Regarding vocabulary size: a look as "Special English"

[Jeffrey Kopp]

Well, the dog days of summer are about over, so I should stop making
tangential posts to see if the list is alive (or if Dave is awake, ha).

But a few months ago, I ran across the Voice of America's "Special
English," and wondered if it had any relevance to some of the questions
about the Jargon and pidgins generally, i.e., how large was the Jargon's
vocabulary in likely actual use, how big does it need to be, and how few
words does a tongue require to be viable and useful? So, here goes:

The VOA's "Special English" is based on "Ogden's Basic English" (with
political/economic terms added), and comes out to around 1500 words. View
full
list:
<http://www.voanews.com/SpecialEnglish/article.cfm?objectID=3B81CAFA-6FE3-11D5-841B00508BF9712A>.
Begun decades ago as an experiment, it has been continued and refined due
to its high popularity among overseas listeners eager to learn English.

This led me back to Ogden's Special English, apparently a phenom of its
own, whose purpose and origins I have yet to grasp; it was apparently
proposed in the 1930s (the early days of international broadcasting). It is
asserted that "90% of the concepts in [the 25,000-word Oxford Pocket
English Dictionary] can be achieved with 850 words." Note the closeness of
this number to the generally accepted size of the "full" Jargon. The word
list is at <http://ogden.basic-english.org/words.html>. A description
comparing it to the VOA's customized version may be seen at
<http://ogden.basic-english.org/voa.html>.

Further along, I ran across "Simplified English," which is a whole 'nother
school of language research by industry, aimed at developing standards for
technical manuals used internationally (presumably to prevent a foreign
customer of Boeing's fine products from putting a gizmo on a widget the
wrong way, with potentially undesirable results). This is of course much a
more complicated affair. Some work began on this decades ago (remember when
the non-prefix "in-" got amputated from "inflammable" to avoid potential
confusion?), but the increasing complexity of technology has accelerated
the effort. They even offer automated proofer/checkers today. See
<http://www.boeing.com/phantom/sechecker/se.html>.

Regards,

Jeff