Word: alphabet
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, used by mathematicians as a symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It is sometimes called the Ludolphian number, after Ludolph von Ceulen who computed its value late in the 16th Century...
Recommendations: 1) Substitute a Roman alphabet for the more than 50,000 Chinese-derived picture-characters of written Japanese. Though newspapers employ fewer than 4,500 characters, even educated Japs have to use dictionaries to understand them all, and uneducated Japs have trouble with anything more than the headlines (the average citizen of Tokyo knows 600 characters; the average rural Jap 325). Beginning Jap schoolchildren spend 17 out of 22 classroom hours a week in a struggle to master 1,356 characters-time, said the mission, "that might be devoted to the acquisition of . . . useful linguistic and numerical skills...
...proposed new alphabet would probably encounter scattered Jap resistance. When the U.S. Army commissioned Tokyo University's Professor Shuhei Ishiyama to compile a democratic teaching manual in simple characters, Jap educators protested that they would lose face if ordinary schoolteachers could understand the whole book...
...instant it is 7 a.m. local time-Eastern Standard-in New York, but the chronometer of a ship in the harbor will read - with corrections - 12h oom oos G.C.T., though the sun may be only just rising. The Court's suggestion: substitute the 24 letters of the Latin Alphabet for the 24 G.C.T. hours. Then at a quarter past R in San Francisco, it would also be a quarter past R in Chungking-and no one would be confused. (Says the Count...
Last week, in exhibitions and displays from New York to San Francisco, children and grownups were visiting the beautiful "new country"-immortalized in her picture books (Under the Window, Marigold Garden, A-Apple Pie, The Pied Piper of Hamlin, Kate Greenaway's Alphabet...