A Language of Beautiful Impurity(www.edwest.co.uk)
72 pointsby nafnlj4 days ago9 comments
  • tempodox3 days 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.

    • PaulDavisThe1st15 hours 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.
    • pessimizer14 hours 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.

  • kej3 days 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...

    • qsort3 days 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.

      • spondylosaurus3 days 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 :)
      • 14 hours ago
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      • navane14 hours ago
        It's hilarious that the one french rooted word is surrender. Did he do that on purpose?
    • falcor843 days ago
      Wow, that's even harder to understand than Randall Monroe's Thing Explainer [0].

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

    • 0823498723498723 days ago
      For the opposite experience, try Europanto: http://www.europanto.be/cabillot1.html
      • lencastre3 days ago
        OMG if you know a bit of German English Spanish and French you will go very far…
    • capitainenemo3 days 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.
    • carapace14 hours 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/

  • davedx3 days 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. :)
    • johnnyjeans14 hours 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.
  • aaroninsf2 days 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!

    • 08234987234987215 hours 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
  • PaulDavisThe1st14 hours 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.

  • 3 days ago
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  • pavlov3 days ago
    By the title I assumed this might be about C.
  • ykonstant15 hours 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.
  • theanonymousone3 days ago
    There are other beautifully impure languages. They are mostly called Creole or Pidgin by some scholars.