Radio: Whose Basic?

On the question of Basic English, raised by Winston Churchill at Harvard (TIME, Sept. 20), a small voice had a large suggestion to make last week. The voice was that of Dr. Lin Mou-sheng, Chinese scholar, author and editor. On CBS’s People’s Platform Dr. Lin interrupted a discussion of whether Basic English should be encouraged as an international language. Dr. Lin asked a disarming pair of questions: Why Basic English? Why not Basic Chinese?

His argument: Chinese is the mother tongue of 450,000,000 people. Hardly more than 200,000,000 people can claim English for their own. There is no easier, simpler language to learn than the simplified “basic” Chinese of 1,000 characters which has made possible China’s huge spread of literacy in recent years.

Dr. Lin tempered his proposal with a compromise suggestion: let each of the world’s most widely used languages be reduced to Basic and universally taught.