Education: By the Numbers

Ivan Petelka was tired of teaching Canadian immigrants to speak English. It was too tough—making Hollanders, Poles and Italians study a new language from scratch, especially one with such senseless spellings, impossible pronunciations and irregular conjugations. Petelka, an ambitious, 46-year-old ex-Ukrainian who had no trouble mastering eight languages himself, thought he could cook up a simpler system.

Last week, in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., Petelka was looking for converts to his “Numbered Words,” a code language that would probably have more appeal for mathematicians than for poets or orators. Whether it would achieve any more practical success than several thousand other international languages, hopefully devised by linguists and peace zealots ever since Babel (among them: Esperanto, Basic English, Volapiik, Novial, Ido, Ro, Nulango), was another story.

Petelka’s system, like one invented by a Hollander in 1940, uses numbers to identify words in different languages with the same meanings. To do business with an Eskimo, an Iranian rug dealer would trot out his Persian number-dictionary, look up the numbers for the words in his mind, and jot them down. Receiving this coded message, the Eskimo customer would simply consult his Eskimauan number-dictionary for the key.

Petelka’s vocabulary starts with personal pronouns: I is 1; you, 2; he, 3; she, 4. Adding X to the word-number makes a plural (man is 330, men is 330X). There are no articles, conjugations of verbs or declensions of nouns (except for the possessive case). Parts of speech are indicated by zeroes (democracy, the noun, is 8730; democratize, the verb, 87300; democratic, the adjective, 873000; democratically, the adverb, 8730000). Says Petelka: “27-83000-27-12300.0-01-02-03.”*

Before Petelka can sell linguists on his system, he will have to clear up several points. Among them: 1) What would his system do about homonyms—words with several different meanings (run has 41 separate meanings as a noun, 49 as a verb, five as an adjective)? 2) What number would make democracy mean the same thing to an American and a Russian?

*”As simple as counting one, two, three.”