subject: About The English Langauage [print this page] The English language is spoken in more different countries than any other language. Many people want the world to have a "universal" language, one that everyone can speak. Some of these people would like to see English become the universal language, but they agree that it is a very difficult language to learn. So in 1920 two Englishmen-a language expert named C. K. Ogden and a literary critic named I. A. Richards-invented a simpler form of English that is called Basic English. Basic English is made up of 850 English words that can be used to express most of the everyday things that people talk about. The largest English dictionaries contain about 500,000 words. About 20,000 of these are words which most educated English-speaking people use often. That is too many words for someone who is just starting to study a language. So Mr. Ogden and Professor Richards selected only the English words that a person must know to express simple things clearly. Basic English follows the same rules of grammar as regular English. The main difference is that there are only eighteen verbs. These are called operators. Some of those included are: come, go, get, make, put, take, be, do, say, see. Besides the verbs, other words having to do with action are also called operators. These include prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, articles, some adverbs, and the words yes, please, north, south, east, west, tomorrow, and yesterday. Basic English has six hundred nouns (names of things). These include two hundred picturable things-of which an artist could draw a picture-such as ant, apple, army. There are four hundred general things-such words as act, behavior, account. Adjectives and adverbs are called qualifiers. Some adverbs are made by adding -ly to adjectives, as we are used to doing (cheap, cheaply). Comparisons are made with more and most (beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful) or with -er and -est (hard, harder, hardest, or near, nearer, nearest). So you can see near, nearer, nearest). So you can see that the original 850 words grow into quite a few more. Basic English also uses words for measurements, numbers, days of the week and months. There are extra lists of words for special subjects. One hundred special words for poetry and fifty for religion were used in a Basic English translation of the Bible. Science calls for one hundred extra words, and there are three hundred "international" words, such as radio, hotel, and bank, which are much the same in most languages. Even with the special lists, Basic English still gets along with many fewer words than regular English. One way this is done is to use a few simple words combined in different ways to take the place of more complicated words. For example, in Basic English a puppy is a young dog, a kitten is a young cat, a sapling is a young tree. You don't climb a tree, you go up it.
