Word: basic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Pure English, Just Refined. I. A. Richards first became hipped on the idea of Basic 22 years ago when he collaborated with its inventor, Charles Kay Ogden, a fellow scholar at the University of Cambridge, on a tortuous book on semantics, called The Meaning of Meaning. Since then he has spent a good deal of time globe-trotting as Basic's chief agitator, wearing the benign smile of a zealot who is content with his life's work. When war broke out, he was at Harvard on a Rockefeller grant as a roving researcher on the problems...
...people who offend Richards most are those who think Basic is a sort of pidgin English. Actually it is pure English, boiled down to a vocabulary of 18 verbs,* 85 "structure words" (prepositions, conjunctions, etc.), 600 nouns, 150 adjectives...
Richards' own translation of Plato's Republic into Basic-he used 150 extra words besides-sounds as dry as Poet Richard Greene's satirical Basic version of Hark, Hark, the Lark (which also uses some unBasic words...
Swearing Is Not Basic. "Every time the Big Three meet," says Richards, "the need for a universal language is emphasized." Basic, being all English, is not a synthetic tongue like Volapük, Esperanto, Europan or Ido; and Richards neither hopes nor expects to see Basic supplant regular English. "It's too dull," he says, "and you can't swear...
...thinks the spread of Basic as a globalingo could help avert war, and he also believes it would end such peacetime horrors as the outburst by the visiting Symphony conductor to his chattering London musicians: "Don't spoke! I stand it then and now, but always, my God, never!" Richards is convinced that English is becoming the world's language; the only issue is whether it will be Basic English or broken English...