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What Is Anglish?

anglish.org

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Re: What Is Anglish?

#111

Post by billiam »

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.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#112

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

vitno wrote: post #19

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 M…

> 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

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.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#113

Post by spokesbeing »

mc32 wrote: post #96
triyambakam wrote: post #20

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,…

I think it depends on what region of England or the UK at large you want to consider. If you're NE England into Scotland, yeah, Scandinavian languages had influence and that's is reflected in their current vocab. Other areas may have retained more of the original dialect with fewer Scandinavian influences initially though those would return via the Norman invasion with added French vocabulary.

Old Norse accounts for about 5% of English vocabulary, including very common everyday words, not regional. Examples: egg, knife, sky, skill, etc, etc. Tons of core vocab.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Old...

Re: What Is Anglish?

#114

Post by longcat »

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.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#115

Post by dorilama »

paganel wrote: post #102
squiffsquiff wrote: post #7

"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

Related to that, it's interesting how many European languages have heavily borrowed from French in the last 2-3 centuries, especially what I would call "technical" terms. I was watching the subtitled video of a speech made by a Hungarian minister recently and the few words that I could make sense of were all similar to the their French counter-parts (or how I would think a French technical word loaned into Hungarian…

I would say borrow from latin and greek: bi- from latin bi- meaning twice [0] cycle from greek kyklos meaning wheel [1]

[0]https://www.etymonline.com/word/bi-?ref=etymonline_crossrefe... [1]https://www.etymonline.com/word/bicycle

Re: What Is Anglish?

#116

Post by tremon »

jake_morrison wrote: post #74

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".

Is that because those are the only known words left in our time, or because the original vocabulary was rather limited?

Re: What Is Anglish?

#117

Post by [deleted] »

epicureanideal wrote: post #28
triyambakam wrote: post #20

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,…

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?

[deleted]

Re: What Is Anglish?

#118

Post by crispinb »

longcat wrote: post #114

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.

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

Re: What Is Anglish?

#120

Post by naniwaduni »

kazinator wrote: post #88

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 + meaning "not a and non + meaning " not ". 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,…

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.

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