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The correlation of foreign accents with "bad" characters could have concerning implications for the way kids are being taught to engage with diversity in the United States. The most wicked foreign accent of all was British English, according to the study. From Scar to Aladdin's Jafar, the study found that British is the foreign accent most commonly used for villains. German and Slavic accents are also common for villain voices. Henchmen or assistants to villains often spoke in dialects associated with low socioeconomic status, including working-class Eastern European dialects or regional American dialects such as "Italian-American gangster" (like when Claude in Captain Planet says 'tuh-raining' instead of 'training.') None of the villains in the sample studied seemed to speak Standard American English; when they did speak with an American accent, it was always in regional dialects associated with low socioeconomic status.

If you want to understand how the peach emoji has come to represent both the potential impeachment of President Trump and a butt, you must first look to the ancient Sumerians. Cuneiform, their early system of writing, began as a series of pictograms, and some characters represented multiple words or concepts. But it could be "tricky to represent something in the abstract," said Vyvyan Evans, a British linguistics professor and author of "The Emoji Code." So the Sumerians would repurpose an existing pictogram that had resonance with the hard-to-illustrate concept.

Reinforcing good behavior while discouraging disobedience and anti-social behavior generally produces positive results in children. Positive reinforcement helps children feel good about their choices, which motivates them to increase the behaviors that bring rewards. Praise and positive reinforcement usually produces both short-term and long-term positive results. This article talks about how positive reinforcement and encouragement from a young age affects the development of the character of a child.

Western literature exhibits a gradual progression from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities. Perhaps people living in medieval societies were less preoccupied with the intricacies of other minds, simply because they didn't have to be. When people's choices were constrained and their actions could be predicted based on their social roles, there was less reason to be attuned to the mental states of others (or one's own, for that matter). The emergence of mind-focused literature may reflect the growing relevance of such attunement, as societies increasingly shed the rigid rules and roles that had imposed order on social interactions. But current psychological research hints at deeper implications. Literature certainly reflects the preoccupations of its time, but there is evidence that it may also reshape the minds of readers in unexpected ways. Stories that vault readers outside of their own lives and into characters' inner experiences may sharpen readers' general abilities to imagine the minds of others. If that's the case, the historical shift in literature from just-the-facts narration to the tracing of mental peregrinations may have had an unintended side effect: helping to train precisely the skills that people needed to function in societies that were becoming more socially complex and ambiguous.

Emoji, however inelegant as they may seem, have become a language of their own, a way to transcend the limits of one's native tongue to communicate with others worldwide. Instagram found that as emoji use rose across the app, the use of Internet slang formed from English letters went down, and that the two phenomena were strongly correlated. That could explain why you may be seeing fewer instances of "Lol" on Instagram photo captions, while smiley face emoji are becoming more prevalent. "It is a rare privilege to observe the rise of a new language," Thomas Dimson, a software engineer on Instagram's data team, said in a company blog post on Friday. "Emoji are becoming a valid and near-universal method of expression in all languages." Even as the limits of emoji characters are reached by the number of available emoji - around 700 by most standard shared measures - users are finding new ways to use them to communicate. Pairing two or more emoji together, for instance, can form rudimentary sentences or sentiments for others to understand.

The accents we take for granted in our fantasy stories are informed, like almost all of the genre, by J.R.R. Tolkien's influence. Tolkien, author of the _Lord of the Rings_ trilogy had his orcs speaking with a working-class Cockney accent, whereas dwarven language reflected Semetic language inspiration, and Elvish, Finnish and Welsh roots. When Tolkienʻs stories were adapted as radio plays and films, the dwarvesʻ accents took on a Celtic character, whereas the elvesʻ accent reflects the upper-crust accent associated with English royalty.

So basically you'll get into college if you write interesting stuff and you establish yourself as an individual. How hard can that be if we're all different people?

This article talked about how UC system used to not read the college essays. However, now that they do, it seems that a strong college essay could be the "edge" needed to make it into some of the more popular and more difficult to get accepted to UC schools. The main point that this article makes is, stand-out essays that represent the applicant's individuality can be much more beneficial than an essay that sounds like everyone else's.

This article promoted writing unique essays that establish you as an individual. This article talked about how they wanted to see more character within these essays rather than reading the same essays over again. I think that the point of this article was to stand out by being yourself and by adding some of your own personality to you essay.

In order to evade government censors blocking free expression, Chinese social media posters utilize homophonic (same sound) and logographic (character) resemblances in order to voice controversial/politically-charged content.

This goes into Chinese "chengyu" or four-character idioms used heavily in mandarin, much like our "two birds, one stone." Like English idioms, origins vary between chengyu, but often they're old stories and have been used for ages in colloquial language.

The immigration debate often centers on who should be welcomed into our country. Some even argue that multiculturalism dilutes our national character - that the very the essence of the country is somehow vanishing. But far from undermining the American experiment, immigrants enhance our culture by introducing new ideas, cuisines and art. They also enrich the English language. As newcomers master a new language, they lend words from their native lexicon to the rest of us. While American English can be perceived as a threat to the survival of other cultures around the world, within our country it is a force that helps to bind us together, even as ideological polarization pulls the other way. Immigrants help us reinvigorate our multitudinous language.

This article focused on the impacts that technology has had on the writing for younger generations. The style of writing that is used for social media has become known as "Netspeak" and typically consists of shorter sentences and phrases, as well as shortening of words through abbreviations or substitutions. ie. lol for laughing out loud, or w8 for weight. These came about as ways to fit the short character limits set by many sites, however this style of writing has been observed to start affecting other more formal forms of writing. Although this is something that some people have become aware of, there are still many people who do this without thinking, and don't realize that they have started to use netspeak in writing for papers

This article talked about the benefits of playing video games for language development since players are immersed in an environment where there is repetition of language through characters, environments, etc. They also learn grammar from dialogue within the game

Imagine putting on a virtual reality headset and entering a world where you can explore communities, like Missoula, except your character, and everyone you interact with, speaks Salish, Cheyenne or Blackfoot. Imagine having a device like Amazon's Alexa that understands and speaks exclusively in Indigenous languages. Or imagine a digital language playground in Facebook's Metaverse, where programmers create interactive games to enhance Indigenous language learning. Michael Running Wolf, a Northern Cheyenne man who is earning his Ph.D. in computer science, wants to make these dreams a reality. Running Wolf grew up in Birney, a town with a population of 150 just south of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. He spent most of his childhood living without electricity. Running Wolf can speak some Cheyenne, but he wants Indigenous language learning to be more accessible, immersive and engaging. And he believes artificial intelligence is the solution. Running Wolf is one of a handful of researchers worldwide who are studying Indigenous languages and AI. He works with a small team of linguists and data scientists, and together, they analyze Indigenous languages and work to translate them into something a computer can interpret. If his team can accomplish this, Running Wolf reasons, then perhaps AI can be used to help revitalize Indigenous languages everywhere.

How many times have your teachers or editors told you that every word counts? Now, it turns out that every character you send counts, too. In fact, it turns out that the best way to punctuate a text message may be by not punctuating it at all: Researchers at Binghampton University have found that ending your text with a period - full stop - may make you seem more insincere.

This article describes how learning Chinese can help to learn Japanese and vice versa, as well as how knowing both makes it easier to be a good educated guesser due to the shared characters.