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 folks right this moment speak Fashionable English is like saying that the French speak Latin. The actual 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 person to person, however principally it is to discover and experiment with the English language. This exploration is pushed for some by aesthetics, for the ethnic English by cultural wants, and but for others it is only an interesting diversion or pastime. Language plays a big position in our lives, so to be able to play with that language, and shape it to our own wants or wants may be very important. For this reason, writing or talking in true English is a positive end in itself, in as much as it provides an other outlet for this need.
However there’s also the further idea that Anglish is a recognition and a celebration of the English part of modern English. For, although it has borrowed hundreds and hundreds of words all through its life, there still exists a real English core to English, an important everyday 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 plays in our language.
The best way to search out out the place a word comes from is to look it up in a dictionary. Most decent desktop dictionaries will embody quick etymologies for a lot of of their entries, which give a little knowledge of the place the word arose from, and how it was used or written in the past. Some on-line dictionaries have this knowledge as well, such because the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com and Wiktionary. There are additionally dictionaries dedicated to word etymologies, which are a goldmine for knowledge about English words. The Online Etymology Dictionary is probably the very best available online.
But these will only inform from the place and when a word got here into English, however not whether it should be thought ‘borrowed’. Some immensely old and very fundamental words, equivalent to ‘cup’ and ‘mill’, are indeed borrowed from Latin, yet 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.
Where to draw the line between English and ‘borrowed’ is but an different area of personal choosing, and there are a lot of views on this amongst Anglish proponents. A really broad rule says that anything borrowed from French, Latin and Greek in 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 genuine need or hole in vocabulary needs to be kept, however these words borrowed to «adorn» or «enrich» the language however in reality push out current words, ought to 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 over the last thousand years. The core of English is Germanic, but only about 25% of the words in English at present derive from such a root, and that includes those of Norse, Dutch, German and others, as well as English. Which will sound like many, one in every four words, however not so much when one thinks that Latin and French every account for 29% of the English vocabulary. Greek yields an different 6% of words, with the last 10% being from other languages, derived from personal names, or just unknown.
Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, the core of the English language still largely 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 a lot of roots for words to switch those 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 is not a readily available English word to be used, 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 occasions wholly new words, «neologisms,» can be put collectively from present words and affixes. None of those methods are proper or unsuitable, but each has its stead in making a wide and diversified lexicon for Anglish, and every is used in accordance with the context and particular needs of a word.