When I spoke to a recent Brussels conference of business translators, one of them asked me if the Financial Times had any plans to publish a separate edition in simplified English. Not that I knew of, I told him, although it was an interesting idea.

We have thousands of readers who are not native English speakers but whose knowledge of the language is sufficient to take in these pages every day. But there must be many others who grasp the financial concepts but find the English too complicated.

On the Eurostar back to London, I pondered what a simplified FT might look like. The first issue to tackle, I thought, would be vocabulary. In his book The English Language, David Crystal says that a medium-sized English dictionary has about 100,000 words in it. Even native speakers know only a fraction of these.