Against Basic English
by ROSE MACAULAY
1
BASIC English has become, since Mr. Churchill accoladed it at Harvard, a solid and imposing, if questionable, upstart, now famous enough, and still eccentric enough, to be a popular butt and cockshy; when it is mentioned in Parliament, members make their feeblest jokes; all the good ones have perhaps been made already by journalists, who have, as a rule, more wit. We have most of us contributed to these quips; it is inevitable, for Basic English is comic, like mothers-inlaw.
The notion of foreigners being deliberately taught to speak English wrong must move all but the gravest Britons to mirth. More comic still is the notion of the English having to learn it too, in order to understand and reply to these poor foreigners. For Mr. Churchill says its use is to enable non-Englishspeakers “to participate more easily in our society,”and they would have little enough ease if they could not make head or tail of what we said to them. “I have tried to explain,” added Mr. Churchill, justifiably annoyed by the weak and irrelevant jests of his colleagues, “that people are quite purblind who discuss the matter as if Basic English were a substitute for the English language.” Nevertheless, if it is to be of any use at all between Britons and foreigners, it must on occasion be just this, and we must suppose that we are to be encouraged to learn to talk it.
It is obvious that we are in danger of being found on the wrong side in this matter, the side of the retrograde, the obscurantists, the purblind. The Basic forces are formidable. The tendency to conceive them, like other reformists, as Folk, jaegerish, sandaled, bearded, weaving, spinning, and folkdancing, adorned with button badges like their hated rivals the Esperantists, is a mistake. In the Basic van march an army of eminent progressives, supported by some, though by no means all, experienced teachers of English abroad, and missionaries to the heathen, who believe (and I am told find) that here is a laborsaving short cut for their innocent charges. Behind amble the less enlightened ranks of those amiable and inexperienced souls who trustfully think that anything promised us by the Prime Minister (even such unappetizing objects as blood, toil, and sweat) must be rather nice to have. And in the rear, quiet and unobtrusive, gazing nonchalantly at the landscape, stroll the Patriots, who see in the spread of any variant of their native tongue a step towards turning the world into a kind of Anglo-Saxon Commonwealth of Nations. This is a view of the matter seen even more clearly by foreigners; I have heard it trenchantly expressed by Frenchmen.
With this heavyweight army against them, I feel that the anti-Basics must stick to their guns. I do not think their charges have been adequately met. There is a tendency to elude, to cover up awkward questions. I have been reading with care Dr. I. A. Richards’s book, Basic English and Its Uses, which deserves careful perusal, both for what it says and what it omits. It must be granted that he makes out a strong case for the language’s being easy to acquire. The case for the advantages of a common tongue does not need arguing; it would obviously be an enormous convenience. It would not necessarily lessen wars, or even “aid immensely in ironing out boundary tensions”: it might even increase the latter, for what is said by those suffering from boundary tension is, as a rule, better not understood by those on the other side of the boundary. As Dr. Richards himself points out, radio, talking to each nation in its own tongue, encourages, on the whole, loyalty to the group, disloyalty to the planet.
Still, without claiming too much for mutual comprehension, we most of us admit it a good aim. And the use of a common tongue by foreigners among themselves would increase it. The Russians and the Poles, the Chinese and the Japanese, the Italians and the French, could (should they desire to do so) understand one another’s utterances, though not, I think, address to each other all those remarks customary between great contiguous nations. Though, if they consult the Basic dictionary, they may be gratified to find what they can say. They can say pig, dog, and hyena (which figures in the dictionary as an “international” term). You cannot call anyone a savage; if you feel like that you must say “early natural man”; you cannot say brute, but “rough animal,” nor barbarian, but “person of no education, at a low stage of development.” It all takes time, but they do, presumably, get one another’s meaning, for they have learned the same idiom.
2
SO MUCH for international understanding between foreigners, that high, shining, and so far rather remote ideal. Passing to that other high and remote ideal, understanding between foreigners and us, the prospect looks less satisfactory. Unless we learned to speak our language in this particular way ourselves, we should not be much better off among foreigners than we are now. As to the foreigners, they would be in the same plight in intercourse with us that most of us are in abroad: we can talk to the native, selecting for use the words we know, but the native talking back knows no such consideration or limitations, and overwhelms us with a torrent of words that he knows and that we don’t.
I have no wish to make elementary jests on this subject, but it is a fact that the Basic foreigner in this country, if he asked the way somewhere and succeeded in making himself understood, would probably not grasp the answer, which is, as we know (unless it is a policeman, a taxi-driver, or a postman who speaks), “Sorry, I’m a stranger in these parts.” To be understood, the native would have to say, “I am sad, troubled, or pained, or I have regret, I am a man from another place, or a strange man here.” Unless he has learned Basic, he will not say this.
And so the Basic foreigner’s day proceeds, frustrated, groping in the dark after his simplest needs. He cannot inform the police that he has lost his purse, though he can say (and perhaps this is near enough) that he has “had a loss of his money-bag.” He has no lunch, but a “middle-day” meal; no dinner, but “the important meal of the day”; if a friend should invite him to lunch or dinner, he will not even be aware that he is being asked to food. If he is asked what time he would like to be called in the morning, he cannot understand; they should have said, “What time will I make you awake?” “It is possible,” Dr. Richards assures us, “to say in Basic English anything needed for the general purposes of everyday existence ... in all the arts of living, in all the exchanges of knowledge, desires, beliefs, opinions and news.” To this, one might reply in the words of the nurse asked by her charge if it was possible to have children without being married, “Quite possible, dear, but a pity.”
Yes, it is more than possible: in both these cases, it is only too easy, provided one condition is fulfilled. The condition is defined by Dr. Richards (in the case, naturally, of Basic English) as “sympathetic coöperation” or “mutual aid.” The native English-speaker must, in fact, talk Basic too, and meet the foreigner halfway. “Their success is a common triumph. An unusual candour on both sides, a simplicity which is not merely linguistic, often accompanies such efforts. Men then return to a fresher world in which the miracle of speech has regained its glory, become conscious again of the tenuousness and fragility of human contacts, and are readier to enjoy and honour them with sincerity. . . . The first stages of a beginner’s progress are often lit by moments of peculiarly intimate communion.” It sounds a little like the experience of someone “changed” by the Buchmanites.
And it is quite easy. “A few hours spent in serious study of the principles, and a little practice, enable most people to write fairly freely in something near enough to strict Basic for all practical purposes.” Too true. The studied childishness, the careful agglomerations of small easy words till they add up to a verb or forbidden noun, the long ramble round instead of the terse short cut, the strained grammar, a kind of tough yet innocent silliness, the degraded diffuseness of a stunted barbarian vocabulary — these are oddly infectious, as readers of a certain school of modern English and American fiction know. It has the morbid fascination of solecism. (“The words employed may be English, but they may be combined in a way that is not English. This is solecism,” as the grammar book says.)
Will for shall, would for should, for example: Dr. Richards himself catches this. He writes a Basic paragraph: “In later pages I will be attempting to say how they do it. . . . Only then will we see,” etc. He translates it into ordinary English; but his final sentence begins in the same way, “Only then will we see.” He has become so far corrupted as to leave the will unchanged.
This corruption (Dr. Richards perhaps calls it cooperation) will, I believe, overtake sooner or later all English-speakers who learn to use Basic. The Englishman abroad will pick it up almost unconsciously; helped by newspapers, radio, and daily conversation, he will “go native”; it may be as easy a trick to acquire as drug-taking, and as hard to throw off.
3
SOON its addicts will scarcely know which language they are speaking; then the stage will arrive when ordinary English sounds wrong to them, pedantic, obscure, verb-ridden, full of “strange ink-horn terms”; in short, out of the mode. Those who say ask instead of make a request or put a question, destroy for make destruction of, shave for take the hair off, buy for get in exchange for money at a store, sweat for drops of heat (Mr. Churchill take note), will sound curt and abrupt by the side of the new elongated, attenuated, sapless speech.
After a few years of it, common English will be rusty on the tongue; the Basic-taught child will grow up unable to read English literature, so full of words he has not learned that Robinson Crusoe will look to him more obscure than Chaucer looks now. Poetry will be a closed book to him. His reason and integrity will be affected; he will be told that, though he may not say “I have brushed the dog,” he may say “The dog lets itself be brushed,” because the second brushed is an adjective, not a verb. If he knows it to be a passive verb, he must forget it. His theology and natural history will suffer, when his Basic dictionary tells him that an angel is “a being with wings”; instead of learning that it is “a subordinate superhuman being in monotheistic religions,” he will be confusing it with wasps and sparrows.
His knowledge of the facts of life will suffer; he will be led to believe a virgin and an unmarried woman the same thing, with the prophet in his Basic Bible exclaiming, “Behold, an unmarried woman will be with child.” (And yet this Bible boasts that it “offers a valuable corrective to the loose and ambiguous use of words.”) His sense of economy will be ruined, having three or four words thrust on him to express what had been better said in one. Such weak extensionism is a step in the wrong direction: there is too much of it already, and new forms of language should take the opportunity to compress. There are certain stock phrases, for instance, often used just now, that might well be expressed, to save time, in one sound: the freedomloving peoples might be freeps, the cause of freedom and democracy, frick, the fight against the forces of evil, fivvle, the British way of life, brife, and so on. Ugly, no doubt, but at least not diffuse.
To our already deplorable use of our native tongue, threatened and debased on all sides by jargon, wrong constructions, solecisms, genteelisms, parvenu pronunciations, are we, in order to help foreigners in their Basic English, to add the deliberate stunting, distortions, circumlocutions, and impoverishment of this clumsy changeling? Its sponsors are insinuating. “Official encouragement from governments,” Dr. Richards persuasively suggests, “school systems, and other bodies, could be a great help. So could the action of powerful individuals.” (A hint to the Prime Minister?)
The scheme of Mr. Ogden and his able followers is clear: they want the thing taught in English schools. They are intellectuals, with a feeling for literature and language; they have no wish to make destruction of the English tongue. They call Basic a ladder to fuller English, and believe it can be knocked away when its tutelary purpose is achieved. That would be an odd situation indeed, should foreigners, having mounted the ladder, be left conversing, reading, and writing in excellent English with one another, while the natives, having corrupted themselves with Basic to oblige them, walked down the ladder rung by rung.
So great cultures go under, change hands.