Word: basic
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...order to understand everything that was said, such an interpreter would have to know about 1.500 different languages, not counting dialects. In Urdu, Kiswahili, Catalan, Manchu, many another mutually outlandish lingo they hissed, jabbered, squeaked to each other. Some (though few of them knew it) were even talking Basic English...
...Basic English's 850-word vocabulary. 16 verbs do the work of over 4,000; 600 nouns, 150 adjectives, 100 other words take the place of the 415.000 listed in The Oxford English Dictionary. There are only five grammatical rules ("the exceptions ... are few and unimportant")The apparently whimsical spelling of English, a grief to struggling foreigners, has not been tampered with. Ogden admits this difficulty but calls it minor, hopes to see spelling reform make plain English even plainer. No pidgin English, Basic can be used to express ideas, as Ogden proves by writing its 100-page system...
Half The System of Basic English is taken up by examples: newspaper stories, radio talks, scenarios, business letters, "translations" into Basic English of scientific lectures, political and economic papers, Bible passages, a scene from Robinson Crusoe. Translation into Basic English sometimes results in a stilted foreignness. President Roosevelt's "You people must have faith; you must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses" is rendered "It is necessary for you to have belief in us. Do not put off your balance by false stories and chance ideas." Sometimes the result is classic simplicity, as in this example from...
...Basic "I was in the War, not as one in authority, but as a common man. That gave me knowledge of the effects of war. Sad memories of those years when the young men of all countries went down in such numbers under the rain of lead are even now in my mind...
...frighten most plain readers. With Ivor Armstrong Richards, another Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, he wrote a book with the fearsome title, The Meaning of Meaning (1923). No mess of metaphysics but an attempt to examine the working efficiency of language, this book was the starting point of Basic English. His position as student of psychology and language has brought him in touch with many a learned head in other countries. From his Orthological Institute of Cambridge and his bachelor London house, crowded with switchboards and phonographs, Ogden directs a propaganda for Basic English that is now worldwide, numbers such...