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What Is Anglish?

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Re: What Is Anglish?

#131

Post by tptacek »

davidgerard wrote: post #104

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/...

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.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#132

Post by retrac »

speakspokespok wrote: post #109
paganel wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

English also seams to borrow heavily from latin for anything medical. The words in Spanish for your bones, bacteria, etc would all be recognizable to your doctor.

It's quite systematic. Latin was the language of medicine. When they switched to English, or other local languages, they kept a lot of jargon. Religion and government and academic areas are similar.

Some of it is a social division that originates back to the Norman conquest of Britain. The guy in the field would call a cow's heart (the Old English equivalent of) a cow's heart. The lord would call it the (Norman French equivalent) of coeur de beouf. His doctor or priest would probably speak French or English but would write in Latin. Cordis bovem (or something I don't Latin).

From this mishmash modern English has cow, beef, bovine, heart, cardiac (Greek but clearly influenced by Latin cor). The original Anglo-Saxon word for cow, beef from French to refer to the meat of cow, and bovine from Latin, the fancy adjective. So even now a thousand years later, an overwrought academic writes of a cardiac arrest experienced by a bovine (Graeco-Latin), while in normal speech we might say the cow's heart gave out (Anglo-Saxon).

Something like "nephropathology induced by neurofibromatosis" was/is a sort of guild jargon or cant. It just means kidney disease caused by fibrous tumours of the nerves disease. Of course, you then lose the precision. How I put it is not unambiguous like neurofibromatosis is. I can see why doctors just keep their cant.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#134

Post by gerdesj »

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.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#135

Post by secondcoming »

wrp wrote: post #127

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.

What in the world are you on about?

Re: What Is Anglish?

#136

Post by dsr_ »

nqzero wrote: post #79
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

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)

More precisely:

Is this English? Cool cool, it finna be.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#137

Post by calvinmorrison »

gerdesj wrote: post #134

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 igno…

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."

Re: What Is Anglish?

#138

Post by Swizec »

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…

This has been fun to observe in Slovenia.

Old words come from German, because we were part of AustroHungary. Old-but-reformed words come from Czech, because in the 1800's we wanted to stop being so Germanic. Somewhat old words come from Serbo-Croatian, because we were part of Yugoslavia. Modern words come from English, because internet.

So we have a language where words you use around the home are often germanic, jokes and swear words are south slavic, and anything to do with computers is english.

Plus a few French words here and there from the time of Napoleon.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#139

Post by irrational »

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…

Same with English, but not only European languages. Just yesterday I was listening to a woman speaking Tagalog and quite a few words almost certainly came from English.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#140

Post by sib »

xico wrote: post #95
TimTheTinker wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First of all, “race” is pseudo-science. Thank you. That is all.

It is a pretty well known fact. The concept of human race is developed by racist ideologies (obviously), see for instance [1], and is as such a banned concept in many countries. [1] https://bioanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement...

How awful to think that a concept could be banned...
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