Linguistics

Animal languages are forms of communication between non-human animals that show similarities to human language. Animals communicate through a variety of signs, such as sounds and movements. Signing among animals may be considered a form of language if the inventory of signs is large enough, the signs are relatively arbitrary, and the animals seem to produce them with a degree of volition (as opposed to relatively automatic conditioned behaviors or unconditioned instincts, usually including facial expressions).

The current academic consensus is that animal communication systems lack key aspects that might define them as languages (or equivalent to human languages), one such aspect being humans' creation of new patterns of signs under varied circumstances. Humans routinely produce entirely new combinations of words. Some researchers, including the linguist Charles Hockett, argue that human language and animal communication differ so much that the underlying principles are unrelated. Accordingly, linguist Thomas A. Sebeok has proposed to not use the term "language" for animal sign systems. However, other linguists and biologists, including Marc Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch, assert that an evolutionary continuum exists between the communication methods of animal and human language.

In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word grapheme is derived from Ancient Greek's gráphō ('write'), and the suffix -eme (by analogy with phoneme and other emic units). The study of graphemes is called graphemics. The concept of a grapheme is abstract; it is similar to the notion of a character in computing. (A specific geometric shape that represents any particular grapheme in a given typeface is called a glyph.) In orthographic and linguistic notation, a particular glyph (character) is represented as a grapheme (is used in its graphemic sense) by enclosing it within angle brackets: e.g. ⟨a⟩.

In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) morae which make up words.

A symbol in a syllabary, called a syllabogram, typically represents an (optional) consonant sound (simple onset) followed by a vowel sound (nucleus)—that is, a CV (consonant+vowel) or V syllable—but other phonographic mappings, such as CVC, CV- tone, and C (normally nasals at the end of syllables), are also found in syllabaries.

In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for [h], which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are [p] and [b], pronounced with the lips; [t] and [d], pronounced with the front of the tongue; [k] and [g], pronounced with the back of the tongue; [h], pronounced throughout the vocal tract; [f], [v], [s], and [z] pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (fricatives); and [m] and [n], which have air flowing through the nose (nasals). Most consonants are pulmonic, using air pressure from the lungs to generate a sound. Very few natural languages are non-pulmonic, making use of ejectives, implosives, and clicks. Contrasting with consonants are vowels.

Since the number of speech sounds in the world's languages is much greater than the number of letters in any one alphabet, linguists have devised systems such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to assign a unique and unambiguous symbol to each attested consonant. The English alphabet has fewer consonant letters than the English language has consonant sounds, so digraphs like ⟨ch⟩, ⟨sh⟩, ⟨th⟩, and ⟨ng⟩ are used to extend the alphabet, though some letters and digraphs represent more than one consonant. For example, the sound spelled ⟨th⟩ in "this" is a different consonant from the ⟨th⟩ sound in "thin". (In the IPA, these are [ð] and [θ], respectively.)

A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this is the distinction, respectively, between free and bound morphemes. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.

In English, inside a word with multiple morphemes, the main morpheme that gives the word its basic meaning is called a root (such as cat inside the word cats), which can be bound or free. Meanwhile, additional bound morphemes, called affixes, may be added before or after the root, like the -s in cats, which indicates plurality but is always bound to a root noun and is not regarded as a word on its own. However, in some languages, including English and Latin, even many roots cannot stand alone; i.e., they are bound morphemes. For instance, the Latin root reg- ('king') must always be suffixed with a case marker: regis, regi, rex (reg+s), etc. The same is true of the English root nat(e) — ultimately inherited from a Latin root meaning "birth, born" — which appears in words like native, nation, nature, innate, and neonate.

This is a partial list of Egyptologists. An Egyptologist is any archaeologist, historian, linguist, or art historian who specializes in Egyptology, the scientific study of Ancient Egypt and its antiquities. Demotists are Egyptologists who specialize in the study of the Demotic language and field of Demotic Studies. Although a practitioner of the disciplined study of Ancient Egypt and Egyptian antiquities is an "Egyptologist", the field of Egyptology is not exclusive to such practitioners.

In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme (less precisely, a word or sign) that consists of more than one stem. Compounding, composition or nominal composition is the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes. Compounding occurs when two or more words or signs are joined to make a longer word or sign. Consequently, a compound is a unit composed of more than one stem, forming words or signs. If the joining of the words or signs is orthographically represented with a hyphen, the result is a hyphenated compound (e.g., must-have, hunter-gatherer). If they are joined without an intervening space, it is a closed compound (e.g., footpath, blackbird). If they are joined with a space (e.g. school bus, high school, lowest common denominator), then the result – at least in English – may be an open compound.

The meaning of the compound may be similar to or different from the meaning of its components in isolation. The component stems of a compound may be of the same part of speech—as in the case of the English word footpath, composed of the two nouns foot and path—or they may belong to different parts of speech, as in the case of the English word blackbird, composed of the adjective black and the noun bird. With very few exceptions, English compound words are stressed on their first component stem.

In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an object or subject within a phrase, clause, or sentence.

In linguistics, nouns constitute a lexical category (part of speech) defined according to how its members combine with members of other lexical categories. The syntactic occurrence of nouns differs among languages.

Social science (not often rendered in the plural as the social sciences) is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among members within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of society", established in the 18th century. It now encompasses a wide array of additional academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, management, communication studies, psychology, culturology, and political science.

The majority of positivist social scientists use methods resembling those used in the natural sciences as tools for understanding societies, and so define science in its stricter modern sense. Speculative social scientists, otherwise known as interpretivist scientists, by contrast, may use social critique or symbolic interpretation rather than constructing empirically falsifiable theories, and thus treat science in its broader sense. In modern academic practice, researchers are often eclectic, using multiple methodologies (combining both quantitative and qualitative research). To gain a deeper understanding of complex human behavior in digital environments, social science disciplines have increasingly integrated interdisciplinary approaches, big data, and computational tools. The term social research has also acquired a degree of autonomy as practitioners from various disciplines share similar goals and methods.

The Indo-European migrations are hypothesized migrations of peoples who spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and the derived Indo-European languages, which took place from around 4000 to 1000 BCE, potentially explaining how these related languages came to be spoken across a large area of Eurasia, spanning from the Indian subcontinent and Iranian plateau to Atlantic Europe.

While these early languages and their speakers are prehistoric (lacking documentary evidence), a synthesis of linguistics, archaeology, anthropology and genetics has established the existence of Proto-Indo-European and the spread of its daughter dialects through migrations of large populations of its speakers, as well as the recruitment of new speakers through emulation of conquering elites. Comparative linguistics describes the similarities between various languages governed by laws of systematic change, which allow the reconstruction of ancestral speech (see Indo-European studies). Archaeology traces the spread of artifacts, habitations, and burial sites presumed to be created by speakers of Proto-Indo-European in several stages, from their hypothesized Proto-Indo-European homeland to their diaspora throughout Western Europe, Central Asian, and South Asia, with incursions into East Asia. Recent genetic research, including paleogenetics, has increasingly delineated the kinship groups involved in this movement.