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/ P / l J «: ri PROVIDENCE, MONDAY, AUGUST 2, 1943 Global Alphabet Former Senator Owen of Oklahoma has devised an alphabet of 41 symbols through which, he claims, reasonably intelligent people the world around can communicate with one another. Within two months, he says, a reason ably intelligent American can be speak ing Chinese. The 41 symbols, which look like shorthand but aren’t, deal simply with universal vowel and consonant sounds. If any new sounds crop up in Tibet or Hoboken, the Senator has 16 symbols in reserve. Such a simple system of phonetics sounds like just what we’ve been wait ing for ever since an unsocial destiny broke up the brotherhood of man around the foot of the Tower of Babel. Since then there have been over 200 at tempts to establish a universal language < but through some deep-seated perver sity in human nature they’ve all failed. All but Esperanto, which still seems to be going strong. But compared with Esperanto, mas tering Senator O w e n ’ s 41 simple sounds seems like child’s play— no •spelling difficulties, very little gram mar, a minimum of ink and paper, and instead of strange vocabularies to struggle with, just a lot of fascinating, fundamental noises to work up. Besides, the Owen system neatly strips international lawyers and career diplomats of the excess verbiage t through which reasonable men get into trouble, and it achieves such startling clarity that only unreasonable people can hope to arrive at misunderstand ings. The only fault with.it, so far as we can see, is that it’s too good to be
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