What Is Anglish?
anglish.org
anglish.org
(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)
Is this English? Cool cool, it finna be.
If the intended dialect and meaning are what I think, the definition of 'finna' and the overall usage are wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Arabi...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1e62d6wHIU
Explanation to get around HN guidelines : The guy says : "Hey Morsi [ndlr. common male name in Egypt], Is this English ?". It started when Modamed Morsi was president of Egypt and spoke in incomprehensible English. Since most arabic speaking people are notoriously bad at English, it became a meme used when someone says something incomprehensible in any language
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 would sound like). Ditto for German, even more so, I'd say. Russian, too.
In fact even a word that we've now stopped regarding as "technical", such as bicycle [1], comes in English via modern French (so not via the French spoken by the Normans back in the day):
> Borrowed from French bicycle (modern bicyclette), from bi- (“bi-”) + cycle (“cycle”). First attested in English in 1868, and in French in 1847.
Or via anything else, really. E.g. the word for car "kocsi" seems oddly similar to Spanish "coche" (I think French would be voiture) and "tombola" to mean "bingo" seems Italian (french/english should be raffle, I think).
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 periodic based "versions" - Old, Middle, Modern. There were also events such as a major vowel change where the way we pronounce vowels today differs from before that event.
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".
English as spoken in Britain and elsewhere should borrow and bother from every language it ever trips over. It should always evolve and mutate and continue to become ever more flexible. It should also continue to enable useful "pidgins" which are amalgams of English bolted on the side of another language and vice versa.
What English seems to have lost compared to the other Germanics is a lot of formal complicated verb conjugations and nounal declensions and noun genders and quite a lot more. Complexity can be bolted on but it is optional. Subject object verb is also quite fluid too in English. I believe German at least insists on a verb dump at the end of a sentence. English still has many of these structures - active, passive, subjunctive verbs (transitive, intrans etc); Nom, Voc, Acc, Gen, Dat, Abl for your nouns but they are largely implied via other words instead of suffixes.
English is quite literally and vocally French!
(lingua franca - language of the Franks)
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/.
Some of it is a social division that originates back to the Norman conquest of Britain. The guy in the field would call a cow's heart (the Old English equivalent of) a cow's heart. The lord would call it the (Norman French equivalent) of coeur de beouf. His doctor or priest would probably speak French or English but would write in Latin. Cordis bovem (or something I don't Latin).
From this mishmash modern English has cow, beef, bovine, heart, cardiac (Greek but clearly influenced by Latin cor). The original Anglo-Saxon word for cow, beef from French to refer to the meat of cow, and bovine from Latin, the fancy adjective. So even now a thousand years later, an overwrought academic writes of a cardiac arrest experienced by a bovine (Graeco-Latin), while in normal speech we might say the cow's heart gave out (Anglo-Saxon).
Something like "nephropathology induced by neurofibromatosis" was/is a sort of guild jargon or cant. It just means kidney disease caused by fibrous tumours of the nerves disease. Of course, you then lose the precision. How I put it is not unambiguous like neurofibromatosis is. I can see why doctors just keep their cant.
[0]https://www.etymonline.com/word/bi-?ref=etymonline_crossrefe... [1]https://www.etymonline.com/word/bicycle
Also there were no bicycles in ancient Grece, that's why the word is different in modern Greek, but kyklos is still a greek word with the same meaning.
Old words come from German, because we were part of AustroHungary. Old-but-reformed words come from Czech, because in the 1800's we wanted to stop being so Germanic. Somewhat old words come from Serbo-Croatian, because we were part of Yugoslavia. Modern words come from English, because internet.
So we have a language where words you use around the home are often germanic, jokes and swear words are south slavic, and anything to do with computers is english.
Plus a few French words here and there from the time of Napoleon.
And in other areas, like the arts (from painting and photography to film and the novel), legal, and political terms. That's because France in those past 2-3 centuries was a huge power in Europe and globally, along with the UK).
For France, this ended with WWI and was a done deal with WWII but there was still some momentum up to the 70s.
So it was kind of like countries today copy US terms, fashion, politics, music, etc.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca
"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
What English had and still has, and say, Romanian, doesn't, is the wide exposure.
Romanian was traditionally spoken in the region of Romania, so Eastern Europe, with some interaction with Central Europe, Southern Europe, Even-More-Eastern Europe, the Middle East. So those are the influences, plus some recent additions from international languages such as French or English.
English, on the other hand, was needed to describe and interact with Western Europeans, Eastern Europeans, Souther Europeans, Native North Americans, Pygmys, Indians, Native Australians, Chinese, Japanese, Incas, Ethiopians, etc and their associated environments and lifestyles.
If you saw curry, you needed to either come up with a word or adopt theirs. Or avocado. Avocado wasn't even a word in Romanian until 2000-something, I'm quite sure.
Admit I can't come up with an example at the moment though.
That also happens in other languages, too, but English has a great affinity.
I think that's just drive by English having, what, 40-50 sounds? Which is quite a lot for a language, and English speakers having a huge aversion towards words with many syllables. 1 is perfect, 2 is okish, 3 is a lot, 4+ is an abomination.
So they tend to import anything they can pronounce and is under 3 syllables.
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.
* when do I have to give it back?
* Is it "by permission"
* do I have a library card limit how many I can borrow?
* can I borrow from the 'enfer' shelves? (there's a loan word...)
I'd say "steal" is a better fit. The word isn't coming back. Capice?
'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 to police loanwords, and nobody gets to say loan or borrow words are bad, and that better ones exist: they are what they are.
I'm really just howling at the moon. (I wonder if howl and moon, in some sense are loan words from latin, or anglo saxon)
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.
You see this a lot with modern Greek. As an example, appointment is ραντεβού, and elevator is ασανσέρ.
On a slight tangent, I've noticed when translating from English to Chinese (mandarin) many of the equivalent literal translations do not have a unique single purpose word where English does. So it can sound much like this Anglish e.g the literal translation of "thigh" is just "big leg", and this is not a one off. I have no idea why this is.
This is exactly analogous to "little finger" in English.
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).
all that being said, I think uncleftish[0] beholding is an amazing piece of text and a good exercise for young physicists
[0]https://groups.google.com/g/alt.language.artificial/c/ZL4e3f...
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 "dictionary" does, but without requiring additional foreign morphemes.
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?
https://shop.duden.de/collections/worterbucher-und-sprache/p...
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.
Personally, I feel like I can be much more precise in English than I can in German (although that's probably mostly impartiality again!) Yes there are lots of words that are ostensibly just synonyms of each other, but they're mostly not true synonyms, because they have different connotations and can be used in different ways. I miss that wealth of vocabulary in German, where it often feels like I say more to get across the exact idea that I want to.
That said, a lot of that is probably familiarity and bias. I grew up in English, and learned German later in life, and I suspect you did the opposite, so obviously we're going have more intuition for our native languages.
That’s not an invention, but a loan word from Latin ampulla (small oil bottle), which got a meaning “hanging lamp” (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Ampel)
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 it.
As a foreigner trying to learn the language (not in DE anymore) I have to remind myself just how weird English is, and not to place unreasonable expectations on people doing the reverse of my journey. Having had to have, so to speak.
There is a certain logic to German. How about:
Wheel -> das Rad
Wheels -> die Räder
Bicycle -> das Fahrrad
Bicycles -> die Fahrräder
Cyclist -> der Radfahrer / die Radfahrerin
Cyclists -> die Radfahrer / die Radfahrerinnen
* 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, and a very rudimentary verb-noun agreement (only third person singular).
* English words have unpredictable pronunciation: like in Chinese, there are some hints and rules, but they are full of exceptions. Try to find a pattern: "busy" / "Suzy" / "circusy", "corps" / "thorps", etc. No way to predict the sound without knowing both the etymology and tradition.
* English has no grammatical gender.
* Though unlike Chinese, English has a sharp distinction between singular and plural.
No wonder even German looks somehow distant from English :)
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.
Certainly there are languages more closely related to English, like Dutch or Swedish / Norwegian, that stand sort of midway between English and (High) German. But if we take older languages, like classic Latin, or those with many archaic features, like Lithuanian, the distance from English syntax and grammar becomes pretty large.
I suspect that languages tend to simplify in grammar in areas where several different languages have to coexist: say, England had Germanic, Celtic, and French languages interacting for quite some time, with some Latin thrown in by the church.
I suspect that Mandarin Chinese also resulted from many languages on a pretty large territory interacting a lot, shaving grammatical complexity bit by bit.
English's grammar actually got far more complex because word order matters a whole lot more syntactically versus German or French or Latin. For one big instance that is often pointed out by English as a Second Language problems, adjective order in English is comparatively extremely rigid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective#Order
Another place you see this complexity is the old "sentences should not end in a preposition" early schooling "rule": in Latin word order mostly doesn't matter as long as key things agree on grammatical case/gender. Prepositions "can't" syntactically exist in Latin without their paired nouns inflected to the right grammar case. But the pair itself can be in almost any order in the sentence. Whereas English has a more rigid prepositional word order, because nouns don't inflect at all when used in a preposition (unless you are someone still trying to keep "whom" on life support centuries after it died in English and became a grammatical zombie). The syntax is more complicated, but the morphology is easier. One of the interesting "gains" from the complicated syntax is that some prepositions started working with intentionally dropped or elided direct nouns. That is also added syntactical complexity. In English there are many prepositions it is perfectly valid to end a sentence with. Parsing that is interestingly complex.
Extremely relatedly the similar childhood "rule" to "never split an infinitive". In many languages infinitives are a pure grammatical case involving word inflections that have to match, and the order generally doesn't matter if they involve multiple participles, and there is no such thing syntactically as a "split infinitive", it just can't syntactically exist. Whereas English relies on a more complex syntax for infinitives that relies more explicitly on rigid word orders, making split infinitives at all possible in the first place. Then regular usage of the different concurrent syntaxes started to diverge their meaning. "To boldly go" means something subtly different in English than "to go boldly", and forbidding split infinitives entirely forbids entire categories of creative expression in the language.
I don't think there's a simple answer for why English grammar evolved the way that it did in shifting morphological complexity for syntactical complexity. I just know that calling that evolution "simplifying" isn't entirely accurate either. (English syntax feels simpler to native speakers than it actually is.) The language certainly had some interesting linguistic pressures being confined to a highly regarded/desirable set of isles for centuries with a mixture of strong related languages immediately nearby, then when it was used as a language for helping bootstrap an industrial revolution and as a world-spanning empire.
Do non-european languages have genders?
"Aéroplane" originally referred just to the wing, as it is a plane moving through the air. In an example of synecdoche, the word for the wing came to refer to the entire aircraft.
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.
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.
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).
Ampel is a loanword from latin, "ampulla", it was used for oil lamps hanging from churches and thus kind of made its way into the "Ampel".
The legal texts use "Lichtzeichen" instead of Ampel IIRC.
Don't know if you are still reading this but nevertheless I wanted to give a reply to this paragraph. Overall I think I really understand your point here, but these various connotations are to me not precision, but a symptom of a high-risk of imprecision if that makes sense. In German (there I am partial), or in french (there I would be impartial) I think that language is more precise because if in doubt, you just add a relative clause or another sentence.
You know, learning English and French in Germany, after 4 years of french classes (like 4h per week) my 4th year of french classes was with the same teacher who also taught English. She made a comparison, when learning english you basically are able to speak fairly easily already in your first or second year on a basic level. To become proficient it takes however a decade of learning and mastery. With french, most students are struggling for 4 years until the grammar is learned, but then they actually have all tools under their belt to speak and write proper french. the rest is filling a few wholes in your vocabulary-knowledge here and there and memorizing a few more irregular verb forms.
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.'
In fact, the hallmark of writing/speaking good English is conveying yourself using the least words required with the utmost precision.
Don't believe it? Watch a British politician roast someone in Parliament. That is bloody masterful English literature right there.
Wait until you start studying Sanskrit ;)
As for English and bloated - I'm probably a high A2/low B1 Swedish speaker. I can read a lot better than I speak. I also dabbled in Norwegian out of fascination of how absolutely similar and yet different the two languages are. (It's like Czech and Polish.) So much looks the same, just spelt differently, but you also have a large corpus of vocabulary that is on the surface different - but in reality a native speaker would know there is a word that is equivilent (maybe just not used as much or archaic.) The one I found today, which blew my mind was "trenge". This means "need" in Norwegian. It is one of those odd "Norwegian seems to prefer another word". Swedish seems to mostly use "behöva" and Norwegian does also have "behøve", but I see trenge way more. Today I saw some Swedish song lyrics with "tränga" (which is basically a Swedish equivalent of the Norwegian spelling.) Synonyms happen in all languages. Even if languages that are purely Germanic with minimal Latin influence. Caveat: this is obviously my own observations. Not claiming any thing other than casual knowledge and no actual expertise.
More examples, from a Swedish speaking point of view, are jente/jänta (latter is archaic, flicka is more contemporary), snakke/snacka (the latter is normally tala or prata), bruke/bruka (bruka in Swedish is seeminly used to mean "usually" rather than "use", and änvenda is used for "use")... the list goes on. I find this really interesting. I think the Hanseatic league and Low German it brought explains an least some of these synonyms.
English is a very bloated language compared to its European neighbours - it's almost two languages in one. That doesn't make English bad per se, but it makes it more challenging for foreigners to learn.
Edit: From wikiquote[1]:
>(This observation is extensively quoted even outside of Usenet, and has appeared in textbooks. It has also been misattributed, in part and in whole, to Booker T. Washington, to Ambrose Bierce, to Terry Pratchett, and, in one case, to the painter James Nicoll (1846–1918).)
However as I've grown as a linguist, I now disagree with the direction that they've taken it, but I understand why.
That is, the Anglish project uses cognates and sometimes inventions from Old English, Dutch and German because most linguists (and people) consider English a West Germanic language, most closely related to German and Dutch, and more distantly related to Swedish, Norwegian and Danish.
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.
So I'd like to see an Anglish project that instead uses the Scandinavian languages for word replacements.
[1] "English as North Germanic [Language]" https://brill.com/view/journals/ldc/6/1/article-p1_1.xml?lan...
Also, I wonder if such a thing might actually arise in the Scandinavian countries in the future?
Going a bit deeper, “dale” (daal - Dutch), “beck” (beek - Dutch).
Having learnt (not learned) in Amsterdam, it’s very, very like the dialects of the north east of Yorkshuh. So much so, it’s rather a surprise.
the only time I’ve ever heard anything different is from foreigners learning English
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/cheerio 1. “Goodbye”, 2. “Hello”
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/cheero “A friendly greeting”
I could be wrong about this of course, but I suspect what you’re observing is people saying thank you as they’re leaving: e.g. getting off the bus, or after buying something, or after receiving directions
In this context, I'm afraid, you are wrong. When I'm in the office, the last thing I say to everybody else as I leave is, 'Cheers.' I'm not thanking them for letting me into office; I'm saying, 'Goodbye.'
I'm perplexed as to why you're pushing this so hard. People who have experience of this are telling you something. But you, despite clearly not having the same experience, are telling them that they are wrong. Don't mean to be snarky, but why is this so important to you?
Next up, 'Do Midlanders really call each other mardy?'
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/1gkmqj/what_exactly_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/2sjb2j/how_do_i_use_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/8tooyt/is_cheers_ins...
you're misunderstanding the nuance of it. when other people are leaving the office and they say cheers, they're saying a short form of "cheers for working with me today" more equivalent to "regards" than "goodbye"
Everything I could find points to a Latin cognate, "cara".
It does appear to be more than a coincidence that my dialect and the modern German usage share a word that sounds the same and means the same.
Regarding if that would arise in the Scandinavian countries in the future - it actually seems more likely in German speaking countries. There is actually a word for it now - Denglisch (Deutsch Englisch), similar to e.g. Hinglish (Hindi English). Basically using German grammar with large amounts of English vocabulary. I hear so many English words in German lately for which there exists a perfectly good German word already.
Examples:
Denlisch: "Bist du ready?" Deutsch: "Bist du bereit?" English: "Are you ready?"
Denglisch: Joke Deutsch: Witz
An example:
"Denne eplejuicen er helt fucka / føkka"
-> This apple juice is fucked up.
Gamers often talk about "lev'le opp" ("level up") for example, but it's not used that often in its written form. It just looks strange to me.
Sometimes gamers even replace a Norwegian word such as "oppgradere" with its English equivalent ("upgrade"). In some cases it is pronounced as English with a Norwegian "e" sound at the end, like the "é" in French "café"
We also have a few loanwords from German, such as:
- "Vorse", from the German "vorspiel" (prelude). We use it to describe starting the evening drinking and partying at a friend's apartment before going to a nightclub / bar.
- "Dass". from "das Haüschen" ("little house"). This is used as a slang for toilet.
I don't see an end to this, as the Norwegian language is not as protected as Icelandic. The Norwegian language council sometimes tries to provide alternatives, but they are usually either too late or it just sounds silly.
are (v.)
present plural indicative of be (q.v.), from Old English earun (Mercian), aron (Northumbrian), from Proto-Germanic *ar-, probably a variant of PIE *es- "to be" (see am). Also from Old Norse cognates.
If we consider pronunciation then closest is probably Danish. As English pronunciation seems to be alien to most European languages.
How the Vikings Changed the English Language https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZV1BOcGiV0
this is lifted from the google closed caption "transcript":
The argument was put forward by Jan Terje Faarlund, professor of linguistics at the University of Oslo. This is what he says:
There are many English words that resemble ours, but there is something more. Its fundamental structure is strikingly similar to Norwegian. We avoid many of the usual mistakes because the grammar is more or less the same. Norwegians find it easy to learn English because of the similarities to their language. We often find that when grammar in modern English is different from other West Germanic languages such as Frisian, Our supposed closest cousin or Dutch is the same as in the Scandinavian language. It's very unusual for a language to borrow syntax from another language.
For example, word order. In English and Scandinavian, the object is placed after the verb.
I have read the book.
Eg har lese boka
German and Dutch and old English put the verb at the end.
Ich habe das Buch gelesen
English and Scandinavian can have a preposition at the end of the sentence.
This we talked about
Dette har vi snakka om
English and Scandinavian can have a split infinitive. That is when we insert a word between the infinitive marker and the verb.
I promise to never do it again.
Eg lovar å ikkje gjera det igjen
Group genitive.
The Queen of England's hands.
Dronninga av Englands hatt.
All of this is impossible in German or Dutch.
And these kind of structures are very unlikely to change within a language. The only reasonable explanation, then, is that English is in fact a Scandinavian language, and the continuation of the Norwegian Danish language, which was used in England during the Middle Ages.
But why the inhabitants of the British Isles chose the Scandinavian grammar is something we can only speculate on.
the idea being floated is that English is that Anglo-Saxon / Scandinavian hybrid.
Famous > Nameknown is one of the examples, but perhaps Wellkent would work better if they're otherwise using ken for knowledge.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Old...
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, just like Dutch and German, is West Germanic.) That is, Middle English did not develop from Old English.
> We claim that Middle and Modern English are instead direct descendants of the language spoken by Scandinavians who had relocated to England over more than two centuries prior to the Norman Conquest. We refer to this earlier language as Norse.
The model there is that you have Angles in England speaking English and they get so badly overrun by Norse settlers that their language is replaced rather than influenced. None of them realize that this has happened; everyone blithely continues to refer to their language as "English" even though they've switched what language they're speaking. That seems like a difficult case to make.
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
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.
based on the rest of the text which is making the argument that middle-English is a creole between Old English and Old Norse, it's very clearly a synecdoche to be read as "Middle English did not solely develop from Old English.". you're taking your attempt to be contrary a bit too far here
Not to over-charge this conversation, but it reminds me of anti-race-mixing ideologies. Race is also a much more slippery concept than some people would care to admit; we're all related if you go back far enough.
All I'm saying is, the word "pure" doesn't make sense to me here.
That said, what I find really interesting here is that William The Conqueror was only something like 4 generations removed from people whose "French" was more or less still a dialect of Latin.
The absurdity of this is manifest in the name: "pure Germanic English". That's like "pure California Champaign" or "pure Wisconsin Parmesan". There is no such thing as "pure English", Germanic or otherwise, because one of the defining characteristics of English is that it is, and always has been, an amalgam of many different languages accrued over time. Even Old English had four different dialects. And certainly a "pure modern English" is the very paragon of an oxymoron. If it's "pure", it's not English.
There's nothing wrong with playing around with language. There is something wrong with calling the result "pure" because it casts negative aspersions on everything else as "impure", which is a word that carries a lot of disparaging implications.
I just think though, by avoiding the word 'pure' to describe something like this, even if it is not exact, this becomes another form of language purification. in this case, it's leaning towards prophesizing how a concept would be approached.
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.
Scotland has its own Parliament, Legal System and even bank notes, for example.
There is no Scottish passport, nor an ISO country code for it, because it isn't a country.
Any justification you have for calling Scotland a country would mean that Georgia and Massachusetts are also countries.
US states are actually are more country-like than Scotland, they have a constitutional right to self-government, and have semi-sovereign powers even within the union. Does Scotland? I think we have seen recently that it does not.
The only evidence or basis you have come up with so far is that you were taught in school that Scotland is a country, which I find to be a very weak argument.
(To be clear, England is not a country either.)
> Not to over-charge this conversation, but it reminds me of anti-race-mixing ideologies. Race is also a much more slippery concept than some people would care to admit; we're all related if you go back far enough.
First of all, “race” is pseudo-science. Language research is not. Second of all, try to make an argument for “race mixing” which isn’t racist.
In contrast, Anglish is more of an aesthetic approach to language, one which doesn’t threaten to marginalize any groups of people. Frankly, I suspect that the reason why this offensive comparison is even brought up is becaue of the Germanic assocation, which some people might not find aesthetic for historical reasons.
Thank you. That is all.
[1] https://bioanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement...
Digressing a bit, I think race is rather akin to dialects, and species akin to languages. Neither have clear distinctions. Most people think of species as groups that can sexually reproduce, and races is a sub-groups of a species with identifiable shared characteristics. Similarly, languages are often defined in terms of mutual intelligibility, and dialects in terms of, well, identifiable shared characteristics.
But this is all very hand-wavy. In particular, nether can satisfy the transitive property. I might understand the English spoken in two different regions, but speakers in those regions could have a hell of a time understanding each other. The same applies to reproduction, and not just hypothetically: Grizzly bears can hybridize with polar bears and with black bears, but the latter two cannot hybridize with each other.
All this is to say that every individual actually has their own unique language, it just happens to be 99.99% similar to a lot of other peoples' language so we call them "the same". But within "a language", differences abound in vocabulary, grammar, slang, and connotations.
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.
You have genes. Certain genes are well adapted to certain environments, for example hi/low melanin to protect from UV radiation. In environments where people don't move a lot, such as the Earth 5000 years ago, genes will tend to cluster together, and if you have someone's genetic makeup you can make informed guesses about their phenotype.
The problem, imo with 'races' is that the modern world has created too many hybrids to be able to accurately guess much information about someone's genetic makeup from their phenotype.
Blue eyes for example, which maybe 5000 years ago were only found in one small corner of the globe, are common in many different places, and associated with many other types of genes. You can no longer reliably predict that someone with blue eyes will have blonde hair for example. Or that they won't also have say sickle cell anemia when in the past those two traits were probably never found in the same person.
Like for example when in the US someone marks their race as "Black" in some census form, that tells you almost nothing besides maybe that they likely have elevated levels of skin pigmentation.
You have some genetic clusters, such as those found in the Kenyan Rift Valley, where they have good genes for long distance running, and others, such as those found in Jamacia and West Africa, better suited for explosive sprinting. Both of which tend to be associated with high levels of skin pigmentation.
Operating at the level of 'races', which, from what I can tell, basically means 'skin color', completely misses this sort of detail, and is, in my opinion, a mental model that is so crude, and so lacking in granularity as to be basically worthless.
Genes exist. Races... if you're using that term to mean "certain groupings of genes which are often found together, usually in groups of people that have spent a long time living together in the same environment", then yes, they exist, but then you have many people that you'd not be able to fit into a 'race' - basically every stereotypical American who is "one eighth Irish, one eighth Italian, one eighth Swedish, one eighth Chinese...." is going to have a set of genes that is not associated with any "race".
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-<race> 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!
I'm going to try in good faith to follow what you just said. Or get so far as the part that makes me stop reading.
> Because “race-mixing” implies that different “races” breeding is bad
Why? Because a bunch of racist bullshit about the mud people? You're confusing the manifestation of an event with the social stigma around it.
And there is no doubt at all that that stigma was abhorrent to its core (shout out to Dolphus Raymond), but that's got fuck all to do with what you are asserting.
And by the way, mixed race people (unimaginary as they are) are sexy as hell.
A for effort.
> > Because “race-mixing” implies that different “races” breeding is bad
> Why? Because a bunch of racist bullshit about the mud people?
“Anti-race-mixing ideologies”. “Anti” means bad, i.e. different races breeding is bad. How could it be more straightforward?
> > Not to over-charge this conversation, but it reminds me of anti-race-mixing ideologies.
It means against. Dys means bad.
"Wago...are native Japanese words, meaning those words in Japanese that have been inherited from Old Japanese, rather than being borrowed at some stage. Together with kango (漢語) and gairaigo (外来語), they form one of the three main sources of Japanese words (there is also elaborate Japanese sound symbolism, of mimetic origin). They are also known as yamato kotoba."
Perhaps like "Anglish", there is an ease and softness to yamato kotoba, especially when compared to foreign loan words (both kango and gairaigo). Here[1] is a nice representative sample of 100 words and expressions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wago
[1] https://origamijapan.net/origami/2018/01/13/yamato-kotoba/
> "... [English] ever borowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt."
Old English borrowed its alphabet from Latin, and imperfectly represents its sounds in Latin, with a couple extra letters. On the other hand, the Japanese borrowed writing from the Chinese, and after a long struggle, eventually adapted it to perfectly represent every sound in the Japanese language. While retaining the entire Chinese character set. The piece de resistance? You have to figure out whether a character has a Chinese or Japanese reading from context, since most have both.
Probably half or more of all Japanese vocabulary is based on Chinese. Most borrowings were about a thousand years ago, or more. In a few cases it's not always obvious if a word is even native Japanese, or not. But the sound and spelling are a very strong hint for almost all words in practice.
There's a split in numbers. In some places you use Chinese numbers, and in others you use Japanese. A rough equivalent of the mono- bi- tri- etc. nonsense.
The same word has sometimes been borrowed from Chinese multiple times, at different times, and from different regions, resulting in different pronunciations. Not unlike English's "warranty" and "guarantee". Which are early and late French pronunciations of the same word.
There are Chinese roots used in compound words to describe academic, medical, scientific, religious, governmental, etc. things. And there are native Japanese words used for all sorts of common everyday things. Despite the majority of terms being Chinese in origin, like with English and words of Germanic origin, in many contexts, the majority of words used are native Japanese.
Words coined in Japan on Chinese word formation principles have sometimes been adopted in China, particularly around the start of the 20th century with technical terms. Much as how English and French have many terms where you can't even say whether it's really an English or French word originally. It's the same roots used in the same way in both languages and would be obvious to speakers of either language if they needed a new word. And they often need a new word around the same time.
[1] Also called 순 우리말 Soon woorimal (lit. only our speak) which is ironically not 순 우리말 itself because of a Sino-Korean morpheme "순" (純).
At the most articulate, you have speakers like Christopher Hitchens: “It especially annoys me when racists are accused of 'discrimination.' The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one 'race' to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian
But sometimes the strongest turns-of-phrase in English can be the simplest. We were recently chatting about the Portuguese "Cansas-me a beleza". In English, if you said to someone: "You tire my beauty" with perfect delivery it would be withering.
Meaning 2: recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another. "discrimination between right and wrong" 2a) the ability to judge what is of high quality; good judgement or taste. "those who could afford to buy showed little taste or discrimination"
I.e. the true ability to distinguish things, not simply sorting objects by color.
I'm sure many people who play with the idea are not ideologically motivated.
However, like some other constructed languages, ideology does play a non-neglible role. I think any time the word 'pure' is used to describe Anglish, it seems likely that some sort of ideological motivation is at play. William Barnes, for example, supported english purification to make the language more accessible to the uneducated.
many supports of the language were
"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 "sourstuff" for "oxygen" - which in German is "Sauerstoff", in Dutch "zuurstof".
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.
English cannot and will not and never will be perfect, nor pure or whatevs but it will get a message across. It is rather more flexible than your average language and that is probably a complete accident. There are loads of pidgins of English and a phenomenal number of dialects. This is just for "modern" English.
You can fiddle with word order and ignore quite a lot of word endings and still it hangs together.
This Anglish bollocks sounds like a roundly racist notion involving "purity". I hate that.
No, we don't need latin, or greek roots, to enjoy our language, and there's just as much if not more of a reason to use roots natural to our language, and no you aren't smarter or wiser, more scholarly or intellectual, because you use big long fancy sounding latin or greek based words.
maybe the reason a lot of english doesn't make sense (in contrast to german) is because we replaced a lot of words we might join to create new meanings with greek words"But there is also the further idea that Anglish is a recognition and a celebration of the English part of modern English. For, although it has borrowed thousands and thousands of words throughout its life, there still exists a true English core to English, the most important everyday words which no sentence or uttering could manage without. By stripping away the layers of borrowings, Anglish lets us better appreciate that core and the role it plays in our language."
English has quite happily built upon its roots and is able to grab "foreign" words and take them on board, without fear, favour or rancour. Why not? Modern English takes advantage of a vast vocabulary, much of which is not natively derived or generated but is still cherished.
Anglish with it's purity notions should be considered degenerative and racist in my view.
I agree that language purity stuff is related to xenophobia.
English is a horrible second language. It's learned through brute forcing the horrid irregularity of grammar (10%) and especially vocabulary/pronunciation (90%), by listening to the ever-present songs in English, watching American TV series/shows, movies, reading English-speaking media, interacting with un-localized websites and mobile apps, etc.
I want to agree with this, but the handful of Anglish examples I've heard with old English equivalents seem awkward. Reducing the borrowed words really helps with comprehension though.
It's worth noting that Paul Jennings is described as a "humourist."
> Paul Francis Jennings (20 June 1918 – 26 December 1989) was an English humourist and author.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Jennings_(British_author)
I think that's why some of the Anglish stuff (or Anglo Saxon class?) might come off as rougher, more basic, simpler, or more profane. It's really interesting (but also really sad) how nearly 1000 years can go by, yet a language can still carry the scars of oppression.
Anyway, that's just my thought, I'm no linguist or historian, so don't take my word for it.
This sort of reads like an attempt at coming up with like a “English, 100 years after the apocalypse, in some super insular community” language. I expect there will be too much world building and some heavy handed social commentary.
Anyway, it is probably a fun exercise for the people engaging in it.
Of course English in actuality is the totally ownerless language that can customized however it needs to be. Let’s be honest about it, just messing with the language is pretty mild revenge, considering all the trouble the British Empire got up to historically.
It sounded to me like English as spoken in Firefly.
:)) for a second there I thought this was /r/justneckbeardthings
walks up to workstation
At last, the time of reckoning is at hand!
They are just a bunch of linguistics nerds who are having fun imagining what English would have been without a Norman invasion.
In the same spirit, I'd recommend checking out the Uncleftish Beholding. Although I think it predates the modern Anglish community, it's an attempt to describe Quantum Mechanics with Latin/French derived words.
https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/docs/uncleftish_beh...
https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/What_is_Anglish%3F
When I first came across Anglish I thought it was a really fun linguistic idea. Then last week I came across the above. Fuck no.
https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/What_is_Anglish%3F?type=revi...
https://www.reddit.com/r/anglish/comments/11dtrqp/special_op...
Gouth Gripper, Fallwardens, Sundry Underrighting, Wyecraftish Loft Sway Band
What do they do with grammatical constructions like non+<noun> meaning "not a <noun> and non+<adj> meaning "not <adj>". English just isn't English without non-.
ex- is another one.
What do Anglish speakers breathe and push out of their lips when speaking Anglish words? It better not be air which is from French, Latin and ultimately Greek. Indeed, I see they replace that with lift. If you know a bit of German, it's not far off from luft, but calling the air lift screws up English, rather than purifying it. lift meaning air is a dead word that disappeared in Middle English.
I suspect purification attempts will produce better results for languages that have a less diverse, more linear (and perhaps shorter, in some sense) history and are spoken by a relatively small number of people concentrated in a particular area.
> I suspect purification attempts will produce better results for languages that have a less diverse, more linear (and perhaps shorter, in some sense) history and are spoken by a relatively small number of people concentrated in a particular area.
Ah, but they're only (or at least more) interesting on languages that are already a mess of influences to contrast with.
It is, from Latin non = “not”.
That said, I still giggle when I read "Uncleftish Beholding", as it sounds like how Marvel's Thor might explain human scientific understanding to his buds in Asgard.
Ethnonationalism, Nationalism, Empire
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/11287462.2006.10...
Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe - Language Chapter
- https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/56/object/122-159898
Linguistic Purism in the History of the German Language
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291539411_Linguisti...
Revisiting Key Debates in the Study of Nationalism
If certain people had their wish,
with the language being Anglish,
then Anglish wouldn't be a word.
You'd need an English noun or verb.It’s an interesting watch but I do see why the attempts at “purifying” the language are troubling if taken as an actual attempt at anything other than a fun conlang.
Edit: oh the video is mentioned on the site. :)
A constitution is not merely, and not entirely, a book of laws. My lawyer wife had a great pile of law books, but none of them were a constitution.
And the idea that one can sensibly revive Old English words to use in Modern English grammar is a bit odd, they are after all related languages not the same language. The first is inflected, the second mostly not.
In my opinion, contrary to that of John Cheke, the great strength of English is precisely that it is so willing to borrow from other languages. It is one of the defining characteristics of English that a foreign word can be adopted, and adapted, very easily so that after a relatively short time it doesn't feel especially foreign.
- are (displacing bēoþ, sind, and sindon)
- their (displacing heora)
- they (displacing hīe)
As a linguistic game, sounds fun. Hopefully its pupils don't take it too seriously, hem hem, e.g. William Strunk the Lesser: "Saxon is a livelier tongue than Latin, so use Anglo-Saxon words"
does not make sense - english is a language sythesised from huge borrowings from other languages, over time. what is the "native" language supposed to be?
and as regards early english, did you ever see phillip larkin describe it as "ape's bumfodder"? luckily we replaced it with many, many borrowings, so much so that looking at AS english is prainful on the brain - and uneccessary.
something there never has been?
does that make sense? are we dealing with recursive definitions of english here?
https://www.britannica.com/place/United-Kingdom/Anglo-Saxon-...
It sounds almost like the handbook from Severance or something quasi-fanatical, fictional religious texts or such.
Turns out that ordinateur wasn't chosen for French purity but because IBM wanted a fancy word to sell their fancy machine by.
"Ordinateur" suggests sorting, rather than just making simple calculations.
It has nothing at all with "keeping the language pure" (which seems kind of a meme in the English speaking world, but really couldn't be further from truth) and it was originally trademarked by IBM, but quickly became a generic word.
The Spanish speakers across the pond use "computadora" or "computador".
To us computador make us think on something like an old ancient device from the 60-70's.
> "Ey, wagwan fam, bare man gwarn dis flick, whatchu sayin'?"
Translated, this means:
> "Hey, how are you? Some folks are headed to the cinema. Would you like to join?"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English
from Politics and the English Language by George Orwell
It is perfect for adding some flavor and old-timey vibes to your writing while still being much more readable than actual old English.
I think John Cheke can be satisfied that English has repaid its dues ten times over in the modern era
Next was French, providing majority of vocabulary but not the most frequent words. Latin provides a lot of vocabulary but it came later, it is mostly scientific and technical terms.
This reminds me (a Welshman) of my favourite theory for the origin of the name "America":
Portmanteau is a French loanword.
Also, before the Norman conquests, wasn’t England full of tribes like Britons who all had different words anyway?
The real consistency you should aim for is pronunciation. Especially for loanwords. Yes, the first time you encounter "CD" spelled out in your native language, it's jarring, but over time the benefits of this add up.
Both English and French fail miserably at pronunciation consistency. See this for English: https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
If you aim to make your language as phonetic as possible, suddenly acquiring the language is much easier. Still very hard, but a degree of difficulty easier.
That would make USA -> FRA. Half France :)
ever borowing and never paying [1500's]
English degrades gracefully, in grammar and vocabulary, enabling it to be widely used (or, conceivably, resulting from wide use).
More likely, we the people.
EDIT: And its online example Up Goer Five: https://xkcd.com/1133/
Supposedly cognate with Beech (the tree) which is called bok (sv) and Buche (de)
Reminds me of riding in a cab once in Turkey with a guy speaking Armenian on the phone. The Turkish driver was prejudiced against Armenians and ordered us out of the cab in angry Turkish, which I did not speak. My companion laughed and told me the phrase he used to tell us to get out was Armenian.
I'm just writing out of frustration. As a practical matter, if, like, the only people on the Internet that do Anglish stuff are Nazis, and so digging into Anglish messes with all the recommendation algorithms, then my being irritated at their claim on it doesn't make much of a difference.
But I won't complain about downvotes without an attempt to actually give people the opportunity to learn something.
Ethnonationalism, Nationalism, Empire
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/11287462.2006.10...
Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe - Language Chapter
- https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/56/object/122-159898
Linguistic Purism in the History of the German Language
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291539411_Linguisti...
Revisiting Key Debates in the Study of Nationalism