Does This Make You Tired?

A new book giving serious arguments for a system of simple English as a common language among all nations has been put out by Ivor Armstrong Richards, head of Harvard's Commission on English Language Studies. Basic English and Its Uses (Norton; $2) says that the greatest number of arguments against this simple language do not commonly come from persons fearing Anglo-Saxon expansion but from supporters of languages that are not natural, such as Esperanto.

Basic Senses. Basic English is the discovery of Richards' old Cambridge Uni versity friend Charles Kay Ogden (TIME, March 12, 1934). When getting ready for the writing of their The Meaning of Meaning, Ogden & Richards made comparisons of the senses of words. In this process, they made use of some words again & again, came to the idea that the most important senses of language may be given in a limited number of words.

Ogden went on to make up Basic, a language of 850 English words used in their chief meanings, half a dozen rules of use. The 850 words are in three groups:

600 names of things, 150 of qualities, 100 of "operations," or important relations between other words. Eighteen, the "operators," are Basic's only verbs; put to gether with other Basic words they do the work of 4,000 verbs. This, for some, is the poor point of Basic for writing that is bright and interesting, because verbs are the strong words of full English.

But Richards makes the point that the use of Basic by learners of English, or for discussion among persons not talking the same full language, will give no wounds to the body of true English. He says:

"There is bad Basic and good Basic. . . . If it is bad English, it is bad Basic."*

If this story is not interesting writing, it is because it is in Basic English. Says Richards: "A reader who has the rest of the English language gets a little tired of Basic writing after a time."

* There is a Basic book that puts over 20,000 English words into Basic words. Good books in Basic now ready for reading: The Three Signs (short stories by Hawthorne, Irving, Poe), George Bernard Shaw's Arms & The Man, the New Testament (the Old is to come), The Republic of Plato (done by Richards), Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, The Outlook of Science (selections from J. B. S. Haldane's writings).

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