Basic English and Its Uses
by I. A. Richards
New York, 1943

 ◮  

PREFACE		5
I.	ON the CHOICE of a SECOND or WORLD LANGUAGE	11
II.	WHAT BASIC ENGLISH IS	23
III.	The SIMPLIFICATION of ENGLISH	45
IV.	AIMS and POLICIES of BASIC ENGLISH	71
V.	BASIC ENGLISH TEACHING FILMS	91
VI.	BASIC ENGLISH for READING BETTER	103
VII.	IMMEDIATE APPLICATIONS	127
APPENDIX		137
INDEX		141




Chapter Three
THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH

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    Why any language should in the course of its growth turn toward analysis is a question on which theoretical linguistics today will hazard only conjectures.
    5 pages on Angles, Danes, Normans

    Basic English, then, when Ogden took up the detail of his research in 1926, was a possibility prepared by the history of the language. It was present in a scattered form among the inexhaustible resources of English, but it needed to be disengaged, extracted, assembled, and systematized before it could be available either as a quasi-independent medium of communications or as the right introduction to the rest of English. On the details and the principles of this every extensive task of selection and organization much has been written by Ogden and others, and an outline was represented in Chapter Two. To go over it comprehensively is no part of our purpose here. Much of it is a matter for specialists. The techniques are of interest chiefly to those who have similar work in view. The arguments for and against particular decisions, at this or that point in the systemization, are necessarily both extensive and subtle. They are made more difficult because inevitably each depends in large degree upon the decisions taken upon other points. As with any other complex design, we cannot easily isolate single features for separate consideration. We have to envisage as comprehensively as we can the working of the whole machine.
    It will be, therefore, with the outcomes as a whole that we shall be chiefly concerned, with the primary aims of Basic English and the principal means by which it attains them. The minutiae, which is so large an undertaking must be many, will be left aside.
    The primary aims are themselves highly interrelated. They may be summarized as follows : to provide a minimum form of normal English, with the amplest covering power and the highest discriminative capacity compatible with the greatest ease in learning. This formulation brings out the interdependence of these aims and suggests how the design had constantly to balance rival advantages. It would have been relatively easy, for example, to work toward a short word list with widest covering power, if the accuracy with which ideas expressed in full English could be rendered were a minor consideration. Again, by sacrificing covering power, by resting content with a language fitted for trade, for example, but unable to handle science or political theory, it would have been easier to include more specific terms for commodities. Yet again, a larger vocabulary would have allowed increased covering power and discrimination to be attained -- but at the price of a heavier learning load.
    This last point is more important that it may seem. Many have wondered why Ogden set the numerical limits of Basic where he did -- at about the number of words that can be printed clearly on one side of a sheet of business notepaper. but, as I have insisted above, the weight, to the learner, of a word list is not simply proportional to its length. At many points in a learner's progress additional words do not merely add to this task ; they multiply it. They increase the probability of confusion as to their senses, as to their spelling. There are a number of well-marked landing stages in the beginner's ascent, points at which his further advance will be greatly eased, if he ceases, for a while, to take in more vocabulary and new constructions. He should devote himself instead to the cultivation of his command of those he has already acquired. When this is solidly established in his handling of these, he can go on to new vocabulary and new constructions with very much less risk of having the old patterns disturbed by the new. Neglect of this fact -- a too rapid and too unregulated advance into new forms, which are therefore never properly understood -- is the chief cause of broken English, a developmental disease which is, alas, in most instances incurable.
    Among these landing stages one of the most important occurs at about the point to which Basic English leads the learner. It is the first point at which he has a stock of English words that can, between them, cover most of the ideas and interests upon which he may wish to communicate. It is the first point at which he has a sufficient supply of grammatical forms with which to manipulate his vocabulary so that it will develop and exert its range of meanings. Some of its words, of course, will not happen to chime in with any one learner's range of concerns. These will be different words for different learners, and any one leaner may rightly neglect words that do not serve his purposes. But the Basic Word List is the briefest which permits books, articles, radio talks, letters, etc., covering all topics to be composed for learners in general without sending them back to a bilingual dictionary. And similarly the syntax taught in Basic English is the simplest syntax which permits these words to be ordered in a fully expressive and sufficiency supple fashion (see Word Economy by L. W. Lockhart).

    One consideration had to be dominate throughout the designing of Basic English -- the considerations that it must use only normal English sentence patterns. It would have been easy to have relaxed this condition and allowed sentence forms which though non-English are not in themselves ambiguous. Chinese, for example, dispenses with plural forms for nouns without resultant confusion. English does so in rare, exceptional instances, as with sheep and, conversely, scissors (to quote the two Basic examples). Getting plural endings right, as every teacher knows, gives the learner a considerable amount of trouble. Nevertheless, Basic, holding fast to its often repeated principle, "If it is bad English, it is bad Basic," insists upon normal English practice here, and forbids "two man" and "three boy," as it forbids "the sheeps" and "the scissor." Chinese again disregards gender in its pronouns and uses t'a  when English says he, she, and it. Basic English keeps to the three distinct forms of normal English. Some economy of learning effort might be made by letting it serve all three purposes. But here, we may suspect, there would be a price to pay in ambiguity. In the early days of Basic English, an enthusiast for simplification did, in fact, recommend the use of it as a universal pronoun. He coupled this with an appeal for the discontinuance of the English aspirate -- in the interests of German and other learners who find the English h's  difficult to manage. Ogden was able to point out that a type sentence could then take the form  " It it it, " which might mean  "He hit her," "She hit him,"  and the rest ! Hit was in the enthusiasts list. It is not in Basic.
    These are but random samples of the numerous simplifications of standard English forms that might, in varying degrees, lighten a learner's task -- at the cost of departure from current English "good usage." It is interesting to play, for a moment, with some other possibilities that would simplify English accidence without resulting in anything worse than archaic or dialect English. One of these would be the dropping of our verb inflections. We manage the future with will ; we could manage the past with did . Again, the present tense of be could be standardized without loss of clarity : I be here , You be there , He be there, They be there ; He will be there, He did be there  would be the outcome. So, too, with all third person singular : He do looks unlettered, though it is a very creditable regularization ( By eliminating does and other 'S's added to make the 3rd person singular, present indicative ). "This lamentable and unmannerly hissing about a third person," Ogden notes, "has been characterized by Sir Richard Paget as un-English. It would probably have disappeared long ago in the normal course of events had not printers, lexicographers, and school masters rallied so egregiously to its defense ; and if any reform is overdue in our accidence, here is surely an appropriate casualty." ¹
    Nonetheless, few will doubt that Ogden was well advised in resisting all such temptations. Every departure would have meant something to be unlearned if the student wished to proceed to a more comprehensive knowledge of English. And there is nothing in Basic that a student has to unlearn. Some have questioned this, who did not know much about Basic. It has even been asserted that Basic "cannot be expanded into real English." The writer omitted to say why not or why Basic is not "real English." However, he added that "confined to its proper purposes, Basic may have a useful function to play in promoting the expansion of real English," so the reader can decide how seriously he will take him. In fact, well-written Basic is as real as any other English, and there is no special difficulty of any sort in passing on from Basic to the rest of English. No language can be taught as a whole in a flash. There have to be steps and stages in the learning process, and it is one of the grater advantages of Basic, an outcome of its scope, that the advance to more complete English can be so solidly grounded on and carried through by means of explanations in Basic. The danger of the bilingual pocket dictionary and misleading identifications with expressions in the other language are thus avoided.
    . . . On any informed view of usage Ogden held fast to the principle that there must be nothing in Basic that anyone would have to unlearn.² The disadvantages of that would outweigh any gains in ease of learning . . .
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1. Basic English and Grammatical Reform, p.7.
2. The worst offense in Basic against custom is in connection with the prefix un- before quality words. Here is Ogden's comment : "A certain number of these formations, e.g., unregular, unprobable, are departures from standard English. All, however, can readily be avoided by the use of not, and the beginner who desires not to disturb the susceptibilities of the purist can thus always attain his desire. Otherwise the justification for these innovations is that while they develop a salutary tendency in the language they are too inoffensive to shock very deeply" (Basic English, p. 52).   In classroom practice, not regular, not possible,etc., are taught. Unregular, etc., if and when they appear, will be treated at the teacher's discretion as circumstances direct. Let purists complain if they will !
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    The most obvious feature is, of course, the limitation of the number of words. But a mere comparison of the number of words in Basic with the number of words in some other limited word list would not bring the chief point out. We should have to ask, further, what sorts of words they are. Words differ immensely in the ease with which we may lean to use them. The easiest words are names. They present the minimum of grammatical trouble. Next come adjectives : their positions with respect to the nouns they qualify can cause trouble. This trouble i English is educed to a minimum by the general rule, in English prose, that the adjective comes before its noun ; or, in the predicative use, after the appropriate part of the verb to be : the deep waters are cold, not cold are the waters deep, except in poetic utterance. More difficult than the adjectives are some of the adverbs, as the trouble most of us experience with placing of only will illustrate.
    Opinions will differ as to which of the other sorts of words are most difficult. Teachers agree, on the whole, that verbs are the hardest, and next to them  prepositions. But this judgment depends in a large measure upon the proportion such words bear to the other words taught. If there were many words in English that were as tricky as the articles a  and the, articles might have a good claim to bad eminence among the vocables. As there are only two of them, the teacher, thankful for that mercy, does not rank them with the verb as among her major troubles. Verbs are difficult partly because of their inflections, partly because of the occurrence of irregularities among these inflections, and still more because of the very important part that verbs take in the construction of the sentence. The job of construing a sentence -- of making out what its construction is -- largely turns on recognizing the verb and on recognizing its form and the work it is doing. Thus, other things being equal, a language that contains few verbs will be easier to construe, and easier to express oneself in, than a language containing more verbs.
    This has brought us to the greatest of the advantages that Basic English has over other languages. Its verbs are only eighteen. This means in practice three things.
    1 . From a very early stage in the study of Basic there is never any doubt as to which word in a sentence is the verb. If at an early point in his progress a learner meets,say, the word change  in a sentence and has as yet no more than dim memories of sentences such as "All change at Dover,"  "I have no change,"   What changes we see !" and "That changes everything" to guide him, he inevitably runs into much needless uncertainty and risk of confusion.
    Such examples are of course artificial, but complex English offers innumerable occasions for such mistakes to the learner who has not had much instructive experience of the language. So the limitation of the verbs to a very few, which because they are s few incessantly recur to his use of the language, gives a clarity and ease to his construing which is not to be measured merely in numerical terms. If at this stage we treble the number of our verbs and let them be verbs that might, as far a form goes, be nouns *(singular or plural) we make construing far more than three times as hard for him. And with we heighten the difficulty for him of innumerable other points in the behavior of works other than verbs. We confuse him as to plurals while blurring his sense of the significance of the hiss or buzz that means "third person, singular, of the present." The old catch, " Time flies ? We cannot. They go too fast," illustrates this point very clearly. Worse still, we lead him in the most damaging fashion to think that utterly non-English constructions are somehow possible. We give him unnecessary excuses to suppose that combinations of words make sense which a more experienced eye would see at once are grammatically impossible in English.
    2 . One or more of the eighteen verbs will appear in every sentence. These repetitions stamp in their inflections as nothing else will. The changes of the irregular verbs are the really troublesome inflections in English. Continual practice is by far the most effective way of learning them. Of Basic verbs, seem  is regular and provides a pattern for regular verbs to be learned later. The rest are irregular -- in representative fashions. And they are the verbs which in any normal form of English do the most work. Mastery of their inflections -- give, gave ; get, got ; take, took ; etc. -- is something never achieved by many learners who otherwise become fairly proficient in English. The learner of Basic has the very best chance of mastering them from the start, while his attention to them is relatively undistracted. Competitive patterns are reduced to a minimum.
    3 . More important, the varying meanings and implications of these key verbs in their chief combinations become established through the intensive practice which Basic enforces, far more firmly and fully than would be possible if they were introduced along with some miscellaneous scores of other verbs -- as has been the custom in traditional school courses. The more we realize how great the part is that these verbs play in everyday, unrestricted English, the more important this point will appear. These are the verbs the ordinary English speaker understands best, the verbs he uses when he most wants to explain something clearly and simply, when he most wants "to get down to the facts" and see what he is really saying. Thus, the point deserves to be stressed that Basic give the learner a uniquely intensive training in these key English verbs before he passes on -- with increasing experience -- to as much of the rest of the language as he needs. "Let first things come first," might well be the motto of this system. These verbs are first in importance in English. there is no doubt whatsoever of that. Basic puts them first -- in teaching order and in the intensity of their cultivation also. That is one of the grounds of its claim to lay the foundations of a knowledge of English well and truly.
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    It will be seen from this sketch of the different sorts of words and the troubles they present to a learner, how far the difficulty of a language is from being simply proportional to the number of words it requires him to memorize. Of two word lists, that is the simpler which contains the least number of troublemakers. Ogden has separated the troublemakers on the Basic Word List and set them together in its first column. The other seven and a half column of nouns and adjectives hardly amount together, to as hard as task for the learner as this first hundred words. But in calling them the first hundred I am referring merely to their place in the first column of the list. No one would suggest that all these words should be taught first, or many of them very early. Just which should come where in a teaching text and what the emphasis put upon them should be in comparison with the others is in fact a highly discussible pedagogic question -- which is touched on in a following chapter. In any case it is clear that in several respects these words are in a different position from nouns and adjectives, It will further clarify our conception of what simplification entails if we consider some of these respects briefly.
    In the first place there is virtual unanimity as to the necessity of including these one hundred words in any short list, whatever the principles on which the list is compiled. Whether we are content, as with the early words counts of E.L.Thorndike or Earnest Horn, to determine which words occur most frequently in various types of writing and base our list on frequency and range (the number of different sources using the word), or whether, as with Ogden's work, we take vastly more complex considerations into account, there is no substantial difference in the result as regards these one hundred operation or structure words. In the most recent and elaborate comparative study of these word list,³ a table displays the amount of overlapping between them for the different categories of words used in the Basic Word List. It shows that Ogden's one hundred operation words appear in Thorndike's first thousand words (all but six of them in this first five hundred). After thee comparisons the conclusion of the authors is, "The separation of the ' operations ' from the rest of the vocabulary as is done in Basic English seems to us a fundamentally important contribution to the solution of this problem of teaching a foreign language" (p.89). As study of the work done on such word lists sine the publication of the Basic List shows, this aspect of Ogden's treatment has already radically affected the handling of the problem, though other aspects hardly less important may need more time before they are widely appreciated.
    The most important part of his treatment is the inclusion of the verb-operators of Basic among these structural words. This has been recognized. "It seems linguistically sound too," Fries and Traver continue, "to include among these ' operators ' whatever verbs  are used in a list for the first approach to English as a foreign language. The verb is a means of ' relating ' just as much as are adverb-prepositions and conjunctions. To classify the verb as an ' operator ' and therefore to use only a minimum number of verbs in a first  vocabulary seems not only theoretically sound but helpful from a practical point of view" (p90).
    By using the Oxford English Dictionary and counting the "distinct meanings" of words there given, Fries and Traver found for the Basic words a total of 12,425 meanings. For 850 words taken from Thorndike's first thousand most frequent words (all the first 500 and 350 taken at random from the second 500), the found a total of 21,120 meanings. "The great difference between these totals,: they note, "seems to be due largely to the fact that Thorndike's list contains many verbs and the Basic List only the eighteen chosen as operators. If these figures have any significance, the learning weight of a list with verbs as vocabulary units is considerably greater than that of a list in which the verbs are reduced to a minimum number of operators" (p.90).
    The significance of these figures -- questionable though they are in themselves -- is really far greater than the authors recognize. It was pointed out in Chapter Two that the words on the Basic List are by no means taught or used, in Basic, with all the "meanings" listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. Ogden and his coworkers were at great pains to limit the meanings recommended for the Basic words an to list the extensions and specializations they possess in Basic. These limitations are specified in detail in The Basic Words. And it is odd that Fries and Traver should have overlooked them in this argument. If we take due account of them and of the fact that the covering power of Basic is nevertheless far greater than that of the 850 words from the Thorndike list, a relevant comparison proves vastly more to the advantage of Basic than such unanalyzed figures can suggest. The argument for the reduction of verb-operators to a minimum becomes, in fact, overwhelming. It may be interesting, however, to note that this figure of 12,425 Oxford English Dictionary meanings for the Basic words given by Fries and Traver has been used by hostile critics of Basic without any regard for these authors' conclusion from it. Such is the technique of controversy. 63

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