Grounds for Anglish

English words taken from Latin, French, and Greek are made up of parts whose meanings are on the whole unknown or at least unclear to the English speaker. These foreign words are made up of wordbits (morphemes) that do not form any part of the base wordstock (vocabulary) of the English speaker, outside of their use in these foreign words. Take the word “compare,” of Latin origin. Broken up, its wordbits are ‘com’ and ‘pare’, oneway -switchedly (literally) ‘with’ + ‘equal’. The semantic outspring “source” of the word becomes clear only when the Latin wordbits are translated oneway- switchedly into their English equivalents (albeit “equal” is of Latin origin). The same thing goes for the word “support”, whose wordbits are ‘sup’ + ‘port’, of Latin origin, which oneway switchedly mean ‘under’ + ‘carry.’ Here too, the semantic outspring of the word support (to carry or bear the weight of) becomes clear only if and when the Latin wordbits from whence the word comes become known through translation into the English equivalents. Put otherwise, ‘com’ might have meant something to the Latin speaker, but it means nothing to the English speaker, nor does ‘pare’, ‘sup’, etc. The reason for this is that ‘com and ‘par’, and many other foreign wordbits are not English, in the sense that they mean nothing on their own to the English speaker since they are not part of the English language on their own. This is unlike the wordbits ‘under’ and ‘carry’ for example, which, when put together, make up a much more logical English word for the word “support’, insofar as the logicalness of a word is proportional to the understandability of its parts.

Take also the word “sympathy,” from the Greek ‘syn’ + ‘pathos’, oneway-switchedly giving ‘with’ + ‘feel’, which could give “withfeel” as an optional replacement for the word sympathy. “Withfeel” could in turn be switched to “withache’’ or at least “withsuffering,” to capture the meaning of the word “sympathy”.

So extreme is this beclouding of so much of the English wordstock, that we get severely hard-to-make-out-the-meaning-of words like “inebriate”, completely incomprehensible to the English speaker from its wordbits, since it contains the wodbit ‘ebri’, from the latin ‘ebrius’, meaning drunk.

Examples such as these are rife within English, and though foreign words in a way enrich the language, not having ‘pure’ English equivalents of them, or not using these ‘pure’ equivalents, impoverishes the language. This is especially true for foreign words not in common use, and so whose meaning cannot even be made clear through it being a common word (e.g. inebriate), unlike the “foreign” word “compare”, for example. As for words like “compare”, whose meanings are clear to every native English speaker, because of them being an everyday word, it still has a foreign feel to it. The English speaker might use the word, “compare”, and know what it means, but they don’t know why it means what it means. They have no connection to the word, it is strange to them, it does not resonate within their wordstock.