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Chess notation has an important role in the world of chess because it preserves the game's history. It allows people to record games for posterity and gives them the chance to review the history of the game's development to date. Notation also allows people to overcome language barriers and communicate with one another in a algebraic form, an interesting form of language indeed!

You probably don't even realize it - but we all talk the language of falconry! Fed up? Hoodwinked? Haggard? Having such a long and rich history around the world, the practice of falconry has developed an extensive vocabulary to describe it. Over time many of these words and phrases have become part of everyday life without many of us realising the original meaning behind the term.

There are so many different languages in the world, that it's impossible for us to be able to communicate with everyone in the world...right? Well, in this article, it discusses the possibility of everyone in the world being able to communicate with each other because of computer translations. These computer translations are now exponentially growing in data, and with more data, the easier it will be for people to translate words, phrases, and text more accurately.

Children learn language and literacy skills best during powerful, high-quality conversations with the important adults in their lives. Learn what the ingredients of a powerful conversation are, and get specific tips for what you can do during these conversations to build the important skills your child needs to learn.

To assist students in thinking "outside of the box" as well as to develop problem solving skills, it is highly beneficial for educators to implement a computer programing curriculum from as early as kindergarten. Defined as its own language, coding helps students to explore their creativity while learning the essential literacy aspects of language.

Yay for Wellesley College, my alma mater! Ravi Ravishanker, Chief Information Officer at Wellesley College, and his team developed an app that allows characters in other languages to be printed on diplomas. Thirty-two students took part in the pilot with nine languages (Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Korean, Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, and Japanese) represented. "The diploma will have both the English and the alternate alphabet," Ravishanker explained, adding that the goal is to make this available to anyone who wishes to take advantage of the program next year. "We are the first liberal arts college to provide this service," he said.

Monday, April 18, 2016 TORONTO - Like a modern twist on ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, two Swiss friends have designed the ultimate t-shirt for travellers featuring universal icons that help overcome language barriers around the world.

New research suggests it's how parents talk to their infants, not just how often, that makes a difference for language development. Infants whose mothers had shown "sensitive" responses--verbally replied to or imitated the babies' sounds--showed increased rates of consonant-vowel vocalizations, meaning that their babbling more closely resembled something like real syllables, paving the way for real words. The same babies were also more likely to direct their noises at their mothers, indicating that they were "speaking" to them rather than simply babbling for babbling's sake. "The infants were using vocalizations in a communicative way, in a sense, because they learned they are communicative," study author Julie Gros-Louis, a psychology professor at the University of Iowa, said in a statement. In other words, by acting like they understood what their babies were saying and responding accordingly, the mothers were helping to introduce the concept that voices, more than just instruments for making fun noises, could also be tools for social interaction.

When people talk about positive and negative emotions they often use spatial metaphors. A happy person is on top of the world, but a sad person is down in the dumps. Some researchers believe these metaphors are a clue to the way people understand emotions: not only do we use spatial words to talk about emotional states, we also use spatial concepts to think about them. Researchers Daniel Casasanto (MPI and Donders Institute, Nijmegen) and Katinka Dijkstra (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) ran 2 experiments. In the first experiment, students had to move glass marbles upward or downward into one of two cardboard boxes, with both hands simultaneously, timed by a metronome. Meanwhile, they had to recount autobiographical memories with either positive or negative emotional valence, like "Tell me about a time when you felt proud of yourself', or 'a time when you felt ashamed of yourself.' Moving marbles upward caused participants to remember more positive life experiences, and moving them downward to remember more negative experiences. Memory retrieval was most efficient when participants' motions matched the spatial directions that metaphors in language associate with positive and negative emotions. The second experiment tested whether seemingly meaningless motor actions, e.g. moving marbles up or down, could influence the content of people's memories. Participants were given neutral-valence prompts, like "Tell me about something that happened during high school," so they could choose to retell something happy or sad. Their choices were determined, in part, by the direction in which they were assigned to move marbles. Moving marbles upward encouraged students to recount positive high school experiences like "winning an award," but moving them downward to recall negative experiences like "failing a test." "These data suggest that spatial metaphors for emotion aren't just in language," Casasanto says, "linguistic metaphors correspond to mental metaphors, and activati

For even more delicious, globally-inspired phrases, check this link out: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3639409/Drachenfutter-Saudade-Onsay.html.

The FOXP2 gene, a front-runner to explain the evolution of language in humans, may have rewired the brain to allow more advanced learning, according to preliminary research presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting this month. In a recent experiment, Christiane Schreiweis of the Max Planck Institute and colleagues looked at the human version of the gene in mice.

Three separate experiments were conducted which all showed that individuals in the open body position took more action than those who were constricted. "Going into the research, we figured role would make a big difference. But shockingly, the effect of posture dominated the effect of role in each and every study," Li Huang, a doctoral student at Kellogg and co-author of the study, said.

Blast from the past: diagramming sentences!

Positive effect of technology on language

Doesn't use the term "niche construction," but certainly makes a case for language constructing a niche.

Language Specialists are attempting to save the Native American Language before it becomes extinct.

According to European researchers, gestures help learning languages.

Maybe this is why Italians use gestures so much :P