Linguistics

Francien (French pronunciation: [fʁɑ̃sjɛ̃]), also anglicized as Francian (/ˈfrænsiən/), is a 19th-century term in linguistics that was applied to the French dialect that was spoken during the Middle Ages in the regions of Île-de-France (with Paris at its centre), Orléanais, as well as Touraine, Berry, and Bourbonnais before the establishment of the French language as a standard language.

According to one theory of the development of French, Francien was chosen out of all the competing oïl languages as an official language (Norman and Picard being the main competitors in the medieval period). The theory currently prevailing, however, is that Francien was one of the dialects in the dialect continuum on top of which an administrative language, untrammeled by perceived regionalisms, was imposed as a compromise means of communication and record to replace Latin.

In linguistics, a stratum (Latin for 'layer') or strate is a historical layer of language that influences or is influenced by another language through contact. The notion of "strata" was first developed by the Italian linguist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, and became known in the English-speaking world through the work of two different authors in 1932.

Both concepts apply to a situation where an intrusive language establishes itself in the territory of another, typically as the result of migration. Whether the superstratum case (the local language persists and the intrusive language disappears) or the substratum one (the local language disappears and the intrusive language persists) applies will normally only be evident after several generations, during which the intrusive language exists within a diaspora culture.

A lexicon (pl. lexicons, rarely lexica) is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word lexicon derives from Greek word λεξικόν (lexikon), neuter of λεξικός (lexikos) meaning 'of or for words'.

Linguistic theories generally regard human languages as consisting of two parts: a lexicon, essentially a catalogue of a language's words (its wordstock); and a grammar, a system of rules which allow for the combination of those words into meaningful sentences. The lexicon is also thought to include bound morphemes, which cannot stand alone as words (such as most affixes). In some analyses, compound words and certain classes of idiomatic expressions, collocations and other phrasemes are also considered to be part of the lexicon. Dictionaries are lists of the lexicon, in alphabetical order, of a given language; usually, however, bound morphemes are not included.

In linguistics, language death occurs when a language loses its last native speaker. By extension, language extinction is when the language is no longer known, including by second-language speakers, when it becomes known as an extinct language. A related term is linguicide, the death of a language from natural or political causes.

The disappearance of a minor language as a result of the absorption or replacement by a major language is sometimes called "glottophagy".

Western Thrace (Greek: Δυτική Θράκη, IPA: [ðitiˈci ˈθɾaci]), also known as Greek Thrace or Aegean Thrace, is a geographical and historical region of Greece, between the Nestos and Evros rivers in the northeast of the country; East Thrace, which lies east of the river Evros, forms the European part of Turkey, and the area to the north, in Bulgaria, is known as Northern Thrace.

Inhabited since Paleolithic times, it has been under the political, cultural and linguistic influence of the Greek world since the classical era; Greeks from the Aegean islands extensively colonized the region (especially the coastal part) and built prosperous cities such as Abdera (home of Democritus, the 5th-century BC philosopher who developed an atomic particle theory, and of Protagoras, a leading sophist) and Sale (near present-day Alexandroupolis). Under the Byzantine Empire, Western Thrace benefited from its position close to the imperial heartland and became a center of medieval Greek commerce and culture; later, under the Ottoman Empire, a number of Muslims settled there, marking the birth of the Muslim minority of Greece.

In linguistics, a conservative form, variety, or feature of a language or dialect is one that has changed relatively little across the language's history, or which is relatively resistant to change. It is the opposite of innovative, innovating, or advanced forms, varieties, or features, which have undergone relatively larger or more recent changes. Furthermore, an archaic form is not only chronologically old (and often conservative) but also rarely used anymore in the modern language, and an obsolete form has fallen out of use altogether. An archaic language stage is chronologically old, compared to a more recent language stage, while the terms conservative and innovative typically compare contemporary forms, varieties or features.

A conservative linguistic form, such as a word or sound feature, is one that remains closer to an older form from which it evolved than cognate forms from the same source. For example, the Spanish word caro /'kaɾo/ and the French word cher /ʃɛʁ/, both adjectives meaning 'dear' or 'beloved', similarly evolved from the Latin word cārum ['ka:rum ~ -ɾũː] (Proto-Romance */ˈka.ru/). The Spanish word, which is more similar to the common ancestor, is more conservative than its French cognate, which is more innovative.

In linguistics, definiteness is a semantic feature of noun phrases that distinguishes between referents or senses that are identifiable in a given context (definite noun phrases) and those that are not (indefinite noun phrases). The prototypical definite noun phrase picks out a unique, familiar, specific referent such as the sun or Australia, as opposed to indefinite examples like an idea or some fish.

There is considerable variation in the expression of definiteness across languages, and some languages such as Japanese do not generally mark it, so the same expression can be definite in some contexts and indefinite in others. In other languages, such as English, it is usually marked by the selection of determiner (e.g., the vs. a). Still other languages, such as Danish, mark definiteness morphologically by changing the noun itself (e.g. Danish en mand (a man), manden (the man)).

Translation studies is an academic interdiscipline dealing with the systematic study of the theory, description and application of translation, interpreting, and localization. As an interdiscipline, translation studies borrows much from the various fields of study that support translation. These include comparative literature, computer science, history, linguistics, philology, philosophy, semiotics, and terminology.

The term “translation studies” was coined by the Amsterdam-based American scholar James S. Holmes in his 1972 paper “The name and nature of translation studies”, which is considered a foundational statement for the discipline. Writers in English occasionally use the term "translatology" (and less commonly "traductology") to refer to translation studies, and the corresponding French term for the discipline is usually traductologie (as in the Société Française de Traductologie). In the United States, there is a preference for the term "translation and interpreting studies" (as in the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association), although European tradition includes interpreting within translation studies (as in the European Society for Translation Studies).

In linguistics, grammatical number is a feature of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). English and many other languages present number categories of singular or plural. Some languages also have a dual, trial and paucal number or other arrangements.

The word "number" is also used in linguistics to describe the distinction between certain grammatical aspects that indicate the number of times an event occurs, such as the semelfactive aspect, the iterative aspect, etc. For that use of the term, see "Grammatical aspect".

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (or Leibnitz; 1 July 1646 [O.S. 21 June] – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat who is credited, alongside Isaac Newton, with the creation of calculus in addition to many other branches of mathematics, such as binary arithmetic and statistics. Leibniz has been called the "last universal genius" due to his vast expertise across fields, which became a rarity after his lifetime with the coming of the Industrial Revolution and the spread of specialized labour. He is a prominent figure in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He wrote works on philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, law, history, philology, games, music, and other studies. Leibniz also made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in probability theory, biology, medicine, geology, psychology, linguistics and computer science.

Leibniz contributed to the field of library science, developing a cataloguing system (at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany) that came to serve as a model for many of Europe's largest libraries. His contributions to a wide range of subjects were scattered in various learned journals, in tens of thousands of letters and in unpublished manuscripts. He wrote in several languages, primarily in Latin, French and German.