Talk:Anglish

Grounds for Anglish
I think that Anglish ought to be a kind of English in which the influence of the upper class speech habits have been undone. This is not a going back or standing still, but rather accepting that a number of things have happened. But only those that have happened from the bottom ought to be kept.

The loss of inflections, for example, is something that has been borned through by all speakers of English, and has not been imported from elsewhere. But, gainwise, the uptake of many French and Latin words has come about by the desire for the upper classes to speak (and be seen speaking) those tongues. The general uptake of those words has come about through everday speakers parodying the speech of their 'betters'.

To undo these shifts in English we need to use a number of weapons. Sometimes simply preferring a homeborn English word to an outland one is enough. Other times a new word need to be made from a common phrase (verbal or noun), like 'uptake' from 'take up'. Another way is the shift the words about so that the word is no longer needed.

Last, and most controversial, is to take old words that have long since gone from English, and bring them back to life. This ought only be done when there is nothing else to choose. I am of the thought that as many outland words as we can ought to be outtaken from Angish. This does make me an extremist of sorts* (I don't mind that word) but I think it avoids blurring the lines between was is and what is not acceptable. Oswax Scolere 16:53, 25 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * The other kind of extremist is those who wish to remodel English into a Germanic tongue by drawing on analogy with German or Dutch. I am not knocking this view, but I do not follow it.