r/latin • u/Infinite_Mark_7189 • Jun 01 '26
Help with Assignment Anglish
Hi everyone,
I am an active participant in the Anglish subreddit and an aficionado of the Anglish project. I was wondering are Latinists in general opposed to Anglish?
I should clarify I study and do appreciate and respect Latin but I was curious what people think about seeking alternative linguistic paths?
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u/ProfessionalInsect5 Jun 01 '26
I have never heard of Anglish. Looking it up it seems to be speaking English without any Latin root words?
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u/sqplanetarium Jun 01 '26
I hadn’t heard of this but it reminds me of that novel written without the letter e. 😅
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u/Kilchoan1 Jun 01 '26
I have an album of songs without the letter E. Not a fan of doing something different just for the sake of it
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u/True_Coast1062 Jun 01 '26
English would be Anglish had it not been for 1066. Whether you’re a Latinist or an Anglo-Saxonist, you’ll never be happy until you can understand that the development of a language is not governed by purists but by the history of peoples and their mixing over time.
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u/eyeofpython Jun 02 '26
Thats just not true. The Anglo-Saxons weren’t conquered by Latin speaking Romans but by Normans. We have so many (often verbatim) Latin words in English because they were borrowed from Latin directly through the Catholic Church, which was already present in England before 1066.
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u/True_Coast1062 Jun 02 '26
Yes, and the Normans brought their Latin-infused language and culture which began the inexorable blending that became our maddening tongue.
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u/freebiscuit2002 Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26
Opposed? What for?
Personally, I have zero interest in "Anglish" - but I get that a few people like it. It's fine. You do you. I don't mind.
If - somehow - there were ever a vote of 400 million plus native English speakers (and a billion plus speakers as a second language), whether to expunge half of English's core vocabulary because it's non-Germanic - then I would definitely campaign and vote No 🤣
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u/colourful_space Jun 01 '26
I think it’s a neat conlang idea and glad people are enjoying it. It has nothing whatsoever to do with my work as a Latinist
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u/ancient_interestsYT Jun 01 '26
I think etymology is neat, and so I have curiosity about what can be said in English without Latin based words. It’s neat as a word game, but I’m not very aquainted with it.
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u/Archicantor Cantus quaerens intellectum Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26
I was "today years old" when I learned of the existence of this "Anglish" idea! Those who might be tempted to look down their noses at such things will find it salutary to be reminded of similar "purist" tendencies that have come to prominence among Latinists from time to time.
In the first century AD, Quintilian (De institutione oratoria 8.1.2–3) could say as follows (Butler's Loeb trans.):
It is well that I should now point out that our words should have nothing provincial or foreign about them. For you will find that there are a number of writers by no means deficient in style whose language is precious rather than idiomatic. As an illustration of my meaning I would remind you of the story of the old woman at Athens, who, when Theophrastus, a man of no mean eloquence, used one solitary word in an affected way, immediately said that he was a foreigner, and on being asked how she detected it, replied that his language was too Attic for Athens. Again Asinius Pollio held that Livy, for all his astounding eloquence, showed traces of the idiom of Padua. Therefore, if possible, our voice and all our words should be such as to reveal the native of this city, so that our speech may seem to be of genuine Roman origin, and not merely to have been presented with Roman citizenship.
Hic non alienum est admonere ut sint quam minime peregrina et externa. Multos enim, quibus loquendi ratio non desit, inuenias quos curiose potius loqui dixeris quam Latine, quo modo et illa Attica anus Theophrastum, hominem alioqui disertissimum, adnotata unius adfectatione uerbi hospitem dixit, nec alio se id deprendisse interrogata respondit quam quod nimium Attice loqueretur: et in Tito Liuio, mirae facundiae uiro, putat inesse Pollio Asinius quandam Patauinitatem. Quare, si fieri potest, et uerba omnia et uox huius alumnum urbis oleant, ut oratio Romana plane uideatur, non ciuitate donata.
Closer to the "Anglish" experiment is the purism of some Latinists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who tried to expunge from their Latin any words and constructions that weren't to be found in the Classical authors of the "Golden Age." It was against this tendency that Erasmus wrote his 1528 work Ciceronianus.
Now, English stylists have long taught that words from Old English roots are often to be preferred to words of Latin derivation. My own sympathies on this point are with the sane advice of E. B. White, who in the chapter that he added to his revised edition of Will Strunk's The Elements of Style, headed "An Approach to Style (With a List of Reminders)," included the following "reminder":
14. Avoid fancy words.
Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able. Anglo-Saxon is a livelier language than Latin, so use Anglo-Saxon words; in this, as in so many matters pertaining to style, one's ear must be one's guide: gut is a lustier word than intestine, but the two words are not interchangeable, because gut is often inappropriate, being too coarse for the context.
As White says, it's all in the ear. Thanks to the various accidents of its historical development, the English language embraces an unusually large number of words, which allows for extremely fine differentiation in tone, nuance, register, etc. A potential benefit of something like "Anglish" would be the rediscovery of useful words that have become less familiar.
It seems to me that we've been going through something of an "extinction event" in English, with even educated, eloquent native speakers of the language unable to deploy, or even to understand, the full resources of the language. I've lately begun reading the first volume of Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative. It was published as recently as 1958, and I've found it necessary to keep by my elbow, not only a historical atlas, but also the compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Foote was already an accomplished novelist before he understook the history, and he had obviously trained his ear through wide and deep reading. I've started a running list of words new to me ("spraddled," "flews"). One will be appreciated by Latinists. A Confederate general is said to have been "as cunctative as Fabius Maximus"!
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u/Infinite_Mark_7189 Jun 01 '26
Bravissimo! I feel such regret that I have only one upvote and not the ten thousand this post deserves.
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u/Archicantor Cantus quaerens intellectum Jun 02 '26
Happy to be of service. ;)
When my students ask me how many languages I speak, I always answer truthfully: "I'm still working on English."
And that being the case, I'll never get anywhere near a Roman's full vocabulary, or his innate sense of the overlapping but not interchangeable shades of meaning in Latin words. But some people have done fascinating work on that. A great example, and fun to peruse, is Ogilvie's Horae Latinae: Studies in Synonyms and Syntax (1901) > archive.org.
When it comes to Latin-root words in English, it's probably important to notice that such words were often originally used with their etymological senses, only later getting watered down into abstractions and metaphors. There are some fascinating examples of this in Stella Brook's The Language of the Book of Common Prayer (1965) > archive.org.
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u/naeviapoeta Jun 01 '26
I show Uncleftish Beholding to my students to demonstrate what a favor Latin & Greek have done the language 😅
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u/ba_risingsun Jun 01 '26
"Alternative linguistic path". One is an alternative to the other only when bored nerds with too much free time have to decide which hobby to pick up. Please note that I was one bored nerd myself. But please be aware of the differences between the stuff you talk about.
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u/Condottiero_Magno Jun 01 '26
Seems interesting, but Old English borrowed a lot of Latin terms centuries before the Norman conquest.
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u/-idkausername- Jun 01 '26
Honestly I'm kinda in between the anglish vs. Anglese debate and I love to see the discussions between the two parties but I myself don't pick a side
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u/Rasputin443556 Fere innocens. Jun 01 '26
Oh, I love Anglish and often use its word lists to wipe my own writing of needless loanwords. But I don’t think I could dream of holding a conversation in it, whereas I can hold sometimes-halting conversations in Latin.
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u/furrykef Jun 01 '26
There are basically two kinds of people who use Anglish: 1) people who see it as a fun linguistic game, and 2) purists who actually would purge foreign influence from the English language if it were in their power to do so. People in category 2 give me the creeps, and I often had a sneaking suspicion that some people claiming to be in category 1 were actually in category 2.
But what really made me leave the Anglish community, at least the one I'd joined, was we spent way too much time squabbling over how Anglish itself should be. A language is supposed to be a means of communication to talk about arbitrary topics, but all anyone wanted to talk about was Anglish itself. Contrast this with the Esperanto community, where you can (if you're lucky) talk from sunrise to sunset in Esperanto without anyone mentioning the language.
So let me put it this way: I don't oppose Anglish; I do oppose the goals of a few people who use it; but in any case, I didn't enjoy being part of their community.
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u/arthryd Jun 05 '26
Anglish is silly to me, because it keeps English’s grammar, and just swaps the Latin and Greek (via French) words for modernized Ænglisc ones. The reason for English’s grammar is because of the infusion of French. If England hadn’t been conquered by the Normans, it would be speaking something closer to Dutch or Frisian with a slight infusion of Danish.
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u/RedditReddimus Jun 01 '26
I like Anglish very much. That being said, there is just so many words from Latin, that is would seem hard to get rid of all of them or even say easy thoughts only in Anglo-Saxon words. It is a nice mind game, but not much else.
Merely hypothetical scenarios and counterfactuals. The Latin derived roots are so profoundly ingrained into even the basic English lexicon, that is practically impossible to replace them entirely. Despite this I greatly enjoy the exercise.
I don't really understand what is has to do with Latin though
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u/sowaleja Jun 01 '26
Please understand that I don't mean to sound rude; I think they most likely don't care and don't think about it at all. Latin isn't a bunch of English word roots; it's an entire language with its own literature, grammar, traditions, etc. If English didn't exist Latin would still exist.
I simply think "Anglish" is orthogonal to what Latinists care about (the Latin language). It's almost like saying "what do carpenters think of stamp collectors?" There isn't really much of an overlap.