| PART ONE -- First Principles | ||
|---|---|---|
| PART TWO -- Teaching Problems -- The Basic Approach | ||
| PART THREE -- Conclusion | ||
| 18 . | Basic and the Nations | 267 |
| How the use of Basic as an international language grows out of its advantages as a 'first step' to English. | ||
| 19. | Basic and Its Critics | 287 |
| A complete answer to West, Ballard, French and other critics of Basic, showing why the 'Critical Examination of Basic English' was withdrawn and destroyed. | ||
| 20. | The Future of Basic | 333 |
| Will Basic be affected by the gradual changes to which all languages are subject? | ||
| APPENDIX | 341 | |
| An account in Basic English, of all the Basic books already published and now being published. | ||
| 1 . School Books | 345 | |
| 2 . Books about Basic | 355 | |
| 3 . Books in Basic (General) | 361 | |
| 4 . More Basic Science. | 367 | |
| 5 . Books in other Languages. | 368 | |
| 6 . Learning of Other Languages | 370 | |
| Basic Representatives, 1938 | 370 | |
| INDEX | 373 | |
| ILLUSTRATIONS | ||
|---|---|---|
| FIGURE | PAGE | |
| 1 . | The Word-Gap (i) | 18 |
| 2 . | The Word-Gap (ii) | 21 |
| 3 . | Covering-Words | 24 |
| . . . | ||
| 26. | The Basic Scheme (outline) | 133 |
| 27. | Friends, Acquaintances and Strangers. | 137 |
| . . . | ||
| 33. | The 'Three Voices' | 283 |
| 34. | The Basic Scheme (detail) | 289 |
does not deal with what is sometimes called simplified English. . . . It arises out of no desire to make English a lingua franca in the world by reducing it to a simplified or standardized form.And so Basic finds a home in neither camp !
. . . To borrow Dr. Ballard’s phrase, it is concerned with the simplification of teaching, not with the with the simplification of language.
One unlooked-for development of the hundred years between 2000 and 2100 was the way in which Basic English became in that short time the common language for use between nations, and the expansion at an even greater rate -- as the outcome of this, and after it had been changed in a number of ways -- of English itself.With such speculations, as I have said, we are not immediately concerned. What does concern us is that our children, today, here and now, should be taught English on the right lines. And which are the right lines ? They are the lines which exploit those tendencies to simplification in the English language which have made Basic English possible. Because English is what it is its teaching, as has been proved, can be immeasurably simpler and more successful than, say the teaching of French in England.
The English used by most of us today in talking and writing is a very different tongue from the English of Shakespeare, Addison, Bunyan, or Shaw. It has got away from the signs of such old and complex forms as a 'subjunctive mood' ; the form of a word on paper has become truly representative of its sound ; everyone gives the same sound to the same word ; a number of words and word-groups have been taken over from other languages.
No attempt was made at forcing it upon other nations as the Earth. In its natural form it was better for the purpose in a number of ways than the chief languages in competition with it, Spanish, French, Russian, German, and Italian. It was simpler, more delicate, more elastic, and even at the time more widely used, but it was certainly the development of Basic English which in the end gave it the position it now has.
Basic English was the invention of a man whose quick and fertile mind was trained at Cambridge in England. This C. K. Ogden (1889-1990), living long and working hard, gave all his time to the question of getting a simpler relation between language and thought, and specially to the working-out of this one system. . . .
Ogden came through with an English of 850 words, and five or six rules for their operation which would make it possible for any person from another country who had a ready memory to get tot he point of talking and writing quite good English in two or three weeks. . . .
Basic was taken up in a most surprising way after the First Conference of Basra. It was made the language for all public and government purposes in every country by the air and Sea Control, and by 2020 almost everyone was able to make use of Basic for talking and writing.
It is from the starting-point of Basic English, worked with a system in which the form of a word on paper is representative of its sound, that the language used by us today has come into existence, chiefly by putting back, by slow degrees, the 'verbs' and special uses from the mother-tongue, and by taking over words and groups of word-groups from other languages. today our language has almost 2,000,000 words in it. It is in fact a language formed from other languages, with roots, words, and special uses taken from the tongues of all nations. . . .
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