Basic English

Basic English


A simplified form of the English language based on 850 key words was developed in the late 1920s by the English psychologist Charles Kay Ogden and publicized by the English educator I. A. Richards.

Known as Basic English, it was used mainly to teach English to non-English-speaking persons and promoted as an international language. The complexities of English spelling and grammar, however, were major hindrances-barriers- to the adoption of Basic English as a second language.

The fundamental principle of Basic English was that any idea, however complex, may be reduced to simple units of thought and expressed clearly by a limited number of everyday words.

The 850-word primary vocabulary was composed of 600 nouns (representing things or events), 150 adjectives (for qualities and properties), and 100 general “operational” words, mainly verbs and prepositions.

Almost all the words were in common use in English-speaking countries; more than 60 percent were one-syllable words.

The abbreviated vocabulary was created in part by eliminating numerous synonyms and by extending the use of 18 “basic” verbs, such as make, get, do, have, and be.

These verbs were generally combined with prepositions, such as up, among, under, in, and forward.

For example, a Basic English student would use the expression “go up” instead of “ascend.”

Modern English is a relatively uninflected language. Nouns have separate endings only in the possessive case and the plural number. Verbs have both a strong conjugation—shown in older words—with internal vowel change, for example, sing, sang, sung,

and a weak conjugation with dental suffixes indicating past tense, as in play, played. The latter is the predominant type.

Only 66 verbs of the strong type are in use; newer verbs invariably follow the weak pattern. The third person singular has an -s ending, as in does.

The structure of English verbs is thus fairly simple, compared with that of verbs in similar languages, and includes only a few other endings, such as -ing or -en; but verb structure does involve the use of numerous auxiliaries such as have, can, may, or must.

Monosyllabic and some disyllabic adjectives are inflected for degree of comparison, such as larger or happiest; other adjectives express the same distinction by compounding with more and most.

Pronouns, the most heavily inflected parts of speech in English, have objective case forms, such as me or her, in addition to the nominative (I, he, we) and possessive forms (my, his, hers, our).



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