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Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

Anglish can go and fuck itself, as a wise person once never said.

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.

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I guess the premise of Anglish can be summed up as:

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 is French! (lingua franca) The reason for that is because English is considered relatively easy to communicate with as a second 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.

lingua franca is not French, it was the language of the Franks, a Germanic language for a Germanic tribe. The French are a Celtic people (Gallic tribes) but their language derives from the Italic language of their Roman oppressors. If lingua franca interests you, Aryan roots and all, you should take a look at Anglish: as your English is quite good, it's a project that would be accessible to you to practice something much closer to lingua franca than French!

The main reason English is used so much is because of the British (and later US) empire, and not because it's easy as a second language (that depends heavily on what someone's first language is). Empires always spread their official language far and wide, no matter how "easy" it is.

I agree that language purity stuff is related to xenophobia.

> The reason for that is because English is considered relatively easy to communicate with as a second language.

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.

> there still exists a true English core to English, the most important everyday words which no sentence or uttering could manage without.

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.

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