BASIC ENGLISH

'Basic English' is a constructed language with a small number of words created by Charles Kay Ogden and described in his book ''Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar'' (1930). The language is based on a simplified version of English, in essence a subset of it.
Ogden said that it would take seven years to learn English, seven months for Esperanto, and seven weeks for Basic English, comparable with Ido. Thus Basic English is used by companies who need to make complex books for international use, and by language schools that need to give people some knowledge of English in a short time.
Ogden did not put any words into Basic English that could be paraphrased with other words, and he strove to make the words work for speakers of any other language. He put his set of words through a large number of tests and adjustments. He also simplified the grammar but tried to keep it normal for English users.
The concept gained its greatest publicity just after the Second World War as a tool for world peace. Although it was not built into a program, similar simplifications were devised for various international uses. I. A. Richards was a forceful advocate of the use of Basic English, and lobbied the government of China to teach it in schools there. More recently, it has influenced the creation of Simplified English, a standardized version of English intended for the writing of technical manuals.

Contents

Rules of grammar

Historical references

Word Lists

Criticism

See also

References

External links

Rules of grammar

Ogden's rules of grammar for Basic English allows people to use the 850 words to talk about things and events in the normal English way.
#Words are pluralised by adding an ''~s'' on the end of the word. If there are special ways to make a plural word in English, such as ''~es'' and ''~ies'', they should be used instead.
#Words like ''change'', ''turn'', and ''use'' are used as verbs, but the 300 of them may be turned into different forms by adding the ending ''~er'' or ''~ing''; or into adjectives by adding ''~ing'' and ''~ed''. Only ''act'' is to be turned into ''actor'' rather than ''acter''.
#Some adjectives can be turned into adverbs with the ending ''~ly''.
#For comparatives and superlatives, either ''more'' and ''most'' or ''~er'' and ''~est'' may be used.
#Some adjectives can be inverted with ''un~''.
#Yes/no questions are formed by adding ''do'' at the beginning or changing the word order.
#Operators and pronouns conjugate as in normal English.
#Combined words can be formed from two operators (for example ''become''), from two nouns (for example ''newspaper'' or ''headline'') or from a noun and a direction (''sundown'').
#Measures, numbers, money, months, days, years, clock time, and international words are in English forms.
#The wordlist can be augmented by the jargon of an industry or science. For example, in a grammar, words such as ''grammar'' or ''noun'' might be used, even though they are not on Ogden's wordlist.

Historical references

In the future history book ''The Shape of Things to Come'', published in 1933, H.G. Wells depicted Basic English as the lingua franca of a new elite which after a prolonged struggle succeeds in uniting the world and establishing a world government. In the future world of Wells' vision, virtually all members of humanity know this language.
According to the Times Educational Supplement's Talking To series, George Orwell might have parodied Basic English in his book ''Nineteen Eighty-Four''. The references to Newspeak could be interpreted as a hidden critique against "universal languages".
Noted science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein used a form of Basic English in his story "Gulf" as a language appropriate for a race of genius supermen.^[1]

Word Lists

These are the 850 core words of Basic English. ''(See )''
In addition to the core 850, there are lists used to expand the vocabulary used in any given piece to 1,000 words. This is accomplished by adding a word list of 100 words particularly useful in a general field (e.g., science, verse, business, etc.), along with a 50-word list from a more specialized subset of that general field.

Criticism

A well-known American linguist, Robert A. Hall, Jr., has written:

Deliberate reductions of existing tongues have been even less successful than
artificially created international languages; the worst such fiasco in modern
times has been Basic English, a restricted variety of English constructed by
the philosophers C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. This language is
strictly limited in vocabulary to 850 words, chosen by the sponsors of the
language, plus 18 special auxiliary verbs or "operators" such as ''get'',
''do'', ''be'', etc. The lexical items were chosen with a view to their use in
expressing (no matter with how much circumlocution) every possible idea, rather
than to their frequency or practicality in everyday usage. Ordinary English
spelling is used, and little attention has been paid to the phonetic side of
the problem; apparently it was assumed that foreigners' difficulties in
learning English sounds were of little or no weight, and the language seems to
have been envisaged primarily as a means of written communication. Despite its
professed limitation to 850 words, the actual number of possible combinations
and the range of meaning covered by Basic English vocabulary is very great, and
they all follow the patterns of standard English. The auxiliary verbs or
"operators" constitute one of the hardest parts of Basic English for any
non-native speaker of English, since such words as ''get'' and ''do'' are among
the trickiest things in the English language. In short, Basic English is quite
without the ease and simplicity that has been claimed for it, and has been put
together naively and without realization of the linguistic problems involved.
^[2]

See also

★ Bible in Basic English

★ Inter-Esperanto or Baza

★ E Prime

★ Special English

★ Simplified English

★ Wycliffe Bible Translators#EasyEnglish

★ Globish

★ European English

★

★ Simple English Wikipedia

★ Number of words in English

References

1. Heinlein, Robert A., "Gulf", in ''Assignment in Eternity'', published by Signet Science Fiction (New American Library), 1953. Page 52-53: "It was possible to establish a one-to-one relationship with Basic English so that ''one phonetic symbol'' was equivalent to an entire word".
2. Introductory Linguistics, , Robert A., Jr., Hall, Chilton Books, ,

External links

★ Charles Kay Ogden, ''Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar'', London: Paul Treber

★ Charles Kay Ogden, ''Basic English and Grammatical Reform'', Cambridge: The Orthological Institute. (1937).

★ I. A. Richards & Christine Gibson, ''Learning Basic English: A Practical Handbook for English-Speaking People'', New York: W. W. Norton & Co. (1945)

★ www.basic-english.org(with downloads)

★ (uses Basic English word list as a basis for studying equivalent basic words in other languages)

★ World English Organization

★ VOA News - Voice of America Special English - News Radio for English Learners

★ Online tool which might help you to write Basic English texts - Detect words which are not in some dictionary. Ogden's Basic English dictionary list included.

★ Essential World English - some criticisms of Basic English and suggestions for overcoming its problems