Das SimpelDeutsch Experiment 6 comments

9 Jun 2006 @ 22:44, by Max Sandor I started an experiment, called "SimpelDeutsch". The idea originally came from Wikipedia's Simple English section. Why should there be Simple English but not also Simple Deutsch?, I asked myself. There was the Basic English project. Wikipedia sez: "Basic English is a constructed language with a small number of words created by Charles Kay Ogden and described in his book Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar (1930). The language is based on a simplified version of English. Ogden said that it would take seven years to learn English, seven months for Esperanto, and seven weeks for Basic English, comparable with Ido. Thus Basic English is used by companies who need to make complex books for international use, and by language schools that need to give people some knowledge of English in a short time." A similar approach should be possible for SimpelDeutsch. In addition, there is another particularity that didn't exist in 1930 at the time of Ogden: the global exchange of concepts promoted a set of words practically identical in many languages. Those words don't even need a translation. In the SimpelDeutsch project, if one starts reading beginning from the first Blog entry (Note, that a BLOG begins at its end!), one should be able to understand basic German (in a written form) in a very short time. A main concept of SimpelDeutsch is that it is NOT a constructed language. I'll leave it up to the readers/commentators to determine the basic set of words to be used. The time necessary to achieve a basic dictionary shall be an interesting part of the experiment. I am testing an online database (and Wiki) for the purposes of crossreferencing and invite all of you to participate in your particular language once it's open for business! Hope to see many of you playing with me (and language) at [link] !!! Thanks for Flemming Funch [link] and Gunter [link] with the setup!

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