‘Vertical Translation’ into BASIC ENGLISH 850 as a Tool for Metalinguistic Awareness in the EFL Classroom
Bill Templer, Bulgaria
Bill Templer is a Chicago-born educator with research interests in English as a lingua franca, literature in the ESL classroom, critical applied linguistics and working-class pedagogies of TEFL. He has taught in the U.S., Ireland, Germany, Israel/Palestine, Austria, Bulgaria, Iran, Nepal, Thailand, Laos and Malaysia. Bill is also a widely published translator from German, is chief staff translator for the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture, University of Leipzig (www.dubnow.de ), as well as Editor, Eastern Europe at the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (www.jceps.com ). He is presently based in northeastern Bulgaria. Email: bill_templer@yahoo.com
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Abstract
Introduction
BASIC 850 in a nutshell
Introducing vertical translation into BASIC
Working with vertical translation in the classroom
Examples of vertical translation: a bit of poetry
The Gettysburg Address in BASIC
A ‘Basic Library of General Knowledge’
Simplish from Great Britain
Conclusion
References
BASIC ENGLISH 850, the experimental venture in English simplification pioneered by Charles K. Ogden, Ivor Richards, A.P. Rossiter, William Empson and others, aimed to create and spread an English auxiliary means of global communication based on a vital core vocabulary of 850 headwords. From 1930 to the mid-1950s, inside TEFL it emerged as a major pedagogical movement for simpler expression (Templer, 2005). As Richards (1942) stressed: the BASIC words “form a language within a language—the words needed in explaining the rest of the language.” One of its principles was ‘vertical translation’ (Wynburne, 1957; 1960; Rossiter, 1935), ‘downshifting’ standard often complex English into its easier leaner equivalent in BASIC. This means asking students, in analyzing texts, to ‘translate’ more complex lexis and expressions into their BASIC equivalent. Wynburne argued that it would enhance pupils’ powers of reading and reasoning in L1 by guiding them to re-formulate any text in fundamental lexis as a regular exercise, thus heightening language awareness. The approach is also clearly applicable to learners of English as L2, and provides a platform for ‘noticing’ in the sense of Schmidt’s “noticing hypothesis” (Spada & Lightbown, 2010, p. 112). Research in the classroom is needed. This paper introduces readers to ‘vertical translation’ into BASIC 850, and looks at sample definitions in BASIC and several texts rendered into BASIC. It also urges empirical research on vertical translation into BASIC 850 as a metacognitive strategy and metalinguistic tool for the broader pedagogy of English as a leaner, more sustainable global lingua franca geared to the communicate needs of ordinary working-class people. Vertical translation into a revived form of BASIC 850 online is being developed by Simplish (www.simplish.org ) in the UK, through a team involved in artificial intelligence research and applications.
Being pinched within the limits of 850 words forces one to look at the
original one is translating with an intentness hard to keep up otherwise.
--Ivor Richards (1942, p. 29).
Our new method will double our pupils’ powers of reading and reasoning and thus enable
them to appreciate both literature and much of the best that is being said and written at the
present time. --S. B. Wynburne (1960, p. xv.).
Most teachers of English will know the first line of Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”: “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.” The words ‘curfew,’ ‘tolls’ and ‘knell’ are very low frequency in English, yet here highly poetic. Let’s put it into a simpler more understandable form: “The bell gives long, slow notes as a sign that day is ending.” This is an example of BASIC 850 as a tool for ‘vertical translation’: “translation of sense without reference to feeling, tone, purpose” (Wynburne, 1960, p. 71). What we have here is the basic sense in its simplest formulation, without the connotations of ‘toll,’ ‘knell,’ ‘death,’ and the sound of a church bell.
Here another example, from the Hebrew Bible, Psalm 23, in the King James version and then in Hooke’s (1949) translation into BASIC 850, available online [http://tinyurl.com/6ds9zvm ]:
23:1 The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. (KJ)
The Lord takes care of me as his sheep; I will not be without any good thing. (BE)
23:2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. (KJ)
He makes a resting-place for me in the green fields: he is my guide by the quiet waters.(BE)
And two verses from the book of Kohelet (Ecclesiates):
1:2 Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. (KJ)
All is to no purpose, said the Preacher, all the ways of man are to no purpose. (BE)
5:10 He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity. (KJ)
He who has a love for silver never has enough silver, or he who has love for wealth, enough profit. This again is to no purpose. (BE)
What do you notice? Which version is more understandable? ‘Vanity,’ a low frequency word, here has a very specific negative meaning. How does the BASIC 850 version ‘unpack’ the sense of the original? Note what verbs are used in BASIC, differing from the KJ version, now 400 years old. This article will introduce you to this kind of English-English ‘intralingual’ translation as a useful tool for your students right from the mid-elementary level, to heighten their awareness of words and their meanings, textual style, and their powers of textual analysis.
BASIC English 850 was the experimental venture by Charles K. Ogden, Ivor Richards, William Empson and others. It needs to be revitalized and experimented with as a simpler highly systematic mini-language for international communication in English as a lingua franca (ELF) pedagogy, as I have argued elsewhere (Templer, 2005; 2008). What I wish to look at here is what those associated with the development and pedagogy of BASIC ENGLISH 850 called ‘vertical translation,’ in effect English-English translation – both by L1 speakers and EFL learners. This paper outlines the application of BASIC English 850 as a pedagogical tool, easily grasped, for metalinguistic reflection about how language and style operate, breaking a complex idea into its parts (Empson, 1940).
Vertical translation is a technique for sharpening semantic and some aspects of stylistic awareness among ordinary learners by teaching them to rephrase propositions in more basic semantic primes, which is the core of BASIC English 850. Virtually any text from most non-technical genres can be rephrased, translated ‘vertically’ into its BASIC equivalent. Students can be taught to do this systematically within about 40 hours of instruction. The gains in heightening metalinguistic awareness, in making implicit knowledge about semantic meanings more explicit through metacognitive reflection as vocabulary is learned and in better comprehending and analyzing any text, including literary genres, can be substantial, as Wynburne (1960) stressed based on his classroom experience in Belfast with L1 learners.
One component of vertical translation is to redefine lexical items in terms of BASIC. Ask a student to define what is meant by ‘explain,’ and she may say ‘make clear,’ or ‘give the sense of,’ both phrases in BASIC. What is ‘compassion’? ‘Feeling for one in trouble.’ What is ‘despair’? It is a ‘condition of having given up hope.’ Ask students what ‘understand’ means, and if they have been trained in BASIC, they will say: ‘get the sense of something.’ As a metalinguistic tool, vertical translation can, I would argue, contribute to enhancing language awareness (LA) along the lines spelled out by Arndt, Harvey, & Nuttall, 2000, pp. 12-13):
LA helps us appreciate the complexity and sophistication of communication through language. […] LA is a productive and rewarding route for exploring the richness and complexity of language. […] LA helps those involved in ELT to understand more about how English works. It contributes to teachers’ ability to explain the language better and to their feeling of being better placed to evaluate teaching materials and approaches.
It provides an alternative vantage on looking at what it means to “know a word” and how our “mental lexicon” may be organized and restructured, “vocabulary depth,” analyzing and learning “lexical chunks” (Thornbury, 2002, pp. 15-16, 22, 115) and other aspects of L1/L2 acquisition. Its teaching and use by students can be seen as a “metalinguistic strategy,” bringing metacognitive awareness about lexis into play. The present paper introduces some of the concepts of vertical translation and examples, but it does not present findings of recent research on the effectiveness of this metalinguistic tool, or look at how particular ideas are expressed and “mapped” in terms of “mental spaces” (Fauconnier, 1997). It argues the need for such empirical research today, building in part on Wynburne’s pedagogy and its practice in Belfast in the 1950s.
BASIC 850 was conceived in part almost as a kind of “semantically sequenced” (Katagiri & Constable, 1993) English-based Esperanto, “systematically denaturalized” (Seidlhofer, 2002, fn. 17) for global communication, a “miniature English” auxiliary language (Richards, 1943, p. 21). It is a simplified auxiliary language, with only 16 verbs (‘operators’) — come, get, give, go, keep, let, make, put, seem, take, be, do, have, say, see, send, plus may and will, plus 20 ‘directives’ (prepositions and particles) — conceiving of verbs as ‘directional actions’: “there are 4000 common verbs in the English language which may be similarly displaced by the sixteen operators” (Ogden, 1937). Of the 850 core words, 513 are monosyllabic, a further 254 have penultimate stress, reducing problems with stress which have proved particularly difficult for speakers of East Asian tone languages. A micro lingua franca, it is engineered to be capable of expressing even quite complex thought. Of course, its reliance on a battery of largely ‘delexicalized’ verbs with particles has provoked criticism as a highly artificial stripping of most higher-frequency verbs from the core vocabulary. Using BASIC 850 means to learn how to say ‘bring together’ instead of ‘integrate,’ ‘come across’ instead of ‘find,’ ‘go beyond’ instead of ‘exceed,’ ‘keep in memory’ instead of ‘remember,’ thus reducing the number of verbs significantly.
Ogden & Richards (1923) provided the original basis for the semantic work on BASIC, when then discovered that they could define anything in English (and thus ‘say’ anything important, any common ‘proposition’) using less that 1,000 words, a ‘leveraged’ semantic core. That core is the very heart of BASIC 850, not a lexical list based on frequency, but something significantly different. Richards (1943, p. 23) describes that discovery:
In our joint work we came to the theory and practice of definition. In comparing definitions - definitions of everything, from a sense quality to a force and from a rabbit to a concept - we were struck by the fact that whatever you are defining, certain words keep coming back into your definitions. Define them, and with them you could define anything. That suggests that there might be some limited set of words in terms of which the meanings of all other words might be stated. If so, then a very limited language - limited in its vocabulary but comprehensive in its scope - would be possible.
Seidlhofer (2002, p. 281) picks up on this, noting:
This then, in a nutshell, is the principal idea behind Basic. In order to make it operational and to formulate his 850 word vocabulary, however, Ogden had to solve the problem of how to deal with verbs. The crucial point here was the realization that most English verbs can be analysed in combinations involving the verbs come, get, give, go, keep, let, make, and put. Examples often used for illustration by Ogden himself are the verbs ascend, which he analyses into go up, descend into go down, and disembark into go off a ship, thus making systematic use of the analytic potential of English.
The famous BASIC word list -- 100 Operation Words, the 600 Things (400 General and 200 Pictured), the 100 Qualities and the 50 Opposites -- put in columns on a single sheet of paper is an emblem of that economy in learning effort, compactness of presentation, and the separation of the ‘functional’ from the ‘content’ words (http://ogden.basic-english.org/words.html ). Significantly, the idea for BASIC was born in Cambridge as Ogden and Richards were working on the chapter on “Definition” in drafting their path-breaking semantic study, The Meaning of Meaning (1923): “at the end of it we suddenly stared at one another and said, ‘Do you know that this means with under a thousand words you can say everything’” (cited in Koeneke, 2004, p. 92). That insight has remained in a sense BASIC’s core principle.
BASIC is not ‘simplified’ English for elementary learners, it is a remarkable tool far more flexible and sophisticated in its power of expression and clarity. An all-purpose auxiliary language suited for Business, Administrative, Scientific, Instructional and Commercial uses, it is ‘not merely a list of words, governed by a minimum apparatus of essential English grammar, but a highly organized system designed throughout to be as easy as possible for a learner’ (Richards, 1943, p. 21). The General Basic English Dictionary (Orthological Institute, 1940) gives 40,000 meanings of 20,000 words in Standard English, all defined in minimal BASIC. Ogden was guided, as Richards stressed, by ‘the balancing and ordering of many rival claims – simplicity, ease of learning, scope, clarity, naturalness – all to be as far as possible satisfied and reconciled’ (Katagiri & Constable, 1993, p. 50). BASIC excludes words which are “primarily emotive rather than referential” or “have chiefly a literary or stylistic value,” or are “used in contexts too abstruse for the level of general communication” (Stein, 2008, p. 11). Ogden’s minimum vocabulary is based on a conception of a hierarchy of levels of abstraction, and the utility of a word for inclusion is based primarily on the “way in which its level relates to the levels of the other words in the vocabulary” (ibid., p. 12).
From 1930 to the mid-1950s, Ogden/Richards’ BASIC blossomed into a major pedagogical movement within the pristine field of TEFL. It championed a ‘leaner’ more learnable and thus ‘sustainable’ form of a semantically engineered ‘English Lite,’ a plain talk or downshifted English lingua franca that no one would speak as their own L1 -- owned by no nation or educated elite, yet open to all human beings on the planet as a simple auxiliary. Even as interest in BASIC in the Commonwealth and Britain waned after the mid-1950s, for various reasons, Ivor Richards vigorously continued to promote an expanded form of BASIC, which he called Everyman’s English (Richards & Gibson, 1974), and spurred a unique three-year pilot program in Everyman’s English in a number of Israeli kibbutz schools (Katagiri & Constable, 1993, pp. 361-367), involving 60 teachers trained to teach BASIC, with intriguing research findings on its effectiveness. Today, www.basic-english.org is reviving BASIC via access to materials and relevant literature online (Templer, 2005; 2006; 2008). Teaching BASIC 850, the primary aim is to teach learners a very high level of control of a limited lexis, massively recycled in a tight learning spiral. Much reading material was made available in BASIC 850, so that students could continue to read and learn in it. A 1938 newsletter from the Orthological Institute provides some impression of the numerous books then available: http://tinyurl.com/4n55q6 . The Graded Direct Method, as pioneered by Yuzuru Katagiri and his associates in Japan (Katagiri & Constable, 1993), is grounded on BASIC and Everyman’s English, in part utilizing the language-plus-stick drawings textbook by Richards & Gibson (2005).
One of the key applications of BASIC 850 is ‘vertical translation’ (Rossiter, 1935; Wynburne, 1957; 1960; Richards & Gibson, 1974, pp. 55f.), a simple technique most teachers and many learners think they are familiar with as paraphrase or rewording. But in the framework of BASIC 850, this kind of paraphrasing into simpler language is very rigorous, since it is controlled by a very specific model of English and carefully limited lexis. This entails ‘downshifting’ often complex English into its easier ‘leaner’ equivalent in BASIC, inter alia as a tool for interpreting any text, including poetry, by rephrasing it in its semantic equivalent in BASIC 850 (Empson, 1950; Wynburne, 1960). Such vertical translation is a special form of ‘intralingual translation’ in Jakobson’s sense of ‘rewording,’ “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language” (quoted in Munday, 2008, p. 5).
Vertical translation in this sense was conceived by Ogden and Ivor Richards (1923) in their spadework on semantics. It was first developed at some length as a pedagogical tool by Rossiter (1935) in his pioneering book Statement and Suggestion applied to poetry, and by Wynburne in the Belfast classroom and teacher education, likewise as a powerful tool for heightening metalinguistic awareness, both for native speakers and users of English, and for learners of ELF, English as a lingua franca. As Richards wrote: “Basic can benefit the English speaker chiefly as an opportunity for English-English translation. We gain through such translation because it teaches us something about our language […] The Basic list contains the words through which the rest of the language may best be explored” (1942, pp. 123, 126). Indeed, “they form a language within a language—the words needed in explaining the rest of the language” (p. 48). Translating from Complete English into BASIC is best seen as an intralingual process of translation into a highly compact “language within a language.” Richards (ibid., p. 29) stressed: “Being pinched within the limits of 850 words forces one to look at the original one is translating with an intentness hard to keep up otherwise.” Stein (2008, p. 10) observes: Ogden “regarded a demystification of eloquent rhetoric and abstractions as a crucial educational task. The way to demonstrate the dangerous vacuousness of high-flown style was to paraphrase its main content in basic terms and thus lay bare its decorous frills and its tautologous and treacherous trimmings.” Her interest in “vocabulary control” led to her work with R. Quirk on ‘nuclear English.’ Rossiter (1935) calls BASIC “a thought-machine for the English reader” (p. 65) and emphasized that “translation into an 850-word English system is NOT something quite different from the process of putting ideas from one language into another; it is a special example of a normal process” (p. 37).
Ogden (1937) stressed that BASIC was “conceived with a dual purpose—a means of International Communication, and as an aid to the Science of Interpretation” (1937, n.p.), a tool for clarifying what we think we want to say. Rossiter (1935) applied BASIC for interpreting poetry, as did Empson (1940), grounded on the “way in which Basic gets a complex idea broken up into its parts.” Using BASIC teaches students how to boil down what is said to the essential ideas and propositions, through metalinguistic reflection on breaking down what may be complex into simpler lexis. ‘Simpler’ here is defined by the parameters of what is in included in BASIC English 850.
Wynburne (1960) provides the best single introduction to using ‘vertical translation’ as key took in teaching native speakers – and by extension, English language learners at all levels -- a better grasp of English, especially practical semantic analysis of basic word sense. His visionary hope in the late 1950s as a teacher and teacher trainer, with extensive experience in teaching both French and English in Belfast, was that ‘vertical translation’ would eventually come to occupy 8 hours a week or more in the secondary school curriculum, replacing the learning of foreign languages. Wynburne argued that students would through vertical translation learn to develop their metalinguistic ability far better than by learning a foreign language: “That 90% of language teaching should be cleared out to make way for vertical translation is our theme and therefore entails hacking away at the lumber of Latin and French” (p. 179).
He stressed:
We provide each pupil with a list of the Basic words, a copy of the General Basic English Dictionary, and then ask him to translate a passage of Complete English into the 850 words on the list. This translation of the sense only of a passage is called vertical translation because it takes down, to a more down-to-earth level, that most factual element of the original without attempting to translate its life and colour […] As the 850 words of the Basic list have been chosen to represent the everyday world we live in, they are to a wide extent unemotive.(Wynburne, 1960, pp. ix., 81)
Wynburne argued, based on experience, that vertical translation was a revolutionary method to teach “definition, grammar, the structure of language and thought, the metaphoric basis of language, the tricks of rhetoric (style) and, like all good translation, it trains discrimination and judgment” (ibid.). His experience was that with some 40 hours of work, most learners could get a good grounding in the technique of vertical translation into BASIC. “If you manage to overcome the resistance your own mind will put up to the painful stretching it will undergo in doing vertical translation, you will start making your own discoveries” (op. cit., p. xii.). He was systematic in this application: “we find that we are using the same words again and again” to track down meaning, and “though this may be a bit tiresome, it is driving home the fact which is easy to state but hard to retain, namely, that the number of our general ideas is small” (Wynburne, 1960, pp. 88-89). Writing in BASIC, Rossiter stresses:
the Basic machine may be of some use in ordering our thoughts, in giving the power of a more delicate attention to our feelings, and making us more conscious of the force and direction of words […] the power of Basic as a clearing-machine will best be seen where the sense is darkest and the mind-position produced by good reading hardest to get into” (pp. 75, 78).
Wynburne (p. 69 ff.) underscores the views of Ivor Richards on analyzing ‘meaning’ as he expounds this is his classic Practical Criticism, where the “Total Meaning we are engaged with is, almost always, a blend, a combination of several contributory meanings of different types” (Richards, 2004, p. 174). What vertical translation seeks is to translate fundamental core sense, “without reference to feeling, tone, purpose” (Wynburne, 1960, p. 71).
In looking at BASIC and English as a lingua franca, Seidlhofer (2002, p. 283) stresses that “the very fact that ELF could be largely uncoupled from any specific primary cultural associations makes it a particularly good point of reference for the study of the way languages normally are inextricably bound up with such associations.” Wynburne had similar insights into his students’ work with vertical translation over a number of years in Belfast, noting:
we can indeed claim that vertical translation is a powerful aid in studying style. The student is guided all the time to a comparison of the two versions, one of which is the whole expression and the other a mere record of the sense as he has put it on paper. The examining glance switches from the whole body to the skeleton, and then back again” (1960, p. 119).
This is based on his work in the classroom, but is not presented in the form of a rigorous research design. Wynburne was a teacher trainer in English and French at Stranmills Training College (now Stranmills University College) in Belfast. He was convinced in his later years that foreign language teaching, and many aspects of teaching English, were ineffectual and should be downscaled drastically in the British schools, to be replaced by intralingual vertical translation into BASIC ENGLISH as a major learning tool. Richards repeatedly emphasized that through the prism of the primary nature of BASIC, "we can learn most about the nature, the resources, and the limitations of language in general,” as a tool for heightening language awareness. Rossiter (1935) is a strong plea for heightening linguistic awareness in the special training of readers to distinguish between “statement” and “suggestion,” connotations, associations of lexis.
We began this article with a line from Gray’s “Elegy.” Another brief example are the lines from Gray “Let not Ambition mock their useful Toil, / Their homely Joys and Destiny obscure; / Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful Smile, / The short and simple Annals of the Poor.” Wynburne (ibid., p. 115) translates the first two lines into BASIC: “Let not those attempting to get a high place in society have a laugh at their (the countrymen’s) work which is of use, and at their simple family pleasures and their low place in society.” The next two lines are similar, with a metaphorical reference to working-class history and the paternalism of the powerful. Wynburne notes: “Get the sense and all the rest will be added unto you is not bad as a motto. When a pupil has disengaged the sense of a passage, he has nearly finished his job because as he weighs the logical skeleton against the meaty original, a little guidance will show him how preferable the second version is to the first” (ibid., p. 72). Take the lines from Gray “Let not Ambition mock their useful Toil, / Their homely Joys and Destiny obscure; / Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful Smile, / The short and simple Annals of the Poor.” Wynburne (ibid., p. 115) translates the first two lines into BASIC: “Let not those attempting to get a high place in society have a laugh at their (the countrymen’s) work which is of use, and at their simple family pleasures and their low place in society.” The next two lines are similar, with a metaphorical reference to working-class history and the paternalism of the powerful.
The first two lines of Keat’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn” also can illustrate this. “Thou still unravished bride of quietness / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time” becomes in vertical translation: “You have been married to quiet and are still unbroken; you have been under the care of quiet and of slow time, who were, so to say, married” (Wynburne, 1960, p. 92). Marvell’s famous lines closing the poem “To His Coy Mistress,” which deals with relations between time and love, are: “Thus, though we cannot make our Sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run.” They are rewritten in Wynburne’s (p. 191) BASIC: “So, though we are unable to put a stop to time, we will get all the pleasure possible while we are young.” As Wynburne goes on: “The imagery, the rhythm of the words, their order, the interlocking suggestions, the prosody: these are cut out by our stressing of the primacy of meaning but there is no danger at all, after a year of our class-work, that the version we put on paper is anything more than a small part of the meaning” (ibid., pp. 191-192). Blake’s “To hold infinity in the palm of your hand, / And eternity in an hour” is translated by Wynburne into “to keep space without limits in the limits of your hand, and time without limits within the limits of an hour” -- an intriguing rewriting centered on the concept of ‘limit.’ He develops entire lessons based on teaching the “general idea of limit,” for example (ibid., pp. 184-185) in terms of space and time, and concludes: “if metaphor can be taught, a new approach might prove of interest and forty hours’ work under the guidance of Ogden and Richards is not an unconscionably heavy demand” (ibid.).
Rossiter (1935: pp. 79-93) presents a very detailed BASIC translation of “The Search” by Henry Vaughan (1621-1695) Its first verse: “LEAVE, leave, thy gadding thoughts; / Who Pores / and spies / Still out of Doores, / descries / Within them nought.” This is translated into BASIC as: “Come away from your thoughts which go about without any fixed interest, looking only for some uncertain amusement of no value. The man who gives much attention to things outside the mind and heart sees nothing inside the mind …” And there are other options for BASIC paraphrase. He notes (p. 86): “As for the long, slow development of the Basic notes, it seems to me to be like a slow-motion picture of a jumper. It may seem foolish; a laugh may be the natural first reaction; but if we are after what is going on, we go to the slow-motion picture, and not to the Queen’s Club.” Rossiter adds 100 selected “verse-words” to the BASIC 850 vocabulary (pp. 118-129, 135). The metaphor of “slow-motion picture” is one apt figurative way to describe what vertical translation into BASIC does.
William Empson (1940) attempts to show how translating Wordsworth’s “Prelude” vertically into his prime or simple BASIC sense opens up a new reading of the poem, especially the effect of Wordsworth’s changing of the lines in a later revision. His article stands as a classic example of how BASIC can act as a tool for semantic analysis of complex words, by means of vertical translation that in effect unpacks and illuminates what the lines are ‘really’ saying. Once again, it is important to stress that this is a highly controlled form of rephrasing within a specific lexical template, not the form of possible rephrasing that of course is common in any discussion of a text and its message.
Wynburne (1960, pp. 67-69) presents the entire speech by Lincoln at Gettysburg in the original and BASIC as an exemplar, taken from Ogden (1937). Below a few lines:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.
BASIC 850:
Seven and eighty years have gone by from the day when our fathers gave to this land a new nation—a nation which came to birth in the thought that all men are free, a nation given up to the idea that all men are equal. Now we are fighting in a great war among ourselves, testing if that nation, or any nation of such a birth and with such a history, is able long to keep united. We are together on the field of a great event in that war. We have come to give a part of that field as a last resting-place for those who went to their death so that that nation might go on living. It is in every way right and natural for us to do this. But in a wider sense we have no power to make this place an offering in their name, to give any mark of our respect, any sign of our belief. Those men, living and dead, who had no fear in the fight, have given it a name far greater than our poor power to make additions or to take away.
The 16 verbs which BASIC has eliminated in this brief excerpt are: bring, conceive, dedicate, create, engage, can, endure, meet, live, fit, shall, consecrate, hallow, struggle, add, detract. The time adverbial ‘ago’ is not in the BASIC list. The phrase “conceived in liberty” is down-translated into “came to birth in the thought that all men are free,” which is a typical expansion of what is packed into the original three words. The solemn and lofty ‘tone’ of the message selects lexis such as “altogether fitting and proper,” which is translated into BASIC as “in every way right and natural.” Many other changes could be pointed out and analyzed. Wynburne (1960, p. 69) observes: “An hour spent examining, word by word, phrase by phrase, the way in which the Basic version disengages the sense-articulations of the original, will give a clear idea of how our main recommendation will work out in practice.”
Ogden and Richards also saw BASIC 850 as a vehicle for translating world classics, academic books and all sorts of fiction and non-fiction into a more readily understandable and learnable BASIC, written with style and verve, an agenda for democratizing knowledge and discourse. Ogden had a dream of a “Basic Library of General Knowledge covering the sciences in 1,000 divisions -- all so cheap that no workingman would be without them,” along with “a Basic Parallel Library of 1,000 books giving the Basic form of the works of great writers of the present and past and on the opposite page the words of the writer himself, so that everyone would at last have a chance of learning any language in which he might be interested” (Ogden, 1930). Richards (1943, p. 37) noted the need for a wealth of “serious, intellectually mature reading matter in linguistically simple form,” utilizing BASIC as an instrument for writing about science and humanities in a far more compact and ‘sustainable’ medium. Philosophy and science in BASIC, economics, literature – all this was pioneered in the 1930s and 40s, with a substantial library, published in large part in Ogden’s series Psyche Miniatures. The literary critic and poet William Empson ‘translated’ two of J.B.S. Haldane’s (1935a, 1935b) classic books on science into BASIC, and Richards translated both Plato’s Republic and Homer’s Iliad into an somewhat expanded BASIC 850. In the 1940s, the Bible scholar S.D. Hooke (1949) translated the Hebrew and Greek bible into BASIC. Shaw’s drama Arms and the Man (1936) was rendered into BASIC by L. W. Lockhart and praised by G. B. Shaw, who strongly endorsed BASIC as a practical and readily learnable lingua franca. Here a section of the play: http://bit.ly/wYjLML .
A website that offers translation online from standard English to Simplish, based on BASIC 850, is worth exploring. They describe themselves as follows:
The Simplish team is part of the group working on Artificial Intelligence at The Goodwill Company Limited, a venture technology and innovation company dedicated to serving the Defence, electronics, power and aerospace industries from their Headquarters in Guildford, England […] The main objective of this team effort is producing a means to reduce the number of words employed to convey knowledge, while substantially maintaining the information content. Currently, the Simplish wizard is able to translate text, based on a 100,000+ vocabulary, to a representation using less than 2,000 words, at www.simplish.org .
The site at http://simplish.org offers Lockhardt’s book The Basic Teacher (1950), in 45 steps or units, http://simplish.org/EnglishTeacher/ , a classic textbook on BASIC 850. This initiative and its Wizard for vertical translation need to be better evaluated. Intriguing are the connections here with artificial intelligence research and applications in several industries. The Simplish project is seeking to develop its databases, and is not as yet oriented to applications for EFL as such (personal communication, M. F.-G./Simplish, 31 Oct. 2011).
Seidlhofer (2002, p. 295) stresses that “Basic […] is highly significant as a stimulus for thought. What now needs to be done is to see how far Ogden’s conceptual scheme relates to (the still very scarce) empirical findings of how people actually use English as a lingua franca.” She herself is working empirically on how Europeans use English as a lingua franca (ELF) in face-to-face communication in the large-scale project VOICE (Vienna Oxford International Corpus of English [http://tinyurl.com/6gsbyje]), but is not researching any aspect of BASIC 850 or of vertical translation as a metacognitive strategy, nor does her new book (Seidlhofer, 2011) look at this. Murata & Jenkins (2009) have no contribution dealing even briefly with more simplified, ‘downshifted’ forms of ELF in the Asian context, and its pedagogy, despite their concern with “comprehensibility” as a criterion for ELF communication events (pp. 4, 6, 17-22). BASIC 850 is not yet on the radar screens of most linguists anywhere and this is unfortunate. The Simplish team in Guilford is one exception.
Teachers at all levels will find that they can profit from experimenting with BASIC and Everyman’s for their own classrooms and action research, as a tool for ‘vertical translation’ and in other ways. If students are taught BASIC 850 as an additional auxiliary from Level A2/B1 of the Common European Framework, i.e. mid-elementary/low intermediate, then virtually any sentence they encounter in authentic texts or teaching materials can be looked at through the prism of vertical translation into a BASIC equivalent. Try it in your own classes, and write up the results. Do some collaborative action research. Use the Simplish Wizard with a set of sentences, perhaps from a graded reader or textbook, to show students how it works. The potential of using BASIC as a metacognitive strategy for textual analysis in the L2 classroom for heightening literacy skills and mental mapping of lexis and word retention, a “thought-machine for reading verse” (Rossiter, 1935), has been barely tapped. This paper has not explored newer perspectives on how meaning in structured, and use of BASIC to heighten awareness of meaning needs to keep in mind that
meaning – even in seemingly straightforward examples – is radically underspecified by linguistic information […] language expressions do not have meaning in and of themselves, but rather meaning potential. The meaning that an expression can produce in a particular communicative situation depends radically on the background knowledge of the participants, as well as the extant mental space configuration set up in the local context” (Coulson & Oakley, 2005, pp. 1512, 1522; Fauconnier, 1997).
A deeper perspective can compare “mappings” in thought and language (ibid.) as reflected in a particular sentence or text and its ‘intralingual’ reconstitution in BASIC 850.
Research and experimentation are needed. Among desiderata is the creation of a small research center for ‘simplified English,’ preferably in the Global South, that could introduce BASIC in pilot school projects and elsewhere, with empirical comparative investigations of its effectiveness for vertical translation and other aspects of teaching English as a lingua franca more sustainable global lingua franca geared to the communicate needs of ordinary working-class people (Templer, 2012; 2008), and exploring how learners perceive literary and other complex discourse – and enhance semantic awareness -- through the prism of vertical translation.
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