What’s Anglish?

The purpose of Anglish is: English with many fewer words borrowed from other tongues. Because of the fundamental changes to our language, to say that English people at this time speak Modern English is like saying that the French speak Latin. The fact is that we now speak a world language. The Anglish project is meant as a method of recovering the Englishness of English and of restoring ownership of the language to the English people.

The goal of the Anglish project differs from person to person, but mostly it is to discover and experiment with the English language. This exploration is driven for some by aesthetics, for the ethnic English by cultural needs, and yet for others it is solely an fascinating diversion or pastime. Language plays a big role in our lives, so to be able to play with that language, and shape it to our own wants or wants could be very important. For this reason, writing or talking in true English is a positive finish in itself, in as a lot as it provides an other outlet for this need.

However there’s additionally the further idea that Anglish is a recognition and a celebration of the English part of recent English. For, though it has borrowed thousands and hundreds of words all through its life, there still exists a real English core to English, crucial everyday words which no sentence or uttering might manage without. By stripping away the layers of borrowings, Anglish lets us better recognize that core and the position it performs in our language.

The best way to search out out the place a word comes from is to look it up in a dictionary. Most first rate desktop dictionaries will embrace brief etymologies for a lot of of their entries, which give a little knowledge of where the word arose from, and the way it was used or written in the past. Some on-line dictionaries have this knowledge as well, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com and Wiktionary. There are also dictionaries dedicated to word etymologies, which are a goldmine for knowledge about English words. The Online Etymology Dictionary is probably the perfect available online.

However these will only inform from where and when a word came into English, however not whether or not it ought to be thought ‘borrowed’. Some immensely old and really fundamental words, such as ‘cup’ and ‘mill’, are certainly borrowed from Latin, but nobody would say these words will not be English. Conversely, words like ‘thaumaturgy’ and ‘intelligentsia’ are clearly not of English origin, and have been borrowed comparatively lately.

The place to draw the road between English and ‘borrowed’ is but an different space of personal selecting, and there are a lot of views on this amongst Anglish proponents. A very broad rule says that anything borrowed from French, Latin and Greek in the final eight hundred years must be thought borrowed. A more discerning view would say that any word which was brought into English to fill a genuine want or gap in vocabulary ought to be kept, however those words borrowed to “adorn” or “enrich” the language however in reality push out present words, ought to be weeded.

Are there actually that many borrowed words in English?

Yes. English is renowned for having borrowed so many words from completely different languages over the last thousand years. The core of English is Germanic, but only about 25% of the words in English at this time derive from such a root, and that includes these of Norse, Dutch, German and others, as well as English. That will sound like many, one in each four words, but not so much when one thinks that Latin and French every account for 29% of the English vocabulary. Greek yields an other 6% of words, with the last 10% being from other languages, derived from personal names, or simply unknown.

Nonetheless, as mentioned earlier, the core of the English language still principally consists of English words, which makes an undertaking like Anglish possible.

When a word is taken out from English, where do replacement words come from?

There are many roots for words to replace these which have been removed from English. Typically, a word which is removed will have a commonly known English synonym already present. Words like ‘quotidian’ and ‘illegal’ can simply be switched for ‘everyday’ and ‘unlawful’ without dropping which means or intelligibility. When there may be not a readily available English word to be used, a new word have to be found or made. Some old or obscure words could be brought back to life and reused; new words may be calqued from English morphemes utilizing the old word’s sample; other occasions wholly new words, “neologisms,” might be put together from current words and affixes. None of those methods are proper or unsuitable, but each has its stead in making a wide and different lexicon for Anglish, and every is used in response to the context and particular needs of a word.