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Swadesh List
A Swadesh list () is a compilation of cultural universal, tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. That is, a Swadesh list is a list of forms and concepts which all languages, without exception, have terms for, such as star, hand, water, kill, sleep, and so forth. The number of such terms is small – a few hundred at most, or possibly less than a hundred. The inclusion or exclusion of many terms is subject to debate among linguists; thus, there are several different lists, and some authors may refer to "Swadesh lists." The Swadesh list is named after linguist Morris Swadesh. Translations of a Swadesh list into a set of languages allow for researchers to quantify the interrelatedness of those languages. Swadesh lists are used in lexicostatistics (the quantitative assessment of the genealogical relatedness of languages) and glottochronology (the dating of language divergence). For instance, the terms on a Swadesh list can be compared between two languages ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cultural Universal
A cultural universal (also called an anthropological universal or human universal) is an element, pattern, trait, or institution that is common to all known human cultures worldwide. Taken together, the whole body of cultural universals is known as the human condition. Evolutionary psychologists hold that behaviors or traits that occur universally in all cultures are good candidates for evolutionary adaptations.Schacter, Daniel L, Daniel Wegner and Daniel Gilbert. 2007. ''Psychology''. Worth Publishers. pp. 26–27 Some anthropological and sociological theorists that take a cultural relativist perspective may deny the existence of cultural universals: the extent to which these universals are "cultural" in the narrow sense, or in fact biologically inherited behavior is an issue of " nature versus nurture". Prominent scholars on the topic include Emile Durkheim, George Murdock, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Donald Brown. Donald Brown's list in ''Human Universals'' In his book ' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Borrowing (linguistics)
In linguistics, borrowing is a type of language change in which a language or dialect undergoes change as a result of contact with another language or dialect. In typical cases of borrowing, speakers of one language (the "recipient" language) adopt into their own speech a novel linguistic feature that they were exposed to due to its presence in a different language (the "source" or "donor" language). Lexical borrowing The most common type of borrowing is for a word that originated in one language to come to be used in another; this is because individual words are relatively superficial components of a language, and a new word can be easily incorporated into the lexicon without disrupting other existing structural features of the recipient language. Words that have been borrowed in this way are known as loanwords. Loanwords often appear in the recipient language in a somewhat different form than they have in the source language, typically undergoing some degree of modification ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Person
A person (: people or persons, depending on context) is a being who has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, or legal responsibility. The defining features of '' personhood'' and, consequently, what makes a person count as a person, differ widely among cultures and contexts. In addition to the question of personhood, of what makes a being count as a person to begin with, there are further questions about '' personal identity'' and '' self'': both about what makes any particular person that particular person instead of another, and about what makes a person at one time the same person as they were or will be at another time despite any intervening changes. The plural form "people" is often used to refer to an entire nation or ethnic group (as in "a people"), and this was the original meaning of the word; i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Woman
A woman is an adult female human. Before adulthood, a female child or Adolescence, adolescent is referred to as a girl. Typically, women are of the female sex and inherit a pair of X chromosomes, one from each parent, and women with functional uteruses are capable of pregnancy and giving childbirth, birth from puberty until menopause. More generally, sex differentiation of the female fetus is governed by the lack of a present, or functioning, ''SRY'' gene on either one of the respective sex chromosomes. Sex differences in human physiology, Female anatomy is distinguished from male anatomy by the female reproductive system, which includes the ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, vagina, and vulva. An adult woman generally has a wider pelvis, broader hips, and larger breasts than an adult man. These characteristics facilitate childbirth and breastfeeding. Women typically have less facial and other body hair, have a higher body fat composition, and are on average shorter and less ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Small
Small means of insignificant size Size in general is the Magnitude (mathematics), magnitude or dimensions of a thing. More specifically, ''geometrical size'' (or ''spatial size'') can refer to three geometrical measures: length, area, or volume. Length can be generalized .... Small may also refer to: Science and technology * SMALL, an ALGOL-like programming language * ''Small'' (journal), a nano-science publication * <small>, an HTML element that defines smaller text Arts and entertainment Fictional characters * Small, in the British children's show Big & Small Other uses * Small (surname) * List of people known as the Small * "Small", a song from the album '' The Cosmos Rocks'' by Queen + Paul Rodgers See also * Smal (other) * Smalls (other) {{disambiguation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Length
Length is a measure of distance. In the International System of Quantities, length is a quantity with Dimension (physical quantity), dimension distance. In most systems of measurement a Base unit (measurement), base unit for length is chosen, from which all other units are derived. In the International System of Units (SI) system, the base unit for length is the metre. Length is commonly understood to mean the most extended size, dimension of a fixed object. However, this is not always the case and may depend on the position the object is in. Various terms for the length of a fixed object are used, and these include height, which is vertical length or vertical extent, width, breadth, and depth. ''Height'' is used when there is a base from which vertical measurements can be taken. ''Width'' and ''breadth'' usually refer to a shorter dimension than ''length''. ''Depth'' is used for the measure of a third dimension. Length is the measure of one spatial dimension, whereas area ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indefinite Pronoun
An indefinite pronoun is a pronoun which does not have a specific, familiar referent. Indefinite pronouns are in contrast to definite pronouns. Indefinite pronouns can represent either count nouns or noncount nouns. They often have related forms across these categories: universal (such as ''everyone'', ''everything''), assertive existential (such as ''somebody'', ''something''), elective existential (such as ''anyone'', ''anything''), and negative (such as ''nobody'', ''nothing''). Many languages distinguish forms of indefinites used in affirmative contexts from those used in non-affirmative contexts. For instance, English "something" can be used only in affirmative contexts while "anything" is used otherwise. Indefinite pronouns are associated with indefinite determiners of a similar or identical form (such as ''every'', ''any'', ''all'', ''some''). A pronoun can be thought of as ''replacing'' a noun phrase, while a determiner ''introduces'' a noun phrase and precedes any ad ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Affirmation And Negation
In linguistics and grammar, affirmation ( abbreviated ) and negation () are ways in which grammar encodes positive and negative polarity into verb phrases, clauses, or utterances. An affirmative (positive) form is used to express the validity or truth of a basic assertion, while a negative form expresses its falsity. For example, the affirmative sentence "Joe is here" asserts that it is true that Joe is currently located near the speaker. Conversely, the negative sentence "Joe is not here" asserts that it is not true that Joe is currently located near the speaker. The grammatical category associated with affirmatives and negatives is called polarity. This means that a clause, sentence, verb phrase, etc. may be said to have either affirmative or negative polarity (its polarity may be either affirmative or negative). Affirmative is typically the unmarked polarity, whereas a negative statement is marked in some way. Negative polarity can be indicated by negating words or particle ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Interrogative Word
An interrogative word or question word is a function word used to ask a question, such as ''what, which'', ''when'', ''where'', '' who, whom, whose'', ''why'', ''whether'' and ''how''. They are sometimes called wh-words, because in English most of them start with '' wh-'' (compare Five Ws). Most may be used in both direct (''Where is he going?'') and in indirect questions (''I wonder where he is going''). In English and various other languages the same forms are also used as relative pronouns in certain relative clauses (''The country where he was born'') and certain adverb clauses (''I go where he goes''). It can also be used as a modal, since question words are more likely to appear in modal sentences, like (''Why was he walking?'') A particular type of interrogative word is the interrogative particle, which serves to convert a statement into a yes–no question, without having any other meaning. Examples include ''est-ce que'' in French, ли ''li'' in Russian, ''czy'' i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Demonstrative
Demonstratives (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic, their meaning depending on a particular Linguistic frame of reference, frame of reference, and cannot be understood without context. Demonstratives are often used in spatial deixis (where the speaker or sometimes the listener is to provide context), but also in intra-discourse reference (including Abstraction, abstract concepts) or anaphora (linguistics), anaphora, where the meaning is dependent on something other than the relative physical location of the speaker. An example is whether something is currently being said or was said earlier. Demonstrative constructions include demonstrative adjectives or demonstrative determiners, which specify nouns (as in ''Put that coat on''), and demonstrative pronouns, which stand independently (as in ''Put that on' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Clusivity
In linguistics, clusivity is a grammatical distinction between ''inclusive'' and ''exclusive'' first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called ''inclusive " we"'' and ''exclusive "we"''. Inclusive "we" specifically includes the addressee, while exclusive "we" specifically excludes the addressee; in other words, two (or more) words that both translate to "we", one meaning "you and I, and possibly someone else", the other meaning "me and some other person or persons, but not you". While imagining that this sort of distinction could be made in other persons (particularly the second) is straightforward, in fact the existence of second-person clusivity (you vs. you and they) in natural languages is controversial and not well attested. While clusivity is not a feature of the English language, it is found in many languages around the world. The first published description of the inclusive-exclusive distinction by a European linguist was in a description of languages of Peru in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Personal Pronoun
Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it''). Personal pronouns may also take different forms depending on number (usually singular or plural), grammatical or natural gender, case, and formality. The term "personal" is used here purely to signify the grammatical sense; personal pronouns are not limited to people and can also refer to animals and objects (as the English personal pronoun ''it'' usually does). The re-use in some languages of one personal pronoun to indicate a second personal pronoun with formality or social distance – commonly a second person plural to signify second person singular formal – is known as the T–V distinction, from the Latin pronouns and . Examples are the majestic plural in English and the use of in place of in French. For specific details of the personal pronouns used in the Engli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
