Word: petelka
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Dates: during 1948-1948
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...Ivan Petelka was tired of teaching Canadian immigrants to speak English. It was too tough-making Hollanders, Poles and Italians study a new language from scratch, especially one with such senseless spellings, impossible pronunciations and irregular conjugations. Petelka, an ambitious, 46-year-old ex-Ukrainian who had no trouble mastering eight languages himself, thought he could cook up a simpler system...
Last week, in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., Petelka was looking for converts to his "Numbered Words," a code language that would probably have more appeal for mathematicians than for poets or orators. Whether it would achieve any more practical success than several thousand other international languages, hopefully devised by linguists and peace zealots ever since Babel (among them: Esperanto, Basic English, Volapiik, Novial, Ido, Ro, Nulango), was another story...
...Petelka's system, like one invented by a Hollander in 1940, uses numbers to identify words in different languages with the same meanings. To do business with an Eskimo, an Iranian rug dealer would trot out his Persian number-dictionary, look up the numbers for the words in his mind, and jot them down. Receiving this coded message, the Eskimo customer would simply consult his Eskimauan number-dictionary...