The Verb System of Basic English

Abstract

The friends of the system have prophesied an era of clear thought and international friendship; the critics have grown indignant over side issues: the accuracy of the figure '850,' the ethics of copyrighting an international language, and the stylistic effect of Basic English as compared with that of the King James Bible.1 The time has come when a calmer analysis is needed. Basic English is more and more being used to teach Standard English to foreigners in the United States, and a small but increasing number of colleges is trying to encourage 'accurate thinking' in native American students by having them write in Basic English. Before anyone can decide whether these uses are desirable, the grammar of the language must be looked into, and compared with that of Standard English. Even apart from pedagogical considerations, Basic English is so original an experiment that a descriptive analysis of it has linguistic interest. This article is confined to the verbs and verbal phrases of BE. The extreme brevity of the BE word list comes largely from the virtual elimination of verbs.2 Only eighteen verbs are taken over from StE into BE:3 come, get, give, go, keep, let, make, put, seem, take, be, do, have, say, see, send, may, will-with, of course, all the inflexional forms that these verbs have in StE.