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Ogden's Basic English

ogden.basic-english.org

113 pointshkhn67 comments

Orwell and HG Wells were both really taken by Basic English at first, with Wells arguing it could help build a singular world government. Orwell later became cynical about it, focusing on its lack of any words for things like "revolution." It became an inspiration for newspeak in 1984.

(I honestly think this particular concern was a bit of a straw man of Wells' and Ogden's optimistic views, a lingua franca used in a few settings doesn't have to be a straightjacket for all contexts. But it made 1984, so maybe fine in the end.)

As was Churchill, who tried to get Roosevelt interested, leading to this wonderful letter:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/10/Churchill_to_...

“Incidentally, I wonder what the course of history would have been if in May 1940 you had been able to offer the British people only ‘blood, work, eye water and face water,’ which I understand is the best that Basic English can do with five famous words.”

Just found rule 5:

Negative adjectives are formed with "UN"-

Double plus ungood, citizen!

Your comment gave me good bellyfeel.

The vocabulary is designed to deal with two distinct levels:

1. The 850 words sufficient for ordinary communications to idiomatic English.

2. By the addition of 100 words required for general science, and 50 for any particular science

I guess "revolution" would be one of the words in political science?

> But it made 1984, so maybe fine in the end.

I have the opposite impression. It is now impossible to have any conversation about conlangs or language reforms without most people parroting 1984 memes, this very thread is already an example of that.

Which is very ironic because these people are just blindly parroting what a book says instead of thinking critically about a topic and forming their own opinions.

I mean the conclusion ends up being the same. Linguistics has understood for generations that language is formed by communities and shaped by need.

Something like esperanto or an intentionally simplified english will never succeed as a universal language. People will use the words they find useful and create new words or usages as they find them valuable.

Stuff like the academy francaise are just a fantasy relic from before this was widely understood about language.

The wonderful thing about having a language with a handful of core words and endless composition is that you never lack a word for anything. Make-un-government I'd expect.

> The wonderful thing about having a language with a handful of core words and endless composition is that you never lack a word for anything. Make-un-government I'd expect.

It seems the Thai language is a bit like that. Some examples:

- good => 'dee'

- not => 'mai'

- bad => 'mai dee' (not good)

- much => 'mak'

- great => 'dee mak' (good much)

- study => 'rian'

- theater => 'rong'

- school => 'rong rian' (theater study)

- work => 'ngaan'

- factory => 'rong ngaan' (theater work)

- movies => 'phapyon'

- cinema => 'rong phapyon' (theater movies)

- nurse => 'phayabaan'

- hospital => 'rong phayabaan' (theater nurse)

- food => 'ahan'

- store => 'ran'

- restaurant => 'ran ahan' (store food)

- trade => 'khaa'

- shop => 'ran khaa' (store trade)

- motor => 'yon'

- carriage => 'rod'

- car => 'rod yon' (carriage motor)

- fire => 'fai'

- train => 'rod fai' (carriage fire)

- carry => 'bantuk'

- truck => 'rod bantuk' (carriage carry)

- room => 'hong'

- water => 'naam'

- toilet => 'hong naam' (room water)

- sleep => 'noon'

- bedroom => 'hong noon' (room sleep)

- underground => 'taidin'

- cellar => 'hong taidin' (room underground)

- sit => 'nang'

- play => 'len'

- living room => 'hong nang len' (room sit play)

- dog => 'ma'

- forest => 'pa'

- wolf => 'ma pa' (dog forest)

- tiger => 'sauw'

- black => 'dam'

- panther => 'sauw dam' (tiger black)

Or German? Generally composite words seem more popular in languages that don't prefer loanwords in general, because there is a limited supply of native words (or morphemes). I think English is in the opposite extreme.

https://xkcd.com/2043/

I've been studying the Belter creole from the Expanse[1] and lack of vocabulary[2] is a substantial issue. However, circumlocution can work, and so I'd propose several revolutions, depending upon which side one is on[3]:

    (laudative)
    térash fo feriting
    burn (as in a ship's engines) for freedom

    (pejorative)
    gang belowt
    temporary excursion, involving lots of blood

    (cynical)
    du ganyamang owta we
    change the winners

[1] TV Show. Normally I'd privilege books, but the authors have said theirs was just made up and shouldn't be considered canon, especially as the TV version is based on code-switching a proper creole.

[2] with na- as a productive un-, very much like newspeak.

[3] I believe this is attested: "Detim da belowt im ere da wowl, sasa kemang to xalte wit?" (when blood hits the walls, do you know where you stand?)

That's quite the hobby to pick up - what resources are you using to learn vocabulary / are there some communities for this, or is it all stitched together from the show?

Will answer more in depth tomorrow. For now: https://pensatingbik.tumblr.com/post/183320546205/learning-l...

There are resources[1] with communities[2], which are stitched together from the show[3].

I learned about lang belta from HN[4], and am interested because the poverty of attested vocabulary makes circumlocution essential. Beside the challenge, it's a language that has no L1 speakers, so milowda kowmang eka, we're all equally disadvantaged[5]. Beyond that, I guess I'm just a kuxakuwala, someone who's been stanning space ever since discovering SciFi[6].

Fo showxa fit natet, gova gif terash, kori gif ye mash.[7]

[1] see showxating beranta, the brother comment, plus "lang belta" as a search term yields more, e.g. https://www.scifi-forum.de/forum/science-fiction/the-expanse...

[2] which I have yet to explore. Maybe when I get closer to real-time productivity I'll be tempted enough to join discord and potentially even Patreon. (can I just make a payment directly to Nick Farmer? Do you all have IBAN in the US yet, so I can avoid third parties, like Patreon, SWIFT, etc.?)

[3] as explained earlier, the show's creole is a retcon with authorial blessing, as it's been done by a langwala, a linguist, in an effort to produce a productive conlang. The show mainly codeswitches a "beltish" lect, with english as the acrolect but in principle (subject to willingness of audience, writers, and actors to exploit it) there's an underlying lang belta basilect. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezU-F028krU

(some articles at https://palawandailynews.com probably contain equivalent mixes of english/filipino?)

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24552727

[5] When the indians were imploring each other to "get yer brits out" ironically they had to do so in english, for similar reasons.

[6] Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24399840 or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TAmISW76Rk

[7] "To spit with flow, the head produces thrust yet it's the heart that provides reaction mass."

after Quintilian (first century) http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

My understanding of the belter language was it was partly driven by the necessity to communicate in a vacuum so gestures were also important. Does that feature in the linguistics at all, or is it purely supplemental?

Again, I haven't actually read the books or seen the show, so I'm a poor reference, just wa paxoniseki unte wa beltawala, an earthling stanning the language like an otaku.

I like what I've found online of the gestural language, and apparently it gets used far more in the show than lang belta itself (being much easier for anglophone audience and actors).

My impression is that it is normally a supplemental redundant channel (pair go with the outstretched arm, ya with a raised fist, kori or sensa with the hand on heart, tugut with the hand beaks, etc.) but an area I can easily imagine it would play a paralinguistic role is in telegraphing sarcasm: one might say something in english while gesturing the opposite[1][2]. IIRC Naomi does this to Martians at one point?

[1] I'd imagine spacesuit comms would often show talking heads, leaving the belter gestural language —which uses everything but the head, because helmets— with a clear channel for side messages to one's crew, in one's immediate presence, versus the ofisha comms reporting to management.

[2] having noticed the strong resemblance of "Oi, mush!" to "Ой, мужик!" I now wonder how coincidental the resemblance of "Guv'nor" to "говно" may be?

Edit: found a thread, https://www.reddit.com/r/LangBelta/comments/5w3puf/gestures/

On a tangent: Quintilian has an interesting chapter on the use of gesture in rhetoric, and he denounces imitative gesture (and especially imitative voice) as being infra dig, while lauding more abstract gesture as a side channel to breadcrumb the separate parts of a speech and their various relations to the current line of argument.

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Quintilia...

> "It was for this reason that Demosthenes used to practise his delivery in front of a large mirror..." et seq

(On the importance of glances, when not hidden by a spacesuit helmet: the soviet equivalent of Sesame Street used puppets with mobile eyes, which I find very expressive indeed.)

Conway's Law probably applies. The linguist and the choreographer for the TV show are two separate people, so there probably won't be very much integration between language and gesture.

found some gestures on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYrTJ-0svjQ

Basic English is a very good tool for teaching English as a second language, but I think that wasn't the focus of both of them; Also Ogden was kind of interested to create a common language for science that lacks ambiguity; I don't think he thought much about politics.

Well of course: oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc.

The now-famous book from Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham, originated with a bet that he couldn't write a complete bestselling book with just 50 words.

These 50: a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you

You can achieve a surprising amount with shockingly little language.

Restricted subsets of a language are a useful concept, for some purposes, but Basic English itself is not a very good example. For example, if I remember correctly, Basic English doesn't allow the word "tolerate" but does allow "put up with". That's a false economy. Also, the "850" is deceptive advertising because there are various categories of word that are allowed in addition to the 850 words listed.

> Basic English doesn't allow the word "tolerate" but does allow "put up with". That's a false economy.

That's a very good point!

"Put up with" is an idiomatic expression that native speakers may take for granted -- but it must be learned, in the same way as "tolerate".

In fact, it would be easier for half of the world to learn the word "tolerate", from the Latin "toleratus", than the expression "put up with".

(For instance: we use the word "tolerar" in Porguese and Spanish.)

There's also tolérer in french, tolerieren in german.

Phrasal verbs (such as "put up with") are one of the more frustrating parts of English to un-learn when trying to learn a foreign language. (I assume they're at least as frustrating to learn when learning English as well.)

A well-known Esperantist, Tim Morley, gives a great talk on phrasal verbs (which, Esperanto having none, tend to trip up English speakers learning it). Here it is in English: https://youtu.be/eQ_hXML4nWg?t=671 (I highly recommend the first half of that video too, on "quite", for its humor value.)

Indeed - the OED gives 419 senses of the verb "put", including as varied as

to put (a person or animal) out of (his or her) misery

Cricket. (a) (Of a fielder or wicketkeeper) to hit or break (a wicket), dislodging a bail;

to put one's feet up

I think `faire` is kind of the same in French - in various phrasal settings, it feels like an all-purpose verb for taking any sort of action. Although I guess that's more like 'do' which also has a bajillion uses in different contexts

More serious attempts to restrict the English vocabulary do limit the word senses, like the Longman American Defining Vocabulary [1] (which does contain an explicit counterexample of "put up with" ;-).

[1] http://www.longmandictionariesusa.com/res/shared/vocab_defin...

Reminds me of Toki Pona, "The Language of Good". [1] The idea is that it consists of a small set of core words, and every other concept is expressed as compound compositions of those words.

I've never learned it, but I find it instructive as a way to think about language. That is, many words are actually derived from multiple simpler words. It is fascinating to think what those core concepts relating to the human experience and human need to use language are.

[1] https://tokipona.org/

mi ken toki kepeken toki pona. taso ijo sona la ona li ike. mi wile sitelen e lipu sona la mi ken ala pali pona e ona. taso jan li wile toki lon pilin lon ijo pona la jan li ken toki e ni kepeken toki pona.

Translation:

I can talk using Toki Pona. But (in the context of) knowledge thing, it bad. (In the context of) me want to write knowledge documents, I cannot do it well. But (in the context of) people want to talk about feelings and about good/simple things, people can talk this using Toki Pona.

Speaking of feelings, I think you underestimate their complexity. Poetry was essentially invented because our vocabulary, for all its breadth, fails to convey exactly what we mean.

Funnily enough, the word "basic" is missing from the word list. The English language needs more than these 850 words just to describe this project.

I guess Ogden hadn't heard of Godel's proof, which was around the same time. Ironic indeed.

In the Land of Invented Languages¹ is a great read if you want to learn more about artificial languages like Basic English, Lojban², or Blissymbolics³.

1. http://inthelandofinventedlanguages.com/

2. https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban

3. https://www.blissymbolics.org/

Lojban Wikipedia has an entry for "Revolution": https://jbo.wikipedia.org/wiki/sutra_binxo

I would love to see this in Spanish or Mandarin

Knowledge of 3000 characters in Chinese is enough to read about 99% of text. Many words use two characters. Then there are Chengyu which are generally 4 characters and are derived from an old story. 850 characters would definitely be enough to communicate, and word creation by combining characters together is more flexible than English. Since every character can be a word, it's a little trickier to define what 850 words would mean, as 850 characters gets you thousands more words.

Just use a word frequency table and take the top 1000, power through memorizing them, and then learn some basic grammar

I would love to see this in Dutch and many other languages!

IIUC, this is close to the english used by the Simple English Wikipedia[0], though it's 1000 words vs 850.

See also, "Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words"[1] by Randall Munroe (the xkcd author), which explains things using the same set of words.

[0] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Simple_Eng...

[1] https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/

imo, the website is utterly confusing as an educational resource

Agreed, that contents page is oof. But given that it was last updated in 2012, I doubt it is something that will change.

It's dead Jim.

Has anyone tried to write an algorithm that translates any piece of text into "basic English." That seems like a tractable problem, since it's just mapping all the words in English and grammatical structures into Ogden's 850 words and rules.

A language translation target would be kind of fun. I wonder how much of modern idiomatic english could be successfully machine translated . . . or even translated using meatware?

You know, the Ogden Basic Word list is really useful when you want to name <30,000 things.

You can combine (150 Qualities) * (200 picturable words) to get easy-to-spell and memorable identifiers.

Of course there are larger lists, but this one has the "easy-to-spell" and "memorable" characteristics that most lists won't give you.

"GET" is such a confusing word. I was on a bus with a man who was leaning English and he asked me to explain "get". His English was already limited, and explaining the diversity of meanings made me grow to hate the word.

Yes. Some people use it wrong in a professional setting and it's really hard to correct without basically building a blacklist of cases where they used it wrong.

I wish someone would do the same for Russian: Basic Русский

My favorite feature of Russian that has no analogue in English is the variety of prefixes that can, for example, add direction to a verb: приехал переехал подехал (prefix before the word "drive" makes it "arrive", "drive over", "just arrived").

The beauty is that these prefixes, being universal, can be added to just about any word adding a flavor you may not have even experienced. Using the same prefixes before a vulgar word makes Russian, perhaps, the most versatile language for cursing.

> has no analogue in English

English uses prepositions instead to modify meaning, as you described.

приехал literal "drove in" переехал "drove over" подъехал "drove up"

> can be added to just about any word adding a flavor you may not have even experienced

That's definitely true. this makes translating from russian lose quite a lot of color.

We've got that in Czech too, it's a nice feature of Slavic languages.

fan-effing-tastic!

Likewise for all languages. 850 words is plausible effort for tourism, 25,000 isn’t.

I listen to pop music. There's probably a high overall vocabulary count, but (a) lyric sites are a thing, and (b) the common words are really common. сердце, очи, люблю, руки, и.т.д.

I know probably fewer than 10 words in Spanish, but the #1 is "corazón" :P

Do you know any good resource to first learn Cyrillic alphabet?

I knew greek before, which has substantial overlap.

Flashcards would probably be the fastest method, but I'm not cramming, so to pick up the rest of the characters, I:

- watched the relevant episodes of Спокойной ночи, малыши for letterforms and pronunciation. (phonic segment is about midway through, nearly always at the same time, IIRC)

- read plenty. VK memes at first, news headlines for the proper nouns later.

- watched lyric music videos to work on reading speed.

Duolingo is good at teaching Cyrillic.

Be warned, though, that it takes a while for an English speaker to recognize the difference between hard consonants and soft consonants. In fact I got the point where I didn't think that I could tell, but was able to successfully guess 10x in a row. I got them right, but it really felt like I had no idea. Very weird experience.

Trying to adhere to this is a nightmare. The amount of time required to reinvent common words even most ESL speakers know anyway is absurd. But hey, at least you can't say 'murder of crows' right? I know how much that annoys some of you.

---

Going after this idea be rough. The amount of time needed to form common words even almost every new language person gets be foolish. But you be unable to say 'cause-death of black birds' right? I have knowledge that some of you protest that word.

I think it would be hard to communicate nuance concisely with such a small vocabulary.

Okay, but have you tried? Did you read of anyone else who tried and found that to be the case?

I'm sure it'd take getting used to for proficient speakers like you and me, perhaps not dissimilar from learning a dialect, but is it inferior?

Is there a French equivalent anywhere?

The FAQ (http://www.basic-english.org/learn/duff.html) says "See Charles Duff who uses Basic English as the basis for other languages." which include French but I cant seem to find any online or ebook versions

It has a section on the same site for French (and also German): http://ogden.basic-english.org/fbasice.html

Those are sections in french and german, for basic english.

For basic french (~A2?) try Le Petit Nicolas.

http://www.petitnicolas.com/collection/albums

(for francophones who wish to try something different: http://www.petitnicolas.com/collection/albums#collection-lan... )

you can use deepl.com to translate it to different languages instantly :)

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