Sharp, Alden

One of the most fundamental aspects of the evolution of spoken language over the course of history is the transformation of its speech sounds. These sound change transformations play an important role in the development of grammatical features such as declensional and conjugational paradigms. These sound changes often occur in highly regular patterns which lend themselves readily to mathematical modeling. Thus, we can construct a list of transformation rules that predict the evolution of words from a parent language to a daughter language to a significant degree of accuracy. This thesis constructs a model expressing these sound changes as a function from a set of words in the parent language to a set of words in the daughter language. This theoretical model is then translated to a practical application in C++ programming, and tested using the evolution of Classical Latin to modern standard Spanish as a sample case study.

Western attitudes toward nonhuman animal species can be organized into two kinds:
an ethical and a mythological. The ethical attitude is that which characterizes the animal
as a subject of ethical consideration, while the mythological attitude is that which
characterizes the animal as a semiotic tool for human communicability. Many important
conflicts on the issue of animal rights arise out of a conflict of these two attitudes. This
thesis examines these conflicts in case studies focused on the wolf species canis lupus as
well as in the practices of zoo maintenance and species conservation, with philosophical
background in structuralism in the case of the mythological attitude, and contrasting
forms of utilitarianism.