Good, Modern and Basic English
George Orwell had completed ‘Politics and the English Language’, his analysis of good and bad language use, with their concomitants of successful and poor thinking, by December 1945. It appeared in Horizon magazine in April 1946, and was reprinted shortly after in the USA, and in abridged forms in Britain. In one section Orwell provides an example of bad writing by showing how an original idea might be written in the most common style of the moment. This was a verse of the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes 9:11, which expressed a philosophical but everyday notion.
A few years before Orwell worked on ‘Politics and the English Language’ Professor Samuel Hooke at Cambridge University had started to translate the Bible into Basic English with, first, the New Testament in 1941. Then the Old Testament followed in 1949. That is, Hooke was working through the years at the end of World War II in parallel with Orwell. While it would be interesting to know if he was aware of Orwell’s rephrasing of an Old Testament phrase before he published his translation, more importantly he shows us how Basic English could be used in practice.
Orwell was aware of Basic English, was in contact with one of its inventors, C K Ogden, but claimed no expertise. In 1944, in one of his ‘As I Please’ columns, he praised Basic in this way:
High-sounding phrases, when translated into Basic, are often deflated in a surprising way. For example, I presented to a Basic expert the sentence, “He little knew the fate that lay in store for him”—to be told that in Basic this would become “He was far from certain what was going to happen.” It sounds decidedly less impressive, but it means the same. In Basic, I am told, you cannot make a meaningless statement without its being apparent that it is meaningless—which is quite enough to explain why so many schoolmasters, editors, politicians and literary critics object to it.
As Hooke’s translation showed, it was perfectly possible to work in Basic, a dialect for the modern age, and still keep the poetry or music of the original, while, as Orwell demonstrated, the tendency of other modern styles was to lose both detail and music.
Here for comparison purposes are the same idea expressed in Good, Modern and Basic English, laid out side by side. The original text is the one chosen by George Orwell.
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Ecclesiastes 9:11 |
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King James Version, which George Orwell called ‘… good English’. |
Orwell’s re-phrasing, into ‘… modern English of the worst sort’. |
The Bible in Basic English (Trans. Professor S H Hooke) |
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I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. |
‘Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account. |
And again I saw under the sun that the reward goes not to him who is quick, or the fruits of war to the strong; and there is no bread for the wise, or wealth for men of learning, or respect for those who have knowledge; but time and chance come to all. |
It seems that of the three options, ‘good, modern and Basic’, it was only ever possible to have two that worked. And in Orwell’s opinion, ‘good’ and ‘modern’ were opposites.
Note:
Sources on the history and publication of ‘Politics and the English Language’ in the first paragraph above are taken from the notes by Professor Peter Davison in The Complete Works of George Orwell.
Orwell’s ‘Basic expert’ may have been C K Ogden, or perhaps Inez Holden who wrote stories in Basic. Or it may have been a third person.
I agree that modern English including, and especially academic writing, continues to be plagued by pretentious writing. I quoted his five basic rules in that ‘Politics and the Engkish Language’ in my recent MA dissertation on the Genesis of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ for an Open Uni MA. I haven’t had the score back yet!