The animal world is large and diverse. Animals are animals, but adults decided to divide them all into groups according to some characteristics. The science of classifying animals is called systematics or taxonomy. This science determines the relationship between organisms. The degree of relationship is not always determined by external similarity. For example, marsupial mice are very similar to ordinary mice, and tupai are very similar to squirrels. However, these animals belong to different orders. But armadillos, anteaters and sloths, completely different from each other, are united in one squad. The fact is that family ties between animals are determined by their origin. By studying the structure of the skeleton and the dental system of animals, scientists determine which animals are closest to each other, and paleontological finds of ancient extinct animal species help to establish more accurately the relationship between their descendants.

Types of multicellular animals: sponges, bryozoans, flat, round and annelids (worms), coelenterates, arthropods, mollusks, echinoderms and chordates. Chordates are the most progressive type of animal. They are united by the presence of a chord - the primary skeletal axis. The most highly developed chordates are grouped into the vertebrate subphylum. Their notochord is transformed into a spine. The rest are called invertebrates.

Types are divided into classes. In total there are 5 classes of vertebrates: fish, amphibians, birds, reptiles (reptiles) and mammals (animals). Mammals are the most highly organized animals of all vertebrates.

Classes can be divided into subclasses. For example, in mammals, subclasses are distinguished: viviparous and oviparous. Subclasses are divided into infraclasses, and then into detachments. Each squad is divided into families, families - on childbirth, childbirth - on kinds. Species is the specific name of an animal, such as a white hare.

Classifications are approximate and change all the time. For example, now lagomorphs have been taken out of rodents into an independent detachment.

In fact, those groups of animals that are studied in elementary school are the types and classes of animals given mixed up.

The first mammals appeared on Earth about 200 million years ago, having separated from the animal-like reptiles.

The question of glottogenesis - the origin of language - is essentially a question from the category of eternal mysteries about the origin of man or life in general. Of course, it is impossible to give an exact answer to it. And neither linguistics nor genetics, anthropology and psychology, who came to its aid in the 20th century, can help in this. There are many absolutely opposite versions regarding all aspects of the origin of the language: dates, root causes, a single parent language, the role of evolution in its formation, etc. Svetlana Burlak, a linguist engaged in comparative linguistics and the study of dead languages, has written a book in which, it seems, linguistics itself is given the least space. This once again proves that the solution of the problem of glottogenesis is hardly possible in the near future, since the exact sciences have only added new doubts and expanded the range of questions. Burlak herself speaks from the position of a classical evolutionist. The main thesis of her careful study with an impressive list of material used is that the emergence of language is an inevitable result of the development of mankind.

An entertaining read for those who can not even learn English. One of the authors of "The Magic of the Word" is Dmitry Petrov, a philologist, translator who worked with Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin, a linguist who knows more than thirty languages ​​​​(and got into the Guinness Book of Records with this record. By the way, recently on the Kultura TV channel it was shown a kind of reality show in which Petrov, according to his system, taught English to public figures... He developed his own psycholinguistic methodology and quite seriously believes that anyone can learn any language, and without limiting himself in the number of these languages. For example, the book contains his conversations with journalist Vadim Boreyko, who personally tested Petrov’s methodology and described his experience in their joint book, not forgetting to talk about language in general, about linguistics and ways of human self-realization through language.

A book that cannot be left out of this linguistic selection. Last year for Why are Languages ​​So Different? Vladimir Plungyan, a well-known linguist and professor at Moscow State University, received the Enlightener literary prize. In a small piece, Plungyan called his book an attempt to introduce the foundations of modern linguistics and added that he originally wrote it for children. But in the end, the book turned out, of course, for adults - and it became a rare example of good Russian non-fiction. It turns out that Plungyan not only wrote an entertaining scientific pop about how and by what laws languages ​​change, about how many of them exist and how they work, but, perhaps without knowing it, revealed the secret of creating a high-quality sample of Russian non-fiction - write, focusing on children's perception.

Linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker, who is sometimes called the popularizer of the ideas of perhaps the most famous living American linguist Noam Chomsky, wrote his main work Language as Instinct back in 1994, translated into Russian only two years ago. This is also a kind of "introduction to the basics", only not in theoretical linguistics, but rather in various versions of the same glottogenesis, which is discussed in the "Origin of Language". For Pinker, language is the result of natural selection, a kind of "instinct" formed in the process of evolution.

In all works on linguistics and related sciences, in which the problem of the origin of the language is raised, one way or another, the theme of the existence of a certain proto-language, which our ancestors once spoke, is touched upon. Two opposing points of view look something like this: 1) most likely, the parent language existed, since all languages ​​without exception have common principles 2) most likely, there has never been a single language for all mankind, and the general principles of all languages ​​are associated only with the similarity of human thinking. The representative of the researchers of the first group, working in the direction of the search and reconstruction of our proto-language, was the outstanding Soviet and Russian linguist Sergei Starostin. Some of the results of his research in this area are given in the preface to the collection of scientific articles, the authors of which attempt to reconstruct this very proto-language. The most curious publication, from which, in particular, you can learn about the roots and syllables of our proto-language, about the deep etymology of many concepts, names and names, and get closer to understanding how some people master several dozen languages.