Actually this chapter follows the text of Design for Escape which has includes paragaphs before and after the three chapters from Basic English and Its Uses. Therefore we link to : Design for Excape.
| ESCAPE III | 53 | |
| 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 |
In the first place learning Basic English apparently involves no more than the learning of 850 words and this would appear to be simple task. Unfortunately, however, most of these words have more than one meaning so that the actual learning burden is much greater than 850 items. Fries and Travers (sic) calculated that the 850 words of Basic English represent 12,425 different meanings and although it is true that Basic English does not try to teach all these meanings, the learning burden of Basic English is misrepresented by a figure such as 850. The learning cannot be complete until all those meanings have been assimilated and not just the forms of the words.To those who know what Fries and Traver actually wrote (see above) this will speak for itself. The writer's conceptions of "those meanings" and of language and of learning will be noted to. He goes on to say :
The meaning of "give-up" cannot be deduced form knowing "give" and "up." Such collocations as "got about," "get at," "get over," "get up" and so on should strictly speaking be added to the figure of 850 since their meaning cannot be said to be contained within the meanings provided by those 850 words.Who has said they can ? Now for a flat misstatement:
In fact Basic English attempts to simplify the grammar of English by restricting the morphological forms. This inevitably means the creation of forms which do not exist in English. All comparatives are formed with "more," for example, so that we could produce the form "more high" and it would be acceptable in Basic English. In natural English this is unacceptable and there would hardly seem much point in teaching the learner this if he has to "unlearn" it later.In fact, Basic teaches ["high",] "higher" and highest." See The Basic Words and The ABC of Basic English, where these questions are analyzed and dealt with.
Basic English is only concerned with written English.Whose ridiculous assumption is this ? Basic is the introduction to English which best serves aural-oral learning. It has also been singularly successful in literacy teaching.
It should be clear from the above that the linguistic evidence is strongly against Basic English.No evidence, linguistic or other, has been offered. In its place appear only uniformed surmises and erroneous assertions. Linguistic evidence form test data of the program concerned will be found in the Appendix, "Outcome Reports." The British Association for Applied Linguistics should surely be particularly concerned about such response to official inquiry. )