18 ms·

What Is Anglish?

265 points by warrenm 4y ago

longcat 4y ago
What makes today's English so great is what has been borrowed and adapted from foreign languages. Everything adapts and grows with the cultures around them.
- crispinb 4y ago
  It's also one of the compensations for so many of us native English speakers being disadvantaged by monolingualism.
coding123 4y ago
why? serious question
miles 4y ago
Reminded of the Japanese native words known as "wago" or "yamato kotoba"[0]: "Wago...are native Japanese words, meaning those words in Japanese that have been inherited from Old Japanese, rather than being borrowed at some stage. Together with kango (漢語) and gairaigo (外来語), they form one of the three main sources of Japanese words (there is also elaborate Japanese sound symbolism, of mimetic origin). They are also known as yamato kotoba." Perhaps like "Anglish", there is an ease and softness to yamato kotoba, especially when compared to foreign loan words (both kango and gairaigo). Here[1] is a nice representative sample of 100 words and expressions. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wago [1] https://origamijapan.net/origami/2018/01/13/yamato-kotoba/ https://origamijapan.net/origami/2018/01/13/yamato-kotoba/
- hunter2_ 4y ago
  Japanese came to mind for me as having borrowed plenty of words from English (often modifying them simply to ensure a vowel between each consonant sound, as two adjacent consonants would be too foreign) as my contrarian reaction to > "... [English] ever borowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt."
- retrac 4y ago
  There are lots of interesting parallels between English and Japanese. Old English borrowed its alphabet from Latin, and imperfectly represents its sounds in Latin, with a couple extra letters. On the other hand, the Japanese borrowed writing from the Chinese, and after a long struggle, eventually adapted it to perfectly represent every sound in the Japanese language. While retaining the entire Chinese character set. The piece de resistance? You have to figure out whether a character has a Chinese or Japanese reading from context, since most have both. Probably half or more of all Japanese vocabulary is based on Chinese. Most borrowings were about a thousand years ago, or more. In a few cases it's not always obvious if a word is even native Japanese, or not. But the sound and spelling are a very strong hint for almost all words in practice. There's a split in numbers. In some places you use Chinese numbers, and in others you use Japanese. A rough equivalent of the mono- bi- tri- etc. nonsense. The same word has sometimes been borrowed from Chinese multiple times, at different times, and from different regions, resulting in different pronunciations. Not unlike English's "warranty" and "guarantee". Which are early and late French pronunciations of the same word. There are Chinese roots used in compound words to describe academic, medical, scientific, religious, governmental, etc. things. And there are native Japanese words used for all sorts of common everyday things. Despite the majority of terms being Chinese in origin, like with English and words of Germanic origin, in many contexts, the majority of words used are native Japanese. Words coined in Japan on Chinese word formation principles have sometimes been adopted in China, particularly around the start of the 20th century with technical terms. Much as how English and French have many terms where you can't even say whether it's really an English or French word originally. It's the same roots used in the same way in both languages and would be obvious to speakers of either language if they needed a new word. And they often need a new word around the same time.
- lifthrasiir 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure that there are parallels everywhere around the world. The Korean equivalent is 토박이말 Tobagimal (lit. native speak) [1]. [1] Also called 순 우리말 Soon woorimal (lit. only our speak) which is ironically not 순 우리말 itself because of a Sino-Korean morpheme "순" (純).
jerf 4y ago
Archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20230227185951/https://anglish.org/wiki/Anglish https://web.archive.org/web/20230227185951/https://anglish.o...
deleted 4y ago
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jacooper 4y ago
Wait, computer isn't English native?
- seszett 4y ago
  No, it's an old French word for "to calculate/to count". Today the French word for that is "compter" (and a counting machine is a "compteur").
- cmh89 4y ago
  'Compute(er)' is a French word
  - G3rn0ti 4y ago
    Ironically, the French „Académie française“ banned the term „computer“ and established „l‘ordinateur“ instead to keep the language pure. :)
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      I had a comment written up to say the same thing, but then I found this: https://blogs.transparent.com/french/the-origin-of-lordinateur-computers-in-french/ https://blogs.transparent.com/french/the-origin-of-lordinate... Turns out that ordinateur wasn't chosen for French purity but because IBM wanted a fancy word to sell their fancy machine by.
    - seszett 4y ago
      The reason "ordinateur" is used in French, is that IBM coined that word because "calculateur" (the regular modern French translation of "computer") sounded too mundane. "Ordinateur" suggests sorting, rather than just making simple calculations. It has nothing at all with "keeping the language pure" (which seems kind of a meme in the English speaking world, but really couldn't be further from truth) and it was originally trademarked by IBM, but quickly became a generic word.
      - G3rn0ti 4y ago
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roncesvalles 4y ago
If you want to read way more Anglish: https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Oned_Riches_of_Emerichland https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Oned_Riches_of_Emerichland
squiffsquiff 4y ago
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." --James D. Nicoll
- nqzero 4y ago
  Is this English: Yes (riffing off the "Is this Arabic" that was posted a few days ago - it's a lot easier in english, ie if the speaker says ti's english, it's english)
  - dsr_ 4y ago
    More precisely: Is this English? Cool cool, it finna be.
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      What do you think that says, and in what dialect? If the intended dialect and meaning are what I think, the definition of 'finna' and the overall usage are wrong.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    With English it’s not a case of “if” but “when”.
  - walrus01 4y ago
    speaking of Arabic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Arabic_origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Arabi...
  - slim 4y ago
    I won't miss his is a unique occasion to post this arabic meme (one has to spend his karma) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1e62d6wHIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1e62d6wHIU Explanation to get around HN guidelines : The guy says : "Hey Morsi [ndlr. common male name in Egypt], Is this English ?". It started when Modamed Morsi was president of Egypt and spoke in incomprehensible English. Since most arabic speaking people are notoriously bad at English, it became a meme used when someone says something incomprehensible in any language
giraffe_lady 4y ago
Because linguistic purism has a totally untroubled and neutral history of effectiveness.
- triyambakam 4y ago
  The Anglish community isn't ideologically motivated. It's a fun conlang (constructed language) project from language nerds.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - triyambakam 4y ago
      We would always be too close, then. The Anglish project is more than 20 years old. It could be older, but I've been familiar with it for at least that long.
      - giraffe_lady 4y ago
        Maybe. But just because the time will never be right doesn't mean now is the time either.
        triyambakam 4y ago
        That's a horrible position to take
    - philwelch 4y ago
      This is what happened to the English under French-speaking dominion in the Middle Ages.
    - nerdix 4y ago
      I actually look at it in the opposite way. There actually are modern English purists. We sometimes call them grammar nazis. Its not usually the result of some overtly oppressive ideology. They just mistakenly believe that there is a "correct" way to speak English. However, the net result of it is the stigmatization of people from poor communities. This project very clearly shows how silly English purity is in a clever way: that the "correct" English of day may very well have been considered "incorrect" by the purists of yesteryear. Language evolves.
zabzonk 4y ago
> Anglish is a kind of English which prefers native words over those borrowed from foreign languages. does not make sense - english is a language sythesised from huge borrowings from other languages, over time. what is the "native" language supposed to be?
- klooney 4y ago
  Probably the Germanic languages of the Anglo Saxons- it's called Anglish, after all.
  - zabzonk 4y ago
    what it is called (which is a kind of advertising) is no evidence of where this came from.
  - bloppe 4y ago
    This is turtles all the way down. All Germanic languages are highly related to the other Indo-European languages. The Latin alphabet we use to write can be traced back to Egyptian Hieroglyphs. People just like to pick arbitrary points in an evolutionary timeline and use those points to create in-groups and out-groups.
    - triyambakam 4y ago
      But if you take that view, you can't define anything. You can't even say it's the Latin alphabet. We must constantly ignore the "turtles" for many things in daily life. So yes, it's arbitrary but that's not a problem. It's just what they chose for the project.
      - bloppe 4y ago
        I'm not saying it's a bad project. I think it's cool, but the words "pure" and "native" don't make sense to me to describe it.
- triyambakam 4y ago
bloppe 4y ago
This is a fun way to speak English, but this notion of "native" vs. "borrowed" words is incredibly slippery. For instance, the example replaces "union" with "oneship", but these words share a common Proto-Indo-European root and can reasonably be interpreted as the same word; the same goes for most other Norman words "borrowed" into English after the conquest. The page advocates the use of "Old English words ... revived and updated to modern spelling and phonology to be used for a modern meaning". How old is too old? Not to over-charge this conversation, but it reminds me of anti-race-mixing ideologies. Race is also a much more slippery concept than some people would care to admit; we're all related if you go back far enough.
- triyambakam 4y ago
  Yes, you could go back and back and back. But the point of this project is to see what a modern "pure" Germanic English would be like.
  - bloppe 4y ago
    Sure, I just think it would make more sense to pick a real date then. No words that would be unrecognizable to a typical English speaker before 1066? Sure. You'd still have to define "typical" because even modern English speakers do not all speak an identical language, and this notion of "updating to modern spelling and phonology" becomes a strange exercise. All I'm saying is, the word "pure" doesn't make sense to me here.
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      It's also not like Norman French was a "pure" offshoot of Latin either. It was heavily influenced by the languages of the Franks and Gauls. That said, what I find really interesting here is that William The Conqueror was only something like 4 generations removed from people whose "French" was more or less still a dialect of Latin.
      - philwelch 4y ago
        And that’s not to mention that William’s great-great-great grandfather Rollo was a Norseman who himself conquered part of northern France, and was allowed to keep his conquests in exchange for swearing allegiance to the French king and converting to Christianity. I think the term “Norman” is actually related to “Norseman”, in fact. (“Rollo” was, incidentally, probably not his real name.)
csours 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding
vitno 4y ago
Before anyone gets too worried, the Anglish community in my (limited) experience has been incredibly anti-racism/Nazi/etc. They are just a bunch of linguistics nerds who are having fun imagining what English would have been without a Norman invasion. In the same spirit, I'd recommend checking out the Uncleftish Beholding. Although I think it predates the modern Anglish community, it's an attempt to describe Quantum Mechanics with Latin/French derived words. https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/docs/uncleftish_beholding.html https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/docs/uncleftish_beh...
- triyambakam 4y ago
  Yes, every time I've brought up Anglish to someone they think it must be some white-supremacist project. I've never come across that in the nearly 20 years I've known about Anglish. It is, as you say, a project from linguists and language nerds.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  > The Anglish project is intended as a means of recovering the Englishness of English and of restoring ownership of the language to the English people. https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/What_is_Anglish%3F https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/What_is_Anglish%3F When I first came across Anglish I thought it was a really fun linguistic idea. Then last week I came across the above. Fuck no.
  - vitno 4y ago
    The fandom is an unmoderated site and does not reflect the general community. Racists have edit buttons too unfortunately. If you look at the edit history of the page it'll tell a story of far-right trolls attempting to rebrand it in recent years. https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/What_is_Anglish%3F?type=revision&diff=75509&oldid=47423 https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/What_is_Anglish%3F?type=revi...
triyambakam 4y ago
I have had a lot of fun with Anglish in the past, composing poetry and even attempting to write school assignments in it. However as I've grown as a linguist, I now disagree with the direction that they've taken it, but I understand why. That is, the Anglish project uses cognates and sometimes inventions from Old English, Dutch and German because most linguists (and people) consider English a West Germanic language, most closely related to German and Dutch, and more distantly related to Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. But I'm convinced that Faarlund is correct [1]; that Old English is not the only ancestor of Modern English, and that actually Modern English is more like a creole of Old English and Old Norse. So I'd like to see an Anglish project that instead uses the Scandinavian languages for word replacements. [1] "English as North Germanic [Language]" https://brill.com/view/journals/ldc/6/1/article-p1_1.xml?language=en https://brill.com/view/journals/ldc/6/1/article-p1_1.xml?lan...
- epicureanideal 4y ago
  Do you have any examples of an English / Scandinavian hybrid? Also, I wonder if such a thing might actually arise in the Scandinavian countries in the future?
  - OnlyMortal 4y ago
    Yorkshuhman here… we say “ta” (tak) for thanks. We also say “cheers” (tschuss) for goodbye. Going a bit deeper, “dale” (daal - Dutch), “beck” (beek - Dutch). Having learnt (not learned) in Amsterdam, it’s very, very like the dialects of the north east of Yorkshuh. So much so, it’s rather a surprise.
    - martynr 4y ago
      Exactly my observation as a southerner who has lived in the north and Scandinavia
    - simonh 4y ago
      Norwegians speaking their native tongue to me sound like they’re speaking German with a Geordie accent.
MarkusWandel 4y ago
This has the same feel as avoiding "immigrant German". My family is ESL, and communicating in our original language/dialect has devolved into a free mix of German and English words. It takes a conscious effort to keep it all German when talking with relatives from the old country! But I agree with others, trying to keep English "pure" is a lost cause; it's a glorious hodgepodge of influences from all over, and I love it (as an ESL person).
- triyambakam 4y ago
  This project isn't ideologically motivated, which I think many people immediately jump to that conclusion. It is a fun project to explore. If you have never come across the conlang (constructed language) community it might not make sense, but it's more so linguists and linguistic hobbyists having fun.
  - MarkusWandel 4y ago
    Sure. Reminds me of "Up Goer Five" but these language experiments don't stay interesting for long.
    - triyambakam 4y ago
      Maybe not interesting to you... but I've been interested in Anglish for almost 20 years :)
  - shkkmo 4y ago
    > This project isn't ideologically motivated I'm sure many people who play with the idea are not ideologically motivated. However, like some other constructed languages, ideology does play a non-neglible role. I think any time the word 'pure' is used to describe Anglish, it seems likely that some sort of ideological motivation is at play. William Barnes, for example, supported english purification to make the language more accessible to the uneducated. many supports of the language were
    - deleted 4y ago
martynr 4y ago
It seems relevant to me that the English themselves are actually a good mix of Vikings, Romans, French, Germans and Celts (and some other stuff no doubt) - so to advocate for just one of these inheritances as opposed to the mixture seems a bit of a nonsense, even if one chooses to ignore the richness of interactions with other languages in Britains history as an international nation - “Global Britain” indeed.
- imbnwa 4y ago
  Sicily is another island in Europe everyone and their mother landed on, and like English, native Sicilianu demonstrates its inheritance from its many mothers: Latin, Greek, Spanish, Norman French, and Arabic.
bee_rider 4y ago
> “We the Folk of the Foroned Riches, to make a more flawless oneship, build rightness, bring frith and stillness to our land, shield one another, uphold the overall welfare, and hold fast the Blessings of Freedom to ourselves and our offspring, do foresay and lay down this lawbook for the foroned riches of Americksland.” This sort of reads like an attempt at coming up with like a “English, 100 years after the apocalypse, in some super insular community” language. I expect there will be too much world building and some heavy handed social commentary. Anyway, it is probably a fun exercise for the people engaging in it. Of course English in actuality is the totally ownerless language that can customized however it needs to be. Let’s be honest about it, just messing with the language is pretty mild revenge, considering all the trouble the British Empire got up to historically.
- SeanLuke 4y ago
  This sort of reads like an attempt at coming up with like a “English, 100 years after the apocalypse, in some super insular community” language. It sounded to me like English as spoken in Firefly.
- deleted 4y ago
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OscarCunningham 4y ago
Weird that they remove Latin from the language but not Anglo-Saxon, even though the Latin influence was earlier.
- ianburrell 4y ago
  Anglo-Saxon is the original language of English. The grammar and base vocabulary is Germanic. English picked up little vocabulary from Brithonic it replaced. Latin was gone from Britain by Anglo-Saxon invasion. Then some words came from Old Norse. Next was French, providing majority of vocabulary but not the most frequent words. Latin provides a lot of vocabulary but it came later, it is mostly scientific and technical terms.
Archelaos 4y ago
A rather subtle feature of Tolkien's style is that he often favours words or expressions of Germanic over such with Romanic roots. He does not overdo it, but the low frequency of "Romanic" words seems deliberate.
henriquecm8 4y ago
This gave me a cool idea for worldbuilding.
jagthebeetle 4y ago
Of particular note are some reinforcements from Old Norse (circa 850s onward): - are (displacing bēoþ, sind, and sindon) - their (displacing heora) - they (displacing hīe) As a linguistic game, sounds fun. Hopefully its pupils don't take it too seriously, hem hem, e.g. William Strunk the Lesser: "Saxon is a livelier tongue than Latin, so use Anglo-Saxon words"
SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
I have first seen this idea in the short piece "Uncleftish Beholding" (Atomic Theory) "For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding It makes some sense, e.g "sourstuff" for "oxygen" - which in German is "Sauerstoff", in Dutch "zuurstof".
- CommieBobDole 4y ago
  "Nor are stuff and work unakin. Rather, they are groundwise the same, and one can be shifted into the other. The kinship between them is that work is like unto weight manifolded by the fourside of the haste of light."
- culebron21 4y ago
  Although I know German and "Sauerstoff" and "Waßerstoff" seem normal, in English "sourstuff" or "waterstuff" sound just utterly hilarious! (English is not my native language.)
  - SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
    English shifts up into this "academic register" for scientific or medical words, utilising Greek or Latin roots. Many other languages ... do not. So learning that e.g. "gums" - (i.e. the part of the mouth around the teeth) is in Dutch "tandvlees" (and German "zahnfleisch") - i.e. "tooth-flesh" - has that humorous quality when the expected shift up does not materialise. I mean, does not happen.
nikolay 4y ago
Isn't "book" borrowed from German ("buch")?
- kzrdude 4y ago
  Probably common origin - i.e came to english before German as it is today existed. Supposedly cognate with Beech (the tree) which is called bok (sv) and Buche (de)
dctoedt 4y ago
Brings to mind the Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe (of XKCD fame), which uses only the 1,000 most-common English words. EDIT: And its online example Up Goer Five: https://xkcd.com/1133/ https://xkcd.com/1133/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer
cafard 4y ago
If that is your thing, have a look at Charles Doughty's Arabia Deserta. I believe that Dover Books keeps it in print.
bitwize 4y ago
As others have commented, modern English is a creole made of bits of Anglo-Saxon, Old French, and Norse such that "Anglish" is about as authentic a pure Anglo-Saxon English as the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park are authentic dinosaurs: enough bits and bobs of modern material have been mixed in that it is at best an approximate reconstruction of something that didn't really exist in that form to begin with. That said, I still giggle when I read "Uncleftish Beholding", as it sounds like how Marvel's Thor might explain human scientific understanding to his buds in Asgard.
jake_morrison 4y ago
My parents were English majors, and they met in Anglo-Saxon class. My father described speaking Anglo-Saxon as being like cursing all the time. Everything is basic words like "shit" and "blood".
- tremon 4y ago
  Is that because those are the only known words left in our time, or because the original vocabulary was rather limited?
  - brenns10 4y ago
    My understanding (and take this with a grain of salt, I don't have sources) is that after the Norman conquest in 1066, the original English language was the lower class language and the Latin/French language of the conquerors became the upper class language. So the words which came to English through French/Latin tended to be considered high class, and the words from older English were considered lower class, rougher, and maybe in some cases more profane. A prime example might be beef vs cow: both referring to the same animal, but the higher class word deriving from French has become the culinary term whereas cow remains the term when speaking of the animal. (That I do have a source for: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef#Etymology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef#Etymology) I think that's why some of the Anglish stuff (or Anglo Saxon class?) might come off as rougher, more basic, simpler, or more profane. It's really interesting (but also really sad) how nearly 1000 years can go by, yet a language can still carry the scars of oppression. Anyway, that's just my thought, I'm no linguist or historian, so don't take my word for it.
    - deleted 4y ago
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IncRnd 4y ago
If certain people had their wish, with the language being Anglish, then Anglish wouldn't be a word. You'd need an English noun or verb.
kazinator 4y ago
The concept behind Anglish is poorly founded because English is built on Latin just as much as on Germanic roots, if not more. What do they do with grammatical constructions like non+<noun> meaning "not a <noun> and non+<adj> meaning "not <adj>". English just isn't English without non-. ex- is another one. What do Anglish speakers breathe and push out of their lips when speaking Anglish words? It better not be air which is from French, Latin and ultimately Greek. Indeed, I see they replace that with lift. If you know a bit of German, it's not far off from luft, but calling the air lift screws up English, rather than purifying it. lift meaning air is a dead word that disappeared in Middle English. I suspect purification attempts will produce better results for languages that have a less diverse, more linear (and perhaps shorter, in some sense) history and are spoken by a relatively small number of people concentrated in a particular area.
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  Unless I'm missing something, I don't think non- is a Latin root in the first place? > I suspect purification attempts will produce better results for languages that have a less diverse, more linear (and perhaps shorter, in some sense) history and are spoken by a relatively small number of people concentrated in a particular area. Ah, but they're only (or at least more) interesting on languages that are already a mess of influences to contrast with.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Unless I’m missing something, I don’t think non- is a Latin root in the first place? It is, from Latin non = “not”.
- deleted 4y ago
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moffkalast 4y ago
> Computer > Reckoner walks up to workstation At last, the time of reckoning is at hand!
davidgerard 4y ago
Beware - Anglish was invented as a fun linguistic game - and it is! - but then neo-Nazis took a liking to it. So if you wonder if some fans are a bit odd in that way ... they probably are. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2018/blue-eyed-english https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/...
- tptacek 4y ago
  At some point, we just have to stop letting trolls claim things like this. Linguistic purity would be a worrisome goal if, like, any native English speakers could casually and correctly speak Anglish. But they can't, because Anglish is silly. It doesn't seem like a useful tool for indoctrination. I'm just writing out of frustration. As a practical matter, if, like, the only people on the Internet that do Anglish stuff are Nazis, and so digging into Anglish messes with all the recommendation algorithms, then my being irritated at their claim on it doesn't make much of a difference.
temp2302271148 4y ago
I think anglosaxon suprematists have bigger issues. First, and foremost your charset is Latin. Enjoy your rune based punycode URIs.
iForgotMyPW 4y ago
This is dumb but I'll take reckoner over computer, that word is wicked
- drpixie 4y ago
  It's a nice word. I wonder where they borrowed it from :)
billiam 4y ago
Tl;dr but it seems like this movement says that English was native before the Norman invasions. Whut. There are no native tongues, and the languages of the Picts, Welsh, Irish, Celts, Romans, Saxons and others shaped what was being spoken on fair Albion long before the Normans showed up. Reminds me of riding in a cab once in Turkey with a guy speaking Armenian on the phone. The Turkish driver was prejudiced against Armenians and ordered us out of the cab in angry Turkish, which I did not speak. My companion laughed and told me the phrase he used to tell us to get out was Armenian.
praveen9920 4y ago
> '..Folk of the Foroned Riches'. That would make USA -> FRA. Half France :)
EGreg 4y ago
Angrish is a portmanteau of Angry and English — people are angry that Normans and other peoples brought more words to the language. Portmanteau is a French loanword. Also, before the Norman conquests, wasn’t England full of tribes like Britons who all had different words anyway?
xwdv 4y ago
Facebook is an Anglish word, so what was the original English word?
cardanome 4y ago
I can see myself using this for fantasy stuff. It is perfect for adding some flavor and old-timey vibes to your writing while still being much more readable than actual old English.
jonnycomputer 4y ago
What a quaint 20th century-sort of ethno-nationalist notion that is.
- drpixie 4y ago
  It's disturbingly reminiscent of the rule britannia crowd, proud boys, and (now) dilbert :(
  - bbg2401 4y ago
    Get a grip.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- jonnycomputer 4y ago
  I think the downvoters must really not know much about 19th and 20th century European ethno-nationalism, or how cultural movements centered around language, religion and myth, were particularly instrumental in the formation of ethnic national identities, and what that inevitably entailed for those not in the hegemonic majorities. Nor how the invention of the past, construction of new "ancient" traditions, and a nostalgic longing for an imagined more pure mythic past served nationalist agendas among competing European states. And of course, all of this is still going on, in all sorts of places other than Europe (e.g. Africa, Asia). But I won't complain about downvotes without an attempt to actually give people the opportunity to learn something. Ethnonationalism, Nationalism, Empire - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/11287462.2006.10800885 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/11287462.2006.10... Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe - Language Chapter - https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/56/object/122-159898 https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/56/object/122-159898 Linguistic Purism in the History of the German Language - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291539411_Linguistic_Purism_in_the_History_of_the_German_language https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291539411_Linguisti... Revisiting Key Debates in the Study of Nationalism - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01432-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01432-w
wrp 4y ago
For the non-British here, the history of the English language can be a toxic political subject in the UK. As an American who studies Anglo-Saxon-Jute language and literature as a hobby, I'm intrigued by speculation on how the language would have developed without the Norman Conquest, but I'm wary of discussing it around Brits unless I'm sure it won't trigger them.
- secondcoming 4y ago
  What in the world are you on about?
gerdesj 4y ago
Anglish can go and fuck itself, as a wise person once never said. English cannot and will not and never will be perfect, nor pure or whatevs but it will get a message across. It is rather more flexible than your average language and that is probably a complete accident. There are loads of pidgins of English and a phenomenal number of dialects. This is just for "modern" English. You can fiddle with word order and ignore quite a lot of word endings and still it hangs together. This Anglish bollocks sounds like a roundly racist notion involving "purity". I hate that.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  I guess the premise of Anglish can be summed up as: No, we don't need latin, or greek roots, to enjoy our language, and there's just as much if not more of a reason to use roots natural to our language, and no you aren't smarter or wiser, more scholarly or intellectual, because you use big long fancy sounding latin or greek based words. maybe the reason a lot of english doesn't make sense (in contrast to german) is because we replaced a lot of words we might join to create new meanings with greek words"But there is also the further idea that Anglish is a recognition and a celebration of the English part of modern English. For, although it has borrowed thousands and thousands of words throughout its life, there still exists a true English core to English, the most important everyday words which no sentence or uttering could manage without. By stripping away the layers of borrowings, Anglish lets us better appreciate that core and the role it plays in our language."
  - gerdesj 4y ago
    English is French! (lingua franca) The reason for that is because English is considered relatively easy to communicate with as a second language. English has quite happily built upon its roots and is able to grab "foreign" words and take them on board, without fear, favour or rancour. Why not? Modern English takes advantage of a vast vocabulary, much of which is not natively derived or generated but is still cherished. Anglish with it's purity notions should be considered degenerative and racist in my view.
    - 4y ago
irrational 4y ago
This reads like Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer (where he describes things using the ten hundred most common words in English) mixed with racism.
maximinus_thrax 4y ago
> We the Folk of the Foroned Riches, to make a more flawless oneship, build rightness, bring frith and stillness to our land, shield one another, uphold the overall welfare, and hold fast the Blessings of Freedom to ourselves and our offspring, do foresay and lay down this lawbook for the foroned riches of Americksland. :)) for a second there I thought this was /r/justneckbeardthings
- ascotan 4y ago
  Honestly I can only hear this in the voice of one of the hobbits from the Amazon LOTR series.
permo-w 4y ago
"I am of this opinion that our own tung should be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges; wherein if we take not heed by tiim, ever borowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt." - John Cheke I think John Cheke can be satisfied that English has repaid its dues ten times over in the modern era
jschveibinz 4y ago
[flagged]
Octokiddie 4y ago
> The term "Anglish" was made up by Paul Jennings in 1966, however the desire to remove foreign influence from the English language is a tradition that goes back all the way to 1066 when the Norman invasion brought in the majority of foreign vocabulary to English. It's worth noting that Paul Jennings is described as a "humourist." > Paul Francis Jennings (20 June 1918 – 26 December 1989) was an English humourist and author. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Jennings_(British_author) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Jennings_(British_author)
ihatepython 4y ago
I was hoping it would be a combination of Angular and English.
ascotan 4y ago
This is silly. There is no such thing as "native" English. English is a hodgepodge of languages from Scandinavian, Celtic, German, Latin, French and more.
- chadlavi 4y ago
  And the Angles came from modern day Germany anyway
tw1984 4y ago
wait a sec, their web site itself is written in English not that fancy Anglish!
sharkjacobs 4y ago
> An interesting illustration of this is the way in which the English flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning-away from the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific. from Politics and the English Language by George Orwell
omoikane 4y ago
These examples like "wordbook" and "nameknown" reminds me of Newspeak, in the sense of building words by concatenating simple words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
ryanschneider 4y ago
I coincidentally just watched a YT video by RobWords on the same subject last week: https://youtu.be/aMA3M6b9iEY https://youtu.be/aMA3M6b9iEY It’s an interesting watch but I do see why the attempts at “purifying” the language are troubling if taken as an actual attempt at anything other than a fun conlang. Edit: oh the video is mentioned on the site. :)
notorandit 4y ago
Nice and interesting. And useless IMHO. It hardly will be a small group of scholars and aficionados to shape a language. More likely, we the people.
kissgyorgy 4y ago
In Hungary, we sometimes speak "Hunglish", where we sprinkle Hungarian with English words, most of the time simply because there is no alternative.
nickpinkston 4y ago
It sounds like how Cletus on the Simpsons talks - which may be because some of the backwoods accents in popular media are parodies of real accent isolates from remote areas in the near past. (present?) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMKqRp3veL8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMKqRp3veL8
intellectronica 4y ago
This is a dog whistle for white supremacy that screams louder than a vuvuzela. English as it is used today is, like every language, the product of evolution, including cross-pollination with other languages. The idea that there's some "pure" form of a language, or really any aspect of Human culture, is an offence to everything that being human is.
kensai 4y ago
I thought only we Greeks did such stuff! :)
hyperthesis 4y ago
ever borowing and never paying [1500's] Did not age well. English degrades gracefully, in grammar and vocabulary, enabling it to be widely used (or, conceivably, resulting from wide use).
inwit 4y ago
Cf uncleftish beholding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding
tux2bsd 4y ago
[dead]
jl6 4y ago
English has clearly borrowed a lot of words, but this makes me wonder whether English has borrowed grammar too.
bravura 4y ago
The beauty of the English language always comes from picking the word with the perfect connotation. At the most articulate, you have speakers like Christopher Hitchens: “It especially annoys me when racists are accused of 'discrimination.' The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one 'race' to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.” ― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian But sometimes the strongest turns-of-phrase in English can be the simplest. We were recently chatting about the Portuguese "Cansas-me a beleza". In English, if you said to someone: "You tire my beauty" with perfect delivery it would be withering.
- permo-w 4y ago
  that Hitchens quote is nice, but typically for him, and fittingly for the context, it’s more of an attempt to be contrary and interesting than it is to be correct. racists are accused of discriminating by race. he obviously knew this, and it’s still an interesting point, but to be annoyed by it is to be annoyed by correct usage of English
  - bravura 4y ago
    The word play here is one of nuanced diction here. Namely the secondary meaning of the word: Meaning 2: recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another. "discrimination between right and wrong" 2a) the ability to judge what is of high quality; good judgement or taste. "those who could afford to buy showed little taste or discrimination" I.e. the true ability to distinguish things, not simply sorting objects by color.
    - permo-w 4y ago
      this was my basic understanding of the quote. it's still correct to accuse a racist of discrimination
culebron21 4y ago
Reading the subredit, all the Anglish names of some special forces make a great alt-rock band names. https://www.reddit.com/r/anglish/comments/11dtrqp/special_operations_in_anglish/ https://www.reddit.com/r/anglish/comments/11dtrqp/special_op... Gouth Gripper, Fallwardens, Sundry Underrighting, Wyecraftish Loft Sway Band
tarkin2 4y ago
English and England and its history have never been pure. It has always mixed and took from other languages and other cultures. And from such derives some its most successful cultural items: its music ands its humour and its general creativity; that is, the creation of culture rather than the preservation of the ways of old. Purity and creativity and creation are no bedfellows. The project is fun for the addition of new words but I would hate to rob myself of the richness of English.
wageslave99 4y ago
Are there something like this for other languages? For example, Spanish without Arabic, Germanic, French or English words? It would be funny to know if a "more Latin Spanish" would be more understandable for Italian or French speakers.
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
That's basically what the Academie Francaise have been doing all along for French and why we have words like "courriel" instead of email in the dictionary despite the fact most people never use them.
- oblio 4y ago
  A bit of consistency is good, I find, but not actually in actual words. The real consistency you should aim for is pronunciation. Especially for loanwords. Yes, the first time you encounter "CD" spelled out in your native language, it's jarring, but over time the benefits of this add up. Both English and French fail miserably at pronunciation consistency. See this for English: https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html If you aim to make your language as phonetic as possible, suddenly acquiring the language is much easier. Still very hard, but a degree of difficulty easier.
junon 4y ago
Anglish seems just to be literally translated German, and still uses borrowed words (book, for example). It sounds almost like the handbook from Severance or something quasi-fanatical, fictional religious texts or such.
kitd 4y ago
> Americksland This reminds me (a Welshman) of my favourite theory for the origin of the name "America": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Amerike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Amerike
fumblebee 4y ago
This reminds me of London slang, or what I now know is called "Multicultural London English"[1], which I was introduced to when I moved to London. A friend asked me: > "Ey, wagwan fam, bare man gwarn dis flick, whatchu sayin'?" Translated, this means: > "Hey, how are you? Some folks are headed to the cinema. Would you like to join?" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English
kwhitefoot 4y ago
The example of the preamble to the US Constitution is a bit poor really because the Anglish version doesn't properly convey the meaning of the English version. A constitution is not merely, and not entirely, a book of laws. My lawyer wife had a great pile of law books, but none of them were a constitution. And the idea that one can sensibly revive Old English words to use in Modern English grammar is a bit odd, they are after all related languages not the same language. The first is inflected, the second mostly not. In my opinion, contrary to that of John Cheke, the great strength of English is precisely that it is so willing to borrow from other languages. It is one of the defining characteristics of English that a foreign word can be adopted, and adapted, very easily so that after a relatively short time it doesn't feel especially foreign.
maksimur 4y ago
I'm curious to discover if an Anglish opposite favouring phrases from other languages in lieu of native ones exists.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jonnycomputer 4y ago
This is very reminiscent of 19th and 20th century European ethno-nationalism, or how cultural movements centered around language, religion and myth, were particularly instrumental in the formation of ethnic national identities, and what that inevitably entailed for those not in the hegemonic majorities. Nor how the invention of the past, construction of new "ancient" traditions, and a nostalgic longing for an imagined more pure mythic past served nationalist agendas among competing European states. And of course, all of this is still going on, in all sorts of places other than Europe (e.g. Africa, Asia). Ethnonationalism, Nationalism, Empire - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/11287462.2006.10 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/11287462.2006.10... Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe - Language Chapter - https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/56/object/122-159898 https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/56/object/122-159898 Linguistic Purism in the History of the German Language - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291539411_Linguisti https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291539411_Linguisti... Revisiting Key Debates in the Study of Nationalism - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01432-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01432-w
glonq 4y ago
I fully endorse harmless lingustic/academic antics, but some of the people behind "linguistic purity" also seem like the kind of folks who endorse cultural and racial purity.
timonoko 4y ago
Ænglish is the language of Ænglanders, who live on Ængland, an island with lots of Ængs. They used have trees, but fools burned them all down. Reason for this is of course that there was too many Ænglanders for normal slash and burn agriculture. And reason for this overpopulation is that they were living on remote island, so there were not enough wars.

265 points by warrenm 4y ago

What makes today's English so great is what has been borrowed and adapted from foreign languages. Everything adapts and grows with the cultures around them.

crispinb 4y ago
It's also one of the compensations for so many of us native English speakers being disadvantaged by monolingualism.

coding123 4y ago

why? serious question

miles 4y ago

Reminded of the Japanese native words known as "wago" or "yamato kotoba"[0]: "Wago...are native Japanese words, meaning those words in Japanese that have been inherited from Old Japanese, rather than being borrowed at some stage. Together with kango (漢語) and gairaigo (外来語), they form one of the three main sources of Japanese words (there is also elaborate Japanese sound symbolism, of mimetic origin). They are also known as yamato kotoba." Perhaps like "Anglish", there is an ease and softness to yamato kotoba, especially when compared to foreign loan words (both kango and gairaigo). Here[1] is a nice representative sample of 100 words and expressions. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wago [1] https://origamijapan.net/origami/2018/01/13/yamato-kotoba/ https://origamijapan.net/origami/2018/01/13/yamato-kotoba/

hunter2_ 4y ago
Japanese came to mind for me as having borrowed plenty of words from English (often modifying them simply to ensure a vowel between each consonant sound, as two adjacent consonants would be too foreign) as my contrarian reaction to > "... [English] ever borowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt."
retrac 4y ago
There are lots of interesting parallels between English and Japanese. Old English borrowed its alphabet from Latin, and imperfectly represents its sounds in Latin, with a couple extra letters. On the other hand, the Japanese borrowed writing from the Chinese, and after a long struggle, eventually adapted it to perfectly represent every sound in the Japanese language. While retaining the entire Chinese character set. The piece de resistance? You have to figure out whether a character has a Chinese or Japanese reading from context, since most have both. Probably half or more of all Japanese vocabulary is based on Chinese. Most borrowings were about a thousand years ago, or more. In a few cases it's not always obvious if a word is even native Japanese, or not. But the sound and spelling are a very strong hint for almost all words in practice. There's a split in numbers. In some places you use Chinese numbers, and in others you use Japanese. A rough equivalent of the mono- bi- tri- etc. nonsense. The same word has sometimes been borrowed from Chinese multiple times, at different times, and from different regions, resulting in different pronunciations. Not unlike English's "warranty" and "guarantee". Which are early and late French pronunciations of the same word. There are Chinese roots used in compound words to describe academic, medical, scientific, religious, governmental, etc. things. And there are native Japanese words used for all sorts of common everyday things. Despite the majority of terms being Chinese in origin, like with English and words of Germanic origin, in many contexts, the majority of words used are native Japanese. Words coined in Japan on Chinese word formation principles have sometimes been adopted in China, particularly around the start of the 20th century with technical terms. Much as how English and French have many terms where you can't even say whether it's really an English or French word originally. It's the same roots used in the same way in both languages and would be obvious to speakers of either language if they needed a new word. And they often need a new word around the same time.
lifthrasiir 4y ago
I'm pretty sure that there are parallels everywhere around the world. The Korean equivalent is 토박이말 Tobagimal (lit. native speak) [1]. [1] Also called 순 우리말 Soon woorimal (lit. only our speak) which is ironically not 순 우리말 itself because of a Sino-Korean morpheme "순" (純).

jerf 4y ago

Archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20230227185951/https://anglish.org/wiki/Anglish https://web.archive.org/web/20230227185951/https://anglish.o...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jacooper 4y ago

Wait, computer isn't English native?

seszett 4y ago
No, it's an old French word for "to calculate/to count". Today the French word for that is "compter" (and a counting machine is a "compteur").
cmh89 4y ago
'Compute(er)' is a French word
- G3rn0ti 4y ago
  Ironically, the French „Académie française“ banned the term „computer“ and established „l‘ordinateur“ instead to keep the language pure. :)
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    I had a comment written up to say the same thing, but then I found this: https://blogs.transparent.com/french/the-origin-of-lordinateur-computers-in-french/ https://blogs.transparent.com/french/the-origin-of-lordinate... Turns out that ordinateur wasn't chosen for French purity but because IBM wanted a fancy word to sell their fancy machine by.
  - seszett 4y ago
    The reason "ordinateur" is used in French, is that IBM coined that word because "calculateur" (the regular modern French translation of "computer") sounded too mundane. "Ordinateur" suggests sorting, rather than just making simple calculations. It has nothing at all with "keeping the language pure" (which seems kind of a meme in the English speaking world, but really couldn't be further from truth) and it was originally trademarked by IBM, but quickly became a generic word.
    - G3rn0ti 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

roncesvalles 4y ago

If you want to read way more Anglish: https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Oned_Riches_of_Emerichland https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Oned_Riches_of_Emerichland

squiffsquiff 4y ago

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." --James D. Nicoll

nqzero 4y ago
Is this English: Yes (riffing off the "Is this Arabic" that was posted a few days ago - it's a lot easier in english, ie if the speaker says ti's english, it's english)
- dsr_ 4y ago
  More precisely: Is this English? Cool cool, it finna be.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    What do you think that says, and in what dialect? If the intended dialect and meaning are what I think, the definition of 'finna' and the overall usage are wrong.
- hinkley 4y ago
  With English it’s not a case of “if” but “when”.
- walrus01 4y ago
  speaking of Arabic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Arabic_origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Arabi...
- slim 4y ago
  I won't miss his is a unique occasion to post this arabic meme (one has to spend his karma) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1e62d6wHIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1e62d6wHIU Explanation to get around HN guidelines : The guy says : "Hey Morsi [ndlr. common male name in Egypt], Is this English ?". It started when Modamed Morsi was president of Egypt and spoke in incomprehensible English. Since most arabic speaking people are notoriously bad at English, it became a meme used when someone says something incomprehensible in any language

giraffe_lady 4y ago

Because linguistic purism has a totally untroubled and neutral history of effectiveness.

triyambakam 4y ago
The Anglish community isn't ideologically motivated. It's a fun conlang (constructed language) project from language nerds.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - triyambakam 4y ago
    We would always be too close, then. The Anglish project is more than 20 years old. It could be older, but I've been familiar with it for at least that long.
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      Maybe. But just because the time will never be right doesn't mean now is the time either.
      - triyambakam 4y ago
        That's a horrible position to take
  - philwelch 4y ago
    This is what happened to the English under French-speaking dominion in the Middle Ages.
  - nerdix 4y ago
    I actually look at it in the opposite way. There actually are modern English purists. We sometimes call them grammar nazis. Its not usually the result of some overtly oppressive ideology. They just mistakenly believe that there is a "correct" way to speak English. However, the net result of it is the stigmatization of people from poor communities. This project very clearly shows how silly English purity is in a clever way: that the "correct" English of day may very well have been considered "incorrect" by the purists of yesteryear. Language evolves.

zabzonk 4y ago

> Anglish is a kind of English which prefers native words over those borrowed from foreign languages. does not make sense - english is a language sythesised from huge borrowings from other languages, over time. what is the "native" language supposed to be?

klooney 4y ago
Probably the Germanic languages of the Anglo Saxons- it's called Anglish, after all.
- zabzonk 4y ago
  what it is called (which is a kind of advertising) is no evidence of where this came from.
- bloppe 4y ago
  This is turtles all the way down. All Germanic languages are highly related to the other Indo-European languages. The Latin alphabet we use to write can be traced back to Egyptian Hieroglyphs. People just like to pick arbitrary points in an evolutionary timeline and use those points to create in-groups and out-groups.
  - triyambakam 4y ago
    But if you take that view, you can't define anything. You can't even say it's the Latin alphabet. We must constantly ignore the "turtles" for many things in daily life. So yes, it's arbitrary but that's not a problem. It's just what they chose for the project.
    - bloppe 4y ago
      I'm not saying it's a bad project. I think it's cool, but the words "pure" and "native" don't make sense to me to describe it.
triyambakam 4y ago

bloppe 4y ago

This is a fun way to speak English, but this notion of "native" vs. "borrowed" words is incredibly slippery. For instance, the example replaces "union" with "oneship", but these words share a common Proto-Indo-European root and can reasonably be interpreted as the same word; the same goes for most other Norman words "borrowed" into English after the conquest. The page advocates the use of "Old English words ... revived and updated to modern spelling and phonology to be used for a modern meaning". How old is too old? Not to over-charge this conversation, but it reminds me of anti-race-mixing ideologies. Race is also a much more slippery concept than some people would care to admit; we're all related if you go back far enough.

triyambakam 4y ago
Yes, you could go back and back and back. But the point of this project is to see what a modern "pure" Germanic English would be like.
- bloppe 4y ago
  Sure, I just think it would make more sense to pick a real date then. No words that would be unrecognizable to a typical English speaker before 1066? Sure. You'd still have to define "typical" because even modern English speakers do not all speak an identical language, and this notion of "updating to modern spelling and phonology" becomes a strange exercise. All I'm saying is, the word "pure" doesn't make sense to me here.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    It's also not like Norman French was a "pure" offshoot of Latin either. It was heavily influenced by the languages of the Franks and Gauls. That said, what I find really interesting here is that William The Conqueror was only something like 4 generations removed from people whose "French" was more or less still a dialect of Latin.
    - philwelch 4y ago
      And that’s not to mention that William’s great-great-great grandfather Rollo was a Norseman who himself conquered part of northern France, and was allowed to keep his conquests in exchange for swearing allegiance to the French king and converting to Christianity. I think the term “Norman” is actually related to “Norseman”, in fact. (“Rollo” was, incidentally, probably not his real name.)

csours 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding

vitno 4y ago

Before anyone gets too worried, the Anglish community in my (limited) experience has been incredibly anti-racism/Nazi/etc. They are just a bunch of linguistics nerds who are having fun imagining what English would have been without a Norman invasion. In the same spirit, I'd recommend checking out the Uncleftish Beholding. Although I think it predates the modern Anglish community, it's an attempt to describe Quantum Mechanics with Latin/French derived words. https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/docs/uncleftish_beholding.html https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/docs/uncleftish_beh...

triyambakam 4y ago
Yes, every time I've brought up Anglish to someone they think it must be some white-supremacist project. I've never come across that in the nearly 20 years I've known about Anglish. It is, as you say, a project from linguists and language nerds.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
> The Anglish project is intended as a means of recovering the Englishness of English and of restoring ownership of the language to the English people. https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/What_is_Anglish%3F https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/What_is_Anglish%3F When I first came across Anglish I thought it was a really fun linguistic idea. Then last week I came across the above. Fuck no.
- vitno 4y ago
  The fandom is an unmoderated site and does not reflect the general community. Racists have edit buttons too unfortunately. If you look at the edit history of the page it'll tell a story of far-right trolls attempting to rebrand it in recent years. https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/What_is_Anglish%3F?type=revision&diff=75509&oldid=47423 https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/What_is_Anglish%3F?type=revi...

triyambakam 4y ago

I have had a lot of fun with Anglish in the past, composing poetry and even attempting to write school assignments in it. However as I've grown as a linguist, I now disagree with the direction that they've taken it, but I understand why. That is, the Anglish project uses cognates and sometimes inventions from Old English, Dutch and German because most linguists (and people) consider English a West Germanic language, most closely related to German and Dutch, and more distantly related to Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. But I'm convinced that Faarlund is correct [1]; that Old English is not the only ancestor of Modern English, and that actually Modern English is more like a creole of Old English and Old Norse. So I'd like to see an Anglish project that instead uses the Scandinavian languages for word replacements. [1] "English as North Germanic [Language]" https://brill.com/view/journals/ldc/6/1/article-p1_1.xml?language=en https://brill.com/view/journals/ldc/6/1/article-p1_1.xml?lan...

epicureanideal 4y ago
Do you have any examples of an English / Scandinavian hybrid? Also, I wonder if such a thing might actually arise in the Scandinavian countries in the future?
- OnlyMortal 4y ago
  Yorkshuhman here… we say “ta” (tak) for thanks. We also say “cheers” (tschuss) for goodbye. Going a bit deeper, “dale” (daal - Dutch), “beck” (beek - Dutch). Having learnt (not learned) in Amsterdam, it’s very, very like the dialects of the north east of Yorkshuh. So much so, it’s rather a surprise.
  - martynr 4y ago
    Exactly my observation as a southerner who has lived in the north and Scandinavia
  - simonh 4y ago
    Norwegians speaking their native tongue to me sound like they’re speaking German with a Geordie accent.

MarkusWandel 4y ago

This has the same feel as avoiding "immigrant German". My family is ESL, and communicating in our original language/dialect has devolved into a free mix of German and English words. It takes a conscious effort to keep it all German when talking with relatives from the old country! But I agree with others, trying to keep English "pure" is a lost cause; it's a glorious hodgepodge of influences from all over, and I love it (as an ESL person).

triyambakam 4y ago
This project isn't ideologically motivated, which I think many people immediately jump to that conclusion. It is a fun project to explore. If you have never come across the conlang (constructed language) community it might not make sense, but it's more so linguists and linguistic hobbyists having fun.
- MarkusWandel 4y ago
  Sure. Reminds me of "Up Goer Five" but these language experiments don't stay interesting for long.
  - triyambakam 4y ago
    Maybe not interesting to you... but I've been interested in Anglish for almost 20 years :)
- shkkmo 4y ago
  > This project isn't ideologically motivated I'm sure many people who play with the idea are not ideologically motivated. However, like some other constructed languages, ideology does play a non-neglible role. I think any time the word 'pure' is used to describe Anglish, it seems likely that some sort of ideological motivation is at play. William Barnes, for example, supported english purification to make the language more accessible to the uneducated. many supports of the language were
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martynr 4y ago

It seems relevant to me that the English themselves are actually a good mix of Vikings, Romans, French, Germans and Celts (and some other stuff no doubt) - so to advocate for just one of these inheritances as opposed to the mixture seems a bit of a nonsense, even if one chooses to ignore the richness of interactions with other languages in Britains history as an international nation - “Global Britain” indeed.

imbnwa 4y ago
Sicily is another island in Europe everyone and their mother landed on, and like English, native Sicilianu demonstrates its inheritance from its many mothers: Latin, Greek, Spanish, Norman French, and Arabic.

bee_rider 4y ago

> “We the Folk of the Foroned Riches, to make a more flawless oneship, build rightness, bring frith and stillness to our land, shield one another, uphold the overall welfare, and hold fast the Blessings of Freedom to ourselves and our offspring, do foresay and lay down this lawbook for the foroned riches of Americksland.” This sort of reads like an attempt at coming up with like a “English, 100 years after the apocalypse, in some super insular community” language. I expect there will be too much world building and some heavy handed social commentary. Anyway, it is probably a fun exercise for the people engaging in it. Of course English in actuality is the totally ownerless language that can customized however it needs to be. Let’s be honest about it, just messing with the language is pretty mild revenge, considering all the trouble the British Empire got up to historically.

SeanLuke 4y ago
This sort of reads like an attempt at coming up with like a “English, 100 years after the apocalypse, in some super insular community” language. It sounded to me like English as spoken in Firefly.
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OscarCunningham 4y ago

Weird that they remove Latin from the language but not Anglo-Saxon, even though the Latin influence was earlier.

ianburrell 4y ago
Anglo-Saxon is the original language of English. The grammar and base vocabulary is Germanic. English picked up little vocabulary from Brithonic it replaced. Latin was gone from Britain by Anglo-Saxon invasion. Then some words came from Old Norse. Next was French, providing majority of vocabulary but not the most frequent words. Latin provides a lot of vocabulary but it came later, it is mostly scientific and technical terms.

Archelaos 4y ago

A rather subtle feature of Tolkien's style is that he often favours words or expressions of Germanic over such with Romanic roots. He does not overdo it, but the low frequency of "Romanic" words seems deliberate.

henriquecm8 4y ago

This gave me a cool idea for worldbuilding.

jagthebeetle 4y ago

Of particular note are some reinforcements from Old Norse (circa 850s onward): - are (displacing bēoþ, sind, and sindon) - their (displacing heora) - they (displacing hīe) As a linguistic game, sounds fun. Hopefully its pupils don't take it too seriously, hem hem, e.g. William Strunk the Lesser: "Saxon is a livelier tongue than Latin, so use Anglo-Saxon words"

SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago

I have first seen this idea in the short piece "Uncleftish Beholding" (Atomic Theory) "For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding It makes some sense, e.g "sourstuff" for "oxygen" - which in German is "Sauerstoff", in Dutch "zuurstof".

CommieBobDole 4y ago
"Nor are stuff and work unakin. Rather, they are groundwise the same, and one can be shifted into the other. The kinship between them is that work is like unto weight manifolded by the fourside of the haste of light."
culebron21 4y ago
Although I know German and "Sauerstoff" and "Waßerstoff" seem normal, in English "sourstuff" or "waterstuff" sound just utterly hilarious! (English is not my native language.)
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  English shifts up into this "academic register" for scientific or medical words, utilising Greek or Latin roots. Many other languages ... do not. So learning that e.g. "gums" - (i.e. the part of the mouth around the teeth) is in Dutch "tandvlees" (and German "zahnfleisch") - i.e. "tooth-flesh" - has that humorous quality when the expected shift up does not materialise. I mean, does not happen.

nikolay 4y ago

Isn't "book" borrowed from German ("buch")?

kzrdude 4y ago
Probably common origin - i.e came to english before German as it is today existed. Supposedly cognate with Beech (the tree) which is called bok (sv) and Buche (de)

dctoedt 4y ago

Brings to mind the Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe (of XKCD fame), which uses only the 1,000 most-common English words. EDIT: And its online example Up Goer Five: https://xkcd.com/1133/ https://xkcd.com/1133/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer

cafard 4y ago

If that is your thing, have a look at Charles Doughty's Arabia Deserta. I believe that Dover Books keeps it in print.

bitwize 4y ago

As others have commented, modern English is a creole made of bits of Anglo-Saxon, Old French, and Norse such that "Anglish" is about as authentic a pure Anglo-Saxon English as the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park are authentic dinosaurs: enough bits and bobs of modern material have been mixed in that it is at best an approximate reconstruction of something that didn't really exist in that form to begin with. That said, I still giggle when I read "Uncleftish Beholding", as it sounds like how Marvel's Thor might explain human scientific understanding to his buds in Asgard.

jake_morrison 4y ago

My parents were English majors, and they met in Anglo-Saxon class. My father described speaking Anglo-Saxon as being like cursing all the time. Everything is basic words like "shit" and "blood".

tremon 4y ago
Is that because those are the only known words left in our time, or because the original vocabulary was rather limited?
- brenns10 4y ago
  My understanding (and take this with a grain of salt, I don't have sources) is that after the Norman conquest in 1066, the original English language was the lower class language and the Latin/French language of the conquerors became the upper class language. So the words which came to English through French/Latin tended to be considered high class, and the words from older English were considered lower class, rougher, and maybe in some cases more profane. A prime example might be beef vs cow: both referring to the same animal, but the higher class word deriving from French has become the culinary term whereas cow remains the term when speaking of the animal. (That I do have a source for: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef#Etymology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef#Etymology) I think that's why some of the Anglish stuff (or Anglo Saxon class?) might come off as rougher, more basic, simpler, or more profane. It's really interesting (but also really sad) how nearly 1000 years can go by, yet a language can still carry the scars of oppression. Anyway, that's just my thought, I'm no linguist or historian, so don't take my word for it.
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IncRnd 4y ago

If certain people had their wish, with the language being Anglish, then Anglish wouldn't be a word. You'd need an English noun or verb.

kazinator 4y ago

The concept behind Anglish is poorly founded because English is built on Latin just as much as on Germanic roots, if not more. What do they do with grammatical constructions like non+<noun> meaning "not a <noun> and non+<adj> meaning "not <adj>". English just isn't English without non-. ex- is another one. What do Anglish speakers breathe and push out of their lips when speaking Anglish words? It better not be air which is from French, Latin and ultimately Greek. Indeed, I see they replace that with lift. If you know a bit of German, it's not far off from luft, but calling the air lift screws up English, rather than purifying it. lift meaning air is a dead word that disappeared in Middle English. I suspect purification attempts will produce better results for languages that have a less diverse, more linear (and perhaps shorter, in some sense) history and are spoken by a relatively small number of people concentrated in a particular area.

naniwaduni 4y ago
Unless I'm missing something, I don't think non- is a Latin root in the first place? > I suspect purification attempts will produce better results for languages that have a less diverse, more linear (and perhaps shorter, in some sense) history and are spoken by a relatively small number of people concentrated in a particular area. Ah, but they're only (or at least more) interesting on languages that are already a mess of influences to contrast with.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Unless I’m missing something, I don’t think non- is a Latin root in the first place? It is, from Latin non = “not”.
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moffkalast 4y ago

> Computer > Reckoner walks up to workstation At last, the time of reckoning is at hand!

davidgerard 4y ago

Beware - Anglish was invented as a fun linguistic game - and it is! - but then neo-Nazis took a liking to it. So if you wonder if some fans are a bit odd in that way ... they probably are. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2018/blue-eyed-english https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/...

tptacek 4y ago
At some point, we just have to stop letting trolls claim things like this. Linguistic purity would be a worrisome goal if, like, any native English speakers could casually and correctly speak Anglish. But they can't, because Anglish is silly. It doesn't seem like a useful tool for indoctrination. I'm just writing out of frustration. As a practical matter, if, like, the only people on the Internet that do Anglish stuff are Nazis, and so digging into Anglish messes with all the recommendation algorithms, then my being irritated at their claim on it doesn't make much of a difference.

temp2302271148 4y ago

I think anglosaxon suprematists have bigger issues. First, and foremost your charset is Latin. Enjoy your rune based punycode URIs.

iForgotMyPW 4y ago

This is dumb but I'll take reckoner over computer, that word is wicked

drpixie 4y ago
It's a nice word. I wonder where they borrowed it from :)

billiam 4y ago

Tl;dr but it seems like this movement says that English was native before the Norman invasions. Whut. There are no native tongues, and the languages of the Picts, Welsh, Irish, Celts, Romans, Saxons and others shaped what was being spoken on fair Albion long before the Normans showed up. Reminds me of riding in a cab once in Turkey with a guy speaking Armenian on the phone. The Turkish driver was prejudiced against Armenians and ordered us out of the cab in angry Turkish, which I did not speak. My companion laughed and told me the phrase he used to tell us to get out was Armenian.

praveen9920 4y ago

> '..Folk of the Foroned Riches'. That would make USA -> FRA. Half France :)

EGreg 4y ago

Angrish is a portmanteau of Angry and English — people are angry that Normans and other peoples brought more words to the language. Portmanteau is a French loanword. Also, before the Norman conquests, wasn’t England full of tribes like Britons who all had different words anyway?

xwdv 4y ago

Facebook is an Anglish word, so what was the original English word?

cardanome 4y ago

I can see myself using this for fantasy stuff. It is perfect for adding some flavor and old-timey vibes to your writing while still being much more readable than actual old English.

jonnycomputer 4y ago

What a quaint 20th century-sort of ethno-nationalist notion that is.

drpixie 4y ago
It's disturbingly reminiscent of the rule britannia crowd, proud boys, and (now) dilbert :(
- bbg2401 4y ago
  Get a grip.
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jonnycomputer 4y ago
I think the downvoters must really not know much about 19th and 20th century European ethno-nationalism, or how cultural movements centered around language, religion and myth, were particularly instrumental in the formation of ethnic national identities, and what that inevitably entailed for those not in the hegemonic majorities. Nor how the invention of the past, construction of new "ancient" traditions, and a nostalgic longing for an imagined more pure mythic past served nationalist agendas among competing European states. And of course, all of this is still going on, in all sorts of places other than Europe (e.g. Africa, Asia). But I won't complain about downvotes without an attempt to actually give people the opportunity to learn something. Ethnonationalism, Nationalism, Empire - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/11287462.2006.10800885 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/11287462.2006.10... Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe - Language Chapter - https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/56/object/122-159898 https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/56/object/122-159898 Linguistic Purism in the History of the German Language - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291539411_Linguistic_Purism_in_the_History_of_the_German_language https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291539411_Linguisti... Revisiting Key Debates in the Study of Nationalism - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01432-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01432-w

wrp 4y ago

For the non-British here, the history of the English language can be a toxic political subject in the UK. As an American who studies Anglo-Saxon-Jute language and literature as a hobby, I'm intrigued by speculation on how the language would have developed without the Norman Conquest, but I'm wary of discussing it around Brits unless I'm sure it won't trigger them.

secondcoming 4y ago
What in the world are you on about?

gerdesj 4y ago

Anglish can go and fuck itself, as a wise person once never said. English cannot and will not and never will be perfect, nor pure or whatevs but it will get a message across. It is rather more flexible than your average language and that is probably a complete accident. There are loads of pidgins of English and a phenomenal number of dialects. This is just for "modern" English. You can fiddle with word order and ignore quite a lot of word endings and still it hangs together. This Anglish bollocks sounds like a roundly racist notion involving "purity". I hate that.

calvinmorrison 4y ago
I guess the premise of Anglish can be summed up as: No, we don't need latin, or greek roots, to enjoy our language, and there's just as much if not more of a reason to use roots natural to our language, and no you aren't smarter or wiser, more scholarly or intellectual, because you use big long fancy sounding latin or greek based words. maybe the reason a lot of english doesn't make sense (in contrast to german) is because we replaced a lot of words we might join to create new meanings with greek words"But there is also the further idea that Anglish is a recognition and a celebration of the English part of modern English. For, although it has borrowed thousands and thousands of words throughout its life, there still exists a true English core to English, the most important everyday words which no sentence or uttering could manage without. By stripping away the layers of borrowings, Anglish lets us better appreciate that core and the role it plays in our language."
- gerdesj 4y ago
  English is French! (lingua franca) The reason for that is because English is considered relatively easy to communicate with as a second language. English has quite happily built upon its roots and is able to grab "foreign" words and take them on board, without fear, favour or rancour. Why not? Modern English takes advantage of a vast vocabulary, much of which is not natively derived or generated but is still cherished. Anglish with it's purity notions should be considered degenerative and racist in my view.
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irrational 4y ago

This reads like Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer (where he describes things using the ten hundred most common words in English) mixed with racism.

maximinus_thrax 4y ago

> We the Folk of the Foroned Riches, to make a more flawless oneship, build rightness, bring frith and stillness to our land, shield one another, uphold the overall welfare, and hold fast the Blessings of Freedom to ourselves and our offspring, do foresay and lay down this lawbook for the foroned riches of Americksland. :)) for a second there I thought this was /r/justneckbeardthings

ascotan 4y ago
Honestly I can only hear this in the voice of one of the hobbits from the Amazon LOTR series.

permo-w 4y ago

"I am of this opinion that our own tung should be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges; wherein if we take not heed by tiim, ever borowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt." - John Cheke I think John Cheke can be satisfied that English has repaid its dues ten times over in the modern era

jschveibinz 4y ago

[flagged]

Octokiddie 4y ago

> The term "Anglish" was made up by Paul Jennings in 1966, however the desire to remove foreign influence from the English language is a tradition that goes back all the way to 1066 when the Norman invasion brought in the majority of foreign vocabulary to English. It's worth noting that Paul Jennings is described as a "humourist." > Paul Francis Jennings (20 June 1918 – 26 December 1989) was an English humourist and author. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Jennings_(British_author) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Jennings_(British_author)

ihatepython 4y ago

I was hoping it would be a combination of Angular and English.

ascotan 4y ago

This is silly. There is no such thing as "native" English. English is a hodgepodge of languages from Scandinavian, Celtic, German, Latin, French and more.

chadlavi 4y ago
And the Angles came from modern day Germany anyway

tw1984 4y ago

wait a sec, their web site itself is written in English not that fancy Anglish!

sharkjacobs 4y ago

> An interesting illustration of this is the way in which the English flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning-away from the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific. from Politics and the English Language by George Orwell

omoikane 4y ago

These examples like "wordbook" and "nameknown" reminds me of Newspeak, in the sense of building words by concatenating simple words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

ryanschneider 4y ago

I coincidentally just watched a YT video by RobWords on the same subject last week: https://youtu.be/aMA3M6b9iEY https://youtu.be/aMA3M6b9iEY It’s an interesting watch but I do see why the attempts at “purifying” the language are troubling if taken as an actual attempt at anything other than a fun conlang. Edit: oh the video is mentioned on the site. :)

notorandit 4y ago

Nice and interesting. And useless IMHO. It hardly will be a small group of scholars and aficionados to shape a language. More likely, we the people.

kissgyorgy 4y ago

In Hungary, we sometimes speak "Hunglish", where we sprinkle Hungarian with English words, most of the time simply because there is no alternative.

nickpinkston 4y ago

It sounds like how Cletus on the Simpsons talks - which may be because some of the backwoods accents in popular media are parodies of real accent isolates from remote areas in the near past. (present?) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMKqRp3veL8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMKqRp3veL8

intellectronica 4y ago

This is a dog whistle for white supremacy that screams louder than a vuvuzela. English as it is used today is, like every language, the product of evolution, including cross-pollination with other languages. The idea that there's some "pure" form of a language, or really any aspect of Human culture, is an offence to everything that being human is.

kensai 4y ago

I thought only we Greeks did such stuff! :)

hyperthesis 4y ago

ever borowing and never paying [1500's] Did not age well. English degrades gracefully, in grammar and vocabulary, enabling it to be widely used (or, conceivably, resulting from wide use).

inwit 4y ago

Cf uncleftish beholding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding

tux2bsd 4y ago

[dead]

jl6 4y ago

English has clearly borrowed a lot of words, but this makes me wonder whether English has borrowed grammar too.

bravura 4y ago

The beauty of the English language always comes from picking the word with the perfect connotation. At the most articulate, you have speakers like Christopher Hitchens: “It especially annoys me when racists are accused of 'discrimination.' The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one 'race' to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.” ― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian But sometimes the strongest turns-of-phrase in English can be the simplest. We were recently chatting about the Portuguese "Cansas-me a beleza". In English, if you said to someone: "You tire my beauty" with perfect delivery it would be withering.

permo-w 4y ago
that Hitchens quote is nice, but typically for him, and fittingly for the context, it’s more of an attempt to be contrary and interesting than it is to be correct. racists are accused of discriminating by race. he obviously knew this, and it’s still an interesting point, but to be annoyed by it is to be annoyed by correct usage of English
- bravura 4y ago
  The word play here is one of nuanced diction here. Namely the secondary meaning of the word: Meaning 2: recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another. "discrimination between right and wrong" 2a) the ability to judge what is of high quality; good judgement or taste. "those who could afford to buy showed little taste or discrimination" I.e. the true ability to distinguish things, not simply sorting objects by color.
  - permo-w 4y ago
    this was my basic understanding of the quote. it's still correct to accuse a racist of discrimination

culebron21 4y ago

Reading the subredit, all the Anglish names of some special forces make a great alt-rock band names. https://www.reddit.com/r/anglish/comments/11dtrqp/special_operations_in_anglish/ https://www.reddit.com/r/anglish/comments/11dtrqp/special_op... Gouth Gripper, Fallwardens, Sundry Underrighting, Wyecraftish Loft Sway Band

tarkin2 4y ago

English and England and its history have never been pure. It has always mixed and took from other languages and other cultures. And from such derives some its most successful cultural items: its music ands its humour and its general creativity; that is, the creation of culture rather than the preservation of the ways of old. Purity and creativity and creation are no bedfellows. The project is fun for the addition of new words but I would hate to rob myself of the richness of English.

wageslave99 4y ago

Are there something like this for other languages? For example, Spanish without Arabic, Germanic, French or English words? It would be funny to know if a "more Latin Spanish" would be more understandable for Italian or French speakers.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

That's basically what the Academie Francaise have been doing all along for French and why we have words like "courriel" instead of email in the dictionary despite the fact most people never use them.

oblio 4y ago
A bit of consistency is good, I find, but not actually in actual words. The real consistency you should aim for is pronunciation. Especially for loanwords. Yes, the first time you encounter "CD" spelled out in your native language, it's jarring, but over time the benefits of this add up. Both English and French fail miserably at pronunciation consistency. See this for English: https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html If you aim to make your language as phonetic as possible, suddenly acquiring the language is much easier. Still very hard, but a degree of difficulty easier.

junon 4y ago

Anglish seems just to be literally translated German, and still uses borrowed words (book, for example). It sounds almost like the handbook from Severance or something quasi-fanatical, fictional religious texts or such.

kitd 4y ago

> Americksland This reminds me (a Welshman) of my favourite theory for the origin of the name "America": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Amerike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Amerike

fumblebee 4y ago

This reminds me of London slang, or what I now know is called "Multicultural London English"[1], which I was introduced to when I moved to London. A friend asked me: > "Ey, wagwan fam, bare man gwarn dis flick, whatchu sayin'?" Translated, this means: > "Hey, how are you? Some folks are headed to the cinema. Would you like to join?" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English

kwhitefoot 4y ago

The example of the preamble to the US Constitution is a bit poor really because the Anglish version doesn't properly convey the meaning of the English version. A constitution is not merely, and not entirely, a book of laws. My lawyer wife had a great pile of law books, but none of them were a constitution. And the idea that one can sensibly revive Old English words to use in Modern English grammar is a bit odd, they are after all related languages not the same language. The first is inflected, the second mostly not. In my opinion, contrary to that of John Cheke, the great strength of English is precisely that it is so willing to borrow from other languages. It is one of the defining characteristics of English that a foreign word can be adopted, and adapted, very easily so that after a relatively short time it doesn't feel especially foreign.

maksimur 4y ago

I'm curious to discover if an Anglish opposite favouring phrases from other languages in lieu of native ones exists.

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jonnycomputer 4y ago

This is very reminiscent of 19th and 20th century European ethno-nationalism, or how cultural movements centered around language, religion and myth, were particularly instrumental in the formation of ethnic national identities, and what that inevitably entailed for those not in the hegemonic majorities. Nor how the invention of the past, construction of new "ancient" traditions, and a nostalgic longing for an imagined more pure mythic past served nationalist agendas among competing European states. And of course, all of this is still going on, in all sorts of places other than Europe (e.g. Africa, Asia). Ethnonationalism, Nationalism, Empire - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/11287462.2006.10 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/11287462.2006.10... Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe - Language Chapter - https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/56/object/122-159898 https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/56/object/122-159898 Linguistic Purism in the History of the German Language - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291539411_Linguisti https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291539411_Linguisti... Revisiting Key Debates in the Study of Nationalism - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01432-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01432-w

glonq 4y ago

I fully endorse harmless lingustic/academic antics, but some of the people behind "linguistic purity" also seem like the kind of folks who endorse cultural and racial purity.

timonoko 4y ago

Ænglish is the language of Ænglanders, who live on Ængland, an island with lots of Ængs. They used have trees, but fools burned them all down. Reason for this is of course that there was too many Ænglanders for normal slash and burn agriculture. And reason for this overpopulation is that they were living on remote island, so there were not enough wars.