Basic English (British American Scientific International and Commercial English) is an English-based controlled language created by linguist and philosopher Charles Kay Ogden as an international auxiliary language, and as an aid for teaching English as a second language. Basic English is, in essence, a simplified subset of regular English. It was presented in Ogden's book Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar. The first work on Basic English was written by two Englishmen, Ivor Richards of Harvard University and Charles Kay Ogden of the University of Cambridge in England.
Ogden's Basic, and the concept of a simplified English, gained its greatest publicity just after the Allied victory in World War II as a means for world peace. He was convinced that the world needed to gradually eradicate minority languages and use as much as possible only one, English in either a simple or complete form. A widely known 1933 book on this is a science fiction work on history up to the year 2106 titled The Shape of Things to Come by H. G. Wells. In this work, Basic English is the inter-language of the future world, a world in which after long struggles a global authoritarian government manages to unite humanity and force everyone to learn it as a second language.
Although Basic English was not built into a program, similar simplifications have been devised for various international uses. Ogden's associate I. A. Richards promoted its use in schools in China. It has influenced the creation of Voice of America's Special English for news broadcasting, and Simplified Technical English, another English-based controlled language designed to write technical manuals.
What survives of Ogden's Basic English is the basic 850-word list used as the beginner's vocabulary of the English language taught worldwide, especially in Asia.
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