179-417: Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between translating (a written text) and interpreting (oral or signed communication between users of different languages); under this distinction, translation can begin only after
358-402: A bilingual document is the 1274 BCE Treaty of Kadesh between the ancient Egyptian and Hittie empires . The Babylonians were the first to establish translation as a profession. The first translations of Greek and Coptic texts into Arabic, possibly indirectly from Syriac translations, seem to have been undertaken as early as the late seventh century CE. The second Abbasid Caliph funded
537-428: A " measure word " to say "one blossom-of roseness." Chinese verbs are tense -less: there are several ways to specify when something happened or will happen, but verb tense is not one of them. For poets, this creates the great advantage of ambiguity . According to Link, Weinberger's insight about subjectlessness—that it produces an effect "both universal and immediate"—applies to timelessness as well. Link proposes
716-636: A common etymology is sometimes misleading as a guide to current meaning in one or the other language. For example, the English actual should not be confused with the cognate French actuel ("present", "current"), the Polish aktualny ("present", "current," "topical", "timely", "feasible"), the Swedish aktuell ("topical", "presently of importance"), the Russian актуальный ("urgent", "topical") or
895-493: A different context. For example, the reference of the word here depends on the location in which it is used. A closely related approach is possible world semantics, which allows expressions to refer not only to entities in the actual world but also to entities in other possible worlds. According to this view, expressions like the first man to run a four-minute mile refer to different persons in different worlds. This view can also be used to analyze sentences that talk about what
1074-440: A different sense have the same referent. For instance, the sentence "the morning star is the evening star" is informative and people can learn something from it. The sentence "the morning star is the morning star", by contrast, is an uninformative tautology since the expressions are identical not only on the level of reference but also on the level of sense. Compositionality is a key aspect of how languages construct meaning. It
1253-502: A fully adequate guide in translating. The Scottish historian Alexander Tytler , in his Essay on the Principles of Translation (1790), emphasized that assiduous reading is a more comprehensive guide to a language than are dictionaries. The same point, but also including listening to the spoken language , had earlier, in 1783, been made by the Polish poet and grammarian Onufry Kopczyński . The translator's special role in society
1432-479: A half millennia . It began with the incipient unification of Nile Valley polities around 3100 BC, traditionally under Menes . The civilisation of ancient Egypt was characterised primarily by intensive agricultural use of the fertile Nile Valley; the use of the Nile itself for transportation; the development of writing systems – first hieroglyphs and then later hieratic and other derived scripts – and literature ;
1611-656: A kind of uncertainty principle that may be applicable not only to translation from the Chinese language, but to all translation: Dilemmas about translation do not have definitive right answers (although there can be unambiguously wrong ones if misreadings of the original are involved). Any translation (except machine translation, a different case) must pass through the mind of a translator, and that mind inevitably contains its own store of perceptions, memories, and values. Weinberger [...] pushes this insight further when he writes that "every reading of every poem, regardless of language,
1790-496: A large kingdom at three different times in history. These are called the Old (20th to 18th centuries BC), Middle (14th to 11th centuries BC), and Neo-Assyrian (9th to 7th centuries BC) kingdoms, or periods. Mitanni was a Hurrian empire in northern Mesopotamia founded around 1500 BC. The Mitanians conquered and controlled Assyria until the 14th century BC while contending with Egypt for control of parts of modern Syria. Its capital
1969-589: A later emperor, Darius the Great , expanded the empire to the Indus River , creating the largest empire in the world to that date. But Darius and his son Xerxes I failed to expand into Greece , with expeditions in 490 and 480 BC eventually failing. The Achaemenid dynasty and empire fell to Alexander the Great by 330 BC, and after Alexander's death, much of the area previously ruled by the Cyrus and his successors
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#17327767304682148-413: A more complex meaning structure. In the expression "Beethoven likes Schubert", the verb like connects a liker to the object of their liking. Other sentence parts modify meaning rather than form new connections. For instance, the adjective red modifies the color of another entity in the expression red car . A further compositional device is variable binding, which is used to determine the reference of
2327-451: A number of dynasties that peaked in power under the reign of Ashoka Maurya, one of India's most legendary and famous emperors. During the reign of Ashoka, the four dynasties of Chola , Chera , and Pandya were ruling in the South, while Devanampiya Tissa (250–210 BC) controlled Anuradhapura (now Sri Lanka ). These kingdoms, while not part of Ashoka's empire, were in friendly terms with
2506-414: A particular language. Some semanticists also include the study of lexical units other than words in the field of lexical semantics. Compound expressions like being under the weather have a non-literal meaning that acts as a unit and is not a direct function of its parts. Another topic concerns the meaning of morphemes that make up words, for instance, how negative prefixes like in- and dis- affect
2685-413: A particular language. The same symbol may refer to one object in one language, to another object in a different language, and to no object in another language. Many other concepts are used to describe semantic phenomena. The semantic role of an expression is the function it fulfills in a sentence. In the sentence "the boy kicked the ball", the boy has the role of the agent who performs an action. The ball
2864-522: A period often known as the Vedic period . Between 1500 and 500 BC these peoples spread throughout most of India and had begun to found small cities. Vedic society was characterized by the varna system which divided society into four broad castes, which were later elaborated. By the end of the Vedic period, this way of organizing society had become central to Indian society. Religion in the late Vedic period
3043-565: A poem like [the one that Eliot Weinberger discusses in 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (with More Ways) ], another untranslatable feature is that the written result, hung on a wall, presents a rectangle. Translators into languages whose word lengths vary can reproduce such an effect only at the risk of fatal awkwardness.... Another imponderable is how to imitate the 1-2, 1-2-3 rhythm in which five- syllable lines in classical Chinese poems normally are read. Chinese characters are pronounced in one syllable apiece, so producing such rhythms in Chinese
3222-445: A speaker remains silent on a certain topic. A closely related distinction by the semiotician Charles W. Morris holds that semantics studies the relation between words and the world, pragmatics examines the relation between words and users, and syntax focuses on the relation between different words. Semantics is related to etymology , which studies how words and their meanings changed in the course of history. Another connected field
3401-438: A strict distinction between meaning and syntax and by relying on various formal devices to explore the relation between meaning and cognition. Computational semantics examines how the meaning of natural language expressions can be represented and processed on computers. It often relies on the insights of formal semantics and applies them to problems that can be computationally solved. Some of its key problems include computing
3580-459: A strong sense, the principle of compositionality states that the meaning of a complex expression is not just affected by its parts and how they are combined but fully determined this way. It is controversial whether this claim is correct or whether additional aspects influence meaning. For example, context may affect the meaning of expressions; idioms like " kick the bucket " carry figurative or non-literal meanings that are not directly reducible to
3759-490: A subject is inserted, a "controlling individual mind of the poet" enters and destroys the effect of the Chinese line. Without a subject, he writes, "the experience becomes both universal and immediate to the reader." Another approach to the subjectlessness is to use the target language's passive voice ; but this again particularizes the experience too much. Nouns have no number in Chinese. "If," writes Link, "you want to talk in Chinese about one rose, you may, but then you use
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#17327767304683938-508: A term. For example, the last part of the expression "the woman who likes Beethoven" specifies which woman is meant. Parse trees can be used to show the underlying hierarchy employed to combine the different parts. Various grammatical devices, like the gerund form, also contribute to meaning and are studied by grammatical semantics. Formal semantics uses formal tools from logic and mathematics to analyze meaning in natural languages. It aims to develop precise logical formalisms to clarify
4117-407: A text that come before and after it. Context affects the meaning of various expressions, like the deictic expression here and the anaphoric expression she . A syntactic environment is extensional or transparent if it is always possible to exchange expressions with the same reference without affecting the truth value of the sentence. For example, the environment of the sentence "the number 8
4296-440: A text's source language are adjusted to the syntactic requirements of the target language. When a target language has lacked terms that are found in a source language, translators have borrowed those terms, thereby enriching the target language. Thanks in great measure to the exchange of calques and loanwords between languages, and to their importation from other languages, there are few concepts that are " untranslatable " among
4475-456: A tradition of bronze production and the manufacture of evermore refined bronze and iron objects, such as plows, axes and sickles with shaft holes, socketed arrows and spearheads and small ornamented items. By about 500 BCE, large and delicately decorated bronze drums of remarkable quality, weighing more than 70 kg (150 lb), were produced in the laborious lost-wax casting process. This industry of highly sophisticated metal processing
4654-457: A translation bureau in Baghdad in the eighth century. Bayt al-Hikma, the famous library in Baghdad, was generously endowed and the collection included books in many languages, and it became a leading centre for the translation of works from antiquity into Arabic, with its own Translation Department. Translations into European languages from Arabic versions of lost Greek and Roman texts began in
4833-457: A uniform signifying rank , and the presence of vultures indicating a nearby animal carcass. Semantics further contrasts with pragmatics , which is interested in how people use language in communication. An expression like "That's what I'm talking about" can mean many things depending on who says it and in what situation. Semantics is interested in the possible meanings of expressions: what they can and cannot mean in general. In this regard, it
5012-427: A word means by looking at its letters and one needs to consult a dictionary instead. Compositionality is often used to explain how people can formulate and understand an almost infinite number of meanings even though the amount of words and cognitive resources is finite. Many sentences that people read are sentences that they have never seen before and they are nonetheless able to understand them. When interpreted in
5191-484: Is hermeneutics , which is the art or science of interpretation and is concerned with the right methodology of interpreting text in general and scripture in particular. Metasemantics examines the metaphysical foundations of meaning and aims to explain where it comes from or how it arises. The word semantics originated from the Ancient Greek adjective semantikos , meaning 'relating to signs', which
5370-400: Is 8. Semanticists commonly distinguish the language they study, called object language, from the language they use to express their findings, called metalanguage . When a professor uses Japanese to teach their student how to interpret the language of first-order logic then the language of first-order logic is the object language and Japanese is the metalanguage. The same language may occupy
5549-528: Is Harappan, after the first of its cities to be excavated, Harappa in the Pakistani province of Punjab . Harappan civilization grew out of the earlier agricultural communities as they evolved into cities. These communities created and traded jewelry, figurines, and seals that appear widely scattered throughout Mesopotamia, Afghanistan, and Iran. Chickens were domesticated in addition to the earlier crops and animals. They developed their own writing system,
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5728-444: Is a time period from the beginning of writing and recorded human history through late antiquity . The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, beginning with the development of Sumerian cuneiform script. Ancient history covers all continents inhabited by humans in the period 3000 BC – AD 500, ending with the expansion of Islam in late antiquity. The three-age system periodizes ancient history into
5907-474: Is a derivative of sēmeion , the noun for ' sign '. It was initially used for medical symptoms and only later acquired its wider meaning regarding any type of sign, including linguistic signs. The word semantics entered the English language from the French term semantique , which the linguist Michel Bréal first introduced at the end of the 19th century. Semantics studies meaning in language, which
6086-529: Is a type of drawing after life..." Comparison of the translator with a musician or actor goes back at least to Samuel Johnson 's remark about Alexander Pope playing Homer on a flageolet , while Homer himself used a bassoon . In the 13th century, Roger Bacon wrote that if a translation is to be true, the translator must know both languages , as well as the science that he is to translate; and finding that few translators did, he wanted to do away with translation and translators altogether. The translator of
6265-735: Is an act of translation: translation into the reader's intellectual and emotional life." Then he goes still further: because a reader's mental life shifts over time, there is a sense in which "the same poem cannot be read twice." Translation of material into Arabic expanded after the creation of Arabic script in the 5th century, and gained great importance with the rise of Islam and Islamic empires. Arab translation initially focused primarily on politics, rendering Persian, Greek, even Chinese and Indic diplomatic materials into Arabic. It later focused on translating classical Greek and Persian works, as well as some Chinese and Indian texts, into Arabic for scholarly study at major Islamic learning centers, such as
6444-577: Is and how it arises. It investigates how expressions are built up from different layers of constituents, like morphemes , words , clauses , sentences , and texts , and how the meanings of the constituents affect one another. Semantics can focus on a specific language, like English, but in its widest sense, it investigates meaning structures relevant to all languages. As a descriptive discipline, it aims to determine how meaning works without prescribing what meaning people should associate with particular expressions. Some of its key questions are "How do
6623-677: Is characterized by loose adaptation, rather than the closer translation more commonly found in Europe; and Chinese translation theory identifies various criteria and limitations in translation. In the East Asian sphere of Chinese cultural influence, more important than translation per se has been the use and reading of Chinese texts, which also had substantial influence on the Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages, with substantial borrowings of Chinese vocabulary and writing system. Notable
6802-426: Is created through the combination of expressions belonging to different syntactic categories. Dynamic semantics is a subfield of formal semantics that focuses on how information grows over time. According to it, "meaning is context change potential": the meaning of a sentence is not given by the information it contains but by the information change it brings about relative to a context. Cognitive semantics studies
6981-445: Is described but an experience takes place, like when a girl sees a bird. In this case, the girl has the role of the experiencer. Other common semantic roles are location, source, goal, beneficiary, and stimulus. Lexical relations describe how words stand to one another. Two words are synonyms if they share the same or a very similar meaning, like car and automobile or buy and purchase . Antonyms have opposite meanings, such as
7160-552: Is described in a posthumous 1803 essay by "Poland's La Fontaine ", the Roman Catholic Primate of Poland , poet, encyclopedist , author of the first Polish novel, and translator from French and Greek, Ignacy Krasicki : [T]ranslation... is in fact an art both estimable and very difficult, and therefore is not the labor and portion of common minds; [it] should be [practiced] by those who are themselves capable of being actors, when they see greater use in translating
7339-408: Is even" is extensional because replacing the expression the number 8 with the number of planets in the solar system does not change its truth value. For intensional or opaque contexts , this type of substitution is not always possible. For instance, the embedded clause in "Paco believes that the number 8 is even" is intensional since Paco may not know that the number of planets in the solar system
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7518-514: Is interested in how meanings evolve and change because of cultural phenomena associated with politics , religion, and customs . For example, address practices encode cultural values and social hierarchies, as in the difference of politeness of expressions like tu and usted in Spanish or du and Sie in German in contrast to English, which lacks these distinctions and uses
7697-454: Is limited to the meaning of linguistic expressions. It concerns how signs are interpreted and what information they contain. An example is the meaning of words provided in dictionary definitions by giving synonymous expressions or paraphrases, like defining the meaning of the term ram as adult male sheep . There are many forms of non-linguistic meaning that are not examined by semantics. Actions and policies can have meaning in relation to
7876-456: Is not hard and the results are unobtrusive; but any imitation in a Western language is almost inevitably stilted and distracting. Even less translatable are the patterns of tone arrangement in classical Chinese poetry. Each syllable (character) belongs to one of two categories determined by the pitch contour in which it is read; in a classical Chinese poem the patterns of alternation of the two categories exhibit parallelism and mirroring. Once
8055-446: Is possible or what is necessary: possibility is what is true in some possible worlds while necessity is what is true in all possible worlds. Ideational theories, also called mentalist theories, are not primarily interested in the reference of expressions and instead explain meaning in terms of the mental states of language users. One historically influential approach articulated by John Locke holds that expressions stand for ideas in
8234-430: Is sometimes defined as the study of context-independent meaning. Pragmatics examines which of these possible meanings is relevant in a particular case. In contrast to semantics, it is interested in actual performance rather than in the general linguistic competence underlying this performance. This includes the topic of additional meaning that can be inferred even though it is not literally expressed, like what it means if
8413-444: Is sometimes divided into two complementary approaches: semasiology and onomasiology . Semasiology starts from words and examines what their meaning is. It is interested in whether words have one or several meanings and how those meanings are related to one another. Instead of going from word to meaning, onomasiology goes from meaning to word. It starts with a concept and examines what names this concept has or how it can be expressed in
8592-504: Is sometimes understood as a mental phenomenon that helps people identify the objects to which an expression refers. Some semanticists focus primarily on sense or primarily on reference in their analysis of meaning. To grasp the full meaning of an expression, it is usually necessary to understand both to what entities in the world it refers and how it describes them. The distinction between sense and reference can explain identity statements , which can be used to show how two expressions with
8771-542: Is the Japanese kanbun , a system for glossing Chinese texts for Japanese speakers. Though Indianized states in Southeast Asia often translated Sanskrit material into the local languages, the literate elites and scribes more commonly used Sanskrit as their primary language of culture and government. Some special aspects of translating from Chinese are illustrated in Perry Link 's discussion of translating
8950-413: Is the branch of semantics that studies word meaning . It examines whether words have one or several meanings and in what lexical relations they stand to one another. Phrasal semantics studies the meaning of sentences by exploring the phenomenon of compositionality or how new meanings can be created by arranging words. Formal semantics relies on logic and mathematics to provide precise frameworks of
9129-416: Is the idea that the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meanings of its parts. It is possible to understand the meaning of the sentence "Zuzana owns a dog" by understanding what the words Zuzana , owns , a and dog mean and how they are combined. In this regard, the meaning of complex expressions like sentences is different from word meaning since it is normally not possible to deduce what
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#17327767304689308-528: Is the norm in classical Chinese poetry , and common even in modern Chinese prose, to omit subjects; the reader or listener infers a subject. The grammars of some Western languages, however, require that a subject be stated (although this is often avoided by using a passive or impersonal construction). Most of the translators cited in Eliot Weinberger's 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei supply a subject. Weinberger points out, however, that when an "I" as
9487-419: Is the object to which the expression points. The sense of an expression is the way in which it refers to that object or how the object is interpreted. For example, the expressions morning star and evening star refer to the same planet, just like the expressions 2 + 2 and 3 + 1 refer to the same number. The meanings of these expressions differ not on the level of reference but on the level of sense. Sense
9666-404: Is the theme or patient of this action as something that does not act itself but is involved in or affected by the action. The same entity can be both agent and patient, like when someone cuts themselves. An entity has the semantic role of an instrument if it is used to perform the action, for instance, when cutting something with a knife then the knife is the instrument. For some sentences, no action
9845-404: Is true. Many related disciplines investigate language and meaning. Semantics contrasts with other subfields of linguistics focused on distinct aspects of language. Phonology studies the different types of sounds used in languages and how sounds are connected to form words while syntax examines the rules that dictate how to arrange words to create sentences. These divisions are reflected in
10024-450: Is used if the different meanings are closely related to one another, like the meanings of the word head , which can refer to the topmost part of the human body or the top-ranking person in an organization. The meaning of words can often be subdivided into meaning components called semantic features . The word horse has the semantic feature animate but lacks the semantic feature human . It may not always be possible to fully reconstruct
10203-520: Is yet to be confirmed with extensive survey work. With the help of archaeological excavations mainly by Susan and Roderick McIntosh , the site is known to have been occupied from 250 BC to AD 900. The city is believed to have been abandoned and moved where the current city is located due to the spread of Islam and the building of the Great Mosque of Djenné . Previously, it was assumed that advanced trade networks and complex societies did not exist in
10382-709: The translātiō pattern, whereas Russian and the South Slavic languages adopted the trāductiō pattern. The Romance languages , deriving directly from Latin, did not need to calque their equivalent words for "translation"; instead, they simply adapted the second of the two alternative Latin words, trāductiō . The Ancient Greek term for "translation", μετάφρασις ( metaphrasis , "a speaking across"), has supplied English with " metaphrase " (a " literal ", or "word-for-word", translation)—as contrasted with " paraphrase " ("a saying in other words", from παράφρασις , paraphrasis ). "Metaphrase" corresponds, in one of
10561-529: The Al-Karaouine ( Fes , Morocco ), Al-Azhar ( Cairo , Egypt ), and the Al-Nizamiyya of Baghdad . In terms of theory, Arabic translation drew heavily on earlier Near Eastern traditions as well as more contemporary Greek and Persian traditions. Arabic translation efforts and techniques are important to Western translation traditions due to centuries of close contacts and exchanges. Especially after
10740-527: The Bible into German, Martin Luther (1483–1546), is credited with being the first European to posit that one translates satisfactorily only toward his own language. L.G. Kelly states that since Johann Gottfried Herder in the 18th century, "it has been axiomatic" that one translates only toward his own language. Compounding the demands on the translator is the fact that no dictionary or thesaurus can ever be
10919-569: The Chaldeans in 614 BC. The Achaemenid Empire was founded by Cyrus the Great , who first became king of the Persians, then conquered the Medes, Lydia , and Babylon by 539 BC. The empire built on earlier Mesopotamian systems of government to govern their large empire. By building roads, they improved both the ability to send governmental instructions throughout their lands as well as improving
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#173277673046811098-763: The Congo River and into the Great Lakes area. By AD 1000 these groups had spread throughout all of southern Africa south of the equator. Iron metallurgy and agriculture spread along with these peoples, with the cultivation of millet, oil palms, sorghum, and yams as well as the use of domesticated cattle, pigs, and sheep. These technologies helped increase population, and settled communities became common in sub-Saharan Africa except in deserts or heavy forests. Paleolithic tools have been discovered in India dating to 200,000 years ago, and Neolithic sites are known from near
11277-681: The Indus Valley dating to around 8000 BC. Agriculture began in the Indus Valley around 7000 BC, and reached the Ganges Valley by 3000 BC. Barley , cotton , and wheat were grown and the population had domesticated cattle, goats, and sheep. The Indus Valley Civilisation developed around 3000 BC in the Indus and Ghaggar-Hakra river valleys of eastern Afghanistan , Pakistan, and western India. Another name for this civilisation
11456-495: The Indus Valley script , which is still mostly undeciphered. The exact structure of society and the way the cities were governed is not known. By about 1600 BC, the Indus Valley culture had abandoned many of their cities, including Mohenjo-Daro . The exact reason for this decline is not known. Indo-European speaking peoples began to spread into India about 1500 BC. The Rigveda , in Sanskrit , dates to this period and begins
11635-529: The Latin word translatio , which comes from trans , "across" + ferre , "to carry" or "to bring" ( -latio in turn coming from latus , the past participle of ferre ). Thus translatio is "a carrying across" or "a bringing across"—in this case, of a text from one language to another. Some Slavic languages and the Germanic languages (other than Dutch and Afrikaans ) have calqued their words for
11814-587: The Maccabean revolt led to independence during Hellenistic period until Roman conquest . Phoenicia was an ancient civilisation centered in the north of ancient Canaan , with its heartland along the coastal regions of modern-day Lebanon , Syria and Israel. Phoenician civilisation was an enterprising maritime trading culture that spread across the Mediterranean between the period of 1550 to 300 BC. One Phoenician colony, Carthage , ruled an empire in
11993-738: The Maritime Jade Road , a jade trade network, in Southeast Asia which existed in Taiwan and the Philippines for 3,000 years from 2000 BCE to 1000 CE. The trade was established by links between the indigenous peoples of Taiwan and the Philippines, and later included parts of Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and other areas in Southeast Asia (known as the Sa Huynh - Kalanay Interaction Sphere). Lingling-o artifacts are one of
12172-603: The Maurya Empire . An alliance existed between Devanampiya Tissa and Ashoka of India, who sent Buddhist missionaries to Sri Lanka. Most of North India was reunited under the Gupta Empire beginning under Chandragupta I around AD 320. Under his successors the empire spread to include much of India except for the Deccan Plateau and the very south of the peninsula. This was a period of relative peace, and
12351-536: The Middle East 's Islamic clerics and copyists had conceded defeat in their centuries-old battle to contain the corrupting effects of the printing press , [an] explosion in publishing ... ensued. Along with expanding secular education, printing transformed an overwhelmingly illiterate society into a partly literate one. Meaning (linguistic) Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning . It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how
12530-778: The Nile Delta in the north, as far south as Jebel Barkal at the Fourth Cataract of the Nile. Extensions to the geographical range of ancient Egyptian civilisation included, at different times, areas of the southern Levant , the Eastern Desert and the Red Sea coastline, the Sinai Peninsula , and the Western Desert (focused on the several oases ). Ancient Egypt developed over at least three and
12709-688: The Old Kingdom , which saw pyramid building on a large scale. After 2100 BC, the Old Kingdom dissolved into smaller states during the First Intermediate Period , which lasted about 100 years. The Middle Kingdom began around 2000 BC with the reunification of Egypt under pharoes ruling from Thebes . The Middle Kingdom ended with the conquest of northern Egypt by the Hyksos around 1650 BC. The Hyksos were expelled from Egypt and
12888-827: The Pitcairns , the Kermadec Islands , and the Norfolk Islands were also formerly settled by Austronesians but later abandoned. There is also putative evidence, based in the spread of the sweet potato , that Austronesians may have reached South America from Polynesia, where they might have traded with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas . Austronesians established prehistoric maritime trade networks in Island Southeast Asia, including
13067-533: The Renaissance , Europeans began more intensive study of Arabic and Persian translations of classical works as well as scientific and philosophical works of Arab and oriental origins. Arabic, and to a lesser degree Persian, became important sources of material and perhaps of techniques for revitalized Western traditions, which in time would overtake the Islamic and oriental traditions. In the 19th century, after
13246-845: The Seleucid Empire . Parthia had many wars with the Romans, but it was rebellions within the empire that ended it in the 3rd century AD. The Sasanian Empire began when the Parthian Empire ended in AD 224. Their rulers claimed the Achaemenids as ancestors and set up their capital at Ctesiphon in Mesopotamia. Their period of greatest military expansion occurred under Shapur I , who by the time of his death in AD 272 had defeated Roman imperial armies and set up buffer states between
13425-713: The Stone Age , the Bronze Age , and the Iron Age , with recorded history generally considered to begin with the Bronze Age. The start and end of the three ages vary between world regions. In many regions the Bronze Age is generally considered to begin a few centuries prior to 3000 BC, while the end of the Iron Age varies from the early first millennium BC in some regions to the late first millennium AD in others. During
13604-496: The Zapotec civilization . The ancient Near East is considered the cradle of civilization . It was the first to practice intensive year-round agriculture; created one of the first coherent writing systems , invented the potter's wheel and then the vehicular wheel , created the first centralized governments , law codes and empires, as well as displaying social stratification , slavery, and organized warfare. It began
13783-519: The concept of "translation" on translatio , substituting their respective Slavic or Germanic root words for the Latin roots. The remaining Slavic languages instead calqued their words for "translation" from an alternative Latin word, trāductiō , itself derived from trādūcō ("to lead across" or "to bring across")—from trans ("across") + dūcō , ("to lead" or "to bring"). The West and East Slavic languages (except for Russian ) adopted
13962-516: The context itself by reproducing the original order of sememes , and hence word order —when necessary, reinterpreting the actual grammatical structure, for example, by shifting from active to passive voice , or vice versa . The grammatical differences between "fixed-word-order" languages (e.g. English, French , German ) and "free-word-order" languages (e.g., Greek , Latin , Polish , Russian ) have been no impediment in this regard. The particular syntax (sentence-structure) characteristics of
14141-399: The use theory , and inferentialist semantics . The study of semantic phenomena began during antiquity but was not recognized as an independent field of inquiry until the 19th century. Semantics is relevant to the fields of formal logic, computer science , and psychology . Semantics is the study of meaning in languages . It is a systematic inquiry that examines what linguistic meaning
14320-598: The vocabulary as a whole. This includes the study of lexical relations between words, such as whether two terms are synonyms or antonyms. Lexical semantics categorizes words based on semantic features they share and groups them into semantic fields unified by a common subject. This information is used to create taxonomies to organize lexical knowledge, for example, by distinguishing between physical and abstract entities and subdividing physical entities into stuff and individuated entities . Further topics of interest are polysemy, ambiguity, and vagueness . Lexical semantics
14499-575: The Assyrians, who conquered Israel in 722 BC. The Neo-Babylonian Empire did the same to Judah in 586. After both conquests, the conquering forces deported many of the inhabitants to other regions of their respective empires. Following the fall of Babylon to the Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great allowed the rebuilding of the temple at Jerusalem , and some of the exiles from Judah returned to Judea , where they remained under Persian rule until
14678-462: The Chinese tradition. Traditions of translating material among the languages of ancient Egypt , Mesopotamia , Assyria ( Syriac language ), Anatolia , and Israel ( Hebrew language ) go back several millennia. There exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh ( c. 2000 BCE ) into Southwest Asian languages of the second millennium BCE. An early example of
14857-522: The Dutch actueel ("current"). The translator's role as a bridge for "carrying across" values between cultures has been discussed at least since Terence , the 2nd-century-BCE Roman adapter of Greek comedies. The translator's role is, however, by no means a passive, mechanical one, and so has also been compared to that of an artist . The main ground seems to be the concept of parallel creation found in critics such as Cicero . Dryden observed that "Translation
15036-650: The Egyptians as a possible challenge to their hegemony , but an ethnic group rather than an organised state. Israel had emerged by the middle of the 9th century BC, when the Assyrian King Shalmaneser III named " Ahab the Israelite" among his enemies at the battle of Qarqar (853). Judah emerged somewhat later than Israel, probably during the 9th century BC, but the subject is one of considerable controversy. Israel came into conflict with
15215-518: The Fertile Crescent, alongside the first evidence for agriculture. Other animals, such as pigs and poultry , were later domesticated and used as food sources. Cattle and water buffalo were domesticated around 7000 BC and horses , donkeys , and camels were domesticated by about 4000 BC. All of these animals were used not only for food, but to carry and pull people and loads, greatly increasing human ability to do work. The invention of
15394-613: The Gupta rulers generally left administration in local rulers. The Gupta Empire was weakened and ultimately ruined by the raids of Hunas (a branch of the Hephthalites emanating from Central Asia), and the empire broke up into smaller regional kingdoms by the end of the fifth century AD. India would remain fragmented into smaller states until the rise of the Mughal Empire in the 1500s. The Neolithic period of Southeast Asia
15573-889: The Malayan-Indonesian " thalassian " zone shared these characteristics with Indochinese polities like the Pyu city-states in the Irrawaddy River valley, the Văn Lang kingdom in the Red River Delta and Funan around the lower Mekong . Văn Lang, founded in the 7th century BCE, endured until 258 BCE under the Hồng Bàng dynasty , as part of the Đông Sơn culture that sustained a dense and organised population that produced an elaborate Bronze Age industry. Intensive wet-rice cultivation in an ideal climate enabled
15752-768: The Middle East. Egypt developed its own system of hieroglyphs by about 3200 BC. By 2800 BC the Indus Valley Civilization had developed its Indus script , which remains undeciphered. Chinese Characters were independently developed in China during the Shang dynasty in the form of the Oracle Bone Script dating to the period 1600 to 1100 BC. Writing in Mesoamerica dates to 600 BC with
15931-588: The Nubians had created a new kingdom further south, known as the Kingdom of Kush , centred on the upper Nile with a capital at Kerma . In the Egyptian New Kingdom period, Kush once more was conquered by Egypt. However, by 1100 BC a new kingdom of Kush had formed, with a capital at Napata . Nubian rulers conquered Egypt around 760 BC and retained control for about a century. The Kingdom of Aksum
16110-653: The Pacific Islands to successfully retain rice cultivation. Palau and Yap were settled by separate voyages by 1000 BCE. Another important migration branch was by the Lapita culture , which rapidly spread into the islands off the coast of northern New Guinea and into the Solomon Islands and other parts of coastal New Guinea and Island Melanesia by 1200 BCE. They reached the islands of Fiji , Samoa , and Tonga by around 900 to 800 BCE. This remained
16289-620: The Sasanians and Roman Empires. After Shapur, the Sasanians were under more pressure from the Kushans to their east as well as the Roman then Byzantine Empire to its west. However, the Sasanians rebuilt and founded numerous cities and their merchants traveled widely and introduced crops such as sugar, rice, and cotton into the Iranian plateau. But in AD 651, the last Sassanid emperor was killed by
16468-667: The Western Mediterranean until being defeated by Rome in the Punic Wars . The Phoenicians invented the Phoenician alphabet , the forerunner of the modern alphabet still in use today. The history of Pre-Islamic Arabia before the rise of Islam in the AD 630s is not known in great detail. Archaeological exploration in the Arabian Peninsula has been sparse; indigenous written sources are limited to
16647-492: The ability of their military forces to be deployed rapidly. Increased trade and upgraded farming techniques increased wealth, but also exacerbated inequalities between social classes. The empire's location at the centre of trading networks spread its intellectual and philosophical ideas throughout a wide area, and its religion, while not itself spreading far, had an impact on later religions such as Christianity , Islam , and Judaism . Cyrus' son Cambyses II conquered Egypt, while
16826-694: The actual practice of translation has hardly changed since antiquity. Except for some extreme metaphrasers in the early Christian period and the Middle Ages , and adapters in various periods (especially pre-Classical Rome, and the 18th century), translators have generally shown prudent flexibility in seeking equivalents —"literal" where possible, paraphrastic where necessary—for the original meaning and other crucial "values" (e.g., style , verse form , concordance with musical accompaniment or, in films, with speech articulatory movements) as determined from context. In general, translators have sought to preserve
17005-418: The appearance of writing within a language community. A translator always risks inadvertently introducing source-language words, grammar , or syntax into the target-language rendering. On the other hand, such "spill-overs" have sometimes imported useful source-language calques and loanwords that have enriched target languages. Translators, including early translators of sacred texts , have helped shape
17184-492: The archipelago of the Philippines , intermingling with the earlier Australo-Melanesian population who had inhabited the islands since about 23,000 years earlier. Over the next thousand years, Austronesian peoples migrated southeast to the rest of the Philippines, and into the islands of the Celebes Sea and Borneo. From southwestern Borneo, Austronesians spread further west in a single migration event to both Sumatra and
17363-527: The capital of the Akkadian Empire. Despite an extensive search, the precise site has never been found. Akkad reached the height of its power between about 2330 and 2150 BC, following the conquests of King Sargon of Akkad . Through the spread of Sargon's empire, the language of Akkad, known as Akkadian from the city, spread and replaced the Sumerian language in Mesopotamia and eventually by 1450 BC
17542-570: The casting of iron with molds and then hammering it which enabled weapons and tools to be made stronger and also cheaper. Although chariots had been used previously, the use of spoked wheels allowed the chariots to be much lighter and more maneuverable. In 1274 BC the Hittites clashed with the Egyptians at the Battle of Kadesh , where both sides claimed victory. In 1207 the Hittite capital of Hattusa
17721-571: The center is the letter-versus-spirit dilemma . At the literalist extreme, efforts are made to dissect every conceivable detail about the language of the original Chinese poem. "The dissection, though," writes Link, "normally does to the art of a poem approximately what the scalpel of an anatomy instructor does to the life of a frog." Chinese characters, in avoiding grammatical specificity, offer advantages to poets (and, simultaneously, challenges to poetry translators) that are associated primarily with absences of subject , number , and tense . It
17900-614: The coastal regions of southern Vietnam, becoming the ancestors of the speakers of the Malayic and Chamic branches of the Austronesian language family. Soon after reaching the Philippines, Austronesians colonized the Northern Mariana Islands by 1500 BCE or even earlier, becoming the first humans to reach Remote Oceania . The Chamorro migration was also unique in that it was the only Austronesian migration to
18079-420: The cognitive conceptual structures of humans are universal or relative to their linguistic background. Another research topic concerns the psychological processes involved in the application of grammar. Other investigated phenomena include categorization, which is understood as a cognitive heuristic to avoid information overload by regarding different entities in the same way, and embodiment , which concerns how
18258-454: The conditions under which it would be true. This can happen even if one does not know whether the conditions are fulfilled. The semiotic triangle , also called the triangle of meaning, is a model used to explain the relation between language, language users, and the world, represented in the model as Symbol , Thought or Reference , and Referent . The symbol is a linguistic signifier , either in its spoken or written form. The central idea of
18437-408: The context, like the deictic terms here and I . To avoid these problems, referential theories often introduce additional devices. Some identify meaning not directly with objects but with functions that point to objects. This additional level has the advantage of taking the context of an expression into account since the same expression may point to one object in one context and to another object in
18616-478: The contrast between alive and dead or fast and slow . One term is a hyponym of another term if the meaning of the first term is included in the meaning of the second term. For example, ant is a hyponym of insect . A prototype is a hyponym that has characteristic features of the type it belongs to. A robin is a prototype of a bird but a penguin is not. Two words with the same pronunciation are homophones like flour and flower , while two words with
18795-399: The corresponding physical object. The relation is only established indirectly through the mind of the language user. When they see the symbol, it evokes a mental image or a concept, which establishes the connection to the physical object. This process is only possible if the language user learned the meaning of the symbol before. The meaning of a specific symbol is governed by the conventions of
18974-538: The empire was Aksum , now in northern Ethiopia. The Nok culture appeared in Nigeria around 1000 BC and mysteriously vanished around AD 200. The civilisation's social system is thought to have been highly advanced. The Nok civilisation was considered to be the earliest sub-Saharan producer of life-sized Terracotta which have been discovered by archaeologists. The Nok also used iron smelting that may have been independently developed. The civilisation of Djenné-Djenno
19153-498: The entire territory. Among large, thin-walled terracotta jars, ornamented and colorized cooking pots, glass items, jade earrings and metal objects were deposited near the rivers and along the coast. Around 3000 to 1500 BCE, a large-scale migration of Austronesians , known as the Austronesian expansion began from Taiwan . Population growth primarily fueled this migration. These first settlers settled in northern Luzon , in
19332-486: The expanding Islamic Arabs. The Hittites first came to Anatolia about 1900 BC and during the period 1600-1500 they expanded into Mesopotamia where they adopted the cuneiform script to their Indo-European language. By 1200 their empire stretched to Phoenicia and eastern Anatolia . They improved two earlier technologies from Mesopotamia and spread these new techniques widely – improved iron working and light chariots with spoked wheels in warfare. The Hittites introduced
19511-470: The extremes in the spectrum of possible approaches to translation. Discussions of the theory and practice of translation reach back into antiquity and show remarkable continuities. The ancient Greeks distinguished between metaphrase (literal translation) and paraphrase . This distinction was adopted by English poet and translator John Dryden (1631–1700), who described translation as the judicious blending of these two modes of phrasing when selecting, in
19690-541: The fact that it is possible to master some aspects of a language while lacking others, like when a person knows how to pronounce a word without knowing its meaning. As a subfield of semiotics, semantics has a more narrow focus on meaning in language while semiotics studies both linguistic and non-linguistic signs. Semiotics investigates additional topics like the meaning of non-verbal communication , conventional symbols , and natural signs independent of human interaction. Examples include nodding to signal agreement, stripes on
19869-521: The farming communities to produce a regular crop surplus that was used by the ruling elite to raise, command and pay work forces for public construction and maintenance projects such as canals and fortifications. The earliest known evidence of copper and bronze production in Southeast Asia was found at Ban Chiang in north-east Thailand and among the Phùng Nguyên culture of northern Vietnam around 2000 BCE. The Đông Sơn culture established
20048-423: The foreground while the base is the background that provides the context of this aspect without being at the center of attention. For example, the profile of the word hypotenuse is a straight line while the base is a right-angled triangle of which the hypotenuse forms a part. Cognitive semantics further compares the conceptual patterns and linguistic typologies across languages and considers to what extent
20227-687: The furthest extent of the Austronesian expansion into Polynesia until around 700 CE, when there was another surge of island colonization. It reached the Cook Islands , Tahiti , and the Marquesas by 700 CE; Hawaii by 900 CE; Rapa Nui by 1000 CE; and New Zealand by 1200 CE. For a few centuries, the Polynesian islands were connected by bidirectional long-distance sailing, with the exception of Rapa Nui, which had limited further contact due to its isolated geographical location. Island groups like
20406-408: The goal they serve. Fields like religion and spirituality are interested in the meaning of life , which is about finding a purpose in life or the significance of existence in general. Linguistic meaning can be analyzed on different levels. Word meaning is studied by lexical semantics and investigates the denotation of individual words. It is often related to concepts of entities, like how
20585-555: The land was reunited in the New Kingdom around 1550 BC. This period lasted until about 1000 BC, and saw Egypt expand its borders into Palestine and Syria. The Third Intermediate Period was marked by the rule of priests as well as the conquest of Egypt by Nubian kings and then later Assyria, Persia, and Macedonians. The Ta-Seti kingdom in Nubia to the south of Egypt was conquered by Egyptian rulers around 3100 BC, but by 2500 BC
20764-453: The language user's bodily experience affects the meaning of expressions. Frame semantics is an important subfield of cognitive semantics. Its central idea is that the meaning of terms cannot be understood in isolation from each other but needs to be analyzed on the background of the conceptual structures they depend on. These structures are made explicit in terms of semantic frames. For example, words like bride, groom, and honeymoon evoke in
20943-467: The many inscriptions and coins from southern Arabia. Existing material consists primarily of written sources from other traditions (such as Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, Romans, etc.) and oral traditions later recorded by Islamic scholars. A number of small kingdoms existed in Arabia from around AD 100 to perhaps about AD 400. Carthage was founded around 814 BC by Phoenician settlers. Ancient Carthage
21122-487: The meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction between sense and reference . Sense is given by the ideas and concepts associated with an expression while reference is the object to which an expression points. Semantics contrasts with syntax , which studies the rules that dictate how to create grammatically correct sentences, and pragmatics , which investigates how people use language in communication. Lexical semantics
21301-457: The meaning of a word by identifying all its semantic features. A semantic or lexical field is a group of words that are all related to the same activity or subject. For instance, the semantic field of cooking includes words like bake , boil , spice , and pan . The context of an expression refers to the situation or circumstances in which it is used and includes time, location, speaker, and audience. It also encompasses other passages in
21480-446: The meaning of an expression is the part of reality to which it points. Ideational theories identify meaning with mental states like the ideas that an expression evokes in the minds of language users. According to causal theories, meaning is determined by causes and effects, which behaviorist semantics analyzes in terms of stimulus and response. Further theories of meaning include truth-conditional semantics , verificationist theories,
21659-492: The meaning of complex expressions by analyzing their parts, handling ambiguity, vagueness, and context-dependence, and using the extracted information in automatic reasoning . It forms part of computational linguistics , artificial intelligence , and cognitive science . Its applications include machine learning and machine translation . Cultural semantics studies the relation between linguistic meaning and culture. It compares conceptual structures in different languages and
21838-407: The meaning of particular expressions, like the semantics of the word fairy . As a field of inquiry, semantics has both an internal and an external side. The internal side is interested in the connection between words and the mental phenomena they evoke, like ideas and conceptual representations. The external side examines how words refer to objects in the world and under what conditions a sentence
22017-655: The meaning of the name George Washington is the person with this name. General terms refer not to a single entity but to the set of objects to which this term applies. In this regard, the meaning of the term cat is the set of all cats. Similarly, verbs usually refer to classes of actions or events and adjectives refer to properties of individuals and events. Simple referential theories face problems for meaningful expressions that have no clear referent. Names like Pegasus and Santa Claus have meaning even though they do not point to existing entities. Other difficulties concern cases in which different expressions are about
22196-421: The meaning of the words they are part of, as in inanimate and dishonest . Phrasal semantics studies the meaning of sentences. It relies on the principle of compositionality to explore how the meaning of complex expressions arises from the combination of their parts. The different parts can be analyzed as subject , predicate , or argument . The subject of a sentence usually refers to a specific entity while
22375-413: The meanings of their parts. Truth is a property of statements that accurately present the world and true statements are in accord with reality . Whether a statement is true usually depends on the relation between the statement and the rest of the world. The truth conditions of a statement are the way the world needs to be for the statement to be true. For example, it belongs to the truth conditions of
22554-492: The meanings of words combine to create the meanings of sentences?", "How do meanings relate to the minds of language users, and to the things words refer to?", and "What is the connection between what a word means, and the contexts in which it is used?". The main disciplines engaged in semantics are linguistics , semiotics , and philosophy . Besides its meaning as a field of inquiry, semantics can also refer to theories within this field, like truth-conditional semantics , and to
22733-866: The middle of the eleventh century, when the benefits to be gained from the Arabs’ knowledge of the classical texts were recognised by European scholars, particularly after the establishment of the Escuela de Traductores de Toledo in Spain. William Caxton ’s Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres (Sayings of the Philosophers, 1477) was a translation into English of an eleventh-century Egyptian text which reached English via translation into Latin and then French. The translation of foreign works for publishing in Arabic
22912-467: The mind the frame of marriage. Conceptual semantics shares with cognitive semantics the idea of studying linguistic meaning from a psychological perspective by examining how humans conceptualize and experience the world. It holds that meaning is not about the objects to which expressions refer but about the cognitive structure of human concepts that connect thought, perception, and action. Conceptual semantics differs from cognitive semantics by introducing
23091-448: The model is that there is no direct relation between a linguistic expression and what it refers to, as was assumed by earlier dyadic models. This is expressed in the diagram by the dotted line between symbol and referent. The model holds instead that the relation between the two is mediated through a third component. For example, the term apple stands for a type of fruit but there is no direct connection between this string of letters and
23270-525: The modern European languages. A greater problem, however, is translating terms relating to cultural concepts that have no equivalent in the target language. For full comprehension, such situations require the provision of a gloss . Generally, the greater the contact and exchange that have existed between two languages, or between those languages and a third one, the greater is the ratio of metaphrase to paraphrase that may be used in translating among them. However, due to shifts in ecological niches of words,
23449-478: The more recent terminologies, to " formal equivalence "; and "paraphrase", to " dynamic equivalence ". Strictly speaking, the concept of metaphrase—of "word-for-word translation"—is an imperfect concept, because a given word in a given language often carries more than one meaning; and because a similar given meaning may often be represented in a given language by more than one word. Nevertheless, "metaphrase" and "paraphrase" may be useful as ideal concepts that mark
23628-442: The organisation of collective projects such as the pyramids ; trade with surrounding regions; and a polytheistic religious tradition that included elaborate funeral customs including mummification . Overseeing these activities were a socio-political and economic elite under the figure of a (semi)-divine ruler from a succession of ruling dynasties . Ancient Egyptian history is divided across various periods, beginning with
23807-472: The population to settle in one place instead of migrating after crops and herds. It also allowed for a much greater population density, and in turn required an extensive labour force and division of labour. This organization led to the necessity of record keeping and the development of writing. Babylonia was an Amorite state in lower Mesopotamia (modern southern Iraq ), with Babylon as its capital. Babylonia emerged when Hammurabi created an empire out of
23986-564: The predicate describes a feature of the subject or an event in which the subject participates. Arguments provide additional information to complete the predicate. For example, in the sentence "Mary hit the ball", Mary is the subject, hit is the predicate, and the ball is an argument. A more fine-grained categorization distinguishes between different semantic roles of words, such as agent, patient, theme, location, source, and goal. Verbs usually function as predicates and often help to establish connections between different expressions to form
24165-401: The problem of meaning from a psychological perspective or how the mind of the language user affects meaning. As a subdiscipline of cognitive linguistics , it sees language as a wide cognitive ability that is closely related to the conceptual structures used to understand and represent the world. Cognitive semanticists do not draw a sharp distinction between linguistic knowledge and knowledge of
24344-601: The pronoun you in either case. Closely related fields are intercultural semantics, cross-cultural semantics, and comparative semantics. Pragmatic semantics studies how the meaning of an expression is shaped by the situation in which it is used. It is based on the idea that communicative meaning is usually context-sensitive and depends on who participates in the exchange, what information they share, and what their intentions and background assumptions are. It focuses on communicative actions, of which linguistic expressions only form one part. Some theorists include these topics within
24523-497: The public meaning that expressions have, like the meaning found in general dictionary definitions. Speaker meaning, by contrast, is the private or subjective meaning that individuals associate with expressions. It can diverge from the literal meaning, like when a person associates the word needle with pain or drugs. Meaning is often analyzed in terms of sense and reference , also referred to as intension and extension or connotation and denotation . The referent of an expression
24702-567: The region in the former savannah of the Sahara. Its inhabitants fished and grew millet. It has been found that the Soninke of the Mandé peoples were responsible for constructing such settlements. Around 300 BC, the region became more desiccated and the settlements began to decline, most likely relocating to Koumbi Saleh. From the type of architecture and pottery, it is believed that Tichit was related to
24881-634: The region until the arrival of traders from Southwest Asia . However, sites such as Djenné-Djenno disprove this, as these traditions in West Africa flourished long before. Towns similar to that at Djenne-Jeno also developed at the site of Dia, also in Mali along the Niger River , from around 900 BC. Dhar Tichitt and Oualata were prominent among the early urban centres, dated to 2000 BC, in present-day Mauritania. About 500 stone settlements littered
25060-450: The relation between expressions and their denotation. One of its key tasks is to provide frameworks of how language represents the world, for example, using ontological models to show how linguistic expressions map to the entities of that model. A common idea is that words refer to individual objects or groups of objects while sentences relate to events and states. Sentences are mapped to a truth value based on whether their description of
25239-489: The relation between language and meaning. Cognitive semantics examines meaning from a psychological perspective and assumes a close relation between language ability and the conceptual structures used to understand the world. Other branches of semantics include conceptual semantics , computational semantics , and cultural semantics. Theories of meaning are general explanations of the nature of meaning and how expressions are endowed with it. According to referential theories ,
25418-403: The role of object language and metalanguage at the same time. This is the case in monolingual English dictionaries , in which both the entry term belonging to the object language and the definition text belonging to the metalanguage are taken from the English language. Lexical semantics is the sub-field of semantics that studies word meaning. It examines semantic aspects of individual words and
25597-402: The same entity. For instance, the expressions Roger Bannister and the first man to run a four-minute mile refer to the same person but do not mean exactly the same thing. This is particularly relevant when talking about beliefs since a person may understand both expressions without knowing that they point to the same entity. A further problem is given by expressions whose meaning depends on
25776-412: The same proposition, like the English sentence "the tree is green" and the German sentence "der Baum ist grün" . Utterance meaning is studied by pragmatics and is about the meaning of an expression on a particular occasion. Sentence meaning and utterance meaning come apart in cases where expressions are used in a non-literal way, as is often the case with irony . Semantics is primarily interested in
25955-427: The same spelling are homonyms , like a bank of a river in contrast to a bank as a financial institution. Hyponymy is closely related to meronymy , which describes the relation between part and whole. For instance, wheel is a meronym of car . An expression is ambiguous if it has more than one possible meaning. In some cases, it is possible to disambiguate them to discern the intended meaning. The term polysemy
26134-588: The same time period. Cultivation of millet, rice , and legumes began around 7000 BC in China . Taro cultivation in New Guinea dates to about 7000 BC also with squash cultivation in Mesoamerica perhaps sharing that date. Animal domestication began with the domestication of dogs , which dates to at least 15,000 years ago, and perhaps even earlier. Sheep and goats were domesticated around 9000 BC in
26313-684: The same time, southeastern Europe and Siberia around 40,000 years ago, and Japan about 30,000 years ago. Humans migrated to the Americas about 15,000 years ago. Evidence for agriculture emerges in about 9000 BC in what is now eastern Turkey and spread through the Fertile Crescent . Settlement at Göbekli Tepe began around 9500 BC and may have the world's oldest temple. The Nile River Valley has evidence of sorghum and millet cultivation starting around 8000 BC and agricultural use of yams in Western Africa perhaps dates to
26492-440: The scope of semantics while others consider them part of the distinct discipline of pragmatics. Theories of meaning explain what meaning is, what meaning an expression has, and how the relation between expression and meaning is established. Referential theories state that the meaning of an expression is the entity to which it points. The meaning of singular terms like names is the individual to which they refer. For example,
26671-524: The sense. Dryden cautioned, however, against the license of "imitation", i.e., of adapted translation: "When a painter copies from the life... he has no privilege to alter features and lineaments..." This general formulation of the central concept of translation— equivalence —is as adequate as any that has been proposed since Cicero and Horace , who, in 1st-century-BCE Rome , famously and literally cautioned against translating "word for word" ( verbum pro verbo ). Despite occasional theoretical diversity,
26850-410: The sentence "it is raining outside" that raindrops are falling from the sky. The sentence is true if it is used in a situation in which the truth conditions are fulfilled, i.e., if there is actually rain outside. Truth conditions play a central role in semantics and some theories rely exclusively on truth conditions to analyze meaning. To understand a statement usually implies that one has an idea about
27029-471: The simple plough by 6000 BC further increased agricultural efficiency. Metal use in the form of hammered copper items predates the discovery of smelting of copper ores , which happened around 6000 BC in western Asia and independently in eastern Asia before 2000 BC. Gold and silver use dates to between 6000 and 5000 BC. Alloy metallurgy began with bronze in about 3500 BC in Mesopotamia and
27208-446: The speaker's mind. According to this view, the meaning of the word dog is the idea that people have of dogs. Language is seen as a medium used to transfer ideas from the speaker to the audience. After having learned the same meaning of signs, the speaker can produce a sign that corresponds to the idea in their mind and the perception of this sign evokes the same idea in the mind of the audience. Ancient history Ancient history
27387-736: The study of the stars and the sciences of astronomy and mathematics. Mesopotamia is the site of some of the earliest known civilisations in the world. Agricultural communities emerged in the area with the Halaf culture around 8000 BC and continued to expand through the Ubaid period around 6000 BC. Cities began in the Uruk period (4000–3100 BC) and expanded during the Jemdet Nasr (3100–2900 BC) and Early Dynastic (2900–2350 BC) periods. The surplus of storable foodstuffs created by this economy allowed
27566-439: The subsequent Ghana Empire. Old Jenne (Djenne) began to be settled around 300 BC, producing iron and with sizeable population, evidenced in crowded cemeteries. The inhabitants and creators of these settlements during these periods are thought to have been ancestors of the Soninke people. Peoples speaking precursors to the modern-day Bantu languages began to spread throughout southern Africa, and by 2000 BC they were expanding past
27745-474: The target language, "counterparts," or equivalents , for the expressions used in the source language: When [words] appear... literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed. But since... what is beautiful in one [language] is often barbarous, nay sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author's words: 'tis enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate
27924-524: The territories of the former kingdoms of Sumer and Akkad . The Neo-Babylonian Empire , or Chaldea , was Babylonia from the 7th and 6th centuries BC. Under the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II , it conquered Jerusalem . This empire also created the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the still-surviving Ishtar Gate as architectural embellishments of its capital at Babylon. Akkad was a city and its surrounding region near Babylon. Akkad also became
28103-446: The time period of ancient history, the world population was already exponentially increasing due to the Neolithic Revolution , which was in full progress. While in 10,000 BC, the world population stood at 2 million, it rose to 45 million by 3000 BC. By the Iron Age in 1000 BC, the population had risen to 72 million. By the end of the ancient period in AD 500, the world population is thought to have stood at 209 million. In 10,500 years,
28282-418: The untranslatables have been set aside, the problems for a translator, especially of Chinese poetry, are two: What does the translator think the poetic line says? And once he thinks he understands it, how can he render it into the target language? Most of the difficulties, according to Link, arise in addressing the second problem, "where the impossibility of perfect answers spawns endless debate." Almost always at
28461-568: The use of fire has been dated as early as 1.8 million years ago, a date which is contested, with generally accepted evidence for the controlled use of fire dating to 780,000 years ago. Actual use of hearths first appears 400,000 years ago. Dates for the emergence of Homo sapiens (modern humans) range from 250,000 to 160,000 years ago, with the varying dates being based on DNA studies and fossils respectively. Some 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa . They reached Australia about 45,000 years ago, southwestern Europe about
28640-455: The very languages into which they have translated. Because of the laboriousness of the translation process, since the 1940s efforts have been made, with varying degrees of success, to automate translation or to mechanically aid the human translator . More recently, the rise of the Internet has fostered a world-wide market for translation services and has facilitated " language localisation ". The English word "translation" derives from
28819-407: The word dog is associated with the concept of the four-legged domestic animal. Sentence meaning falls into the field of phrasal semantics and concerns the denotation of full sentences. It usually expresses a concept applying to a type of situation, as in the sentence "the dog has ruined my blue skirt". The meaning of a sentence is often referred to as a proposition . Different sentences can express
28998-457: The work of the Tang dynasty poet Wang Wei (699–759 CE). Some of the art of classical Chinese poetry [writes Link] must simply be set aside as untranslatable . The internal structure of Chinese characters has a beauty of its own, and the calligraphy in which classical poems were written is another important but untranslatable dimension. Since Chinese characters do not vary in length, and because there are exactly five characters per line in
29177-869: The works of others than in their own works, and hold higher than their own glory the service that they render their country. Due to Western colonialism and cultural dominance in recent centuries, Western translation traditions have largely replaced other traditions. The Western traditions draw on both ancient and medieval traditions, and on more recent European innovations. Though earlier approaches to translation are less commonly used today, they retain importance when dealing with their products, as when historians view ancient or medieval records to piece together events which took place in non-Western or pre-Western environments. Also, though heavily influenced by Western traditions and practiced by translators taught in Western-style educational systems, Chinese and related translation traditions retain some theories and philosophies unique to
29356-432: The world and see them instead as interrelated phenomena. They study how the interaction between language and human cognition affects the conceptual organization in very general domains like space, time, causation, and action. The contrast between profile and base is sometimes used to articulate the underlying knowledge structure. The profile of a linguistic expression is the aspect of the knowledge structure that it brings to
29535-542: The world is in correspondence with its ontological model. Formal semantics further examines how to use formal mechanisms to represent linguistic phenomena such as quantification , intensionality , noun phrases , plurals , mass terms, tense , and modality . Montague semantics is an early and influential theory in formal semantics that provides a detailed analysis of how the English language can be represented using mathematical logic. It relies on higher-order logic , lambda calculus , and type theory to show how meaning
29714-443: The world population increased by 100 times. Prehistory is the period before written history. Most of our knowledge of that period comes from the work of archaeologists. Prehistory is often known as the Stone Age , and is divided into the Paleolithic (earliest), Mesolithic , and Neolithic . The early human migrations in the Lower Paleolithic saw Homo erectus spread across Eurasia 1.8 million years ago. Evidence for
29893-414: Was Washukanni , whose precise location has not been determined by archaeologists. The Medes and Persians were peoples who had appeared in the Iranian plateau around 1500 BC. Both peoples spoke Indo-European languages and were mostly pastoralists with a tradition of horse archery. The Medes established their own Median Empire by the 6th century BC, having defeated the Neo-Assyrian Empire with
30072-414: Was a city-state that ruled an empire through alliances and trade influence that stretched throughout North Africa and modern Spain . At the height of the city's influence, its empire included most of the western Mediterranean. The empire was in a constant state of struggle with the Roman Republic , which led to a series of conflicts known as the Punic Wars . After the third and final Punic War , Carthage
30251-438: Was an important trading nation in northeastern Africa centered in present-day Eritrea and northern Ethiopia , it existed from approximately AD 100 to 940, growing from the Iron Age proto-Aksumite period around the 4th century BC to achieve prominence by the 1st century AD. The Kingdom of Aksum at its height by the early 6th-century AD extended through much of modern Ethiopia and across the Red Sea to Arabia. The capital city of
30430-445: Was characterized by several migrations into Mainland and Island Southeast Asia from southern China by Austronesian , Austroasiatic , Kra-Dai and Hmong-Mien -speakers. Territorial principalities in both Insular and Mainland Southeast Asia, characterized as "agrarian kingdoms", developed an economy by around 500 BCE based on surplus crop cultivation and moderate coastal trade of domestic natural products. Several states of
30609-422: Was destroyed and then occupied by Roman forces. Nearly all of the territory held by Carthage fell into Roman hands. Ancient Egypt was a long-lived civilisation geographically located in north-eastern Africa. It was concentrated along the middle to lower reaches of the Nile River, reaching its greatest extent during the 2nd millennium BC, which is referred to as the New Kingdom period. It reached broadly from
30788-405: Was developed independent of Chinese or Indian influence. Historians relate these achievements to the presence of organized, centralized and hierarchical communities and a large population. Between 1000 BCE and 100 CE, the Sa Huỳnh culture flourished along the south-central coast of Vietnam . Ceramic jar burial sites that included grave goods have been discovered at various sites along
30967-609: Was developed independently in China by 2000 BC. Pottery developed independently throughout the world, with fired pots appearing first among the Jomon of Japan and in West Africa at Mali . Sometime between 5000 and 4000 BC the potter's wheel was invented. By 3000 BC, the pottery wheel was adapted into wheeled vehicles which could be used to carry loads further and easier than with human or animal power alone. Writing developed separately in five different locations in human history: Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, and Mesoamerica. By 3400 BC, "proto-literate" cuneiform spread in
31146-421: Was evolving into Hinduism , which spread throughout Southeast Asia. Siddhartha Gautama , born around 560 BC in northern India, went on to found a new religion based on his ascetic life – Buddhism . This faith also spread throughout Eastern and Southeastern Asia after his death. This period also saw the composition of the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata . The kingdom of Magadha rose to prominence under
31325-455: Was located in the Niger River Valley in the country of Mali and is considered to be among the oldest urbanized centers and the best-known archaeology site in sub-Saharan Africa . This archaeological site is located about 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) away from the modern town and is believed to have been involved in long-distance trade and possibly the domestication of African rice. The site is believed to exceed 33 hectares (82 acres); however, this
31504-413: Was revived by the establishment of the Madrasat al-Alsun (School of Tongues) in Egypt in 1813. There is a separate tradition of translation in South , Southeast and East Asia (primarily of texts from the Indian and Chinese civilizations), connected especially with the rendering of religious, particularly Buddhist , texts and with the governance of the Chinese empire. Classical Indian translation
31683-403: Was ruled by the Seleucid dynasty . Parthia was an Iranian civilisation situated in the northeastern part of modern Iran. Their power was based on a combination of military power based on heavy cavalry with a decentralised governing structure based on a federated system . The Parthian Empire was led by the Arsacid dynasty , which by around 155 BC under Mithradates I had mostly conquered
31862-442: Was sacked, ending the Hittite Empire . Israel and Judah were related Iron Age kingdoms of the ancient Levant and had existed during the Iron Ages and the Neo-Babylonian, Persian and Hellenistic periods. The name Israel first appears in the stele of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah around 1209 BC. This "Israel" was a cultural and probably political entity of the central highlands, well enough established to be perceived by
32041-516: Was the main language of diplomacy in the Near East. Assyria was originally a region on the Upper Tigris , where a small state was created in the 19th century BC. The capital was at Assur , which gave the state its name. Later, as a nation and empire that came to control all of the Fertile Crescent, Egypt and much of Anatolia , the term "Assyria proper" referred to roughly the northern half of Mesopotamia (the southern half being Babylonia), with Nineveh as its capital. The Assyrian kings controlled
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