Fascinating TLS signed “H. G.,” one page, 7 x 9, 13 Hanover Terrace letterhead, November 15, 1943. Letter to British writer and linguist Charles Kay Ogden, in full: "Thanks for Richards's book. But he seems to me to ignore the necessity for a preliminary and very fundamental respelling of Basic, which presents words which are bound to be sounded quite differently and incomprehensibly in different parts of the world until we have a universal alphabet that will evoke the same sounds everywhere. I am all for Basic, but that alphabet is necessary to make Basic really practicable. It is a necessary twin movement. I don't go back on my belief in the high practicability of Basic becoming a world speech. The Time Machine is yours for the asking, and I am sending you a copy of The Natural Rights of Man with its latest revisions which I shall be only too glad to see in Basic." Curiously, Wells adds one word in his own hand. In fine condition, with an extra horizontal fold.
Charles Kay Ogden (1889-1957) was an English philosopher, writer, and linguistic psychologist, who is now mostly remembered as the inventor and propagator of Basic English, an international auxiliary language and aid for teaching English as a second language. Essentially a simplified subset of regular English, the concept was first presented in Ogden's 1930 book Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar. Wells adopted the idea of Basic English in his 1933 science fiction work The Shape of Things to Come.
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