The region that we focus on in this chapter is larger than the one traditionally designated as the Middle East, yet smaller than the political term “the Greater Middle East”, which was coined during the second George W. Bush administration in the USA to refer to the contiguous Muslim world, a larger zone extending beyond Egypt’s western and southern borders – in North Africa and the Horn of Africa – and beyond Iran’s eastern borders – in parts of South Asia (Afghanistan and Pakistan). Linguistically speaking, the region of interest to us here stretches from Egypt in the west to the western border of Iran in the east and from the southern border of Turkey in the north to Yemen and Oman in the south. (Languages of Iran and Turkey themselves are discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, respectively.)

In Chapter 2 we discussed how a British jurist and colonial bureaucrat Sir William Jones established a connection between the classical language of India, Sanskrit, and the classical languages of Europe, particularly Latin and Greek. This discovery, together with a previously uncovered link between Romani and its “sibling languages” spoken in northern India, became the cornerstone of the discipline of historical linguistics. Sir William Jones, however, was not the first one to note the affinity among Indo-European languages of Europe and India. Nor was he the first one to add Sanskrit to the family list. That link was first discovered by the sixteenth-century English Jesuit Thomas Stevens (Masica 1991: 3).

In this chapter we focus on languages spoken in eastern Asia, which belong to three major language families in the region: Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic, and Tai-Kadai. In the past, Vietnamese and some other languages of Southeast Asia were classified as members of the Sino-Tibetan family; however, now they are treated as constituting a family of their own and their similarities to Chinese are now credited to language contact by most linguists outside of China, though in the Chinese scholarly community some of the Southeast Asian languages are still included in the Sino-Tibetan family. We also consider Korean and Japanese, whose family affiliation is still hotly debated. Section 8.5 examines the writing systems used in languages from different language families; as we will see in that section, contact played an important role in the spread of writing in this region.

In this chapter we examine indigenous languages spoken from Mexico to the southern tip of South America. It is rather difficult to find an appropriate geographical designation for this region: “Central and South America” does not include Mexico, “Mexico, Central and South America” is too awkward, “Middle and South America” includes two partially overlapping regions, whereas “Latin America” generally excludes Guyana and Suriname, where the official languages are English and Dutch, respectively. Moreover, “Latin America” suggests that the discussion revolves around Spanish and Portuguese rather than indigenous languages of the region. After careful deliberation, I have chosen to use “indigenous languages of Latin America and the Caribbean”, with the understanding that the former region is to include Guyana and Suriname, and the focus of the discussion is not on European languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and Dutch, but on languages that are indigenous to the region.

Chapter 14 covers TWO-WAY ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE and includes the following specific topics, among others: Statistical Interaction, Balanced versus Unbalanced Factorial Designs, F-Ratio, Effect Size, Fixed Factors, Random Factors, Post-Hoc Multiple Comparison Tests, Simple Effects, and Power Analyses.

An important tool of the mind for analysing sustainability issues is systems thinking -- that is, interpreting observations in causal relationships between elements. I present some of the key features of system dynamics: stock-flow, feedbacks, inertia, delays, change processes, causal loop diagrams (CLDs) and archetypes. Systems modelling is an art: which problems are addressed, which elements and relationships are identified as relevant, which hypotheses about system behaviour are explored? Such acts of modelling tend to be worldview-biased by nature. The appearance of powerful IC-tools has broadened the domain of (formal) modelling. I present three novel approaches, with examples: Cellular Automat (CA), network analysis and agent-based modelling (ABM).

Chapter 5 covers the relationship between two variables and includes the following specific topics, among others:Scatterplots, Pearson Product-Moment Correlation Coefficient, The Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient, The Point Biserial Correlation Coefficient,The Phi Coefficient and Visual Displays of Bivariate Relationships.

Economic science or economics is about individual and collective decision-making, primarily in the material domain. It is an integral part of the use of food, water, energy and minerals, as previous chapters show. There is the micro-level of individual choice, with notions such as value and utility. There is the macro-level of organization: coordination from above (state, church) and coordination from below (market, community). Material quality of life is interwoven with political and economic power and, unsurprisingly, economic organization is a reflection of power distribution in society, and so is its intellectual representation in ’economic science’ (ideology). The organizational and ideological forms have a tendency to be corrupted and become part of historical cycles. The dominant form in Modernity is market- and technology-driven economic growth in (corporate and/or state) capitalism. It is hailed for its successes in material quality of life, but it also did and does create side-effects which become ever more visible and harmful (environmental and social ’externalities’). The prevailing economic ideology is therefore in disarray and there is a broad search for complementary and alternative views on a sustainable and fair organization of the economic system (degrowth, post-growth and others). It is naturally the domain of -- perhaps the fiercest -- worldview battles.

The quest for sustainable development is not only an existential need and an intellectual challenge, but also an emotional and ethical appeal for action. Underneath is what we need and expect from life, what we value in life and what we believe about life. Take SDG 1: No poverty, or SDG 2: Zero hunger. Poverty and hunger are surrounded by feelings of pity, generosity, ignorance, envy, guilt, hate and blame, and have explanations ranging from bad luck or laziness to corruption, mismanagement and war. The same is true for most of the other SDGs.