Charles Kay Ogden

Charles Kay Ogden (born June 1, 1889 in Fleetwood , Lancashire , † March 21, 1957 in London ) was a British linguist and writer .

Life

Ogden studied languages ​​at Cambridge. In 1912 he founded a weekly magazine The Cambridge Magazine with writers as authors such as Thomas Hardy , George Bernard Shaw , H. G. Wells etc. In his life he translated a total of 15 books from the German and French languages. The best-known translation was a philosophical work: with the help of George Edward Moore , Frank P. Ramsey and Ludwig Wittgenstein himself, Ogden translated Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into English in 1922 .

Ogden is also the inventor of the constructed simplified language ( world auxiliary language ) Basic English , with 850 words and a simplified grammar, developed from 1926 to 1930. His intention was to create a standardized, uniform aid for international communication, conceived as an international second foreign language, to create. For this he received support from Prime Ministers Arthur Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill as well as from the American President Franklin D. Roosevelt . A foundation ( Orthological Institute ) was set up specifically for the dissemination of Basic English , of which Ogden was the chairman and director. One of the aims of the institute was to train teachers. These activities were discontinued after the end of World War II .

Ogden is also known for his theory about the meaning of meaning ( The Meaning of Meaning ), developed in collaboration with I. A. Richards in 1923 , which describes the so-called semiotic triangle and the famous grammatically correct, but meaningless sentence “ The gostak distims the doshes ” (German: The Gostak distims the cans ) contains. This only says that the Gostak is a distimmer of cans, that the cans are distimmed from the Gostak as long as it is not known what the words Gostak , distimmen and cans actually mean.

Works (selection)

• Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The CK Ogden translation. prepared with assistance from Moore, Ramsey, and Wittgenstein himself . Routledge, 1990, ISBN 0-415-05186-X (first edition: 1921).
• IA Richards, CK Ogden: The Meaning of Meaning . 1989, ISBN 0-15-658446-8 (first edition: 1923).
  • The importance of meaning. An investigation into d. Influence d. Language on d. Thinking u. about d. Knowledge d. Symbolism . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt (am Main) 1974.
• Conducted by CK Ogden: The General Basic English Dictionary . Evans Brothers Limited, London, ISBN 0-87471-362-5 (from 1940).

Web links

• Ogden's Basic English
• Ryota Iijima: List of Basic Words: first made by CK Ogden 2005. See that “CART” is in front of “CARRIAGE.”