Word: alphabets
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...servicemen in World War II, the pronouncing alphabet (Able, Baker, Charlie, etc.) was well suited to rolling off the American tongue. But not so for servicemen of other lands. Since the French, for instance, have no such sound for a as in able, the word comes out ahble. Baker became Bahkay or Bahkair. In 1947 the International Civil Aeronautics Organization began working out a new alphabet that would be readily pronounceable for all. As the result, last week NATO's forces officially shifted from...
...there is one unassailable fact about the present controversy, it is that it is nothing new. True enough, the U.S. was once perfectly willing to leave Johnny chained to the alphabet. The New England Primer taught him his ABCs through little rhymes (e.g., for R: "Rachel doth mourn/ For her first born"). Noah Webster...
...fourth grade, students absorb the alphabet and are taught how to use the dictionary-a technique which the jargon-prone experts call a "location skill." They are also taught to vary the pace of their reading and even to know when to skim. "Far too many children and adults," says Arthur I. Gates of Columbia University's Teachers College, "have habituated one speed of reading which they use on all materials and for all purposes...
...lines she sang in a melodious but somewhat fruity "voice of gold." Rumor had it that she slumbered in a coffin lined with silk. The majestic Modjeska once held a U.S. audience "clutched in [her] spell" with a heartbreaking recital of what she later admitted was the Polish alphabet, and the mighty Duse would petulantly play her big scenes hidden from the audience...
Down among the French Cameroons in equatorial Africa, there lived a Sultan, a chief of the Bamoun tribesmen, who decided to be on the side of progress. The 17th Sultan of Foumban invented an alphabet of his own, taught his subjects the virtues of hard work and discipline and sent his son Seydou N'jimoluh Njoya off to learn French in a Protestant mission school. In time, Seydou himself became Sultan and decided to outdo his father in progress. Though he surrounded himself with the traditional swarms of wives and concubines (59 in all), and wore the heavy cloaks...