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What Is Anglish?

anglish.org

261–270 of 363 posts

Re: What Is Anglish?

#261

I have first seen this idea in the short piece "Uncleftish Beholding" (Atomic Theory) "For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding It makes some sense, e.g "so…

Although I know German and "Sauerstoff" and "Waßerstoff" seem normal, in English "sourstuff" or "waterstuff" sound just utterly hilarious! (English is not my native language.)

Re: What Is Anglish?

#262
post #14

This 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…

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.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#263
English and England and its history have never been pure. It has always mixed and took from other languages and other cultures. And from such derives some its most successful cultural items: its music ands its humour and its general creativity; that is, the creation of culture rather than the preservation of the ways of old. Purity and creativity and creation are no bedfellows. The project is fun for the addition of new words but I would hate to rob myself of the richness of English.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#264
post #79

"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)

Sometimes speakers say its French as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_my_French

Re: What Is Anglish?

#265
post #95

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...

The only thing that this proves is that the humanities have science by the balls.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

... and Old/Ancient Greek. When you see -phth- you know you are in for a right old tongue twister. Not human but fish related: ichthyophthirius. In English it's called "white spot" - both of those words are very Anglo-Saxon. 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…

> 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".

Spanish does not have a lisp. During the medieval age, in the territory that would be called Spain in the future, there were several dialects (or "norms") of Spanish. One of them pushed for seseo (no /θ/, "th" as in think) and other for a combined approach. The latter was chosen by a king (Alfonso X the wise), and the rest is history.

However, all dialectal varieties are accepted by the RAE (Royal Academy of Spanish) jointly with the Spanish Academies of the American Continent regulates the language (like the Académie française for the French language).

So, in Seville (Spain) most people does not use the /θ/ sound, as in Venezuela, for example.

To sum up, please stop saying "Spanish has a lisp" because it has the same "lisp" than English or other languages with the sound /θ/.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#267
Are there something like this for other languages? For example, Spanish without Arabic, Germanic, French or English words? It would be funny to know if a "more Latin Spanish" would be more understandable for Italian or French speakers.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#268
post #233
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I disagree about the Zeug, I think it’s great to have the flexibility — “Zeug” is also just “thing” sometimes — but I find Fahrzeug and Flugzeug just as intuitive as Werkzeug and Feuerzeug. Now relating them to the various meanings of “zeugen” might be tricky but I think I get that too. In many languages the airplane is a “flying machine” and that makes way more sense than “flat thing in the air” if you think about i…

But the key point here is that "fire stuff" is still a pretty ambiguous term. Sure, it does describe a lighter, but it also describes lots of other things pretty well. The compound parts give some clues as to the nature of the object in question (a Feuerzeug does have something to do with fire), but fundamentally you still need to know what the word means.

So I don't think compound words magically remove ambiguity, at least not in the general case. Any given compound word could have multiple different meanings, and any given meaning can be described by several compound words.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#269

I have first seen this idea in the short piece "Uncleftish Beholding" (Atomic Theory) "For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding It makes some sense, e.g "so…

Although I know German and "Sauerstoff" and "Waßerstoff" seem normal, in English "sourstuff" or "waterstuff" sound just utterly hilarious! (English is not my native language.)

English shifts up into this "academic register" for scientific or medical words, utilising Greek or Latin roots. Many other languages ... do not.

So learning that e.g. "gums" - (i.e. the part of the mouth around the teeth) is in Dutch "tandvlees" (and German "zahnfleisch") - i.e. "tooth-flesh" - has that humorous quality when the expected shift up does not materialise. I mean, does not happen.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#270

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…

Rome first, the descendants of Charlemagne second, and William the Conqueror. “English” didn’t have a chance.

I mean Rome came first everywhere, William the conqueror came from Norsemen, which means Normandy was where the Vikings settled there. Pretty much all of Europe has had this kind of multiple conquests different language groups percolating everywhere - but English is the one that chose this model of how to handle it.
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