Basic Vocabulary

BasicVocabulary is the vocabulary of some 900 words daily used by any speaker and writer of a language.

[900? 9000 would be nearer the truth for users of English. There are more than 80 words used in this page's opening paragraphs alone.]

Recent studies show that even for Chinese some 900 characters are sufficient to grasp the general meaning of a newspaper article. Moli�re wrote all his plays in 2006 words.

The English example was set by Ogden. But this wasn't entirely based on frequency. Yet his BasicEnglish had an enormous success, permitting thousands of people to express themselves in a comprehensible way.

For French, the "resistment" (resistance?) for a similar experience, was enormous. Especially due to the idea of a closed word list. But the idea of a primordial language bagguage was accepted.

Sorry, the frequency-based introduction is numbered. Read the work [link?] on the creation of this list. Only some 900 words are introduced due to their frequency, the rest were added as 'mots disponibles'.

http://vocabulaire.eduinfo.com is an attempt to offer to learners of French worldwide a possibility to enter the realm of the francophone world.

-- PieterJansegers

This appears to be based on and perhaps perpetuating a misconception. Ogden produced a list of 900 words and claimed that they sufficed for minimalist communication. That's not the same as claiming that people generally only use 900 words.

["Mom! Mom! Don't forget to buy me more Pepsi! We're almost out!" screams the adolescent from the basement...Sadly, the person who wrote this wiki article has probably never learned a second language. Ogden's point was to make it possible for adults to communicate at a basic level. It takes all of 10 minutes to learn how to say something bad in a foreign language. Go read the stuff ogden wrote. It's great. We now return you to the annoying attitude of the original author.]

According to http://ogden.basic-english.org/basiceng.html, Ogden originally listed just 850 English words. However, the count depends on playing silly tricks. For example, the plural forms of nouns and verbs are omitted, and the -ing and -ed forms of most verbs are also omitted. Most adverbs are omitted. Even in Ogden's day, the list was ridiculously inadequate - one has to jump through hoops merely to explain the list using its own vocabulary, since "basic" and "English" are not among the 850 words listed! Modern communication, even at a minimalist level, would be completely impractical without hundreds of nouns such as "television" for concepts that simply didn't exist in Ogden's time. Also, all attempts to specify quantities are frustrated, since the list omits not just the word "quantity", but also the words "zero", "one", "two", "three", etc. The words "religion" and "church" are included, but the list omits not only all words for specific religions, but also the words "human", "being" and "God". Even such basic terms as "live" and "die" are omitted. The list includes "teaching", but not "teach", "learning", but not "learn", etc. The list includes "day", "month" and "year", but no words that allow you to specify which day, which month, or which year you are talking about. There are numerous other inadequacies. You can say "yesterday" or "tomorrow", but not "today"; you can say "married", but not "marriage", "husband", "wife" or "partner". You can't even swear, since there are no swear words!

Here's a list of short omitted words: accuse, annoy, axe, bet, better, bring, buy, can, carrot, carry, choice, decide, define, did, done, dumb, dye, enemy, exact, exist, fast, feet, fur, game, got, gave, gift, guilty, gum, had, ham, her, his, him, home, hug, inform, jar, job, just, king, know, lay, lie, lower, made, main, many, mess, naked, next, noon, obey, owe, own, parent, pay, pear, pet, quack, queen, quote, rabbit, radio, rid, ride, rot, salmon, shop, spice, tape, tell, toast, until, us, useful, utter, verify, virus, wake, we, what, X-ray, yawn, yoga, yolk, your, zip, zone. Most of these can't easily be expressed using the basic vocabulary.

Though Ogden himself defined 20,000 words in the framework of his BasicEnglish vocabulary, to defend it from attacks. [But only about half of the words in that sentence are in his list.]

Expressing a language in terms of a smallish set of primitives and the rest as derivations has a certain elegance to it. Doing so with natural language might just be a case of ChasingTheDragon, or perhaps one might be forced into MetaCircular? definition. I seem to recall a presentation by GuySteele titled Growing a Language (GrowingaLanguage) that started by assuming all one-syllable English words as primitive vocabulary, and defined any more complex words in terms of primitives and previously defined words. -- JeffreyHantin

See EarthMinimal - a complete language with only 300 'words' - or rather meaning carrying elements which can be combined to give every meaning required. Quite easy to learn and very elegant.