The goal of Anglish is: English with many fewer words borrowed from different tongues. Because of the fundamental adjustments to our language, to say that English people at the moment speak Fashionable English is like saying that the French speak Latin. The very fact is that we now speak an international language. The Anglish project is meant as a means 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 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 only an fascinating diversion or pastime. Language plays a big role in our lives, so to be able to play with that language, and form it to our own needs or desires is very important. For this reason, writing or talking in true English is a positive finish in itself, in as a lot as it provides an other outlet for this need.
But there’s additionally the additional concept that Anglish is a recognition and a celebration of the English part of modern English. For, although it has borrowed hundreds and 1000’s of words all through its life, there still exists a real English core to English, an important everyday words which no sentence or uttering could handle without. By stripping away the layers of borrowings, Anglish lets us higher recognize that core and the function it plays in our language.
One of the best way to find out the place a word comes from is to look it up in a dictionary. Most first rate desktop dictionaries will embrace short etymologies for many of their entries, which give a little knowledge of where the word arose from, and how it was used or written in the past. Some on-line 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 the most effective available online.
However these will only inform from the place and when a word came into English, but not whether it must be thought ‘borrowed’. Some immensely old and really fundamental words, comparable to ‘cup’ and ‘mill’, are certainly borrowed from Latin, but nobody would say these words 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 road between English and ‘borrowed’ is but an other space of personal choosing, and there are various views on this among Anglish proponents. A really broad rule says that anything borrowed from French, Latin and Greek in the last eight hundred years must 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 must be kept, however those words borrowed to “adorn” or “enrich” the language however in reality push out present words, ought to be weeded.
Are there really 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, but only about 25% of the words in English immediately 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 4 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, where do replacement words come from?
There are a lot of roots for words to replace those which have been removed from English. Typically, a word which is removed will have a commonly known English synonym already present. Words like ‘quotidian’ and ‘illegal’ can simply be switched for ‘everyday’ and ‘unlawful’ without losing which means or intelligibility. When there’s not a readily available English word to be used, a new word have to be found or made. Some old or obscure words might be brought back to life and reused; new words may be calqued from English morphemes using the old word’s sample; other times wholly new words, “neologisms,” can be put together from existing words and affixes. None of these methods are right or unsuitable, however every has its stead in making a wide and different lexicon for Anglish, and every is used according to the context and particular needs of a word.