[HN Gopher] What Is Anglish?
___________________________________________________________________
What Is Anglish?
Author : warrenm
Score : 68 points
Date : 2023-02-27 18:59 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (anglish.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (anglish.org)
| roncesvalles wrote:
| If you want to read way more Anglish:
| https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Oned_Riches_of_Emerichland
| jagthebeetle wrote:
| Of particular note are some reinforcements from Old Norse (circa
| 850s onward):
|
| - are (displacing beoth, sind, and sindon)
|
| - their (displacing heora)
|
| - they (displacing hie)
|
| 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"
| moffkalast wrote:
| > Computer > Reckoner
|
| _walks up to workstation_
|
| At last, the time of reckoning is at hand!
| squiffsquiff wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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)
| martynr wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Because linguistic purism has a totally untroubled and neutral
| history of effectiveness.
| triyambakam wrote:
| The Anglish community isn't ideologically motivated. It's a fun
| conlang (constructed language) project from language nerds.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| We're too close in history to language purity being used as a
| tool of oppression and genocide. There are living people now
| still trying to regain what they lost by having their
| ancestral dialects and languages "purified" out of them using
| the same logic presented here.
|
| That horror is just too recent to be played for fun by nerds
| imo. Not that I can stop them and I'm not trying to, but if
| you're free to say "it's just for fun" I'm equally free to
| say "and it sucks anyway."
| philwelch wrote:
| This is what happened to the English under French-speaking
| dominion in the Middle Ages.
| triyambakam wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Maybe. But just because the time will never be right
| doesn't mean now is the time either.
| miles wrote:
| 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 (Han Yu ) and
| gairaigo (Wai Lai Yu ), 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
|
| [1] https://origamijapan.net/origami/2018/01/13/yamato-kotoba/
| hunter2_ wrote:
| 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."
| jerf wrote:
| Archive.org:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230227185951/https://anglish.o...
| bee_rider wrote:
| > "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 wrote:
| 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]
| zabzonk wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Probably the Germanic languages of the Anglo Saxons- it's
| called Anglish, after all.
| zabzonk wrote:
| what it is called (which is a kind of advertising) is no
| evidence of where this came from.
| bloppe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If you wind back when the borrowings started happening in great
| number, you get to a time when English was mostly "purely"
| Germanic. That's what this project is - as if Old English had
| continued on without being influenced from French etc.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Don't the Celtic or other pre-Saxon dialects have the better
| claim to seniority, rather than the tongue of the Saxon
| invaders?
|
| https://www.britannica.com/place/United-Kingdom/Anglo-
| Saxon-...
| zabzonk wrote:
| borrowings have always happened.
|
| and as regards early english, did you ever see phillip larkin
| describe it as "ape's bumfodder"? luckily we replaced it with
| many, many borrowings, so much so that looking at AS english
| is prainful on the brain - and uneccessary.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| True, but only a quarter to a third of modern English
| vocabulary can be legitimately described as having purely
| English or Germanic origins. It might as well not be
| "English" at this point.
| triyambakam wrote:
| Of course, at different times it happened to more or less a
| degree, and from different languages. It's all arbitrary,
| but this project chose an arbitrary precision of "pure"
| Germanic English. It's their choice and doesn't feel
| ideologically motivated, more so in the spirit of conlang
| (constructed languages).
| zabzonk wrote:
| > "pure" Germanic English
|
| something there never has been?
| simonh wrote:
| Think of it as English as it was when the concept of
| England originated.
| triyambakam wrote:
| No, there was a definite period of history when English
| was highly Germanic and lacked influence from non-
| Germanic languages.
| [deleted]
| zabzonk wrote:
| > only a quarter to a third of modern English vocabulary
| can be legitimately described as having purely English
|
| does that make sense? are we dealing with recursive
| definitions of english here?
| bloppe wrote:
| 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.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Tired point to make. Languages are cousins, either first or
| fifteenth. (Or maybe they have no known cousins, but
| whatever... English certainly does.) Anglish proposes more
| Germanic words. It doesn't propose to find words which cannot
| be traced back to a common Indo-European root word...
|
| > 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.
|
| First of all, "race" is pseudo-science. Language research is
| not. Second of all, try to make an argument for "race mixing"
| which isn't racist.
|
| In contrast, Anglish is more of an aesthetic approach to
| language, one which doesn't threaten to marginalize any groups
| of people. Frankly, I suspect that the reason why this
| offensive comparison is even brought up is becaue of the
| _Germanic_ assocation, which some people might not find
| _aesthetic_ for historical reasons.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| > First of all, "race" is pseudo-science.
|
| Thank you. That is all.
| axlee wrote:
| I see it as a fun way to see how english would work when it is
| delatinized / degallicized. Most other influences are a detail.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| Although it seems intended as fun I'm always a little nervous
| of things like this because it also denies the power
| relationships that led to those borrowings. Degallicized
| English is kind of erasing the relationship between England,
| Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and even Cornwall. I'd be much more
| comfortable if I didn't have to explain to so many Americans
| that Scotland is not a part of England, that it isn't a
| separate island, etc.
| triyambakam wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lisper wrote:
| > the point of this project is to see what a modern "pure"
| Germanic English would be like.
|
| The absurdity of this is manifest in the name: "pure Germanic
| English". That's like "pure California Champaign" or "pure
| Wisconsin Parmesan". There is no such thing as "pure
| English", Germanic or otherwise, because one of the defining
| characteristics of English is that it is, and always has
| been, an amalgam of many different languages accrued over
| time. Even Old English had four different dialects. And
| certainly a "pure _modern_ English " is the very paragon of
| an oxymoron. If it's "pure", it's not English.
|
| There's nothing wrong with playing around with language.
| There is something wrong with calling the result "pure"
| because it casts negative aspersions on everything else as
| "impure", which is a word that carries a lot of disparaging
| implications.
| philwelch wrote:
| Latin and Proto-Germanic were both Indo-European languages but
| that doesn't make them the same language. A lot of the family
| resemblance between English and other related languages like
| German or Dutch is lost under the thick blanket of Romance
| vocabulary.
| IncRnd wrote:
| 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.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| Weird that they remove Latin from the language but not Anglo-
| Saxon, even though the Latin influence was earlier.
| ianburrell wrote:
| 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.
| kazinator wrote:
| The concept behind Anglish is stupid because English is built on
| Latin just as much as on Germanic roots, if not more.
| Archelaos wrote:
| 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.
| csours wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding
| cafard wrote:
| If that is your thing, have a look at Charles Doughty's _Arabia
| Deserta_. I believe that Dover Books keeps it in print.
| jake_morrison wrote:
| 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".
| nikolay wrote:
| Isn't "book" borrowed from German ("buch")?
| kzrdude wrote:
| 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)
| vitno wrote:
| 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_beh...
| triyambakam wrote:
| 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.
| triyambakam wrote:
| 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?lan...
| epicureanideal wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| simonh wrote:
| Norwegians speaking their native tongue to me sound like
| they're speaking German with a Geordie accent.
| martynr wrote:
| Exactly my observation as a southerner who has lived in the
| north and Scandinavia
| martynr wrote:
| Northern English is significantly influenced by Scandinavian
| words today- for example the "-by" suffixes on town names is
| a direct use of the modern Danish word for town, Kirkby
| meaning Church Town in a direct translation
| triyambakam wrote:
| I'm not aware of any natural or constructed
| English/Scandinavian pidgins/creoles, but that sure would be
| fun. The conventional wisdom is that it's easier for an
| English speaker to learn Swedish than it is to learn German.
|
| Regarding if that would arise in the Scandinavian countries
| in the future - it actually seems more likely in German
| speaking countries. There is actually a word for it now -
| Denglisch (Deutsch Englisch), similar to e.g. Hinglish (Hindi
| English). Basically using German grammar with large amounts
| of English vocabulary. I hear so many English words in German
| lately for which there exists a perfectly good German word
| already.
|
| Examples:
|
| Denlisch: "Bist du ready?" Deutsch: "Bist du bereit?"
| English: "Are you ready?"
|
| Denglisch: Joke Deutsch: Witz
| throwaway305235 wrote:
| Norwegian has several loanwords from English. Some are
| pronounced differently (such as "juice"), while others use
| the English pronunciation, but sometimes with a Norwegian
| ending. The latter is more common among the youth.
|
| Another example:
|
| "Denne eplejuicen er helt fucka / fokka"
|
| -> This apple juice is fucked up.
|
| Gamers often talk about "lev'le opp" ("level up") for
| example, but it's not used that often in its written form.
| It just looks strange to me. Sometimes they even replace a
| Norwegian word such as "oppgradere" with its English
| equivalent ("upgrade"), but pronouncing it in a mix of
| English and Norwegian.
|
| We also have a few loanwords from German:
|
| - "Vorse", from the German "vorspiel" (prelude). We use it
| to describe starting the evening drinking and partying at a
| friend's apartment before going to a nightclub / bar.
|
| - "Dass". from "das Hauschen" ("little house"). This is
| used as a slang for toilet.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| They'd probably get some of that for free if they leant on
| Scottish and Northern dialect words, like they give the example
| of
|
| Famous > Nameknown is one of the examples, but perhaps Wellkent
| would work better if they're otherwise using ken for knowledge.
| triyambakam wrote:
| That's true! I forgot about Scots
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| Perhaps the word bairns for children could have been used
| instead of the word offspring. The word is pretty similar to
| the Scandinavian words for children
| philwelch wrote:
| It's not clear to me why the project should seek to revert the
| linguistic influence of Norman invaders while enshrining or
| even amplifying the linguistic influence of Norse invaders.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > 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
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Sure. Reminds me of "Up Goer Five" but these language
| experiments don't stay interesting for long.
| triyambakam wrote:
| Maybe not interesting to you... but I've been interested in
| Anglish for almost 20 years :)
| henriquecm8 wrote:
| This gave me a cool idea for worldbuilding.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| 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
|
| It makes some sense, e.g "sourstuff" for "oxygen" - which in
| German is "Sauerstoff", in Dutch "zuurstof".
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| "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."
| dctoedt wrote:
| 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer
| [deleted]
| jacooper wrote:
| Wait, computer isn't English native?
| seszett wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 'Compute(er)' is a French word
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| Ironically, the French ,,Academie francaise" banned the term
| ,,computer" and established ,,l'ordinateur" instead to keep
| the language pure. :)
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| I had a comment written up to say the same thing, but then
| I found this: 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Ok, sorry, I did not fact check my comment. I just
| remembered my French teacher from school making fun about
| L'Academie with regard to this and other weird French
| terms like ,,baladeur" instead of Walkman (tm).
| anthk wrote:
| We Spaniards use ordenador and before that we used
| "computadora".
|
| The Spanish speakers across the pond use "computadora" or
| "computador".
|
| To us computador make us think on something like an old
| ancient device from the 60-70's.
| [deleted]
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Compter is a verb in french, the noun would be comptoir, I
| believe. But they use ordinateur for computer, because IBM
| wanted a fancier word to better sell their fancy machine.
| https://blogs.transparent.com/french/the-origin-of-
| lordinate...
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2023-02-27 23:00 UTC)