Martha Bridegam wrote:
> ....There are several more Basic
> English mentions in the CW index. If nobody else gets to them first I'll go
> through them tonight.
>
> /M
In addition to what Tom has already posted, following is Basic English discussion
from the Orwell Complete Works.
Material is quoted only & not necessarily shewn forth as infallible. Readers are
implored to insert "sic" where necessary.
- In the BBC correspondence, 18 August 1942, letter to Leonora Lockhart:
"Dear Miss Lockhart,
I am approaching you in the hope that you will do a talk on Basic English in the
Indian Service of the BBC, on October 2nd. This series of talks, in which I want
you to take part, is called 'I'd Like it Explained,' and the talks usually take
the form of a dialogue between two experts, who are questioned by an Indian
interviewer. In the case of Basic English, I think it would be better not to have
a discussion, but simply an interview in which the method is explained from the
ground upwards, because it is here a case of putting on the map something which
many of our listeners will not have heard of, and others will have heard a
distorted version of. In trying to put over the idea of Basic English to India,
we are liable to encounter a certain amount of opposition from Indians who
already speak standard English, but what I am chiefly concerned with is to
popularise the idea that Basic English will be particularly useful as between
Indians, Chinese and other Orientals who don't know one another's languages, and
that we have as an initial advantage the fact that between five and ten million
Indians know a certain amount of standard English. We would therefore frame the
interview along these lines. I hope you will undertake this, as I am particularly
anxious to have this subject put on the map, with a view to dealing with it more
elaborately later.
Yours truly,
George Orwell
Talks Producer
Indian Section"
Per further correspondence and footnotes in the CW, Orwell got a note from C.K.
Ogden, principal developer and proponent of Basic English, and corresponded with
him about the difficulty of promoting Basic English. Orwell expressed his own
hope for "a series of talks giving lessons in Basic English which could perhaps
afterwards be printed in India in pamphlet form." He continued, "I still have not
given up this project but I must tell you that it has come up against a great
deal of discouragement and opposition, some of which I understand and some not."
Later, in 1944, he writes again thanking Ogden for a "booklet" and says, "I was
aware, of course, that you have much to put up with from the Esperanto people,
and that was why you drew attention to their very unfortunate choice for the verb
'to be' or whatever it is. We have had them on to us since mentioning Basic, but
I have choked them off. Also the Ido people." (A footnote explains "Ido" as "An
artificial language based on Esperanto, officially Linguo Internaciona di la
Delegitaro (Sistema Ido), made public in 1907.") He complains again, that at the
BBC "there was great resistance against doing anything over the air about Basic,
at any rate for India. I rather gathered that its chief enemies were the writers
of English textbooks, but that all Indians whose English is good are hostile to
the idea for obvious reasons. At any rate it was with great difficulty that I got
Miss Lockhart on to the air."
--------------------------------------------
In December 1943 there is a mainly favorable review of the book *Interglossa* by
Lancelot Hogben, as part of a review column for the Manchester Evening News. He
discusses the advantages of easily learned universal languages and then says in
part:
"...Anyone with a good memory could probably master this in a few weeks, and
anyone who has learned Latin and Greek could guess his way through many
Interglossa sentences at sight.
Now, having set forth some of the advantages of Interglossa, why is it that I
don't believe in a future for this language, as I don't of course.
To begin with, it is difficult to believe in any artificial language, even if one
could be agreed upon, making headway against tongues already spoken by hundreds
of millions of people.
Professor Hogben's chief foe, of course, is Basic. Basic may be slightly harder
to learn than Interglossa, but the only real argument against it is the
suspicion, which is bound to arise in many people's minds, that it is an
instrument of Anglo-American imperialism.
To offset this there is the enormous advantage of being put in touch, straight
off, with two or three hundred million people. Moreover, anyone who chooses to
proceed from Basic to standard English has access to a world-wide press and the
literature of hundreds of years.
So also with several of the great natural languages. An artificial language has
none of these advantages..."
He goes on to complain, "...I doubt very much whether Professor Hogben is the
right person to make up languages, except perhaps for strictly technical
purposes..." because, he says, Hogben's English is full of bad & in fact
preposterous phrases. Here he includes the "ducks and drakes with a native
battery of idiom" later cited in P&TEL.
"...International languages are not, of course, devised for literary purposes,
but if they are to be used as a weapon against the nationalism which Professor
Hogben rightly fears they cannot be a merely technical and scientific jargon
either. They must be capable of expressing fairly subtle meanings with the
maximum of clarity, but in that case they must be devised by someone who really
cares about clarity...
....An 8,000-word English-Interglossa dictionary will follow this preliminary
volume...."
A letter-writer then suggested Orwell was wrong to name Basic as Interglossa's
chief competitor, saying instead that the main competitor was really Esperanto.
Later still, in the January 1944 "As I Please" column that Tom mentions, Orwell
introduces the subject by saying he now realizes how "comparatively chivalrous"
Hogben has been in describing other artificial languages, compared with the
"feuds" elsewhere among proponents of such languages.
--------------------------------------------
An October 11, 1945 column for the Manchester Evening News reviews several books
including a typically sharp review of a book by a friend. This is a book of short
stories by his friend Inez Holden. He concludes the review by mentioning: "At the
end (these are linguistic curiosities, but one of them is quite a good story in
itself) are three very short stories written in basic English."
(Hmmm. Does anyone remember if Inez Holden had any association with the
Westropes?)
--------------------------------------------
There's an April 4, 1947 "As I Please" in addition to the ones Tom mentioned that
was probably left out of CEJL at least in part because of poor taste in quoting
for comic effect from Solomon and New Hebrides Islands pidgin. He goes on to say:
"...There are similar pidgins, most of them not quite so bad, in other parts of
the world. In some cases the people who first formed them were probably
influenced by the feeling that a subject race ought to talk comically. But there
are areas where a lingua franca of some kind is indispensable, and the
perversions actually in use make one see what a lot there is to be said for
Basic."
--------------------------------------------
Thanks for asking the question, Alejandro. It is really strange to pile all of
this up and realize just how deeply Orwell and several of his friends and
relatives did care *in favor of* artificial languages. Which makes it hard to
understand how he then flipped from Basic into Newspeak.
/M<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
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