Word: alphabets
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Thereupon the Office of Indian Affairs created a new Navajo language. Its authors: Novelist-Ethnologist Oliver (Laughing Boy) La Farge and Smithsonian Institution's Dr. John P. Harrington. The new language used the English alphabet, created words which resembled the scientists' jargon and the Navajos' vernacular closely enough so that both sides could make head & tail of them. Last week posters drawn by Navajo artists and designed to teach Navajos the language by means of pictures and text (see cut) were displayed all over the reservation. Passed around in Navajo classrooms was the first Navajo primer...
...remark he made a year or two ago, concerning the famous initialed institutions of the New Deal. He said that all but five letters were used in these, and that all we needed was a Quick Loans Corporation for Xylophones, Yachts, and Zithers to exhaust the alphabet. . . . Regardless of whether or not you think this one is funny, it unquestionably comes under the heading of a joke...