A Language of Beautiful Impurity

> 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.

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...

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. :)

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!

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.

By the title I assumed this might be about C.

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.

There are other beautifully impure languages. They are mostly called Creole or Pidgin by some scholars.