Imagine a Martian scholar who aims to understand the linguistic diversity on Planet Earth. One way this imaginary alien scholar might go about this research is by exploring Google Translate. However, doing so would offer our imaginary extraterrestrial scholar only a very biased and rather misleading picture. As of November 2022, Google Translate supports 134 languages, which constitutes about 2 percent of the world’s 7,151 languages identified by Ethnologue. Not only is it a small fraction of the total number of languages, but the list is not representative of global linguistic diversity: of the 134 Google Translate languages, 64 (or nearly half) are Indo-European languages.

To understand the human predicament in the Anthropocene, it is helpful to investigate the rise, maintenance and fall of social complexity in the past. Tribal communities, early states and large empires have all been confronted with extra-human, inter-human and intra-human dynamic processes. Local and regional biogeography often played a major role (resources, threats), but in combination with technical and organizational skills and sociopolitical and cultural (elite) behaviour. Reconstructions of ancient civilzations (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus, Rome, China and others) suggest the mechanisms and contingencies in societal growth, expansion and decline. One feature is the capability to collect and interpret long-term changes or lack thereof.

Industrialization could not have happened without abundant, easy-to-store-and-transport fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas). They and the technologies that mined, traded, processed and used them satisfied needs which they also created (including wars). They provided the heat, power and feedstock to run factories, operate transport systems and shape household living conditions (space heating--cooling, appliances). Energy use has exponentially risen in the last two centuries, to an average 2 kW/cap for poor and over 20 kW/cap for rich people, and supply is still dominated by fossil fuels. Modernization has become closely linked to provision of ’modern’ energy carriers (energy ladder). Apart from corporate and state super-profits and power and associated turmoil, it has brought enormous environmental destruction and harm, some of it affecting many generations to come. The most serious impact, climate change from greenhouse gas emissions, is stimulating a transition away from fossil fuels and towards efficient use and non-carbon supply (renewable, nuclear). This process is confronted with the divergence in worldviews, around issues such as risks, use of land and materials, lifestyle changes versus high-tech, role of decentral versus central supply, and private or public ownership.

Chapter 13 covers ONE-WAY ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE and includes the following specific topics, among others: Between Group Variance, Withn Group Variance , The R-Ratio, ANOVA Summary Table, Effect Size, Post-Hoc Multiple Comparison Tests , The Bonferroni Adjustment, and Power Analyses.

Worldviews are defined as combinations of value orientations and belief systems. Both are an inevitable part of the sustainability disourse. Both can be correlated to the worldview dimensions (previous chapter). Values are empirically explored through surveys; several value categories have been proposed. Beliefs tend to be linked to values; they are difficult to explore empirically. Important beliefs have to do with the place of humans in Nature, the roots of good and evil, the role of human ingenuity, the constraints of the collective on the individual, and the balance between coordination and competition. Throughout the sustainability discourse, ethical questions about how to reconcile individual desires with what is considered collectively desirable emerge. I consider here briefly the roots and critique of Modernity ethics, and discuss some alternative and new ethical positions (virtue ethics, development and eco-spiritual ethics).

To engage with sustainable development and the SDGs, I present a heuristic framework to explore the underlying aspirations and actions from different perspectives: the worldview framework. In essence, it distinguishes the dimensions of I--local--particular from We--global--universal, and body--material from soul--immaterial. It is a methodology to experiment with, not a (scientific) theory. Its conceptualization is based on a historical analysis of Modernity (previous chapters), on insights from perennial philosophy and on empirical surveys. The four corners of this space are denoted Subjective Materialism (A2), Objective Materialism (A1), Objective Idealism (B1) and Subjective Idealism (B2). I apply it to interpret the roots of Modernity in European history and I offer a tentative social dynamics theory as a broad canvas for exploring sustainable pathways. The centre of this worldview space is the locus of the integral worldview, where dialogue, partnerships and coalitions are the means to overcome the -- often polarized -- differences in values and ideas of the competing worldviews.

Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist considered to be one of the fathers of modern linguistics, in his Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics, 1916) defines language as “a product of the collective mind of linguistic groups”. But this definition hardly helps us in drawing the boundary between one language and another: how can we tell who is or is not to be included in any given “linguistic group”? Take any two people, even close relatives, and they are sure to speak at least slightly differently. Yet it is not insightful to say that there are as many languages in the world as there are individual people!

Chapter 16 covers AN INTRODUCTION TO MULTIPLE REGRESSION and includes the following specific topics, among others: Confidence Intervals, Statistical Significance of b-Weight, Fit of the Overall Regression Equation, R and R-squared,Adjusted R-squared, Semipartial Correlation, Partial Slope, Confounding, and Statistical Control.

After millennia of modest growth, the human population started growing exponentially in the last few centuries. The human habitat has expanded, with population density primarily a function of NPP, distance to coasts and rivers, and altitude. Population growth in Europe underwent the so-called demographic transition as a consequence of changes in fertility and mortality. This was caused by several developments within the broader transformation into Modernity. It was and is repeated at a faster rate in regions outside Europe. One perspective on human behaviour (and reproduction) stems from evolutionary biology, with views on competition--cooperation, selfishness--altruism and niche construction. Complementary views emphasize the role of environmental and sociocultural factors, describing long-term evolution in terms of regimes and syndromes. Growth of the human population has large inertia, but there is still a wide margin of uncertainty in the estimates of quantity and quality of humans by the end of the twenty-first century. Some uncertainty, for instance about abortion, euthanasia and migration, can be understood in terms of divergent worldviews.

Chapter 8 covers THEORETICAL PROBABILITY MODELS and includes the following specific topics, among others:The binomial probability, the normal probability.

Chapter 18 covers NONPARAMETRIC METHODS and includes the following specific topics, among others: Parametric versus Nonparametric Methods, Chi-Square Distribution, Chi-Square Goodness-of-Fit Test, Chi-Square Test of Independence, Fisher’s Exact Test, Wilcoxon Sign Test, Mann–Whitney U-Test, Wilcoxon’s Rank Sum Test, and Kruskal–Wallis Analysis of Variance.

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).