – not even monozygotic twins  – are genetically identical, two humans on average will have a genetic similarity of 99.5%-99.9%. This makes them more homogeneous than other great apes, including chimpanzees. This small variation in human DNA compared to many other species suggests a population bottleneck during the Late Pleistocene (around 100,000 years ago), in which

3808-687: Is prominently reflected in human culture and has led to the development of food science . Linguistic typology Linguistic typology (or language typology ) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the common properties of the world's languages. Its subdisciplines include, but are not limited to phonological typology, which deals with sound features; syntactic typology, which deals with word order and form; lexical typology, which deals with language vocabulary; and theoretical typology, which aims to explain

3920-425: Is seen in most languages or is probable in most languages. Universals, both absolute and statistical can be unrestricted, meaning that they apply to most or all languages without any additional conditions. Conversely, both absolute and statistical universals can be restricted or implicational, meaning that a characteristic will be true on the condition of something else (if Y characteristic is true, then X characteristic

4032-513: Is suggested more recently that the left-right orientation is limited to role-marking connectives ( adpositions and subordinators ), stemming directly from the semantic mapping of the sentence. Since the true correlation pairs in the above table either involve such a connective or, arguably, follow from the canonical order, orientation predicts them without making problematic claims. Another common classification distinguishes nominative–accusative alignment patterns and ergative–absolutive ones. In

4144-452: Is that the larger a consonant inventory a language has, the more likely it is to contain a sound from a defined set of complex consonants (clicks, glottalized consonants, doubly articulated labial-velar stops, lateral fricatives and affricates, uvular and pharyngeal consonants, and dental or alveolar non-sibilant fricatives). Of this list, only about 26% of languages in a survey of over 600 with small inventories (less than 19 consonants) contain

4256-445: Is the subject of ongoing debate. Hylobatidae ( gibbons ) Pongo abelii Pongo tapanuliensis Pongo pygmaeus Gorilla gorilla Gorilla beringei Pan troglodytes Pan paniscus Homo sapiens (humans) Until about 12,000 years ago, all humans lived as hunter-gatherers . The Neolithic Revolution (the invention of agriculture ) first took place in Southwest Asia and spread through large parts of

4368-399: Is true). An example of an implicational hierarchy is that dual pronouns are only found in languages with plural pronouns while singular pronouns (or unspecified in terms of number) are found in all languages. The implicational hierarchy is thus singular < plural < dual (etc.). Qualitative typology develops cross-linguistically viable notions or types that provide a framework for

4480-654: Is typified by an unusually rapid growth spurt during adolescence. Human females undergo menopause and become infertile at around the age of 50. It has been proposed that menopause increases a woman's overall reproductive success by allowing her to invest more time and resources in her existing offspring, and in turn their children (the grandmother hypothesis ), rather than by continuing to bear children into old age. The life span of an individual depends on two major factors, genetics and lifestyle choices. For various reasons, including biological/genetic causes, women live on average about four years longer than men. As of 2018 ,

4592-534: The British Empire expanded to become the world's largest empire . A tenuous balance of power among European nations collapsed in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War , one of the deadliest conflicts in history. In the 1930s, a worldwide economic crisis led to the rise of authoritarian regimes and a Second World War , involving almost all of the world's countries . The war's destruction led to

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4704-568: The Caral–Supe civilization is the oldest complex civilization in the Americas. Astronomy and mathematics were also developed and the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. There is evidence of a severe drought lasting about a hundred years that may have caused the decline of these civilizations, with new ones appearing in the aftermath. Babylonians came to dominate Mesopotamia while others, such as

4816-501: The Church would provide centralized authority and education. In the Middle East, Islam became the prominent religion and expanded into North Africa. It led to an Islamic Golden Age , inspiring achievements in architecture , the revival of old advances in science and technology, and the formation of a distinct way of life. The Christian and Islamic worlds would eventually clash, with

4928-470: The Homo genus. The name " Homo sapiens " means 'wise man' or 'knowledgeable man'. There is disagreement if certain extinct members of the genus, namely Neanderthals , should be included as a separate species of humans or as a subspecies of H. sapiens . Human is a loanword of Middle English from Old French humain , ultimately from Latin hūmānus , the adjectival form of homō ('man' – in

5040-566: The Kingdom of England , the Kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire declaring a series of holy wars to regain control of the Holy Land from Muslims . In the Americas, between 200 and 900 CE Mesoamerica was in its Classic Period , while further north, complex Mississippian societies would arise starting around 800 CE. The Mongol Empire would conquer much of Eurasia in the 13th and 14th centuries. Over this same time period,

5152-819: The Mali Empire in Africa grew to be the largest empire on the continent, stretching from Senegambia to Ivory Coast . Oceania would see the rise of the Tuʻi Tonga Empire which expanded across many islands in the South Pacific. By the late 15th century, the Aztecs and Inca had become the dominant power in Mesoamerica and the Andes , respectively. The early modern period in Europe and

5264-572: The Old World over the following millennia. It also occurred independently in Mesoamerica (about 6,000 years ago), China, Papua New Guinea , and the Sahel and West Savanna regions of Africa. Access to food surplus led to the formation of permanent human settlements , the domestication of animals and the use of metal tools for the first time in history. Agriculture and sedentary lifestyle led to

5376-629: The Poverty Point culture , Minoans and the Shang dynasty , rose to prominence in new areas. The Late Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BCE resulted in the disappearance of a number of civilizations and the beginning of the Greek Dark Ages . During this period iron started replacing bronze, leading to the Iron Age . In the 5th century BCE, history started being recorded as a discipline , which provided

5488-766: The colonization of the Americas and the Columbian Exchange . This expansion led to the Atlantic slave trade and the genocide of Native American peoples . This period also marked the Scientific Revolution , with great advances in mathematics , mechanics , astronomy and physiology . The late modern period (1800–present) saw the Technological and Industrial Revolution bring such discoveries as imaging technology , major innovations in transport and energy development . Influenced by Enlightenment ideals,

5600-511: The 1961 conference on language universals at Dobbs Ferry . Speakers included Roman Jakobson , Charles F. Hockett , and Joseph Greenberg who proposed forty-five different types of linguistic universals based on his data sets from thirty languages. Greenberg's findings were mostly known from the nineteenth-century grammarians, but his systematic presentation of them would serve as a model for modern typology. Winfred P. Lehmann introduced Greenbergian typological theory to Indo-European studies in

5712-573: The 1970s. During the twentieth century, typology based on missionary linguistics became centered around SIL International , which today hosts its catalogue of living languages, Ethnologue , as an online database. The Greenbergian or universalist approach is accounted for by the World Atlas of Language Structures , among others. Typology is also done within the frameworks of functional grammar including Functional Discourse Grammar , Role and Reference Grammar , and Systemic Functional Linguistics . During

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5824-598: The 1980s and 1990s for the above correlations. They suggest that the brain finds it easier to parse syntactic patterns that are either right or left branching , but not mixed. The most widely held such explanation is John A. Hawkins ' parsing efficiency theory, which argues that language is a non-innate adaptation to innate cognitive mechanisms. Typological tendencies are considered as being based on language users' preference for grammars that are organized efficiently, and on their avoidance of word orderings that cause processing difficulty. Hawkins's processing theory predicts

5936-441: The 1980s – 1110. As the result of development and specialising of terminological studies, some of the branches of terminology science – such as typological terminology science, semasiological terminology science, terminological derivatology, comparative terminology science, terminography, functional terminology science, cognitive terminology science, historical terminology science and some branch terminology sciences – have gained

6048-510: The Americas and Europe experienced a period of political revolutions known as the Age of Revolution . The Napoleonic Wars raged through Europe in the early 1800s, Spain lost most of its colonies in the New World , while Europeans continued expansion into Africa  – where European control went from 10% to almost 90% in less than 50 years  – and Oceania. In the 19th century,

6160-639: The Difference in Human Linguistic Structure and Its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind’ (posthumous 1836). In 1818, August Wilhelm Schlegel made a classification of the world's languages into three types: (i) languages lacking grammatical structure, e.g. Chinese; (ii) agglutinative languages, e.g. Turkish; and (iii) inflectional languages, which can be synthetic like Latin and Ancient Greek, or analytic like French. This idea

6272-449: The English niece and knees . According to a worldwide sample of 637 languages, 62% have the voicing contrast in stops but only 35% have this in fricatives. In the vast majority of those cases, the absence of voicing contrast occurs because there is a lack of voiced fricatives and because all languages have some form of plosive (occlusive) , but there are languages with no fricatives. Below

6384-829: The Mediterranean. In West Asia, the Achaemenid Empire 's system of centralized governance became the precursor to many later empires, while the Gupta Empire in India and the Han dynasty in China have been described as golden ages in their respective regions. Following the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, Europe entered the Middle Ages . During this period, Christianity and

6496-792: The Near East ( c.  1450 –1800) began with the final defeat of the Byzantine Empire , and the rise of the Ottoman Empire . Meanwhile, Japan entered the Edo period , the Qing dynasty rose in China and the Mughal Empire ruled much of India. Europe underwent the Renaissance , starting in the 15th century, and the Age of Discovery began with the exploring and colonizing of new regions. This included

6608-544: The above table but also makes predictions for non-correlation pairs including the order of adjective, demonstrative and numeral in respect with the noun. This theory was based on corpus research and lacks support in psycholinguistic studies. Some languages exhibit regular "inefficient" patterning. These include the VO languages Chinese , with the adpositional phrase before the verb, and Finnish , which has postpositions. But there are few other profoundly exceptional languages. It

6720-574: The accuracy and content of its terminology. Technical industries and standardization institutes compile their own glossaries. This provides the consistency needed in the various areas—fields and branches, movements and specialties—to work with core terminology to then offer material for the discipline's traditional and doctrinal literature. Terminology is also then key in boundary-crossing problems, such as in language translation and social epistemology . Terminology helps to build bridges and to extend one area into another. Translators research

6832-486: The actual daily use of the language. The daily spoken language of Sophocles or Cicero might have exhibited a different or much more regular syntax than their written legacy indicates. The below table indicates the distribution of the dominant word order pattern of over 5,000 individual languages and 366 language families. SOV is the most common type in both although much more clearly in the data of language families including isolates . 'NODOM' represents languages without

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6944-547: The auxiliary. German is thus SVO in main clauses and Welsh is VSO (and preposition phrases would go after the infinitive). Many typologists classify both German and Dutch as V2 languages, as the verb invariantly occurs as the second element of a full clause. Some languages allow varying degrees of freedom in their constituent order, posing a problem for their classification within the subject–verb–object schema. Languages with bound case markings for nouns, for example, tend to have more flexible word orders than languages where case

7056-473: The available food, improving aesthetics , increasing knowledge or enhancing the exchange of resources. Humans are one of the most adaptable species, despite having a low or narrow tolerance for many of the earth's extreme environments. Currently the species is present in all eight biogeographical realms , although their presence in the Antarctic realm is very limited to research stations and annually there

7168-437: The basic order of subject , verb , and direct object in sentences: These labels usually appear abbreviated as "SVO" and so forth, and may be called "typologies" of the languages to which they apply. The most commonly attested word orders are SOV and SVO while the least common orders are those that are object initial with OVS being the least common with only four attested instances. In the 1980s, linguists began to question

7280-561: The best long-distance runners in the animal kingdom, but slower over short distances. Humans' thinner body hair and more productive sweat glands help avoid heat exhaustion while running for long distances. Compared to other apes, the human heart produces greater stroke volume and cardiac output and the aorta is proportionately larger. Like most animals, humans are a diploid and eukaryotic species. Each somatic cell has two sets of 23 chromosomes , each set received from one parent; gametes have only one set of chromosomes, which

7392-512: The cat ate.' To define a basic constituent order type in this case, one generally looks at frequency of different types in declarative affirmative main clauses in pragmatically neutral contexts, preferably with only old referents. Thus, for instance, Russian is widely considered an SVO language, as this is the most frequent constituent order under such conditions—all sorts of variations are possible, though, and occur in texts. In many inflected languages, such as Russian, Latin, and Greek, departures from

7504-640: The collapse of most global empires, leading to widespread decolonization. Following the conclusion of the Second World War in 1945, the United States and the USSR emerged as the remaining global superpowers . This led to a Cold War that saw a struggle for global influence, including a nuclear arms race and a space race , ending in the collapse of the Soviet Union. The current Information Age , spurred by

7616-771: The combined eastern and western Roman Empire in the 4th century AD. Bubonic plagues , first recorded in the 6th century AD, reduced the population by 50%, with the Black Death killing 75–200 million people in Eurasia and North Africa alone. Human population is believed to have reached one billion in 1800. It has since then increased exponentially, reaching two billion in 1930 and three billion in 1960, four in 1975, five in 1987 and six billion in 1999. It passed seven billion in 2011 and passed eight billion in November 2022. It took over two million years of human prehistory and history for

7728-474: The continent, gradually replacing or interbreeding with local populations of archaic humans. Humans began exhibiting behavioral modernity about 160,000–70,000 years ago, and possibly earlier. This development was likely selected amidst natural climate change in Middle to Late Pleistocene Africa. The "out of Africa" migration took place in at least two waves, the first around 130,000 to 100,000 years ago,

7840-466: The default word-orders are permissible but usually imply a shift in focus, an emphasis on the final element, or some special context. In the poetry of these languages, the word order may also shift freely to meet metrical demands. Additionally, freedom of word order may vary within the same language—for example, formal, literary, or archaizing varieties may have different, stricter, or more lenient constituent-order structures than an informal spoken variety of

7952-503: The description and comparison of languages. The main subfields of linguistic typology include the empirical fields of syntactic, phonological and lexical typology. Additionally, theoretical typology aims to explain the empirical findings, especially statistical tendencies or implicational hierarchies. Syntactic typology studies a vast array of grammatical phenomena from the languages of the world. Two well-known issues include dominant order and left-right symmetry. One set of types reflects

8064-423: The desire to understand and influence phenomena having motivated humanity's development of science , technology , philosophy , mythology , religion , and other frameworks of knowledge ; humans also study themselves through such domains as anthropology , social science , history , psychology , and medicine . There are estimated to be more than eight billion living humans . Although some scientists equate

8176-511: The development of the Internet and Artificial Intelligence systems, sees the world becoming increasingly globalized and interconnected. Early human settlements were dependent on proximity to water and – depending on the lifestyle – other natural resources used for subsistence , such as populations of animal prey for hunting and arable land for growing crops and grazing livestock. Modern humans, however, have

8288-623: The early 20th century, there has been continuous human presence in Antarctica through research stations and, since 2000, in space through habitation on the International Space Station . All modern humans are classified into the species Homo sapiens , coined by Carl Linnaeus in his 1735 work Systema Naturae . The generic name " Homo " is a learned 18th-century derivation from Latin homō , which refers to humans of either sex. The word human can refer to all members of

8400-563: The early years of the twenty-first century, however, the existence of linguistic universals became questioned by linguists proposing evolutionary typology. Quantitative typology deals with the distribution and co-occurrence of structural patterns in the languages of the world. Major types of non-chance distribution include: Linguistic universals are patterns that can be seen cross-linguistically. Universals can either be absolute, meaning that every documented language exhibits this characteristic, or statistical, meaning that this characteristic

8512-668: The emergence of early civilizations . An urban revolution took place in the 4th millennium BCE with the development of city-states , particularly Sumerian cities located in Mesopotamia . It was in these cities that the earliest known form of writing, cuneiform script , appeared around 3000 BCE. Other major civilizations to develop around this time were Ancient Egypt and the Indus Valley Civilisation . They eventually traded with each other and invented technology such as wheels, plows and sails. Emerging by 3000 BCE,

8624-413: The existing definitions. Considering the fact that characteristics and functioning of term depend heavily on its lexical surrounding nowadays it is common to view as the main object of terminology science not separate terms, but rather the whole terminology used in some particular field of knowledge (also called subject field). Terminological research started seventy years ago and was especially fruitful at

8736-561: The genomes of 1,184 individuals from 11 populations and identified 1.6 million single nucleotide polymorphisms . African populations harbor the highest number of private genetic variants. While many of the common variants found in populations outside of Africa are also found on the African continent, there are still large numbers that are private to these regions, especially Oceania and the Americas . By 2010 estimates, humans have approximately 22,000 genes. By comparing mitochondrial DNA , which

8848-412: The genus Homo . They are great apes characterized by their hairlessness , bipedalism , and high intelligence . Humans have large brains , enabling more advanced cognitive skills that enable them to thrive and adapt in varied environments, develop highly complex tools , and form complex social structures and civilizations . Humans are highly social , with individual humans tending to belong to

8960-580: The global average life expectancy at birth of a girl is estimated to be 74.9 years compared to 70.4 for a boy. There are significant geographical variations in human life expectancy, mostly correlated with economic development – for example, life expectancy at birth in Hong Kong is 87.6 years for girls and 81.8 for boys, while in the Central African Republic , it is 55.0 years for girls and 50.6 for boys. The developed world

9072-443: The human lifestyle. Genes and the environment influence human biological variation in visible characteristics, physiology , disease susceptibility, mental abilities, body size, and life span. Though humans vary in many traits, humans are among the least genetically diverse species. Any two humans are at least 99.5% genetically similar. Humans are sexually dimorphic : generally, males have greater body strength and females have

9184-550: The human population to reach one billion and only 207 years more to grow to 7 billion. The combined biomass of the carbon of all the humans on Earth in 2018 was estimated at 60 million tons, about 10 times larger than that of all non-domesticated mammals. In 2018, 4.2 billion humans (55%) lived in urban areas, up from 751 million in 1950. The most urbanized regions are Northern America (82%), Latin America (81%), Europe (74%) and Oceania (68%), with Africa and Asia having nearly 90% of

9296-505: The human population was reduced to a small number of breeding pairs. The forces of natural selection have continued to operate on human populations, with evidence that certain regions of the genome display directional selection in the past 15,000 years. The human genome was first sequenced in 2001 and by 2020 hundreds of thousands of genomes had been sequenced. In 2012 the International HapMap Project had compared

9408-604: The importance of lesser-known languages in gaining insight into human language. Speculations of the existence of a (logical) general or universal grammar underlying all languages were published in the Middle Ages, especially by the Modistae school. At the time, Latin was the model language of linguistics, although transcribing Irish and Icelandic into the Latin alphabet was found problematic. The cross-linguistic dimension of linguistics

9520-416: The last forty years. At that time the main types of special lexical units, such as terms proper, nomens, terminoids, prototerms, preterms and quasiterms were singled out and studied. A nomen , or a nomenclature unit , is a name of a single notion or a certain unit of mass production, e.g. prefix dis-; Canon 550D; UA-24; etc. Terminoids , or jargon terms , are special lexical units which are used to name

9632-567: The late Miocene epoch. During this split, chromosome 2 was formed from the joining of two other chromosomes, leaving humans with only 23 pairs of chromosomes, compared to 24 for the other apes. Following their split with chimpanzees and bonobos, the hominins diversified into many species and at least two distinct genera. All but one of these lineages – representing the genus Homo and its sole extant species Homo sapiens  – are now extinct. The genus Homo evolved from Australopithecus . Though fossils from

9744-405: The leading European languages belonging to many subject fields were described and analysed. It should be mentioned that at the former USSR terminological studies were conducted on an especially large scale: while in the 1940s only four terminological dissertations were successfully defended, in the 1950s there were 50 such dissertations, in the 1960s their number reached 231, in the 1970s – 463 and in

9856-555: The ongoing mass extinction of other forms of life. Within the last century, humans have explored challenging environments such as Antarctica , the deep sea , and outer space . Human habitation within these hostile environments is restrictive and expensive, typically limited in duration, and restricted to scientific , military , or industrial expeditions. Humans have visited the Moon and made their presence known on other celestial bodies through human-made robotic spacecraft . Since

9968-442: The only primates to have short, relatively flush canine teeth . Humans have characteristically crowded teeth, with gaps from lost teeth usually closing up quickly in young individuals. Humans are gradually losing their third molars , with some individuals having them congenitally absent. Humans share with chimpanzees a vestigial tail, appendix , flexible shoulder joints, grasping fingers and opposable thumbs . Humans also have

10080-543: The original language was SVO, which supports simpler grammar employing word order instead of case markers to differentiate between clausal roles. Universalist explanations include a model by Russell Tomlin (1986) based on three functional principles: (i) animate before inanimate; (ii) theme before comment; and (iii) verb-object bonding. The three-way model roughly predicts the real hierarchy (see table above) assuming no statistical difference between SOV and SVO, and, also, no statistical difference between VOS and OVS. By contrast,

10192-474: The palm of the hand and on the soles of the feet. It is estimated that the worldwide average height for an adult human male is about 171 cm (5 ft 7 in), while the worldwide average height for adult human females is about 159 cm (5 ft 3 in). Shrinkage of stature may begin in middle age in some individuals but tends to be typical in the extremely aged . Throughout history, human populations have universally become taller, probably as

10304-563: The phenomena that are absolutely new and whose concepts are not interpreted in a monosemantic way. E.g., Salmon Day, mouse potato, etc. Prototerms are special lexemes that appeared and were used in prescientific times. Preterms are a special group of lexemes which is represented by special lexical units used as terms to name new scientific notions. They are represented by a vast descriptive pattern, e.g. business process reengineering , management by walking about, etc. The main principles of terminological work were elaborated, terminologies of

10416-402: The point of view of their origin, formal structure, their meanings and also functional features. Terms are used to denote concepts, therefore terminology science also concerns itself with the formation and development of concepts, as well as with the principles of exposing the existing relations between concepts and classifying concepts; also, with the principles of defining concepts and appraising

10528-511: The population density varies from one region to another, and large stretches of surface are almost completely uninhabited, like Antarctica and vast swathes of the ocean. Most humans (61%) live in Asia; the remainder live in the Americas (14%), Africa (14%), Europe (11%), and Oceania (0.5%). Estimates of the population at the time agriculture emerged in around 10,000 BC have ranged between 1 million and 15 million. Around 50–60 million people lived in

10640-455: The processing efficiency theory of John A. Hawkins (1994) suggests that constituents are ordered from shortest to longest in VO languages, and from longest to shortest in OV languages, giving rise to the attested distribution. This approach relies on the notion that OV languages have heavy subjects, and VO languages have heavy objects, which is disputed. A second major way of syntactic categorization

10752-482: The relevance of geographical distribution of different values for various features of linguistic structure. They may have wanted to discover whether a particular grammatical structure found in one language is likewise found in another language in the same geographic location. Some languages split verbs into an auxiliary and an infinitive or participle and put the subject and/or object between them. For instance, German ( Ich habe einen Fuchs im Wald gesehen - *"I have

10864-487: The rest ("stative verbs") join the subject in the same case as the patient . Yet other languages behave ergatively only in some contexts (this " split ergativity " is often based on the grammatical person of the arguments or on the tense/aspect of the verb). For example, only some verbs in Georgian behave this way, and, as a rule, only while using the perfective (aorist). Linguistic typology also seeks to identify patterns in

10976-451: The same language. On the other hand, when there is no clear preference under the described conditions, the language is considered to have "flexible constituent order" (a type unto itself). An additional problem is that in languages without living speech communities, such as Latin , Ancient Greek , and Old Church Slavonic , linguists have only written evidence, perhaps written in a poetic, formalizing, or archaic style that mischaracterizes

11088-404: The second ( Southern Dispersal ) around 70,000 to 50,000 years ago. H. sapiens proceeded to colonize all the continents and larger islands, arriving in Eurasia 125,000 years ago, Australia around 65,000 years ago, the Americas around 15,000 years ago, and remote islands such as Hawaii , Easter Island , Madagascar , and New Zealand in the years 300 to 1280 CE. Human evolution was not

11200-547: The sense of humanity). The native English term man can refer to the species generally (a synonym for humanity ) as well as to human males. It may also refer to individuals of either sex. Despite the fact that the word animal is colloquially used as an antonym for human , and contrary to a common biological misconception , humans are animals . The word person is often used interchangeably with human , but philosophical debate exists as to whether personhood applies to all humans or all sentient beings , and further if

11312-427: The status of independent scientific disciplines. Terminological theories include general theory of terminology, socioterminology, communicative theory of terminology, sociocognitive terminology, and frame-based terminology . Human Humans ( Homo sapiens , meaning "thinking man" or "wise man") or modern humans are the most common and widespread species of primate , and the last surviving species of

11424-485: The structure and distribution of sound systems among the world's languages. This is accomplished by surveying and analyzing the relative frequencies of different phonological properties. Exemplary relative frequencies are given below for certain speech sounds formed by obstructing airflow (obstruents) . These relative frequencies show that contrastive voicing commonly occurs with plosives , as in English neat and need , but occurs much more rarely among fricatives , such as

11536-433: The term "humans" with all members of the genus Homo , in common usage it generally refers to Homo sapiens , the only extant member. All other members of the genus Homo , which are now extinct, are known as archaic humans , and the term "modern human" is used to distinguish Homo sapiens from archaic humans. Anatomically modern humans emerged around 300,000 years ago in Africa, evolving from Homo heidelbergensis or

11648-439: The terminology of the languages they translate. Terminology is taught alongside translation in universities and translation schools. Large translation departments and translation bureaus have a Terminology section. Terminology science is a branch of linguistics studying special vocabulary. The main objects of terminological studies are special lexical units (or special lexemes ), first of all terms. They are analysed from

11760-427: The transition are scarce, the earliest members of Homo share several key traits with Australopithecus . The earliest record of Homo is the 2.8 million-year-old specimen LD 350-1 from Ethiopia , and the earliest named species are Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis which evolved by 2.3 million years ago. H. erectus (the African variant is sometimes called H. ergaster ) evolved 2 million years ago and

11872-444: The universal tendencies. Linguistic typology is contrasted with genealogical linguistics on the grounds that typology groups languages or their grammatical features based on formal similarities rather than historic descendence. The issue of genealogical relation is however relevant to typology because modern data sets aim to be representative and unbiased. Samples are collected evenly from different language families , emphasizing

11984-687: The use of terms in different fields. The terminology discipline consists mainly of the following aspects: A distinction is made between two types of terminology work: Ad hoc terminology is prevalent in the translation profession, where a translation for a specific term (or group of terms) is required quickly to solve a particular translation problem. Nomenclature comprises types of terminology especially having to do with general ontology , applied ontology , and taxonomy ( categorizations and classifications , such as taxonomy for life forms , taxonomy for search engines , and so on). A terminologist intends to hone categorical organization by improving

12096-796: The world by Europeans gave rise to 'missionary linguistics' producing first-hand word lists and grammatical descriptions of exotic languages. Such work is accounted for in the ‘Catalogue of the Languages of the Populations We Know’, 1800, by the Spanish Jesuit Lorenzo Hervás . Johann Christoph Adelung collected the first large language sample with the Lord's prayer in almost five hundred languages (posthumous 1817). More developed nineteenth-century comparative works include Franz Bopp 's 'Conjugation System' (1816) and Wilhelm von Humboldt 's ‘On

12208-440: The world's 3.4 billion rural population. Problems for humans living in cities include various forms of pollution and crime , especially in inner city and suburban slums . Most aspects of human physiology are closely homologous to corresponding aspects of animal physiology. The dental formula of humans is: 2.1.2.3 2.1.2.3 . Humans have proportionately shorter palates and much smaller teeth than other primates. They are

12320-575: Was established in the Renaissance period. For example, Grammaticae quadrilinguis partitiones (1544) by Johannes Drosaeus compared French and the three ‘holy languages’, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The approach was expanded by the Port-Royal Grammar (1660) of Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot , who added Spanish, Italian, German and Arabic. Nicolas Beauzée 's 1767 book includes examples of English, Swedish, Lappish , Irish, Welsh , Basque , Quechua , and Chinese. The conquest and conversion of

12432-419: Was later developed by others including August Schleicher , Heymann Steinthal , Franz Misteli, Franz Nicolaus Finck , and Max Müller . The word 'typology' was proposed by Georg von der Gabelentz in his Sprachwissenschaft (1891). Louis Hjelmslev proposed typology as a large-scale empirical-analytical endeavour of comparing grammatical features to uncover the essence of language. Such a project began from

12544-402: Was the first archaic human species to leave Africa and disperse across Eurasia. H. erectus also was the first to evolve a characteristically human body plan . Homo sapiens emerged in Africa around 300,000 years ago from a species commonly designated as either H. heidelbergensis or H. rhodesiensis , the descendants of H. erectus that remained in Africa. H. sapiens migrated out of

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