About Ogden's Basic English, prominent Esperantist and United Nations translator Claude Piron[1] had this to say[2]: > ""Basic English cut its essential vocabu

About Ogden's Basic English, prominent Esperantist and United Nations translator Claude Piron[1] had this to say[2]: > ""Basic English cut its essential vocabulary to 850 words", says our critic. Let's not discuss the fact that the 850 words of Basic English do not enable you to say, for instance, "Waiter, a tomato salad!". But what is amazing is that Mr Rye appears not to know that people whose mother tongue is other than English have to learn by rote probably twice as many words as what they need in order to get along in an average language, and something like ten times as many as what is necessary to express everything in Esperanto. Esperanto's basic vocabulary, unlike the basic vocabulary of English (as in Basic English or Nerrière's Globish) is a source of many thousands of words, because the right to combine elements is unlimited, or, to put it otherwise, because of the multiplying effect of many morphemes. The first level of the youth magazine Kontakto uses less than Ogden's 850 words: only 520 lexical elements. Since these include a hundred of vocabulary-enriching words, like igi, (words the Chinese call "empty words"), the list contains only something like 430 semantemes ("full words" in Chinese parlance). But when you read the short stories and the articles written with this limited vocabulary, you don't notice that the author was restricted in his choice of words. Esperanto enables him to be lively, expressive, fun, with a very small lexical basis, precisely because nothing restricts what French speaking mathematicians call the combinatoire (do you say "combinatory"?). In Esperanto, most roots give birth to dozens of words, easy to form, or forming themselves automatically, by simple reflex, since the patterns are regular, whereas in English, you have to learn a new word for each new concept. Where in Esperanto you make up the adjective with a simple - a, in English you have to learn it by rote, and English differs from most other languages in that very often no similarity of form helps your memory. You don't derive lunar from moon, annual from year, rural from country, urban from city, avuncular from uncle (Esperanto: luna < luno; jara < jaro; kampara < kamparo; urba < urbo; onkla < onklo). And the same problem confronts the learner in other aspects of what is, in most languages, derivation: you don't form dentist from tooth, fraternize from brother or stallion from horse. Rye's statement in this respect is flabbergasting. How can one compare two languages and reach a conclusion so much at odds with reality?" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Piron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Piron [2] http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/why.htm http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/why.htm