The Anglish Times: the news in Anglish, a kind of English without borrowed words from other tongues
The Anglish Times: the news in Anglish, a kind of English without borrowed words from other tongues
Sweden has at long last been brought into NATO. On Thursday, Sweden's first wickner, Ulf Kristersson, went to the US
When I was a child, I spoke like a child. Now I am a man and I speak like the King of England!
English is three different languages in a trench coat. It’s all borrowed to some degree.
Most linguists formally classify English as Germanic (West Germanic, alongside Frisian, Dutch and German, though one Norwegian linguist made a case for it being North Germanic), though some people refer to it as a Romance-Germanic creole. It is quantifiably true that, if you want to read Old English, knowing Icelandic will be more helpful than knowing modern English.
Three languages?
- Anglo German (aka old English)
- French
- Norwegian/Danish?
Not sure what the third one is. You could make an honest argument for a number of languages to be number 3.
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...
English is a Germanic language, so Germanic words are fine, foreign just means latin, greek, french...
"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 :-)
That's an interesting experiment. I like how it "vibes" from informal to ancient.