Re: Pending requests

[Michael Everson <[e-mail]>]

> On 25 Nov 2015, at 23:44, Shawn Steele <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> There were only two Americans stopping at the hotel. They did not know any of the people they ??? on the ??? on ??? way to and from their room. Their room was on the second floor facing the sea. It also faced the public garden and the war ???. There were big ??? and green ??? in the public garden. In the good weather there was always an ??? with his ???. ??? liked the way the ??? grew and the bright colors of the hotels facing the gardens and the sea. Italians came from a long way off to look up at the war ???. It was made of ??? and ??? in the rain. It was raining. The rain ??? from the ??? trees. Water ??? in ??? on the ??? paths. The sea ??? in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the ??? to come up and break again in a long line in the rain. The motor cars were gone from the square by the war ???. Across the square in the doorway of the café a waiter stood looking out at the empty square.

This is English. Are there words you don’t know in it (as a Basic English speaker)?

Sure. 

Here’s a more or less random sentence in two passages in arguably difficult science writing. 

The osmoregulatory organ, which is located at the base of the third dorsal spine on the outer margin of the terminal papillae and functions by expelling excess sodium ions, activates only under hypertonic conditions. […] “…to confirm the nature of electrical breakdown of nitrogen in uniform fields at relatively high pressures and interelectrode gaps that approach those obtained in engineering practice, prior to the determination of the processes that set the criterion for breakdown in the above-mentioned gases and mixtures in uniform and non-uniform fields of engineering significance.”

I don’t follow all of that very easily. 

The fact that a passage of text has words which might be unfamiliar to a reader does NOT put that text into a different language. There is no way Basic English or science writing jump as far into another language as we do legitimately find in “eng” and “sco”. 

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/