Basic English uses approximately 850 words, and produced this communication between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt:
Churchill (so much for automatic text recognition): "When I was with you in the United States last August you expressed to me your interest in Basic English. The Cabinet Committee which I appointed here to consider the possibilities of Basic and means of promoting its wider use have reported and we have adopted the recommendations they have rode. I thought it might be of interest to you to see the Report and am sending you copi
[...]
"If the United States authorities feel able to give their powerful support to the promotion of Basic English as a means of international intercourse, I feel sure that that would ensure its successful development. My conviction is that Basic English will then prove to be a great boon to mankind in the future and a powerful support to the influence of the Anglo-Saxon peoples in world affairs."
FDR: "...Incidentally, I wonder what the course of history would have been if in May 1940 you had been able to offer the British people only "blood, work, eye water and face water", which I understand is the best that Basic English can do with five famous words...."
Of course Basic English cheats by including all the phrasal verbs, without considering that they are usually separate lexical items. "pick on" or "pass for" aren't easily decipherable based purely on their components.
Any language with a small number of "words" will have to do the same thing. At the other end of the spectrum are agglutinative languages, like Turkish and German (?).
Yes, but the combinations in English are somewhat arbitrary. It's obvious in context what flyingmetaltube might refer to. It's not obvious that "pony up" means to settle an account, rather than something about hovering horses.
You inspired me to look into this more and it turns out that George Orwell was inspired to invent Newspeak (from his book 1984) from his experience with Basic English. He was initially a big proponent of it but eventually turn against the idea.
Churchill (so much for automatic text recognition): "When I was with you in the United States last August you expressed to me your interest in Basic English. The Cabinet Committee which I appointed here to consider the possibilities of Basic and means of promoting its wider use have reported and we have adopted the recommendations they have rode. I thought it might be of interest to you to see the Report and am sending you copi
[...]
"If the United States authorities feel able to give their powerful support to the promotion of Basic English as a means of international intercourse, I feel sure that that would ensure its successful development. My conviction is that Basic English will then prove to be a great boon to mankind in the future and a powerful support to the influence of the Anglo-Saxon peoples in world affairs."
FDR: "...Incidentally, I wonder what the course of history would have been if in May 1940 you had been able to offer the British people only "blood, work, eye water and face water", which I understand is the best that Basic English can do with five famous words...."
http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/psf/box37/t335k01.html