Monday, Jan. 18, 1943

Yon Fo Gret Blu Form Bel

Up from his easy chair in the venerable Athenaeum Club rose Sir John Squire in righteous wrath. He rushed for pen & paper to write a letter to the Times;

"Sirs: Is the Times going per iter tenebricosum like the rest of the papers? . . . This morning your correspondent says 'Mothers have been chided by various ministers. . . .' What has happened to the old English word 'chidden?'. . . We seem to be reaching a point at which an Englishman won't be able to call his language his own!"

Hardly was the letter in print before old George Bernard Shaw joined in the fun from his Hertfordshire retreat:

"Sir John Squire, like all poets, loves the euphonious past participles of our irregular verbs. So do I. But . . . English usage is just what we need to get rid of. It is overloaded with unnecessary grammar; and our mad persistence in trying to spell the sounds of our speech costs us the price of a fleet of battleships every year in writing and printing superfluous letters. The most civilized nation in the world, the Chinese, have taken our language in hand for business purposes and produced an English with a minimum of grammar. ..."

Not merely another evidence of Shavian delight in biting the hand that feeds him was Shaw's championship of a simpler English. He is now backing a new system of "Universal Pidgin" advanced by Kenneth Littlewood, a 29-year-old Yorkshire munitions worker. In his spare time Littlewood prepared a primer based on the study of Russian, Latin, Greek, French, Welsh, Arabic and Basic English. Unlike Esperanto, Universal Pidgin seldom uses more than two syllables in any word, telescopes these with borrowed syllables to make new words. Sample: "Yon fo gret blu form bel" (Those four great blue flowers are beautiful).

When Simplifier Littlewood sent a rough draft of his work to Shaw the response was "By hook or crook get it published without waiting to make it any better. Then advienne que pourra."

Sly old G.B.S. is aware that more troops of divergent tongues are fighting side by side than ever before in history. Obviously a market for a practical, simplified international language is wide open. Littlewood claims his system can be learned by anyone in two months.

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