If you take a dictionary, there must be a small set of words with which you can define all the rest of the words, proof style. So, say words A and B let you define word C. Then with all three you can define D. That sort of thing.
These original words would be English axioms of sorts. I suppose a computer could find them very easily.
This set of words would be the only words that need to be manually taught to students/kids. It could be assumed that any English speaker would already know them (since they would be the core must-haves of the language). Kind of like the set of words that the Simple English Wikipedia uses (though they actually try to use just the 1000 most common words).
I wonder how big the axiom set would be, in comparison to that 1000 most-common-words set.
It would be interesting to compare the relative sizes of such an axiom set from several languages, as well, say, English, Mandarin, Spanish, Japanese, and Hindi. Then you can compare the relative ability of each language to be distilled. In addition, you can intersect the sets to produce a fine basis for a constructed language, guaranteed to express all of the concepts necessary to cover a usable interchange language.
In other news, long time no see. ^_^
Hello, John!