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You Can Learn Chinese Easily With the New Global Alphabet £ V j~ S o ^ / o / 9 / j /? < /* . / / M j £ By C h a r l e s A. M ic h ie PM's Bureau WASHINGTON, July 31.-T h e skimpy little 26-letter alphabet we use to write pieces like this is pretty old hat these days. I couldn’t put in a phrase in Chinese or apt quotation from the Swahili with it if I wanted to. Senate Document 49 seeks to correct a situation which is' rapidly becoming * insufferable to m e n .of letters. It is the global alphabet, .concocted by Robert L. Owen,’ for mer Senator from Oklahoma, and ■ Soil. -E lm e r pFheznns tD., Okla.). Using Owen’s alphabet with 41 symbols and 16 others i which are for emergencies only you could sit down and bat out a story in Eskimo or Afghan if you wanted to and a Norwegian or a Croat or came up with an alphabet of 50 an American could read it with letters, which he said could ease. Always providing he had press any sound in any tongue. boned up on Owen’s little dinguses “Unfortunately,” writes Owen in that take the place of letters. Senate Document 49, “international Owen guarantees he could teach transportation and communication almost anybody Chinese in a month made concerted action (on the or two with the new alphabet Lepsius alphabet) impracticable at which looks a little bit like short that time . . .” hand but isn’t. The whole thing is Seeing as how international j based on 18 consonant. and 18 transportation and communication i vowel sounds and five double con- among these same linguists— or 1sonants. Want to know what the their successors— isn’t in much bet five double-deckers are? “Ch,” “Sh,” ter shape now, it doesn’t look as if “Th,” “Wh” and “Ng.” Owen is going to get any farther In Senate Document 49 Owen with his new alphabet than old points out that Sequoia, who Lepsius did with his. couldn’t speak anything but Chero Owen allows that it wouldn’t be kee, invented an alphabet of 85 very hard to change over all the symbols by which he taught his typewriters and linotype machines fellow tribesmen to write Cherokee in die world to his new alphabet— in only two weeks. So that’s how which, by die way, is piade up of the Indians found out we had a lot of little things that look like swiped their country on them? pollywogs, curves, triangles and Another fellow, a Dr. C. R. Lep- others that are for all the world sius, who dickered with alphabets like the things Nephew Willy draws at the University of Berlin in 1863 on the wallpaper. ex- q
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