A WORLD LANGUAGE

Greymouth Evening Star, 18 July 1933, Page 10

A WORLD LANGUAGE

HAS IT BEEN FOUND? It is an old idea, that necessity is the mother of invention. Ono of our most crying needs, now the nations are being brought so abruptly together by the conquest of time and space, is the need of a universal language. The 1500 languages of mankind are such serious barriers to world understanding that experts of many nations have been labouring to invent some means of overcoming them. A A. -I that O 11 QQ

been found. Mr C. K. Ogden, director of rhe Orthological Institute at Cambridge, believes that a means of world communication has been found which is the most promising yet invented, and leading scholars all over the world are working with him to make the good news known. Everyone will be surprised to know that, this language is nothing more than simplified English. A vocabulary of only S5O words has been chosen to do the work of more than 20,000, and it is possible to write all these words on a sheet of notepaper. They can also be put on a gramophone 7 record. To cover any field of knowledge

150 other words, scientific and of gon- ; eral utility, may be added if desired, thus bringing the vocabulary up to a thousand. The 850 words, with a few rules for applying them, may be learned in 24 hours by English-speaking people and in about a month by foreign students who study the language for two hours a day. One of the chief difficulties of Esperanto and the many other artificial

, languages is that few people have ‘enough leisure to learn them. One of the reasons that so few words are needed in Basic English is that most English verbs, as Mr Ogden points out, aie luxuries. Thousands can be replaced by simpler verb forms helped by adverbs, prepositions, and nouns. After long' and painstaking tests only is verb forms are left in tin' Basic English. The new English is essentially a noun language, and it is easily learned by foreigners because English nouns rarely have gender, ami, with

■ link J . Ulin, wiUl few exceptions. Ihe\ are regular in all their cases and in their plurals. English, says Mr Ogden, is nearer . the language systems of the Orient and of Africa than any language, natural or artificial, derived from Latin, and it is now the most widely ‘ accepted of all living forms of speech. Commerce is as keen as science to 1 help along .the movement, and.it is believed that within ten years there will he world radio for knitting the nations together, probably by means of this newly-invented Basic English.