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Africanized versions of the Arabic alphabet are collectively called "Ajami." Much as the Latin-based alphabet is used to write many languages, including English, Ajami is not a language itself, but the alphabetic script used to write a language: Arabic-derived letters to write a non-Arabic-in this case, African-language. "Ajami" derives from the Arabic a'jamiy, which means "foreigner" or, more specifically, "non-Arab." Historically, Arabs used the word to refer to all things Persian or non-Arab, a usage they borrowed from the ancient Greeks. Yet over the last few centuries, across Islamic Africa, "Ajami" came to mean an African language written in Arabic script that was often adapted phonetically to facilitate local usages and pronunciations across the continent, from the Ethiopian highlands in the east to the lush jungles of Sierra Leone in the west. The use of Ajami is tied to the religious spread of Islam. From its beginning, Islam was a literate religion. Iqra' ("read") is the first word of God's revelations to Muhammad that became the Qur'an. Knowledge of Islam meant knowledge of the revealed word of God: the Qur'an. Consequently, wherever Islam went, it established centers of learning, usually attached to mosques, where children learned to read and write Arabic in much the same way that European and American children have often been taught literacy by using the Bible. For members of African societies where oral tradition predominated, Arabic was the first written language to which they had been exposed.

This is a thesis paper exploring the various theories regarding the evolution of Chinese characters. It is highly unlikely that the Chinese took inspiration from the Mesopotamian cuneiform script, which may have formed at around the same period in time. The author makes the claim that while it is true that Chinese characters may have started off as drawings or pictographs, in the most ancient form of the script, the characters are far from any recognizable images of items. It is very likely that the Chinese script went through a similar evolution process as to the Mesopotamian cuneiform, but no such archeological evidence for this theory has been found.

This is an excerpt of an article that details the evolution of the earliest writing systems. The most traceable writing system to date is the Mesopotamian cuneiform script, which follows a trackable evolutionary pattern through history. The script evolved from tokens to 2D impressions, to logographs, and then finally into something similar in concept to the modern alphabet. The Mesopotamian cuneiform script would later become the foundation of many other written languages, including the current English alphabet.

Answers the question: how do literature and film cause real emotions in us in response to things that aren't real? This is the script of a speech, so it is a fairly easy read with lots of information.

Google is working on a font, Noto, that aims to include "all the world's languages" - every written language on Earth. Right now, Noto includes a wide breadth of language scripts from all around the world - specifically, 100 scripts with 100,000 characters. That includes over 600 written languages, says Jungshik Shin, an engineer on Google's text and font team. The first fonts were released in 2012. But this month, Google (in partnership with Adobe) has released a new set of Chinese-Japanese-Korean fonts - the latest in their effort to make the Internet more inclusive. But as with any product intended to be universal, the implementation gets complicated - and not everyone for whom the product is intended is happy.

From the start of Trump's presidency, you would be able to notice when Trump started to speak without notes from a teleprompter. He would say start to talk about chocolate cake, while U.S. missiles were going down on Syria, or when he implied the Frederick Douglass was still alive. Going off script, it shows the sophistication that Trumps has is about the same as a 7-year-old. Psychologist, psychiatrists, and other experts in cognitive assessment and neurolinguistics all observed Trumps speaking when he was a reality TV show host to now and have conclude that "there had been a deterioration" in Trump's brain.

It is believed that the rongorongo script was developed on Easter Island some time after the Spanish visit in 1770, possibly inspired by a written document of annexation given to the islanders to sign. However, from the 1860s the islanders began to lose the ability to read it, and no inhabitant of Easter Island is able to read it today.

Decoding pictures as part of communication has been at the root of written language since there was such a thing as written language. "What is virtually certain," writes Andrew Robinson in Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction, is "that the first written symbols began life as pictures." Pictograms-i.e., pictures of actual things, like a drawing of the sun-were the very first elements of written communication, found in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. From pictograms, which are literal representations, we moved to logograms, which are symbols that stand in for a word ($, for example) and ideograms, which are pictures or symbols that represent an idea or abstract concept. Emoji can somewhat magically function as pictograms and ideograms at the same time.

emojis were born from a man named Shigetaka Kurita back in the late 1990s. They came up with emojis as a way to appeal to teens. Emoji which is a japanese neologism means "picture word". A bunch of different emojis can actually be traced back to some Japanese custom or tradition.

This is an interesting college essay about an actor. She introduces the idea that "actors aren't human," in the first few lines, which hooks our attention, but never clearly tells us why they aren't. Instead of revisiting this topic, she shares a personal narrative of her acting experiences which, in a way show us why "actors aren't humans." I still think she could made it a little more clear.

At first when I started reading this essay, it didn't seem much like an essay, which is why I kept reading. I thought it was interesting how the author decided to write about her acting experiences; she made it clear that acting was very important to her. She did a good job of capturing my attention as a reader.

I think this essay is interesting. The ending message of it is about how her director had such a big impact on her life but you would never have guessed it would end up being about the director because he is not brought up until the end. I think this essay shows a great way to talk about someone who had a great impact in your life while still sharing a ton of information about yourself because I know that colleges use the essays to learn more about you.

"Ancient Egyptians did not speak to posterity only through hieroglyphs. ... people in everyday life spoke a different language and wrote a different script, a simpler one that evolved from the earliest hieroglyphs. ... Now, scholars at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago have completed almost 40 years of research and published online the final entries of a 2,000-page dictionary that more than doubles the thousands of known Demotic words."

Does Music Really Affect the Development of Children?

"The reason that the unusual fonts are effective is that it causes us to think more deeply about the material," a co-author of the study, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton, wrote in an e-mail. "But we are capable of thinking deeply without being subjected to unusual fonts. Think of it this way, you can't skim material in a hard to read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully."

I wonder how this might relate to second language learning. When one doesn't know the words, even if the font is markedly legible, reading is slower and more difficult. One would expect comprehension and retention to be better, but I doubt that is the case. Interesting article. Must be why wedding invitations get put into Olde English or ornate script typefaces -- so that folks will read the names more carefully.

Ha!

And the 2015 word of the year: the emoji for "tears of joy." Whereas traditional alphabet scripts struggle to keep pace with 21st century rapid communication, emoji, in contrast, "are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one which transcends linguistic borders...They can serve as insightful windows through which to view our cultural preoccupations."

A few weeks ago, after I said goodbye to a friend who was moving across the country, I texted her an emoji of a crying face. She replied with an image of chick with its arms outstretched. This exchange might have been heartfelt. It could have been ironic.

Use of emoticons varies by geography, age, gender, and social class-just like dialects or regional accents. Friend groups fall into the habit of using certain emoticons, just as they develop their own slang. Emoji have undoubtedly changed the way we text, Gchat, and tweet-but are they changing language itself? While emoji are more popular than ever, the idea behind them is actually quite old. "There's an old utopian ideal that we could create a kind of a universal pictorial language," says linguist Ben Zimmer. Emoji could even mark a return (regression?) to a more pictographic script. However, Ben Zimmer suggests that emoji help convey tone and emotion and enrich written language.

This article discusses both emoji use, and emoji effects in language and expression. The vast majority of web users use or have used emojis, and the emojis that we use can yield information about us such as our general age and interests. Furthermore, emojis may be a form of language simplification and a return to pictogram communications.

Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, is the remotest inhabited island on Earth, 1,298 miles from its nearest populated neighbor. According to oral traditions, tablets with rongorongo, the only indigenous writing system to develop in Oceania before the 20th century, were brought there by the first settlers, who arrived between the years 800 and 1200, probably from the Marquesas or Gambier islands, which are now part of French Polynesia.

Although linguists have used for many years the process of deriving pronunciations of obscure words via comparing it to related descendant languages, this method has now been expedited by being scripted into computer code. Thus, scientists can now utilize computer technology to predict pronunciations of obscure words with up to 76% accuracy, which is greatly assisting the documentation of ancient, poorly recorded, or endangered languages in India.

While the invention of emojis was fairly recent, researchers have found that instead of creating a new type of communication, emojis call back to ancient proto-languages and cuneiform-type scripts. Emojis can be helpful in communicating online across cultures, due to the ease of interpretation across all language systems.