A Language of Beautiful Impurity(www.edwest.co.uk)
79 pointsby nafnlj9 months ago9 comments
  • tempodox9 months ago
    > In this world, lamentation is sorrowword, unanimous becomes sameheart and acceptable is replaced with thankworthy. The US Declaration of Independence would be the ‘Forthspell of Selfdom’ while Alcoholics Anonymous renamed as The Unnamed Overdrinkers.

    > In Anglish, theology would be godlore. rhetoric is speechcraft. doctors would be healers, journalists newsmen, and status-signalling would be rankmarking. A rodent is a gnawdeer while a comedian is a laughtersmith.

    Exquisite. What a loss that those aren't common now.

    • PaulDavisThe1st9 months ago
      It's far from clear that these "missing" words were ever common (with the likely exception of "healers"). Anglish is all about extrapolation over 1000 years of history, which is a tricky game to play.
    • pessimizer9 months ago
      Latin always gets badrapped when English people talk about how practical and clear Germanic equivalents would be, but Romance languages also sound like this to Romance speakers.

      Modern English is just particularly goofy, young, and not conservative, especially in its American variant. We rankmark by accumulating more exotic words with more exotic vowels, until the vocabulary is absurdly large and redundant.

  • kej9 months ago
    This reminds me of Poul Anderson's "Uncleftish Beholding" [1] which is an attempt to explain atomic science without words derived from French, Latin, and Greek.

    [1] https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/docs/uncleftish-beh...

    • qsort9 months ago
      When you write a whole essay like that it's more than a bit ridiculous, but the same idea on a smaller scale can work very well rhetorically. For example, take this section from Churchill's notorious speech:

      We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

      every word except "surrender" has an Anglo-Saxon root.

      • ttepasse9 months ago
        Earlier in the speech Churchill used the same rhetorical device of in a positive sentence full of words with french/latin roots:

        A miracle of deliverance, achieved by valor, by perseverance, by perfect discipline, by faultless service, by resource, by skill, by unconquerable fidelity, is manifest to us all.

        https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1940-the-fin...

        (That form of repetition seems to be called anaphora, I just learned.)

        It’s interesting that people often comment on the Anglo-Saxon/Germanic roots of that famous phrase – but nobody finds it weird to use Germanic words in a (defensive) war against Germany and eschewing French words in support of France in this war. The explanation seems to be the specific English context: there the connotation of Anglo-Saxon as the language of the people seems to override any germanic associations.

      • spondylosaurus9 months ago
        Have you read Farnsworth's Classical English Style? He talks about Saxon vs. Latinate word choice (and invokes Churchill frequently!), which makes me think you've either read it already or would enjoy it if you haven't yet :)
      • 9 months ago
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      • navane9 months ago
        It's hilarious that the one french rooted word is surrender. Did he do that on purpose?
    • falcor849 months ago
      Wow, that's even harder to understand than Randall Monroe's Thing Explainer [0].

      [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer

    • 0823498723498729 months ago
      For the opposite experience, try Europanto: http://www.europanto.be/cabillot1.html
      • lencastre9 months ago
        OMG if you know a bit of German English Spanish and French you will go very far…
    • carapace9 months ago
      Probably a good time to trot out "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut" again?

      > Wants pawn term, dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage, honor itch offer lodge dock florist...

      https://annex.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/ladle/

    • capitainenemo9 months ago
      BTW, as the wikipedia page notes, Poul was unable to completely remove french, since several words he needed had no modern english equivalent derived from the anglo-saxon.
  • davedx9 months ago
    As a English native and Dutch speaker, many of the Anglish words translate directly into Dutch, somewhat unsurprisingly. “Gnawdeer” is indeed “knaagdier” in Dutch, a very cute word I always find. :)
    • throw3108229 months ago
      Agree. However "rodent" literally means "gnawing thing" e.g. in Italian. The Anglish version also sounds cuter because "deer" in English is not the same as "deer" in Anglish, where it would mean just animal, as the Dutch "dier".
    • johnnyjeans9 months ago
      The Dutch language is extremely cute to me as a native English speaker. "Sneeuw" is probably my favorite word of all time in any language.
  • aaroninsf9 months ago
    Remarkable that such brief mention is made of Tolkien, fans of whom will be familiar with a great many more of the coinages and their components than most!

    And who will find new appreciation from this article for what Tolkien was about and why it's said he created his stories to accommodate his exploration of these root languages!

    • 0823498723498729 months ago
      JRRT even translated all the names the characters' knew each other by into anglophone cultural equivalents, eg the kudugin (which JRRT translates as "hobbits"):

        Maura Labingi         Frodo Baggins
  Banazîr "Ban" Galpsi  Samwise "Sam" Gamgee
  • PaulDavisThe1st9 months ago
    I've been a huge fan of the idea of Anglish since I first came across it a decade ago.

    But online, the Anglish community appears to me to have been overtaken by an, at minimum, unpleasant "anglo-saxon nationalism" (as if such a thing even makes sense). At worst, it is downright scary.

    Exploring the counterfactual history of English without French is fascinating.

    Pushing one version of such an exploration as what Anglo-Saxons (read: the English) ought to do, implicitly or explicitly denying that the identity of the English (and other inhabitants of the British Isles) after 1000+ years is inextricably tied up with other languages, is deranged.

  • 9 months ago
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  • pavlov9 months ago
    By the title I assumed this might be about C.
  • ykonstant9 months ago
    Modern Greek is another beautifully impure language. Demotic poetry and literature, especially from the turn of the 20th century, makes full use of its linguistic syncretism: local idioms, loan-words and phrases that accent the lines with "images of the time and place" or of the social status of the narrator.
  • theanonymousone9 months ago
    There are other beautifully impure languages. They are mostly called Creole or Pidgin by some scholars.