Let's Learn Algerian

Henry Lee Smith Jr.'s secretary can ask her way to the ladies' room in 26 languages. Her boss is one of the world's top linguists. Small, fast-talking, Baltimore-born Henry Lee Smith Jr., Ph.D. (Princeton), used to awe nationwide radio audiences by interviewing people and telling, by their dialects and inflections, what parts of the U.S. they were from. Often he was able to detect not only Philadelphia, for example, but also what part of Philadelphia. Today Lieut. Smith has a full-time job teaching soldiers, via phonograph records, a smattering of the odd dialects they are meeting from Tunis to Burma. He is an outstanding pedagogue in the thriving field of language-teaching-by-record.

Last summer high officers preparing the U.S. invasion of North Africa spent days absorbing Smith's records, and the invasion ships carried discs of three or four dialects. Soldiers en route learned phrases useful in military intelligence, such as WASH MIN WAKT TIB-DA SI-NEE-MA (Algerian for "When does the movie begin?"), and in reconnaissance, such as FAYN DAR LO-DOO (Moroccan for "Where is a toilet?").

"Language," says Smith, "is nothing more than a bunch of noises made by the face." Smith evolved a system which selects from every language some 115 basic words and phrases. The soldier can then pick up more words by talking to natives. Smith's records are accompanied by booklets so that record-listeners see what they hear. In the field, special service officers hold language lessons for groups of from 10 to 20 men, who hear each set of records a half-dozen times and repeat the alien phrases aloud.

Smith's records do more than make military operations easier. "One of the biggest things we have to lick in soldiers serving overseas," he explains, "is homesickness. If a soldier knows the basic phrases of a language, he'll get a smile instead of a blank stare, and he'll begin to feel that he 'belongs.' "

Smith's recording talent has been found in strange places. Recordings of Fanti--a West African Negro tongue--were made by Francis Nkrumah, a Gold Coast native, now a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. Biggest problem was finding someone who could speak Madagascar's Hova language. Lieut. Smith searched up & down the land before he finally discovered a Harlem cook who was three-quarters Melanesian, one-quarter Polynesian. He was married to a Jamaican Negro. They courted in French; now from Smith's records she is learning Hova.

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