K BASIC ENGLISH

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 54, Issue 3894, 26 April 1937, Page 7

K BASIC ENGLISH

A WHOLE LANGUAGE IN 850 WORDS.

Though Mr H. G. Wells, in his lat - est discoveries of the future, made it clear that Basic English would become the international language, he may well have been surprised by the developments of the past year (says C. K. Ogden, founder of the system). In 1933, in “The Shape of Things to Ccme,” he took the view that by A.D. £O2O almost everyone would be able to make use of Basic for talking and \ writing; and 1936 has seen a great increase in the number of those who are attempting to get things moving in the right direction. The chief landmark cf 1935 was the opening of an international eflice- in China under the directioi of Professor R. D. Jameson of Tsing Hua univeristy. Before he went to Peking, Picfessor Jameson was working on language questions, first in Chicago ar.d then in London, and is now getting the necessary schoolbooks for use in the Far East, with th? help of a group of Chinese teachers and the support of the Rockefeller Foundation. In Japan,''a parallel programme is almost complete, and by the middle of 1937 the Japanese-Basic Dictionary will be ready for the printer together with a number cf books of general interest for those who have got through the first stage of learning • the 850 weirds which make up the new e language. NORMAL ENGLISH. Not that the words themselves are f new. Basie is a form of normal Eng- \ l.sh, which to' readers in America or England will seem so clear and natural that they will generally not even be conscious of the way in which its woird range is limited—not only in numbers, but in sense and use. On the one hand, and it is a language complete in itself for all the- purposes of everyday existence; cn the other, it is the best first step to English as such, for those who are going forward to the language of Shakespeare and Mencken. English, in one form or another, is now' the international language of trade, science, and more than half the radio stations on the earth.

Learning 850 words of such a language is clearly not a waste of time for the millions of China, India, Africa and South America; so that, as was recorded in the New York Times some months back, “in recent years interest has been shifting from Esperanto to Basic English’’ and in . ail countries where English has now , been made part of the education system, such as the U.S.S.R., F : aland, the Argentine and Estonia, forwardlooking teachers are turning to Basic as the first step. What is taking place in Moscow is of special interest in this connection. The Soviet authorities have had a number of the Basic books printed, with notes in Russian by Madame Litinova. “Black Beauty” was the first, and now there is a Russian ‘ ‘Step by Step ” guide for learners. More than 100,000 copies of these were put on the market in the past year, and new printings are frequently needed. The first Basic group in Moscow was in the Institute of Legal Psychiatry, and last winter others were framed in a Stalin Industrial Academy, the Fo reign Office Institute, and the Cinema Institute and its academy. Naturally, at this stage, there are not enough Basic experts to go round, but with the help of the Foreign Language! Combinat, the organisation from which the Red Army gets most of its

. teachers, their number is increasing. In Singapore, a school for teachers has been started by Dr Victor Pur-

cell, with the approval of the Director of Education, and more than 13u a persons have sent in their names 1 to ' the Inspector of Schools. They are now’ being trained under the direction of Mrs Bottrall of the Raffles Institution; and in addition, there are almost 100 other learners, Chinese and Malay, under the care of the Singapore Basic English School, this winter.

|ln the East, and in countries where the form of the letters used in English is as hard as the sounds of the words, special books are necessary in the early stages. All these will be based on “The A.B.C. of Basic English,” where it is made clear how language is a system of signs which takes the place of pointing, and why “verbs” are not necessary when we have the 16 names of actsi or operations and 20 names of directions. “From Pictures to Letters,” by Ellen Walpole, of Kingston, Ontario, is a good example of Basic material tor the very young; pictures, giving the sense of the 850 words, are being made by Dr Otto Neurath in The Hague, and records by Professor Lloyd James of the British Broadcasting Corporation make it clear to those who have no English teacher how the words themselves are to be said.

From an international standpoint, it is more important that a language should be learnt than that it should be taught, and thus reading of Basic might be accelerated quite as much by its use on the radio for world news as by its adoption in the schools of the warring tribes into which the world is still segregated. The unification of mankind for peaceful ends is regarded by many as the ultimate goal of natural science, and the sue cess of recent radio talks in Basie on

the short-wave, both in England and America, may soon lead to further developments. USE IN SCIENCE. Men of science too, have been influenced by the appearance in Basic of such works as “The Outlook of Science” and “Science and ’Wellbeing,” by Professor J. B. S. Haldane; “A Basic Astronomy,” “Basic for Economics,” and other aids to the diffusion of international knowledge; and an ambitious scientific programme has been initiated for the years 1937-38. In Europe, however, education is still largely in the hands of traditionalists, so, although between 30 and 50 hours 1 are mere than sufficient to equip a normal Basie learner, progress is relatively slow. We have therefore made sure that it shall also be on solid foundation. In Denmark, for example, since the first successful experiments in 1932, Basic has been steadily gaining ground through methodical annual or biennial courses.