Basic English - Literary References

Literary References

In the novel The Shape of Things to Come, published in 1933, H. G. Wells depicted Basic English as the lingua franca of a new elite which after a prolonged struggle succeeds in uniting the world and establishing a totalitarian world government. In the future world of Wells' vision, virtually all members of humanity know this language.

From 1942 to 1944 George Orwell was a proponent of Basic English, but in 1945 he became critical of universal languages. Basic English later inspired his use of Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In his story "Gulf", science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein used a constructed language, in which every Basic English word is replaced with a single phoneme, as an appropriate means of communication for a race of genius supermen.

Read more about this topic:  Basic English

Famous quotes containing the word literary:

    ... the Ovarian Theory of Literature, or, rather, its complement, the Testicular Theory. A recent camp follower ... of this explicit theory is ... Norman Mailer, who has attributed his own gift, and the literary gift in general, solely and directly to the possession of a specific pair of organs. One writes with these organs, Mailer has said ... and I have always wondered with what shade of ink he manages to do it.
    Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928)