Internationalingo

THE SYSTEM OF BASIC ENGLISH -- C. K. Ogden -- Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

All over the world last week men, women & children were talking. Though the subjects of their conversation were limited, rio one interpreter could have been quite sure what they were talking about; for in order to understand everything that was said, such an interpreter would have to know about 1.500 different languages, not counting dialects. In Urdu, Kiswahili, Catalan, Manchu, many another mutually outlandish lingo they hissed, jabbered, squeaked to each other. Some (though few of them knew it) were even talking Basic English.

"What the World needs most," says Orthologist Charles Kay Ogden, ''is about 1,000 more dead languages -- and one more alive." Seeing the modern Babel as the principal barrier to worldwide communication, commerce and science. Ogden cast about for a linguistic ladder. Such manufactured lingos as Esperanto, Volapuk, Ido, Novial, Occidental he rejected as unrealistic, improbable. Instead he hit upon the idea of making a simplified form of English, thinks it has a good chance of becoming the international auxiliary language of the future. Though the arguments in favor of his choice would be more cogent if he were a Frenchman. Turk or Prussian, he advances four potent claims: 1) English is now "the natural or governmental" language of over 500,000,000 people. 2) It is the second language of the Far East. 3) It is the language of more than 800 of the world's 1,400 radio stations. 4) No other existing language can be simplified to the same extent.

In Basic English's 850-word vocabulary. 16 verbs do the work of over 4,000; 600 nouns, 150 adjectives, 100 other words take the place of the 415.000 listed in The Oxford English Dictionary. There are only five grammatical rules ("the exceptions ... are few and unimportant")The apparently whimsical spelling of English, a grief to struggling foreigners, has not been tampered with. Ogden admits this difficulty but calls it minor, hopes to see spelling reform make plain English even plainer. No pidgin English, Basic can be used to express ideas, as Ogden proves by writing its 100-page system in Basic English.

Half The System of Basic English is taken up by examples: newspaper stories, radio talks, scenarios, business letters, "translations" into Basic English of scientific lectures, political and economic papers, Bible passages, a scene from Robinson Crusoe. Translation into Basic English sometimes results in a stilted foreignness. President Roosevelt's "You people must have faith; you must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses" is rendered "It is necessary for you to have belief in us. Do not put off your balance by false stories and chance ideas." Sometimes the result is classic simplicity, as in this example from a speech of Mussolini's:

Original "I fought in the War as a soldier in the ranks. I know what war means. Terrible memories of those years when whole generations of youth of so many countries were laid low by the hail of lead have not been cancelled from my mind."

Basic "I was in the War, not as one in authority, but as a common man. That gave me knowledge of the effects of war. Sad memories of those years when the young men of all countries went down in such numbers under the rain of lead are even now in my mind ."

The Author. One fact about Charles Kay Ogden would be enough to frighten most plain readers. With Ivor Armstrong Richards, another Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, he wrote a book with the fearsome title, The Meaning of Meaning (1923). No mess of metaphysics but an attempt to examine the working efficiency of language, this book was the starting point of Basic English. His position as student of psychology and language has brought him in touch with many a learned head in other countries. From his Orthological Institute of Cambridge and his bachelor London house, crowded with switchboards and phonographs, Ogden directs a propaganda for Basic English that is now worldwide, numbers such potent adherents as Britain's George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley, America's John Dewey, Sweden's Sven Hedin, Japan's Y. Okakura. Small, spectacled, fair-haired, with a tight-lipped mouth like the late Calvin Coolidge's. from which purrs an endless stream of speech, 45-year-old Missionary Ogden is no fanatic but a scholarly enthusiast. Though he is a preacher of simplified language, he is capable of horrendous complexities, as when he writes about James Joyce's Work in Progress as: "intensive, compressive, reverberative infixation . . . oneiric logorrhoea, polymathic, polyperverse . . . clangorous calembour . . . kaleidoscopic recamera . . . logophilous Birth-trauma . . chronic serial extension

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