Word: alphabets
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...state farms, as in Russia. The No. i Communist, Tsedenbal, heads both the government and the party, as Khrushchev does in Moscow. Ulan Bator has a mausoleum, containing Sukhe Bator's remains, similar to the Lenin tomb in the Soviet capital. In 1946, Mongols adopted the Russian Cyrillic alphabet; their army is Russian trained and equipped. A Mongol guide explained, "Everything new here is Russian...
...four delights, tiny enough for a child to hide away and keep. All the stories are both written and illustrated by Sendak, who is the Picasso of children's books, and each of them has a function: one teaches counting, another the alphabet, a third offers a strong moral (you should care), and the fourth praises the wonders of chicken soup with rice...
Following a number of Shavian stipulations, the Shaw-Read alphabet has 48 symbols, including 24 separate vowel sounds so that no matter what their context each one can be pronounced the same way. Its letters come in several matching-size categories such as "talls" and "deeps" (tails turned upside down). For example...
...drops rafts of silent e's, of course, and the four most commonly used words in English (the, of, and, to) economically get by with just one symbol each ( ? , f , , -I,). Logically, too, the new alphabet does away with Shaw's own favorite example of the phonetic madness of the present alphabet, the fact that phonetically "ghoti" spells "fish."* In Shaw-Read, "fish" is clearly J , i and "ghoti" is forever ? o -I « . All this is not likely to compensate new readers for the strange look of the new letters. Because Shaw insisted on discarding all familiar...
Inventor Read stoutly asserts that "earnest practice for a single week enables one to write with assurance if not with speed." But Read, now 74, took more than 15 years to work the alphabet out, with the help of some correspondence with Shaw before the old man died. In the new book's last note, Read closes with a good old-fashioned "good luck!" If he had really the courage of his convictions, he would simply have said...