121–130 of 363 posts
Portmanteau is a French loanword.
Also, before the Norman conquests, wasn’t England full of tribes like Britons who all had different words anyway?
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 mes…
It is, from Latin non = “not”.
It is perfect for adding some flavor and old-timey vibes to your writing while still being much more readable than actual old English.
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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.
Spanish is considered a "Romance" language, along with French, Italian int al. English is considered a "Germanic" language along with German, Dutch int al. English alone has at least three major periodic based "versions" - Old, Middle, Modern. There were also events such as a major vowel change where the way we pronounce vowels today differs from before that event.
Spanish seems to have a famed "lisp". However that simplistic approach to a complex language and Spain as a whole ignores rather a lot of history, culture and is frankly an insult! As we say in Britain - "Viva la difference".
English as spoken in Britain and elsewhere should borrow and bother from every language it ever trips over. It should always evolve and mutate and continue to become ever more flexible. It should also continue to enable useful "pidgins" which are amalgams of English bolted on the side of another language and vice versa.
What English seems to have lost compared to the other Germanics is a lot of formal complicated verb conjugations and nounal declensions and noun genders and quite a lot more. Complexity can be bolted on but it is optional. Subject object verb is also quite fluid too in English. I believe German at least insists on a verb dump at the end of a sentence. English still has many of these structures - active, passive, subjunctive verbs (transitive, intrans etc); Nom, Voc, Acc, Gen, Dat, Abl for your nouns but they are largely implied via other words instead of suffixes.
English is quite literally and vocally French!
(lingua franca - language of the Franks)
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.
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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.
> 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 languag…
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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.
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-...