Editing Thomas Young (scientist) (section)

===Languages===
In an appendix to his 1796 Göttingen dissertation {{lang|la|De corporis humani viribus conservatricibus}} there are four pages added proposing a universal phonetic alphabet (so as "not to leave these pages blank"; "{{lang|la|Ne vacuae starent hae paginae, libuit e praelectione ante disputationem habenda tabellam literarum universalem raptim describere}}"). It includes 16 "pure" vowel symbols, nasal vowels, various consonants, and examples of these, drawn primarily from French and English.

In his ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' article "Languages", Young compared the grammar and vocabulary of 400 languages.<ref name=":0">{{cite book | author=Robinson, Andrew | title=The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young, the Anonymous Genius who Proved Newton Wrong and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone, among Other Surprising Feats | publisher=Penguin | year=2007 | isbn=978-0-13-134304-7 | url=https://archive.org/details/lastmanwhoknewev00robi }}</ref> In a separate work in 1813, he introduced the term [[Indo-European languages]], 165 years after the Dutch linguist and scholar [[Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn]] proposed the grouping to which this term refers in 1647.