Word: ik
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...first, the words that rolled so precisely off the pronouncer's tongue ("All-right-y. Yours is an old spelling-bee favorite, the study of fishes: ik-thee-olo-gee") seemed a cinch. By lunchtime. Mrs. Wilford White, the chief judge, had rung her bell only 16 times to signal the fall of contestants. But after lunch, the pronouncer began to give out words that even he admitted he could not define...
After that, there are a few instructions about gender (if jeval is horse, omjeval is stallion and jijeval is mare), ordinal numbers (balid is first, balsid is tenth), and adjectives (add ik to noun stems). Finally there are about a hundred words of vocabulary. Samples...
...names of everyday things: banana, fire, water, house, etc. It was tough going. They found that the only difference between many words was the presence or absence of a glottal stop (written ' in the phonetic system devised by Townsend). For example, 'ino ka 'okë 'ikën means "The jaguar is at the other side of the river." Pronounced without the stop before the third word, the same sounds mean "The jaguar has come." Townsend's team also found that the Cashibos could put the Germans to shame with multisyllabled words. In Cashibo...
Script (circ. 27,000), the West Coast imitation of The New Yorker, had almost written "The End" last Christmas, when the magazine's backers (including Moviemaker Sam Goldwyn and General Manager Bob Smith of the Los Angeles Daily News) pulled out. Publisher Ik Shuman, once an editor of The New Yorker, bought the monthly from them for $1, and tried to keep it going. But production costs were too high, and revenue too low. Last week Shuman sadly put the final issue to bed. Then he called his creditors together to write a P.S. to Script. Debts...
...Owlish Ik Shuman, who had made his mark as a crack editor on the New Yorker and Holiday, signed on for three years as publisher. His prescription: raise the rates to contributors, get better cartoons, "try for a civilized point of view...