Basic English (a

backronym A backronym is an acronym formed from an already existing word by expanding its letters into the words of a phrase. Backronyms may be invented with either serious or humorous intent, or they may be a type of false etymology or folk etymology. The ...

for British American Scientific International and Commercial English) is a controlled language based on standard English, but with a greatly simplified

vocabulary A vocabulary (also known as a lexicon) is a set of words, typically the set in a language or the set known to an individual. The word ''vocabulary'' originated from the Latin , meaning "a word, name". It forms an essential component of languag ...

and

grammar In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rul ...

. It was created by the linguist and philosopher Charles Kay Ogden as an

international auxiliary language An international auxiliary language (sometimes acronymized as IAL or contracted as auxlang) is a language meant for communication between people from different nations, who do not share a common first language. An auxiliary language is primarily a ...

, and as an aid for teaching English as a second language. It was presented in Ogden's 1930 book ''Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar''. The first work on Basic English was written by two Englishmen, Ivor Richards of Harvard University and Charles Kay Ogden of the University of Cambridge in England. The design of Basic English drew heavily on the semiotic theory put forward by Ogden and Richards in their 1923 book '' The Meaning of Meaning''. Ogden's Basic, and the concept of a simplified English, gained its greatest publicity just after the Allied victory in World War II as a means for world peace. He was convinced that the world needed to gradually eradicate minority languages and use as much as possible only one: English, in either a simple or complete form. Although Basic English was not built into a program, similar simplifications have been devised for various international uses. Richards promoted its use in schools in China. It has influenced the creation of Voice of America's Learning English for news broadcasting, and Simplified Technical English, another English-based controlled language designed to write technical manuals. What survives of Ogden's Basic English is the basic 850-word list used as the beginner's vocabulary of the English language taught worldwide, especially in Asia.

Design principles

Ogden tried to simplify English while keeping it normal for native speakers, by specifying grammar restrictions and a controlled small vocabulary which makes an extensive use of paraphrasing. Most notably, Ogden allowed only 18 verbs, which he called "operators". His "General Introduction" says, "There are no 'verbs' in Basic English", with the underlying assumption that, as noun use in English is very straightforward but verb use/conjugation is not, the elimination of verbs would be a welcome simplification.A good summary in Bill Templer: ''Towards a People's English: Back to BASIC in EIL'
Humanising Language Teaching
.

Word lists

Ogden's word lists include only word roots, which in practice are extended with the defined set of affixes and the full set of forms allowed for any available word (noun, pronoun, or the limited set of verbs).Se
the list of words which are assumed and not counted
for details. The 850 core words of Basic English are found in Wiktionary's Basic English word list. This core is theoretically enough for everyday life. However, Ogden prescribed that any student should learn an additional 150-word list for everyday work in some particular field, by adding a list of 100 words particularly useful in a general field (e.g., science, verse, business), along with a 50-word list from a more specialised subset of that general field, to make a basic 1000-word vocabulary for everyday work and life. Moreover, Ogden assumed that any student should already be familiar with (and thus may only review) a core subset of around 200 "international" words. Therefore, a first-level student should graduate with a core vocabulary of around 1200 words. A realistic general core vocabulary could contain around 2000 words (the core 850 words, plus 200 international words, and 1000 words for the general fields of trade, economics, and science). It is enough for a "standard" English level. This 2000 word vocabulary represents "what any learner should know". At this level students could start to move on their own. Ogden's Basic English 2000 word list and Voice of America's Special English 1500 word list serve as dictionaries for the Simple English Wikipedia.

Rules

Basic English includes a simple grammar for modifying or combining its 850 words to talk about additional meanings (

morphological derivation Morphological derivation, in linguistics, is the process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix, such as For example, ''unhappy'' and ''happiness'' derive from the root word ''happy.'' It is differentia ...

inflection In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, ...

). The grammar is based on English, but simplified. * Plural nouns are formed by adding ''-s'' or related forms, as in ''drinks'', ''boxes'', or ''countries''. * Nouns are formed with the endings ''-er'' (as in ''prisoner'') or ''-ing'' (''building''). * Adjectives are formed with the endings ''-ing'' (''boiling'') or ''-ed'' (''mixed''). * Adverbs can be formed by adding ''-ly'' (for example ''tightly'') to words that Basic English calls "qualities" (adjectives that describe objects). * The words ''more'' and ''most'' are used for comparison (for example ''more complex''), but ''-er'' and ''-est'' may appear in common use (''cheaper''). * Negatives can be formed with ''un-'' (''unwise''). * The word ''do'' is used in questions, as it is in English (''Do you have some?''). * Both pronouns and what Basic English calls "operators" (a set of ten

verb A verb is a word that generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual description of English, the basic f ...

s) use the different forms they have in English (for example ''I go to him'', ''He goes to me''). * Compound words can be formed by combining two nouns (e.g. ''soapbox'') or a noun and a preposition, which Basic English calls "directives" (''sunup''). * International words, words that are the same or similar in English and other European languages (e.g. ''radio''), use the English form. English forms are also used for numbers, dates, money, or measurements. * Any technical terms or special vocabulary needed for a task should be written in inverted commas and then be explained in the text using words from the Basic English vocabulary (for example ''the 'vocabulary' is the list of words'').

Criticism

Like all

s (or IALs), Basic English may be criticised as inevitably based on personal preferences, and is thus, paradoxically, inherently divisive. Moreover, like all natural-language-based IALs, Basic is subject to criticism as unfairly biased towards the native speaker community.For instance, a sample quotation fro
the auxlang mailing list archives
and another from noted linguist Robert A. Hall, Jr. As a teaching aid for English as a second language, Basic English has been criticised for the choice of the core vocabulary and for its grammatical constraints.For instance, by proponents of Essential World English. Se
a summary of EWE
for instance and, again, the linguist Robert A. Hall, Jr. In 1944, readability expert Rudolf Flesch published an article in ''

Harper's Magazine ''Harper's Magazine'' is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts. Launched in New York City in June 1850, it is the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States. ''Harper's Magazine'' has ...

'', "How Basic is Basic English?" in which he said, "It's not basic, and it's not English." The essence of his complaint is that the vocabulary is too restricted, and, as a result, the text ends up being awkward and more difficult than necessary. He also argues that the words in the Basic vocabulary were arbitrarily selected, and notes that there had been no empirical studies showing that it made language simpler. In his 1948 paper "

A Mathematical Theory of Communication "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" is an article by mathematician Claude E. Shannon published in '' Bell System Technical Journal'' in 1948. It was renamed ''The Mathematical Theory of Communication'' in the 1949 book of the same name, a s ...

Claude Shannon Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist, cryptographer and inventor known as the "father of information theory" and the man who laid the foundations of th ...

contrasted the limited vocabulary of Basic English with

James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (born James Augusta Joyce; 2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influentia ...

's ''

Finnegans Wake ''Finnegans Wake'' is a novel by Irish literature, Irish writer James Joyce. It was published in instalments starting in 1924, under the title "fragments from ''Work in Progress''". The final title was only revealed when the book was publishe ...

'', a work noted for a wide vocabulary. Shannon notes that the lack of vocabulary in Basic English leads to a very high level of redundancy, whereas Joyce's large vocabulary "is alleged to achieve a compression of semantic content".

Literary references

In the novel '' The Shape of Things to Come'', published in 1933,

H. G. Wells Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer, prolific in many genres. He wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, hist ...

depicted Basic English as the

lingua franca A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, link language or language of wider communication (LWC), is a Natural language, language systematically used to make co ...

of a new elite that after a prolonged struggle succeeds in uniting the world and establishing a totalitarian world government. In the future world of Wells' vision, virtually all members of humanity know this language. From 1942 to 1944,

George Orwell Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to a ...

was a proponent of Basic English, but in 1945, he became critical of universal languages. Basic English later inspired his use of Newspeak in '' Nineteen Eighty-Four''. Evelyn Waugh criticized his own 1945 novel '' Brideshead Revisited'', which he had previously called his magnum opus, in the preface of the 1959 reprint: "It orld War IIwas a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster—the period of soya beans and Basic English—and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language that now, with a full stomach, I find distasteful." In his story "

Gulf A gulf is a large inlet from an ocean or their seas into a landmass, larger and typically (though not always) with a narrower opening than a bay (geography), bay. The term was used traditionally for large, highly indented navigable bodies of s ...

", science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein used a

constructed language A constructed language (shortened to conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, orthography, and vocabulary, instead of having developed natural language, naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devise ...

called Speedtalk, in which every Basic English word is replaced with a single

phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

, as an appropriate means of communication for a race of genius supermen.

Samples

The Lord's Prayer has been often used for an impressionistic language comparison:

Notes

References

External links

* Charles Kay Ogden,

'', London: Paul Treber * Charles Kay Ogden,

', Cambridge: The Orthological Institute. (1937)e
Ogden.Basic-English.org
, Ogden's books and word lists online and several discussions
Basic-English.org
Ongoing project to support and update Ogden's Basic (with downloads)

a discussion about Basic English, with supporters and critics * Charles Kay Ogden
Basic English Course
(1930) * Augusto Ghio Del'Rio
Inglés Básico
1954 translation of Ogden's Basic English Course for Spanish Speakers
Simple English Helper Tool
— Detect words which are not in a given dictionary, Ogden's Basic English dictionary list included

— some criticisms of Basic English and suggestions for overcoming its problems
Records of the Basic English Foundation
at

University College London University College London (Trade name, branded as UCL) is a Public university, public research university in London, England. It is a Member institutions of the University of London, member institution of the Federal university, federal Uni ...

Ogden Library
at

Ogden Manuscript Collection
at

{{English dialects by continent International auxiliary languages Technical communication English language Controlled English Constructed languages introduced in the 1930s 1930 introductions