Literature/1937/Palmer

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Harold E. Palmer & Albert S. Hornby (1937). Thousand-word English: what it is and what can be done with it. G.G. Harrap & Company, Ltd.

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    Following his return from Japan in 1936 at the age of fifty-nine, Palmer began to share some of the fruits of his research and development work in Japan with a wider readership. In a joint publication for Harrap, Palmer and Hornby (1937) introduces a new series of simplified readers based on a word-list originally drawn up by them in 1934 (Hornby and Palmer 1934). Implicitly contrasting their own 'Thousand-Word English' scheme with Basic English, they emphasized that it

    is not intended in any sense as a substitute for ordinary English for the purpose of international communication. It is simply one of several similar plans of providing foreign students of English with a first elementary vocabulary embodied in (a) a world-list and (b) interesting reading-matter composed almost entirely within the limits of that list.

    (Palmer and Hornby 1937: 7)

    Indeed, 'Thousand-Word English' was to prove its value in the continuing battle against Basic English during the wartime years, when the British Council recommended it in order to resist Churchill's support for the diffusion of Basic. (pp. xlvi-xlvii)

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  1. Richard C. Smith. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Email: richard@srv0.apl.ed.ac.uk or ricsmith@fs.tufs.ac.jp.