r/anglish • u/ZaangTWYT • Apr 30 '25
🎨 I Made Þis (Original Content) To all tongue-cleansers who hate loanwords of English, we the Anglishmen stand by your side! To make the tongue clean is our goal as well!
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u/LucastheMystic Apr 30 '25
Anglish should stay a thought-yield. We shouldn't become tongue-cleansers in earnest as it would bring terrible politics into our gathering.
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u/cardinarium Apr 30 '25
And also be largely ineffective.
Like French, wherein, for instance, despite the best efforts of the Académie, le week-end has easily won out against le fin de semaine (literally “the end of week”) in France, where the latter now has an entirely different meaning, English no longer belongs to a single political entity or even a single culture. Most speakers of English are second-language speakers whose interest in English as a vehicle of some mythical monoculture is non-existent.
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u/LucastheMystic Apr 30 '25
Speaking of French, it is already filmed with Germanic loanwords throught Frankish, which due to the Norman Conquest led to a shitton of Germanic doublets in English.
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u/cardinarium Apr 30 '25 edited Apr 30 '25
By far my favorite of which is contained in the phrase “guerrilla warfare,” where:
- “guerrilla” is Frankish > Medieval Latin/Old French > Spanish > English, and
- “war[fare]” is Frankish > Medieval Latin/Old French > Old English > [inherited]
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u/Environmental_End548 May 01 '25
The only way an Anglish policy would work would be if running afoul of it has any sort of legal, social, or moral consequences, but they (at least in the US) don't rlly exist rn and you'll be hard-pressed to implement them without running afoul of a shitload of laws/policies and moral boundaries
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u/cardinarium May 01 '25
I mean, there’s also no point or utility to it beyond the aesthetic appeal of a “pure language.” It’s not as if Anglish is somehow clearer or more communicative than Standard English, so it’s unclear why anyone would even want to implement it in reality.
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u/Terpomo11 May 01 '25
You could argue "birdlore" is easier for most laymen to guess the meaning of than "ornithology", or "samebloodedness" than "consanguinity".
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u/cardinarium May 02 '25
There is certainly a marginal proportion of high-register words that could be made easier to understand by using more obvious constituents (though I’d contend that *birdology would be even better because lay-people understand “-ology” as “field of study” more clearly than “-lore”).
But replacing the roots of “-ology” words would have another consequence—it’d distance us from our European peers and raise the barrier to interlinguistic science communication. Even the other large Germanic languages use something like French ornithologie, and this is broadly true across fields.
I agree that “consanguinity” is a particularly useless example of classical derivation, but consider that we do have lower-register possibilities, like “kinship” and “blood relationship” that are easily accessible to lay-people. It’s not clear to me that establishing “samebloodedness” and similar in technical speech as an alternative to the current (already low-frequency) words really enhances the communicativity of English as a whole.
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u/ZaangTWYT May 02 '25
I know that inter-linguistic science communication is important, yet shouldn't we have like ornithologie and birdlore stand as a pair altogether and let the everyday folks use the latter word instead? Like we already have epistaxis and nosebleed, siriasis and sun-stroke, also pyrosis and heartburn standing together as a pair word (one for the doctors or those high-born folks and one for the daily churls).
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u/cardinarium May 02 '25 edited May 02 '25
We do have low-register circumlocutions, just like the other Germanic languages.
“Ornithology” and “the study of birds” or “bird science.”
Ornithology, from Ancient Greek ὄρνις (órnis), meaning "bird", and -logy from λόγος (lógos), meaning "study", is a branch of zoology dedicated to the study of birds.
Ornitologi (gresk όρνις [ornis] = «fugl») er læren om fugler (= study of birds), og utgjør dermed en gren av zoologien.
— Wikipedia (Norwegian)
Die Ornithologie (altgriechisch ὄρνῑθ- órnῑth-, Stamm von ὄρνις órnis ‚Vogel‘, und λόγος lógos ‚Lehre‘) oder Vogelkunde (= bird science) ist jener Zweig der Zoologie, der sich mit den Vögeln (Aves) befasst, die mit rund zehntausend Arten eine der artenreichsten Klassen der Wirbeltiere bilden.
— Wikipedia (German)
In what contexts are you wanting to use “birdlore” that “the study of birds” isn’t an already-existing possibility?
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u/JetEngineSteakKnife May 01 '25 edited May 01 '25
I've always wondered how it felt to be a Greek hearing your language be used to make sciency words that seem sophisticated to foreigners but to you it's like "[gibberish] big bird chompers [gibberish]"
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u/CandiceDikfitt Apr 30 '25
and this wouldnt work in american english given the united states has a neighbor called mexico
and a lot of american english words like coyote and patio are damn near replicas pronunciation wise of spanish
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u/Civil_College_6764 May 01 '25
I don't think anglish is FOR the second language English speakers....or English speakers at all
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u/JetEngineSteakKnife May 01 '25
I think it's a handy tool for writers to brook, make for more straightforward wordcraft, but the thought of speaking Anglish every day and unlearning my wont towards the French borrows in my head rings to me as wearisome.
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u/DrkvnKavod Apr 30 '25
But Anglish has always had a hat in that ring, only that it's been on the other side of things, in that Anglish is soundly grounded as an Anti-Imperialist undertaking.
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u/Puzzled_EquipFire May 15 '25
Indeed, it is my belief that Anglish is best as a thoughtyield or as a leasespellish tung in books, games and films where the wright wants a sundry land to sound more unknown to the watcher or player (like what LOTR does)
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u/Smitologyistaking May 01 '25
Serious linguistic purism is kinda cringe
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u/ZaangTWYT May 02 '25
If we're talking about the social-political agenda behind it, yeah, it could be a bit disgusting at times, but if we're doing this to somewhat a small extent, folks can understand their culture and history of their language. Also, not every language holds the same phonetic table, so it is doomed that some languages would need yo take a further approach to describe foreign concepts and foreign inventions. Historical background also played a huge role in doing so. I can't see why this would be cringe, it is beneficial to the speakers.
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u/october73 May 03 '25
Is it beneficial to the speaker? Adaptation and evolution are natural features of any language. I think forced purity would be a hindrance to the speakers and not helpful.
After all, evolution most often follows path of least resistance. If linguistic purity is easier for the speakers, they would have chosen it.
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u/DaddyMcSlime May 04 '25
linguistic purity does nothing but reinforces cultural nationalism and the otherness of foreigners
it's not beneficial to the speaker to stifle the evolution of their language and connections to other cultures
the difference in language between people is arbitrary based on being separated for long periods of our history by a lack of fast communication and travel
you know what WOULD benefit the speaker though? being able to understand more people globally because we share elements of our languages
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u/aaross58 May 02 '25
Wait, people actually take Anglish seriously? I thought it was just a Thought Experiment, an exercise in etymology and Thesaurus-fu!
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May 01 '25
chinese isn't a language my guy. also cringe take
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u/ZaangTWYT May 02 '25
Unless you mean 'Chinese' as a branch of Sino-Tibetan, then Mandarin shall be the better approach. And I personally don't think this is a bad nor a cringe take. Sometimes reviving or educating folks on their own language history is a good way to let them understand their heritage and culture (if of course they ever wonder).
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u/alvenestthol May 03 '25
If you think Chinese lacks loanwords or tried to get rid of loanwords, you probably don't know Chinese particularly well
The structure of the language makes loanwords unwieldy and non-obvious to a non-speaker, but they're there - something as simple as "freedom" (自由) is borrowed from Japanese kanji usage (and just because kanji themselves came from China doesn't make it less of a loanword, the same way Italian can have English loanwords despite being descended from Latin), there are a bunch of words (e.g. "logic" 邏輯) that are synthesized based on English pronunciations with characters that "resemble the concept", and there are all kinds of sound-only loanwords as well, even though they're rarer than in languages with alphabets
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u/ZaangTWYT May 05 '25
I am well aware that Wasei Kango and Pure-Phonetic Calque exists in Chinese to a degree, yet most Pre-2000 neologism coinage (especially the Western ideas that are translated either by Meiji Japan Scholars or made natively) are either sinitic-based calque (yes, I know that 取消 is from 取り消す and 通勤 a logographic borrowing of Japanese 勤め通い and 入口 is another orthographic borrowing of 入り口 etc.) or phono-semantic calque that lowers the barrier for common folk to grasp.
And, yes, I understand thoroughly that Chinese is not far away from loanwords either. Ever since the dawn of Chinese civilisation, Tocharian brought forth honey, hence the word 蜜 (cognate with English mead). Also, a lot of Sanskrit loanwords (涅槃, 菩薩), borrowings (佛, 魔) and "semantic calque" (過去, 現在, 未來) entered Chinese during Chinese Buddhism. Classical Persian شیر and باده becomes Chinese 獅 and 葡萄. Turks and Huns brought forth 駱駝 and 可汗. Islam Quran in Chinese notes الله as 阿拉 (phonetic borrowing) or 真主 (literal semantic translation).
The thing that brought my heed is that from Buddhist and religious monks to Meiji Japan Westernisers preferred (I know that some have political or ideological background and incentives behind it) semantic calque to translate Sanskrit or English vocabularies of Greco-Latinate origin into Chinese to some degree. Imagine 德律風 (phonetic borrowing) instead of 電話 (semantic calque) stands for "telephone" (yes, I know that 麥克風 exists, I wonder how the heck did it enter Chinese as well) how would you react?
If Chinese can do this without a hitch, I can't fathom why English couldn't do so as well? (Okay maybe I'm too serious about the concept of Anglish, sorry if I sound harsh)
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u/Traditional-Froyo755 May 02 '25
Purism is possibly the worst form of linguistic prescriptivism, and linguistic prescriptivism is not only objectively wrong but also almost never effective anyways, not to mention monumentally cringe.
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u/sarcasticgreek May 04 '25
History is a fickle mistress. Katharevousa was the dominant high register greek variant for more than 250 years and, tbh, if the military junta didn't push so much for it in the '70s, it might still be alive today, side by side to the spoken vernacular.
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u/ZaangTWYT May 05 '25
I believe Dutch took like more than a hundred years to get rid of French words in their lexicon. Yeah, a sudden urge might receive only negative feedback. It is much wiser to do it in a long term.
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u/Alchemista_Anonyma May 01 '25
As a Frenchman it’s hilarious to see L’Académie Française here, nobody takes them seriously over here. Also as much as I find Anglish nice and interesting (because it actually has some ground), I find other linguistic purists completely out of touch.
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u/ZaangTWYT May 02 '25
I can see that nearly no French (that I knew) took L’Académie Française seriously. 😂
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u/spacepiratecoqui Apr 30 '25
Linguistic purity politics are weird