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There's a very interesting essay from 1989 written about basic atomic theory while avoiding latin and otherwise non-germanic roots as much as possible called "U

There's a very interesting essay from 1989 written about basic atomic theory while avoiding latin and otherwise non-germanic roots as much as possible called "Uncleftish Beholding" You can read it here: https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language.artificial/ZL4e3fD7eW0/_7p8bKwLJWkJ https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language...

xenadu02 10y ago
If you want a taste of the linked article: >At first is was thought that the uncleft was a hard thing that could be split no further; hence the name. Now we know it is made up of lesser motes. There is a heavy kernel with a forward bernstonish lading, and around it one or more light motes with backward ladings. The least uncleft is that of ordinary waterstuff. Its kernel is a lone forwardladen mote called a firstbit. Outside it is a backwardladen mote called a bernstonebit. The firstbit has a heaviness about 1840-fold that of the bernstonebit. Early worldken folk thought bernstonebits swing around the kernel like the earth around the sun, but now we understand they are more like waves or clouds. >In all other unclefts are found other motes as well, about as heavy as the firstbit but with no lading, known as neitherbits. We know a kind of waterstuff with one neitherbit in the kernel along with the firstbit; another kind has two neitherbits. Both kinds are seldom. >The next greatest firststuff is sunstuff, which has two firstbits and two bernstonebits. The everyday sort also has two neitherbits in the kernel. If there are more or less, the uncleft will soon break asunder. More about this later. It takes some effort but it is understandable.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  This reads like an excerpt of some alternate universe version of Thing Explainer, from a world in which "up goer five" (which may well still have been its name) was a little different in limitation.
  - schoen 10y ago
    If Randall Munroe wants to write a book of Thinglore in this style, I'll be happy to buy it!
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      ...or we could write it ourselves. Somebody, build an allowed words and suffixes dictionary file, and I'll go look up the emacs documentation for how to verify text in real time. Let's do this!
      - schoen 10y ago
        You could do well with https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_derived_from_Old_English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_derive... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germanic_and_Latinate_equivalents_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germanic_and_Latinate_... edit: and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_dual_French_and_Anglo-Saxon_variations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_dua...
        qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        Maybe. The trick is stripping the wordlists themselves. Scraping, etc. But that shouldn't be too hard.
      - abecedarius 10y ago
        http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Main_leaf http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Main_leaf
        schoen 10y ago
        Looks like people have gotten pretty far indeed!
        qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        Well, then. If I could grab some wordbooks from this project, then I'd be set.
- strlen 10y ago
  Out of curiosity, I decided to translate this Frisian (the closest continental language to English): http://bit.ly/2enwGyT http://bit.ly/2enwGyT It's interesting to contrast this with a side-by-side translation of "normal" English with Frisian, where the similarity is much lower.
  - schoen 10y ago
    It would be nice to have the translation done by a human speaker. Although Google's machine translation is pretty great nowadays, I doubt it does a great job with constrained languages containing nonstandard and constructed vocabulary! I tried using Google Translate to translate this to Portuguese (which I do speak) and I found some mistakes in the translation that might not have come up in normal English. It's an interesting question to what extent you'd want the translator to understand what Anderson is trying to do and translate accordingly.
    - strlen 10y ago
      Perhaps a speaker of a continental Germanic tongue could chime in? As a native Russian speaker, but one who moved to the United States 20 years ago, I do find the Google translation of Russian to be really excellent, as well as vice-versa (but Russian is much more widely spoken, including of course, by a Google Executive, than Frisian.)
      - alistoriv 10y ago
        A lot of the words coined in the essay are Anglicized versions of words used in other Germanic languages. Sourstuff as oxygen, for example, is consistent with the word in several other languages (Sauerstoff in German). Certain words, like uncleftish, are based off of the root words in the original Greek or Latin (the German word is just Atom). I could attempt to translate the essay into German, but my German is quite bad and would no doubt have some serious grammatical errors :P
    - misja111 10y ago
      I was born in Friesland and although I don't speak Frysk fluently, I can say that Google didn't do a good job in translating this text. Partly that is of course due to all non-standard words such as 'uncleftish' and 'bernstonish'. But also a lot of normal English words were not translated to Frysk, e.g. 'early' would be 'eardere'.
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  There's a wikipedia explainer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding Perhaps the sort of divergance we'll end up with if climate change collapse stops global interaction for a millenia.
- Asooka 10y ago
  Is "forwardladen" and "backwardladen" really the best way to translate positive and negative? Also, I would implore whoever is doing this to switch to phonetic spelling from before the Norman invasion and, of course, the text should be read in such a way as well.

xenadu02 10y ago

If you want a taste of the linked article: >At first is was thought that the uncleft was a hard thing that could be split no further; hence the name. Now we know it is made up of lesser motes. There is a heavy kernel with a forward bernstonish lading, and around it one or more light motes with backward ladings. The least uncleft is that of ordinary waterstuff. Its kernel is a lone forwardladen mote called a firstbit. Outside it is a backwardladen mote called a bernstonebit. The firstbit has a heaviness about 1840-fold that of the bernstonebit. Early worldken folk thought bernstonebits swing around the kernel like the earth around the sun, but now we understand they are more like waves or clouds. >In all other unclefts are found other motes as well, about as heavy as the firstbit but with no lading, known as neitherbits. We know a kind of waterstuff with one neitherbit in the kernel along with the firstbit; another kind has two neitherbits. Both kinds are seldom. >The next greatest firststuff is sunstuff, which has two firstbits and two bernstonebits. The everyday sort also has two neitherbits in the kernel. If there are more or less, the uncleft will soon break asunder. More about this later. It takes some effort but it is understandable.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
This reads like an excerpt of some alternate universe version of Thing Explainer, from a world in which "up goer five" (which may well still have been its name) was a little different in limitation.
- schoen 10y ago
  If Randall Munroe wants to write a book of Thinglore in this style, I'll be happy to buy it!
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    ...or we could write it ourselves. Somebody, build an allowed words and suffixes dictionary file, and I'll go look up the emacs documentation for how to verify text in real time. Let's do this!
    - schoen 10y ago
      You could do well with https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_derived_from_Old_English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_derive... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germanic_and_Latinate_equivalents_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germanic_and_Latinate_... edit: and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_dual_French_and_Anglo-Saxon_variations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_dua...
      - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        Maybe. The trick is stripping the wordlists themselves. Scraping, etc. But that shouldn't be too hard.
    - abecedarius 10y ago
      http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Main_leaf http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Main_leaf
      - schoen 10y ago
        Looks like people have gotten pretty far indeed!
      - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        Well, then. If I could grab some wordbooks from this project, then I'd be set.
strlen 10y ago
Out of curiosity, I decided to translate this Frisian (the closest continental language to English): http://bit.ly/2enwGyT http://bit.ly/2enwGyT It's interesting to contrast this with a side-by-side translation of "normal" English with Frisian, where the similarity is much lower.
- schoen 10y ago
  It would be nice to have the translation done by a human speaker. Although Google's machine translation is pretty great nowadays, I doubt it does a great job with constrained languages containing nonstandard and constructed vocabulary! I tried using Google Translate to translate this to Portuguese (which I do speak) and I found some mistakes in the translation that might not have come up in normal English. It's an interesting question to what extent you'd want the translator to understand what Anderson is trying to do and translate accordingly.
  - strlen 10y ago
    Perhaps a speaker of a continental Germanic tongue could chime in? As a native Russian speaker, but one who moved to the United States 20 years ago, I do find the Google translation of Russian to be really excellent, as well as vice-versa (but Russian is much more widely spoken, including of course, by a Google Executive, than Frisian.)
    - alistoriv 10y ago
      A lot of the words coined in the essay are Anglicized versions of words used in other Germanic languages. Sourstuff as oxygen, for example, is consistent with the word in several other languages (Sauerstoff in German). Certain words, like uncleftish, are based off of the root words in the original Greek or Latin (the German word is just Atom). I could attempt to translate the essay into German, but my German is quite bad and would no doubt have some serious grammatical errors :P
  - misja111 10y ago
    I was born in Friesland and although I don't speak Frysk fluently, I can say that Google didn't do a good job in translating this text. Partly that is of course due to all non-standard words such as 'uncleftish' and 'bernstonish'. But also a lot of normal English words were not translated to Frysk, e.g. 'early' would be 'eardere'.
anexprogrammer 10y ago
There's a wikipedia explainer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding Perhaps the sort of divergance we'll end up with if climate change collapse stops global interaction for a millenia.
Asooka 10y ago
Is "forwardladen" and "backwardladen" really the best way to translate positive and negative? Also, I would implore whoever is doing this to switch to phonetic spelling from before the Norman invasion and, of course, the text should be read in such a way as well.