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The Anglish Times: the news in Anglish, a kind of English without borrowed words from other tongues
(theanglishtimes.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
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But there are heaps of borrowed words in that text? "Friendly" stems from old germanic, so does "land"... how is there no etymologist checking for "foreign" words? Oh wait, english is but a mix of bad french and bad german... But still. I expected a bit more effort to replace "foreign" words...
"Friendly" and "land" are inherited, not borrowed. Those are two different processes and Anglish only gets rid of the words from one, not from the other.
"English" is not a mix; "English vocabulary" is. (Just like the vocab of most other languages.) A language is not just its vocab just like a mammal is not just its fur. The core of the language (its grammar) is pretty much what you expect from a Germanic language after some aggressive erosion of the case system.
English didn't get many words from "German"; the inherited vocab is from "Proto-Germanic". The name might be similar but they're different languages, Proto-Germanic is the parent of English, German, Swedish, Icelandic, Gothic, etc.
People often point out the "French" (actually a mix of French and Norman) loanwords in English. Sure, there's a lot of them, but as Anglish shows they aren't structurally that important. On the other hand, the text couldn't get rid of "they", even if it's a borrowing from Old Norse - the old third person plural "hīe" would probably have ended as "she", just like the feminine singular.
EDIT: if the downvotes are due to some incorrect piece of info, please, say it. I tried to make the comment as accurate as possible, but something might've slipped, dunno.
Alternatively, if something that I said is unclear, please also say it and I'll do my best to clarify it.
I for one, thank you a lot for your clarification. I am a native german speaker and by no means a linguist - so I appreciate your effort to make some of these historical processes clearer. I was just a bit disappointed becuase I expected something else... there is a german book by Ze do Rock (a native brasilian for that matter) who tries to invent "Siegfridisch" a language that gets rid of all "foreign" words. No more "street (strasse)" for that is from latin, instead he uses "way (weg)" which is germanic. Also, the german wort "schreiben" stems from latin "scribere" and has to be replaced with the english "write" (ritzen) since that is what the celts did... and I was hoping this newspaper would do something similar :-)
Originally Anglish was a lot like Siegfridisch - a single guy (Paul Jennings), replacing borrowings with new expressions coined from native words, just for fun. Jennings framed this as how English would be if the Normans were defeated in 1066, and he published it in a satirical magazine (Punch).
It does look more serious nowadays, though. Anglish started out in 1966, and the people picking the idea up focused a lot on making it more consistent. (And also because Jennings wasn't being as playful as Zé do Rock.)
Kind of off-topic, but can you believe that practically nobody knows Zé do Rock here in Brazil? Even if a chunk of his stuff is written also in Portuguese. (He also plays with the language, his "brazileis" is... weird, but in a good way, to say the least.)
Wow. Thank you again for your detailed answer. I might have a look into Mr. Jennings and the Punch magazine. Hats off to Zé and to you for sharing your love for language(s) and teaching me a fair bit about that :-) Cheers!