Everything about Charles Kay Ogden totally explained
» For the children's book writer, see Charles Ogden (children's writer).
Charles Kay Ogden (
June 1 1889 Fleetwood,
Lancashire -
March 21 1957 London) was an
English linguist, philosopher, and writer.
Basic English
He is now mostly remembered as the inventor and propagator of
Basic English, his primary activity from 1925 until his death. Basic English is an auxiliary international language of 850 words comprising a system that covers everything necessary for day-to-day purposes. To promote Basic English, Ogden founded the Orthological Institute, from
orthology, the abstract term he proposed for its work (see
orthoepeia). Ogden was also a consultant with the
International Auxiliary Language Association, which presented
Interlingua in 1951.
At Cambridge
Educated first at
Rossall he went on to
Magdalene College, Cambridge,
Cambridge, Ogden obtained the M.A. in 1915. He founded the
Cambridge Magazine in 1912 while still an undergraduate, editing it until it ceased publication in 1922. It evolved into an organ of international comment on politics and the war. A survey of the foreign press filled more than half of each issue, and its circulation rose to over 20,000. Ogden often used the
pseudonym Adelyne More in his journalism. The magazine also included literary contributions by
Siegfried Sassoon,
John Masefield,
Thomas Hardy,
George Bernard Shaw, and
Arnold Bennett.
The editor
In 1923, he took over the editorship of the psychological journal
Psyche. He founded and edited two major series of monographs, "The History of Civilisation" and "
The International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method"; the latter series included about 100 volumes after one decade. He edited and wrote a number of monographs on a variety of subjects.
Language and philosophy
Although neither a trained philosopher nor an academic, Ogden had a material impact on British academic philosophy. He helped translate
Wittgenstein's
Tractatus. His most durable work is his monograph (with
I. A. Richards) titled
The Meaning of Meaning (
1923), which went into many editions. This book, which straddled the boundaries among linguistics, literary analysis, and philosophy, drew attention to the
significs of
Victoria Lady Welby (whose disciple Ogden was) and the
semiotics of
Charles Peirce. A major step in the "linguistic turn" of 20th century British philosophy,
The Meaning of Meaning set out principles for understanding the function of language and described the so-called
semantic triangle. It included the inimitable phrase "The
gostak distims the doshes."
Entrepreneur
Ogden ran a network of bookshops in Cambridge, also selling art by the
Bloomsbury Group. One such bookshop was looted on the day World War I ended.
He was a voracious book collector; his
incunabula, manuscripts, papers of the Brougham family, and
Jeremy Bentham collection were purchased by
University College London. The balance of his enormous personal library was purchased after his death by the
University of California - Los Angeles.
Further Information
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