Sign Language

If you want to speak to someone you need to share a language. Because languages have different phonemes it can be difficult to pronounce a foreign language.
So how about if we all had a base of sign language that we could communicate with? The advantage is simple movements do not have a local accent that localises them.
So how many words do you need to know?

Language word usage follows zipfs law. Which means a suprisingly low number of words cover a high percentage of our speech.

There are 850 words in basic english which implies you can communicate basic information with about this many words.

Newspeak the artificial language in the novel 1984 was simplified to the extent to make coherent political thought impossible. The point of here is to search for a simple universal language is for emergency situations or for providing an anchor for language learning so such a Newspeak nightmare is not a worry.

One way of looking for a basic subset of language is to find the common subset of all languages. This has been studied as the semantic metalanguage. There follows a list of the words (in english) that occur in all known languages and their international sign language equivalant.

Semantic primitives

The English exponents of the 61 Semantic Primitives (addition of LONG is proposed)

substantives
I,
YOU
SOMEONE
PEOPLE
SOMETHING/THING
BODY

mental predicates
THINK
KNOW
WANT
FEEL
SEE
HEAR
BE
speech
SAY
WORD
TRUE
actions, events and movement
DO
HAPPEN
MOVE
PUT
GO
existence and possession
THERE
IS
HAVE
life
TIME
WHEN/TIME
BEFORE
A LONG TIME
A SHORT TIME
FOR SOME TIME
MOMENT
space
WHERE/PLACE
HERE
ABOVE
BELOW
FAR
NEAR
SIDE
INSIDE
TOUCHING

"logical" concepts
NOT
Maybe
CAN
BECAUSE
IF
intensifier
VERY
augmentor
MORE
quantifiers
ONE
TWO
SOME
ALL
MANY/MUCH
evaluators
GOOD
BAD
descriptors
BIG, SMALL, (LONG)
taxonomy, partonomy
KIND OF, PART OF;
similarity
LIKE
determiners
THIS
SAME
OTHER