Basic English
Basic English is a constructed language with a small number of words created by Charles Kay Ogden and described in his book Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar (1930). The language is based on a simplified version of English.
from Wikipedia
What do you think about that? I guest that it doen’t used nowadays but… Could be it usefull to start learning english? Is it compatible with the standar english? Do you belive that we all have a universal language in the future?
December 13th, 2005 at 12:54 pm
Hi arreche,
Thanks for your post on the blog. I really don’t know much about ‘Basic English,’ though I did go to wikipedia and check it out.
I’m not sure it’s a good idea to study ‘Basic English’ which looks to me like it is pretty non-standard. I saw that the language doesn’t include the word ‘world,’ and it probably omits many other commonly-used English words. Languages evolve naturally over time (decades and centuries) and I’m not sure that a language can be methodically (and artificially) ‘condensed’ or ‘created’ with any success for it to become widely-spoken. However, I do remember a story a few years ago about the Dutch simplifying and/or standardizing some areas of spelling in their language.
Though ‘Basic English’ is in fact based on English and not completely ‘created,’ I still think that you’ll be better off to study a smaller ‘subset’ of common English. For example, at some points in your langauge learning process, you could limit new vocabulary words or new idioms/phrasal verbs, and just focus on improving your structures (tenses, word order, sentence structure, etc.) in a. postive statements, b. negative statements, and c. questions.
Regarding a ‘universal language’ or ‘global language,’ I think we’re many many many many years away from it, but it’s definitely possible in the future. Would it be based on Chinese? English? Hindi? Spanish?
I’d be interested to hear other opinions on ‘Basic English’ or a ‘universal language.’
January 1st, 2006 at 10:51 pm
More things fron The Wikipedia! This is one very interesting article called How to write Simple English articles where you can found information about Basic, Simple and Special English.