Interglossa, page 19

metaphorical and generic usage of words. Still, we can provide a sufficient number of specific terms for qualities with no very obvious connexion; and this has been the aim of the author.

A constructed language cannot admit words of so diverse semantic content as order, listed in the miniature Basic Dictionary as meaning: arrangement, sequence, class, command, religious body, decoration.¹ It cannot admit such definitions as (ibid.) "undertaking" for enterprise and "(statement of) undertaking" for promise. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idiom which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate or put at a loss for bewilder. In what follows the aim has been to keep sharpness of definition within the limits set by two dispensations:

(a) Since action and its product are necessarily co-existent, the same word (e.g. writing in English) can suffice for both in a given context;

(b) Where a metaphorical usage is common to equivalent words of different origin and unrelated language, families (cf. tongue-language for the organ of that name and for a local variety of speech) it is permissible to conclude that the link between the two is substantial.²

The numerical word-economy of Basic English owes much to two circumstances which are not propitious to the needs of the beginner. It includes abstract words with wide diversifications of meaning by metaphorical extension; and it has a very small number of names for common objects. In conformity with the principle stated above, Interglossa does not aim at economy of either sort. Where self-explicit compounds involving generic terms are not available as names for common things, it is far better to provide a new one than to leave the

¹ This is especially true of the hundred items ("Operations"), which make up the grammatical matrix of Basic. Laying aside the eighteen verbs— not one of which has an absolutely clear-cut terrain— the remaining words (82) include such obvious pitfalls for the unwary as any, some, that, ever, well, still, even, only, all. The prepositions, on the use of which Basic relies so much, are by no means above reproach. Those that have a single characteristic meaning (e.g. in) enter into innumerable and inescapable idiomatic combinations. Several (e.g. against, with, by) have more than one characteristic meaning. Others (of, for) are as empty as the "essential" articles a and the. All in all, at least a third of the words listed as operations are so polyvalent as to claim front rank among the booby traps for the beginner who is learning English.