Idle Fears About Basic English

by I. A. RICHARDS

1

To LIKEN so spare a frame as Basic English to Falstaff may seem odd. But they have points in common. “Men of all sorts,” he says’, “take a pride to gird at me. ... I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.” (2 Henry IV, I, 2, 11) Men (and women) of all sorts also take a pride to gird at Basic. The pride is often conspicuous.

Basic is a great excitant of humor. Hardly a week passes but the New Yorker or Punch or now Miss Macaulay, in the April Atlantic, finds Basic irresistible. And I imagine that Mr. Ogden—himself a man of resource in jokes — gains deep satisfaction from this. To have provided, in this distressed world, a new and seemingly inexhaustible recipe for humor is in itself no slight achievement. But there are other sides to Basic. This distressed world needs jokes; but it needs greater helps still more. And Basic offers them. It would be a pity if the humorists, through misapprehensions or malice, were to hinder the understanding and use of these helps just when they are most urgently needed.

Let us see wdiat these helps are. Miss Macaulay rightly takes up “the use of a common tongue by foreigners among themselves” first. There are some 220 million people who have a good knowledge of English; and these form an invaluable stabilizing and teaching reserve which artificial languages lack; but there are over 1900 million of the others. And they talk some 1700 tongues. No man knows how many of these people are soon going to be flung suddenly into new international contacts. We are far more likely to underrate than to overestimate what the Air Age is about to do for us, and English of some sort or other will certainly have to be the operating language of the airways — with all that that implies. Is it to be Broken English or Basic English? That is really the question. A form of English which is a barrier, or a smooth and solid runway? Those who have heard Cantonese and North Chinese, for example, using English as their bridge will not think “international understanding between foreigners” through Basic so remote an ideal. It is true that Basic is short in terms of abuse, in irritants and insults. But is that a disadvantage?

Now as to talk between English-speakers and the rest. Miss Macaulay claims to “have no wish to make elementary jests on this subject.” If so, she must be somewhat at the mercy of her unconscious, for she does little else. Of course if the foreign learner knew English perfectly, things would be easier for him and for us. If he knew really well the current English Miss Macaulay would put in a phrase book for him, we would escape a little trouble, but at what cost to him? Learning to keep sufficiently within Basic is really a very light task for an English-speaker. Learning to talk full contemporary idiom — whether American or British — is an appallingly heavy undertaking for almost any foreigner.

Miss Macaulay has unfortunately not concerned herself with this key question and a key fact. She has been too busy passing judgment on what is or is not good English — usually a thought-free process — and shuddering at the possibilities of change. “The mind is ever ingenious in making its own distress,” as Goldsmith noted. And she seems to regard “a laborsaving short cut” as a minor matter here. If she were to consider this key question and the key fact, she would find that Basic, far from being a danger, is a much needed protection to English.

The key question is, “Which is easier for the foreigner: to attain some general competence in English with Basic, or with the miscellaneous assortments of common phrases that have passed for elementary English?” And the key fact is that the foreigner gets much further in his command of correct English with Basic than through any other plan of study of comparable scale. He goes on from Basic, if he wants to, with a flying start.

Basic offends Miss Macaulay’s feeling for her own English. She does not like it. Perhaps she likes scrambled English better? If she had sat through more classes in elementary English she would be better placed to judge. Or if she had taught English literature to representative foreign products of six years’ hard labor at Miss Macaulay’s English. She is attached to her shall and should — an ambiguous, insecure, recent, and regional development of English which can cause much misunderstanding. How confident she is that the use of will where she would write shall is a “corruption” of English.

This is the arbitrary attitude to language, ignoring alike the variations in the uses of these words made by equally discerning speakers, the confusions which are the only crop to be expected from attempts to teach such distinctions in elementary English, and the linguistic research of a hundred years. It well illustrates the source of Miss Macaulay’s angry and apprehensive feelings about Basic. They come from secluded, entrenched, and unexamined ideas about usage. After the disturbance Basic English and Its Uses has evidently caused her, I hesitate to refer her to Interpretation in Teaching for a fuller discussion of usage. She may prefer the linguistic ivory tower.

2

HERE I must take care to be clear. Basic is no enemy to usage (critically examined). At countless points it is governed (and as strictly as any English) by usage. It does not pretend — how could any limited selection of English do so? — that its usages are the best or superior to other usages which those who know more English would follow. But to keep Basic as normal a form of English as possible — under the terrific hammerings a language gets from foreign learners — Mr. Ogden had to select the most important key patterns on which to insist. To try for too much leads in practice to less success — to greater deviation from Standard English — unless we assume that the foreigner is going to devote years of toil to polishing his English under far better teachers than are ever likely to be generally available.

I remark in Miss Macaulay a noteworthy absence of constructive thought here. The rapid spread of English is going anyhow to lead to a great deal of queer lingo. We in America and Canada have more than a little experience of this. We know, and the Armed Forces know too, what the crippling effect of widespread broken English is. Miss Macaulay writes as a member of a highly literate elite. She does not face the present fact that a dauntingly large proportion of nominal English-speakers are without adequate means either of expressing their thought or understanding the thoughts of others on any but a narrow range of the most familiar subjects.

Basic, we are finding, can help them greatly. It is easy to denounce “a stunted barbarian vocabulary.” That needs only a pen and a consciousness of superior cultivation. To go into the classrooms and observe the actual effects of Basic in releasing minds from stultifying confusions is more trouble. It is well to point to “our already deplorable use of our native tongue, threatened and debased on all sides by jargon, wrong constructions, solecisms, genteelisms, parvenu pronunciations” — though I wonder a little whether Miss Macaulay really knows how far such things have gone. But merely to list them does little good. What has been shown is that Basic can be a useful remedy where more traditional remedies are failing.

Mr. Ogden had to strike a balance. No form of widely useful English which could be generally learned in a reasonable time could avoid some shocks to routine minds. His task was to prevent serious distortion of English without sacrificing ease, economy of vocabulary, and the widest utility. In any case, if English-speakers are to talk at all to those whose English is limited, they must make concessions and adapt their speech to their hearers. What does Miss Macaulay propose? That we should all learn all the major languages? Or that we should shut ourselves up for fear of damage to our English ? Language is, after all, a tool which we use variously for various purposes, and Basic is a special use, no more. Exclusive language custom priding itself on being “the only good English” is an amusing spectacle. But it can be a nuisance when it gets in the way of science, critical judgment, teaching, world collaboration, or constructive statesmanship.

Whimsicality, I suppose, is irresponsible in all these directions. And literary quirks will not much affect men of practical judgment who have, for example, the Chinese Air Force to train and can save lives by doing it through Basic. But when Miss Macaulay charges Basic with misleading interpretation, a reply is needed. Her two instances concern angel and virgin. She says that the Basic-taught child will be confusing an angel with wasps and sparrows because his Basic dictionary tells him it is a “being with wings.” Actually his General Basic Dictionary gives this: “(Sp. in Christian religion higher being, servant of Higher Power, gen. pictured as winged.” Miss Macaulay has consulted only the little preliminary handbook for translators, in spite of Mr. Ogden’s warning foreword. That is hardly fair play. As to virgin, the translators of The New Testament in Basic English were not, of course, rewriting the King James Version; they were making a new translation and an unmarried woman is closer to the Hebrew used by the prophet than virgin would be. Miss Macaulay’s sneers here somewhat recoil upon herself.

In all this, however, she is indulging in a fly’s-eye view of a mountain. Here is an immense contribution towards a more sanely organized world, a tested and proved means for making the coming diffusion of English give rise to as little strain and distortion as possible. This diffusion is inevitable, whoever wishes it or not; the war has seen to that; it is occurring already. All that Miss Macaulay has to offer as comment are sundry examples of the obvious fact that no limited form of English can do everything to satisfy all critics, and some doleful prophecies which sadly contradict one another.

In these she little cares how she shifts her ground. First, Basic won’t work because the English-speaker can’t understand (!) or speak it. Next everybody will come to speak it so well they will speak nothing else. They “will pick it up almost unconsciously.” But why should any of us become limited to Basic? Who doesn’t already speak many forms of English — in the classroom, on the playground; at home and in the office; drunk and sober; in the army and out of it? Teachers, nurses, and parents, who daily restrict their language far more drastically than Basic would, don’t lose the rest of it. Finally the foreigner — through Basic — comes to “conversing, reading, and writing in excellent English” while we go “down the ladder rung by rung. So great cultures go under, change hands.” The bland patriotic assumption that of course the great culture is ours will amuse the foreigner. The prophet-critic has changed camps again.

Miss Macaulay is a satirist. Her readers expect her to wave a witty whip. Often in the past she has attacked foibles, prejudices, and other modes of folly to good effect. But there she knew intimately what she was attacking. Guesses about what may happen are not a safe substitute. Basic is a tempting field for such guesses. Comparatively few people, as yet, have the actual experience which alone shows what it can and will do. I do not for one moment suggest that Miss Macaulay thought, “Here is a big new subject to go for. Everybody is interested and naturally suspicious. It is easy game.” Oh, no. She is Horatia at the bridge or at least among the geese in the Capitol. But to one of her readers it was a disappointment to see her talent go astray for lack of inquiry into what is actually happening.

One culminating instance: “The scheme,” she says, “. . . is clear: they want the thing taught in English schools.” I do not know of any who want Basic taught (as opposed to studied) in normal English or American classes. For the deaf and the blind, yes. And I have seen retarded readers, who would have had to leave school with a complete reading failure against them, turned into sound and fluent readers in five months through Basic. But no one is proposing to have Basic taught — as a first stage or as any stage — to normal English-speaking children. “Taught” here is one of those compact ambiguous words beloved by controversialists which Miss Macaulay favors. It calls up horrid pictures of helpless children being drilled in Basic phrases to the neglect of the rest of their English. But this “scheme” which is so “clear” to her is just nonexistent.

A good number of people have found that Basic, as a paraphrasing instrument, has its uses. It can awaken interest in the resources of full English and of the Basic words themselves. It provides some of the exercise and discipline which Latin translation at its best can give. So used, it already looks like part of the answer to many a current problem in teaching technique. And were they substantial, Basic could readily handle the dangers conjured up by Miss Macaulay’s idle fears.