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What Is Anglish?

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Re: What Is Anglish?

#331

Post by hinkley »

oblio wrote: post #279
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which model?

It’s been known for some time that English started as a pidgin language, but some recent linguistic analysis suggested that it wasn’t a pidgin once, but twice. And that’s why it’s particularly messy.

Despite another responder’s assertion that William the Conquerer was Norse, the fact is that he spoke French. So you had a ruler who didn’t even speak English, and a ruling class that was familiar with French.

Which, by the way, is why English names for animals and their meats are such a mess. For the most part the peasants raised the animals and the aristocracy ate them (still an era when protein deficiency limited the upward mobility of peasants). So animal names are from one linguistic root and meat names from another. Sheep/mutton, cow/beef, pig/pork,ham.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#332

Post by wolverine876 »

wirrbel wrote: post #202
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…

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…

> optimal information transmission rate

Written like a programmer. Information transmission is only one narrow purpose of language. We are not computers; language isn't a data structure. It's an Orwellian concept.

> No ambiguity

> 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).

Measuring precision of a word requires a defined, precise or accurate (complete, correct, consistent) concept. I.e., to say Wörterbuch is precise, you need to have a precise concept of what it describes. But reality isn't precise; you never have complete, correct, or consistent knowledge of it. There is always another variation, invention, exception, etc.

The only exception is circular definition - if you define the object according to the bounds of the word. 'This object is a Wörterbuch, and an object that doesn't meet the definition is not one.'

Re: What Is Anglish?

#333

Post by wolverine876 »

dsr_ wrote: post #136
nqzero wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

More precisely: Is this English? Cool cool, it finna be.

What do you think that says, and in what dialect?

If the intended dialect and meaning are what I think, the definition of 'finna' and the overall usage are wrong.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#334

Post by biztos »

wirrbel wrote: post #322
MrsPeaches wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I understand it, Zeug means thing in this context. Stuff is “Stoff” as in Brennstoff. Fire-thing and burning-stuff. Lighter is “Zünder“ in German. Feuerzeug vs Zünder To close to call regarding which is clearer.

Feuerzeug is a lighter, its a fixed term, nothing "wobbly" that relates to fire-stuff. Zünder is an igniter/detonator, Zündung is the ignition. Zeug can be used as "thing", but it is frequently used when refearing to gear. So "Feuerzeug" is like "Firegear", "Werkzeug" is the "gear for working" (tools).

There is Zündholz for “match” but lo[0], apparently there is/was Zündzeug:

https://www.dwds.de/wb/dwb/zündzeug

[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lo

Re: What Is Anglish?

#335

Post by WorldMaker »

nine_k wrote: post #309
hgomersall wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the genders, which are completely arbitrary and very annoying to a learner.

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 grammatical genders are generally attributed as "animate" and "neuter" and there's a lot of interesting debate on exactly where and when (and why) what today are called "masculine" and "feminine" split from animate (and how much they were "masculine" and "feminine" to PIE is also an interesting debate). That split might have been very late indeed, which seems reflected in the evidence of how few Indo-European languages agree on grammatical genders beyond people and a very small list of animals. (Also, late enough that for instance Farsi might not have "lost" much at all, simply missed out on some of the late splits and evolved around them.) Grammatical gender especially has stopped being seen as a key common trait in IE languages given what linguists have seemed to reconstruct of PIE.

> No wonder even German looks somehow distant from English

A lot of that is inter-tribal politics more than just the syntactic shifts English experienced versus "trunk Indo-European". Modern German sometimes referred to as "High German" intentionally dominated in such a way as to push out all of its "Low German" rivals from the core of Germany which included the Anglo-Saxon tribes. At a raw level English is closer on the family tree to other "Low German" languages such as modern-day Dutch, but modern-day Dutch has its own cultural supremacy battles in its territories and mostly driven its rivals to extinction, several of which themselves were closer to English on the family tree. The closest living relatives of Anglo-Saxon German are the Frisian languages [1] most of which have been classified as endangered or nearly extinct due to cultural domination fights with Dutch (including events relatively similar to the Norman conquest in terms of massive linguistic after-shocks, just between Dutch and Frisian tribes). Modern English is like four tree-branches away from Modern German, even before taking into account the Norman invasion influenced language changes and slowly differently evolved syntax. So it shouldn't be a surprise English looks distant to German because it was always distant to German.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisian_languages

Re: What Is Anglish?

#336

Post by avgcorrection »

yarg wrote: post #262
avgcorrection wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 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.

One can easily imagine a parallel universe where what we call races correspondend with completely wildly different traits, like a completely different level of intelligence (a recurring racist trope). Or we could just look at the differences in other biological species in our own (non-parallel) universe. But it just so happens to be the apparent fact that human races (in the everyday sense) are not substantially different.

Certainly not different enough to worry about race-mixing.

If you raise a child born in Indonesia in Sweden, they will speak Swedish and be like other Swedes. But if you put a 20-year-old Swede in the middle of a jungle of in Papua, they will probably just die. The point is how plastic young children are and how inconsequential the fact that your genes came from the other side of the planet really are.

Your allusion to examples of differences between people illustrates this:

> Human beings are a single species with a large number of branches allowing them to survive localised environmental niches.

Human beings are a tropical primate who use technology to survive permanently in climates ranging from the tundra to the desert. The know-how of an Inuit is much more relevant for their survival compared to the fact that they are probably more adapted as an organism to living in eight-month-winter climate compared to a Spaniard.

> But to pretend that races aren't real just because of an interlink between the study of race and racist ideologies is fucking ridiculous.

Nowhere did I say or imply that I think that “race” is pseudo-science because of racist ideologies.

Stop making shit up!

Re: What Is Anglish?

#337

Post by avgcorrection »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #89
avgcorrection wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> First of all, “race” is pseudo-science. Thank you. That is all.

Thank you for the assent.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#338

Post by philwelch »

walthamstow wrote: post #324
Wildgoose wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pleased to meet you. I'm English. Scotland and Wales are countries. There can't be a concept of a "Union" if there are no components to unite. Scotland has its own Parliament, Legal System and even bank notes, for example.

So Georgia and Virginia are countries too? They entered into a union, they have their own legal systems, they have their own legislatures.

They even have their own militaries.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#339

Post by philwelch »

Wildgoose wrote: post #288
walthamstow wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know any English people who think that Scotland or Wales are countries. Most people understand that the four nations compete separately in football because the game was invented here, and the first ever international match was between England and Scotland. A great distinction I once heard was that the US is a nation made up of states, the UK is a state made up of nations.

Pleased to meet you. I'm English. Scotland and Wales are countries. There can't be a concept of a "Union" if there are no components to unite. Scotland has its own Parliament, Legal System and even bank notes, for example.

The Scottish Parliament has its authority devolved to it from Westminster. It lacks the inherent constitutional right to self-government held by any of the fifty United States.

Re: What Is Anglish?

#340

Post by NoGravitas »

atchoo wrote: post #219
lifthrasiir wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I was curious about "thesaurus" given that is not a dictionary but still a "word book". According to Google Translate, apparently Wörterbuch also means thesaurus so OP is correct, it is more ambiguous than dictionary. The first suggested translation for thesaurus is... thesaurus... so much for compound words eh?

Likewordbook, surely.
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