We describe the mathematical meaning of patterns in the abstract painting Number Structure II (1984) by Kazuo Nakamura, held at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Canada. The canvas reflects the artist's engagement with mathematics as a universal language. We describe the numerical tables depicted on the canvas as representations of values of several well-known mathematical sequences; their properties and connections to each other are reviewed.

Universal Language and Universal Prose: Eugene Jolas, H. G. Wells, and the Languages of Modernist Utopianism

Identification of children with language impairments often relies on caregivers raising concerns. However, caregivers may find it difficult to identify language impairment. This study examined how child and family characteristics were related to the likelihood that caregivers reported concerns about oral language and literacy to understand the possible underlying factors influencing identification. In a larger longitudinal study, kindergarten children (N = 385) completed a battery of oral language and literacy assessments. The caregivers completed a questionnaire including demographic information (e.g., caregiver education level) and reported concerns in the areas of oral language, literacy, speech, and attention/memory. We used two multiple logistic regressions to evaluate the predictors of caregivers' concern about (a) oral language and (b) literacy. Among the children with language difficulties, less than 40% of caregivers reported oral language concerns. Among the children with word reading difficulty, just over half of the caregivers reported literacy concerns. Oral language scores and attention concerns were significant predictors of caregivers' oral language concerns. Word reading scores, caregiver education, speech concerns, and attention concerns were significant predictors of literacy concern. Although interpretations of caregivers' concerns may vary according to our provided checklist, these concerns appear to be meaningful indicators of child language and literacy difficulties. These difficulties-particularly in oral language-often go unrecognized. Our findings underscore the need for universal language screening in early education and expanded caregiver education regarding language impairment. Relying solely on caregiver concern may lead to missing children in need of services.

Color is a powerful visual element that transcends linguistic boundaries and communicates meaning across cultures. This study investigates color as a universal language in supporting Inclusive Design (ID), which aims to create products usable by individuals regardless of background or ability. The research examines how color influences perception, emotion, and cognition across different cultural contexts. A total of 547 design professionals from diverse disciplines were selected using stratified random sampling. Data were collected through a structured questionnaire and analyzed using SPSS software. The findings indicate that applying consistent color principles enhances cross-cultural usability and improves accessibility in design outcomes. Results also reveal that certain colors evoke similar psychological responses across countries, reinforcing their universal communicative potential. The study’s innovation lies in conceptualizing color as a shared design language that bridges cultural differences. By emphasizing strategic color decisions, this research provides practical insights for designers to create more inclusive, accessible, and culturally responsive products.

This text addresses the significant educational initiatives of the Prague City Gallery for visitors from Ukraine. The gallery actively develops and implements diverse programs, which are outlined alongside the broader context of their efforts. Key offerings include educational activities, promotional materials, spaces for charitable and cultural events, and paid roles for Ukrainian lecturers, whose contributions are highlighted. The gallery also collaborates with organizations supporting foreigner integration and Ukraine, with financial backing from entities such as UNHCR, UNICEF, and the Czech Ministry of the Interior. The text explores the use of visual arts as a universal language, transcending linguistic barriers, and presents examples of best practices, such as the presentation of Ukrainian art and literature at the Art Book Fair of Prague City Gallery. Finally, it outlines opportunities for sustainability, further development, and future plans.

This essay introduces the themed cluster of articles, ‘Towards a linguistic anthropology of AI’. The advent of artificial intelligence (AI), especially in large language models capable of producing coherent discourse mimicking conversational interaction, is exerting unprecedented pressure on prevailing concepts of language, personhood, and the human. This provides a challenge and opportunity for reflection, particularly for linguistic anthropology, that sub‐field centred on language as medium/practice of meaning‐making in social life. Moving beyond AI as communicating machine to explore communicative processes that structure AI as ideological imaginary and technological infrastructure, the articles in this cluster draw on linguistic anthropology to examine different facets of AI as people take it up, such as the features that invite users to endow chatbots with personhood (Keane), attempts to use AI to unlock animal communication (Handman), and research seeking linguistic biomarkers predictive of psychopathology (Semel). To contextualize the articles, this introduction offers some basic semiotic distinctions developed within linguistic anthropology needed to parse AI, with a focus on the concept of semiotic ideology. We then situate AI within a set of ideological genealogies – from Enlightenment visions of universal languages to the representationalism of modern linguistics – before turning to themes of transduction and semiosis beyond the human.

Although emojis are often hailed as a universal digital language, their meanings changes across cultures. By focusing on three polysemic examples—(hands pressed together), (skull), and (peach)—this study examines how interpretations shift across English, Japanese, Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, and Chinese contexts. Also, this research combines content analysis with semiotic approach grounded in Saussurean, Peircean, and Barthesian theory. Results reveal clear divergences: hands pressed together signifies “prayer” in English, “gratitude/politeness” in Japanese, and “Namaste” in Indian discourse; skull denotes “death” in Arabic, “humor” in Western slang, and “ancestral ritual” in Mexican culture; peach represents sexual slang in English, fruit in European posts, and longevity in Chinese folklore. These findings demonstrate that emojis are culturally embedded, polysemic signs shaped by ideology, ritual, and online vernaculars, challenging the notion of emojis as neutral or universal symbols and positioning the study as an exploratory contribution to cross-cultural in digital semiotics.

In today’s globalised world, being able to communicate in English is vital since it opens up a lot of options and is a need for both academic and professional success. In academic discourse, English is the universal language of communication. It enables people to access vast amounts of information given through books, internet resources, and scholarly publications. The aim of the study was to investigate the impact of Blackboard, a widely used learning management system (LMS), on English instruction in higher education. The introduction of Blackboard as an electronic learning platform at King Khalid University for English language programmes signifies a substantial shift in educational practices; hence, a thorough assessment of its efficacy from the faculty’s viewpoint is required. This assessment is critical to understanding the platform’s role in addressing the particular difficulties of language instruction in a culturally diverse setting as well as its value in improving teaching strategies and student engagement.The opinions of faculty members offer priceless insights into the real-world use of the Blackboard application, highlighting both its advantages and shortcomings. The success of Blackboard and its widespread usage in the educational sector attest to the growing popularity of Learning Management Systems, or LMS. Within the learning ecosystem, these digital platforms serve as virtual hubs that simplify the delivery of courses, promote communication, and encourage teamwork. One of its benefits is that it can efficiently gather vast volumes of data from a variety of teachers and students. This study looked into how English instruction in higher education was affected by Blackboard, a popular Learning Management System (LMS). These results imply that using these technologies could encourage innovative teaching methods and raise student interest in the subject matter.

Chemputation is the process of programming chemical robots to do experiments using a universal symbolic language, but literature can be error-prone and hard to read due to ambiguities. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various domains, including natural language processing, robotic control, and more recently, chemistry. Despite significant advancements in standardizing synthetic chemistry data, automatic reproduction and verification of reported syntheses remains labor-intensive task. We introduce an LLM-based chemical research agent workflow for automatic verification of synthetic literature procedures. Our workflow can autonomously extract synthetic procedures and analytical data from extensive documents, translate these procedures into universal XDL code, simulate the execution in a hardware-specific setup, and ultimately execute the procedure on an XDL-controlled robotic system for synthetic chemistry to confirm the procedure works in the real world. This demonstrates the potential of LLM-based workflows for autonomous chemical synthesis with Chemputers. While recent LLM-based agents have demonstrated remarkable success in autonomous experiment planning, a robust workflow for the faithful digitization and verification of existing literature remains a challenge. Our approach bridges this gap by providing six realistic examples of syntheses directly executed from synthetic literature on two robotic platforms. Our workflow will significantly enhance automation in robotically driven synthetic chemistry research, streamline data extraction, improve the reproducibility, scalability, and safety of synthetic chemistry.

Our access to language is governed by various technical infrastructures, artifacts, and media. The rise of AI language models has intensified questions surrounding such technical mediation-often framed as unprecedented disruptions. While historians and STS scholars have long emphasized the sociotechnical contingencies of informatic systems, scholarship has paid less attention to how contemporary language technologies intervene in longstanding debates about language, information, and the ordering of knowledge and social life. Beginning in seventeenth-century Europe, through projects for universal languages, and extending to the mid-twentieth-century emergence of information theory, and integration of computational methods into linguistics, this article shows that the formalization, coding, and rendering computable of language were co-constituted with particular epistemic assumptions, technical circumstances, and practices of knowledge production. By situating contemporary AI systems within this longer genealogy, the article reframes language technologies as historically contingent interventions rather than radical ruptures.

The paper analyzes the practices of integrating national cultural codes with global design trends in the identity of modern Russian brands. The concept of cultural code is used, as well as a method of structural and semantic analysis of key elements of branding, based on identifying the relationship between the meanings communicated by the brand and their visual and graphic embodiment – color, fonts, ornaments, compositional solutions and visual images. The empirical basis of the study includes an analysis of the identity of six Russian brands: the tourist brand “Visit Russia”, the Moscow Cycling Festival, the styles of the cities of St. Petersburg and Kazan, as well as the brands of the Moscow Kremlin and the cultural center “Zotov”. It has been revealed that hybrid design solutions combining national cultural codes with a universal visual language are the most effective. Such approaches allow brands to preserve their national identity while remaining modern and understandable to an international audience. Universal values and unifying visual elements play a special role, contributing to the formation of a stable and emotionally significant image.

Objective: this study examines how artificial intelligence (AI) can be combined with empirical linguistic data to develop models of universal phonological and orthographic systems. The broader aim is to contribute to more sustainable and inclusive tools for cross-linguistic communication. The work focuses on a central challenge in contemporary linguistics: the lack of reproducible AI-driven methods that link computational modeling with theoretical analysis and that ensure fair and accessible use of digital language technologies. Method: A mixed-method framework has been adopted, in which corpus-driven linguistic analysis has been integrated with neural-network modeling. The empirical data have been drawn from two open-access resources: PHOIBLE (Phonetics Information Base and Lexicon) and the r12a database (r12a.github.io). After standardization and tokenization, the datasets have been processed using Python-based AI modules to extract frequency distributions, identify clusters and detect structural patterns. The analytical workflow has followed a clear, reproducible sequence of steps informed by PRISMA principles, ensuring transparency and methodological rigor. Originality/Relevance: the paper brings together corpus linguistics, interlinguistics and artificial intelligence to propose a data-driven approach for identifying shared phonological and orthographic patterns across languages. By combining extensive linguistic datasets with computational techniques, the study demonstrates the potential of AI to support the creation of sustainable knowledge infrastructures and to promote more inclusive forms of digital communication — domains that are becoming central to innovation and strategic growth in the humanities. Main conclusions: the analysis revealed a relatively small set of phonemes and grapheme correspondences that recur across a wide range of the world’s languages. These results offer empirical support for developing streamlined, accessible alphabetic systems and for designing universal auxiliary language models. The study further shows that AI-supported modeling can improve linguistic inclusivity and analytical precision, especially in low-resource and multilingual settings, while still relying on the interpretive judgement of human specialists. Theoretical/methodological contributions: the research contributes to interlinguistics by bringing together the concept of language universals and contemporary AI techniques. It outlines a reproducible pathway for connecting empirical linguistic data with computational tools and theoretical interpretation. In doing so, the study supports the sustainable development of language technologies and enriches our understanding of how human expertise and artificial intelligence can work together to strengthen global communication. Practical implications: identifying a universal phoneme core and stable sound-script correspondences can streamline multilingual analytical workflows, lessen structural biases toward non-Latin scripts and lower the overall costs of integrating low-resource languages into sustainable and reproducible knowledge systems.

Abstract The Chicago Federal Center (1959–74) has long been interpreted by architectural critics and historians in relation to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s exploration of a universal architectural language, across a broad range of building types and geographies. When the U.S. federal government commissioned Mies, it had for 150 years elaborated a traditional, and often classical, canon of civic architecture and iconography. Why did the United States then adopt modern forms honed primarily in the commercial realm? This essay argues that, despite the gesture toward universal language, the Chicago Federal Center was importantly rooted in the particularities of place, locality, and history. In Chicago the priorities of a newly expansive federal administrative state intersected with new post–World War II public commitments to urban renewal and revitalization. Boosterish local pride in a usable history associated with steel-frame skyscrapers shaped the Federal Center and crafted its distinct civic form and meaning.

ABSTRACT We examined English‐speaking preschoolers' and adults' attention to emotional prosody in an unfamiliar language when asked to: (a) match emotional prosody with emotional faces; and (b) use emotional prosody to identify a speaker's intended referent. In Experiment 1, 4‐year‐olds ( N = 36, M = 4.16 years; 18 females) and adults ( N = 38, M = 21.18 years; 26 females) matched happy and sad Polish utterances to a corresponding emotional face, as evidenced through pointing decisions. In Experiment 2, adults ( N = 36, M = 20.17 years; 31 females), but not 4‐year‐olds ( N = 36, M = 4.11 years; 18 females), matched the same emotional utterances to objects whose properties signalled an association with happiness or sadness (e.g., intact vs. broken toy). These findings demonstrate that 4‐year‐olds and adults can recognise emotional prosody in an unfamiliar language, however, only adults are successful at extending this information to other kinds of emotion‐relevant decisions.

This paper investigates the potential of visual modeling as an effective means of overcoming language barriers and enhancing intercultural communication in the education of international students. It is argued that mathematical visualization constitutes a universal instructional method that facilitates the comprehension of physical processes and supports the learning of higher mathematics, physics, and technical disciplines. Graphical and dynamic models are shown to serve as essential cognitive supports that enable students to assimilate complex physical and mathematical concepts irrespective of their level of proficiency in the language of instruction. The relevance of this issue remains particularly pronounced in higher education institutions working with international student cohorts. Instructors frequently encounter communication challenges arising from students’ insufficient command of the Ukrainian language as well as from disparities in their prior mathematical preparation. Within this context, the article examines the didactic potential of visual modeling as an instructional approach for teaching international students. Emphasis is placed on the role of mathematical visualization – including tables, graphs, diagrams, vector representations, and dynamic geometric model – as a universal language of instruction that reduces the cognitive load imposed by language barriers. This reduction facilitates understanding and contributes to the improvement of teaching and learning processes in physical, mathematical, and technical disciplines. Teaching experience in international student groups demonstrates that the systematic use of visual models significantly decreases the time required to explain new material and enhances students’ success in problem-solving during practical classes. This effect is attributed to the fact that students rely on visual representations and conceptual understanding rather than on literal translation of problem statements. Visual mathematical models represent a powerful tool for pedagogical adaptation in an international educational environment. They function as a “communication bridge,” enabling students to concentrate on the conceptual content of the subject rather than on linguistic difficulties. The integration of visual models into the educational process contributes to the creation of conditions necessary for the acquisition of robust and sustainable knowledge essential for the professional development of future specialists

Retraction Note: Linguacultural and Cognitive Peculiarities of Linguistic Universals.

English proficiency is a cornerstone of success in multinational organizations, where seamless communication drives teamwork, collaboration, and operational efficiency. This study adopts a descriptive-correlational design to examine the influence of language skills on core dimensions of employee engagement, including collaboration, emotional commitment, job satisfaction, and productivity. A purposive sample of 100 employees representing various departments provided diverse perspectives on the interplay between language proficiency and engagement. In a multinational company with a multicultural workforce speaking different languages, English, widely recognized as a universal language is a necessity for an efficient communication and effective collaboration. The study highlights a significant positive correlation between English proficiency and employee engagement. Employees with strong language skills demonstrate better collaboration, deeper emotional ties to their organizations, higher job satisfaction and productivity. Demographic factors such as age, education level and job role influence both proficiency and engagement, with leaders showing the highest engagement levels. Challenges such as training gaps and cultural barriers highlight the need for targeted language development program. This research concludes that enhancing English proficiency is a strategic imperative for improving employee engagement and strengthening organizational cohesion. To address this, it advocates for the development and implementation of targeted, flexible, and job-specific language training programs designed to meet the diverse needs of the workforce. Additionally, the study calls for a collaborative approach among policymakers, educators, and HR professionals to design dynamic, inclusive learning frameworks that embrace cultural and demographic diversity. By integrating language development into broader organizational strategies, companies can cultivate a more engaged, confident, and effective workforce, driving innovation, collaboration, and long-term success in an increasingly globalized market. This research reinforces the pivotal role of language proficiency in shaping organizational culture, leadership, and sustainable growth.

The purpose of this study is to identify the specific features of musical Orientalism in the European tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries through an analysis of the modal, rhythmic, timbral, and dramaturgical means by which the image of the East as the “Other” was constructed in musical art. The methodological framework of the research is based on historical-conceptual and hermeneutic approaches, as well as comparative analysis of factual data, drawing on the works of Chang Yu-Chi, Chung-yuan Chang, R. Golianek, M. Collins, H. M. Miller, E. Ziter, J. Moran, and others. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the interpretation of musical Orientalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an artistically constructed phenomenon formed within a Western aesthetic and ideological system, rather than as a direct reflection of Eastern musical traditions. Orientalist styles are examined as conditional acoustic markers of exoticism that function independently of specific ethnocultural sources and do not require ethnographic accuracy. Conclusions. Musical Orientalism in European culture of the 18th and 19th centuries emerged as a conventional artistic model generated by Western aesthetic and ideological frameworks. The image of the “East” in music was largely imaginary and functioned as a symbol of exoticism and otherness. The so-called “Eastern” styles – Turkish, Chinese, Indian – were employed as interchangeable signs not oriented toward ethnographic authenticity. In operatic and academic music of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Orientalist stylistics often reinforced the hierarchy of “self” and “other,” assigning ethnic coloring to secondary characters, while principal protagonists remained within a universal European musical language. At the same time, certain trends, notably the Hungarian style, demonstrate the possibility of a more autonomous development of “foreign” material within the European tradition. Overall, the evolution of musical Orientalism reflects broader sociocultural transformations of the modern era: a movement from romanticised aesthetic fascination with the image of the East toward its systematic ideological and cultural instrumentalisation within Western artistic thought.

PurposeThe ninth TNM staging of non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) was introduced in 2023 to replace the eighth edition that had been in use since 2017. It provides a standardised universal language to discuss management of NSCLC patients. Outcomes across different patient populations can be better evaluated and this process is undertaken by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer Lung Cancer Staging Project team to further refine the staging classification past and present.Changes in descriptorsThere is no change to the size-based T-descriptors. Mediastinal nodal N-descriptors followed previous definitions but are now subdivided into N2a and N2b depending on single or multiple nodal stations involvement respectively. M1c M-descriptors that described multiple extra-thoracic metastases were also subclassified into single (M1c1) or multiple (M1c2) organ system involvement.Changes in stagingMajor revisions were made to stage 2 and 3 disease. Previous T1N1M0 disease is downstaged from stage 2B to 2A. T1N2aM0 disease is now downstaged to 2B whilst T1N2bM0 remained as stage 3A. Previous T2N2M0 and T3N2M0 disease were staged 3A and 3B respectively. Under the new classification, T2N2aM0 (unchanged) and T3N2aM0 (downstaged) are now stage 3A whilst T2N2bM0 (upstaged) and T3N2bM0 (unchanged) are now stage 3B.ConclusionThe ninth edition NSCLC TNM staging is now in place. It is important to be familiar with it to allow effective communication between surgical and medical oncologists to optimise patient care. It is also pertinent to start collecting and maintaining databases using the revised staging to help us further improve treatment in lung cancer patients.

ECG-aBcDe: Overcoming model dependence, encoding ECG into a universal language for any large language model.