Talk:Main leaf

A discussion or talk leaf (page) on the ins-and-outs of Anglish. Feel free to voice your ideas. But bear in mind, this Anglish project is not an attempt at an alternative, what-if (the Norman conquest and so forth had not happened) language, but simply a clearer, plainer, more Germanic English, making better use of its Germanic roots. :) In effect, if "Anglish" is sucessful, one would never know, by definition (for instance, does one even note "foreword" as being odd or outlandish nowadays? Or indeed, does one think that of the word "preface", the Latinism that was replaced by it?)

= "Unresolved" Issues =

Bringing Back to Life "Dead" Words
Do we have a policy on this? We seem to be doing it all the time. I was thinking anything in literature, particularly written in the standard dialect, from after the great vowel shift should, by definition, be considered acceptable ot revive. Anyone else got any thoughts on this? BryanAJParry 15:32, 2 Jan 2006 (UTC)

Talking anent everything on the headside

 * I'm not disagreeing with anything written here in as such, but I think that these dicussion would be better had at the talk page of the respective letter. Oswax Scolere 14:37, 25 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * Also, I think that general discussion anent Anglish ought to be on the talk leaf of Anglish, or, if the subject is important enough, be taken to a leaf of its own. We ought to keep this leaf for only talk anent the headside. Oswax Scolere 16:36, 25 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * I kinda think we should keep it al in one place. Just my feeling BryanAJParry 22:48, 28 Dec 2005 (UTC)
 * My worry is that this leaf will become to long and unwieldy, and it will become hard to find what you want. Oswax Scolere 23:12, 28 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * A fair worry. But I'ld rather cross that bridge when we come to it. Also, if necessary, we can always moove some things from here to the relevant talk page (that is, as I say, this one gets too full up). BryanAJParry 01:01, 29 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * This leaf is already 30kb, the larger it gets the longer it will take to load and harder it will be to find what thou wishes to talk anent. Please, let us talk on a subject at the right talk page. It is easy enough to use a watchlist or recent changes to find any discussion. Oswax Scolere 17:02, 31 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * I have started commenting on the relevant pages, but no one seems ot respond there. Also see I edited this page to make it resolved and unresolved issues. BryanAJParry 11:31, 2 Jan 2006 (UTC)

The tragedie of the loss of good words
Some words, such as "branch", have good value in metaphore.

It's all very well to say the evolutionary tree "forks" out, but that doesn't conjure images of it happening again and again and again.

The things that are naughty about Romance words that means we want to get rid of them, are simply not true of all Romance words.

Therefore, I think we should either invent a word, think of a strikingly good synonym, or stay quiet on that particular word until we feel we can do these two thing.

~Inkstersco 30 Dec


 * I think we are always gonna have trubble justifying this thing on a purely LINGUISTIC level. I mean, okay, we could to a small degree. For instance, why should the adjectival forms of bodyparts take a Latin or Greek root when the noun forms don't? (Lung/pulmon(ic, ary), kidney/renal, mouth/oral, eye/ocular)? Same with animals. And what about words whose roots do not exist (independently) in English, and which could be repalced by a word of equal meaning who roots do exist in English. Loads of words fit this last category, of course, particularly slightly technical words. Parts of speech, sciences, longer words. But where is the justiication in replacing perfectly understood words like "animal/creature" with "wight", "energy" with "sprack" blahblahblah... you get the idea, most of the wors we have.


 * I have found my ideas on this topic find better favour when I don't assert (or seem to imply) that English as it is is wrong (and that users of it, likewise, are bad), but that, partly for linguistic reasons, but mostly for reasons of taste, style, patriotism (asf.) English COULD work if it were more Germanic. If anyone wants to write an essay on the linguistic (or other) case for Anglish, I guess it would be appropriate to add it to the wiki. :) BryanAJParry 11:43, 2 Jan 2006 (UTC)

On the Moot in General
Is it really wise to start new articles simply because the article title is an Englandish word? Wouldn't it be far better to write articles (on whatever) but make them in Anglish? BryanAJParry 15:29, 30 Dec 2005 (UTC)
 * Yah. ~Inkstersco Dec 30
 * I don't understand what your getting at. Do you mean that we ought to write articles on stonelore, but call them 'geology'? Or rather that we ought to write an article first and then slot it in somewhere?


 * If you mean the first, then no. But I can understand the second, and certainly stubs can look ugly, but that is no reason not to make them. Make a hundred now, or a thousand! This is how wikis grow, and I think that an Anglish Wikipedia ought to be one of our aims, for not only will it give us a chance to practise our Anglish, but it will become a great resource in the Anglish tongue.


 * Forgive me if I have wholly misunderstood what thou meant. Oswax Scolere 16:57, 31 Dec 2005 (UTC)

On the Wordbook in General
There is a probable cross-section of readers who would like to use the Anglo-Saxon as much as possible without crossing the line into the world of neologisms. It is for this reason that I suggest a simple indicator on whether the word is established(e.g. waylay), half-established(e.g. fewfold), or coined (e.g. withreckoner), and perhaps whether it is dialectal. If it is established, they can check a dictionary to help them decide.

The Anglish wordbook has all the potential of a sort of contrained thesaurus, but would repel some readers who see it as a Roald-Dahlish exercise of word inventing. Consider that I don't think anyone has ever published a Romance to A-S thesaurus before, so I think a large niche would be filled if we could somehow isolate that capacity from the larger con-lang, by means of simple annotation. ~Inkstersco, 26 Dec 05


 * I agree. If wikicities supports colour, I would suggest no colour (that is, black) for the established words (that is, ones in the OED, collins and dictionary.com, for instance), red for new words, and green for archaic, literary, or dialect words. BryanAJParry 12:01, 27 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * How about a class for unestablished words that are implicit in established words, such as "fewfold" as an opposite of "manifold", "yaysay" as an opposite of "naysayer", and anything-goes morphologies like "Lifewise"?


 * Where Anglish falls short as a language it can be a very nice thesaurus-like tool ~Inkstersco, 27 Dec


 * Okay, how about black for normal, everyday English words, blue for archaic or dialectal words, green for implied words (e.g. yaysay), and red for totally made-up words . By the way, I have written the foregoing sentences in different colours NOT because I think you two are too thick to know what "green", "red" and "blue" mean (:D), but because I want to demonstrate how to actually make words different colours. BryanAJParry 21:04, 2 Jan 2006 (UTC)


 * I suggest, if we agree on the colours, that one of us goes thru "A" (because I think it has the most words so far) and edits it according to this colour scheme. Then we can all look at it and see what we think. If we like it, we can go thru the entire wiki letter-by-letter, changing it. :) BryanAJParry 21:13, 2 Jan 2006 (UTC)

So, who wants to go thru each page and add a note in the talk page saying how many words there are for that letter? Of course, for that to be of any worth, we would have to update the number whenever we added a word. Well, I could just count the words myself... :O BryanAJParry 01:13, 30 Dec 2005 (UTC)
 * Nah -- If we get curious about exactly how many word there are we can just copy and paste them into a WP and then do a line count. It won't matter very often. In truth, I think we may as well just have one page for all the words, albeit divided by neat headers. Even if we had 10 000 words, it wouldn't be that bad. This way if, like me, you come up with ten words at once, you don't have to flit between the pages, and can add them all in a single edit. Flicking between letters is tedious(sorry, tiresome). ~Inkstersco 30 Dec


 * I prefer the seperate letters. BryanAJParry 13:22, 30 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * On another tact, we currently have 586 Englandish words rendered into English. Aha! BryanAJParry 15:41, 30 Dec 2005 (UTC)

What about wordbook entries policy? We all seem to have an unspoken policy, but I want to speak just so I know we are reading from the same hymn sheet, and so that we can put it in writing for any newcomers. The policy is that we only add the derived words where there is something unusual or unexpected, or we need to spell things out for random perusers. For instance, I listed "ruth" just now for "compassion", but I also listed "ruthful" with "compassionate". Why? Because, whilst folk might extract ruth from ruthless, they might not make the leap to "ruthful", and I wished to spell it out, as it were. 82.44.212.6 22:59, 3 Jan 2006 (UTC)

One v. Man
Likewise and kin to the above issue, we have that of the indefinite kind of pronoun. The use of "one", instead of "man", is brought from forran influence. If one is to exclude the lack of thou/thee aso. on the basis that this is originally forran, then are we to say that "one" is no longer acceptable because it too displaced "man" (even tho "one" is a perfectly homeborn word). -Bryan


 * I do not know the history of that pronoun, but will look it up to see. Again, without a set ideology, we simply must muddle through. I have a fairly tight policy on which words I let in, but when needs must, I compromise, I'm not too dogmatic about it. Anyone can set their own limits for inclusion or exclusion of words and apply that to their work. Anglish is a cover term for everyone who wishes to speak English with less foreign influence, whether that be much less or a little less. Oswax Scolere 13:27, 12 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * Of course, there is another alternative, and that is to say "you", as most English and Scots speakers do. :)


 * Note that the traditional "ye" is still in use in Scotland(not simply a modern corruption of "you"), and "youse" is standard enough to be spelt with an E (naturalised into extraphonetic orthographical standards). ~Inkstersco, 25 Dec

On rationale
Eew, sorry about the word. Anyway, I've been asked by Oswax to drop a few words about myself and my viewpoint. Basically, I think an actual what-if is futile; I'm not into fantasy games. Language is like weather. Remember also that even if the Norman invasion hadn't happened, we'd still have Resaissance-gained words and scientific words, not to mention pure Latin interjections and biological Latin. However, I think the true thrill of reading Anglish shouldn't be "cute, these are all Germanic", but instead should be "wow, this actually sounds very familiar, but there's no -ation or re- and all that stuff I've been taught is so special", as if they've heard it in another life. "Thee" and "thou" create the false impression that Anglish is a nostalgic language. I wish they hadn't gone, but there's a strange stigma attached to using them. I think Anglish is more of a con-dialect in that people can speak it to varying degrees of thickness against a backdrop of Standard English. If it has any real-world influence, it'll be in bringing the more bottom-drawer English words to the surface. The exciting diversity of modern English is something that is much overlooked nowadays.

I think a word in Anglish should be 1) Preferably attested even if it's obscure and dialectal. If not attested, very easily attestable. For example, we say "wear out" for erode, so an English teacher would not criticise "outwear" 2) Natural sounding, so that one cannot tell the real from the constructed. 3) Unforeign -- That also goes for stuff like Uber, which is worse than Super IMO. 4) Brief -- Let's not try and be too clever and tack equivilents of Re- onto words. Let's just put "again" before the word.

I suggest plunging the depths of our island's dialects(are we all British here?) for hidden treasures. I would *not* like to see English look more Germany-ish, and think Uber is as bad as Super, nor would I like to see too much loyalty to morpheme calquing, for that can be clumsy.

I think the best possible approach in creating words is _not_ to calque morphemes, but to calque definitions. Keep it short. Let's just convert re- into "again" as a seperate word. Instead of a pedantic Life-lore-ish for Bio-logic-al, let's have Lifewise, and then Lifelore for Biology. Isn't the ultimate aim to make English more like English? If this is the case, it shouldn't have quite the same long-winded methodology as German.

Anyway I'm rambling unforgivably. Note that I'm Scottish and so am a hidden tresure chest of obscure dialectal words which could be brought to the surface.

~Iain Dec 22nd


 * I can agree with not calqueing words straight from the Latin or Greek, for so many new words I have seen do just this, but fail to make a worthy or even understandable word. One example is the word 'understandable' itself. Some folk have given it as 'understandcan' which is truly awful to my ears. In truth, I do not think we have a word for the '-able' suffix, and must live with saying 'can understand'. Overbringing is never exact between 'true' tongues, and it need not be between English and Anglish.


 * Although, having said this, I do think that a set of prefixs and suffix is useful for Anglish to grow the wordhoard swiftly. The ones I like are '-lore' to show a science, which lets us make hundreds of words straight away. Also, '-lust', '-hate', '-fear', '-worship' and '-craft' can be wirtten like this. Oswax Scolere 16:00, 23 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * More-or-less agree with both of you. Altho we are always gonna disagree on the details, right? I think you two are slightly more "extreme" (not the best word, but can't think of another; you get what I mean, tho; and only SLIGHTLY) than me, but I think our views are still fairly close together (so as to make this thing work; for instance, none of us think English should be more GERMAN-looking). I take real issue with some of the words in the wordbook. But as I say, this will always be so; I think we should definitely clearly explain to outsiders or newcomers that a degree of tolerance (tholing?) is allowable (no, not "letsome" :P ;) ) in terms of the words used, as none of us are gonna agree TOTALLY on the details. I particularly agree with you, Ian, on the issue of "thou/"thee"; great pronouns, but the use of such pronouns makes us look cranky, to my mind. And this is what I meant before, Joe; surely we are not trying to make a "make if" language, and therefore "thou/thee/ye/you" paradigm is not good as it seems ot be stepping into that territory. My personal hope for "Anglish" is jsut everyday usage; if we can get people THINKING English again thru sprinkling our own speech which Anglish formations, and by thoughtful selection of our wording, we may be on to a winner. BryanAJParry 01:06, 25 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * We can, and will, shift the 'thou/thee' back to 'you', give a little time to do them all thought. Oswax Scolere 14:36, 25 Dec 2005 (UTC)

On special words
Words like Catholic, cent, boomerang, kimono, nam-myoho-renge-kyo, Loch, zebra, ought to remain roughly as they are, wouldn't you agree? They are all specific to particular cultures, environments and cliques, and the way they name their jargon is part of the general aethetic presence of their environment, which I think we probably ought to respect. -- Inkstersco 24, DEC, 05


 * I don't think anyone debates this, Ian. :) BryanAJParry 00:56, 25 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * Au contraire, I think Oswax was interested in renaming Cent and Catholic(according to the wordbook), which seems a bit overboard to me, way beyond Hastingsless English. Currencies and religions are generally named by the organisations responsible, at least in part. ~Inkstersco Dec 25


 * The words 'catholic' and 'cent' are in the wordbook only for the most general meanings. Indeed, the word 'catholic' is an adjective in the wordbook, and not a noun. This means that there would yet be 'a Catholic church' but no longer 'a catholic church'. If you see the difference. Oswax Scolere 19:39, 25 Dec 2005 (UTC)

= "Resolved" Issues =

THOU/THEE/YE/YOU
Oswax, I don't really see the need to write everything all "thou/thee". Those pronouns dropped out of use LONG after the Norman conquest and, like the dual pronouns, likely would have no matter what. -Bryan


 * I can't settle with that, for the habit of calling someone by the plural was borrowed from French (see thou for more info). We need to talk anent this further to come to some kind of settling whether it ought to be in Anglish or not. Oswax Scolere 18:51, 11 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * Are we now to be excluding EVERYTHING that is of non-Germanic influence? That is certainly not what I thought we had agreed to ;) Do we now outcast all words of non-Germanic origin, and all words which have been influenced by non-Germanic languages (e.g. "tongue" with the meaning of "language"; a Latin influence). That is plainly absurd. Perhaps contentious areas should be left in limbo til we have drawn up some kind of acceptable Anglish rule/check list. By the way, I like "thou", "thee", "you" and "ye", but I just don't think it is prudent to exclude ALL things in our **tongue** which have the hint of forran influence. It's mad. Remember, the history of the English language IS one of forran influence. That fact just cannot be gotten away from. So we must decide whether we are trying to construct some "what if..." language that might have come about had not the Norman conquest (and so on) happened, or are we just trying to make English Englisher. -Bryan


 * I should clearen: I am not saying thou/thee/ye/you is not acceptable. What I am saying is that are we, on one hand, trying to make the most of the Germanic part of the England tung (e.g. formations such as "filmhouse", "forelast", "weaponhoard"), or are we trying to make a language that MIGHT have been had it not been for the course history has taken. The latter of these two is distinctly not what we are trying to do. Therefore certain things (such as the ressurection of thou/thee) is perhaps of little worth. - Bryan


 * We do need to clarify exactly what our goal is for Anglish. I hope we can come to an agreement on it. What I want is not to take out every word of non-Germanic birth, but rather to undo, as far as we can, the influence of history on English. What I mean, is that for many years the majority of speakers of English did not control their tongue, but rather others did, others who preferred French or Latin or whatever.


 * We need to think what would have happened had the everyday English speaker held on to control of their tongue. To do that we must think of which outside influence was brought in against our wishes, and which influence came in naturally, as part of normal language change. I would like to keep thou/thee as I feel it is a French influence propagated by the upper classes, but the loss of verb conjugations '-est' and '-eth' was spread by a normal process.


 * Certainly, strengthening the wordhoard that English has left is the first and main goal of Anglish, but surely when we do so, it means that a foreign word is pushed out? We cannot raise up the word 'playhouse' without killing the word 'theatre', can we? I think our disagreement is rather of extent, but even then, we only need to settle on which words we can, and then call that 'Anglish'. I would like to think we could hold all views on different kinds of Anglish.


 * By the way, if you have an account, I will make you an admin straight away as agreed. Oswax Scolere 23:23, 11 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * Ah, but how can you get rid of the -est, -eth stuff when you are merely guessing that they would have dropped out? More to the point, who would find acceptable an English with thou and thee in it? We can hold different views on Anglish, sure. But if we are to have an online project like this, then we must come to a conclusion on which kind of Anglish is to be shown-off. In short, keep the thou/thee thing, but don't expect me to start using thou and thee in my writings. :D -Bryan


 * I know they would have dropped off for they did! The current verb conjugations were not influenced from France, but rather northern English. The southern forms began to be dropped in the 1400s, the current forms we have were standard in northern England, from many years ago. I think they have something to do with the Danes. Overall, the process of inflectional simplification was underway by the end of the Old English period, with the extant Late West Saxon texts preserving a far older tongue than what was common.


 * It is alright if you do not wish to use thou/thee, there is no compulsion to do so, but I wish to. I understand that we will have to choose whether or not to use them on the interface, but if we wait until we have a few more members, then we can vote on it. We can take them off if everyone agrees. Oswax Scolere 13:27, 12 Dec 2005 (UTC)

On "-able"
My suggestion with dealing with the apparent lack of equivilent of "-able" in the Anglo-Saxon tier, is to

1) Describe the state of something being able to to do something with -some : Bothersome

2) Describe the state of something being able to have something done to it with   be-...-some : Beliftsome

Inkstersco, 24 Dec 05


 * Yes, I agree with this. But I think -able is on of those naturalised suffixes (probably aided by its connection with "able") BryanAJParry 00:56, 25 Dec 2005 (UTC)

Acceptable use of Latin
I think in humour it is very funny (ergo, and so on). It has a real job there. Also, what about in certain technical fields? I don't, for instance, have a problem with those genus names, like catus catus and all that. Ideas, thoughts? BryanAJParry 01:24, 25 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * Merry Christtide!


 * If Velociraptor was Speedy Snatcher(the calque), that would "clutter" the language with ambiguity, don't you think? Are we talking about an animal or some sinister person? The drift between monosyllabic Saxon and long Latinate words in a single sentence is used by Shakespeare quite a lot; It is functional. It's like Burns switching between Scots dialect and very standard English in his works; The contrast is part of the language. The benefit of Latinate words is that they lack connotation and vividness, and so can be used for very dispassionate matters, such as the scientific and legal.


 * However, I think one point of Anglish could be to provide an extreme, that people can use to whatever extent. We can use Anglish to make Romance an option rather than a necessity. ~ Inkstersco, 25 Dec 05


 * Also, I think that most words that were in Old English, particularly before about 1000ad, whatever their birth., should be allowable as English. I mean, if they shouldn't, then why should words like street or pound be acceptable either? And blatantly they should. BryanAJParry 22:59, 28 Dec 2005 (UTC)

Outlandish Wordbooks
This may be a stupid question, but why oh why have we go the beginnings of a French wordbook? BryanAJParry 17:55, 27 Dec 2005 (UTC)
 * For we need it to do overbringings. I can read a little French, and so I am slowly building a French wordbook to help me. It is better for us to do overbringings from a tongue like French or Latin or German, rather than straight from English, so that we do not get 'interference' from today's English. Also, the English wordbook only holds word for the Anglish word is otherly. In the French, or whatever, wordbook we can have every word, from 'I' and 'and' onwards.


 * If thou can speak another tongue it would be good to make a wordbook for that tongue here and publish any overbringings thou might have. Otherwise, doing an overbringing from English would be good. Oswax Scolere 20:16, 27 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * Well, it's your call, Joe. I like French, but I don't speak it and so won't be adding to it at all. I'll focus on updatign the English workbook and maybe adding to the articles. :) BryanAJParry 21:34, 27 Dec 2005 (UTC)
 * It's our call. But it is cool if you don't wish to add anything. BTW look at your email. Oswax Scolere 21:42, 27 Dec 2005 (UTC)
 * Let's just define Anglish relative to English and then let French-to-English knowhow handle the rest of the problem. Thankfully, we know how to translate French to Anglish inasmuch as we can translate it into English. It's a big enough task creating a big enough Anglish vocabulary to be comfortably useable. Anglish is a kind of English dialect, and so the French wordbook is no way to run a railroad. There's nothing at all wrong with what you're doing, but the French stuff looks a bit of a distraction to me. There are many Scots dictionaries, but you'll never(easily) find a French to Scots dictionary for a very similar reason. Once you can translate Standard English to Scots, the rest pretty much falls into place. ~Inkstersco, 27 Dec

ALERT: THE MOOT IS GOING WRONG: IMPORTANT
Okay, I just went to add some stuff to "P" in the wordbook, and the page came up as a bunch of code. And a bunch of the other letters just link you to the wrong page. What the HELL is going on here!?!? BryanAJParry 13:51, 29 Dec 2005 (UTC)
 * No apparent problem at my end -- check your email. ~Inkstersco 29 Dec


 * Cheers for the emails, Ian, Joe. But for some reason it is still effed for me. In Firefox. But not in Internet Explorer. Hmmm. Weird, cos it WAS workign in FF til now. Well, whato. Do you two use IE? This is obviously a bug we need to get onto tech support with, init :) BryanAJParry 23:36, 29 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * I use Opera and IE. ~Inkstersco 30 Dec


 * I use both Firefox and IE. I haven't seen any problems in either. Oswax Scolere 16:21, 30 Dec 2005 (UTC)

Don't neglect the obvious
I think we should forgo the slight obsession we seem to have with synonyms all being one word. I noticed that the entry for Advance was Forward(which is fine), but didn't even include the perfectly obvious "move on", which is probably actually a perfect synonym. Sometimes we try too hard. That's why nobody thought of Speed Up and Slow Down for Accelerate and Decelerate. ~Inkstersco 29 Dec


 * Actually, I did think of em. Just didn't add em yet :D I agree, Ian; and if you look at the words I have added, most of them actually AREN'T neologisms. Mankind, world, the lord's prayer and co are all words which I have added. :) Yes, best policy is to list the sundry "synonyms" for each word. BryanAJParry 23:34, 29 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * Also, I am going about editting entries so that the most obvious word is first. For, at the moment, we seem to have the crazier words first, and the more established words later. BryanAJParry 23:58, 29 Dec 2005 (UTC)
 * I was just about to suggest that :) ~Inkstersco 30, Dec

Words Whose Pronounciation Was Altered By Forran Influence
How are these to be dealt with, d'ya think? I am thinking specifically of "righteous". This WAS "rightwise", but the pronounciation and spelling was influenced by the forran "-eous" ending. I am in favour of keeping it "righteous", but what do you say, Oswax? BryanAJParry 18:57, 12 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * For me, it hinges on the word. 'Rightwise' is, I think, alright as a word for it can be understood without foreknowledge. But other words may be otherwise, and I will take them one at a time. Oswax Scolere 19:14, 12 Dec 2005 (UTC)

This seems to be a dead topic for the minnit. Mooving it to "resolved" for the sake of less clutter. :) BryanAJParry 15:34, 2 Jan 2006 (UTC)

=Wordbook Entries Discussion: Link= http://anglish.wikicities.com/wiki/Talk:How_do_I_say%3F