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The four-page questionnaire that has been issued to President Kennedy's Peace Corps members includes a question about Urdu, the third-largest spoken language in the world.
Urdu, which is a Turkish word for lashkar (army), developed under the influence of the Mogul kings some 400 years ago as a sort of lingua franca, originating in the northern parts of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent. Later during the centuries, it spread very rapidly throughout the subcontinent and became the principal language of the people. For the first time in its history, Urdu has been declared an official language (in Pakistan, pop. 95 million)—the other official language being Bengali. The Urdu script is Arabic, written from right to left.
Some of the many words Urdu has given to the English language are: khaki, pundits, kismet, pyjamas.
IBNUL HASAN Rawalpindi, Pakistan
The Walrus & the Carpenter
Sir:
With thanks to Lewis Carroll, we herewith comment on the meeting of our new carpenter and builder, Kennedy, with the walrus-mustachioed statesman, Macmillan:
"A slice of Laos," the walrus said,
"Is what we chiefly need,
Congo and Arabia besides
Are very good indeed,
Now, if you're ready, taxpayers,
We can begin to feed."
DR. ERNEST F. BURGER Glen Head, N.Y.
Hesburgh & Notre Dame
Sir:
Thank you for the good things you said about Notre Dame and me. Some of the quotations, while verbally correct, were so much out of context that they seemed to say what I did not really say. The "abysmal mediocrity" was part of a long historical summary on the ups and downs of Catholic higher learning, not an indictment of present-day efforts. The charge of being "almost universally destitute of intellectual leadership" was from a paragraph much later on that referred to a specific problem: "As to civil rights and equal opportunity for all races, we have been almost universally destitute of intellectual leadership in our colleges and universities. I know of no research in this area." This latter is an indictment, of course, and unfortunately it is true of the vast majority of all colleges and universities, public and private.
The final quotation is again a mixture of two sources. All doctrines, even Communism, are of course studied and discussed in a Catholic university. My not wanting to be a medieval man came from another context, wherein I described St. Thomas as doing a vital work in his time and our need to apply the ancient wisdom with equal vitality to the monumental and unprecedented problems of our own times.
(THE REV.) T. M. HESBURGH President
University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Ind.
Sir:
As a graduate magna cum laude of a ranking Jesuit institution, Fordham, I observe that the fatal intellectual schism that rends Catholic colleges has seldom been more openly revealed than in your story on Notre Dame's Father Hesburgh.