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From: Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Morse Code Day (27 April)
Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2024 18:56:38 +0100
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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)