Edward Curtis, Photographer of the American Indian

During his long life, the photographer Edward Curtis (1868-1952) created perhaps the most authentic and certainly the largest photographic record of the American Indian. He took more than 40,000 photographs of Native Americans, determined not just to record, but also to document his subjects.

The son of a minister, Curtis grew up in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Fascinated with photography, he dropped out of school in the sixth grade and built his own camera. At 17, he apprenticed with a photographer in St. Paul. 

After some years, the pace of Curtis’s life began to pick up. In 1892, he married Clara Phillips; the first of their four children, Harold, was born the following year. When his parents moved to Seattle 1896, Curtis and his family went with them.

Fate struck. Curtis photographed his first Native American, Princess Angeline, daughter of Chief Sealth of Seattle (1895). A few years later, he was invited to join the Harriman Alaska Expedition, and after that, he photographed the Blackfoot people of Montana (1900).

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By this point, Curtis had made thousands of images of Indians, and financier J.P. Morgan offered to publish his work. The product of this collaboration, The North American Indian, was issued in twenty volume and contained more than 1,500 photographs. The final volume was published in 1930.

“The information that is to be gathered … respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once or the opportunity will be lost.”

–Edward Curtis, preface to The North American Indian

Curtis was an ethnographer, dedicated to recording the Indian’s way of life before it vanished; in addition to his photographs, he made wax cylinder recordings of Indian music and language, wrote down tribal folklore and history, and noted down facts of everyday life such as food, clothing, recreation, and funeral customs. Not infrequently, these materials are our only surviving information.

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Such devotion to his calling, however, came at a cost to Curtis. In 1917, his wife divorced him. He was not a good businessman and was arrested once for failure to pay alimony. In 1924, he sold an original ethnographic film, The Land of the Headhunters for $1,500; the film had cost him $20,000 to make.

Despite these troubles, Curtis continued his work. Much of the material he produced is now part of a special archive at the Library of Congress.

His work remains an astounding gift to the American people.

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Photos: Top: Edward Curtis; Middle: Princess Angeline; Bottom: Apache, Morning Bath. All photos: Edward Curtis, WikiCmns; Public Domain.

The Syro-Phonecian Woman

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The “Syrophonecian Woman” in the Gospel of Mark has perplexed me for some time. As an episode in Mark’s gospel (the first of the four canonical gospels to be written), and one that portrays a woman outwitting Jesus, I’m inclined to think the episode is genuine.

Then we come to the fierceness of Jesus’s rejection of the woman, who is pleading for the life of her child: “It isn’t right to take the children’s food and give it to the dogs.”

If Jesus is fleeing from Herod’s spies, he would be under a great deal of stress, and this might account for his harsh rebuke–which compares the local population to dogs, in contrast to the Children of God. If so, it reveals a streak of contempt in Jesus that is visible (to my eye) no where else in the Gospels. Would Jesus really risk his safety by insulting in such humiliating terms the population sheltering him?

Then there is Tyre’s odd status. Home to a pantheon of gods, including a goddess who received the sacrifice of children, the city nonetheless lay within Asher’s tribal allotment. Saving “the lost sheep of Israel” (as Jesus mentions in Matthew’s account of the story) may have been a second reason for Jesus’s journey into Phonecian territory. In short, Jesus may not have viewed the woman as a straightforward pagan.

In fact, her description as Syro-Phonecian may refer mainly to her language, Greek. Sophisticated merchants that they were, the Phonecians would have been likelier than the people of Galilee to have a good command of this international language. That would be doubly true if the woman were rich, as the presence of little dogs in her household may indicate.

If that is the case, then we have strong evidence for a bilingual Jesus.

Finally, a word about reconstruction. My version of this story is broadly reconstructed: much has been added to bring the story to a state I think eliminates the problems I’ve mentioned. All reconstruction is tentative, meant to help advance the understanding of a story. What is at stake here is not only the details and accuracy of the account, but also a search for consistency in voice and event.

The Syro-Phonecian Woman

(original text in roman type; RT’s additions in italic & enclosed in brackets)

      [When he had sent his disciples on the road,] Jesus traveled to the area around Tyre. [Because of the price that Antipas had set on his head,] he wished to enter each house anonymously, [and he was travelling as a local fisherman; despite these precautions,] word of his arrival spread. So when he entered a house one day, a woman [followed him in] and, kneeling down, said, “A demon has entered my daughter; please have mercy and cure her!”

      [Now Jesus was furious, afraid that she had revealed his identity; but at least] the woman was a gentile of Syro-Phonecian descent [and was speaking Greek. He said, “I am not a doctor—I can’t cure her.” The woman replied, “Please! She hasn’t eaten for days. The demon makes her play with her food, and now she is so weak she can’t get up from her mat.”

      “What have you done to make her eat?” After a moment, the woman replied, “I have scolded her several times, and once she was playing with her food in such a disgusting way I grabbed it out of her mouth and threw it to the little dogs.”]

      Shocked, he replied, “It isn’t right to pull bread out of a child’s mouth and give it to dogs.” She snapped in response, “Even dogs under the table eat food that children refuse!”

      [Jesus laughed and said], “[I am no expert, but] in return for such spirit, you may go home; the demon has fled from your daughter.” And when the woman got home, she found her daughter lying on her mat, and the demon fled.

      [But Jesus had to leave Tyre after that, and on the advice of his friends, he travelled north to Sidon.] [Mk 7:26b–30]

Copyright: The Rag Tree, 2012.

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Painting: Queen Anne of Hungary, 1520; painter unknown; WikiCmns; Public Domain.

mad women in the upstairs and druidical peasants

Reblogged from Flamingo Dancer's Blog:

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I have been reading Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, which is quite amusing. I fell in love with the following passages:

Mrs Smiling’s second interest was her collection of brassieres, and her search for the perfect one. She was said to have the largest and finest collection of this type of underwear in the world. It was hoped that on her death it would be left to the nation.

Read more… 173 more words

Even with the variety of topics I discuss, it seems to me that the Rag Tree at times needs a little livening up...So, with a tip of the hat to life on the other side of the Great Equation... RT

Is Cursive Obsolete?

 

Some worthwhile thoughts from a teacher in Seattle. Enjoy!   RT

Is Cursive Obsolete?.

Happy Bastille Day!

On the morning of July 14, 1789, a crowd of less than 1,000 people stormed and took the moribund Bastille prison. Though the event had no military significance, it marked the moment when the French Revolution, up until then largely a political crisis, became a popular revolt. The storming of the Bastille also set the stage for the National Assembly’s dramatic Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, issued in August 1789. The brief and powerful Declaration helped sweep away the Old Regime and its aristocracy and gave the principles of revolution and republican government that had been recently enacted in America its first political expression in Europe. Here is the Declaration, and Vive La Revolution!

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen

(adopted by the National Constituent Assembly, 26 or 27 August 1789)

Articles:

1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.
2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.
3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.
4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.
5. Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society. Nothing may be prevented which is not forbidden by law, and no one may be forced to do anything not provided for by law.
6. Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its foundation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to their abilities, and without distinction except that of their virtues and talents.
7. No person shall be accused, arrested, or imprisoned except in the cases and according to the forms prescribed by law. Any one soliciting, transmitting, executing, or causing to be executed, any arbitrary order, shall be punished. But any citizen summoned or arrested in virtue of the law shall submit without delay, as resistance constitutes an offense.
8. The law shall provide for such punishments only as are strictly and obviously necessary, and no one shall suffer punishment except it be legally inflicted in virtue of a law passed and promulgated before the commission of the offense.
9. As all persons are held innocent until they shall have been declared guilty, if arrest shall be deemed indispensable, all harshness not essential to the securing of the prisoner’s person shall be severely repressed by law.
10. No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.
11. The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.
12. The security of the rights of man and of the citizen requires public military forces. These forces are, therefore, established for the good of all and not for the personal advantage of those to whom they shall be intrusted.
13. A common contribution is essential for the maintenance of the public forces and for the cost of administration. This should be equitably distributed among all the citizens in proportion to their means.
14. All the citizens have a right to decide, either personally or by their representatives, as to the necessity of the public contribution; to grant this freely; to know to what uses it is put; and to fix the proportion, the mode of assessment and of collection and the duration of the taxes.
15. Society has the right to require of every public agent an account of his administration.
16. A society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitution at all.
17. Since property is an inviolable and sacred right, no one shall be deprived thereof except where public necessity, legally determined, shall clearly demand it, and then only on condition that the owner shall have been previously and equitably indemnified. ♦

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Photo:  July Fireworks in Paris; Celeste Hutchins; WikiCmns; CC 2.0 Generic.

Extinctions

The thought of language extinction can bring frightening images to mind: whole populations defeated, oppressed, and eventually destroyed or driven into exile, taking their words with them. But not all language extinctions happen in such a violent way, and some languages survive and reappear again in everyday speech despite intense persecution (e.g., Hebrew). What seems to be most important to language survival is the degree to which a language is necessary to conducting daily business. Next most important is whether the power elite speaks it. Finally, the use of a language in liturgy can preserve it–once again, Hebrew is an example, as are Latin, Old Church Slavonic, and Sanskrit.

When a language does disappear in speech, its written record can preserve important stories, and, above all, the history of the language’s community. 

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Here are some extinct languages you may not have heard of (I hadn’t–and note that all are European), accompanied by stories and history:

1) Shaudit. A Romance language spoken by Jewish people living in southern France from at least the 10th century A.D. It is unclear whether Shaudit developed from Judeo-Latin, evolved independently after Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, or owes it origins to the Jewish exegetical school at Narbonne. Shaudit declined rapidly during the Inquisition, and the last known speaker, Arman Lunel, died in 1977.

2) Sicel. Spoken by the Sicels, one of the three pre-Latin and -Punic tribes of Sicily. The language is of Indo-European origin, and scholars think that they arrived in Sicily after 1000 B.C. and introduced the use of iron to the island. The Odyssey mentions them, and Thucydides notes that they may originally have inhabited central Italy. After the arrival of Greek colonists in Sicily, the Sicel tribe began to decline, and sometime after 400 B.C. the language died out.

3) Cumbric. A Celtic language spoken in Hen Ogleth, the Old North of England and southern Scotland. Associated with the Kingdom of Strathclyde, Cumbric died out in the 12th century A.D. By the way, speakers of Cumbric were P-Celts.

4) Norn. A north German language spoken in the Shetland Islands and Caithness. After the Shetlands were transferred from Norway to Scotland in the 14th century, the language began to die out. Walter Sutherland, from Shaw in Unst, was possibly Norn’s last speaker. He died in 1850.

5) Auregnais. A dialect of Norman spoken on Alderney, one of the English Channel Islands. By 1880, the local children has stopped speaking it among themselves. Population movement and official neglect have been cited as reasons for the language’s extinction.

6) Tartessian. A language spoken in the southwestern Iberian peninsula (Spain) before the Romans secured the peninsula and Latin became its common language. Tartessian, which was spoken from about the 7th century B.C. to the 1st century A.D., is an unclassified language and one of the paleohispanic languages.

7) Meyra. Merya was spoken be the Merya tribe, an important pre-Slavic community centered around Lake Nero near Yaroslavl in northwest Russia. Merya was a Uralic language, related to Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian, and Meryan religious sites, such as sacred stones and groves, continued in use for feasts much longer than other such sites in the region. It is believed that the Slavs peacefully assimilated the Merya about 1000 A.D., and Yaroslav the Wise founded Yaroslavl on the site of a Meryan shrine where a sacred bear was kept.

8) Galindan. A little known language, spoken in Poland until the 14th century, Galindan was a member of the Baltic language group,  and thus related to Lithuanian, Latvian, and the extinct language Old Prussian. The Galindans were known to Ptolemy, and medieval Russians have left a written reference to them. No inscriptions in Galindan are known. Possibly, like their neighbors, the Old Prussians, the Galindans were warlike and very difficult to convert.

9) Messapian. Few inscriptions written in Messapian have survived, making its study and classification difficult. What is known is that this language was spoken in southeastern Italy (Apulia) and died out about the 1st century B.C. If this language belongs to the Illyrian language group, as some scholars believe, its inscriptions would be the only writing found so far for this language group. Some Greek mythographers noted that the ancestor of the Messapian-speaking tribes was the son of Dedalus.

10) Anglo-Norman. The variety of Old Norman spoken by the English court after William the Conqueror deposed the House of Wessex. This language, one of the northern French dialects (or langues d’oil), is the missing link between continental French and the many words that found their way into English after the Norman Conquest. For instance, chou-caboge-cabbage. And the AN “captain” retained the /k/ sound not found in French. So it turns out that the educated English elite were trilingual in medieval times, speaking AN, Latin, and English. After English replaced AN as the language of law and in sessions of Parliament in the mid-14th century, the use of Anglo-Norman dwindled away–English (in its radically altered Middle English form) had remained the language of commerce and the common people. But the most colloquial of the many AN dialects contributed to the development of early Modern English (in general use by 1500) to such an extent that it might be truer to say that they were absorbed into everyday English usage. Readers should nevertheless note: modern English remains a Germanic language.

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Photo: Etruscan Gold Pendant, WikiCmns, Public Domain

The Great Truth of a Woman’s Body

The struggle for, and achievement of, equality for women seems to be one of the most underappreciated stories of modern times.

As my work with Gilgamesh has convinced me, women largely lost political power by the end of the 4th millennium B.C. Hammurabi’s Code sought to protect women but not to empower them. Men gathered all political and military power to themselves; worse than this, because it was believed that the creative spark of life was purely masculine (women functioning only as an oven and food source during gestation), women were understood to be inferior to men in the most basic ways.

What changes the scientific revolution and Enlightenment have wrought! We now know that women contribute half the genetic material to every child, and the French Revolution has made equality one of the pillars of modern political and social life.

And with this change has come the full panoply of legal rights for women: the rights to vote, own property, divorce, and work–to be a full citizen and the legal equal of men. There is no doubt in my mind that the New Deal would never have happened without women’s suffrage, and I think that overall their contribution to political life has been to make society less aggressive and contemptuous of failure. Not to mention the emergence of children’s rights: when you empower women, you empower children.

On the other hand, this fundamental transition has not been easy. If society has been feminized by votes for women, women themselves have  been masculinized. Role models and expectations that date back 4,000 years are being challenged and overturned. Acknowledging that women in the workplace need special accommodations–day care for their children, maternity leave–has not been easy. So rapid and difficult has women’s emancipation been that I thought it could only have happened in the West.

But now I’m not so sure. I had thought that the ongoing Egyptian Revolution was mainly about political and social issues: corruption, poverty and misery, the lack of democracy. But I recently ran across a photo of a woman in a burka flashing her breasts and midriff in the middle of the Egyptian demonstrations. I can find no word for her act other than shocking. Shocking, above all, because it flies so directly in the face of Middle Eastern culture. Here is a woman willing to demand full equality with men and to use the great truth of a woman’s body to get her point across. Here is a long banished reality–the necessity of sex and sexual pleasure–shaking not only Egypt, but even the “liberated” West, to its knees. Can we create a world in which women’s power and orderly societies co-exist? This, in fact, is the world that seems to be emerging.

It’s too early to say what the long-term effects on religion and philosophy will be. But it seems to me that we are heading towards a more perceptive and compassionate world.  RT

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Image: Eric Gill, Eve; Src: WikiCmns; License: Public Domain

How do I love thee?

 

 

Sonnet 43

How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth
and breadth
and height
My soul can reach,
when feeling out of sight.
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need,
by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely,
as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely,
as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion
put to use In my old griefs,
and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,
–I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears,
of all my life!
–and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

 

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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Image: Art–Bourgeureau, The Proposal; Src–WikiCmns; License: Public Domain

 

Black as a Raven, Red as Blood, White as Snow

The Morragan; art: Louis Brocquy; src: WikiCmns

It’s 4 o’clock folks (and not in the p.m.)

and this one might run on a bit, but is worth wading through.

1. Deirdre

Our tales start with Deirdre and the Fate of the Sons of Usnach, the most famous story from ancient Irish literature, and not without reason: it contains the most intense moment in old Irish writing. In brief, when Deirdre was born, the Druid Cathav prophesied that she would be the most beautiful woman in Ireland, and that many men would die on account of her. The cry went up among the warriors to have her slain, but, rather than doing so, the king, Conashoor (all spellings are approximate transliterations of the Irish) hide her away far from human eyes so that she could grow to maturity and become his wife.

Well, everything went according to plan until one year Deirdre went out at midwinter (note the time of year) and saw her foster-father flaying a calf in the snow. A raven was drinking the calf’s blood, and Deirdre said, “I can love only a man with those three colors: cheeks red as blood, hair black as a raven, and body white as snow.”

And immediately, Deirdre’s nurse tells her where such a man could be found. Well (and excuse me, Twilight), the incident is incredibly powerful on its own, and says quite a bit about ancient mythology (or even religion); for instance, we should remember that the raven was the symbol of the ancient Irish goddess of war. And, of course, the calf prefigures the death of Deirdre’s lover, who dies at the hands of the jealous king.

One further point: Noisiu is Deirdre’s principle lover, but he has an unfixed number of brothers…three, or more, depending on the version. Let us assume for the moment that he has six brothers.

2. Snow White

Art: Anne Anderson; Src: WikiCmns

Come on, you’re thinking, what does Snow White have to do with this? This is how the tale starts: at midwinter, a queen was stitching besides a window with a black ebony frame. It was snowing outside, and the falling snow distracted the queen, who looked up from her work and pricked her finger by accident. And she said, “I wish I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as ebony.” And soon after, the queen gives birth to a little girl with these colors, but dies in childbirth.

Hmmm…the plot thickens. Evidently the three colors, black, white, and red, have to do with the birth and death of a chosen woman, the queen of midwinter (or the annual representative of the goddess). She and her lover (the annual king) are doomed to die at the solstice. But there is more.

Enter the seven dwarfs. When they come home, they find that Snow White has slept in each of their beds (and is sleeping in the bed of the seventh). Now let us take a slightly more mature approach to this image and understand that Snow White has slept with each of the seven dwarfs, and is currently the lover of the seventh. (A number repeated over and over in the scene).

So it seems that the midwinter queen has seven consorts.

3. The Six Swans

The Brothers Grimm offer some more help with our puzzle. In this story, there are six brothers and a sister. When the brothers are transformed into swans by the evil stepmother, their sister waits for them an extra night, and they return to the castle, where they are magically transformed back into men. Of course, though the scene features seven beds, the sister does not sleep in any of them. (But the parallels are hard to overlook).

4. The Levirite Marriage

Now the stakes go up, for in the next occurrence of our motif, we are no longer in ancient Europe, but in Jerusalem during Jesus’ final week. Sadducees approach him in the temple & ask him a question about the Resurrection: a woman marries seven brothers according to the Levirite Law–whose wife will she be in the Resurrection?

At first this seems an outrageous question, making fun of both Jesus and the majority of the population, which believed in the resurrection of the dead. Why would the Sadducees court public rejection by asking the question?

Because they are reminding their listeners of the rumor that Jesus did marry such a woman–the woman at the Samaritan well.

5. The Woman and the Well

Scholars are inclined to think that the Gospel of John is not historic–but in the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4), I think we have an important episode in Jesus’ early life that has been heavily edited.

Note that the episode starts with one of Jesus’ chief themes: ask and you will receive.

In John, the woman is identified only as Samaritan, but we have to wonder about the coincidence–a woman appearing at the well at the same time as Jesus (and not just any well–Jacob’s well!). “[She] came to draw water [for Jesus].”  This woman is the well’s keeper–and the keeper of ancient Samaritan practice and belief.

This story is occurring at the heart of Samaria–the well beneath Mount Gerizim that Jacob gave to Joseph.

Except that here the Samaritan woman does not give, and with good reason: she can see by Jesus’s clothing and manner that he is a Jew. The hostility between Jews and Samaritans (a well-known conflict, already centuries old when the conversation besides the well occurred ) prevents her from giving Jesus a drink. And look at the time of day–noon!

artist: angelika kauffman; src.: WikiCmns.

In the argument that ensues Jesus makes a claim about the woman that seems to be miraculous: he knows that the woman has had five husbands, and is living with a sixth man whom she is not married to. Miraculous, however, only because the identity of the woman has been withheld: as the keeper of the well, she was *obliged* to take multiple husbands. I think we can also claim that this woman will marry her current partner and then leave him and marry another man, the seventh.

That Jesus knows this impresses the woman: here is someone who is Judean, but who has also taken an interest in Samaritan culture and belief–no ordinary man, but one who is destined to do great good: “I perceive that thou art a prophet.”

Then Jesus makes one of his most epiphanous statements: that the Father will be worshipped neither at Gerizim or Jerusalem. He implies that the Father will be worshipped in the heart of the believer. In other words, Jesus’ message is for everyone. At this point, the well-keeper is swept away by his vision and intensity, and as seems likely, invites Jesus to come and teach her. This would account for the Gospel’s assertion that all Samaria believed–this woman stood for the heart of the Samaritan people.

But if Jesus lived with the woman for a significant period of time, this would appear to be a sort of marriage, and a rumor would have circulated to that effect.

There is another, more demanding, interpretation of the scene’s outcome: Jesus does not join the Samaritan woman to teach her, but to become her student. And she asks him to join her because a moment of prophetic foresight has come on her, and she has seen him lying at the foot of the cross, his cheeks covered with blood, his filthy hair black as a raven, his body (under the grime) white as snow. He becomes her seventh husband, and so is doomed to die.

A prophet indeed, and one who aspired to heal the rift between Samaritan and Jew, to recreate the ancient united monarchy.

6. Conclusions

Wow! What started as a discussion of an old Irish legend has lead us through the forests of Germany to Jerusalem and Gerazim. In each of the stories, a woman with seven consorts holds the fate not only of the men who serve her, but also of her nation. That an ancient guild of poets circulated throughout Europe and into the Middle East seems to have been well-known by such observers as Socrates and the Irish bards. From the well of their imagination many stories have been drawn and remain with us in more-or-less altered forms.

copyright 2010, The Rag Tree

(Note: I have altered the work of Louis Brocquy by adding the stream of blood.)

the alphabet & redefining intelligence

Part I

the alphabet may be the key to uniting humanity.

No really, I’m serious. Writing is the fundamental magic that created urban life, that cemented the walls that made people safe (at least for a while). the ancients who began inventing the first writing system, cuneiform, about 3200 BC, knew this, and included a god of writing in their cosmology, but it seems that we have forgotten how important (and difficult) writing–and even learning the alphabet–can be.

Some people, of course, are lucky. The English alphabet? Twenty-six letters? Piece of cake! I always read way ahead of my grade level!

But then the problems start: our alphabet wasn’t designed for writing English. The earliest forms of the latin alphabet, on which our letters are based, goes back to the 6th Century BC, and the alphabet was bequeathed to us by the Romans, for whom the proto-English were a bunch of barbarians on the wrong side of the frontier.

So where does that leave us? There are thirteen vowel sounds & seven dipthongs (at least according to the Wikipedia article; check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Phonology).

But at last count there were only five vowels in our alphabet; not the best news for English orthographers, aspiring or otherwise.

And then there are the common sounds in the language: “th” and “ing,” for instance. Why aren’t there single letters to represent these sounds?

Plenty of other examples exist, but I think it’s fair to say just on the basis of the problems already mentioned that our common alphabet isn’t the most efficient or effective way of writing down English. That isn’t to say that there aren’t some powerful arguments for continuing to use the current alphabet, but certainly one of them isn’t ease of teaching. Especially if a student is struggling with one of the learning disabilities that can make learning the alphabet devilishly hard.

I’ll close this opening volley by noting one of the biggest reasons for not improving the alphabet: the difficulty of changing over keyboards to the new system. (The biggest reason is probably getting everyone to agree on a new system.)

Puzzled & Perplexed, I remain, RT