The intention of Anglish is: English with many fewer words borrowed from other tongues. Because of the fundamental adjustments to our language, to say that English people right now speak Fashionable English is like saying that the French speak Latin. The actual fact is that we now speak a world language. The Anglish project is intended as a way 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 individual to individual, but mostly it is to explore and experiment with the English language. This exploration is driven for some by aesthetics, for the ethnic English by cultural wants, and yet for others it is purely an interesting diversion or pastime. Language performs a big role in our lives, so to be able to play with that language, and shape it to our own needs or needs is very important. For this reason, writing or talking in true English is a positive end in itself, in as much as it provides an different outlet for this need.
However there is also the additional idea that Anglish is a recognition and a celebration of the English part of modern English. For, though it has borrowed 1000’s and thousands of words throughout its life, there still exists a real English core to English, an important everyday words which no sentence or uttering could manage without. By stripping away the layers of borrowings, Anglish lets us higher recognize that core and the position it plays in our language.
The perfect way to find out where a word comes from is to look it up in a dictionary. Most decent desktop dictionaries will embrace quick etymologies for many of their entries, which give a little knowledge of where the word arose from, and how it was used or written within the past. Some online dictionaries have this knowledge as well, such because 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 On-line Etymology Dictionary is maybe the very best available online.
But these will only tell from where and when a word got here into English, but not whether it should be thought ‘borrowed’. Some immensely old and really basic words, such as ‘cup’ and ‘mill’, are certainly borrowed from Latin, yet nobody would say these words usually are not English. Conversely, words like ‘thaumaturgy’ and ‘intelligentsia’ are clearly not of English origin, and have been borrowed comparatively lately.
The place to draw the line between English and ‘borrowed’ is but an other area of personal selecting, and there are lots of views on this amongst Anglish proponents. A really broad rule says that anything borrowed from French, Latin and Greek in the final eight hundred years ought to 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 should be kept, however these words borrowed to “adorn” or “enrich” the language but in reality push out current words, must be weeded.
Are there truly that many borrowed words in English?
Yes. English is renowned for having borrowed so many words from different languages over the last thousand years. The core of English is Germanic, but only about 25% of the words in English immediately derive from such a root, and that features these of Norse, Dutch, German and others, as well as English. Which will sound like many, one in each four words, but not a lot when one thinks that Latin and French each account for 29% of the English vocabulary. Greek yields an other 6% of words, with the last 10% being from different languages, derived from personal names, or just unknown.
Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, the core of the English language still mostly consists of English words, which makes an undertaking like Anglish possible.
When a word is taken out from English, the place do replacement words come from?
There are various roots for words to interchange these which have been removed from English. Generally, a word which is removed will have a commonly known English synonym already present. Words like ‘quotidian’ and ‘illegal’ can simply be switched for ‘on a regular basis’ and ‘unlawful’ without dropping meaning or intelligibility. When there may be not a readily available English word for use, a new word must be discovered or made. Some old or obscure words can be introduced back to life and reused; new words may be calqued from English morphemes using the old word’s pattern; different times wholly new words, “neologisms,” might be put together from existing words and affixes. None of those strategies are proper or incorrect, but every has its stead in making a wide and assorted lexicon for Anglish, and each is used in response to the context and particular wants of a word.