The goal 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 in the present day speak Modern 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 person to person, however mostly it is to discover and experiment with the English language. This exploration is pushed for some by aesthetics, for the ethnic English by cultural needs, and yet for others it is purely an interesting diversion or pastime. Language performs a big function in our lives, so to be able to play with that language, and form it to our own wants or needs is very important. For this reason, writing or talking in true English is a positive end in itself, in as a lot as it provides an different outlet for this need.
But there is additionally the additional idea that Anglish is a recognition and a celebration of the English part of recent English. For, though it has borrowed 1000’s and 1000’s of words throughout its life, there still exists a true English core to English, crucial on a regular basis words which no sentence or uttering might manage without. By stripping away the layers of borrowings, Anglish lets us higher admire that core and the function it performs in our language.
The perfect way to seek out out where a word comes from is to look it up in a dictionary. Most respectable desktop dictionaries will include short etymologies for a lot of 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 as 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 Online Etymology Dictionary is maybe one of the best available online.
However these will only tell from where and when a word got here into English, but not whether it ought to be thought ‘borrowed’. Some immensely old and very fundamental words, similar to ‘cup’ and ‘mill’, are indeed borrowed from Latin, yet nobody would say these words aren’t English. Conversely, words like ‘thaumaturgy’ and ‘intelligentsia’ are clearly not of English origin, and have been borrowed comparatively lately.
The place to draw the road between English and ‘borrowed’ is yet an different area of personal selecting, and there are many views on this amongst Anglish proponents. A very broad rule says that anything borrowed from French, Latin and Greek within the last eight hundred years needs to be thought borrowed. A more discerning view would say that any word which was brought into English to fill a real want or hole in vocabulary should be kept, however these words borrowed to “adorn” or “enrich” the language however 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 completely different languages during the last thousand years. The core of English is Germanic, however only about 25% of the words in English as we speak derive from such a root, and that features those of Norse, Dutch, German and others, as well as English. That may sound like many, one in every four words, but not so much when one thinks that Latin and French each account for 29% of the English vocabulary. Greek yields an other 6% of words, with the final 10% being from other languages, derived from personal names, or simply unknown.
Nevertheless, as talked about earlier, the core of the English language still principally 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 many roots for words to replace those which have been removed from English. Sometimes, a word which is removed will have a commonly known English synonym already present. Words like ‘quotidian’ and ‘illegal’ can easily be switched for ‘everyday’ and ‘unlawful’ without shedding meaning or intelligibility. When there may be not a readily available English word to be used, a new word must be discovered or made. Some old or obscure words could be introduced back to life and reused; new words may be calqued from English morphemes utilizing the old word’s sample; different occasions wholly new words, “neologisms,” will be put collectively from existing words and affixes. None of these strategies are proper or unsuitable, but each has its stead in making a wide and diversified lexicon for Anglish, and each is used in line with the context and particular wants of a word.