Word: alphabet
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...catalogue. WPA was not the first topical song on Government work relief. Decca had released Working for the PWA; Working on the Project; Lost My Job on the Project; Don't Take Away My PWA ["Mr. President, listen to what I have to say; take away the whole alphabet, but don't take away the PWA"]. Columbia had a WPA Rag, a Pink Slip Blues low-moaned by oldtime Ida Cox. But WPA was different. Last week it was banned...
There did exist, not a "jargon" invented by scientists, but an alphabet for recording the Navajo language-a competent language, incidentally, with a large vocabulary. The alphabet, worked out by scientists, was minutely accurate in catching every sound and intonation, but contained so many odd characters, special marks and accents as to be utterly unusable for ordinary purposes. Dr. Harrington and I were asked to work out an alphabet in which Navajo could be written understandably, using only what is to be found on the keyboard of a standard typewriter...
With a workable alphabet, interpretation corrected, and a collection of phrases which had been tested on a number of non-English-speaking Indians, Mr. Modley got out his posters, with text in Navajo and English...
...obvious that when Dean Landis defends the agencies he is doing more than merely justifying the record of the New Deal. It is equally clear that the Logan Bill, though inspired by an antipathy for the New Deal alphabet, is striking at something which under the American form of government has been found indispensable...
Thereupon the Office of Indian Affairs created a new Navajo language. Its authors: Novelist-Ethnologist Oliver (Laughing Boy) La Farge and Smithsonian Institution's Dr. John P. Harrington. The new language used the English alphabet, created words which resembled the scientists' jargon and the Navajos' vernacular closely enough so that both sides could make head & tail of them. Last week posters drawn by Navajo artists and designed to teach Navajos the language by means of pictures and text (see cut) were displayed all over the reservation. Passed around in Navajo classrooms was the first Navajo primer...