What a quaint 20th century-sort of ethno-nationalist notion that is.
It's disturbingly reminiscent of the rule britannia crowd, proud boys, and (now) dilbert :(
What Is Anglish?
141–150 of 363 posts
Re: What Is Anglish?
#142This 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 ... reviv…
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…
I think it's fine to describe Anglish as "more Germanic". It's the words "native" and "pure" that I find confusing in this context.
Digressing a bit, I think race is rather akin to dialects, and species akin to languages. Neither have clear distinctions. Most people think of species as groups that can sexually reproduce, and races is a sub-groups of a species with identifiable shared characteristics. Similarly, languages are often defined in terms of mutual intelligibility, and dialects in terms of, well, identifiable shared characteristics.
But this is all very hand-wavy. In particular, nether can satisfy the transitive property. I might understand the English spoken in two different regions, but speakers in those regions could have a hell of a time understanding each other. The same applies to reproduction, and not just hypothetically: Grizzly bears can hybridize with polar bears and with black bears, but the latter two cannot hybridize with each other.
All this is to say that every individual actually has their own unique language, it just happens to be 99.99% similar to a lot of other peoples' language so we call them "the same". But within "a language", differences abound in vocabulary, grammar, slang, and connotations.
Re: What Is Anglish?
#143This reads like Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer (where he describes things using the ten hundred most common words in English) mixed with racism.
Re: What Is Anglish?
#144> 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
Re: What Is Anglish?
#145This is dumb but I'll take reckoner over computer, that word is wicked
It's a nice word. I wonder where they borrowed it from :)
Re: What Is Anglish?
#146I 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,…
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Re: What Is Anglish?
#147I 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,…
> 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.
But your link says the opposite of that:
> In the book, we show that both synchronically and historically, Middle (and Modern) English is unmistakably North Germanic and not West Germanic. (Uncontroversially, Old English, just like Dutch and German, is West Germanic.) That is, Middle English did not develop from Old English.
> We claim that Middle and Modern English are instead direct descendants of the language spoken by Scandinavians who had relocated to England over more than two centuries prior to the Norman Conquest. We refer to this earlier language as Norse.
The model there is that you have Angles in England speaking English and they get so badly overrun by Norse settlers that their language is replaced rather than influenced. None of them realize that this has happened; everyone blithely continues to refer to their language as "English" even though they've switched what language they're speaking. That seems like a difficult case to make.
Re: What Is Anglish?
#148Anglish 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 b…
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.
Re: What Is Anglish?
#149"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…
>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.
And in other areas, like the arts (from painting and photography to film and the novel), legal, and political terms. That's because France in those past 2-3 centuries was a huge power in Europe and globally, along with the UK).
For France, this ended with WWI and was a done deal with WWII but there was still some momentum up to the 70s.
So it was kind of like countries today copy US terms, fashion, politics, music, etc.
Re: What Is Anglish?
#150Reminded 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 kn…
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.