RICHARDS OF HARVARD CREATES BASIC ENGLISH

In the nation-wide publicity following British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's remarks about it in his Sanders Theatre address on Labor Day, Basic English, an international language formulated by Ira A. Richards of Harvard's Orthological Committee and F. K. Ogden of Cambridge University and London, England, has been acclaimed as one of the major cultural developments hastened by the war.

Miss Christine M. Gibson, research assistant to Richards, yesterday stated that as an international language, Basic English is sufficient, practical, and universal. So simple, in fact, is the language, that persons of Chinese, Indic, and Russian origin have learned it easily.

Basic English was conceived in 1920 when Ogden and Richards were writing "The Meaning of Meaning," a book of the processes by which words came to have different meanings. In this work they charted the various definitions and senses in which key words of the language could be used.

Use Key Words

Ogden saw that, because each of these key words reflected so many meanings, perhaps a basic language could be formulated. If a small enough number of words could cover a wide enough field, then this code of words could become a working international language, he thought.

He actually reduced the number of words to between 200 and 300 which, in theory, could be considered the base of all ideas expressible in English. These words, however, could not be used as a practical basic language, since conversation would not be smooth-nor-could the normal purposes of the languages be satisfied by so few words.

To be easily learned by most people, the language was to have less than 1000 words. So after nearly ten years of work, Ogden and Richards chose 850 words as the Basic English vocabulary. These words together with some simple grammar rules, can be printed on one side of a piece of paper, thus affording a wide circulation of the language instruction.

English is spoken by more people than any other language in the world, with 200 million people natively speaking the tongue. Other languages which embrace the greatest number of people include Northern Chinese, nearly 200 million; Russian, 120 million; German, 100 million; Spanish, 100 million; Japanese, 80 million; and French, 75 million.