-=> Quoting Sondra Ball to Robin Arnhold <=-
Hi, Sondra,
 
 >salary'.  One of the reasons I chose a state civil service job was
 >relative job security (another is that the state here is really big on
 >affirmative action).  Even if one's job is eliminated such as happened to
 >a number of employees when the Department of Revenue took over the
 >State Lottery Board a year and a half ago, one is pretty much guaranteed
 >another state job at the same pay range.
 SB> 
 SB> They also have wonderful pension plans, and lots of vacation times --
 SB> or at least they do in New Jersey.
Our pension plan is pretty good, although a few years back the governor
appointed some of his political cronies to the investments board.  They
didn't know what they were doing, made some stupid investments with
predictable results.  It created quite a scandal when the news came out,
and several municipalities in the system withdrew all their pension
funds.  We're about average on vacation.  We start out with two weeks a
year and it goes up depending on length of service.  Next year I get
another 2 and a half days before it's prorated--I'm seasonal.  I think
the top end is 5 weeks for those who've worked more than 25 years for the
state.
 
 SB> English is already the business language of the world, so most
 SB> capitalists know it quite well.  It is also the international air
 SB> control language.
It is also used a lot in cyberspace.
 
 SB> And it really isn't that hard to learn to speak.  
I'd have to say that it depends on one's mother tongue.  People who were
raised speaking a highly inflected language like German frequently have
difficulties just the same as English speakers tend to have problems
dealing with declensions and conjugations.  And a lot of people who speak
English as a second language have problems with articles.
 SB> I was talking with a
 SB> linguist a while ago, who said English is actually one of the easier
 SB> languages to learn to speak, because it has only two true tenses for
 SB> the verbs, doesn't conjugate nouns at all, and has a very limited
 SB> number of sounds (I think it was 44 sounds, but I'm not sure of that
 SB> number). 
Then again, it has several sounds that seem not to be common in other
languages.  English pronounces 'r' differently than many other languages
and one of the 'th' sounds is difficult for those learning it as a second
language.
 SB> But it is a difficult language to learn to read and write,
 SB> principally because English is a hybrid language, and takes its
 SB> spelling rules from a multitude of other tongues.  
Even for those who speak it as their mother tongue.  The spelling of each
word almost has to be learned by rote.  Then there are languages like
Gaelic where the words are rarely pronounced anything like what one would
think they should be pronounced.
Take care,
Robin
--- Blue Wave/DOS v2.20
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