BASIC ENGLISH SUPPLEMENTARY WORD LISTs
SOCIAL SCIENCES - Word list submitted by P. Sargant Florence
Discussion of Word Selections

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D . Social Sciences : submitted for consideration by P. Sargant Florence. eminent economist, writer, and Professor at Cambridge and Birmingham Universities. The wordlist is from a paper "Basic English for the Social Sciences" reproduced in C.K. Ogden : A Collective Memoir". This is a work in process using the social sciences of Economics and Political Science as examples. Note that the Social Science of Economics is different from the commercial Economics by L.W. Lockhart accepted into Basic as a supplement. The creation of the commercial economics word list shows that much of the subject is adequately covered by the Basic Wordlist. (We found the same thing when investigating international Religion.) The methodology is interesting -- to scan the index of introductory texts looking for key words in each subject area. This needs to have the rigor of Ogden's application of the Panoptic Method to determine a final wordlist.

    A discussion item is if a new meaning to an existing Basic word requires a listing in a general or specific wordlist. This is obviously a requirement for the teacher to see that expanded sense of a Basic word is known to students of the speciality, but Ogden correctly believed that the size of the wordlist impacted ease of learning from spelling, pronunciation, recognition of a word disguised by an accent, etc.
    Florence identified the following general social science word requirements using the index method.
General Words : (102)   able, act, adjustment, agreement, apparatus, association, attitudes, authority, bank, behaviour, belief, birth, body, business, capital, chief, class, committee, common, community, competition, complex, concentration, control, cost, culture, custom, death, decentralization, decision, desire, direction, discussion, distribution, division, environment, equal, expert, family, firm, force, free, government, group, growth, habit, heredity, history, impulse, incentive, industry, integration, invention, judge, knowledge, land, law, margin, market, meeting, mixed, money, monopoly, move, need, operation, order, organization, person, plant, population, position, power, price, private, process, profit, property, public, punishment, reason, rent, representative, rule, security, selection, separate, society, special, standardization, state, structure, technology, top, town, trade, unemployment, use, value, wages, will, work.
Of these words, some are broken out as of primary interest to :
Economics : (17)   bank, business, capital, competition, firm, habit, margin, market, money, population, price, profit, property, rent, security, value, wages.
Political Science : (26)   agreement, authority, committee, concentration, control, decentralization, decision, discussion, equal, free, government, judge, law, meeting, order, organization, power, private, public, punishment, representative, rule, security, selection, structure, will.
Note that only a few are entirely new words to the Basic learner.
General Social Science : (14)   association, attitudes, class, community, culture, custom, environment, heredity, incentive, integration, standardization, State, technology, unemployment.
Economics : (3)   capital, firm, wages.
Political Science : (5)   concentration, control, decentralization, structure, will.
You will note that Florence is of the list-new-meanings-as-new-words school. "Will" is known to the Basic learner as an "auxiliary of future assertion" (future tense). The new meanings are radically different, "a power of mind" and "to have one's way," a special instance of this is a written statement (testament) of desires for distribution of one's money and items (wealth) after death.
Other things to note is how well or badly Basic handles the idea :

General Social Science = Basic English association = organization ; connection of ideas attitude = behaviour class = division ; learning group ; place to learn community = town ; group of persons having something in common culture = general development of a society ; bacteria custom = thing generally done ; tax on goods coming into country ; [business] environment = condition ; general (outside) condition ; [science] heredity = handing on of qualities to offspring ; quality given to offspring incentive =reason (purpose) for doing integration = united as complete thing ; made mixed into social = living in groups [second] standardization = act of making regular State = proper noun for "the state" state = country, nation, government technology = science of arts and processes of industry unemployment = without work ; employer [business] Economics capital = money ; by death ; chief town ; great letter, like A ; very good ; [second] firm = business ; hard, strong, solid wages = payments (to workmen) ; makes (war) Political Science concentration = power of putting all of ones attention decentralization = give (more) self-government to structure = structure /added sense/ will = will /added sense/

The subject areas included in Social Science are considered by Florence to include : Economics, Sociology, Political Science, Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, Geography, Ecology. Please note that Demography - statistics of populations - overlaps with Mathematics and that Ecology -- organisms relations with the environment -- with Biography, both of which are in the general area of natural science. Should these influence general word selection for both general science and social science, or should the person interested in interdisciplinary subjects pay attention to both general lists. To put the burden on the few interested in broad areas will make free to the greater number of learners to learn more words of new meanings. Reducing duplicate words on general lists, allows for greater number of different concept to be introduced.
Good judgment is required, Ogden's genius, to allow word selection so as to accept words with alternate meanings, yet not so many as to get in the way of clear understanding.

For electronic office aids, where the sense of a word is not known to a computer (only its spelling), only 19 words are coded as being from a special wordlist [social]. The root form is assumed where a derivative form is put forward, thereby allowing other derivatives.

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About this Page: International Words -- Supplemental words of general international understanding. The learner is expected to already know the international words and numeric system. The learner is expected to learn one general area wordlist in his area of interest and one specialty wordlist within that general interest of 50 words. This makes 1000 words for each student, although the specialty interest words may be different for different learners.
Last updated : October 11, 2005
URL: http://zbenglish.net/sites/basic/socialsci.html