<below will be relevant in due course>
The minimal something just is, we call it an entity.
The minimal extra something is a second entity.
An association between them is ambiguous.
The minimal explicit relationship between them is a triple, E.R.E - yes, RDBMS from first principles.
But no, not ERE, because a Relationship (eg: father) is itself an entity, with the potential to describe it, thus making it the subject of further triples.
So, not E.R.E but E.E.E.
That quickly, Trinity Triples was born.
And later, we discovered that Sir Tim-Berners Lee (of HTML fame, our key moment) had also come up with a Triples concept: the Semantic Web.