24 ways of looking at Dao De Ching 33

It's too big to be a blog entry, so see my web page on it.

Dao dem bones

Someone talked about "expressing the profundities of the Way solely via medical jargon". I tried.

The innominate bone that can be named
Is not a true bone.
Its name is not a true name.

The skeletal system
Begins in the innominate;
The pelvic girdle
Is the mother of the 206 things.

So the X-ray machine
Sees what it can see
And the X-ray technician
Sees what he expects to see.

The two views are alike in essence,
but different in phenomenology.
The most mysterious of the mysteries,
The viewport on what is wonderful.

See also my Unix Power Classic.

W3C XML Schema constraint types

A W3C XML Schema imposes three kinds of constraints:

1. Schema-instance constraints: if an attribute is declared to have a certain (simple) type in the schema, then all values of that attribute in the instance must conform to the type.

2. Instance-instance constraints: if an attribute is declared to be unique, then no two values of that attribute in the instance may be equal (according to the definition of "equality" for the attribute's type).

3. Schema-schema constraints: if a complex type is said to be derived by restriction from another complex type, then it must redeclare the components of that type either unchanged or reduced in what may be called "strength".

RELAX NG does not have constraints of types 2 or 3. Therefore, it cannot specify complex type derivation by restriction. In addition, restricting simple types by facet is not a first-class operation, so once a built-in simple type has been restricted by facets, it can't be restricted further. This is a place where WXS is genuinely more orthogonal than RNG. (The way in which complex type derivation by restriction is done in WXS is bogus, because it generates fragile subclasses, a kind of bassackwards version of the well-known "fragile superclass" problem in OO.)

Tangled references and representations

Consider the case of a self-portrait of the artist at work. The body of the artist isn't really a body, it's just paint. The palette being used by the artist isn't really a palette, it's just paint. And the paint on the palette ... no, wait, it really is paint! So do we here have a case of something being represented by itself?

Or what about "fictional music"? In Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus, we have the fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn and his fictional compositions. Mann did not write a note of these, yet he does refer to them within the novel, so they are as fictional as Adrian himself. What's more, fictional Adrian also invents the system of 12-tone composition, which in the Real World was invented by Arnold Schoenberg. (S. made a fuss about this, and Mann inserted a note into the preface.) Now if I published musical compositions by Leverkühn, I would be at best committing another fiction, or at worst deceiving the public. Those works would be by someone else altogether (me, perhaps, or even Mann, but not Leverkühn).

Douglas Hofstadter discusses the case of A, who is writing a novel in which appears the fictional character B, who is writing a novel in which appears the fictional character C, who is writing a novel in which appears the fictional character A! Is this possible? Why, yes; all three characters are mere fictions in a novel written by D.

The TV (and radio) business is much like the chicken business: the chickens only think it's all being done for their benefit. In fact, the real customers (the advertisers, in the case of TV) are hidden, and the chickens only get whatever will barely keep them alive (watching/listening).

Consider A, B, and C, who all tell the truth. A has a principle that says "Tell the truth", and he wishes to act according to his principles, so he tells the truth. B has no such principle, but believes that he will suffer if he does not tell the truth, so he too tells the truth. C like A has the principle, but like B his motivation for telling the truth is avoidance of suffering. C acts in accordance with his principle (objectively speaking), but not because of (i.e. motivated by) it.

A FOAF of mine claimed to be two-thirds Cherokee. When asked how that could be, he replied "Simple. Both of my parents are two-thirds Cherokee."

So to make a long story short (but too late now): trust me, Tully and Cicero are the same person, because whatever is true of one is true of the other, even if you know that Cicero is a great Roman orator but never heard of Tully before. And the Morning Star and the Evening Star are the same thing, too, namely the planet Venus. And furze is gorse, and gorse is furze, and it matters not whether you contract Jakob-Creutzfeld disease or Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, for in either case your brain will one day look like Emmenthaler, or "Swiss cheese" as we simplistically call it here in the U. S. of A., as if there were no other cheeses from that country. Or as Niklaus Wirth replied when asked how to pronounce his name, "You may call me by name, and call me Veert, or you may call me by value, and call me Worth."

And Livorno is called Leghorn (a breed of chicken) in English, and Italy is called Włochy in Polish, and my second floor is a Brit's first floor, and even the O.E.D. (also called the N.E.D.) despairs of distinguishing between beer, properly so called, and ale, properly so called. But stop reading this farrago (from the Latin word for cattle feed, especially that made from Hordeum vulgare, or barley, which brings us back to beer) and go have either one or the other.

Ceci ne pas un message.

Are XML documents concrete or abstract?

A while back, Dan Connolly and I argued this point. He said that XML documents were like integers: just because you write a new one down doesn't mean you've created anything new, and likewise writing something to a file doesn't cause the set of XML documents to grow either.

But I think an XML document is first and foremost a document, and documents can be created and destroyed. The sentence "John Rumpelmayer Jones sold me a goat, a bridge, a boat, a wedge, a coat, a dredge, a groat, a hedge, a stoat, a pledge, a moat, a midge, and a vote." is a grammatical English sentence, and a fortiori a document, that never existed before this posting.

If there is a poem beginning "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan" (and there is), then is there a poem whose text is solely:

Singing of Mount Abora

and every other possible poem-fragment?

The translation of this poem into German exists and is a poem (it begins "Im Xanadu ließ Kubla Khan"). Does the translation into Zarphatic (the dead Jewish language which is to French as Yiddish is to German and Ladino to Spanish) also exist and also constitute a poem, regardless of the fact that no one has ever made such a translation, nor will (very likely) in future? I think not.

French in all its purity

Here are two contrasting samples, one of French-English code-switching, one of pure French with no English at all.

Hier on est alle faire une hike de six miles dans le Blue Hills. On a fait trois sommets, up and down, et ensuite on a pris un trail qui nous a amene pres de Clear Pond. Les guys etaient en forme mais Helen avait l'air tired. A la fin on s'est tous entasses dans la station wagon de Bob et on est alle bruncher chez moi.

Jean-Marie ecoute son transistor, un verre de Scotch a la main. Apres le flash d'information et l'interview d'un chanteur de rock, il enfile son jean tout neufs et descend au parking du building. Le trafic du weekend etant impossible, il decide de prendre sa Harley-Davidson pour aller au match de rugby.

(I'm told that "building" is no longer current in French.)

The oath of Elfconner

Then Elfconner swore a terrible oath. His four sons leapt straightaway to his side and took the selfsame vow together, and red as blood shone their keyboards in the glare of their monitors. They swore an oath which none shall break, and none should take, by even the name of Christopher, calling the Everlasting Dark upon them if they kept it not; and Marquette they named in witness, and Blackburn, and the hallowed bookhouse of Bodley, vowing to pursue with vengeance and hatred to the ends of the World Norwegian, Frenchman, or American as yet unborn, or any creature, great or small, good or evil, that time should bring forth unto the end of days, whoso should hold or take or keep a manuscript reading from their possession.
     -- The Tolkiendillion, IX

The clitics of Anyi Creole

Anyi Creole (I made it up, don't bother looking for more information) uses clitics to express its six verbal aspects. There is also a clitic 3rd-person agreement marker-cum-pronoun, and a clitic transitivity marker. Here is how it's done:

Realis perfective: no marker:

wo go 'I went, I have gone'

Realis imperfective: enclitic in:

wo go-in 'I am going, I was going'

Irrealis perfective: proclitic wu:

wo wu-go 'I might have gone, I will have gone'

Irrealis imperfective: both wu and in:

wo wu-go-in 'I might go, I will go'

Negative perfective: proclitic en:

wo en-go 'I didn't go, I haven't gone'

Negative imperfective: proclitic don:

wo don-go 'I'm not going, I won't go'

The 1st and 2nd pronouns wo (exclusive plural women, inclusive plural woyu) and yu (pl. yumen) are not clitics. The 3rd person pronoun i- (pl. e-) is proclitic to the verb, and is used even if a non-pronoun appears as subject:

i-go 'He/she/it went'

men i-go 'The man went'

The transitivity marker is enclitic im:

men e-go-im Nguyok 'The men went to New York'

That's all I have so far, except the verb tsu 'come'.

They drop on you

"Look Pooh!" said Piglet suddenly. "There's something in one of the Pine Trees."

"So there is!" said Pooh, looking up wonderingly. "There's an Animal." Piglet took Pooh's arm, in case Pooh was frightened.

"Is it One of the Fiercer Animals?" he said, looking the other way. Pooh nodded.

"It's a Jagular," he said.

"What do Jagulars do?" asked Piglet, hoping that they wouldn't.

"They hide in the branches of trees, and drop on you as you go underneath," said Pooh. "Christopher Robin told me."

"Perhaps we better hadn't go underneath, Pooh. In case he dropped and hurt himself."

"They don't hurt themselves," said Pooh. "They're such very good droppers." Piglet still felt that to be underneath a Very Good Dropper would be a Mistake, and he was just going to hurry back for something which he had forgotten when the Jagular called out to them.

"Help! Help!" it called.

"That's what Jagulars always do," said Pooh, much interested. "They call 'Help! Help!' and then when you look up, they drop on you."

"I'm looking down," cried Piglet loudly, so as the Jagular shouldn't do the wrong thing by accident. Something very excited next to the Jagular heard him, and squeaked:

"Pooh and Piglet! Pooh and Piglet!" All of a sudden Piglet felt that it was a much nicer day than he had thought it was. All warm and sunny —

"Pooh!" he cried. "I believe it's Tigger and Roo!"

"So it is," said Pooh. "I thought it was a Jagular and another Jagular."

--A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner chapter 4

If you think you understand the applicability of this quotation today, excellent.

The "gentil" quadruplets

Doublets occur when a word from another language is borrowed into English more than once, leaving two distinct forms. Once a borrowed word arrives in English, it's subject to all the sound changes that the native words undergo: just as the native word my stopped being pronounced "me" around 1450, so the borrowed word sky stopped being pronounced "ski". (What did English use for the blue object that's overhead when we're outdoors, before borrowing sky back in the days of the vikings? Why, heaven, which can still be used that way but is mostly used in a more specialized meaning now.)

A fine example of a doublet is gentle and genteel, which are both borrowings from French gentil. The former arrived with the big wave of French words between the Norman Conquest and Chaucer's day, and is first recorded in writing in the early 13th century; the latter was borrowed in the late 16th century, well after the Great Vowel Shift and before the final standardization of English spelling in the 18th century.

But wait, there's more! There is also jaunty, which is an offshoot of genteel that came to have a meaning of its own. All of these words originally meant "noble, well-bred", as the French original did, but shifted meaning in various ways: gentle toward "soft, mild"; genteel toward "courteous, elegant"; jaunty toward "lively, brisk" — all supposed attributes of the nobility. Finally, gentil itself descends from the Latin adjective gentilis, meaning "belonging to the same clan or nation"; from this word we get English gentile, a non-Jew (or in Mormon country, a non-Mormon, Jewish or not).

Amazing enough for you? Consider the Latin word discus, which gives us five English words: discus itself; disk or disc, a shortened form of it; dish, which arrived before the Conquest and underwent the sound-change that converted all "sk" into "sh" (later "sk" words are borrowings, like Norse skirt next to native shirt); dais, which arrived in Middle English from French; and lastly desk, also arriving in Middle English, but from Italian. Latin discus is itself a borrowing from Greek ....

A few more: inch direct from Latin uncia (one-twelfth) back in Old English days, ounce also from uncia via French (originally pounds had twelve ounces only, and still do when you talk of gold or silver); canal straight from Latin as-is, channel via French; captain from Norman French, chieftain from Parisian French; shabby from the native English wordstock, scabby from Old Norse.

Quiddity and haecceity

Quiddity is the property a thing has of being the kind of thing that it is, whereas haecceity is the property of being the very thing that it is and no other. Both of them are essences, but quiddity is the essence of universals, whereas haecceity is the essence of particulars.

A rant on partial understanding

I was eating dinner in a French restaurant some years back (Pergola Des Artistes at 252 W. 46th St. in Manhattan; excellent food) and in the men's room was a poster of an ocean liner with a French inscription more or less as follows (I didn't have pen and paper with me, and may have misremembered something):

NORMANDIE
Cie. Gle. Transatlantique
60 Voyages
400.000 Milles Marins
115.000 Passagers
Au 1er Janvier 1939

Now, I already knew that "Cie." means "Company", and a bit of thought told me that "Gle" must be "Generale". "NORMANDIE" is the name of the vessel, as I already knew, and the numbers and date are obvious: sixty voyages, 400,000 nautical miles, 115,000 passengers, and the first of January, 1939. ("English is just misspelled French.")

In short, without knowing any French at all, I understand all the 10-euro words on this poster, and only one tiny, tiny detail escapes me:

Does it mean "since 1 January 1939" or "before 1 January 1939"?

Which of course is a point that is doubtless obvious to any French three-year-old, who does not know the big words at all!

I have similar problems with international auxiliary languages, where again the roots are plain but the grammatical endings are often not. Don Harlow (I think) says that if you learn that droni means "to drown", you haven't learned it (because the subject of "drown" in English can be either a semantic agent or a semantic patient); whereas if you know that it means sufokigi in akvo, you understand it. But this helps me not at all, because I can't remember if it's sufokigi or sufokiĝi, and because the English verb "suffocate" also can take an agent or a patient subject, and I know that the Esperanto suffixes -ig- and -iĝ- convert between transitive and intransitive forms, but I can't remember which is which!

Now I know perfectly well that I can look both these points up. But being vague about them interferes with on-the-fly comprehension, which is what one needs most of the time. Another fine example, from the days of King Canute, but devised by Tom Shippey (the Tolkien and Old English scholar):

Consider what happens when somebody who speaks. . . Old English. . . runs into somebody. . . who speaks good Old Norse. They can no doubt communicate with each other, but complications in both languages are going to get lost. So if the Anglo-Saxon from the South wants to say (in good Old English) "I'll sell you the horse that pulls my cart," he says: Ic selle the that hors the drægeth minne wægn.

Now the old Norseman -- if he had to say this -- would say: Ek mun selja ther hrossit er dregr vagn mine.

So, roughly speaking, they understand each other. One says wægn and the other says vagn. One says hors and drægeth; the other says hros and dregr, but broadly they are communicating. They understand the main words. What they don't understand are the grammatical parts of the sentence.

For instance, the man speaking good Old English says for one horse that hors but for two horses he says tha hors. Now the Old Norse speaker understands the word horse all right, but he's not sure if it means one or two because in Old English you say "one horse", "two horse". There is no difference between the two words for horse. The difference is conveyed in the word "the" and the old Norseman might not understand this because his word for "the" doesn't behave like that. So: are you trying to sell me one horse or are you trying to sell me two horses? If you get enough situations like that there is a strong drive towards simplifying the language.

And so it goes.

("I know one of these is my right and one is my left. Left? Right? Right? Left?")

"The Fish"

Here's a Marianne Moore poem called "The Fish":

wade
through black jade.
   Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
   adjusting the ash-heaps;
      opening and shutting itself like

an
injured fan.
   The barnacles which encrust the side
   of the wave, cannot hide
      there for the submerged shafts of the

sun,
split like spun
   glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
   into the crevices —
      in and out, illuminating

the
turquoise sea
   of bodies. The water drives a wedge
   of iron through the iron edge
      of the cliff; whereupon the stars,

pink
rice-grains, ink-
   bespattered jelly-fish, crabs like green
   lillies, and submarine
      toadstools, slide each on the other.

All
external
   marks of abuse are present on this
   defiant edifice —
      all the physical features of

ac-
ccident — lack
   of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
   hatchet strokes, these things stand
      out on it; the chasm-side is

dead.
Repeated
   evidence has proved that it can live
   on what can not revive
      its youth. The sea grows old in it.

This poem is an example of that very rare thing in English verse (outside haiku): syllabic verse. Each stanza has lines with 1, 3, 9, 6, and 8 syllables respectively.

The rhyme scheme is AABBC with the usual English half-rhymes like an-fan, live-revive and swiftness-crevices. Iron has one syllable, opening has two.

There's gobs of commentary on this poem: if you want it, Google for it.

Obituary

I published this back in 2001. Don't believe a word of it.

MAY 15 (Reuters) The comedy and linguistics team of Joe Greenberg and Doug Adams is no more. Greenberg, 85, died a week ago of cancer; Adams, 49, on Friday of an unexpected heart attack. Greenberg's last words are reported to have been "Adams still lives!"

They were best known for their masterwork Hitchhiker's Guide to the World's Languages, which followed the fictionalized adventures of a group of planet-hopping travelers, joined by a British everyman named Arthur Dent. A biting satire of technology, politics, bureaucracy, and the multiple origins hypothesis, the book sold nearly 14 million copies around the world.

An earlier work, Life, the Universe, and Africa, was the subject of furious controversy at first, with its partition of all African languages into four giant families, but is now generally accepted by scholars in the field. Greenberg's solo work Dirk Gently, Linguistic Typologist is said to be one of the most cited works in comic linguistics.

Construe them

Though we are told that Shakespeare had small Latine and less Greeke, he certainly could translate. Taming of the Shrew III, i:

BIANCA. Where left we last?

LUCENTIO. Here, madam:

Hic ibat Simois, hic est Sigeia tellus,
Hic steterat Priami regia celsa senis.

BIANCA. Construe them.

LUCENTIO. Hic ibat, as I told you before — Simois, I am Lucentio — hic est, son unto Vincentio of Pisa — Sigeia tellus, disguised thus to get your love — Hic steterat, and that Lucentio that comes a-wooing — Priami, is my man Tranio — regia, bearing my port — celsa senis, that we might beguile the old pantaloon.

The lines are from Ovid's "Letter from Penelope to Ulysses", lines 34-35, with hic ibat instead of the correct hac ibat and hic est instead of haec est. (English-speakers have been making mistakes in gender for a long time.) They actually mean:

"Here the Simois flowed; this is Sigeian land; Here stood the lofty palace of old Priam.

Design

A favorite sonnet by Robert Frost:

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white
    On a white healall, holding up a moth
    Like a white piece of stiff brocaded cloth,
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to start off the morning right
    Like the ingredients of a witch's broth:
    A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
    The wayside blue and innocent healall?
What brought the kindred spider to that height?
And steered the white moth thither in the night?
    What but design of darkness to appall?
    If design govern in a thing so small.

I love the irony in line 5, and the overall shift from the scientific doubt in the octave to the moral outrage of the sestet — with the return to doubt in line 14. Note also the etymological force of "appall" in line 13 = "make pale".

(This picture of a healall (Prunella vulgaris) is blue rather than white; I couldn't find a white one. It's about a foot tall.)

Who knows? Maybe nonstandard arithmetic is just unavoidable

Gödel's Proof is usually taken to mean that Peano arithmetic is radically incomplete; that one has the choice of adding one of two new axioms, G and ~G, and when that is done, one can construct a new statement G' and then has the choice of adding G' or ~G', and so on forever, splitting arithmetic into an infinite tree of theories.

Assuming G, G', G'', ... produces standard arithmetic; assuming one or more of ~G, ~G', ~G'' ... produces various kinds of nonstandard arithmetic, in which the natural numbers are supplemented by entirely novel nonstandard numbers. (The reciprocals of nonstandard numbers are the infinitesimals of nonstandard analysis.)

But although Gödel showed by a metamathematical argument that there can be no proof of G within Peano arithmetic, he did not show that there is no finite proof of ~G. Which means that in principle there might be one. And that would mean that there is only one kind of arithmetic, and that nonstandard numbers exist, period. Shocking.

Here's a proof sketch:

Let x be the Gödel number of a Peano-arithmetic (PA) proof, and y the Gödel number of a (purported) PA theorem. Let PRF(x, y) be true iff y is the Gödel number of the theorem proved by the proof whose Gödel number is x.

Then ∃y PRF(x, y) means (meta-mathematically) that x has a PA proof. G then is the formula that asserts (again, meta-mathematically) that "G has no PA proof"; contrariwise, ~G asserts "G has a PA proof".

Assume that G has a proof whose Gödel number is k. Then PRF(G, k) is true, contrary to G's assertion that G has no proof. In that case, given the proof of G, we have found a proof of ~G as well, so PA is inconsistent.

But the alternative, that there is a proof of ~G, is not symmetrical with the preceding case. If there is a proof of ~G, then there is a proof of ∃y PRF(g, y), but it does not follow that if we attempt to prove for each k (a natural number) a proof of ~PRF(G, k), that we will necessarily find a proof of G. We might not.

The result is very bizarre, but not necessarily a direct contradiction; "for each k, there is a proof of ~PRF(G, k)" does not amount to a proof of ∀y PRF(G, y). This is callled ω-inconsistency, and although semantically related to ordinary inconsistency ("G and ~G"), it's not the same.

Assuming G has a proof, then PA is inconsistent, but assuming ~G has a proof, then PA is either inconsistent or ω-inconsistent, we don't know which.

Since we have no proof of G (and can't have one), we can assume ~G as an axiom. Since we have no proof of ~G either, we can assume G as an axiom. However, if a proof for ~G were actually found, then PA would be inescapably ω-inconsistent.

~G (which says "G has a proof") is consistent with PA, but only at the cost of making PA + ~G ω-inconsistent: ∃y PRF(y) is true, but each of PRF(G, k) is false for each natural number k. It must therefore be true of something other than the natural numbers. Hence, theories which postulate ~G necessarily have nonstandard numbers.

If there did turn out to be a proof of G in PA itself, though, then PA would be inescapably ω-inconsistent, and nonstandard numbers would exist in every PA-compatible number theory.

I am leaning here on Podnieks, who provides a lot more detail.

Sae weel me likes yer couthie kind intreatin

The Occitan language goes by many names for its various dialects and was the ordinary language spoken in the South of France until well into the 20th century. Its nearest relative is the better-known Catalan. But in Dante's day, a standardized variety of Occitan was the language of lyric poetry, and many who were not French, geographically speaking, wrote verse in it.

When Dante puts the troubador (or trobador in Occitan) Arnaut Daniel, inventor of the bizarre poetic form the sestina into Purgatory, he has him speak in his native tongue, the last words spoken by any soul in Purgatory:

Versi d'amore e prose di romanzi
   soverchiò tutti: e lascia dir li stolti
che quel di Lemosí credon ch'avanzi. (...) "

Io mi fei al mostrato innanzi un poco,
   e dissi ch'al suo nome il mio disire
apparecchiava grazïoso loco.

E cominciò liberamente a dire:
   "Tant m'abellis vostre cortes deman,
qu'ieu no me puesc ni voill a vos cobrire.

Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan;
   consiros vei la passada folor,
e vei jausen lo joi qu'esper, denan.

Ara vos prec, per aquella valor
   que vos guida al som de l'escalina,
sovenha vos a temps de ma dolor!"

Poi s'ascose nel foco che li affina.

The Dorothy Sayers translation renders these lines as follows, using Border Scots as a rough analogue:

Then I: "Your verse, forged sweetly link by link,
   Which while our modern use shall last in song,
Must render precious even the very ink." (...)

I to that soul he'd shown advanced a pace,
   Begging he would vouchsafe his name to me,
Who hoped to write it in an honoured place;

And he at once made answer frank and free:
   "Sae weel me likes your couthie kind entreatin',
I canna nor I winna hide fra' ye;

I'm Arnaut, wha gae singin' aye and greetin';
   Waefu' I mind my fulish deeds lang syne,
Lauchin' luik forrit tae the bricht morn's meetin'.

Pray ye the noo, by yonder micht that fine
   Sall guide ye till the top step o' the stair,
Tak' timely thocht for a' my mickle pine" —

Then veiled him in the fires that fine them there.

--

Le français hexagonal

... means French as she is spoke in France. As opposed to the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe, the scole of Huitieme-Rivieres-Petit-Tabernac, the scole of Joliet /'dʒowliɛt/, Illinois /ɪlə'nɔj/, the scole of Oubouboubadoubdoubou, or the scole of Viniviniapupapupu'apukupu'apukupupa.

Why Basic English doesn't work

Basic English is an attempt to produce a fully expressive language using English grammar and a vocabulary of just 850 English words (plus technical terms). Originally it was intended to be an international auxiliary language, but more recently it's been advertised as a bridge to learning full English.

But Basic English is hopeless for either purpose. It replaces simple clear words like succeed (which has close analogues in other European languages), with paraphrases that don't make any sense unless you already know full English, like make good. Make good does mean "succeed (financially)" in full English, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the meanings of make and good in either full English or Basic English. Do well has been proposed as a substitute, but it leans on do, the most semantically bleached verb in the English language.

Furthermore, Basic English forces you to be vague and wordy. Here are some horrible examples in roughly increasing order of horribleness, showing the "awkward and ridiculous circumlocutions" that Basic makes necessary:

Full: He scratched his cheek.
Basic: He cut the side of his face.

Full: He hurt his forehead.
Basic: He did damage to the part of his face between his hair and eyes.

Full: She had lost her handkerchief.
Basic: She was unable to come across the square of linen used for blowing her nose.

Full: He does not shave every day.
Basic: He does not take hair off his face every day.

Full: Feel my pulse.
Basic: Take the rate of my heart.

Full: Put the chair in the corner.
Basic: Put the seat with back for one person in the angle between the two walls.

Full: He can play the piano.
Basic: He is able to make music on an instrument in which stretched wires are given blows by hammers worked from keys.

Full: She is a widow.
Basic: She is a woman not married again after the death of the man she was married to.

Full: The priest thanked the ladies.
Basic: The servant of the church said it was very good of the women of good birth to give him help.

Full: The officer led his soldiers against the enemy.
Basic: The person in military authority was the guide of his men in the army against the nation at war.