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International Scene
OYMOrlt. I
THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, JULY 7, 1993. PAGE 5.
Buddy, can
you spare
a dime?
Buddy, can you spare a dime? I'm just
kidding. I've got a dime. If you could spare
three or four thousand bucks, this might turn
out to be a meaningful conversation. But
never mind, forget it. We're all singing the
Short of Hard Cash Blues.
Most of us anyway. In place of dollars and
cents we've got bills and dreams. That's what
keeps us plugging away at our nine-to-five
grinds, buying lottery tickets and investing
mad money in a few shares of Consolidated
Moose Pasture every once in a while.
There's no shortage of folks trying to get
rich, but you hardly ever come across
someone who's trying to be poor.
No money in it.
Still ... did you ever wonder what it must
be like to be rich? Really rich? Rockefeller/
King Midas/Scrooge McDuck rich?
Well, I can tell you it's no picnic.
For one thing, a billion dollars won't buy
what it used to, you know. Not by a long
shot. Why, measured in 1987 dollars, a
billion today is really no more than a measly
$795 million according to Fortune magazine.
Which explains why there are more than
twice as many billionaires in the world as
The joys
of learning
English
My wife teaches English as a second
language in a local high school and she is in
somewhat of a growth industry. Not only do
we have hordes of people in Canada learning
the language but, given its importance as an
international language, there are any number
of people elsewhere attempting to get their
tongues around the difficulties of it.
It would not surprise you to learn that I
frequently get asked:
(1) How can one best go about learning
English and
(2) what are the biggest difficulties for
foreigners?
My answer to the first part is to be born in
an English-speaking country and I reply to
the second part by asking if they would like
me to write a book on it or just give them a
short answer. They always opt for the
second choice.
Well, here goes! Why can an otherwise
intelligent race of people as the English
completely screw up when it comes to
creating the spelling of the language they
speak? I have never seen anything worse.
You want examples: I will give you
examples. Take, for openers, the
combination of words -ough. First of all, by
itself it has no pronunciation. When you put
other words with it, all sorts of things
happen. With 'r' it is pronounced as an T,
with 'thr' it takes on the sound 'oo', put `th'
only and it becomes 'o' but put `th' at the
front and 't' at the end and it immediately
changes to There may be a rule for all
this but when I was young there wasn't and I
still haven't found one. Maybe some English
there were just six years ago. Back in 1987
there weren't even a hundred people in the
world with a billion bucks to their name.
Today, the club membership stands at 233.
It's interesting to peruse the list and pick
out the cream of the crop, the 10 richest
people in the world. One of them is a
woman. There are three Japanese, several
Arabs and a handful of Americans.
Put away those maple leaf flags folks.
There are no Canadians among the top 10.
You have to go all the way down to number
17 before you uncover a Canuck. There
you'll find media tycoon Ken Thompson and
his modest $5.7 billion dollar grubstake.
Queen Elizabeth is the one woman on the
list. They reckon her stock investments, race
horses, jewellery and art, not to mention ahh
... real estate, mean Her Majesty (make that
Her Maje$ty) is worth just under $8 billion
and number nine slot in the top 10.
You know all those Mars Bars you've
eaten over the years? Well Mister Forrest
Mars Sr. would like to thank you most
sincerely for that. Your patronage earned
him the title of the world's third richest
person with a fortune of $14 billion, give or
take a nickel.
And yes, Virginia, there really is
legendary American family called the
Waltons, but it ain't the folks that lived on
Walton mountain. This Walton family owns
the Wal-Mart store chain which the number-
crunchers figure is worth $23.5 billion.
teacher can help me.
Then there is `kn'. Well, I know where
that comes from. It is Germanic as in Knabe
Knecht, etc. However, somewhere between
German and English the pronunciation of the
`k' got dropped, but it was apparently too
much to drop off the letter as well so we end
up with a k which is written but not
pronounced. Logical it is not.
I should tell you that even such a famous
English speaking author as George Bernard
Shaw got fed up with the language. He once
stated to a surprised audience that he had
just eaten an excellent dish of "photi" that
day. A sea of puzzled looks faced him. He
continued to say that, given the rules of
English pronunciation, the 'ph' could be
pronounced T as in phone, 'i' as in women,
and `sh' as in tuition. In short, said Shaw,
photi was an acceptable way to spell fish.
Then there are words like "sewer". You
pronounce it one way if it describes someone
who sews and another way to describe
something that carries water. There are silent
letters all over the place and there are letters
whose pronunciation defies logic. Why, for
example, should `ie' be pronounced one way
in pie and another in piece? Why is a 'w'
necessary with 'r' to have a word
pronounced with an 'r' as in write. Shouldn't
the 'r' be enough by itself?
You may say that all languages are like
that but they are not. Major tongues such as
German, Italian and Spanish are 99 per cent
phonetic, which means that they are spelt the
same way as they sound. Once you hear a
word, you know how to spell it. If you are an
immigrant to Canada and you have a native
tongue which is phonetic, English becomes
something of a nightmare to you when you
have to sit down and learn it.
There are, to be sure, hard things about
any language. Prepositions are a case in
point. English says "at someone's house",
German uses "by". English says "from time
to time" French says "from time in time"
I
The richest person in the world? A rotund
and smiling chap in white silk robes whose
business card — if he carried a business card
— would read Sultan of Brunei. Brunei is a
laughable little chunk of sand not much
bigger than Prince Edward Island.
Fortunately for the Sultan his patch of
sand sits atop the richest known oil and gas
deposit on the planet, which makes the
Sultan worth a cool $37 billion.
How much is that? How much is thirty-
seven thousand million dollars? Who
knows? Who knows how much anything is
these days? We live in a world where a man-
child like Robbie Alomar gets four and a
half million bucks a season for playing
second base in what used to be a kid's game.
We live in a world where a crook like Ivan
Boesky, the convicted securities dealer, can
tell a judge with a straight face that he needs
$20 million from his ex-wife because he's
"barely surviving". The judge agreed. He
also ordered Boesky's ex-wife to pay him
$180,000 a year for life and to throw in a
$2.5 million dollar mansion in California.
Yeah, that oughtta keep the wolf from the
door.
Ivan Boesky proves the truth of
Hemingway's retort to F. Scott Fitzgerald.
"Let me tell you about the very rich," said
Fitzgerald. "They are different from you and
me."
"Yes," retorted Hemingway. "They have
more money."
and so on. I have found that, regardless of
the language, one of the hardest things to
learn well are the prepositions and you had
better accept this.
The English verb system is rather easy
compared to some, with the subjunctive just
about disappeared from the language; the
same cannot be said for German, French,
Italian or Spanish. We don't have gender
while any student of French has spent hours
learning whether to use le or la with a noun.
In short there are some compensating
factors.
However, more and more it is the spoken
language which is to the fore. For this reason
it is essential that a good command of the
spoken word be acquired. In this respect it is
worth relating another story about George
Bernard Shaw. In his will he bequeathed a
sum of money for the purpose of having a
phonetic alphabet created for the English
language so that people would no longer
have the agony of saying it one way and
spelling it another. A contest was duly held
according to the terms of the will and, if I
remember correctly, a woman from Nova
Scotia won a major prize, one of three
granted. The results were filed away, never
to be seen again. We are not, it seems, ready
for a dramatic change in our spVipg,__ _
The
Short
of it
By Bonnie Gropp
Common sense
doesn't spoil
the fun
The long, hot summer has been a long
time coming.
Last year, as we'll all recall, was a
disappointment. Giving us no evening
where you had to kick off the covers to keep
from sweltering, it was with a new and
accepting tolerance that I welcomed this
weekend's sauna-like conditions
Summer gives us the opportunity to move
a little slower and if we're able to get away
with it, do a little less. It's a time to relax and
have fun. We quickly learn the tricks to
beating the heat, sealing our houses from the
swelter during the day then opening them at
night to let in the still muggy, though
slightly cooler temperatures.
What you don't need however, is to have
someone make the sleeping a little more
difficult. Thanks to several young people
who were obviously incapable of feeling
anything, let alone the heat, Saturday
evening was a restless one.
Contrary to .what the younger generation
has always thought they did not invent a
good time. It's been going on for quite some
time often with the same abandon. But what
many (and I know there are exceptions,
thankfully) of this younger generation
seemed to have developed is a total
disregard for any other feelings than the ones
that bring them pleasure.
It was 3 a.m. on Sunday morning that our
quiet neighbourhood was awakened by the
revving of car engines and loud, very loud,
conversation. It ticked me off, but I could
live with it. However, my dog couldn't and
rather than have her contribute to what was
already a noise that would have commanded
attention in daylight let alone the dead of
night, my husband went to retrieve her.
Opening the door he suggested to the
group, in an admittedly less than friendly
manner, they move on, which they did in an
eruption of screaming voices and tires.
About one block up the street, one of the
youths decided to sum up his view on the
interference in two words — second word is
"you" and the first has four letters —
delivered in a blockbuster voice that would
have done Ethel Merman proud.
I started wondering if I had ever in my
youth spoken to an adult like that. The
answer was an emphatic "No!" The closest I
ever came was "Shut up!", which I said once
then spent the next four days waiting for my
mouth to move back to the centre of my
face. (It may have been a crude discipline
tactic, but for me at least, it was effective.)
I was no goody two shoes. I've got to tell
you, and I'm sure my mother would too, I
was not an easy kid to raise. But, I and my
peers would never have forced our party on
our parents. While we may not always have
liked or agreed with adults, there was a
grudging respect. Only the potential
delinquents didn't have it.
I almost wish it were that easy now. The
majority of these kids aren't bad, they're
actually quite nice until booze turns their
Jeckyll to Hyde.
Thankfully, there are a lot of good young
people around us who are a pleasure to talk
with and show a strength and maturity that I
wish I'd had at their age. They still have fun
on hot summer nights but do it with some
common sense. I just hope the other ones
don't make it hard to remember that.
Arthur Black