Birthday of Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791-1872), whose very useful
invention showed linguistic awareness by correlating (inversely) the
length of a code sequence with the frequency of the corresponding letter
in English.

The famous "What hath God wrought" (no punctuation) message was sent in
1838 from the Supreme Court room in the Capitol in Washington to Morse's assistant Alford Vail in Baltimore (about 50km away).

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Ar an t-ochtú lá is fiche de mí Aibreán, scríobh Ross Clark:

Birthday of Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791-1872), whose very useful invention showed linguistic awareness by correlating (inversely) the length of a code sequence with the frequency of the corresponding letter in English.

Something that we don’t (didn’t) have in English but that, e.g. German did was
a widely-known mnemonic for the codes. The deleted entry on the German Wikipedia for it is here:

https://de-academic.com/dic.nsf/dewiki/976551/

Each syllable with an <O> was a dash, each syllable without was a dot. I presume anyone who went to the Bund in .de in the 80s and 90s can remember their Morse code as a result; how well do (did) English-speakers manage it after leaving the army? We have a tiny army here and never had National Service so there’s no local context to evaluate.

The famous "What hath God wrought" (no punctuation) message was sent in 1838 from the Supreme Court room in the Capitol in Washington to Morse's assistant
Alford Vail in Baltimore (about 50km away).

--
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)

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On 2024-04-28, Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net> wrote:

Something that we don’t (didn’t) have in English but that, e.g. German did was
a widely-known mnemonic for the codes. The deleted entry on the German Wikipedia for it is here:
https://de-academic.com/dic.nsf/dewiki/976551/

I don't think I've ever seen this before.
If it was deleted from Wikipedia, that fact should give you pause.

Each syllable with an <O> was a dash, each syllable without was a dot. I presume anyone who went to the Bund in .de in the 80s and 90s can remember their Morse code as a result;

Morse code was not part of basic training, nor was it part of the
additional introductory radio operator course I did. The NATO/ICAO
spelling alphabet was.

I don't want to get too political, but it is important to realize
that compulsory military service does not produce trained soldiers.
In fact, we were explicitly told that the military would not waste
resources on training us beyond the absolute minimum, given that
we would be gone again after a year.

I hear being able to use Morse code has traditionally been the most
difficult part of getting an amateur radio license, for anybody
inclined to do so.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de

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On 2024-04-28 15:18:01 +0000, Christian Weisgerber said:

On 2024-04-28, Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net> wrote:

Something that we don’t (didn’t) have in English but that, e.g.
German did was
a widely-known mnemonic for the codes. The deleted entry on the German
Wikipedia for it is here:
https://de-academic.com/dic.nsf/dewiki/976551/

I don't think I've ever seen this before.
If it was deleted from Wikipedia, that fact should give you pause.

Each syllable with an <O> was a dash, each syllable without was a dot. I
presume anyone who went to the Bund in .de in the 80s and 90s can remember >> their Morse code as a result;

Morse code was not part of basic training, nor was it part of the
additional introductory radio operator course I did. The NATO/ICAO
spelling alphabet was.

I don't want to get too political, but it is important to realize
that compulsory military service does not produce trained soldiers.
In fact, we were explicitly told that the military would not waste
resources on training us beyond the absolute minimum, given that
we would be gone again after a year.

David Lodge had a book in 1962 called Ginger You're Barmy, based on his experience doing military service in the 1950s. It's been many years
since I read it (more than 40), but my recollection is that he agreed
exactly with what you are saying, that compulsory military service is a complete waste of time for all concerned. Fortunately it was ended
about year before I would have had to do it.

As an anecdote, when my daughter acquired French nationality she had to
do one day's national service. That consisted of going to an army base
for lectures on civics, and doing a very simple test. For this last she
was amazed that some of the others didn't know the most basic things:
there were a couple of girls behind her who were whispering to one
another as neither had the least idea why the 14th July is a holiday
and that it's called Bastille Day.

I hear being able to use Morse code has traditionally been the most
difficult part of getting an amateur radio license, for anybody
inclined to do so.

--
Athel -- French and British, living in Marseilles for 37 years; mainly
in England until 1987.

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Ar an t-ochtú lá is fiche de mí Aibreán, scríobh Christian Weisgerber:

On 2024-04-28, Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net> wrote:

Something that we don’t (didn’t) have in English but that, e.g. German did was
a widely-known mnemonic for the codes. The deleted entry on the German Wikipedia for it is here:
https://de-academic.com/dic.nsf/dewiki/976551/

I don't think I've ever seen this before.
If it was deleted from Wikipedia, that fact should give you pause.

Each syllable with an <O> was a dash, each syllable without was a dot. I presume anyone who went to the Bund in .de in the 80s and 90s can remember their Morse code as a result;

Morse code was not part of basic training, nor was it part of the
additional introductory radio operator course I did. The NATO/ICAO
spelling alphabet was.

I don't want to get too political, but it is important to realize
that compulsory military service does not produce trained soldiers.
In fact, we were explicitly told that the military would not waste
resources on training us beyond the absolute minimum, given that
we would be gone again after a year.

As I said, we didn’t and don’t have it here, I lack much of a frame of reference. What may have thrown off my working understanding is that a close Portuguese friend volunteered for the NATO deployment to Kosovo during his mandatory service, and I suspect got a level of training above and beyond the norm for this.

There’s a similar dynamic to medical training in Ireland and the UK. To get a broad exposure to different clinical contexts and patient populations doctors have to work in different departments and different hospitals, routinely for only four months at a time, and the less conscientious consultants (Oberärzte) are well aware that making a given trainee better at their job will only be to their direct benefit for that time period. Physician assistants and nurse practitioners are not forced to be as geograpically mobile and that is attractive to the consultants training them.

--
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)

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