Diagram of the ‘radial definition routes’ of Panoptic Conjugation (Ogden 1930: 12)

A fascinating turn in recent Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) scholarship is the development of ‘Minimal English’, an international auxiliary language combining the best of Standard English and NSM. One of the earliest published mentions of this project is in Anna Wierzbicka’s 2014 Imprisoned in English, where she states that Minimal English ‘is, essentially, the English version of “Basic Human”‘ (Wierzbicka 2014: 195), the rendering in English exponents of the set of primitive concepts uncovered by NSM research. An example of Covid-19-related messages in Minimal English can be found here.

The idea of a simplified engineered language for international communication is by no means new, as Wierzbicka and her colleagues freely acknowledge. The specific proposal of creating a reduced form of English for this purpose has also found many advocates in the past.

The special characteristic of Minimal English that is supposed to set it apart from all prior projects is its culturally neutral standpoint. The use of Minimal English should preserve the existing investment of the millions of second-language learners of English in acquiring the formal shell of that language – its phonology, word forms, grammar and so on – while leaving the baggage of ‘Anglo’ culture behind. Any other language could be reduced in this way to serve as the medium for ‘Basic Human’, argues Wierzbicka, but in the context of present-day globalisation English is indisputably the best host:

[G]iven the realities of today’s globalizing world, at this point it is obviously a mini-English that is the most practical way out (or down) from the conceptual tower of Babel that the cultural evolution of humankind has erected, for better or worse. (Wierzbicka 2014: 194)

Wierzbicka (2014: 194) tells us that Minimal English ‘is not another simplified version of English analogous to Ogden’s […] “Basic English” or Jean-Paul Nerrière’s “Globish”‘ (cf. Goddard and Wierzbicka 2018: 8). But if we look at the particular case of Ogden’s Basic English we may notice many striking parallels to Minimal English. These parallels warrant closer inspection.

In the most detailed published treatment of Minimal English to date, the 2018 edited volume Minimal English for a Global World, Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka dedicate a section of their co-authored chapter to comparing Minimal English and Basic English (as well as ‘Plain English’; Goddard and Wierzbicka 2018: 18–22). Goddard and Wierzbicka (ibid.: 19) note ‘enormous’ differences across ‘structure (words and grammar), intended range of functions, and in “spirit”‘ between Basic and Minimal English.

However, the comparison misses many significant points of contact between the two endeavours.

In terms of the differences in ‘structure’, Goddard and Wierzbicka point out that Ogden’s core vocabulary of 850 ‘Basic Words’ (see Ogden 1933 [1930]) does not respect the cross-linguistic primitives proposed within the NSM framework. In addition, a central grammatical feature of Basic English was the elimination of verbs from the language, a goal foreign to NSM thinking. These two differences between Basic and Minimal English are quite real, but focusing on them misses the more profound philosophical and methodological similarity between the projects: that both NSM and Basic English are centred around reductive paraphrase. Although not identical to NSM procedure, Ogden’s (1930) method of ‘panoptic conjugation’ sought, in very similar fashion to NSM reductive paraphrase, to strip down meaning to its fundamentals. From Goddard and Wierzbicka’s commentary we may get the impression that Ogden’s method was not much more than an ad hoc heuristic, but this is by no means the case: his method was grounded in contemporary analytic philosophy and even received monograph-length exposition in the 1931 Word Economy by Leonora Wilhelmina Lockhart, one of his close collaborators.

The ‘intended range of functions’ of Basic English is perhaps also not as far from NSM and Minimal English as Goddard and Wierzbicka suggest. Ogden and his collaborators of course indulged in very off-putting Anglo chauvinism, but this was in many ways an expression of a kind of universalism current in analytic philosophy of the time. While NSM explicitly rejects any claims of cultural superiority, it shares many of the same sources. The historiography of NSM typically looks much further back and conceives of the approach as a continuation of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ (1646–1716) characteristica universalis (see, e.g. Wierzbicka 1992: 216–218; Wierzbicka 1996: 11–13), but NSM – like Basic – also has clear proximal predecessors in the language-critical thought of early analytic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. These connections are something that I have explored at length in my 2018 Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism (see also McElvenny 2014).

Finally, the difference in ‘spirit’ that Goddard and Wierzbicka highlight is another aspect of the comparison between Basic English and Minimal English that deserves deeper scrutiny. It is indeed true that Ogden and many of his collaborators – although by no means all – were quite hostile to multilingualism and saw Basic English as a means to the linguistic homogenisation of the world. By contrast, practitioners of NSM and Minimal English celebrate linguistic and cultural diversity and see their project as a means for facilitating cross-cultural communication.

However, the historical contexts of Basic English and Minimal English are very different in this respect. Ogden and his collaborators were working in a world that was much more multilingual than ours today: in Ogden’s day, many languages were used equally in science, business and international relations. At the same time, this world was deeply fractured, having endured by the middle of the twentieth century two World Wars. Whether right or wrong, many scholars of the first half of the twentieth century imagined a connection between competing national languages and international friction.

Minimal English, on the other hand, has been born into a world where Ogden’s dream has essentially come true: international co-operation in science, business and politics is today overwhelmingly mediated in English (see Piller 2016 for incisive discussion of how this plays out in present-day language scholarship). With the end of the Cold War, most people around the world live in an often uneasy but enduring peace – and let’s hope that there will never be a World War III. In this environment, Minimal English has the opposite mission of overcoming the de facto hegemony of English, which has brought with it a different set of problems.

The ahistorical juxtaposition of Basic English and Minimal English ignores these important points of intellectual and political context, which shape the outlook and design of the two projects. There is no shortage of current secondary literature that would help to illuminate this context. My own Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism, mentioned above, deals with this, as does Michael Gordin’s 2015 Scientific Babel.

This blog post is intended as a plea for greater engagement with intellectual history on the part of linguists. On the example of Minimal English, we can immediately see that there are significant parallels between this project and efforts pursued by scholars of only a few generations ago. Greater awareness of their work and the context in which it was undertaken may cast new light on our own assumptions and practices, and in the process enrich our own thinking and alert us to potential pitfalls.

References

Goddard, Cliff and Anna Wierzbicka (2018), ‘Minimal English and how it can add to Global English, in Minimal English for a Global World: Improved communication using fewer words, ed. Cliff Goddard, Cham: Palgrave McMillan, pp. 5–28.
Gordin, Michael D. (2015), Scientific Babel: How science was done before and after Global English, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lockhart, Leonora Wilhelmina (1931), Word Economy, London: Kegan Paul.
McElvenny, James (2014), ‘Ogden and Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning and early analytic philosophy’, Language Sciences 41, 212–221. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2013.10.001
McElvenny, Jame (2018), Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism: C. K. Ogden and his contemporaries, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ogden, Charles Kay (1930), ‘Penultima (editorial)’, Psyche 10:3, 1-29.
Ogden, Charles Kay (1933 [1930]), Basic English: a general introduction with rules and grammar, London: Kegan Paul.
Piller, Ingrid (2016), ‘Monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism’, Journal of Multicultural Discourses 11.1, pp. 25–33. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2015.1102921
Wierzbicka, Anna (1992), ‘The search for universal semantic primitives’, in Thirty Years of Linguistic Evolution, ed. Martin Pütz, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 215-242.
Wierzbicka, Anna (1996), Semantics: primes and universals, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2014), Imprisoned in English: the hazards of English as a default language, Oxford: Oxford University Press.