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What Is Anglish?

anglish.org

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Re: What Is Anglish?

#341

Post by nine_k »

WorldMaker wrote: post #335
nine_k wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is because English has lost most of its Indo-European heritage (except lexical), and looks much more similar to Chinese that to an IE language like German, Spanish, Russian, Greek, Hindi / Urdu, or even Farsi (though Farsi has also lost grammatical gender). * English has no inflections; nouns and adjectives stay the same no matter what role in a sentence do they have. * English has no noun-adjective agreement, a…

English has had a lot of good or at least interesting evolutionary reasons to drop most grammatical cases and grammatical genders. English decided to make some interesting trade-offs in expected word order to lower redundancy in inter-word agreement morphology. Also, while Proto-Indo-European had plenty of grammatical cases, the current theories are that it had fewer grammatical genders than modern languages. The PIE…

Thanks for the detailed comment!

Certainly there are languages more closely related to English, like Dutch or Swedish / Norwegian, that stand sort of midway between English and (High) German. But if we take older languages, like classic Latin, or those with many archaic features, like Lithuanian, the distance from English syntax and grammar becomes pretty large.

I suspect that languages tend to simplify in grammar in areas where several different languages have to coexist: say, England had Germanic, Celtic, and French languages interacting for quite some time, with some Latin thrown in by the church.

I suspect that Mandarin Chinese also resulted from many languages on a pretty large territory interacting a lot, shaving grammatical complexity bit by bit.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#342

Post by tsimionescu »

coldtea wrote: post #274
tsimionescu wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Franks" in lingua franca refers to all Western Europeans collectively, it's not actually about the French.

Etymologically. In the last 2-3 centuries it was used referring to French.

Sure, but the name of the language (lingua franca) originates much earlier, when it referred to (Western) Europeans in general.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#343

Post by jhbadger »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #196
wolfram74 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counterargument is that lots of words allow for precise concision. wordbook can be ambiguous, as almost all books are filled with words. Is wordbook specifying that this book is a word book as opposed to a picture book? wordkenbook might be less ambiguous, but maybe this referring to all nonfiction books using words? all that being said, I think uncleftish[0] beholding is an amazing piece of text and a good exerc…

> wordbook can be ambiguous, as almost all books are filled with words. Is wordbook specifying that this book is a word book as opposed to a picture book? wordkenbook might be less ambiguous, but maybe this referring to all nonfiction books using words? Your description only applies to a word phrase "word book". The lexicalized word "wordbook" would have its own meaning (presumably one of your suggestions), just like…

Yes, Compound words in any language are ambiguous based on their components and need to be learned as concepts into themselves. In English we have "houseboat", which means a boat that has living quarters in it that someone uses as a home. But based on the words, it could mean a boat that you keep in your house instead.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#344

Post by WorldMaker »

nine_k wrote: post #341
WorldMaker wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English has had a lot of good or at least interesting evolutionary reasons to drop most grammatical cases and grammatical genders. English decided to make some interesting trade-offs in expected word order to lower redundancy in inter-word agreement morphology. Also, while Proto-Indo-European had plenty of grammatical cases, the current theories are that it had fewer grammatical genders than modern languages. The PIE…

Thanks for the detailed comment! Certainly there are languages more closely related to English, like Dutch or Swedish / Norwegian, that stand sort of midway between English and (High) German. But if we take older languages, like classic Latin, or those with many archaic features, like Lithuanian, the distance from English syntax and grammar becomes pretty large. I suspect that languages tend to simplify in grammar in…

English's grammar didn't simplify if you mean its syntax by that, its morphology did. (Inflections affect morphology [word form] more than syntax.)

English's grammar actually got far more complex because word order matters a whole lot more syntactically versus German or French or Latin. For one big instance that is often pointed out by English as a Second Language problems, adjective order in English is comparatively extremely rigid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective#Order

Another place you see this complexity is the old "sentences should not end in a preposition" early schooling "rule": in Latin word order mostly doesn't matter as long as key things agree on grammatical case/gender. Prepositions "can't" syntactically exist in Latin without their paired nouns inflected to the right grammar case. But the pair itself can be in almost any order in the sentence. Whereas English has a more rigid prepositional word order, because nouns don't inflect at all when used in a preposition (unless you are someone still trying to keep "whom" on life support centuries after it died in English and became a grammatical zombie). The syntax is more complicated, but the morphology is easier. One of the interesting "gains" from the complicated syntax is that some prepositions started working with intentionally dropped or elided direct nouns. That is also added syntactical complexity. In English there are many prepositions it is perfectly valid to end a sentence with. Parsing that is interestingly complex.

Extremely relatedly the similar childhood "rule" to "never split an infinitive". In many languages infinitives are a pure grammatical case involving word inflections that have to match, and the order generally doesn't matter if they involve multiple participles, and there is no such thing syntactically as a "split infinitive", it just can't syntactically exist. Whereas English relies on a more complex syntax for infinitives that relies more explicitly on rigid word orders, making split infinitives at all possible in the first place. Then regular usage of the different concurrent syntaxes started to diverge their meaning. "To boldly go" means something subtly different in English than "to go boldly", and forbidding split infinitives entirely forbids entire categories of creative expression in the language.

I don't think there's a simple answer for why English grammar evolved the way that it did in shifting morphological complexity for syntactical complexity. I just know that calling that evolution "simplifying" isn't entirely accurate either. (English syntax feels simpler to native speakers than it actually is.) The language certainly had some interesting linguistic pressures being confined to a highly regarded/desirable set of isles for centuries with a mixture of strong related languages immediately nearby, then when it was used as a language for helping bootstrap an industrial revolution and as a world-spanning empire.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#345

Post by thaumasiotes »

permo-w wrote: post #310
thaumasiotes wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The link says that Old English is not an ancestor of modern English. triyambakam says that it is. A creole would be neither West Germanic nor North Germanic; creoles are new. The grammatical structures of a creole are, in general, not inherited from any of the "parent" languages.

it’s a synecdoche. the link is saying it didn’t solely develop from Old English, not that it didn’t at all

It really can't get any clearer than stating "Middle English did not develop from Old English."

Re: What Is Anglish?

#346

Post by permo-w »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #345
permo-w wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it’s a synecdoche. the link is saying it didn’t solely develop from Old English, not that it didn’t at all

It really can't get any clearer than stating "Middle English did not develop from Old English."

you’re reading it too literally

Re: What Is Anglish?

#347

Post by thaumasiotes »

permo-w wrote: post #346
thaumasiotes wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really can't get any clearer than stating "Middle English did not develop from Old English."

you’re reading it too literally

You are attempting to read in a viewpoint that the book specifically says it doesn't believe.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#348

Post by yarg »

avgcorrection wrote: post #336
yarg wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Races exist. I can't believe that I'm even saying that. They're not a social construct. Nor are the sexes. Human beings are a single species with a large number of branches allowing them to survive localised environmental niches. Sometimes the edges are blurry, sometimes not. But to pretend that races aren't real just because of an interlink between the study of race and racist ideologies is fucking ridiculous.

I salute your tilting at windmills against Political Correctness. But it’s a waste of effort. I mean that it is pseudo-science in the sense that there is no scientific substance to it. I mean that every time someone has tried to make a science of race—and there have been plenty of attempts—it’s just turned out to be a crock of shit. There is an everyday meaning of “race”, yes. mostly about skin pigmentation, eye shap…

> There is an everyday meaning of “race”, yes. mostly about skin pigmentation, eye shape, bone shape. Things like that. So why do I mention the pseudo-scientific connection? Because “race-mixing” implies that different “races” breeding is bad, which must mean—beyond the completely shallow like the appearance of people who are “mixed”—that there is something substantive to the notion of races which makes mixed-race people inferior in some way. Or that non- are inferior. But there isn’t.

I'm going to try in good faith to follow what you just said. Or get so far as the part that makes me stop reading.

> Because “race-mixing” implies that different “races” breeding is bad

Why? Because a bunch of racist bullshit about the mud people? You're confusing the manifestation of an event with the social stigma around it.

And there is no doubt at all that that stigma was abhorrent to its core (shout out to Dolphus Raymond), but that's got fuck all to do with what you are asserting.

And by the way, mixed race people (unimaginary as they are) are sexy as hell.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#349

Post by wirrbel »

MrJohz wrote: post #227
wirrbel wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

na, you are missing the point here, in German "Wörterbuch" (literally wordsbook) is the standard term for a dictionary. No ambiguity because by default a book is with words and then all composita describe some kind of deviation (Bilderbuch= picture book, Handbuch = handbook -> manual, Fahrtenbuch = drive book -> driver's log). English just draws vocabulary from many roots and attaches connotations to them which have…

You're cherry picking examples here though. How do you explain the "-zeug" words? If you think of "Zeug" more as tool then some of them kind of make more sense ("Feuerzeug", "Werkzeug", at a pinch "Spielzeug") but are you really thinking of a plane as a flying tool? And there are also cases where English has opted for a compound word and German has just invented its own: Ampel vs traffic light, for example. Personall…

> Personally, I feel like I can be much more precise in English than I can in German (although that's probably mostly impartiality again!) Yes there are lots of words that are ostensibly just synonyms of each other, but they're mostly not true synonyms, because they have different connotations and can be used in different ways. I miss that wealth of vocabulary in German, where it often feels like I say more to get across the exact idea that I want to.

Don't know if you are still reading this but nevertheless I wanted to give a reply to this paragraph. Overall I think I really understand your point here, but these various connotations are to me not precision, but a symptom of a high-risk of imprecision if that makes sense. In German (there I am partial), or in french (there I would be impartial) I think that language is more precise because if in doubt, you just add a relative clause or another sentence.

You know, learning English and French in Germany, after 4 years of french classes (like 4h per week) my 4th year of french classes was with the same teacher who also taught English. She made a comparison, when learning english you basically are able to speak fairly easily already in your first or second year on a basic level. To become proficient it takes however a decade of learning and mastery. With french, most students are struggling for 4 years until the grammar is learned, but then they actually have all tools under their belt to speak and write proper french. the rest is filling a few wholes in your vocabulary-knowledge here and there and memorizing a few more irregular verb forms.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#350

Post by avgcorrection »

yarg wrote: post #348
avgcorrection wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I salute your tilting at windmills against Political Correctness. But it’s a waste of effort. I mean that it is pseudo-science in the sense that there is no scientific substance to it. I mean that every time someone has tried to make a science of race—and there have been plenty of attempts—it’s just turned out to be a crock of shit. There is an everyday meaning of “race”, yes. mostly about skin pigmentation, eye shap…

> There is an everyday meaning of “race”, yes. mostly about skin pigmentation, eye shape, bone shape. Things like that. So why do I mention the pseudo-scientific connection? Because “race-mixing” implies that different “races” breeding is bad, which must mean—beyond the completely shallow like the appearance of people who are “mixed”—that there is something substantive to the notion of races which makes mixed-race pe…

> I'm going to try in good faith to follow what you just said. Or get so far as the part that makes me stop reading.

A for effort.

> > Because “race-mixing” implies that different “races” breeding is bad

> Why? Because a bunch of racist bullshit about the mud people?

“Anti-race-mixing ideologies”. “Anti” means bad, i.e. different races breeding is bad. How could it be more straightforward?

> > Not to over-charge this conversation, but it reminds me of anti-race-mixing ideologies.

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