Riecken Foundation Libraries in Central America

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I’m Phoebe Zimmermann with the VOA Special English Development Report.

Andrew Carnegie became rich in the American steel industry. But he spent much of his life giving away his money. One of his main interests was developing libraries in small towns. Andrew Carnegie died in nineteen nineteen.

Now a non-profit group in the United States has taken some of his ideas to Central America, especially Guatemala and Honduras. The Riecken Foundation has opened fifteen libraries in the past five years. Seven more are being built.

The goal is to help people explore new worlds. Not just through books, but also through computers connected to the Internet. The hope is to build as many as one thousand libraries throughout Central America.

The Riecken Foundation provides much of the cost of building the structures as well as paying for the books and computers. The group also trains committees to make the policies that govern how a library operates. Members of these library committees are not paid. They provide land for the building and pay for a full-time librarian. They also pay for water and electricity for the library.

Some of the people who work for the Riecken Foundation are former members of the Peace Corps. This government program sends Americans to help communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America. They work for two years or more with very little pay.

The foundation was created in two thousand by Allen Andersson, a businessman. He served in the Peace Corps in Honduras in the nineteen sixties. The very first employee, Meredith Bellows, served in Guatemala several years ago. Now she is a director of the foundation.

Miz Bellows worked in the small community of San Juan la Laguna. A story in G.W. Magazine in two thousand two described her work. Miz Bellows trained poor women who received small business loans. She told how she taught one woman to bake bread in ovens built from simple materials.

The library in the town is extremely small. But things are about to change. Meredith Bellows tells us that this week a bigger library will be completed in San Juan la Laguna.

Internet users can learn more about the Riecken Foundation at riecken.org.

This VOA Special English Development Report was written by Gary Garriott. I’m Phoebe Zimmermann.

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January 26, 2005 - Questions About Pronunciation and Style

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First broadcast: January 26, 2005

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: we answer a couple of questions with help from English teacher Lida Baker in Los Angeles.

The first is from a listener who teaches physics at Hebei Normal University in China. Bill Zhao wants to know if all voiceless consonants should be pronounced as voiced consonants if they come right after the sound of "s." Voiced means the vocal chords vibrate. For example, in the word "sports," he hears people pronounce the "p" as a "b." Lida Baker has the explanation:

LIDA BAKER: " It's not actually a 'b,' but it has certain characteristics of a 'b,' and I'll tell you why that is.

"'S' is a voiceless sound and 'p' is a voiceless sound. The problem in a word like 'sport' is that the vowel after the 'p' is a voiced sound. All vowels are voiced sounds: oh, ah, ee, oo, right? So what happens when you have a voiceless sound like a 'p' next to a voiced sound like a vowel, to some people that 'p' is going to sound a little bit like a 'b.' And that's what Mr. Zhao is hearing. There's a little bit of crossover between the voiceless and the voiced sound because of the fact that they're neighbors in that word.

"But if you look in any dictionary at the phonetic spelling of a word like sport or scout, that voiceless sound is written phonetically as a voiceless sound -- in other words, as a 'p' or a 't' or a 'k.' And dictionaries don't indicate that there is this kind of intermediate quality to the sound because native speakers don't hear that. O.K. The bottom line is, it is still a voiceless sound but it has qualities of a voiced sound because of the fact that the vowel comes after it.

"Now there is one exception which I'm sure Mr. Zhao was also aware of, which is the case where you have what is written as a 't' occurring between two vowels in a word like pretty, p-r-e-t-t-y, which in British English is pronounced pri-tee. But in American English that 't' changes into a 'd' sound and we say ... "

RS: "Pri-dee."

LIDA BAKER: "That's right, and the reason for that is that you have this voiceless 't' sound between two vowels.'

AA: "Wait, a voiceless 't' between two vowels, or is it -- "

LIDA BAKER: "Well, don't think about the spelling. Think about the pronunciation: preh-tee. If I slow it down, I'm going to pronounce it as a 't.' But there's those two vowel sounds there -- eh, ee -- and the voiceless 'tuh' will change to a 'd' sound in American English because of the fact that the consonant is surrounded by two voiced sounds.

"And the voiced sounds around it overwhelm, if you will, the voiceless quality of the consonant, and in this case it changes to a 'd.' But that's as far as I know only true in most dialects of North American English and it certainly isn't true in British English and in a lot of other varieties of English around the world."

AA: The next question is from Atefeh in Iran. She's studying English literature at a university, and would like to know the difference between the abbreviation U.S.A. spelled with periods and U.S.A. spelled without periods. As Lida Baker explains, the only difference has to do with style.

LIDA BAKER: "The meaning is the same, and whether you use the periods or not is something that your writing teacher is going to tell you that she prefers for you to write it this way or that way. Or if you're a professional writer and you're working for a newspaper or a magazine, generally different publications have their own style guidelines and they will tell you how they want you to write it.

"I should point out for people who are in the university and writing papers that there are style manuals for different college fields. For example, there is the style manual of the American Psychological Association, the APA style manual ... Students who are majoring in psychology as well as other social sciences are required to follow the guidelines of that style manual when they write papers. In my writing classes, I don't care which way students do it, as long as they're consistent."

AA: Lida Baker teaches in the American Language Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, and writes textbooks for English learners.

That's all for Wordmaster this week. Our e-mail address is word@voanews.com, and our Web site is voanews.com/wordmaster. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

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Ann Veneman, U.S. Agriculture Chief, Nominated to Lead UNICEF

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This is Phoebe Zimmermann with the VOA Special English Development Report.

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has nominated Ann Veneman to head UNICEF, the U.N. children's agency. Miz Veneman is leaving office as United States agriculture secretary. UNICEF directors must confirm her to replace Carol Bellamy as executive director. Miz Bellamy leaves in April after two five-year terms.

An American has always led the agency. The United States is the biggest financial supporter of UNICEF. But the Bush administration and the U.N. disagree about policies on reproductive health and sex education.

Last week, at a news conference, reporters asked Ann Veneman about her position on these issues. She said she does not believe that these or any other "social issues," as she called them, are part of the job of UNICEF. She said her main concerns will be to help children especially in the areas of education and health, and to deal with hunger issues.

The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund was created in nineteen forty-six to help children survive after World War Two. Today, it leads human rights campaigns, educational programs and other efforts around the world.

Ann Veneman is a lawyer who grew up on a farm. She is an expert on agriculture, international marketing and food aid. She resigned as agriculture secretary to President Bush after his re-election.

Miz Veneman said she would try to help the U.N. work toward its Millennium Development Goals. Five years ago, U.N. members agreed to make an effort to reduce the number of hungry and extremely poor in the world by half. The goal is to do this by two thousand fifteen. Other goals are to stop the spread of AIDS and malaria, and to provide education to all children.

But a new U.N. report says the Millennium Development Goals will not be reached without more money. More than two hundred experts prepared the report. They urge rich nations to increase their development aid by one hundred percent over the next ten years.

The plan calls on twenty-two countries to give almost fifty thousand million dollars more for next year than currently promised. The United States would be asked to give about forty percent of that additional aid.

World leaders will discuss the report at the U.N. General Assembly meeting in September.

This VOA Special English Development Report was written by Jill Moss. I'm Phoebe Zimmermann.

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January 19, 2005 - Interview with William Labov: Sound Change, Part 2

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First broadcast: January 19, 2005

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster we talk about regional changes in American English with University of Pennsylvania linguist William Labov [la-BOVE]. Imagine a situation like this:

WILLIAM LABOV: "Someone says 'gee, I got to find a coffee shop,' and someone said 'but you already had your coffee.' The people who would normally expect that 'copy shop' would be different from 'coffee shop' are quite confused when they enter an area where both are pronounced with the same vowel."

RS: "As were we right now."

AA: "So copy -- there are some Americans who say 'coffee' and 'copy' the same?"

WILLIAM LABOV: "Well, the vowel will be the same; the 'p' and 'f' differences are hardly worth noticing in rapid speech. But the vowels will be identical for the people who come from Pittsburgh or from Montreal.

"People have a great tendency to think our language works better than it does. So when we ask people to keep track of the number of misunderstandings that occur in the course of a day, there are quite a few. But if you ask them to remember them, they don't."

AA: Yet there may be more and more misunderstandings. Professor Labov says many local dialects are dying out and regional ones are growing stronger.

WILLIAM LABOV: "We have plenty of real-time studies to show that these changes are moving on so that the dialects of the United States are more different from each other now than they were 100 years ago."

RS: "That's so surprising, given that we travel so much."

AA: "And given that we hear each other so much more now through radio and television."

RS: "And even the Web."

WILLIAM LABOV: "Well, one of the things that social psychology has told us, and many other branches of study, is that listening passively to the radio and television doesn't change your behavior. You're influenced by the people you speak with in daily interaction face-to-face."

AA: "Now you've done a lot of research on the influence of women as a driving force in sound change, have you not?"

WILLIAM LABOV: "Yes, the difference between men and women is really important, and it's an astonishingly powerful force in most of the changes that we've talked about. In about 90 percent of them, women are way ahead of men -- a full generation ahead."

RS: "Now what is your explanation for -- you say it's who you interact with. But we are very mobile people. We go from coast to coast. We take a job in one city and then another. We're taking our language with us and interacting with people on business trips and such."

WILLIAM LABOV: "Well, almost everybody will tell you, 'Oh, I'm a regular chameleon. I change my speech according to who I'm talking to.' That's a great exaggeration. The fundamental pattern that you learned as a child stays with you pretty much for the rest of your life."

AA: "Now, Doctor Labov, I'm curious, let's take an example like Southern California or other parts of the country where there's a large number of immigrants, and so you've got different languages and different sounds and dialects all coming together. What effect are you seeing?"

WILLIAM LABOV: "Well, people used to think that the American dialects are the result of all the immigrants coming in. And that turns out to be just the opposite. Gender has a big influence on the way you speak, your social class, what city you're living in.

"But the language spoken by your parents has almost no influence in most areas, so that the people whose parents spoke Italian or Yiddish or German or Irish, now in the second or third generation will speak almost the same. That's the powerful assimilationist tendency in the United States.

"There is one exception to that, and you mentioned Southern California. For the first time we are getting a native type of English which shows a certain amount of ethnic difference, and that's the people whose parents spoke Spanish and who may have grown up themselves speaking Spanish."

AA: "Can you give us an example or two?"

WILLIAM LABOV: "Let's take the pronunciation of a word like card, and old. Most Americans will sometimes drop the d in old, and you'll see this when you read a novel, 'good ol' Joe,' o-l apostrophe. But Americans never drop the d when it comes after an r, so you don't talk about a 'car game' for a 'card game.' Nobody will say 'I had a har time' for 'a hard time.' But Latino speakers will do this.

"These are small differences. We still don't know what the future holds for us with the large Asian group that's coming in the United States. But in every community there are some groups who assimilate totally and become absolutely natural speakers of that local dialect, and others who become native speakers but not really local."

AA: University of Pennsylvania linguist William Labov is the project director for the forthcoming Atlas of North American English. You can learn more about this project from a link at our Web site. The address is voanews.com/wordmaster. And our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

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January 12, 2005 - Interview with William Labov: Sound Change, Part 1

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First broadcast: January 12, 2005

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: the sounds of change.

RS: If you want a good example of how language changes, just picture a "mouse." Are you thinking of a rodent -- or a device for moving the cursor on a computer screen?

AA: Shifts in language also involve pronunciation. In fact, our friend Ali the English teacher in Iran suggested this topic, since regional dialects can be confusing for English learners.

RS: Native speakers, too. If someone in Chicago offered us some "sacks," we might think it was for carrying our groceries, not for keeping our feet warm. "Sacks" is how Chicagoans pronounce what we call "socks."

AA: The linguist William Labov at the University of Pennsylvania cites this example of a sound change in the United States called the "Northern Cities Shift."

WILLIAM LABOV: "Now what happens here is the short-a becomes 'ai' [like in "yeah"] in every single word, so that people have, say, 'theaht' and 'feahct'. In the meantime, the short words spelled with short-o like 'socks' or 'block' or 'cot' move into the position that was formerly occupied by 'ah.' So the man's name [John becomes] 'Jahn' -- that's a man's name, 'Jahn.' And the girl's name [Jan] becomes 'Jain.' So this is like a game of musical chairs. We call it chain shifting, in which five or six vowels all change places."

RS: William Labov and other researchers have been tracking sound changes for a big project, the Atlas of North American English, to be published in a few months.

WILLIAM LABOV: "Well, American dialects have been studied for a hundred years or so. But unlike European countries, America has never finished a map of the United States, only the eastern United States is covered and a few spots here and there. So we included both Canada and the United States in a study we started in 1992. And in about six years we covered the entire continent using a telephone survey of all the urbanized areas, the big cities. So it covers about two-thirds of the population of North America, and it represents them with about 800 speakers.

"And what's most remarkable is that the rapidly changing dialects of the United States form a very solid, clear picture. And instead of getting a pepper-and-salt effect, we find very clear and sharp divisions between the dialects of the United States, which are getting more different from each other as time goes on. The most important differences have developed in this huge area around the Great Lakes region which we call the Inland North, going from Buffalo, Syracuse, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee. Those great cities occupying about 35 million people are all moving in a very different direction from the rest of the United States."

RS: "How do you go about describing how people talk? How do you put together an atlas -- you have to actually hear the people talk."

WILLIAM LABOV: "Well, yes, our Web site is in construction now, is being created by people at the University of Marburg [in Germany], is going to be quite a remarkable innovation in dialectology because on this Web site you will see the maps, you will see all the cities. And when you click on any one point you will be able to hear maybe a minute or two of speech from each person in that area. And, furthermore, you can hear the same word pronounced in many, many different cities across North America.

"The answer to your question about sounds is that we can measure sounds acoustically and the difference between 'mad,' 'maad' and 'maaad,' the difference between 'go' and 'gow' and 'gaow,' will show up very clearly in these measurements, which is one of our main businesses. So about 440 speakers of our 800 have been analyzed in that way."

RS: "So these are all from telephone conversations?"

WILLIAM LABOV: "Yep."

AA: "And you give them a list of words to repeat?"

WILLIAM LABOV: "We actually have mailed people word lists. We focus upon pairs of words very often which are the same in some areas and different in other areas. For about half the geographic area of North America, the words 'cot' and 'caught' are pronounced the same way, [and] 'Don' and 'Dawn.' So they will say 'Don Hock married Don Hock' whereas the people in New York might saw 'Dawn Hock married Don Hawk.'"

RS: We continue our conversation with University of Pennsylvania linguist William Labov next week on Wordmaster.

AA: We will also have a link to where you can learn more about the forthcoming Atlas of North American English, at our Web site, voanews.com/wordmaster.

RS: And our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

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December 29, 2004 - Top 10 Words Looked Up Online in 2004

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Broadcast: December 29, 2004 Adam Phillips looks back at the words that most intrigued users of Merriam-Webster's online dictionary over the past 12 months.

AP: For years, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary has been one of the most popular and authoritative dictionaries of the American language in use -- even when it was just in book form. Today, the company's online dictionary is visited hundreds of thousands of times each month over the Internet. Because its website records the words people want to know, Merriam-Webster is able to compile a ranking of what's hot and what's not in American speech. Peter Sokolowski is an editor there.

PETER SOKOLOWSKI: "The most commonly looked up words every day of the year are words that are often easily confused or have definition that are a little bit tricky - words like paradigm, which means the plan or a typical example of something, or serendipity, which means a fortunate or lucky event or moment. Or words that are easily confused with each other such as affect and effect, which are both nouns and verbs."

Merriam-Webster has just announced 2004's ten most frequently looked-up words. Mr. Sokolowski says that, taken together, they offer a sense of what really mattered in the public sphere.

The news from Iraq, for example, prompted many people to look up the word insurgent. It means "a person who revolts against civil authority or an established government; especially a rebel not recognized as a belligerent." Insurgent ranked number four on the Merriam- Webster list. The editor notes that U.S. domestic news also played a big role in 2004.

PETER SOKOLOWSKI: "We have the word incumbent which means a person who holds an office -- a political office -- and the world electoral, which refers to the process of electing a public official. And those two words obviously were very popular this year because of the American presidential election."

Words for natural phenomena were among the big winners this year. Peter Sokolowski points to cicada, which is the type of insect that infested eastern North America this past summer, and hurricane -- 2004's fifth most popular "look-up" word. PETER SOKOLOWSKI: "That is a word that everyone knows the meaning of. It is a storm -- a very violent storm -- of a kind that is typically found in the Atlantic Ocean. And it affected America particularly this past year."

Mr. Sokolowski offers two reasons why so many people might have looked up this quite familiar word.

PETER SOKOLOWSKI: "One is that it is spelled with two R's, and often, words that have two consonants next to each other are words that people are a little insecure about the spelling. Part of the problem with English is, of course, that we do not have an orthographic pronunciation, which is to say that words are not always pronounced the way they are spelled. That, right there, is a huge part of why people look up words.

And also I think people like the definition of hurricane because it gives the actual wind speed that a hurricane requires, [which is] 119 kilometers an hour or greater. So that is an official definition, and I think that's one reason people look the word up."

Peloton, a French word meaning the main body of riders in a bicycle race, clocked in at number seven on Merriam-Webster's list in 2004. Mr. Sokolowski says that's due to Lance Armstrong, the American cyclist who won the Tour de France race again this year.

PETER SOKOLOWSKI: "What is interesting about peloton is, it's the second time that word has come into English in 300 years. In the 1600s, the word platoon entered English - to mean a group of men, often soldiers. And that word is a very popular English word, especially in military circles. And now, peloton has come into English. They are really the same word but with different meanings."

The number one most popular word on the Merriam Webster site was blog. It's one of a host of new Internet and computer-related words that are now officially mainstream. PETER SOKOLOWSKI: "And blog is the latest. In fact, it's the newest in the dictionary. Blog is short for Web log -- that is, Internet log. And we define it as 'a website that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.'

"Blog really entered the language in 1999. That's the first time we found the word used in print. But then we had to wait and see if that word would become very generally accepted and understood, and this past year, especially with the Presidential election and the folks who wrote blogs for political commentary, they found themselves being reported in the mainstream press. That's when the word got into the dictionary. It's just going in now. It'll be in print in the spring."

Other words that made the top ten list include partisan, meaning 'a firm adherent to a party, faction, cause or person," and sovereignty, meaning "supreme power, especially over a body politic" or "freedom from external control."

The biggest surprise on the top ten list may be defenestration, which means "a throwing of a person or thing out of a window." Listeners are free to speculate for themselves about why that word was so popular in 2004. Editor Peter Sokolowski did not say.

For Wordmaster, this is Adam Phillips reporting from New York.

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January 5, 2005 - 'Palindrome'

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Riders in the Sky

Broadcast: January 5, 2005

AA: I'm Avi Arditti. Rosanne Skirble is away. This week on Wordmaster: some wordplay to start off 2005.

Each New Year we play a production inspired by a 1950s television series about a gunfighter named "Paladin." Only the skit is called "The Ballad of Palindrome."

A palindrome is something that reads the same backward or forward, like "a man, a plan, a canal: Panama." You might be wondering, what do palindromes have to do with the New Year?

Well, January is named for Janus, the Roman god of beginnings. Janus is shown with two faces: one looking backward, the other looking forward.

So a skit about palindromes seems a fitting way to mark the end of one year and the beginning of another. And so here now is the cowboy musical group Riders in the Sky, joined by singer and songwriter Johnny Western, with "The Ballad of Palindrome."

AUDIO: "The Ballad of Palindrome/Palindrome: The Scene with Johnny Western"

Riders in the Sky and Johnny Western with "The Ballad of Palindrome." It's from the 1998 album "A Great Big Western HOWDY!" on the Rounder Records label.

That's Wordmaster for this week. Our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. And our Web site is voanews.com/wordmaster. Wishing you all the best in 2005, I’m Avi Arditti.

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Canning Food

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I'm Gwen Outen with the VOA Special English Development Report.

People have always had to find ways to keep food safe to eat. Methods to dry, smoke and salt food were invented thousands of years ago. The process of canning is much more recent. This storage method keeps food safe to eat for long periods of time. Today, canning is one of the most popular methods of storing food.

Canning uses heat to kill bacteria and other micro-organisms that cause poisons to form in food. Canning also takes away the air that these organisms need to live. One popular method of canning uses a water bath.

Clean fruits or vegetables are placed in glass bottles. The food can be put into the bottles either hot or cold. The cold method is used for soft fruits and vegetables that could lose their shape or taste. Firmer fruits and most vegetables are usually cooked. They take up less space in the bottles.

After the food has been placed in glass bottles, boiling water is poured into the bottles to about three centimeters below the top. Then covers are placed on the bottles, but are not turned all the way. The bottles are placed in a large container filled with warm water that is then brought to a boil.

The water must completely cover the bottles, from three to five centimeters over the top. When the water boils, any air in the bottles will be expelled. The boiling continues for several minutes. Then the bottles are allowed to cool. Finally, they are placed briefly into cold water. This makes a strong barrier to keep the air out. In other words, a vacuum is created.

When the bottles are completely cool, notes can be placed on them to identify what is inside. The bottles can then be stored in a cool, dark place at a temperature of between four and twenty-one degrees Celsius.

Canning allows your family to enjoy foods that might not come fresh throughout the year. It is also a good way to store food for six months to a year, or even several years, in case of an emergency. It does not cost much to continue canning every year once the equipment has been purchased.

You can get more information about canning food from the group, Volunteers in Technical Assistance. VITA is on the Internet at vita.org.

This VOA Special English Development Report was written by Gary Garriott. I'm Gwen Outen.

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