PROJECT 202 -- COMMON ENGLISH WORDS

100. Ogden's Basic English -- making his work known and understood
200. 21st Century -- vocabulary, publicity
300. E-Office -- spell checking, dictionary, translation, software.
400. Education -- for aid to instructors
500. Learning -- for aid to students
600. Language -- other than English.
800. Other Projects
900. Projects Administration

202 . Common English Words
    Side by side comparison of the most common 1000 words with the BE 1000 words. Where the Basic Word is missing, include the Basic translation in a different font/color. Where there is no English word for the Basic word, this becomes an example of why the common word approach to language is flawed. Prepare a report. I suspect it will confirm Ogden's theory of selected words is more useful than are the most used words. But the "word count' school might have something going for it and we might learn something to help make Basic better. The word count statistics will be helpful to the 21st Century Words project and information to support that project should accumulated for reference. See 315 and 452.
Reference: BNC Word Frequency -- the most frequent 50 words are 43.4% of total word usage ; 48 are Basic, 43% of all usage.
    Do it again with the most common 2,000 words vs. the Basic 2,000. Where there are gaps in common words for concepts that Ogden shows are necessary for living expression, make up some examples for use in "selling" Basic English.
    If the common words have much merit, include them as a column in our simplified language comparisons worksheet. Showing the gap that common words have within the Universal Language Dictionary definitions can be of some small valuable, but there might be many duplicate words for the most common subjects which could clutter the serious considered word lists of rival, simplified vocabularies. Perhaps a separate report.
Sources : A rather complete update was done by COBUILD and is used by the Longman Defining Vocabulary, also based on GSL, all three are very similar, to provide a much larger vocabulary intended for students whose native language is English.
    We did a spreadsheet comparing vocabularies from several leading language sources -- with UDP, EWE, Cobuild, Longman, GS available as  OtherVoc.xls. This may be useful for next-step teaching sequence. Also see Simple English. We base the translation dictionary upon the SCOWL lists -- spell Checking Oriented Word Lists which does spelling, rather than only root words.
Other References:
Origins of Vocabulary.
Chinook (or Nootka or Oregon) Trade Jargon

---

Back to Basic English Institute home page.           or   Project Page
About this Page: projcat.html - Project Catalog. .
Last updated April 25, 2010.
May 20, , 2006 -- Other Voc.xls

Contact us
URL: http://www.basic-english.org/projcat.html