Random Intelligence III

1. The Fermi Paradox is a physical paradox that was brought to light by a simple question posed by the physicist Enrico Fermi when speculating about the existence of technologically advanced civilizations within the observable universe, and exactly how common they would be.
   

   The belief that the universe contains many technologically advanced civilizations, combined with our lack of observational evidence to support that view, is inconsistent. Either this assumption is incorrect (and technologically advanced intelligent life is much rarer than we believe), our current observations are incomplete (and we simply have not detected them yet), or our search methodologies are flawed (we are not searching for the correct indicators).

   Those who believe that the lack of such overt evidence is a conclusive argument for the non-existence of technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilization within communication distance of earth refer to this lack of evidence as the Fermi principle.

2. The mediocrity principle is the notion in the philosophy of science that there is nothing special about Earth, and by implication the human race. It is a Copernican principle, used either as a heuristic about Earth’s position or a philosophical statement about the place of humanity.
3. A heuristic is a particular technique of directing your attention in learning, discovery, or problem-solving. (Greek eureka: ευρίσκω: “I find.”)
   The term was introduced in the 4th century by Pappus of Alexandria.The mathematician George Pólya popularized heuristic in the twentieth century in his book How to Solve It.Some commonplace heuristics, all from How to Solve It:
   If you are having difficulty understanding a problem, try drawing a picture.
   If you can’t find a solution, try assuming that you have a solution and seeing what you can derive from that (“working backward”).
   If the problem is abstract, try examining a concrete example.
   Try solving a more general problem first (the “inventor’s paradox”: the more ambitious plan may have more chances of success).
   Lexical note: The name of the topic is heuristic (not “heuristics”); a particular technique of directing your attention toward discovery is a heuristic, two or more of these are heuristics, and the adjective for “pertaining to how something is discovered” is heuristic.
4. A lexicon is usually a list of words together with additional word-specific information, i.e., a dictionary. Lexicon is a word of Greek origin (λεξικόν) meaning vocabulary. When linguists study the lexicon, they study such things as what words are, how the vocabulary in a language is structured, how people use and store words, how they learn words, the history and evolution of words, types of relationships between words as well as how words were created.
5. In linguistics, lexicon has a slightly more specialized definition, as it includes the lexemes used to actualize words. Lexemes are formed according to morpho-syntactic rules and express sememes. In this sense, a lexicon organizes the mental vocabulary in a speaker’s mind: First, it organizes the vocabulary of a language according to certain principles (for instance, all verbs of motion may be linked in a lexical network) and second, it contains a generative device producing (new) simple and complex words according to certain lexical rules. For example, the suffix ‘-able’ can be added to transitive verbs only such that we get ‘read-able’ but not ‘*cry-able’. (Though exceptions exist to this rule: one can certainly imagine a ‘sleepable mattress’ or the expression, ‘Sure, that’s workable.’)Furthermore an individual’s lexical knowledge (or lexical concept) is that person’s knowledge of vocabulary.
6. Morphology is a sub discipline of linguistics that studies word structure. While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example, any English speaker can see that the words dog, dogs and dog-catcher are closely related. English speakers can also recognize that these relations can be formulated as rules that can apply to many, many other pairs of words. Dog is to dogs just as cat is to cats, or encyclopædia is to encyclopædias; dog is to dog-catcher as dish is to dishwasher. The rule in the first case is plural formation; in the second case, a transitive verb and a noun playing the role of its object can form a word. Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies such rules across and within languages.The term was coined by August Schleicher in 1859: Für die Lehre von der Wortform wähle ich das Wort “Morphologie” (“for the science of word formation, I choose the term ‘morphology'”, Mémoires Acad. Impériale 7/1/7, 35).
7. In English grammar, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a subject and one or more objects. Transitive verbs that are able to take both a direct object and an indirect object are called ditransitive; an example is the verb give above. Verbs that require a single object are called monotransitive.
   Verbs that don’t require an object are called intransitive, for example the verb to sleep. Since you cannot “sleep” something, the verb acts intransitively. Verbs that can be used in a transitive or intransitive way are called ambitransitive; an example is the verb eat, since the sentences I am eating (with an intransitive form) and I am eating an apple (with a transitive form that has an apple as the object) are both grammatical.
   There are languages which distinguish verbs based on their transitivity, which suggests that this is a salient linguistic feature. However, the definition of transitive verbs as those which have one object is not universal and is not used in grammars of many languages.
8. Polish (język polski, polszczyzna) is the official language of Poland. Polish is the main representative of the Lechitic branch of the Western Slavic languages. It originated in the areas of present-day Poland from several local Western Slavic dialects, most notably those spoken in Greater Poland and Lesser Poland.

   Polish was once a lingua franca in various regions of Central and Eastern Europe, mostly due to the political, cultural, scientific and military influence of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Although no longer having as great an influence outside of Poland, due in part to the dominance of the Russian language, it is still sometimes spoken or at least understood in western border areas of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania as a second language. It shares some vocabulary with the languages of the neighboring Slavic nations, most notably with Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian, Czech and Slovakian.

9. A lingua franca is any language widely used beyond the population of its native speakers. The de facto status of lingua franca is usually “awarded” by the masses to the language of the most influential nation(s) of the time. Any given language normally becomes a lingua franca primarily by being used for international commerce, but can be accepted in other cultural exchanges, especially diplomacy. Occasionally the term lingua franca is applied to a fully established formal language; thus formerly it was said that French was the lingua franca of diplomacy.

   The origin of the term lingua franca is Latin (literally “Frankish language”), derived from the medieval Arab and Muslim use of the ethnonym “Franks“ as a generic term for Europeans during the period of the Crusades.

10. An ethnonym (Gk. ethnos, ‘tribe’, + onuma, ‘name’) is the name of an ethnic group, whether that name has been assigned by another group (ie. an exonym), or self-assigned (ie. an autonym). For example, the ethnically dominant group in Germany is the Germans, an exonym carried into English from Latin; the Germans refer to themselves with the autonym “Deutsch”.

    As language evolves, ethnonyms which were at one time acceptable become offensive. Examples include Gypsy (Roma) and (perhaps the most notable example in English) negro/colored (African American). Other examples of ethnonym-turned-ethnic slur in history include Punic, Vandal, Barbarian, San, Lapp and Philistine. Some are accepted for a time but still offensive (slants (Asians), gooks (Vietnamese), niggers (African Americans), and the contemporary towelhead (Arabian); some of these (nigger, for instance) are not offensive when used self-referentially within the group.

    In English, ethnonyms are generally derived through suffixation. See Demonym for a much more detailed explanation of this process.

The Fermi Paradox is a physical paradox that was brought to light by a simple question posed by the physicist Enrico Fermi when speculating about the existence of technologically advanced civilizations within the observable universe, and exactly how common they would be. The belief that the universe contains many technologically advanced civilizations, combined with our…