Short Cut to Literacy

First speaker: "What is Basic English? What is it for? I haven't got it clear."

Second speaker: "It's only the part of the English language which does the most work."

First: "But what about us? We have thousands of other words. Isn't it very hard for us to keep to it?"

Second: "We are talking Basic right now. All this we've been saying is in Basic English."

First: "Well, blow me down!"

Second: "You're still talking Basic."

Walt Disney was the first speaker. The second was Ivor Armstrong Richards, famed British co-developer and chief propagator of Basic English (850-word vocabulary).

Last week, in Disney's big Hollywood studio, they were collaborating on the first educational movie short on Basic English aimed at teaching English to 1) Army-age illiterates and 2) non-English-speaking peoples on the global fighting fronts.

46 Words, Seven Verbs. The first experimental film will run for ten minutes. Using only 46 words and seven verbs (give, get, come, go, put, take, be), it will teach as much English in an hour, claims Richards, as an "English" teacher can manage in a month. An average lesson consists of six showings of the short. "If a person can't learn in ten," says Richards, "he's a hospital case."

A newcomer to Hollywood, slight, humorous, 49-year-old Ivor Richards has amply pretested Basic English in textbook and lecture. Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, he traveled eight years as a Basic missionary in Europe and China, in 1939 became director of the Harvard Commission on English Language Studies under a Rockefeller grant. His textbook for Massachusetts adult aliens (soon to be published by Houghton Mifflin) made a big hit in Latin America. One of his two Basic helpers in China was killed in a bombing raid; the other, in Kunming, has reported a lively business in the first book of Basic English for Chinese.

Linguistic Imperialism? Some critics have accused Ivor Richards of cooking up a sort of pidgin English. No criticism annoys him more. Though he rewrote Plato's Republic in 1,000 Basic words, his sole interest in Basic, he says, is to aid in clarifying thought and to simplify language education.

Nor does he like it said that he is trying to impose English-language imperialism on the rest of the world. What he would like to do is to reduce other languages to Basic. Chinese, he points out, reduces to Basic in 1,000 words; German and Spanish run from 2,000 to 2,500 words. "Imagine," he says, "how our troops would be received if they could arrive in China singing one of the great Chinese marching songs."

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