Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Ogden's Rules of Grammar

Ogden said that it would take seven years to learn English, seven months for Esperanto, and seven weeks for Basic English.

Ogden's rules of grammar for Basic English allows people to use the 850 words to talk about things and events in the normal English way.

  1. Words are pluralised by adding an ~s on the end of the word. If there are special ways to make a plural word in English, such as ~es and ~ies, they should be used instead.
  2. Words like change, turn, and use are used as verbs, but the 300 of them may be turned into different forms by adding the ending ~er or ~ing; or into adjectives by adding ~ing and ~ed. Only act is to be turned into actor rather than acter.
  3. Some adjectives can be turned into adverbs with the ending ~ly.
  4. For comparatives and superlatives, either more and most or ~er and ~est may be used.
  5. Some adjectives can be inverted with un~.
  6. Yes/no questions are formed by adding do at the beginning or changing the word order.
  7. Operators and pronouns conjugate as in normal English.
  8. Combined words can be formed from two operators (for example become), from two nouns (for example newspaper or headline) or from a noun and a direction (sundown).
  9. Measures, numbers, money, months, days, years, clock time, and international words are in English forms.
  10. The wordlist can be augmented by the jargon of an industry or science. For example, in a grammar, words such as grammar or noun might be used, even though they are not on Ogden's wordlist.
Thanks to wikipedia... You can view it's source by clicking here !