The Mating Mind

CYRANO AND SCHEHERAZADE 371
Basic English works with ordinary English grammar. Despite
it having a vocabulary only 1 per cent as large as normal,
Richards wrote that "it is possible to say in Basic English
anything needed for the general purposes of everyday
existence—in business, trade, industry, science, medical work—
and in all the arts of living, in all the exchanges of knowledge,
desires, beliefs, opinions, and news which are the chief work of
a language." Indeed, Richards wrote this passage using Basic
English. Richards and Ogden also found that they could easily
define any other English word using just the Basic vocabulary:
their General Basic English Dictionary did this for 20,000 non-Basic
words. Basic is really quite simple: it gets by with just 18 verbs,
which Richards called his "willing, serviceable little workers . . .
less impressive than the more literary verbs, but handier and
safer." Basic is not quite as compact as ordinary English—it
takes perhaps 20 percent more words to state a given idea—but
it is vastly easier to learn, and easier to understand by a wider
range of people. A slightly expanded Basic even works for
expressing scientific ideas: the Basic Scientific Library series in
the 1930s included introductory textbooks on astronomy and
biology.
Like Basic English, "pidgin" languages illustrate how useful
even small vocabularies can be. Pidgins arise when people
speaking mutually unintelligible languages are thrown together in
a situation, such as a slave plantation, that forces some means of
communication to develop. Most pidgins have small vocabularies,
like Basic English, and minimal grammar. Yet they suffice for
trade, cooperative work, and ordinary survival functions. However,
children brought up learning a small-vocabulary pidgin tend
to transform it into a larger-vocabulary "creole," which is a fullsized
language. Language researchers take "creolization" as
evidence that small-vocabulary pidgins must have been
insufficient for pragmatic communication in some respect. But
that implies that all complexity must be due to pragmatic
demands. A different view is possible: perhaps Creoles, like
language itself, arose as better verbal ornaments and better
indicators of verbal intelligence.