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What Is Anglish?

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Re: What Is Anglish?

#201

Post by guidoism »

wolfram74 wrote: post #193
mkotowski wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opinion of a Polish guy: In my eyes, English is pretty bloated, when seemingly almost every concept can have three or more alternative words, each from a different source. It is all matter of perspective, I suppose. :) I think such feeling can be caused by languages that rely strongly on creating compound words rather than borrowing a new ones (example from the site: Dictionary > Wordbook).

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…

I feel this way when I speak Spanish. I'm constantly looking for the right word and it always seems that there is only one word in Spanish that fits multiple words in English. I've had the opposite happen where there are more precise words in Spanish, but not as often as the reverse.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#202

Post by wirrbel »

wolfram74 wrote: post #193
mkotowski wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opinion of a Polish guy: In my eyes, English is pretty bloated, when seemingly almost every concept can have three or more alternative words, each from a different source. It is all matter of perspective, I suppose. :) I think such feeling can be caused by languages that rely strongly on creating compound words rather than borrowing a new ones (example from the site: Dictionary > Wordbook).

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…

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 to be made a bit more explicit in englisch. So english for example has from the Germanic root "hunger", and from the french root (compare french "faim" hungry -> french "famine") "famine". Now in German, famine is "Hungersnot" (hunger crisis) and "hunger" is "Hunger".

Both languages are precise, yet I would say as a German native speaker, that French is more precise than English (also German is more precise but in this argument I am not impartial).

Just to be clear I am no opponent of loan words, and overall I believe modern-day languages that have a written culture probably converge towards an optimal information transmission rate, which is why english will gain and lose words, so will French and German.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#204

Post by msrenee »

ggm wrote: post #198
nwah1 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I steal your bicycle, but you still have it, then is it really stolen?

loan has the explicit give back property. thats what a loan IS: 'borrowed' carries the same implications with a down-note on the giving back. taken, adopted, brought in, co-opted... there's a thesaurus of choices which to my way of thinking do a better job of describing english's habit of .. adopting other languages words. the key point is that gate-keeping in english doesn't work. we don't have the academie francais…

Well, I don't have any specific examples off the top of my head, but it's not that unusual for a loanword to disappear from the language it was borrowed from and then wind up reintroduced in some form to the original language.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#206

Post by thaumasiotes »

permo-w wrote: post #164
thaumasiotes wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, ju…

>> … English is unmistakably North Germanic and not West Germanic … that’s exactly what they were saying. English is traditionally described as West Germanic with German, Frisian and Dutch, but as a creole with Old Norse it could be instead described as North Germanic

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.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#207

Post by intellectronica »

This is a dog whistle for white supremacy that screams louder than a vuvuzela. English as it is used today is, like every language, the product of evolution, including cross-pollination with other languages. The idea that there's some "pure" form of a language, or really any aspect of Human culture, is an offence to everything that being human is.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#208

Post by ggm »

msrenee wrote: post #204
ggm wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

loan has the explicit give back property. thats what a loan IS: 'borrowed' carries the same implications with a down-note on the giving back. taken, adopted, brought in, co-opted... there's a thesaurus of choices which to my way of thinking do a better job of describing english's habit of .. adopting other languages words. the key point is that gate-keeping in english doesn't work. we don't have the academie francais…

Well, I don't have any specific examples off the top of my head, but it's not that unusual for a loanword to disappear from the language it was borrowed from and then wind up reintroduced in some form to the original language.

Pho would be a good example. Its Viet Nam's adoption of "pot au feu" from the french, then back imported into French as Pho, along with everywhere else when the indochine community brought it along for the world.

And of course, British English has both pot au feu and pho.

I am told that Bistecca in Florentine, is the pre 1871 ununified italy, adopting "beef steak" from the english, and then exporting it as a speciality dish to the world as italian food went global.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#209

Post by ithkuil »

mkotowski wrote: post #192
hcayless wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting to me how comparatively impoverished Anglish seems. Here’s to promiscuity!

Opinion of a Polish guy: In my eyes, English is pretty bloated, when seemingly almost every concept can have three or more alternative words, each from a different source. It is all matter of perspective, I suppose. :) I think such feeling can be caused by languages that rely strongly on creating compound words rather than borrowing a new ones (example from the site: Dictionary > Wordbook).

Being bloated is a boon to the poet and a curse to student

Re: What Is Anglish?

#210

Post by taylorius »

mkotowski wrote: post #192
hcayless wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting to me how comparatively impoverished Anglish seems. Here’s to promiscuity!

Opinion of a Polish guy: In my eyes, English is pretty bloated, when seemingly almost every concept can have three or more alternative words, each from a different source. It is all matter of perspective, I suppose. :) I think such feeling can be caused by languages that rely strongly on creating compound words rather than borrowing a new ones (example from the site: Dictionary > Wordbook).

As a native English speaker, I think the multiple choices of word are a strength. They usually have subtle differences of style (if not meaning), which can affect the tone of the sentence. In my opinion, this is where English achieves its precision - at the phrase or sentence level, rather than the level of individual words.
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