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12:25PM
Apr-24-10
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Nzalamba
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bfoose said:
I was so glad to hear the caller from California, who was also taught A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y and W! Mrs. Bassett taught us that in second grade in 1974, but could never give us an example. I had started to think that I never really saw that W on her bulletin board. I would be interested to know if that caller also was using the Houghton-Mifflin second grade reading series.
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12:33PM
Apr-24-10
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Nzalamba
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My second grade teacher, Miss Walgrave, taught us – in Portland OR public school in the late 1940s – the A E I O U and sometimes Y and, she said, W in "bowl." Miss W was a terrific teacher -my mom told me more than 30 years later that she'd never encountered such a good primary teacher anywhere else – and I'd never questioned this notion until now. If the W is not a vowel in "bowl," what is it?
Also, regarding the Benson bubblers, we referred to the things we drank out of in school as "drinking fountains," and used "bubblers" only for the ones out on the street that Mr. Benson was responsible for. I wonder if anyone else from Portland had that same experience?
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6:09PM
Apr-28-10
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telemath
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Amy West said:
telemath said:
Regarding the alarmist opinion that texting will ruin literacy…
I'm looking for a historical analogy to compare it to. How about telegraphs? Did the terse nature of telegraphs raise alarm among the purists of the day?
Or how about when all the odd European letters (the German vowels with umlauts, the Danish representations of ae, oe, and aa, etc.) were formed due to a paper shortage? Did that raise the highbrows' eyebrows?
Re: the telegraph shorthand, I think Crystal discusses the historical predecessors of IM and TXT abbreviations in Txtg the Gr8 Db8, and yes, IIRC, there was a similar reaction.
As for the "odd European letters" being formed due to a paper shortage, that sounds very much like a myth to me. I'm not a historian of writing systems, but these characters have predecessors in medieval manuscripts written on parchment and vellum and are much more likely to be derived from suspension marks in the medieval scripts. For example, in German MSs, you'll often find a little suspended "e" where you'd later see an umlaut/diaresis.
There's no doubt that the umlaut came from condensing vowel combinations – the 'e' first trailed another vowel, then was written above the vowel, then was morphed into an umlaut. A similar process in Danish condensed ae, oe and aa into new vowels. The only part in question is the paper shortage. But why the forced brevity if not to conserve paper?
Thanks for the reference to Crystal's work! It's nice to know that not all my theories are crackpot. 
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1:06AM
May-06-10
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Elysia
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Bubblers: Another listener mentioned the "Benson Bubblers" in Portland Oregon, near where I live. They were provided by Simon Benson, local businessman who noted alchohol on the breath of his workers and asked why they drank in the middle of the day. They replied that there was no fresh water source in the area, so he provided money to the City of Portland to commission and install 50 of the four headed bubblers in downtown Portland. Alchohol consumption reportedly decreased by 25%. I think that the style of the bubbler is descriptive of what they do – water bubbles directly upward continuously – no on/off control, and drains through the plumbing. Similar to those vertical rock bubbling fountains you see in front of some expensive homes and commercial buildings where the water flows down the sides of the rock after bubbling up through a hole drilled from top to bottom. So perhaps this style is called a "bubbler," whereas another "fountain" style with an on/off or continuous stream of water flowing out to the side might be called a drinking fountain. As far as I know, both terms are used in Portland, and no one would tell you that it was wrong if you used either word. I've never been to Wisconsin or Rhode Island – but maybe they also have this bubbler style fountain from which the term was popularized?
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4:44PM
May-09-10
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srleonard
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bfoose said:
I was so glad to hear the caller from California, who was also taught A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y and W! Mrs. Bassett taught us that in second grade in 1974, but could never give us an example. I had started to think that I never really saw that W on her bulletin board. I would be interested to know if that caller also was using the Houghton-Mifflin second grade reading series.
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4:47PM
May-09-10
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srleonard
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We did use Houghlin-Mifflin when I was in elementary school in the 1960s in Dayton, OH area and when I was in second grade or so my best friend's teacher told him w was sometimes, though very rarely, a vowel. The example I recall, though, was words like "owe", which even at the time I thought was weak.
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3:30PM
Jul-19-10
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vgfalcao
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Re: bubbler. I grew up in suburban Maryland and then went to college in Worcester, MA, in 1975. Most of the students there were from somewhere in New England, and almost all of them called the drinking fountains bubblers. The people from Massachusetts definitely called them bubblers. I'm guessing that Massachusetts has had a lot of changeover in population since then and has moved away from the term "bubbler".
And in Catholic school around 1965, we learned that the vowels were a, e, i, o u and sometimes y and w. I think they used words like "town" to show the use of w as a vowel? And they might have used the adverbial "ly" as an example of when "y" is used as a vowel. Or maybe a simpler word like "easy".
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