Criticism
Like all international auxiliary languages (or IALs), Basic English may be criticised as inevitably based on personal preferences, and thus, paradoxically, inherently divisive. Moreover, like all natural language based IALs, Basic is subject to criticism as unfairly biased towards the native speaker community.
As a teaching aid for English as a Second Language, Basic English has been criticised for the choice of the core vocabulary and for its grammatical constraints.
In 1944, readability expert Rudolf Flesch published an article in Harper's Magazine, "How Basic is Basic English?" in which he claimed, "It's not basic, and it's not English." The basic complaint was that the vocabulary is too restricted, and, as a result, the text ends up being awkward and more difficult than necessary. He also notes that the words in the Basic vocabulary were arbitrarily selected, and there have been no empirical studies showing that it makes language simpler.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“A tailor can adapt to any medium, be it poetry, be it criticism. As a poet, he can mend, and with the scissors of criticism he can divide.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)