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THE EVENING SUN, BALTIMORE, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 1946 Appeal For Gioba! Alphabet Made Washington, Dec. 18 (^P)— Blind form er Senator Robert L. Owen, of Oklahoma, plans to appeal to the people of the world through vari ous ways to adopt his global al phabet. Me has sent to the printer, he said,, a 48-pa^c booklet bo lia_s prepareu 1 Tfliing^TToW any" child any where in the world can learn to read and write the English lan guage correctly in from ten to twenty weeks instead of several years.” tributed through a nonprofit organi zation which is seeking to establish the alphabet as a means of getting English spoken as a universal lan guage. Later, Owen said, he plans to broadcast an explanation of the global alphabet plan and appeal ‘ ‘to the people to support it for their own advantage.” Has Made Typewriter ‘ ‘I expect the press and the radio to support it as a matter o f public service,” Owen said. ‘ ‘It Is being handled ori a nonprofit basis en tirely, fo r the public good only, and I am making nothing out o f it at all. In fact, I have spent $25,000 of my own m oney on it up to now.” Owen disclosed that he also has invented a typewriter which has the shorthand-like characters of the global alphabet. The characters rep resent certain phonetic sounds used in speaking English. To the eye they resemble shorthand characters. “ With it I can write in any language in the world, including the language o f the Indian tribes in Oklahoma,” he said, adding: “ The greatest asset in the world is the intelligence and the industry of the people of the world, and the global alphabet will quickly help wipe out illiteracy and result in greater industry.” T o D is trib u te T h o u san d s About 50,000 to 100,000 copies of these will be printed and dis Improving the Alphabet The World Language Foundation, headed by former Senator Robert L. Owen, believes it would be easier to make English universal if our present alphabet were increased to 37 letters. The Foundation estimates that more than 400 million people now speak English. Some of them do not speak it very well. Chinese is credited with 200 million users, but there are several different Chinese languages. . The Language Foundation asserts that a 37-letter alphabet could repre sent every sound in any language. It does not state how many sounds there are, but our present alphabet of 26 letters is used for more than 50 sounds in English alone. And, the alphabet makes no provision for those unarticu lated sounds used to express approval, doubt, surprise, or negation. Some times these are more effective than enunciated words. Undoubtedly world understanding would be increased if all people spoke one language, and more especially if each of all the words in that language had only one meaning. Enlarging or diminishing the alpha bet hardly could be expected to change, at least for several generations, the laryngeal formations of different peo ples, which have a good deal to do with the sounds they make in forming words. The relatively small span of latitude between • northern and south ern Europe covers definite differences in ability to enunciate certain sounds, differences that have been developed through centuries. People who have lived a long time in China say that the way to learn to speak Chinese is to begin at .the age of 2. Chinese probably have the same opinion of English. World uniformity of the English lan- ' guage is being furthered by radio trans mission and distribution of the printed word. It even might be furthered in Russia if American publications were allowed to be circulated there. •
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