Special English is a simplified, reduced version of English used by the Voice of America in some of its broadcasts. It is meant to be understandable by as many people as possible, even if they are just learning English. It has a reduced vocabulary (it isn’t hard to pare down the English vocabulary) and the presenters don’t use idiomatic constructions or complex grammar. The difference between Special English and a simplified version of normal English is that Special English has been consciously constructed and defined.
Each language has words that stand / mean other words. To some extent, I am sure each language can have at least partial “special-n” where N is the native language.
A great advantage here is that you do not need to learn the written aspect of the language. When turning to one alphabet set to another it will take some time to read texts. I assume the number of words that represnt words directly relate to population and technologies. This should imply that population relates to the distance away from a language’s ““specialness””. Slang and idioms exist for all languages, but these have to be removed for obvious purposes.
I’m Listening to a broadcast right now. It is real slow. Real real slow. Annoyingly slow if english is your fist, primary, and only language. --they just mentioned the “center of the earthquake” instead of “epicenter”. I guess this rules German out of your question. Same for “Assassinate” over “To kill President bush”
There is a univeral language interlingua that I thought this was addressing;
I wasn’t around for the entire US “Esperanto” situation, but I think this falls along the same lines. (In my Opinion I think this EVENTUALLY has a chance at succeding worldwide.)
In German there is no formally established subset, but one thing that I notice is that the popular tabloid BILD uses a seemingly deliberately pared down version of German: no “intellectual” words, and they hyphenate compound words that usually are not hyphenated:
e.g. from today’s front page of their web site
Produkt-Tests instead of Produkttests (product tests)
Drogen-Beichte instead of Drogenbeichte (drug confession).
Apparently they have language guidelines to that effect (or they retain a neurosurgeon to work on new hires).
This is not for the benefit of non-native speakers, though, but for the benefit of the knuckle-dragging segment of the native speakers.
Twice a day, “Radio-France Internationale” broadcast the news in “easy french”. However, I wouldn’t know if it’s the same as “special english” since I don’t know if it has been formalized in the same way.
It’s a script and is intended to be read out loud. Another year was given as “Nineteen-Oh-Five” so the idea is that’s how they want it said and not “Nineteen-Hundred-And-Five” or any other way.
bump, have you ever learned another language? If I’m reading “Ella nació dos años después de él, en 1945,” out loud, it can be surprisingly difficult not to say “Ella nació dos años después de él, en nineteen forty-five.” Writing it that way is a huge help to non-native speakers.
Spelling out “nineteen twenty-three” is definitely to make it clear to someone who is learning English how those numbers are pronounced in English. Even with languages I know fairly well, like French, I see “1923” and think “nineteen twenty-three” and not “mille neuf cents vingt-trois”. If the numbers are spelled out in full, it both helps the reader to understand the text and to learn how numbers work in English; if they’re represented with numerals, it’s very easy to read them in your native language. Since you can’t fall back on this trick if you’re hearing or speaking English, it’s best to write numbers as they’re spoken. They do this with other numbers, such as ‘one hundred fifty thousand’ for 150,000 and ‘March seventeenth’ for ‘March 17th’.
A couple other things I noticed: they use metric units, and they don’t appear to use phrasal verbs. Metric units would be much better recognized by non-Americans than miles and pounds. And phrasal verbs are probably the one of the most difficult parts of learning English; so many of them don’t mean what they seem, like ‘go off’ and ‘put up’.
Meeko: Interlingua is based on another artificial language that was essentially Latin without inflections (‘Latine sine flexiones’). The vocabulary is primarily Latin/Romance-derived, and thus it’s easy to learn for someone who knows Latin or a Romance language. Many fewer people learn Latin than did in the past, and the Romance-derived vocabulary wouldn’t be easy to learn for someone who didn’t know a Romance language. The vocabulary would be no more difficult than English, but as long as English remains the most widespread language of commerce, entertainment, science and information technology, it’s probably better to use an English-derived artificial language, or English itself, instead of one based on Romance roots, wholly artificial roots, or roots borrowed from various European languages (as with Esperanto).
I think English is the most second learned language and all stuff like that. I didn’t mean to doubt English’s power. I personally thought that the basic “roots” of all words could be the fastest absorbed by all. I mean, I think “Taxi” is the same in 10 plus langauges and so forth. Languages have reinvented the wheel over 4,000 or so times… why?
Just to note, there’s something called the Flesch Test that is supposed to rate readability of prose (in English). I wonder if there’s something similar for other languages?
First, how do you know the various other words for ‘taxi’ aren’t all loanwords?
But back on track, there’s no real evidence that going back to any roots makes it easer to learn. What’s easy to learn is what is closest to your own language, and trying to construct a language based on the common ancestor of the Germanic and Romance languages would create something far distant from any language now spoken.
But in the final analysis, constructed languages tend to fail miserably beyond a community of enthusiasts. Esperanto is probably the most successful of all of them, and it has never been a major language of science or trade or anything else. It serves a role, but not the grand one its creators envisioned.
The lesson of constructed languages is that being easy to learn doesn’t matter. People learn English because everyone around them knows it and they need it to get a good job.
Same for “Assassinate” over “To kill President bush”