Editing Basic English (section)

== Criticism ==
Like all [[international auxiliary language]]s (or IALs), Basic English may be criticised as inevitably based on personal preferences, and is thus, paradoxically, inherently divisive.<ref>{{cite web|first=Rick |last=Harrison |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20120716230133/http://www.rickharrison.com/language/farewell.html |url=http://www.rickharrison.com/language/farewell.html |title=Farewell to Auxiliary Languages |archivedate=16 July 2012 |date=24 February 1997}}</ref> Moreover, like all natural-language-based IALs, Basic is subject to criticism as unfairly biased towards the native speaker community.<ref group=note>For instance, a sample quotation from [http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0512A&L=AUXLANG&T=0&F=&S=&P=2560 the auxlang mailing list archives] and another from noted linguist [[Robert A. Hall, Jr.]]</ref>

As a teaching aid for [[English as a second or foreign language|English as a second language]], Basic English has been criticised for the choice of the core vocabulary and for its grammatical constraints.<ref group=note>For instance, by proponents of Essential World English. See [http://www.langmaker.com/outpost/eswldeng.htm a summary of EWE] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060818175724/http://www.langmaker.com/outpost/eswldeng.htm |date=August 18, 2006 }} for instance and, again, the linguist [[Robert A. Hall, Jr.]]</ref>

In 1944, [[readability]] expert [[Rudolf Flesch]] published an article in ''[[Harper's Magazine]]'', "How Basic is Basic English?" in which he said, "It's not basic, and it's not English." The essence of his complaint is that the vocabulary is too restricted, and, as a result, the text ends up being awkward and more difficult than necessary. He also argues that the words in the Basic vocabulary were arbitrarily selected, and notes that there had been no empirical studies showing that it made language simpler.<ref name="Flesch">{{cite magazine|last1=Flesch|first1=R. F.|title=How Basic is Basic English?|magazine=[[Harper's Magazine]]|date=March 1944|pages=339–343}}</ref>

In his 1948 paper "[[A Mathematical Theory of Communication]]", [[Claude Shannon]] contrasted the limited vocabulary of Basic English with [[James Joyce]]'s ''[[Finnegans Wake]]'', a work noted for a wide vocabulary. Shannon notes that the lack of vocabulary in Basic English leads to a very high level of [[Redundancy (linguistics)|redundancy]], whereas Joyce's large vocabulary "is alleged to achieve a compression of semantic content".<ref>{{cite journal|year=1948|last1=Shannon |first1=Claude|title=A Mathematical Theory of Communication |journal=The Bell System Technical Journal |volume=27 |issue=3 |pages=379–423; 623–656|doi=10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x |hdl=11858/00-001M-0000-002C-4314-2 |hdl-access=free }}</ref>