LBE Chap 2 Vocabulary

Learning Basic English, page 15.
CHAPTER TWO
The Vocabulary

What is the difference between visiting a man and going to see him, extracting a tooth and taking it out, forbidding a person solid food and saying, he may not have it, preparing a meal and getting one ready, retiring at 10 P.M. and going to bed at that hour, rising at 7 A.M. and getting up then, dispatching a message and sending one, maintaining silence and keeping quiet, assisting your friends and helping them, commenting on something they do and making an observation about it, enlisting in one of the services and joining up, occupying a house and living in it, concentrating on your work and putting your mind on it? What we do is the same whether we bestow $10 upon a man or give it to him. The difference is a purely verbal one. We give an account in different words of the same thing. The second way of saying it is in every case a Basic way. It keeps to the vocabulary and rules of the system of Basic English.
To be able to express himself in Basic, an English-speaking person must first get to know which words are allowed in the restricted vocabulary. Every book in or about Basic carries with it a list of these 850 words in eight and a half columns and a summary of simple rules for putting them together. Before examining the list, anyone setting out to learn Basic would do well to jot down for himself some, at least, of the words he would expect to find there. It will help to put them under different headings, THINGS, QUALITIES, and OPERATIONS, etc., as the Basic chart divides them. Six hundred Basic THINGS provide us with the words for abstract ideas and concrete objects; 150 QUALITIES gives us adjectives for refining these ideas and describing the objects; and the compact left-hand column of 100 OPERATIONS, etc., furnishes a newcomer to the language with the neatest little kit for building English sentences that has yet been devised. Understand the sub-groupings of the OPERATIONS list and you have a bird's-eye view of the syntax of your own language. It summarizes the essential means we have for expressing relations between things -- that is, for building sentences.
When you look over one or the other of the short samples of Basic restatement given above you will readily see which words in it come out of which Basic group. In take a tooth out, for example, tooth is the only word from the list of THINGS. Take, a, and out will be found in the OPERATIONS column. For building the sentence, I say that this person may not have solid food, you use two names for THINGS, one adjective giving a QUALITY of one of these things and seven OPERATIONS words by means of which you are able to express the relation which you have in mind between the person on one hand and solid food on the other. If you were a Dutchman or a Mongolian, of course, setting out on your first English lesson, even with the simple start that Basic provides, it wouldn't be easy to put such sentences together. You'd first have to get to know English word order and the inflected forms of pronouns and verbs for which you will find only the head word I, he, you, who and have, be, do, etc., in the OPERATIONS column. English-speaking people know me, my, mine, we, us, our, and the rest. They know how to use the tenses of the verb in its different persons and numbers, and which order to put their words in (doer of the act, operator, thing done, etc.). Their task in learning Basic is very much simpler : (a) finding out and remembering which words are on the list, (b) getting to know which of the various familiar ways of using these words are permitted in the system. They can get a general idea of it very quickly. Part (b) of this task is the subject of the next chapter; part (a) of the rest of this chapter.
When an English-speaking person confines himself to Basic, he deliberately restrains himself from using nine-tenths and more of his vocabulary. There is nothing very unusual about that. We all more or less consciously scale down our language on many occasions -- sometimes too consciously when we are talking to children whose capacities we underestimate. The novel thing about Basic is the defined and systematic character of the reduction. When we make use of Basic we keep within limits which few people 20 years ago would have thought possible. It was not until 1929 that Mr. Ogden's first pronouncement in the American press about the word list upon which he had been working for years explained it as "a scientific attempt to select the most fundamental words in the current language to form a practical auxiliary language for all nations," and stated that "To have succeeded in getting on the back of a sheet of notepaper in legible form all the words actually needed to communicate idiomatically most of the requirements of international correspondence, science, and commerce (the acrostic of British, American, Scientific, International, Commercial makes up the Basic name) is the claim of those who have spent a decade in compiling the vocabulary here printed." -- Saturday Review of Literature, July 20, 1929.
If you have been trying your hand at making up a one-page fundamental vocabulary before studying this one, you'll see something of the scale of the task. But you will comprehend the magnitude of the achievement only when you put the word list to the test. Several years of testing and a rapidly expanding library of over 100 Basic books bear witness to its adequacy and to the thoroughness of the work that went into it. Random attempts to guess the make-up of the list seem rather futile perhaps. Yet, however rough may be your own jottings on the THINGS, QUALITIES, and OPERATIONS you expect to find included in the authentic word list, a comparison of the two will prove instructive. It will show you some of the principles of selection, and trying to use the list will show you more. With the thought that such comparison provokes, remembering which words are and which are not included becomes less of a strain than you might expect. In fact there will be very little strain if the 12 exercises which complete this chapter are taken easily and not all at once.

EXERCISE I . Consider THINGS PICTURED first. A third of the Basic list of THINGS is given up to names for common objects. We can point to such things when they are present, and we can easily make rough pictures of them when they are not, but we cannot conveniently eliminate all the names of them from any pocket vocabulary. As you try out Basic you will soon discover their wide usefulness. If you try drawing up such a list you will think of names of things that people anywhere in 'the, civilized world are likely to know. Many of them are things men eat or wear or work with, or common living things and parts of them. They will include parts of the body, things used for food, articles of clothing, buildings and parts of buildings, furnishings, machines, and instruments. You will not find it difficult to say which 10 in each of the following group of picturable objects are most likely to be named in the list of 200 Basic pictured things :

1 . nose, planet, avenue, boat, otter, glove, desk, canoe, trunk, star, street, cow, pomegranate, casement, mitten, table, proboscis, window, box, potato
2 . maiden, coat, shears, book, revolver, plume, coupon, bird, town, canary, village, ticket, jacket, church, gun, cathedral, girl, scissors, novel, feather
3 . saucer, spade, adder, plate, trowel, mare, snake, foal, gate, portrait, shovel, horse, picture, mosquito, door, ranch, fly, farm, seminary, hammer, gavel, school, maul

As you check your choices from these groups of words with the 200 "list in columns six and seven of the word list, you may be struck by the omission of words like automobile, radio, hotel, or bank, but those are already international so don't need to be learned. Wherever such things are available in the world their names are known. Basic permits the use of 50 international words (see page 41) and holds a further list of 50 likely additions on reserve to be accepted whenever their international currency becomes indisputable. The 50 are general language equipment, known everywhere by such men and women as they may concern, much as special scientific terms are known by experts in the different sciences. (Basic for Science, page 47; System of Basic English, pages 6 - 7.)
Then compounds like post office (built from an international word with the name of a picturable thing added), fishhook (assembled from two picturables), toothpaste (obtained by adding a picturable to a general name), and. outcome (where two OPERATIONS words together make a noun) help out the list. Such compounding from single words is allowed if the sum of the parts makes sense to a person familiar with their separate uses. So handbag, warship, and overcoat are quite clear, where starboard and ballroom and butterfly would have to be learned as something new, and are therefore ruled out, just as over idiomatic word combinations are ruled out in Basic discourse. The English-speaking beginner has only to remember that the object of Basic is to keep discourse to the clearest, simplest level. That will guide him in his handling of the pocket vocabulary, which is listed with the accepted uses of all 850 words and the addition of compounds and international terms in Mr. Ogden's Basic Words (Kegan Paul, London). For 100 per cent Basic that little book is his invaluable reference. For simple conversation with beginners in English who want to understand what you are saying, 90 per cent Basic is enough.

EXERCISE II. The QUALITIES list might well be considered next. It is easy to see that the range of reference 9f even 200 names of things can be vastly extended with the help of adjectives. We do not need such words as stream, village, twig, or cookie in a pocket language if we add the widely useful quality small to the equipment of the picturable list. The same quality, or young, will dispense with words like 17 kitten and call. A few more adjectives will make it possible to distinguish between red apples and green, quick trains and slow, new hats and old. And a glance back at the list of 200 picturable things with which we have just been working will bring to your attention how common to things these qualities are. We could talk of some specimens of all the picturable things as small -- there are even small ants and small pins, though all ants and most pins are small. All living things arc at some time young, and all objects were at one time new. And an animal that is not young, or a thing that is not new, need not necessarily be old, which reminds us of another tremendous range of possible modifications to be made by using un- or not before a quality as needed (a thing Basic permits us to do). In fact, when you come to examine the Basic QUALITIES list you will note its arrangement with the 100 most indispensable adjectives first; then a list of 50 which can be learned by a newcomer to the language in a second round, as a relief from having to say not right for wrong, and not good for bad.
If you go on with the selection of Basic qualities for the list yourself, you'll find it simpler to systematize the job a little first by tackling them in groups. There will be some words for talking about the color of things, for example, and others for their taste and smell and size and form and position and condition. Such exercise makes us aware of a fundamental difference between these qualities and those others that permit us to talk of the use or value of things to us and the feelings we have about them. All but the blind and the color blind will see a red book as red, but the book may be important to only one out of a thousand. Basic, with its restricted, carefully chosen group of "projectile" adjectives, forces our attention upon the fundamental difference between such qualities of things as we can distinguish through our senses and the qualities which we ascribe to things but which are really our feelings or opinions about them.
Then, besides, it makes us think about comparison, and the fact that most of our qualifications, consciously or unconsciously, are made as a result of comparison. Long compared with what? Important in comparison with whom? Which reminds us that such highly useful quality words as like and same and different will have to appear on any Basic list so that a comparison can be put into words when we want to draw attention to a thing with explicit reference to something else.

1 . Which 10 of the following qualities would you expect to find on the Basic list : sagacious, good, rough, microscopic, happy, infinitesimal, expansive, uncouth, wise, jocund, wide, plangent, approximate, small, sad, stalwart, substantial, dry, strong, solid?
2 . Which one quality on the Basic list might be used to describe a person whom someone called solemn; another glum; another heavy; another sober; another thoughtful; another intent; another purposeful; another grave; another earnest; another reserved?
3 . Which one quality on the Basic list might be attributed to anyone described as extraordinary, eccentric, unfamiliar, peculiar, exceptional, alien, foreign, quaint, outlandish, queer, freakish, odd, or weird?

EXERCISE III. Now the list of GENERAL THINGS. When you know these and how to use them with the 16 Basic operators you know Basic. They range all the way from words like seat, harbor, building, and mother and others like milk, metal, and part to names of acts like push and walk and abstract ideas like approval and harmony. None of them may readily be explained by simple pictures. That is why they are separated for the learner from the 200 names of separate picturable objects. Draw a scat, and your learner will look at a chair or a stool or a bench or a couch and not know that seat is a general name used for any of these. Draw a harbor and his attention will turn to ships or to a river mouth. Draw milk and you will show it in a milk bottle or a glass or being got from a cow. Mass words like milk and metal and names for the common divisions of things are on this list, as are words for various relations and conditions and the words relation and condition themselves.. If you put down the most useful English words you can think of under each of the following headings you will have the beginnings of a list of GENERAL THINGS to compare with the Basic too :

1 . Material things not easily pictured (insect, instrument)
2 . Common substances, solid, liquid, and gaseous (chalk, water, air) about 50 of these
3 . Parts or divisions of material things or of space or of time (bit, back, field, week)
4 . Persons -- general class, family, sex, or occupation (man, son, servant)
5 . Common acts (bite, jump)
6. The feelings and other "psychological" words such as attention, hate, feeling

Or you may like to explore the list of GENERAL THINGS at once with the help of these six groupings, and see which words in it fit under which category. Then look over the unclassified remainder to determine what sort of usefulness they are likely to have.

1 . Which 10 of the following general things do you expect to find on the list: memorandum, government, increment, pit, evening, uranium, hole, plutocracy, record, augmentation, burrow, increase, twilight, metal, comment, perception, night, observation, precaution, solicitude, discourse, care, hazard, chance, opportunity, conversation, perforation, talk?
2. In each of the following groups, which word is on the general list?
(a) ascent, declivity, slope, escarpment, gradation, inclination
(b) foreboding, timidity, fright, panic, fear, terror, apprehension
(c) ability, power, capacity, potency, vigor, strength
(d) arbiter, critic, umpire, magistrate, arbitrator, judge, referee
(e) quiz, inquiry, question, interrogation, query, problem
3 . Which word on the general list might help one to do without the following?
(a) slumber, doze, nap, hibernation,. drowsing, snooze
(b) implement, tool., utensil, contrivance, agent, contraption
(c) decoration, embellishment, adornment, trimming, accessory
(d) encounter, assembly, gathering, junction, confluence
(e) lamp, candle, illumination, dawn, enlightenment, radiance

The Interdependence of Words on the Basic List

Conjecture about the content of Basic, before we have become familiar with the detail of the list, is useful only up to a point. The choice of the words was a complex matter. Anyone deciding what words to include among the 400 general names would undoubtedly consider life and nature and truth and necessity and possibility and goodness and beauty and wisdom and electricity and likeness and difference if he did not know that living, natural, true, necessary, possible, good, beautiful and wise and electric and like and different were among the list of 150 QUALTIE5. Similarly even a verb so seldom used as excoriate, or the more common flay or abrade or strip, could not be eliminated unless some such word as integument or skin were included with the general names, and from or off, as well as take, with the OPERATIONS words. And take can do the work of verbs like seize or snatch or grab only if such words as violent and sudden are available for conversion into adverbs by the addition of -ly. Then again, when seize means take by right, still other words are needed. In fact, words cannot be thought about as isolated units if their work is to be systematized at all within a compact vocabulary range. Clearly, the selection of the vocabulary could not be made on the basis of anything so limited in its significance or so mechanical and mindless as a frequency count.
Nor can the redefining of terms proceed as simply as if all words had single, separable, unchanging meanings, as scientific terms may have. Take, for example, the verb to think. The noun thought is on the Basic list but take thought of, give thought to, put thought on, etc., by no means cover adequately among them the work the verb think can do. We might say that a man is giving something thought if we mean he is thinking about it, but we might also say that he is turning it over in his mind or giving it his attention or looking into it. And if we want to give a Basic restatement of "He thinks a lot of his brother," we shall first have to determine from a wider context what the remark means. If by of his brother is meant about his brother then the restatement might run His brother is frequently in his thoughts, but the meaning of the comment is more likely to be He has a high opinion of his brother or perhaps His brother is very dear to him. Again, usually when we say a man "thinks for himself" we do not mean that he takes thought for himself as in "Take no thought for the morrow" but that his processes of thought are independent And if we say that he "thinks he can do a certain thing" we probably mean that he is of the opinion that he is able to do it or that he has a feeling that he will be able to do it. Yet these are only a few of the possible uses of such a common verb as think.
We can use the Basic vocabulary really effectively, then, only as we get to know the selection of key ideas named on its list, and how these ideas, like the locksmith's or the burglar's skeletons, turn in various types of verbal lock, as well as the grammatical forms these key words are allowed to take. QUALITIES help out the limited number of names of THINGS and both help the operators. We have no name "lamb" in Basic, but we have a young or small or baby sheep. We have no "hills" (except in the special list of 50 science words for geologists), but we have high land and slopes and low mountains. We have no verb "to surprise," "to fear" or "to hate," but the names of the conditions surprise, fear and hate may be combined with operators to give us take by surprise, etc.
Which brings us to" the examination of the rest of the list.

EXERCISE IV. There remain the 100 structure words in the OPERATIONS column to the left of the list. These it is easiest to take up in groups, beginning with the 16 operators at the head of the column.
Basic has just 18 verbs, two of which are used only as auxiliaries. The rest Ogden prefers to call "operators" and 10 of them, at least in their most readily demonstrable uses, are the names of the simplest acts man can perform. These meanings Ogden calls their "root senses.
See if you can fill in the 16 operators to make sense of this short Basic account of their simplest uses :

We see how important the 16 "verbs" of Basic are when we make an attempt to give some account of their root senses in other words. For example, the simplest sense of . . . . . . . . is the act of putting a thing into another person's hand, while . . . . . . . . . . is the opposite process of having something put into one's hand. . . . . . . . . . . is in one sense the opposite of be; it says that some condition probably, but not certainly, is. Or it may say that an error is being made, as when water (in the Sahara) . . . . . . . . to be where there is no water. . . . . . . . . is the name of the connection between an owner and his property. . . . . . . . . and . . . . . . . . are words for naming the act of moving to and from by a person. The name of the act of not letting go, or of going on having, is . . . . . . . . . Not to keep a person from doing a thing is to . . . . . . . . him do it. To . . . . . . . . may be the 'act of giving existence to a new thing as in "He . . . . . . . . the earth and all that in it is," or it may be to put things together in some new way, as when we . . . . . . . . a box. To . . . . . . . . a thing somewhere is to give that thing a fixed place, and to . . . . . . . . it is to make normally a certain sort of change in its position. But when Japan . . . . . . . . the Philippines there was no change in their position (or was there?). . . . . . . . . is in a way like it, for as it may take the place of the name of any thing, . . . . . . . . may be the representative of any act word.
The other three, . . . . . . . . , . . . . . . . . , and . . . . . . . . are complex words. They are nearer to being "verbs" in C. K. Ogden's use of that word, and are less necessary than the other 13. If you . . . . . . . . a thing, physically, it is before your eyes; if you . . . . . . . . it you put it into words, and if you . . . . . . . . it anywhere you make it go to that place.

You can check your answers to these questions by consulting the Basic list (page 109). [ I don't find "be." My answers?]
The 16 operators, you may notice, are listed alphabetically in three subgroupings, be, do, and have being placed together as the three that can also be used as auxiliaries, for tense changes, question forms, etc., of the verb. Say, see, and send are more complex than the rest, as has been pointed out. May and will, which follow the 16, can be used only as auxiliaries, to express future time, condition, etc. They have one past form each (might, would) and no other inflections.
The 16 operators would, of course, be quite incapable of doing substitute work for the four or five thousand verbs in common use in English if they were not supported by the next group of words in the OPERATIONS column, the prepositions, or directives as Ogden prefers to call them. In Basic, we go on our way instead of proceeding, go into a building instead of entering it, go over a statement instead of reviewing it, go up a mountain instead of ascending it, go with a person instead of accompanying him, and so on. The Basic expression is just as English as the other; facilities for breaking down verb ideas into their component parts of OPERATIONS, DIRECTIONS, etc., exist alongside the more complex vocabulary elements of the language so that we constantly resort to them for explaining new words. To excoriate, we say, means to take the skin off, and we are using a Basic restatement when we say it. The highly analytical nature of English makes such procedure possible. It took Ogden to discover that the 16 Basic operators and their auxiliaries may and will may be made, with the help of other Basic words, to carry the verb load of full English if need be.
A little practice with the breaking down of full English verbs will show how readily they may be replaced by Basic operators, directives, etc. Try making Basic restatements of the following. Some may be handled in various different ways. One restatement of each in Basic is given opposite as a check.

EXERCISE V . In Basic:

When we enter a room	we
When we leave	we
If an arm advances	it
If it retreats	it
If a man hurries	he
If he dawdles	he
If you ascend some steps in descending	you you
If a man precedes another and if he follows him or pursues him	he he
If you forget a thing and if you recollect it	it it
If you visit a relative and if you inherit some money from him	you you
If men convene or lines converge	they
When the sun or the moon rises and when it sets	it it
If it disappears behind a cloud and if it reappears	it it
When bombs explode and when lights are extinguished	they they
When a roof leaks and when a boat sinks	water it
When things happen and when they are discovered	they they

All these and many - more full verbs may be handled with 2 of the 16 operators come and go. Basic also permits the use of such readily understandable compounds as overcome. A man may undergo an experience, overcome his fears and become important. His income may go up. He may be looking up incoming and outgoing boats and trains and not see an oncoming automobile. The outcome may be unhappy. -21-

Part B.
Exercise VII. Consider Put and Take.
Exercise VIII. In Basic : Keep and Let.
Exercise IX. Make.
Exercise X . Say.

Part C.
Exercise XI. The other operators besides do with auxiliary as well as full verb use are have and be.
Exercise XII. If you fill in blanks from memory in the next exercise you will review these relation words in the order in which they occur on the Basic list. < prev next b > next 3 >>

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