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Oral forms like ballads and epics exist in every culture, originating long before the advent of written language. In preliterate eras, tales had to be appealing to the ear and memorable to the mind or else they would simply disappear. After all, most messages we hear are forgotten, or if they're passed on, they're changed beyond recognition - as psychologists' investigations of how rumors evolve have shown. In his classic book Memory in Oral Traditions, cognitive scientist David Rubin notes, "Oral traditions depend on human memory for their preservation. If a tradition is to survive, it must be stored in one person's memory and be passed on to another person who is also capable of storing and retelling it. All this must occur over many generations… Oral traditions must, therefore, have developed forms of organization and strategies to decrease the changes that human memory imposes on the more casual transmission of verbal material." What are these strategies? Tales that last for many generations tend to describe concrete actions rather than abstract concepts. They use powerful visual images. They are sung or chanted. And they employ patterns of sound: alliteration, assonance, repetition and, most of all, rhyme. Such universal characteristics of oral narratives are, in effect, mnemonics - memory aids that people developed over time "to make use of the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of human memory," as Rubin puts it.

Hawaiian culture and traditions are being preserved in many different ways, most of which are showcased at the Merrie Monarch Festival every year. Hula is one of the main traditions practiced, but hula can only exist if the Hawaiian language does, as the dance is a performance of oli and mele. Before westernization, the Hawaiian people did not write down anything, but rather passed down stories through oral traditions such as oli and mele. ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, an official state language, is required to be taught in public schools now.

This article discusses how different methods of teaching influences success and how it may benefit students with learning disabilities.

Chinese New Year, known in China as Spring Festival, has an abundance of unique traditions associated with it. Some of these traditions are more widespread than others. Among the many New Year's customs are a few whose meaning is derived from puns of Mandarin words.

Study shows that traditional toys and books should be used more for early language development whereas play with electronic toys should be discouraged.Transforming dinosaur, learning bug, talking farm or baby cellphones - these are some of the most whiz-bang toys most parents would think to buy for their kids this Christmas.

Article talks about an adult Okinawan-language class in Hawaii. Okinawan, also known as Uchinaaguchi, is an endangered language--it fell into disuse due to Japanese colonization--hence few native speakers of the language remain. I've posted the text of the article below, as you've got to be a Star-Advertiser subscriber to see the full page: POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Aug 27, 2013 StarAdvertiser.com Learning Okinawan helps preserve culture and identity, an instructor says By Steven Mark In a classroom for preschoolers, a group of adults is trying to revive a language that is foreign to their ear but not to their heart. The language is Okinawan, or "Uchinaaguchi," as it is pronounced in the language itself. The class at Jikoen Hongwanji Mission in Kalihi, as informal as it is, might just be the beginning of a cultural revival thousands of miles to the east of the source. At least that is the hope of Eric Wada, one of the course instructors. "For us, it's the importance of connecting (language) to identity," said Wada, who studied performing arts in Okinawa and is now the artistic director of an Okinawan performing arts group, Ukwanshin Kabudan. "Without the language, you really don't have identity as a people." Okinawa is the name given to a prefecture of Japan, but it was originally the name of the main island of an archipelago known as the Ryukyu Islands that lies about midway between Japan and Taiwan in the East China Sea. For centuries, the Ryukyu kingdom maintained a degree of independence from other East Asian nations. As a result, distinctive cultural practices evolved, from graceful and meditative dance to the martial art called karate and the poetic language that sounds like a blend of Japanese and Korean. The islands were officially annexed by Japan in 1879. The 20th century saw the World War II battle of Okinawa, which claimed more than a quarter of the island's population, the subsequent placement of U.S. military bases and the return of the islands to

I think that many of us have heard that swearing can help to improve pain tolerance, but this study shows that only using "real" swear words help. This makes me wonder what makes swear words so bad, and why it is so taboo to say them. I don't think it has very much to do with how rude the meaning of the word is. For example, I can say something like "explosive diarrhea" in class, but I can't say "sh*t". Also, why does text censoring make it better? We all know what the word says.

This article describes the debate between prescriptivists and descriptivists in terms of language use and change. Prescriptivists believe in traditional grammar and vocabulary while descriptivists analyze how language evolves over time. The article goes on to talk about how language changes naturally but remains cohesive due to its systematic nature.

Jaber George Jabbour, a Syrian banker living in the UK, has invented SaypU, an alphabet with none of the indecipherable squiggles of traditional phonetic alphabets. A simplified universal alphabet would end not only misunderstanding, he asserts, but would help foster world peace. SaypU contains 23 letters from the Roman alphabet as well as a back to front e. The article also addresses larger issues of language and phonetic standardization and utopian language plans.

'To Google' has become a universally understood verb and many countries are developing their own internet slang. But is the web changing language and is everyone up to speed? In April 2010 the informal online banter of the internet-savvy collided with the traditional and austere language of the court room.

Australian composer Liza Lim unveils her opera "Tree of Codes," which includes snippets of a Turkish whistling language from a small mountain village. This article explains that numerous people believe that if tradition is dying, something new should take it's place; there must be a way to incarnate the dying into something new.

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.

Why do writers abandon their native language? IN 2012, Jhumpa Lahiri moved to Rome and began a period of self-imposed linguistic exile from English. She stopped speaking, reading, and writing the language entirely, the better to learn Italian. I just read this book, and it was extremely interesting since I read the book in conjunction with our discussions about bilingualism in class. I highly recommend this book called In Other Words.

Why do writers abandon their native language? IN 2012, Jhumpa Lahiri moved to Rome and began a period of self-imposed linguistic exile from English. She stopped speaking, reading, and writing the language entirely, the better to learn Italian.

It has become a tradition for writers to completely abandon their native language and continue their writings in a new language. In this article Jhumpa Lahiri goes over the improvements to her writing brought about by this transition.

Recently, people have been returning to writing basics: handwriting, notebooks, pens, paper, and stationary. While technology can certainly provide an edge for certain tasks, digital overload, addiction, and distraction are growing concerns. many studies indicate that multitasking is bad for us and makes our brains more scattered. In contrast, several studies suggest that pen and paper have an edge over the keyboard. In three studies, researchers found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. Those who took written notes had better comprehension and retention of material because they had to mentally process information rather than type it verbatim. And, another study, published in the Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology, showed that people who doodle can better recall dull information. Writing it down also sparks innovation. Being innovative and creative is about "getting your hands dirty" a feeling that is lacking when you use technology or gadgets, says Arvind Malhotra, a professor at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School."Research has also shown that tactile sensory perceptions tend to stimulate parts of the brain that are associated with creativity. So, touch, feel and the sensation you get when you build something physical has also got a lot to do with creativity," he says.

Nineb Lamassu, a researcher at England's Cambridge University, travels among the Assyrian diaspora, recording the traditional epic poetry of the Assyrian ethnic minority and capturing at least the memory of an ancient people whose presence in their homeland is gradually fading.

"The pure traditionalist and pure revisionist positions are both oblivious to what is at stake in arguments over language. The traditionalists claim they are just asking us to play by the rules of the game; revisionists say they are just asking us to accept the fact that language is always changing. But both sides ignore the profound consequences of how we speak."

"But languages do differ significantly in what they force speakers to express, something Lera Boroditsky talks about often in support of the "linguistic relativity" hypothesis. ... What really can't be translated properly is "go" into Russian, or "loved" into Spanish, not because the English words are too specific but because they're too vague. Those languages force you to say much more ... The traditional idea of "can't be translated" has the facts exactly backwards."

"According to a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society in January by Brice Russ, a graduate student at Ohio State University, the 200 million or so messages posted each day in the supposedly placeless world of Twitter may end up being a rich source of information about regional difference. ... it may allow them to track linguistic patterns on a vast scale and in something close to real time, identifying phenomena that can then be investigated more deeply by traditional fieldwork."

As e-readers grow in popularity as convenient alternatives to traditional books, researchers have found that convenience may not be their only benefit. The team discovered that when e-readers are set up to display only a few words per line, some people with dyslexia can read more easily, quickly and with greater comprehension.

Cognitive neuroscientists warn that humans may be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia.