Construct · 3 fields · 3 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, three constructs Nearest construct by meaninggenuscompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to family is genus.
Hold this as a prompt, not a verdict. Two constructs sitting close in meaning is a reason to read them side by side and decide for yourself whether they are one idea under two names. It is not proof that they are. Compare the meanings in the Collider.
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In sociology and anthropology, the family is a social institution built around kinship: a group of people tied by descent, marriage, or adoption who share a household and the raising of children. Murdock's 1949 Social Structure argued that a core unit, the nuclear family of parents and their children, recurs across societies and carries shared economic, reproductive, and caregiving functions. The referent is a human kinship group and the norms around it, studied through how people live and relate, not a rank of organisms, a class of probability curves, or a group of related languages.[1]
In statistics, a family is a set of probability distributions that share one mathematical form and differ only in the values of their parameters, so that fixing the parameters picks out one member. The exponential family, a large and central case, gathers distributions such as the normal, Poisson, and binomial whose densities can be written in one common exponential form; Pitman's 1936 paper Sufficient statistics and intrinsic accuracy is among the works that characterised this class through the existence of compact sufficient statistics. The referent is a parameterised collection of probability models, indexed by numbers, not a rank of organisms, a kinship group, or a set of related languages.[2]
In historical linguistics, a language family is a group of languages descended from a single common ancestor, so that their similarities reflect shared inheritance rather than chance or borrowing (the Indo-European family, spanning languages from English to Hindi, is the classic case). The comparative method reconstructs the ancestor from regular sound correspondences among the descendants; Campbell's 2013 Historical Linguistics: An Introduction lays out how families are established and how the method works. The referent is a set of related tongues linked by descent, traced through their sounds and words, not a rank of organisms, a kinship group of people, or a class of probability curves.[3]
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