"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
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
Related to that, it's interesting how many European languages have heavily borrowed from French in the last 2-3 centuries, especially what I would call "technical" terms.
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.
Hungarian actually had a language reform in the late 1800s to remove foreign words and replace them with pure Hungarian equivalents. These days though, quite a few loanwords have crept back in. I'm not sure if the Latin-based words actually came via French or via English. And there are very many Slavic loan words in Hungarian too, and some Germanic ones. My favorite loan word in Hungarian is "vásziszdász" from German "Was ist das?", it's used to mean deal, as in "not a big deal", "nem egy nagy vásziszdász".
Interestingly, that German phrase also has its application in French: the word Vasistas [1], used to refer to roof windows. Ended up completely different than both German and Hungarian versions.
A related one I like is “vonundzu” which I guess you’d have to spell as “fanencú?” I’ve never seen it spelled, but it’s dismissive slang for aristocrats both real and self-appointed.
> I'm not sure if the Latin-based words actually came via French or via English
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).
Coach/coche/kocsi all come from Hungarian. There is a Hungarian town called Kócs. Kócsi literally means "(a thing) from Kócs". Hungary used to sell some horse drawn carriages made in Kócs and from there, the word entered German and then English.
But that’s only because French (but also English) coin words by mixing latin and greek (and making the spelling more French). The modern Greek word is completely different.
Many languages in Europe derive from Latin and ancient Greek, that does not mean that the english bicycle derives from the French word.
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.
>Related to that, it's interesting how many European languages have heavily borrowed from French in the last 2-3 centuries, especially what I would call "technical" terms.
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.
Actually, lingua franca originally refereed to a pidgin bridge language (also called Sabir) in use mostly by sailors and traders in the Mediterranean Basin. While it also borrowed from French, it was mostly based on Italian dialects from what I read. [0]
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.
English also seams to borrow heavily from latin for anything medical. The words in Spanish for your bones, bacteria, etc would all be recognizable to your doctor.
It's quite systematic. Latin was the language of medicine. When they switched to English, or other local languages, they kept a lot of jargon. Religion and government and academic areas are similar.
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.
Cow - said by the Anglo-Saxon serf that would rear it. Beef - said by the Norman noble that would eat it. Same with deer/venison, pig/pork, sheep/mutton.
... and Old/Ancient Greek. When you see -phth- you know you are in for a right old tongue twister. Not human but fish related: ichthyophthirius. In English it's called "white spot" - both of those words are very Anglo-Saxon.
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.
> 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".
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/.
Same with English, but not only European languages. Just yesterday I was listening to a woman speaking Tagalog and quite a few words almost certainly came from English.
I mean Rome came first everywhere, William the conqueror came from Norsemen, which means Normandy was where the Vikings settled there. Pretty much all of Europe has had this kind of multiple conquests different language groups percolating everywhere - but English is the one that chose this model of how to handle it.
It’s been known for some time that English started as a pidgin language, but some recent linguistic analysis suggested that it wasn’t a pidgin once, but twice. And that’s why it’s particularly messy.
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.
"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
Ah, English is not exclusive in that. It's the language acquisition model of all languages from what I can tell.
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.
ok most languages do that, take another language word in, but I think English has the habit of turning things into metaphorical phrases, adjectives, adverbs and the like for the things it imports.
Admit I can't come up with an example at the moment though.
Something like "mesmerizing" coming from the German person named Mesmer?
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.
loan has the explicit give back property. thats what a loan IS:
'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)
Well, I don't have any specific examples off the top of my head, but it's not that unusual for a loanword to disappear from the language it was borrowed from and then wind up reintroduced in some form to the original language.
Pho would be a good example. Its Viet Nam's adoption of "pot au feu" from the french, then back imported into French as Pho, along with everywhere else when the indochine community brought it along for the world.
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.
howl is so clearly old English it's funny (well Middle English but I call it old because I am not a pedant or professional). Moon is also old English but it is related to other words from other languages and comes from some far off proto language. So moon doesn't give the same feeling of look at that old timey word that howl does.
Opinion of a Polish guy: In my eyes, English is pretty bloated, when seemingly almost every concept can have three or more alternative words, each from a different source. It is all matter of perspective, I suppose. :)
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).
The counterargument is that lots of words allow for precise concision. wordbook can be ambiguous, as almost all books are filled with words. Is wordbook specifying that this book is a word book as opposed to a picture book? wordkenbook might be less ambiguous, but maybe this referring to all nonfiction books using words?
all that being said, I think uncleftish[0] beholding is an amazing piece of text and a good exercise for young physicists
na, you are missing the point here, in German "Wörterbuch" (literally wordsbook) is the standard term for a dictionary. No ambiguity because by default a book is with words and then all composita describe some kind of deviation (Bilderbuch= picture book, Handbuch = handbook -> manual, Fahrtenbuch = drive book -> driver's log).
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.
You're cherry picking examples here though. How do you explain the "-zeug" words? If you think of "Zeug" more as tool then some of them kind of make more sense ("Feuerzeug", "Werkzeug", at a pinch "Spielzeug") but are you really thinking of a plane as a flying tool? And there are also cases where English has opted for a compound word and German has just invented its own: Ampel vs traffic light, for example.
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.
> and German has just invented its own: Ampel vs traffic light, for example
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)
I disagree about the Zeug, I think it’s great to have the flexibility — “Zeug” is also just “thing” sometimes — but I find Fahrzeug and Flugzeug just as intuitive as Werkzeug and Feuerzeug. Now relating them to the various meanings of “zeugen” might be tricky but I think I get that too.
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.
Airplane makes some sense too as according to Wikipedia:
"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.
But the key point here is that "fire stuff" is still a pretty ambiguous term. Sure, it does describe a lighter, but it also describes lots of other things pretty well. The compound parts give some clues as to the nature of the object in question (a Feuerzeug does have something to do with fire), but fundamentally you still need to know what the word means.
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.
Feuerzeug is a lighter, its a fixed term, nothing "wobbly" that relates to fire-stuff.
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).
This is because English has lost most of its Indo-European heritage (except lexical), and looks much more similar to Chinese that to an IE language like German, Spanish, Russian, Greek, Hindi / Urdu, or even Farsi (though Farsi has also lost grammatical gender).
* 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 :)
Oh those things are certainly true, but the genders are not consistent across Indo-European languages. In learning a language they act as a thing to get stuck on. It's an unpleasant feeling to know you are constantly getting genders wrong, even if you are understood (though seemingly in France, getting genders wrong is sufficient to be not understood).
Although vaguely off topic, one thing that grinds my gears is calling Persian "Farsi". Nobody goes around saying "hello I speak Español" but for some reason, rather recently, it has become popular to use the endonym for Persian in place of the already well established "Persian". I've more than once met people not knowing they are the same thing which is sad because using the new word loses well-rooted associations like with famous authors and other cultural elements etc
That's an afterthought, in English you say Levantine Arabic or Egyptian Arabic, or Brazilian Portuguese, Bavarian etc not "Bayrisch" or "al-lahje shamiye" or something else
English has had a lot of good or at least interesting evolutionary reasons to drop most grammatical cases and grammatical genders. English decided to make some interesting trade-offs in expected word order to lower redundancy in inter-word agreement morphology.
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 didn't simplify if you mean its syntax by that, its morphology did. (Inflections affect morphology [word form] more than syntax.)
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.
Indeed, for a native English person who doesn't have genders for inanimate objects (I'm sure someone will come up with an exception) they don't seem to add any benefit. La chaise vs Le chaise. It's a chair, you sit on it. Someone articistic might decide that a chair has a masculine form, but another chair could be feminine, but that doesn't change the "le" vs "la" part.
> 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.
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.
I'd translate "Zeug" as "device": a tool or other contraption made to facilitate some activity. Flugzeug definitely helps flying, like Werkzeug helps working.
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.'
> wordbook can be ambiguous, as almost all books are filled with words. Is wordbook specifying that this book is a word book as opposed to a picture book? wordkenbook might be less ambiguous, but maybe this referring to all nonfiction books using words?
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.
I specifically said "lexicalized" because the word "wordbook" would be somehow related to "word" and "book" but can mean something else so these words can't no longer stand as a standalone word. Whether the word "thesaurus" can be said to be a "word book" or not is pretty much irrelevant here. If a "wordbook" meant a thesaurus then a plain dictionary would naturally use a different word (or phrase) to avoid confusion. Or more likely, "thesaurus" may not exist as a single word but would be just called a synonym dictionary.
Yes, Compound words in any language are ambiguous based on their components and need to be learned as concepts into themselves. In English we have "houseboat", which means a boat that has living quarters in it that someone uses as a home. But based on the words, it could mean a boat that you keep in your house instead.
I feel this way when I speak Spanish. I'm constantly looking for the right word and it always seems that there is only one word in Spanish that fits multiple words in English. I've had the opposite happen where there are more precise words in Spanish, but not as often as the reverse.
As a native English speaker, I think the multiple choices of word are a strength. They usually have subtle differences of style (if not meaning), which can affect the tone of the sentence. In my opinion, this is where English achieves its precision - at the phrase or sentence level, rather than the level of individual words.
Depends on what part of vocabulary you look at. Some words, on the contrary, have many names: "nut", "beam", "housing", "tell", "well", etc. I used to think it's the contrary to Slavic languages, where borrowed words in professions get exact meaning (marine industry, or IT).
Having a Polish wife an knowing something about Polish through a few failed attempts to learn some, Polish is a lot more "bloated" to an English eye. The moods and aspects make learning Polish super hard. If you learn the morphology of the individual elements I guess you can guess what a verb means, but it all seems a bit alien. An needing to know if a verb is in one aspect or another, and that sometimes the aspect is "past" and sometimes "future" in tense... it is hard unless you are a native speaker or really dedicated.
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.
Is that mainly due to it being based upon a historical snapshot of English? that by definition never evolved further. If it had the same huge population of English speakers over hundreds of years (i.e was a living language) then it may also have evolved a diverse range of words without the need to absorb other languages - not that I care for it.
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.
In Dutch, as an example we have a word called zoetwater - which if you translate it literally, is "sweet water". But it is the word for 'freshwater' in English [as opposed to saltwater], not some kind of sweet water. Even though zoetwater could be literally translated, no one really knows it means freshwater in English. There is advertisement for 'fris water' or 'vers water', which means fresh water correctly.
Fun fact: If you follow an extreme lowcarb diet (e.g., Atkinson, where you aim at getting 25g of carbs or less daily) for a long time, some things that didn't have a sweet taste before get a sweet tinge. One of them is water. I remember thinking “Oh, that's why it's called ‘zoetwater’ in Dutch!”
Compared to what? German is a rich language with a wealth of literature from novels to philosophy and science/technology, utilizing a much smaller set of root words.
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.
There are lots of languages that are more insular than English. Do you consider them to be impoverished, why so? All a language needs is to provide the ability to communicate to its speakers.
Y'know, I've seen dozens of versions of this quote, but this is the first time I've seen it phrased this way and with proper attribution.
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).)
I have had a lot of fun with Anglish in the past, composing poetry and even attempting to write school assignments in it.
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.
Perhaps the word bairns for children could have been used instead of the word offspring. The word is pretty similar to the Scandinavian words for children
> 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.
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.
>> … English is unmistakably North Germanic and not West Germanic …
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
The link says that Old English is not an ancestor of modern English.
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.
do you genuinely think that the book is saying that English is not descended at all from Old English and is in fact solely descended from Old Norse?
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
It’s not clear to me why the project should seek to revert the linguistic influence of Norman invaders while enshrining or even amplifying the linguistic influence of Norse invaders.
I think it depends on what region of England or the UK at large you want to consider. If you're NE England into Scotland, yeah, Scandinavian languages had influence and that's is reflected in their current vocab. Other areas may have retained more of the original dialect with fewer Scandinavian influences initially though those would return via the Norman invasion with added French vocabulary.
Old Norse accounts for about 5% of English vocabulary, including very common everyday words, not regional. Examples: egg, knife, sky, skill, etc, etc. Tons of core vocab.
And "they", "them", "their", which is really interesting. I can understand a language borrowing nouns (or verbs, or adjectives) from a neighbour, but pronouns?
I'm not aware of any natural or constructed English/Scandinavian pidgins/creoles, but that sure would be fun. The conventional wisdom is that it's easier for an English speaker to learn Swedish than it is to learn German.
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?"
Norwegian has several loanwords from English. Some are pronounced differently (such as "juice"), while others use the English pronunciation, but sometimes with a Norwegian ending. The latter is more common among the youth.
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.
I wonder where the b in sein conjugation came from?
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.
Not Danish. Danish is pretty alien. Norwegian is quite easy for an English speaker, plus all the dialects mean that even technicalities such as the tone accent can be "worked around". Swedish and Norwegian are both pretty easy to pronounce and pretty easy to learn as an English speaker. Most of the problem is vocabulary, not really so much the grammar.
Are you familiar with the Danelaw, and with Danegeld? I think that knowing "Danes" ruled much of mainland Britain for hundreds of years and provided kings of a unified-ish (pre-Norman) England (Cnut [Canute]) makes it less surprising?
The pronunciation of words between English and Dutch make them appear to be quite different. Once you’re used to hearing Dutch, which most British won’t be, the differences are much, much less than one might imagine.
cheers means goodbye in Yorkshire? In Lancashire (and elsewhere in the UK) I’ve never heard it mean anything other than “thank you” or the thing you say after clinking glasses
the only time I’ve ever heard anything different is from foreigners learning English
yes I’m aware of the dictionary definitions, that’s why foreigners say it, but not once have I ever heard an actual Brit use it like that. it’s a definition that has pretty much passed out of common usage, if it was ever in it
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 the context of 'cheers' being a direct one-to-one replacement of 'goodbye'. (Or more precisely 'bye'.) If, in my local usage, there is any difference between 'bye' and 'cheers', it's that the latter has a bit more bonhomie about it.
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?'
yesterday after discussing this, I asked multiple people I know from across the country, including the midlands, and they all said that no, cheers is not something they've ever heard as goodbye. I stand by the fact that cheers means thank you/regards, and occasionally is used in place of or alongside goodbye when some kind of transactional behaviour has taken place
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"
not a direct answer to your question, but there is a great youtube video explaining the reasons why English may be more Scandinavian in origin than we thought. has to do with... can't remember gotta search, brb
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.
Northern English is significantly influenced by Scandinavian words today- for example the “-by” suffixes on town names is a direct use of the modern Danish word for town, Kirkby meaning Church Town in a direct translation
What is the "Anglish project"? Do you mean people who write in it for fun, as one might write a short story in Klingon? Or are there people advocating that we should adopt it, by avoiding romance-language words? Something else?
I don't think this has anything to do with Brittain or geography but rather the language of the Angles, which is posited to form the primary substrate for modern English.
Its odd that you immediately paint this as racist, when it is exactly what the "Académie Française" does and has done for centuries.
And, if you read into the site even a little they define Anglish inborn terms as those in use prior to 1066 after the Norman Conquest [1] of England.
This is an innocent conlang designed to highlight some interesting historical circumstances around a bloody and protracted conquest. That some people with Inborn Anglish ancestory have an interest in their own history is innocent and given current trends, perfectly reasonable.
I would suggest you examine you own biases before jumping to conlcusions, as I doubt you would make the same statements against any other culture seeking to document their history.
This is a fun way to speak English, but this notion of "native" vs. "borrowed" words is incredibly slippery. For instance, the example replaces "union" with "oneship", but these words share a common Proto-Indo-European root and can reasonably be interpreted as the same word; the same goes for most other Norman words "borrowed" into English after the conquest. The page advocates the use of "Old English words ... revived and updated to modern spelling and phonology to be used for a modern meaning". How old is too old?
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.
Tired point to make. Languages are cousins, either first or fifteenth. (Or maybe they have no known cousins, but whatever… English certainly does.) Anglish proposes more Germanic words. It doesn’t propose to find words which cannot be traced back to a common Indo-European root word…
> 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.
I think it's fine to describe Anglish as "more Germanic". It's the words "native" and "pure" that I find confusing in this context.
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.
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 salute your tilting at windmills against Political Correctness. But it’s a waste of effort.
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.
> 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.
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.
"race science" may be pseudo science, but race is not == science. in a linguistic context, people mean something when they talk about something. you may not like what they mean, or even what they talk about, but that doesn't mean they aren't thinking something and are talking about nothing.
It is a pretty well known fact. The concept of human race is developed by racist ideologies (obviously), see for instance [1], and is as such a banned concept in many countries.
Although it seems intended as fun I’m always a little nervous of things like this because it also denies the power relationships that led to those borrowings. Degallicized English is kind of erasing the relationship between England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and even Cornwall. I’d be much more comfortable if I didn’t have to explain to so many Americans that Scotland is not a part of England, that it isn’t a separate island, etc.
While I understand and appreciate these distinctions, I think a lot of Brits can get a little precious about the idea that England, Scotland, etc. are different “countries”, to the degree that they even e.g. field competing teams in the World Cup. I understand that there’s a nuanced narrative in which the UK consists of four different countries that share a monarch and a government, but from the outside y’all are just one country. I’m a little more sympathetic to pedantry about not calling that country “England”, but people do the same thing with the Netherlands and Holland. (There are apparently twelve Netherlands, with Holland only consisting of two of them!)
I don't know any English people who think that Scotland or Wales are countries.
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.
The Scottish Parliament has its authority devolved to it from Westminster. It lacks the inherent constitutional right to self-government held by any of the fifty United States.
Every English person I know thinks that England, Scotland and Wales are countries. It's what we were taught in school. I find it odd that you find the opposite.
It says the name of the issuing country on the front, like every passport in the world, and inside it says that the issuing country is GBR, the ISO code for the UK.
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.
I guess you are deferring (appealing?) to the authority of the International Organization for Standardization and their list of country codes then, which is fair enough, but not really to the Passport Office, which doesn't make mention of the word country in their passports and is not really weighing in on this semantic dispute, despite using an ISO code. I'm not trying to advance any evidence that Scotland etc. "really are" countries, rather that it is very common usage of the word, per wikipedia it seems that even the Prime Minister's office and the ONS use it, as does more or less everyone I know, that is all.
Sure, I just think it would make more sense to pick a real date then. No words that would be unrecognizable to a typical English speaker before 1066? Sure. You'd still have to define "typical" because even modern English speakers do not all speak an identical language, and this notion of "updating to modern spelling and phonology" becomes a strange exercise.
All I'm saying is, the word "pure" doesn't make sense to me here.
It's also not like Norman French was a "pure" offshoot of Latin either. It was heavily influenced by the languages of the Franks and Gauls.
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.
And that’s not to mention that William’s great-great-great grandfather Rollo was a Norseman who himself conquered part of northern France, and was allowed to keep his conquests in exchange for swearing allegiance to the French king and converting to Christianity. I think the term “Norman” is actually related to “Norseman”, in fact. (“Rollo” was, incidentally, probably not his real name.)
> the point of this project is to see what a modern "pure" Germanic English would be like.
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.
Agreed. English is not the only language deeply influenced by other languages. The other "Germanic" languages aren't necessarily any more "pure" than English. The other day I came across an article (unfortunately I can't find the link) which talked about how the Scandinavian languages were forever changed by the contact with the Hansa trade union, some 40% of Norwegian vocabulary, for example, is from Low Middle German. The article showed example sentences where every single word was from LMG, but at the same time perfectly fine Norwegian.
Grammar stays the same in borrowings. For instance, Italian has greek borrowings for centuries, that disobey the gender endings (-o for masculine and -a for feminine, m. fotógrafo -> f. fotógrafa), and the biggest offender is the Greek suffix -ista, which can have both genders (communista, feminista, etc.). Nevertheless Italian grammar didn't get broken. (I'm personally outraged that they say "il mouse" (pronounced il máus), instead of native il topo/la rata as every other Latin language, but Italian grammar still functions fine.).
Which is all a fun linguistic ‘what-if’ game - but when you start posting ideas online about ‘pure Germanic heritage’ you might find you attract an audience who are not just interested in word games.
Certain people would be attracted to things even if you didn't mention the word 'pure'. We all clearly understand that there will be people will have impulses towards provincialism, etc.
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.
Latin and Proto-Germanic were both Indo-European languages but that doesn’t make them the same language. A lot of the family resemblance between English and other related languages like German or Dutch is lost under the thick blanket of Romance vocabulary.
Reminded of the Japanese native words known as "wago" or "yamato kotoba"[0]:
"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.
There are lots of interesting parallels between English and Japanese.
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.
Japanese came to mind for me as having borrowed plenty of words from English (often modifying them simply to ensure a vowel between each consonant sound, as two adjacent consonants would be too foreign) as my contrarian reaction to
> "... [English] ever borowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt."
It seems relevant to me that the English themselves are actually a good mix of Vikings, Romans, French, Germans and Celts (and some other stuff no doubt) - so to advocate for just one of these inheritances as opposed to the mixture seems a bit of a nonsense, even if one chooses to ignore the richness of interactions with other languages in Britains history as an international nation - “Global Britain” indeed.
Sicily is another island in Europe everyone and their mother landed on, and like English, native Sicilianu demonstrates its inheritance from its many mothers: Latin, Greek, Spanish, Norman French, and Arabic.
The beauty of the English language always comes from picking the word with the perfect connotation.
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.
that Hitchens quote is nice, but typically for him, and fittingly for the context, it’s more of an attempt to be contrary and interesting than it is to be correct. racists are accused of discriminating by race. he obviously knew this, and it’s still an interesting point, but to be annoyed by it is to be annoyed by correct usage of English
The word play here is one of nuanced diction here. Namely the secondary meaning of the word:
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.
This has the same feel as avoiding "immigrant German". My family is ESL, and communicating in our original language/dialect has devolved into a free mix of German and English words. It takes a conscious effort to keep it all German when talking with relatives from the old country! But I agree with others, trying to keep English "pure" is a lost cause; it's a glorious hodgepodge of influences from all over, and I love it (as an ESL person).
This project isn't ideologically motivated, which I think many people immediately jump to that conclusion. It is a fun project to explore. If you have never come across the conlang (constructed language) community it might not make sense, but it's more so linguists and linguistic hobbyists having fun.
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.
I have first seen this idea in the short piece "Uncleftish Beholding" (Atomic Theory)
"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."
"Nor are stuff and work unakin. Rather, they are groundwise the same, and one can be shifted into the other. The kinship between them is that work is like unto weight manifolded by the fourside of the haste of light."
Although I know German and "Sauerstoff" and "Waßerstoff" seem normal, in English "sourstuff" or "waterstuff" sound just utterly hilarious! (English is not my native language.)
English shifts up into this "academic register" for scientific or medical words, utilising Greek or Latin roots. Many other languages ... do not.
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.
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.
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."
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> The term "Anglish" was made up by Paul Jennings in 1966, however the desire to remove foreign influence from the English language is a tradition that goes back all the way to 1066 when the Norman invasion brought in the majority of foreign vocabulary to English.
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.
My parents were English majors, and they met in Anglo-Saxon class.
My father described speaking Anglo-Saxon as being like cursing all the time. Everything is basic words like "shit" and "blood".
My understanding (and take this with a grain of salt, I don't have sources) is that after the Norman conquest in 1066, the original English language was the lower class language and the Latin/French language of the conquerors became the upper class language. So the words which came to English through French/Latin tended to be considered high class, and the words from older English were considered lower class, rougher, and maybe in some cases more profane. A prime example might be beef vs cow: both referring to the same animal, but the higher class word deriving from French has become the culinary term whereas cow remains the term when speaking of the animal. (That I do have a source for: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef#Etymology)
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.
A rather subtle feature of Tolkien's style is that he often favours words or expressions of Germanic over such with Romanic roots. He does not overdo it, but the low frequency of "Romanic" words seems deliberate.
> “We the Folk of the Foroned Riches, to make a more flawless oneship, build rightness, bring frith and stillness to our land, shield one another, uphold the overall welfare, and hold fast the Blessings of Freedom to ourselves and our offspring, do foresay and lay down this lawbook for the foroned riches of Americksland.”
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.
Are there something like this for other languages? For example, Spanish without Arabic, Germanic, French or English words? It would be funny to know if a "more Latin Spanish" would be more understandable for Italian or French speakers.
> We the Folk of the Foroned Riches, to make a more flawless oneship, build rightness, bring frith and stillness to our land, shield one another, uphold the overall welfare, and hold fast the Blessings of Freedom to ourselves and our offspring, do foresay and lay down this lawbook for the foroned riches of Americksland.
:)) for a second there I thought this was /r/justneckbeardthings
Before anyone gets too worried, the Anglish community in my (limited) experience has been incredibly anti-racism/Nazi/etc.
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.
Yes, every time I've brought up Anglish to someone they think it must be some white-supremacist project. I've never come across that in the nearly 20 years I've known about Anglish. It is, as you say, a project from linguists and language nerds.
> The Anglish project is intended as a means of recovering the Englishness of English and of restoring ownership of the language to the English people.
The fandom is an unmoderated site and does not reflect the general community. Racists have edit buttons too unfortunately. If you look at the edit history of the page it'll tell a story of far-right trolls attempting to rebrand it in recent years.
The concept behind Anglish is poorly founded because English is built on Latin just as much as on Germanic roots, if not more.
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.
Unless I'm missing something, I don't think non- is a Latin root in the first place?
> 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.
As others have commented, modern English is a creole made of bits of Anglo-Saxon, Old French, and Norse such that "Anglish" is about as authentic a pure Anglo-Saxon English as the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park are authentic dinosaurs: enough bits and bobs of modern material have been mixed in that it is at best an approximate reconstruction of something that didn't really exist in that form to begin with.
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.
This is very reminiscent of 19th and 20th century European ethno-nationalism, or how cultural movements centered around language, religion and myth, were particularly instrumental in the formation of ethnic national identities, and what that inevitably entailed for those not in the hegemonic majorities. Nor how the invention of the past, construction of new "ancient" traditions, and a nostalgic longing for an imagined more pure mythic past served nationalist agendas among competing European states. And of course, all of this is still going on, in all sorts of places other than Europe (e.g. Africa, Asia).
For the non-British here, the history of the English language can be a toxic political subject in the UK. As an American who studies Anglo-Saxon-Jute language and literature as a hobby, I'm intrigued by speculation on how the language would have developed without the Norman Conquest, but I'm wary of discussing it around Brits unless I'm sure it won't trigger them.
I coincidentally just watched a YT video by RobWords on the same subject last week: https://youtu.be/aMA3M6b9iEY
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.
It sounds like how Cletus on the Simpsons talks - which may be because some of the backwoods accents in popular media are parodies of real accent isolates from remote areas in the near past. (present?)
The example of the preamble to the US Constitution is a bit poor really because the Anglish version doesn't properly convey the meaning of the English version.
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.
Of particular note are some reinforcements from Old Norse (circa 850s onward):
- 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"
> Anglish is a kind of English which prefers native words over those borrowed from foreign languages.
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?
If you wind back when the borrowings started happening in great number, you get to a time when English was mostly "purely" Germanic. That's what this project is - as if Old English had continued on without being influenced from French etc.
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.
Of course, at different times it happened to more or less a degree, and from different languages. It's all arbitrary, but this project chose an arbitrary precision of "pure" Germanic English. It's their choice and doesn't feel ideologically motivated, more so in the spirit of conlang (constructed languages).
True, but only a quarter to a third of modern English vocabulary can be legitimately described as having purely English or Germanic origins. It might as well not be "English" at this point.
This is turtles all the way down. All Germanic languages are highly related to the other Indo-European languages. The Latin alphabet we use to write can be traced back to Egyptian Hieroglyphs. People just like to pick arbitrary points in an evolutionary timeline and use those points to create in-groups and out-groups.
But if you take that view, you can't define anything. You can't even say it's the Latin alphabet. We must constantly ignore the "turtles" for many things in daily life. So yes, it's arbitrary but that's not a problem. It's just what they chose for the project.
I fully endorse harmless lingustic/academic antics, but some of the people behind "linguistic purity" also seem like the kind of folks who endorse cultural and racial purity.
The reason "ordinateur" is used in French, is that IBM coined that word because "calculateur" (the regular modern French translation of "computer") sounded too mundane.
"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.
Ok, sorry, I did not fact check my comment. I just remembered my French teacher from school making fun about L‘Académie with regard to this and other weird French terms like „baladeur“ instead of Walkman (tm).
This reminds me of London slang, or what I now know is called "Multicultural London English"[1], which I was introduced to when I moved to London. A friend asked me:
> "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?"
English and England and its history have never been pure. It has always mixed and took from other languages and other cultures. And from such derives some its most successful cultural items: its music ands its humour and its general creativity; that is, the creation of culture rather than the preservation of the ways of old. Purity and creativity and creation are no bedfellows. The project is fun for the addition of new words but I would hate to rob myself of the richness of English.
Ænglish is the language of Ænglanders, who live on Ængland, an island with lots of Ængs. They used have trees, but fools burned them all down. Reason for this is of course that there was too many Ænglanders for normal slash and burn agriculture. And reason for this overpopulation is that they were living on remote island, so there were not enough wars.
> An interesting illustration of this is the way in which the English flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning-away from the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific.
from Politics and the English Language by George Orwell
This is silly. There is no such thing as "native" English. English is a hodgepodge of languages from Scandinavian, Celtic, German, Latin, French and more.
"I am of this opinion that our own tung should be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges; wherein if we take not heed by tiim, ever borowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt." - John Cheke
I think John Cheke can be satisfied that English has repaid its dues ten times over in the modern era
Anglo-Saxon is the original language of English. The grammar and base vocabulary is Germanic. English picked up little vocabulary from Brithonic it replaced. Latin was gone from Britain by Anglo-Saxon invasion. Then some words came from Old Norse.
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.
That's basically what the Academie Francaise have been doing all along for French and why we have words like "courriel" instead of email in the dictionary despite the fact most people never use them.
A bit of consistency is good, I find, but not actually in actual words.
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.
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.
What makes today's English so great is what has been borrowed and adapted from foreign languages. Everything adapts and grows with the cultures around them.
Tl;dr but it seems like this movement says that English was native before the Norman invasions. Whut. There are no native tongues, and the languages of the Picts, Welsh, Irish, Celts, Romans, Saxons and others shaped what was being spoken on fair Albion long before the Normans showed up.
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.
Beware - Anglish was invented as a fun linguistic game - and it is! - but then neo-Nazis took a liking to it. So if you wonder if some fans are a bit odd in that way ... they probably are. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/...
At some point, we just have to stop letting trolls claim things like this. Linguistic purity would be a worrisome goal if, like, any native English speakers could casually and correctly speak Anglish. But they can't, because Anglish is silly. It doesn't seem like a useful tool for indoctrination.
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.
I actually look at it in the opposite way. There actually are modern English purists. We sometimes call them grammar nazis. Its not usually the result of some overtly oppressive ideology. They just mistakenly believe that there is a "correct" way to speak English. However, the net result of it is the stigmatization of people from poor communities.
This project very clearly shows how silly English purity is in a clever way: that the "correct" English of day may very well have been considered "incorrect" by the purists of yesteryear. Language evolves.
We would always be too close, then. The Anglish project is more than 20 years old. It could be older, but I've been familiar with it for at least that long.
I think the downvoters must really not know much about 19th and 20th century European ethno-nationalism, or how cultural movements centered around language, religion and myth, were particularly instrumental in the formation of ethnic national identities, and what that inevitably entailed for those not in the hegemonic majorities. Nor how the invention of the past, construction of new "ancient" traditions, and a nostalgic longing for an imagined more pure mythic past served nationalist agendas among competing European states. And of course, all of this is still going on, in all sorts of places other than Europe (e.g. Africa, Asia).
But I won't complain about downvotes without an attempt to actually give people the opportunity to learn something.
This is a dog whistle for white supremacy that screams louder than a vuvuzela. English as it is used today is, like every language, the product of evolution, including cross-pollination with other languages. The idea that there's some "pure" form of a language, or really any aspect of Human culture, is an offence to everything that being human is.
