# Purify English / Old English revival



## laurent485

I speak French along with English. Linguistically, English is a Germanic language but has a high percentage of French and Latin vocabulary. I'm just wondering how a lot of words of Germanic origin that existed in old English and always exist in modern other Germanic languages such as German, Dutch and Sweidsh, etc, had been lost and replaced by French and Latin vocabulary, for exemple: arbeiten (labour), Luft (air), Regierung (government), Bund (Federal), König (King, but its adjectif royal is of French origin, are there other exempls like this one?), Handel (commerce), etc etc. 

Moreover, I am wondering whether it is possible to purify English vocabulary, that is to replace as much as possible words of French or Latin origin by either corresponding words of Germanic origin in use or old English words that had been forgotten or new words but based on old English roots or Germanic roots. I have some suggestions such as: arrive replaced by come, language by speech, combat by fight, construct by build, dictionary by wordbook, Germany by Dutchland (accordingly German by Dutch, Dutch that we use by Netherlandish),  etc.


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## Frank06

Hi,


laurent485 said:


> Moreover, I am wondering whether it is possible to purify English vocabulary


Almost everything is possible, but why would you like to purify English? What would be the practical benefits of a 'purified English'? 
I really wonder why some people have the urge to think that they have to purify something used by 100s, 1000s, 10,000s, millions of speakers who don't really skip their well deserved 8 hours sleep wondering whether or not their language is 'Pure'... 



> that is to replace as much as possible words of French or Latin origin by either corresponding words of Germanic origin


I also think your ideas about a 'pure language' are a bit thwarted, or at least, highly selective.

Why this _very arbitrary_ starting point called, sorry, labeled 'Germanic'. Why do you think 'Germanic' is 'pure'? 

Why stop at 'Germanic', or -- if you're following a language family three model -- why not stop at PIE? Why not purify English to the point of 'ooh', 'aah', 'wee-wee', 'blahblah' and 'oink'?

And why only the vocabulary? Why would you like to have 'Germanic' words but wouldn't mind a non-typically Germanic syntaxis? Neither do you advocate for a Germanic morphology (cases and verbal inflection). Why not?

Just wondering.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## Athaulf

laurent485 said:


> I speak French along with English. Linguistically, English is a Germanic language but has a high percentage of French and Latin vocabulary. I'm just wondering how a lot of words of Germanic origin that existed in old English and always exist in modern other Germanic languages such as German, Dutch and Sweidsh, etc, had been lost and replaced by French and Latin vocabulary, for exemple: arbeiten (labour),



There's an ongoing thread about that one. As for the others, you seem to be underestimating the Germanic legacy of English: 



> Luft (air),


This root still lives in the English words "loft" and "aloft". 



> Regierung (government),


This word comes from Latin _regere _"to rule" (or some French derivation thereof), so it's no more Germanic than English "government". 



> Bund (Federal),


This one has a bunch of English cognates, among them "bind", "bend", "bond", and "bound". 



> König (King, but its adjectif royal is of French origin, are there other exempls like this one?),


Of course, there are many other English words where you can choose between Germanic and Romance synonyms. In fact, for just about any Germanic word in English, you'll also find one or more Romance words with similar meanings. 

As for "king", it's of course a Germanic word. Yes, the usual corresponding adjective is Romance "royal" (or more rarely Germanic "kingly" and Latin "regal"), but most other Germanic languages also have words derived from the same Romance root as "royal", like e.g. German _Royalist_.  



> Handel (commerce), etc etc.


Again, this is not a lost Germanic word, but merely semantic drift. English "handle" is cognate with German _Handel_, and in fact, it's closer to the original meaning, which was derived straight from "hand". 

That leaves us with only one real example in your list. 



> Moreover, I am wondering whether it is possible to purify English vocabulary, that is to replace as much as possible words of French or Latin origin by either corresponding words of Germanic origin in use or old English words that had been forgotten or new words but based on old English roots or Germanic roots. I have some suggestions such as: arrive replaced by come, language by speech, combat by fight, construct by build, dictionary by wordbook, Germany by Dutchland (accordingly German by Dutch, Dutch that we use by Netherlandish),  etc.


Of course, such a change would be impossible to impose in practice. However, in principle, it wouldn't be difficult to construct such a "purified", almost purely Germanic English, together with modern technical terminology and everything. 

In fact, there have been some attempts along these lines. The famous SF writer Poul Anderson once wrote a popular-science essay on atomic theory titled "Uncleftish Beholding", in which he used an invented scientific terminology derived almost solely from Germanic English roots. You can find an excerpt from Anderson's essay and a link to the complete version here. I think the article wonderfully demonstrates how very much Germanic English still is. It reads very naturally and to anyone familiar with the topic, every single sentence is perfectly clear. (Moreover, as someone with a solid background in physics, I can vouch that the essay is completely accurate scientifically, in fact much more accurate than what usually passes for pop-science.)

As a side note, I once read somewhere that if one was supposed to speak English using only Germanic words, the Romance word most difficult to replace would be "to use". Anderson has cleverly opted to use "to wield" instead in his essay.


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## jackswitch

The reason those words were replaced by their French equivalents in English is due to the Norman occupation of England, which began in 1066. Areas like government, law, science, the humanities and so on were all affected. This is why English seems to have a Germanic 'core', but with a layer of French and Latin over the top taking care of its 'big words'.

As for 'purifying' English... you're kidding, right? Any populations you'd like to purify too?


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## berndf

jackswitch said:


> As for 'purifying' English... you're kidding, right? Any populations you'd like to purify too?


There would be a historic parallel. The “Deutsche Sprachverein” tried to rid German of all non-Germanic words. Fortunately, they did not succeed but quite a few differences between German German on the one hand and Austrian and Swiss German on the other hand can be trace back to this effort (e.g. _Bürgersteig_ instead of _Trottoir_). The silliest proposal was to replace _Nase_ with _Gesichtserker_. I did not happen during the Nazi period but a few decades earlier. But purification of populations was indeed what followed as we all know.
 
But it could be an interesting exercise to try to find out if the surviving OE roots would suffice to make yourself understood at least in simple every-day contexts.


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## Outsider

laurent485 said:


> Moreover, I am wondering whether it is possible to purify English vocabulary, that is to replace as much as possible words of French or Latin origin by either corresponding words of Germanic origin in use or old English words that had been forgotten or new words but based on old English roots or Germanic roots. I have some suggestions such as: arrive replaced by come, language by speech, combat by fight, construct by build, dictionary by wordbook, Germany by Dutchland (accordingly German by Dutch, Dutch that we use by Netherlandish),  etc.


That sounds like an interesting intellectual exercise, but most unlikely to succeed in practice. I think that Modern English is too widespread across the world and "entrenched" for any substantive reform to be feasible.

But if the idea truly fascinates you, the next best thing you can do is study Old English.


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## Ayazid

Ahoj lidi

Firstly, I think that some of you were a bit too hard on the original poster. He posed a question which is, although highly speculative, quite innocent and legitimate. I don't see there any "underestimation of the Germanic legacy of English" as Athaulf wrote neither he expressed a will to purify any population together with the English language  I think that if we substituted the word "purify" with "remove" it would not sound so "dangerous".

Anyway, as for the question itself, as the other foreros already wrote, such attempt would be theoretically possible but practically completely utopian since most of those "loanwords" are already firmly embedded in the English vocabulary and most English speakers seem to be fine with them. It doesn't mean that there has never been any "attempt" of that kind, but it was always a personal initiative or hobby of some individuals who never constituted any movement like purists in some other languages. In Wikipedia there is an interesting article about such purist proposals in English:

Anglish

A few enthusiasts are even building their own version of Wikipedia written completely in such "purified" English:

The Anglish Moot



berndf said:


> But it could be an interesting exercise to try to find out if the surviving OE roots would suffice to make yourself understood at least in simple every-day contexts.



I am certainly no expert on the English language, but I think that they would, since the basic vocabulary of English is mostly Germanic (not only Old English but also Scandinavian), but talking about more advanced things like politics, science, arts etc. without Romance and Greek loanwords would be much more difficult and probably impossible. But the "Uncleftish Beholding" is a possible solution 

By the way, this topic has been already discussed various times in WR, so the following threads might be worth reading:

English - the Weight of the Germanic Component

English, a Germanic language??

Artifacts from the origins of English

English words having their origin in French


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## Sepia

I think we should start purifying the English language by ridding it of all Anglo-Saxon elements. They have been disturbing factor all along and came from what is now Germany and nobody likes the Germans anyway.

No, honestly, there are so many elements from so many corners of the world forming what we know today as the English language. A very basic and characteristic feature of the English language is its huge Vocabulary that more than makes up for what it lost Gramatically along the way. So "purifying" would mean throwing away most of what has become this language over the centuries - or you'd have to pick out elements based on some nitty-gritty nationalistic and biased motivation. It would then have more to do with fascism than linguistics.


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## Hilde

Of course its an interesting idea, but its unnatural. There is no such thing as a pure language.


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## Wilma_Sweden

The beauty of the English language is, in fact, the diverse heritage of its vocabulary. Even if there are more words to be learned, at least Europeans with a Germanic or Romance language as their first language, will get a 'free ride' in that they look alike in writing, and often mean the same thing.

Icelandic is probably the 'linguistic opposite' in that new words and concepts are often not borrowed 'as is' from Latin, English or Greek, but are usually 'translated' to Icelandic words with pure Scandinavian etymology, which makes Icelandic very difficult to understand even for other Scandinavians.

/Wilma


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## Frank06

Hi,


Wilma_Sweden said:


> Icelandic is probably the 'linguistic opposite' in that new words and concepts are often not borrowed 'as is' from Latin, English or Greek, but are usually 'translated' to Icelandic words with pure Scandinavian etymology, which makes Icelandic very difficult to understand even for other Scandinavians.


 
Which, in it's turn, should force us to think why we'd consider those 'Skandinavian etymologies' as pure. And what's 'pure Skandinavian' anyway?

Let's deal with it, let's get over it: A "pure language" is a contradictio in terminis. 

Groetjes,

Frank


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## Athaulf

Ayazid said:


> Firstly, I think that some of you were a bit too hard on the original poster. He posed a question which is, although highly speculative, quite innocent and legitimate.



I agree. I don't think anyone in this thread ever seriously thought about "purifying" English as a project that should be really undertaken in practice. Experimenting how far we can get by limiting ourselves to the Germanic vocabulary in English is just a fun intellectual exercise. 



> I don't see there any "underestimation of the Germanic legacy of English" as Athaulf wrote


Well, he did incorrectly claim that certain Germanic words had been lost in English, as evidenced in detail in my post #3. What I meant with this statement is that he is jumping to conclusions whenever the English cognates of a German, Dutch, or Scandinavian word aren't immediately obvious.


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## Nanon

laurent485 said:


> Moreover, I am wondering whether it is possible to purify English vocabulary, that is to replace as much as possible words of French or Latin origin by either corresponding words of Germanic origin in use or old English words that had been forgotten or new words but based on old English roots or Germanic roots.



Amusingly (funnily ), this is how we were instructed to speak English when I was a student. We had to use as many words of Saxon origin as possible, in order to show that we were not just relying on our knowledge of French. Obviously, the purpose was entirely pedagogical. Such a "purified" language does not exist in real life.
As a result, we could _ask_, but we could not _pose a question_ .


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## Hilde

I know some scholars claim that English is a originally creol language. In that case there would definitely not be such a thing as a pure English


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## Sepia

Frank06 said:


> Hi,
> 
> 
> Which, in it's turn, should force us to think why we'd consider those 'Skandinavian etymologies' as pure. And what's 'pure Skandinavian' anyway?
> 
> Let's deal with it, let's get over it: A "pure language" is a contradictio in terminis.
> 
> Groetjes,
> 
> Frank


 
which you in a certain way could say they are, because the Icelandic language only differs little from the language that was brought there from Scandinavia. That is probably as pure Scandinavian as you can get.

But the words they construct are often very odd and artificial - the best example I can think of is the hybrid of "number" and "shaman" getting to mean computer. 
That is what happens when a small group of people invent words for the rest of the population.


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## Athaulf

Hilde said:


> I know some scholars claim that English is a originally creol language.



This is highly unlikely. See the discussion this thread.


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## jimreilly

Yes, an interesting intellectual exercise, perhaps, to purify the language. But if the task could be accomplished we would miss out on all the history (political, social, literary) that has been embedded in the language's impurity.

Here's to impurity, so rich and various! English is a sexy Cleopatra, and Shakespeare, who described Cleopatra's variety as so alluring, certainly took advantage of all the impurity he could find in English, even inventing some of his own.

Not only Latin and French have added their "foreign" blood to our linguistic genes; only yesterday I was in a _bungalow_ here in Minneapolis, and while I was there someone picked some _schnibbles_ up off the floor. And, given the large Somali population now living here, I am waiting to hear the first word of that language become common in local non-Somali discourse. Here's hoping....


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## Nanon

The word "purify" should disappear from the title, to begin with...


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## sokol

I've only found this when re-reading the thread; missed it first time:


Hilde said:


> I know some scholars claim that English is a originally creol language. In that case there would definitely not be such a thing as a pure English


No, Hilde, with due respect but no scholar _ever _would claim seriously that English (as such, the English language, and not a particular regional variety) were a Creole.
A Creole is a language evolving from a Pidgin; and Pidgin is a simplified language used only as a means between people who don't have a common language - a Pidgin is no one's mother tongue, while creolisation is the process of a Pidgin becoming a mother tongue.
And the English as spoken in medieval England never really was a Pidgin: the Anglosaxons never changed their mother-tongue (i. e. never gave up their old one and never adopted a new one), change as it happened was gradual and thus completely different from a creolisation process. And some scholars indeed compare this process with creolisation - but those who claim that it _were _creolisation (if there are any) really are just wrong.

But you are nevertheless right of course: it would be impossible to try and purify English (and I don't think that anyone of the people who've posted here thinks so).



Sepia said:


> which you in a certain way could say they are, because the Icelandic language only differs little from the language that was brought there from Scandinavia. That is probably as pure Scandinavian as you can get.


Yes, Icelandic is probably as pure Scandinavian as you can get - but nevertheless it is not completely 'pure', and it has artificial elements - all those puristic new words indeed _are _artificial.

But let's stick to topic.
There never really were serious attempts to purify English - I guess the English speech communities are one of the least puristic ones we have; English just assimilates what it needs, and creates where the need arises. To try and purify English the language would need native speakers who _wish _to purify it - and even though there are some overall I'd guess they're a very small percentage of the whole population.


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## laurent485

*Moderator note:
This is more or less the same question asked again. I therefore merged the two threads.
Berndf*

I am doing a linguistic study on the evolution of English. Old English was merely a dialect of west germanic language brought to England by Saxons, Angles and Jutes and has undergone a lot of changes, especially influences from Latin and French on English vocabulary (fortunately there has been nearly no influence on English grammar and phonetic system). However, due to its mixed vocabulary (ONLY 25% of modern English vocabulary is native anglo-saxon words, while Latin and French loan words make up around 60% to 66%, source from Wikipedia). The result is that in Modern English there exists often two words for the same thing, one of Anglo-Saxon origin and the other of Romance origine.
So I am wondering whether it is possible to revital the Old English, at least its vocabulary/wordstock (if I can say that) and to coin words from the Old English word stems to get rid of French and Latin influence. Icelandic language is a perfect exemple in that Icelanders always use words of Scandinavian origin to replace loan words from Danish, Low German and Latin. Moreover, I wish to know what native English speakers, especially Brittons think of the fact that there language is full of French and Latin words? French people are pround of the French language, although I think it rather ridiculous that French people or more precisely the Gaullish people had abandonned their authentic native language the Gaullish to adopt Latin and try to protect their language from influence from English.


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## Aydintashar

Pure language is a rare phenomenon, and is not considered an advantage. All living languages have a certain degree of load words, no less than 50% in certain cases. Today, English is a cosmopolitan language, it is not the property of English people only. So, your proposed revival of old English is neither possible, nor fruitful.


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## Askalon

English is English by now, regardless of where it came from.  As an English speaker, I couldn't care less where the words come from.  As a linguistics student, I just find it interesting.

I'm not sure what you mean by a "revital of Old English."  Do you mean trying to steer Modern English towards increasingly using words of only Germanic origins, while expecting all or some of the English-speaking population to go along with forcibly eliminating Latin and French influence in their language?  That won't happen and there would be no benefit to speak of anyway.

If you mean simply maybe coming up with some sort of half constructed language based on both Modern and Old English, then I see no reason why something like that couldn't be created.  Extremely few people would actually use it though.

I'm not sure what you mean by French people abandoning Gaulish.  Gauls are not equivalent to modern French people, first of all.  The Gauls were conquered by the Romans and became a part of the Roman Empire, which is why they started speaking Latin (which ultimately replaced Gaulish), and the Latin they spoke developed into a distinct dialect and eventually language.  The Franks showed up at some point with their Germanic language and this influenced the Latin dialect the people there were speaking.  From all of this you eventually got a new language called Old French.  So the Gauls did not one day decide they really didn't care for their language anymore and would rather speak Latin--they were forcibly invaded.


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## Alxmrphi

> I'm not sure what you mean by a "revital of Old English."


I think what was intended was a *revival*.
As for the question about how do modern day English speakers feel that such a high proportion of their vocabulary is Latinate (encompassing French), I don't think they know. The vast majority of English speakers are monolingual and aren't aware in more than basic names for fruit/veg in French, let alone the lesser known words, the ones that look less French.

In fact, on multiple occasions when I've been in the company of people and they've noticed a similar word in a Romance language, the normal (and I suspect natural) understanding is that it is _*from *_the English word that the French / Italians get it, not the other way around. It's human nature if you're used to speaking a language all of your life, and all of a sudden you see a very close cognate in another language, you associate its similarity to _your_ language.

I've had a lot of conversations about aspects of the history of English with many friends of mine, even ones who have completed MAs and most others with BAs (even in English) that express this same sort of sentiment. Only through studying a foreign language and/or the linguistic history of English do you come to know/appreciate the period when English borrowed all of these words. I don't think anybody who doesn't know anything about the other languages or the history of English would know that *army* is derived from French, and is not a native English word. This goes (I imagine) for thousands of other words as well.

With Icelandic, the purist language _Háíslenska_ (High Icelandic) can function with these words because it is regulated by a language body, which is independent of the language body that regulates the normal Icelandic language. Without a body functioning in the same capacity in England I can't see how it would ever be possible to introduce a system even if it was wanted, to make English more like its older counterpart. This also works because it's a relatively contained language, native to mainly Iceland and some colonies in Canada/North America, English is too far spread for a consistant change to be applied for Englishes used all over the world.

So in that sense I'd have to disagree that it would be ever possible to actually carry out a revival of Old English that would be universally adopted.
I think the attempts to revolutionise spelling even before English became so far widespread is an indication of how mass change would not be accepted, so we write like English was spoken about 400-500 years ago. People are reluctant to change in any dramatic way, linguistic change occurs tiny step by tiny step, in ways the speaker doesn't even consciously realise, so how that could be applied in this case... well, I don't think it could.


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## Pedro y La Torre

(British) English is still imitating French to a great extent - the relatively recent adoption of -ise instead of -ize being a case in point.

"Purifying" English is an utter impossibility.


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## grubble

laurent485 said:


> I wish to know what native English speakers, especially *Britons* think of the fact that there language is full of French and Latin words? French people are pround of the French language, although I think it rather ridiculous that French people or more precisely the Gaullish people had abandonned their authentic native language the Gaullish to adopt Latin and try to protect their language from influence from English.


As a native of England (as opposed to Britain - so there is little or no Gaelic influence in my speech), I have always enjoyed the fact that I have so many words to choose from. Sometimes they are exact synonyms but more often there is subtle difference in meaning.

In general Germanic (G) words are used for everyday speech whereas Latinate (L) words are used in learned works, the law, science, medicine and other technical subjects.

This is helpful because often, if something is said in G we know that it probably is not backed up by study or research but is a personal opinion. This is a huge generalisation but I believe there is truth in it.

For example, when people wish to convince buyers that their product (say hair shampoo) is efficacious, they often use L sounding words in order to blind their listeners with science.

This web page shows some different ways of describing such products. http://www.amazon.co.uk/b?ie=UTF8&node=74094031

_Flaky Itchy Scalp Shampoo_ - This uses ordinary, everyday words because it is important for the user to know the purpose of the product.

_Shampoo 360ml and Conditioner 360ml (Fortified Amino Scalp Therapy)_ Most purchasers would not know what the phrase "fortified amino therapy" really means, it sounds good though.

_New Hair Biofactors Shampoo for Normal to Oily Hair_ This product uses both forms: "oily hair" explains in simple language what the product does whereas "biofactors" sounds as though it means something important or scientific.

Note, I am not praising advertisers for this usage. It is merely a convenient way to point out the differences. In scientific writing for example the vocabulary is tightly defined so as to avoid ambiguity and misunderstanding. We tend to use L words for this. In everyday speech, ambiguity and vagueness are often acceptable and indeed useful; thus we tend to use G words.

Example
_John: "Hello Tim, I see you have broken your leg."
Tim: Hello John, yes I *broke my shinbone *when some shelves fell on me. I am suing my employer._  (The information is approximate but clear enough for a friend)

Later in court...

_Judge: What was the injury and its cause?
Doctor:He has a *medial tibial fracture*, proximate cause - impact from heavy object._ (The meaning is precise as needed for evidence)



(apologies to lawyers and medics if I got anything wrong!)


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## koniecswiata

English already is "purely English".  Once a word becomes incorporated into a language, it is part of that language.  The words "spaghetti", "royal", "chair" or "diversify" are no less English than "wield", "yarn", "rutabaga" or "spit".


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## Aydintashar

In General, the discussion concerns all living languages, which are extremely impure. Some languages are suffering from a superfluous inflow of foreign (often unnecessary) loadwords, due to political situations. For example, my mother language Azeri is under a very strong influence of Russian (in The Republic of Azerbaijan) and Persian (in Iran). This kind of languages really have to defend themselves, and revive at least some of their genuine words. English, on the other hand, is in a dynamic situation resulting from economical and political factors, and is actually disrupting plenty of other languages in the world due to its cosmopolitan situation. I think, this language needs no external intervention to control its evolution. As for the loanwords from Latin, Greek etc., absorbed during the past centuries, these loanwords have greatly enriched the language and increased its capacity in various branches of science and technology as well as medicine and philosophy. It is impossible to use (even relatively) pure English in fields such as engineering, law, medicine, philosophy etc. You cannot draft even a brief agreement or express a brief mathematical theorem in pure English.


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## Frank06

Aydintashar said:


> In General, the discussion concerns all living languages, which are extremely impure. Some languages are suffering from a superfluous inflow of foreign (often unnecessary) loadwords, due to political situations. For example, my mother language Azeri is under a very strong influence of Russian (in The Republic of Azerbaijan) and Persian (in Iran). This kind of languages really have to defend themselves, and revive at least some of their genuine words. English, on the other hand, is in a dynamic situation resulting from economical and political factors, and is actually disrupting plenty of other languages in the world due to its cosmopolitan situation. I think, this language needs no external intervention to control its evolution. As for the loanwords from Latin, Greek etc., absorbed during the past centuries, these loanwords have greatly enriched the language and increased its capacity in various branches of science and technology as well as medicine and philosophy. It is impossible to use (even relatively) pure English in fields such as engineering, law, medicine, philosophy etc. You cannot draft even a brief agreement or express a brief mathematical theorem in pure English.


So, in short: loanwords in English equals an enrichment, loanwords in other languages equals a threat.
Allow me not to understand this.


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## rayloom

Frank06 said:


> So, in short: loanwords in English equals an enrichment, loanwords in other languages equals a threat.
> Allow me not to understand this.



Some people resist change, some don't.
I think it's a subjective matter (I'll keep my personal opinion for last).

In regards to Arabic, some really view the acquisition of loanwords to be a threat. The reason is that some Arabs (although I don't claim to be speaking for any party) see that change in Arabic means drifting away from our ancient culture and literature.

As in: Maybe for an English speaking person, it's not that important to be able to read and understand Shakespeare, but for an Arab, not being able to read and understand the Quran for example might be considered a big problem. 
You see a religious reason gets mixed up in the issue, which is quite difficult to ignore in reality.

There are already some Arabs who view the current diglossial situation and the divergence from Classical Arabic to be a big problem.

On the otherhand, there are Arabs who are calling for the opening up of the language, and using the colloquial forms as formal languages. Some Arabs support this, others view it as treason and those calling for it no less than traitors!

As for my personal view, I think that languages are bigger than being controlled by the will of a few. Languages develop and grow, it's only natural to change. And I welcome borrowings and the diglossia which have enriched the Arabic language and culture.

I also view that the view to purify a language is quite absurd.
Let's purify French for example. The Franks originally spoke a Germanic langauge too. Or should we remove the Gaulish influence from French, so it can be a "purer Latin" language; it would certainly sound "more Latin"!
Or should we remove the Frankish and Latin altogether, and revive Gaulish, it's the "original French" now isn't it?


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## Hulalessar

The impossibility of eradicating non-Germanic from English will readily be appreciated when you consider that a native English speaker can hardly sit down to eat without using non-Germanic words: _table chair plate fork_


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## Nanon

Fork


> O.E. forca "forked instrument used by torturers,"   a Germanic borrowing (cf. O.N. forkr) from L. furca  "pitchfork; fork used in cooking," of uncertain origin. Table forks  were not generally used in England until 15c. The word is first attested  in this sense in English in a will of 1463, probably from O.N.Fr. forque (O.Fr. furche, Mod.Fr. fourche), from the Latin word.


OED


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## grubble

In the history of the world no living language has ever remained stationary let alone moved backwards. Why? -  because language describes our lives and our lives change and evolve with our culture.

Think of the sheer effort to invent old-sounding words to describe the arts, the law, literature and works of science. Then, having done it, all we  achieve is an inability to communicate with other nations.

Fun to talk about but impractical, undesirable and pointless.


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## berndf

grubble said:


> In the history of the world no living language has ever remained stationary let alone moved backwards. Why? -  because language describes our lives and our lives change and evolve with our culture.
> 
> Think of the sheer effort to invent old-sounding words to describe the arts, the law, literature and works of science. Then, having done it, all we  achieve is an inability to communicate with other nations.
> 
> Fun to talk about but impractical, undesirable and pointless.


Well some do. E.g. Modern Hebrew which artificially reverts to Mishnaic Hebrew ignoring medieval Hebrew. They use biblical and Mishnaic words translate modern concepts on a large scale. E.g. the Israeli defense minister is _Sar HaBitachon_. If you translate this with a modern Hebrew dictionary you get _Minister of the Security_; just for fun I once used my _Biblical Hebrew-German_ dictionary and got _Prinz der Zuversicht = Prince of the Confidence_.


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## grubble

berndf said:


> Well some do. E.g. Modern Hebrew which artificially reverts to Mishnaic Hebrew ignoring medieval Hebrew. They use biblical and Mishnaic words translate modern concepts on a large scale.


Well I did say impractical and not impracticable.  I get your point though. Efforts on a much smaller scale have been made to do the same sort of thing with Welsh and there are some amusing tales about this. 

_Cyclists between Cardiff and Penarth in 2006 were left confused by a bilingual road sign telling them they had problems with an "inflamed bladder"._
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7702913.stm


----------



## Alxmrphi

grubble said:


> Efforts on a much smaller scale have been made to do the same sort of thing with Welsh and there are some amusing tales about this.
> 
> _Cyclists between Cardiff and Penarth in 2006 were left confused by a bilingual road sign telling them they had problems with an "inflamed bladder"._
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7702913.stm



Haha I remember when that article first popped up (wow, over 2 years ago).
But, I'm afraid this doesn't link to the process of the Welsh reverting back to an earlier form of the language , so while the article is funny, I'm not sure how it links to back up the point about older forms of the language? This BBC article suggests it was possibly an online translation error.

After moving to Wales part of what I've been interested it is its linguistic history and I've not come across a revival movement linking to older forms of the language. There is certainly a revival movement here definitely, for example with mandatory primary education and quotas of Welsh language radio, but this is just to spread the language and make it equal with English in certain parts.


----------



## grubble

Alxmrphi said:


> But, I'm afraid this doesn't link to the process of the Welsh reverting back to an earlier form of the language


The anecdote was to support my belief that artificial languages are impractical. Welsh is backward looking in the sense that, in the past, most Welsh speakers borrowed technological words such as "television", "refrigerator" and so on. The purists want to replace these with words that have Welsh roots.

 Example: refrigerator -->  oergelloedd

This is directly related to the original question of purification.


----------



## Alxmrphi

grubble said:


> The anecdote was to support my belief that artificial languages are impractical. Welsh is backward looking in the sense that, in the past, most Welsh speakers borrowed technological words such as "television", "refrigerator" and so on. The purists want to replace these with words that have Welsh roots.
> 
> Example: refrigerator -->  oergelloedd
> 
> This is directly related to the original question of purification.


Ok, I totally get what you mean here.
But the 'inflamed bladder' wasn't a case of this, as the article says:



> Welsh language expert Owain Sgiv told the South Wales Echo: "It certainly does not mean anything like cyclists dismount."
> 
> A spokesman for the Vale of Glamorgan Council's highways department said: "A mistake has been made and we are investigating.


I just wanted to explain the root of my confusion about this.
But in general, purification is quite a common ideal in Welsh here.


----------



## koniecswiata

As Hulalessar said--there is really no practical way to strip English of its non-Germanic words (let's say mainly those of Latin/Romance origin).  I find such an idea to be even incredibly ludicrous as it demonstates a complete misunderstanding of what English is.  As with many, or most, languages, it has a lot of vocabulary from diverse sources.  That's just how it is. To say that "house" or "king" are more English than "mansion" or "royal" is idiotic.  They are all just English words--pure and simple.  They just have different etymologies.


----------



## jimreilly

grubble said:


> In the history of the world no living language has ever remained stationary let alone moved backwards. Why? - because language describes our lives and our lives change and evolve with our culture.
> 
> Think of the sheer effort to invent old-sounding words to describe the arts, the law, literature and works of science. Then, having done it, all we achieve is an inability to communicate with other nations.
> 
> Fun to talk about but impractical, undesirable and pointless.


 
The idea of "purifying" a language and the above quote remind me a bit of the creation of nynorsk in Norway, a language based on Norwegian dialects which had remained relatively free of Danish influence. The more Danish-influenced language was called _riksmål_ or _bokmål_ (i.e. the language of the kingdom and book-language), and was spoken by people with more formal education and people closer to the centers of power. Of course the creation of nynorsk had a politcal component ( the desire for a free Norway after long years of Danish rule, then Swedish rule).

This was successful only to a certain extent--there is excellent literature in Nynorsk, many people took it up, and it still exists as one of the legal languages of Norway. But it has never become the majority Norwegian dialenct, as much as some people might think it "purer" or "more Norwegian". And us poor non-Norwegians who study Norwegian generally study bokmål and when we encounter nynorsk we can be easily confused.


----------



## sound shift

I have trouble with the notion of purity. Why would anyone wish to attempt to "purify" (whatever that may mean) a language? Most such attempts have been part of a policy of authoritarian nationalism, and I don't want any of that here.


----------



## jimreilly

I'm with you, Sound Shift, and such efforts sometimes also have a racist component. Check out a book by Moussa Traore about the history of such efforts by means of the Academie Française and the overlap of these efforts with racism. (If you Google Taore's name and "Academie Française" I'm sure you'll fin it--I just can't remember the title and I'm too lazy to go upstairs and find it).


----------



## Donnerstag

Frank06 said:


> Hi,
> 
> 
> Which, in it's turn, should force us to think why we'd consider those 'Skandinavian etymologies' as pure. And what's 'pure Skandinavian' anyway?
> 
> Let's deal with it, let's get over it: A "pure language" is a contradictio in terminis.
> 
> Groetjes,
> 
> Frank



With regards to Icelandic, for the past 200 years it has been a policy to avoid loanwords and use old Scandinavian words instead, or, if they don't exist, to formulate new words derived from parts of old Scandinavian words. Of course it hasn't succeeded completely, there are still some loanwords, like e.g. _sígaretta _(cigarette)

This policy has had broad popular support in Iceland and people generally try as they can to use Germanic words.

Why?

Simply because the old Norse sagas, which were written in Iceland, are such a huge part of the culture, we generally consider them to be what defines us. The ability to read these 1000 year old sagas of the first settlers here and adventures of their kinsmen in Europe is something Icelanders generally want to preserve.

So this language policy is designed to give every Icelander, born now or in the future, the ability to read our sagas, even though they were written nearly 1000 years ago. The language has changed very little since then.

Other Scandinavians, on the other hand, would never be able to read them without extensive studying.


----------



## Tazzler

We should change the word "question" to "askthing" to get rid of that annoying Latinate word.


----------



## Frank06

Tazzler said:


> We should change the word "question" to "askthing" to get rid of that annoying Latinate word.


Any suggestion for the word "purify"? ;-)
And revival for that matter?
And suggestion, obviously?


----------



## Alxmrphi

Frank06 said:


> Any suggestion for the word "purify"? ;-) *Rinse*
> And revival for that matter? *wakening*
> And suggestion, obviously?



Bit lost for *suggestion *though 
But yeah pointing out the Latin terms in the original title is quite funny and ironic


----------



## DenisBiH

Alxmrphi said:


> Bit lost for *suggestion *though
> But yeah pointing out the Latin terms in the original title is quite funny and ironic




Well, since suggestions get _put forth_, my _forthput _would be to coin a new word along those lines.  It would have the added benefit of being parallel in form to the already existing _input_, _output_, _throughput_...


----------



## Havfruen

What ask-things!

My fore-throw:

rinse English / Old English again-waking!!


----------



## DenisBiH

English newbirthing well on its way...


----------



## Kevin Beach

Havfruen said:


> What ask-things!
> 
> My fore-throw:
> 
> rinse English / Old English again-waking!!


Why not "Old English wake-up"?


----------



## Peano

It seems to be just a question of commonsense. Probably the English-speaking people would use language far more accurately if plain English were favored. See for example Orwell :

In his 1946 essay "*Politics and the English Language*", George Orwell wrote:
Bad writers –especially scientific, political, and sociological writers– are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglish )

In 1946, writer George Orwell wrote an impassioned essay, "*Politics and the English Language*", criticizing what he saw as the dangers of "ugly and inaccurate" contemporary written English - particularly in politics where _pacification_ can be used to mean "...defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets...".
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_English )


----------



## Pedro y La Torre

Peano said:


> It seems to be just a question of commonsense. Probably the English-speaking people would use language far more accurately if plain English were favored. See for example Orwell :
> 
> In his 1946 essay "*Politics and the English Language*", George Orwell wrote:
> Bad writers –especially scientific, political, and sociological writers– are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.
> ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglish )
> 
> In 1946, writer George Orwell wrote an impassioned essay, "*Politics and the English Language*", criticizing what he saw as the dangers of "ugly and inaccurate" contemporary written English - particularly in politics where _pacification_ can be used to mean "...defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets...".
> ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_English )



I would suppose the regarding Latinate and French words as more "refined" or "educated" is a hold-over from the effects of the Norman Conquest. The English upper-classes have always had a sense of inferiority in comparison to the French, and at one time, if not still to this day, strived to imitate them wherever possible. Many countries have a similar relation with what many consider to be a grander power, Ireland of course is one of them.


----------



## berndf

Peano said:


> In 1946, writer George Orwell wrote an impassioned essay, "*Politics and the English Language*", criticizing what he saw as the dangers of "ugly and inaccurate" contemporary written English - particularly in politics where _pacification_ can be used to mean "...defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets...".
> ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_English )


Here, Orwell criticizes the euphemistic character of the use of the term _pacification_. It has nothing to do with the romance origin of the word.



Pedro y La Torre said:


> I would suppose the regarding Latinate and French words as more "refined" or "educated" is a hold-over from the effects of the Norman Conquest. The English upper-classes have always had a sense of inferiority in comparison to the French, and at one time, if not still to this day, strived to imitate them wherever possible. Many countries have a similar relation with what many consider to be a grander power, Ireland of course is one of them.


I don't think we have to go quite that far back. The nimbus of refinement around Latin and French was a pan-European phenomenon until the 19th century where upper class families, nobility and bourgeoisie alike, had French speaking nannies, ... sorry... governesses, for their children.


----------



## Peano

berndf said:


> Here, Orwell criticizes the euphemistic character of the use of the term _pacification_. It has nothing to do with the romance origin of the word.



In my opinion, the term _pacification_ (from Latin, not Romance) may be more easily manipulated than say _ceasefire_, which has a plain meaning in comparison.

Actually I'm not acquainted with the book of Orwell, nor with the "Plain English" campaign, but let me speculate about the ingent Latin-Greek component of the English lexicon, which may be kept so high just in order to create the fiction of a "hyper-language" to rule the world, while becoming the international language.

Getting a language 100% pure in its lexicon is probably impossible, but English stays at the other extreme, having a Germanic base apparently under 50%, which is incredible.


----------



## berndf

Peano said:


> from Latin, not Romance


Well, English got it from French but in French itself in it a late medieval loan from Latin and not inherited. In this respect you are right.


Peano said:


> ...may be more easily manipulated than say _ceasefire_, which has a plain meaning in comparison.


... but has nothing to do with Germanic vs. Romance words. If he'd been criticizing German military/political jargon he would have criticized the purely Germanic word _Befriedung_ (=_pacification_) in the same way.


----------



## TheRock87

Athaulf said:


> There's an ongoing thread about that one. As for the others, you seem to be underestimating the Germanic legacy of English:
> 
> This root still lives in the English words "loft" and "aloft".
> 
> ...



One of the best posts I have read here. I salute you Sir!


----------



## koniecswiata

How words are used/misused has nothing to do with their etymology.  A young speaker of English tends not to be aware of whether a word is of Germanic or Latin or any other origin.  
Above in "Rinsed English":  How words are tooled has nothing to do with their come-from-ness.  A young speaker of English ofts not to be aware of whether a word comes from a Theodish or Latinish spring.
I guess the "Rinsed English" is sort of understandable but would have a certain sloppiness to it.  Besides, we'd have to litterally invent tons of new vocabulary.

Besides, whether you pacify or "make a village happy"--it's the same cynical misuse of the language.

What would happen with basic vocabulary like peace, chair, boy, lettuce, pear, sauce, school, coast, mountain, forest, city, quiet, etc... I don't see them as being that replaceable without making the language really poor (oops two "latin" words).


----------



## jimreilly

Donnerstag said:


> With regards to Icelandic, for the past 200 years it has been a policy to avoid loanwords and use old Scandinavian words instead, or, if they don't exist, to formulate new words derived from parts of old Scandinavian words. Of course it hasn't succeeded completely, there are still some loanwords, like e.g. _sígaretta _(cigarette)
> 
> This policy has had broad popular support in Iceland and people generally try as they can to use Germanic words.
> 
> Why?
> 
> Simply because the old Norse sagas, which were written in Iceland, are such a huge part of the culture, we generally consider them to be what defines us. The ability to read these 1000 year old sagas of the first settlers here and adventures of their kinsmen in Europe is something Icelanders generally want to preserve.
> 
> So this language policy is designed to give every Icelander, born now or in the future, the ability to read our sagas, even though they were written nearly 1000 years ago. The language has changed very little since then.
> 
> Other Scandinavians, on the other hand, would never be able to read them without extensive studying.


 
I certainly admire the Icelanders for their efforts to preserve and protect their language, and while I don't speak it I have sung it upon occasion (probably badly) and have taken a little second-hand pleasure in their admirable musical culture.

But their situation is certainly unique, in that the language changed so little for so many years. English, which has changed in so many many ways for so many years, is in a very different situation. And in the United States, where so many of us are of mixed heritage (Italian, German, and Irish in my case) the fact that English has words that reflect various aspects of our heritages is especially delightful. We need linguistic purity just as much as we need genetic purity--that is, not at all.


----------



## Tazzler

Frank06 said:


> Any suggestion for the word "purify"? ;-)
> And revival for that matter?
> And suggestion, obviously?




I guess we have "cleanse." "revival" maybe "againliving." For "suggest" we could use "forslay" based on German "vorschlagen."

chair-> backstool
table-> legboard

I remember readinga paragraph that the authors wrote deliberately only using words of Anglo-Saxon origin. Unfortunately, I can't find it, but it was quite interesting to see that such a feat could actually be done (only a paragraph though).


----------



## Perseas

That made me remember something relevant.
Zolotas used to be director of the Bank of Greece (he had served as a PM for a while). In order to demonstrate the contribution of Greek language to the English vocabulary  he gave two speeches in English in 1957 and in 1959 to foreign audiences  "using with the exception of articles and prepositions _only Greek words_". Everybody understood them.

Here's a little extract of his speech in 1957:

_"...This phenomenon is characteristic of our epoch. But, to my thesis, we  have the dynamism to program therapeutic practices as a prophylaxis  from chaos and catastrophe..."

Both speeches and information are in this link of wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophon_Zolotas

and here:

http://users.forthnet.gr/ath/ttz/

_


----------



## Havfruen

Kevin Beach said:


> Why not "Old English wake-up"?



It seems you're speaking the southern dialect while I'm speaking northern.


----------



## Havfruen

Tazzler said:


> I guess we have "cleanse." "revival" maybe "againliving." For "suggest" we could use "forslay" based on German "vorschlagen."


 
Sounds closer to a borrowing from North Germanic, i.e. Scandinavian.
"question" in Danish/Norwegian/Swedish is forslag/forslag/förslag and the Danish is even pronounced like "forslay"
"revival" in Danish/Norwegian/Swedish can be genoplivning/gjenoppliving/återuppliving which mean approximately "again living"

If I had to remove all the non-Germanic words from modern English, then I would propose to replace them with Danish words.


----------



## berndf

Havfruen said:


> Sounds closer to a borrowing from North Germanic, i.e. Scandinavian.
> "question" in Danish/Norwegian/Swedish is forslag/forslag/förslag and the Danish is even pronounced like "forslay"


No, _forslag/förslag_ are Middle Low German loans (/foɐslax/, /føɐslax/ in Modern Low German). The common Germanic base is _*slog-/*slakh-_ < PIE *_slak-._ The Danish noun _slag_ alone is certainly derived form ON but the phrasal verb _foreslå _from which _forslag_ is derived is a German loan (or claque, in this particular case the distinction doesn't really matter; click).


----------



## Peano

berndf said:


> ... but has nothing to do with Germanic vs. Romance words. If he'd been criticizing German military/political jargon he would have criticized the purely Germanic word _Befriedung_ (=_pacification_) in the same way.


Possibly that was not a good example.

I will try it with _school_. We may ignore the etymology of it (ancient Greek _σχολή_), which was "leasure, spare time", and especially "leasure for learning", and then "learning-place". ( http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/school ).
Well, schools sometimes may become stressing places (exams, punishments, bullying, and so on), rather than "leasure-places". I'm just speculating. But anyway, I mean that by keeping an ingent number of loanwords like "school", it is more easy to make children believe that schools are necessarily streesing.
Why not to call it just "learning-house"? Why not to call a church (also from ancient Greek, _κυριακόν_) a "godly-house"? 
So, to me all the "Plain English / Anglish" cause is just common-sense.


----------



## Hulalessar

The word "school" has been around in English for over a thousand years. It is more English than fish and chips.


----------



## erased

Overall, this operation sounds very anachronistic,  i am unable to see,  what is the motivation  and in the other hand what is the "true final target".   The Icelandic case has a context completly different,first of all Icelandic never died, Danish had a little impact on Icelandic. In addition we must remember that the ,so called, "Icelandic Revival" had an important role:the reawakening of the Icelandic National Identity during the danish "occupation".  But who care about the words , the are only signs on a piece of paper, what ,really,identify a Language is the grammar and not the words. Or do you think that Czech language is a Latin language only because it uses the Latin alphabet?  Can you write something on English using a non-germanic grammar? In  most cases the answer is :not.  Can you write something in a non-germanic languages using a germanic grammar? In  most cases the answer is :not.    There is an Institute on Iceland ,which erases foreign words ( Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies), Ok, it is right to defend their own culture,but there is also a limit. I dont know what is kimono or vodka or google in Icelandic, but i suppose they could be some strange words or paraphrases.  At the same time what could be in a purified English words like coffe (turkish?) or tea (chinese?)  or blitzkrieg (flash war?'?'??),  we could reach strange results.   People forget that the composition of a vocabulary  occurs in the course of centuries and it is influenced by many factors  and  by different cultures,not necessarily from a single culture . This happens in English like in other languages,but for some, obviously, what is different is bad. Also Talibans thought so,and then Bayamin Buddhas were differents? -erased- ,The twin towers were differents? -erased-.


----------



## Tazzler

Here are some place one would find in an Anglo-Saxon city (or "bigtown"):

Children go to learnhouse to receive an education.
When one needs surgery, one goes to a sickhouse to get an operation.
Dramatic pieces and movies are performed at a playhouse.
One can borrow books to read at a bookhouse.
When one travels to a foreign country, one would stay in a biginn.
To receive a higher education, one attends a biglearnhouse.
You keep your money and make financial transactions at a goldhouse.
People go to worship at a godhouse.
You can find collections of rare objects at an oldhouse.
You can work out and exercise at a bodyhouse.
You can find good food at a mealhouse.
You can send packages at a sendhouse.


----------



## Tazzler

Perseas said:


> That made me remember something relevant.
> Zolotas used to be director of the Bank of Greece (he had served as a PM for a while). In order to demonstrate the contribution of Greek language to the English vocabulary  he gave two speeches in English in 1957 and in 1959 to foreign audiences  "using with the exception of articles and prepositions _only Greek words_". Everybody understood them.
> 
> Here's a little extract of his speech in 1957:
> 
> _"...This phenomenon is characteristic of our epoch. But, to my thesis, we  have the dynamism to program therapeutic practices as a prophylaxis  from chaos and catastrophe..."
> 
> Both speeches and information are in this link of wikipedia:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophon_Zolotas
> 
> and here:
> 
> http://users.forthnet.gr/ath/ttz/
> 
> _



What about "this," "we," "but," "have," "and," "my," and "our"?


----------



## terredepomme

If we were to go back in time before the Norman Conquest, we would try our best to protect the English tongue as it were. But the old English people did not bother protecting it, because a language was regarded differently by then, since there was no nationalism, whereas in modern days, all formal languages are "national." That is to say, there were no standard grammar, no standard dictionaries, no teaching of national languages in schools, and no need to standardize the various dialects into a common form. But now English, as a national language of many nations, should be protected how it is formed, because it is simply too late, and all the history and culture has been written in this form of English. That is to say, if a feat of linguistic invasion similar to the Norman conquest were to happn to English today, I would be a vehement opposer of that conquest. This is because a language means different to us than what it meant to people of the pre-nationalist era.
Likewise, Korean, rich with Sinitic vocabularies, should stay as it is for now, accepting its Sinitic lexicon as part of its indivisible identity. If we were to go back in time before the Chinese language influenced Korean, we would try to adopt the Korean words to form higher vocabulary, but now it is too late. Moreover, I highly oppose that the words of English and other languages infiltrate the contemporary Korean language, because now is not an age where languages should develop that way.
Why is this? Because this is an era where we decide to use our vernacular tongue as a formal language, whereas in pre-nationalist era, classical languages different from speech language were used, such as Latin and Classical Chinese, and these languages remained relatively unchanged. Now, the same thing applies to national languages; we cannot compare the un-protective attitude towards vernacular languages of the past with our attitude towards our modern-day national languages; rather, we must be protective of our national tongue as the elders did with their classic languages, because the national languages has assumed the function that the classic languages once served: a universal, standard language, unchanged throughout time and space. 
The purest form of a language is as it is now, as defined by your dictionaries, your school teachers, and your language councils. Instead of reviving the past, focus on maintaining what is established at the present, so that the posterities may not deviate from what we speak.


----------



## Peano

erased said:


> what could be in a purified English words like coffe (turkish?) or tea (chinese?)



They could be part of a moderate stock of foreign loanwords, maybe a 5%, with the most popular ones, including _coffee_, _tea_, _wine_, _potato_, and so on. 
But note that potato itself would be "_land-apple"_ according to the French.


----------



## berndf

Peano said:


> But note that potato itself would be "_land-apple"_ according to the French.


_Ground apple_ or _earth apple_ but not *_land apple_. _Land _is _terre_ in its extension on the surface (_terroir, pays_) but not the element. Some Germanic languages use such constructs, like Southern German _Erdapfel_ (_earth apple_) or Eastern German _Grundbirne _(_ground pear_).


----------



## Nanon

Note that _pomme de terre_ coexists with _patate_, which is colloquial. Which one should we "purify"?


Tazzler said:


> When one needs surgery, one goes to a sickhouse to get an operation.


That one sounds Scandinavian to me .


----------



## Roy776

Nanon said:


> That one sounds Scandinavian to me .



But it's also germanic. Hospital is *Krankenhaus* in German, which would mean something along the lines of "House of the Sick".


----------



## Nanon

Genau  . _Precis_, as they say in (pure??) Swedish!


----------



## Ayazid

Peano said:


> So, to me all the "Plain English / Anglish" cause is just common-sense.



I would say that "Plain English" (clearly written English) is, but Anglish (artificially purified English)? I don't think so.


----------



## Peano

berndf said:


> _Ground apple_ or _earth apple_ but not *_land apple_. _Land _is _terre_ in its extension on the surface (_terroir, pays_) but not the element. Some Germanic languages use such constructs, like Southern German _Erdapfel_ (_earth apple_) or Eastern German _Grundbirne _(_ground pear_).



Ok, you're right. So _earthapple_ might be fine. Actually _Erdapfel_ is at least as fine as _Kartoffel_, which seems to come from an Italian _tartufolo_ ... ( http://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Kartoffel ).
Just as fine as _watermelon_ (German _Wassermelone_) and other fruit names.

If searching a little, it's curious to see how a given language like Russian would take the Italo-German loan _Kartoffel_ (> _картофель_, _картошка_), while Greek would take just the Caribean-Spanish _πατάτα_. It's so funny to go comparing various languages.

Of course an eventual commission for the selection of loanwords (in England or wherever) should provide advice, not banning. Any official language commission must give advice, not ban. The problem is the narrowminded school-teachers who disapprove any word suspicious to be outside the norm, without giving any reasons at all.


----------



## DenisBiH

IMHO, non-purism and anti-purism are two different things. Non-purism would/should be just as open to newly coined words or old words with new meanings that are of full or partial Germanic origin as it is to borrowings. On the other hand, anti-purism, as in discouraging/mocking any new words based on the Germanic part of English vocabulary, sounds just as extreme as purism.


----------



## apmoy70

Nanon said:


> Note that _pomme de terre_ coexists with _patate_, which is colloquial. Which one should we "purify"?
> 
> That one sounds Scandinavian to me .





Roy776 said:


> But it's also germanic. Hospital is *Krankenhaus* in German, which would mean something along the lines of "House of the Sick".


And English; Jackspeak (Navy slang) actually: *Sick bay*--> _A room or area for the treatment of the sick or injured, as on board a ship or at a boarding school_ (dictionary.reference.com)


----------



## PaulQ

Apart from Occam's Razor, one difficulty is that English has grown up  using Germanic and Romance word and whereas there might seem to be  synonyms in each, in fact, I suggest there are not.

An example given at the start of the thread was 'regal' and 'kingly'; to  me, 'regal' possess the implication of sophistication, almost  unworldly, drifting around in robes dispensing favours, whereas 'kingly'  makes more of the absolute monarch side of the business, somewhat  autocratic, bellicose yet paternal. (These are 'off the top of my head' but the thrust is there.)

I see this distinction in many such synonyms. The point here is that the  introduction of a Germanic word to replace a current Romance one would  not work. The Germanic word would only be of use (and thus adopted) if  it expressed a different attribute, however slight.

There is nothing to stop words for new concepts/products being Germanic based though.


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## koniecswiata

While this thread is about doing away with things (here doing away with the English language and replacing it with a contrived "Anglish" language), I think we should do away with the term "borrowing".  Languages don't borrow--akin to borrowing a pen and then giving it back.  They absorb.  These words of "other origin" become part of the language period.  Eventually people don't even know they are "borrowed".  Besides what about words like "slippage", "shortage" or "convolutedness"--they combine germanic and romance elements in one word.


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## erased

Peano said:


> The problem is the narrowminded school-teachers who disapprove any word suspicious to be outside the norm, without giving any reasons at all.


 ....but .... they do it wisely. These words come from our ancestors,and there is a reason because they chose to use "Hospital" istead of "Sykehus",which is Norwegian....not English.  England is a very little country ,geographically speaking,but it is incredible that a so little country produced a so big culture. This attempt (I'll sleep peacefully tonight,beacause our "powerful" school system will never accept these "puns") sounds to me ,really humiliating for English culture/language,first of all because many of these puns are not so easily understandable ("oldhouse" what is? an old house or?),  and after i don t think that this " copy and paste " form Norwegian or from who knows where.. it is an enrichment/enhancement but it is ,quite,a parody of English culture/language.


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## Walshie79

It's only now dawned on me that no truly Old English word for either _war_ or _peace_  has lived on! Gyth, lac, frith, grith- the last two would be spoken out  much the same in English today as back then, as is "smith".

I  think the big deal English-speakers have learning other tongues is the  one and only make-up of the English wordstock; many of the first words  Netherlandish children learn are understood by us English-speakers:

_moeder vader een twee drie 

_yet we understand the Frenchish grown-up words instead:

_mariage exceptionnel regrette impossible_

Which leads to we never can learn either rightly.


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## berndf

Walshie79 said:


> It's only now dawned on me that no truly Old English word for either _war_ or _peace_  has lived on!


What about OE _gewin_ meaning _struggle,war_ (ModE _win_)?


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## Peano

koniecswiata said:


> I think we should do away with the term "borrowing".  Languages don't borrow--akin to borrowing a pen and then giving it back.  They absorb.  These words of "other origin" become part of the language period.  Eventually people don't even know they are "borrowed".



Here is the key! Our dictionaries have been absorbing thousands of foreign words, for centuries and centuries. And now the English sponge is so overloaded that some people are willing to press the sponge and let go a good number of unnecessary words. I think the point is to keep just those words that are really hard to be replaced by the native stock (_coffee_ and so on). Or just to keep the most beautiful ones.

Why not, any borrowed words might be given back, when an increasing number of speakers are not willing any longer to keep on with them. 

Maybe there is not "an owner" to "take back the borrowing", and it is rather a  question of just "_giving up"_ the words.

Do we really need a vocabulary of 2 544 000 words? (English Wiktionary)


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## rayloom

Peano said:


> Do we really need a vocabulary of 2 544 000 words? (English Wiktionary)



This number is the number of entries on the English wiktionary. Mind you, not all entries are English on the English wiktionary.
For example, you have an entry for كوكب in the English wiktionary (and yes, in Arabic characters).
English words are closer to a milion, including scientific words.

I personally find this number to be acceptable. Since it counts also the derivatives of words.
For example you have:
friend
unfriend
befriend
defriend
friendship
friendly
unfriendly
friendliness
friendless
boyfriend
girlfriend
penfriend
friendish

All these words are counted as different words. And when it comes to scientific words, then you can find even more derivatives and root combinations, giving rise to an even larger number of counted words.

Now, is there such a thing as having unneeded words. English has around 50 thousand obsolete words (according to here), that's 50 thousand from amongst a milion (or more). Meaning that the nearly milion words are in use, certainly not in all domains or regions, but they are in use. Moreso that English is now an international language taught in nearly every corner of the world and used for science, business and commerce (among other fields). 
Consider it a tax in a way or the other!


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## Walshie79

berndf said:


> What about OE _gewin_ meaning _struggle,war_ (ModE _win_)?



_Win= _OE _(ge)winnan? _Likely handed down from the same root, but it can't truly be thought of as the same word.


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## terredepomme

Most languages have more words than any speaker can ever learn in one's life. It's quite misleading to say that one language has more vocabulary than others.


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## Peano

terredepomme said:


> Most languages have more words than any speaker can ever learn in one's life. It's quite misleading to say that one language has more vocabulary than others.



You're surely right. 
But still there is the possibility of selecting a set of essential words, like Simplified Chinese. This doesn't mean to forbid the Traditional Chinese (which is healthy at Wikipedia), it simply means to support the simplified version, mainly at the schools.

English had a try with "Basic English" ("Simple English" at Wikipedia), but it surely was too simplified, with its 850 words.


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## Hulalessar

Peano said:


> English had a try with "Basic English" ("Simple English" at Wikipedia), but it surely was too simplified, with its 850 words.



Probably, but it did have the benefit of concentrating minds on what the core vocabulary should be for those learning English.


----------



## terredepomme

> But still there is the possibility of selecting a set of essential words, like Simplified Chinese. This doesn't mean to forbid the Traditional Chinese (which is healthy at Wikipedia), it simply means to support the simplified version, mainly at the schools.



The Simplified Chinese has nothing to do with vocabulary. It's a reform of a writing system, not a simplification of vocabulary.


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## Peano

terredepomme said:


> The Simplified Chinese has nothing to do with vocabulary. It's a reform of a writing system, not a simplification of vocabulary.



Well, I'm used to see Simplified Chinese showing a number of essential words (radicals), arranged by number of strokes. It may have something to do with vocabulary.

But I admit that other reformed languages would have more to do with our topic (we are dealing with purified English). For instance, I guess the purified North-Corean lexicon would be closer to the "Anglish" case.

I'll be off-line for some days. Bye.


----------



## jimreilly

....... rather said:


> I don't think it's possible to freeze (American) English in its present form, although we might be able to slow down change a bit. There will always be new technologies demanding new vocabulary, new words entering from other languages, new slang (some of which will become "standard"), shifts in pronunciation, etc. We (Americans) do not live on a little island with a small population; trying to control English would be like trying to control how much rain hits the ground.


----------



## terredepomme

jimreilly said:


> I don't think it's possible to freeze (American) English in its present form, although we might be able to slow down change a bit. There will always be new technologies demanding new vocabulary, new words entering from other languages, new slang (some of which will become "standard"), shifts in pronunciation, etc. We (Americans) do not live on a little island with a small population; trying to control English would be like trying to control how much rain hits the ground.


 It is an ideal that, although may never be completely achieved, must be constantly aimed for. Neologisms of new technologies are one inevitable changes that must be made, but even those have to be made accordingly to the language's phonetics and etymologic context. I for one thinks that the Academie Française did a great job for coming up with the word "ordinateur" for computers. On the other hand, slang words should stay what they are, slang words, and not be standardized. The next generation should be able to read our works exactly as we read them, and not be mislead by slang words that will have become obsolete or of different meanings in their time.And people of smaller population living in small islands experience linguistic changes just as much, it is not unique to Americans or other peoples of a bigger population.


----------



## Peano

Hulalessar said:


> Probably, but it [Basic English] did have the benefit of concentrating minds on what the core vocabulary should be for those learning English.



Yes. Indeed I didn't get to be fluent in English until reading "Basic English. International Second Language" (CK Ogden, 1968).
Basic English is not wholly an "Anglish", as it has many non-germanic nouns (like _hospital _and so on.) But it is partly a kind of "Anglish" because its set of essential verbs & grammatical particles is wholly germanic (except some two or three words):

_come, get, give, go, keep, let, make, put, seem, take, be, do, have, say, see, send, may, will; about, across, after, against, among, at, before, between, by, down, from, in, off, on, over, through, to, under, up, with; as, for, of, till, than; a, the, all, any, every, no, other, some, little, much, such; that (those), this (these), I (we), he (she, they), you, who (which, what); and, because, but, or, if, though, while; how, when, where, why; again, ever, far, forward, here, near, now, out, still, then, there, together, well; almost, enough, even, not, only, quite, so, very, tomorrow, yesterday; north, south, east, west; please, yes._

Perhaps we have already a thread on Basic English?


----------



## Peano

jimreilly said:


> trying to control English would be like trying to control how much rain hits the ground.



Trying to control English is just what the editors of English dictionaries do. Not to mention advertising, where language is controlled in order to control the consumers. That's our daily bread.
So, why not to let an official academy to work on language.


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## Frank06

Peano said:


> Well, I'm used to see Simplified Chinese showing a number of essential words (radicals), arranged by number of strokes. It may have something to do with vocabulary.


It doesn't really matter how you are used to see it, does it? . "Simplified Chinese", or rather, simplified Chinese _characters_ is about the _script_, as has been pointed out in this thread. There is a whole body of literature about it. Maybe this Wiki-article is a good starting point.



Peano said:


> Trying to control English is just what the editors of English dictionaries do.


What do you mean by this?


> Not to mention advertising, where language is controlled in order to control the consumers. That's our daily bread.


What do you mean by this?


> So, why not to let an official academy to work on language.


What does this have to do with the two previous sentences?


----------



## Peano

Frank06 said:


> It doesn't really matter how you are used to see it, does it? . "Simplified Chinese", or rather, simplified Chinese _characters_ is about the script. There is a whole body of literature about it, maybe this Wiki-article is a good starting point.



Well, at the Chinese course I attended, we saw a list of numbered Chinese radicals arranged by number of strokes. But I can not say whether the list was "official". I'll have to check it, thanks for the link.




Frank06 said:


> What do you mean by this?



I mean that dictionaries are a kind of work requiring an enormous task of _control_, that is: "_the power and means of limiting or regulating something"_ (Oxford English Mini Dictionary). Here we are dealing with the power of defining words, the power of giving words a fixed semantic limit. Who has the authority to do this, is not always clear. Now the official dictionaries of Spanish and Catalan are regulated and published by two official academies (the "Real Academia de la Lengua" and the "Institut d'Estudis Catalans" respectively). But actually the official Catalan dictionary of the IEC is very recent. During the last decades of the 20th century there was the dictionary of the "Enciclopedia Catalana" which is a prestigious publishing house. So to say, the Catalan people have believed in the high quality of the "Enciclopedia Catalana" dictionary, and this has been a critical factor in favour of the Catalan language. In fact, the new dictionary of the official IEC is highly based on the former dictionary of the "Enciclopedia Catalana".

http://dlc.iec.cat/

In the case of English, there are several dictionaries, Oxford, Collins, Webster, even Ogden ("The General Basic English Dictionary", 1940), etc., and such a diversity of definitions may seem a bit surrealistic. According to the dictionary you have at home, the definition of things may be somewhat different.


----------



## Frank06

Peano said:


> Well, at the Chinese course I attended, we saw a list of numbered Chinese radicals arranged by number of strokes. But I can not say whether the list was "official".


Please do some basic reading about simplified Chinese characters. Please.

Aren't you all in all a little bit too much obsessed with the erronous idea of a language having to be "official", that somebody (or some organisation) has to regulate it?


> In the case of English, there are several dictionaries, Oxford, Collins, Webster, even Ogden ("The General Basic English Dictionary", 1940), etc., and such a diversity of definitions may seem a bit surrealistic. According to the dictionary you have at home, the definition of things may be somewhat different.


Yes, so... ? So what? You find it surrealistic? Okay, so...?

What's the problem exactly? And what does it have to do with the topic of this thread?

Frank


----------



## jimreilly

Peano said:


> Trying to control English is just what the editors of English dictionaries do. Not to mention advertising, where language is controlled in order to control the consumers. That's our daily bread.
> So, why not to let an official academy to work on language.



Some editors of dictionaries may be trying to "control" English, but other editors try to define words according to usage current at the present time (or at past times). I love picking up the OED and seeing how word meanings have shifted, and I love looking at the examples given from different periods. Variety and change are a feast for an inquiring mind, they are not "surrealistic" (unless life is "surrealistic"). Slang can enrich a language, it has vitality, it gives different groups (e.g. young people, ethnic groups, minorities) a way of asserting identity and value. In the case of English the horse left the barn such a long time ago that the idea of shutting the barn door 
now is a fantasy.

Of course all this makes it harder to learn English! But as a sometime speaker of French I have some of these problems, too (changing meanings, slang, new technical vocabulary), despite the Académie. That's the way it is.


----------



## Peano

jimreilly said:


> Some editors of dictionaries may be trying to "control" English, but other editors try to define words according to usage current at the present time (or at past times). I love picking up the OED and seeing how word meanings have shifted, and I love looking at the examples given from different periods. Variety and change are a feast for an inquiring mind, they are not "surrealistic" (unless life is "surrealistic").



Well, in the end we are dealing with the scientific method. If the OED is an excellent work of lexicography, so much the better. Some other works may be far poorer.



Frank06 said:


> Aren't you all in all a little bit too much obsessed with the erronous idea of a language having to be "official", that somebody (or some organisation) has to regulate it?



By "official" I mean: "_authorised by a public organisation"_, that is an organisation democratically constituted, like the _Real Academia de la Lengua Española_, or the _Institut d'Estudis Catalans_. I feel that a dictionary edited by such public institutions will be a more trustworthy reference than anyone of several dictionaries edited by several publishing houses.
Anyway, if you give me good arguments in favour of the OED, or any other, I might do an exception.


----------



## berndf

Peano said:


> By "official" I mean: "_authorised by a public organisation"_, that is an organisation democratically constituted, like the _Real Academia de la Lengua Española_, or the _Institut d'Estudis Catalans_. I feel that a dictionary edited by such public institutions will be a more trustworthy reference than anyone of several dictionaries edited by several publishing houses.
> Anyway, if you give me good arguments in favour of the OED, or any other, I might do an exception.


In many cultures, among them the English speaking area, people reject the idea that any kind of government agency, however democratically legitimated, should have the power to regulate language.

This is very closely related to the concept of freedom of speech which includes the right to use language in a deviant way. If people don't understand you that is your problem. Hence linguists and dictionaries observe factual language usage but don't define it. This hasn't been always so. If you look at 18th century dictionaries the prescriptive ambition of the authors were obvious. But today the purpose of dictionaries are different.


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## Pedro y La Torre

berndf said:


> In many cultures, among them the English speaking area, people reject the idea that any kind of government agency, however democratically legitimated, should have the power to regulate language.
> 
> This is very closely related to the concept of freedom of speech which includes the right to use language in a deviant way.



This may be over-exaggerated. If a native British English speaker were to start using Americanisms like "stroller" or "diaper" in the UK, the reaction would be biting. Indeed, one often hears laments about how English is now becoming progressively "Americanized". I have even come across certain ignoramuses in Ireland who decry "gotten" as an Americanism, when of course it's not, it having been used in Irish English since the language was first brought to the country.

I see no problem with having a regulatory body for English (we accept them for Irish, Welsh and Scots Gaelic after all), though for most people, the OED already fills that role. I actually think it might be quite a good idea as the standard of English as spoken by the average citizen in large parts of both Britain and Ireland remains quite poor.


----------



## berndf

Pedro y La Torre said:


> This may be over-exaggerated. If a native British English speaker were to start using Americanisms like "stroller" or "diaper" in the UK, the reaction would be biting. Indeed, one often hears laments about how English is now becoming progressively "Americanized". I have even come across certain ignoramuses in Ireland who decry "gotten" as an Americanism, when of course it's not, it having been used in Irish English since the language was first brought to the country.


Well, this belongs together, doesn't it? As much as you have the right to use language as you want (limited maybe by rules of decency) you have the right to criticize certain uses of language.



Pedro y La Torre said:


> we accept them for Irish, Welsh and Scots Gaelic after all


The situation is a bit different here. The creation of common standards for these language are emergency measures to prevent their extinction.


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## L'irlandais

berndf said:


> ...The situation is a bit different here. The creation of common standards for these language are emergency measures to prevent their extinction.


Hi,
A little like the OQLF does for Qubécois.
Here in France la vieille dame du quai Conti (aka l'Académie française) often pronounces on matters of the proper usage of French.  However (it seems to me) many of the words imposed on the population never gain popularity and so "disappear" from everyday usage.


----------



## Peano

berndf said:


> In many cultures, among them the English speaking area, people reject the idea that any kind of government agency, however democratically legitimated, should have the power to regulate language.



It seems we are dealing with culture. Languages are complex tools that all human communities are using constantly in life. These tools may be managed by public authorities or rather private ones, depending on the political background of each country.
Well, I think this question is not unrelated with our thread. I guess the English-speaking communities are happy with English playing the role of the new _Lingua Franca_ of the world. Having this into account, the high presence of Greco-Latin-Romance words inside the English lexicon would be not a problem but rather an advantage to keep, because such an hybrid (and declension-free) language is in a sense like a true _Lingua Franca_. So, at present there might be no political will in favour of a purified English.


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## erased

Hybrid? From the vocabulary point of view,all languages are somehow "hybrid",a vocabulary reflects the various cultural influences during the history. But as I already wrote ,what identify a language is the grammar not the vocabulary.  "...This phenomenon is characteristic of our epoch. But, to my thesis, we have the dynamism to program therapeutic practices as a prophylaxis from chaos and catastrophe..."  This sentence uses  "only Greek words". Please , could you say me if a greek speaker use this grammar in Greek?


----------



## Outsider

Peano said:


> By "official" I mean: "_authorised by a public organisation"_, that is an organisation democratically constituted, like the _Real Academia de la Lengua Española_, or the _Institut d'Estudis Catalans_. I feel that a dictionary edited by such public institutions will be a more trustworthy reference than anyone of several dictionaries edited by several publishing houses.
> Anyway, if you give me good arguments in favour of the OED, or any other, I might do an exception.


I can't help pointing out that, while they are undoubtedly official, there is hardly anything democratic about the setup of institutions like the _Real Academia de la Lengua Española_ and the  _Institut d'Estudis Catalans..._ or about the folks behind the _OED_, for that matter.


----------



## Peano

erased said:


> Hybrid? From the vocabulary point of view,all languages are somehow "hybrid",a vocabulary reflects the various cultural influences during the history.



Surely there may be several languages with an _hybrid _vocabulary (that is, "_made by combining two different things"_, Oxford MiniDict.). Anyway, the English vocabulary is especially hybrid, since the Germanic part is about 40% of it, while the Italic-Hellenic part is about 50% of it ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_vocabulary#Word_origins ).


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## Pedro y La Torre

L'irlandais said:


> Hi,
> A little like the OQLF does for Qubécois.
> Here in France la vieille dame du quai Conti (aka l'Académie française) often pronounces on matters of the proper usage of French. However (it seems to me) many of the words imposed on the population never gain popularity and so "disappear" from everyday usage.



Probably because unlike the OQLF, the académie is mostly made up of a bunch of aged gombeen men.


----------



## LoboSolo

Tazzler said:


> We should change the word "question" to "askthing" to get rid of that annoying Latinate word.



No need to make a new word, there is one from OE that made it to ME: frain It is both a noun and a verb.

The frain is where there is another word for frain? If you don't like frain then you can go back to OE for askung (ascung) ... Maybe _asking_ nowadays.

BTW, ask is also a noun that means "request".


----------



## Alxmrphi

LoboSolo said:


> The frain is where there is another word for frain? If you don't like frain then you can go back to OE for askung (ascung) ... Maybe _asking_ nowadays.



Wouldn't it have been aksung/acsung?
The *ks* was shifted to* sk* after OE, right?

Actually, on later research, it appears that they were both possibilities and alternate spellings, not a switch from one to the other.
Ignore what I said


----------



## grubble

Pedro y La Torre said:


> This may be over-exaggerated. If a native British English speaker were to start using Americanisms like "stroller" or "diaper" in the UK, the reaction would be biting. Indeed, one often hears laments about how English is now becoming progressively "Americanized". I have even come across certain ignoramuses in Ireland who decry "gotten" as an Americanism, when of course it's not, it having been used in Irish English since the language was first brought to the country.
> 
> I see no problem with having a regulatory body for English (we accept them for Irish, Welsh and Scots Gaelic after all), though for most people, the OED already fills that role. I actually think it might be quite a good idea as the standard of English as spoken by the average citizen in large parts of both Britain and Ireland remains quite poor.


.. and would your regulatory body allow the tautology of_ over-exaggerate_?  Unfortunately strollers are already in evidence in Britain. However "gotten" is an Americanism in England; there are several examples of words that travelled with the Pilgrim fathers and then vanished over here only to return via Hollywood.

The strength of English is its adaptability: Let's not put it in a cage. Let's educate people to understand grammar and then let them loose.


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## LoboSolo

Frank06 said:


> Any suggestion for the word "purify"? ;-)
> And revival for that matter?
> And suggestion, obviously?



purify - clean, cleanse, filter (early 15c., from O.Fr. _filtre_ and directly from M.L. _filtrum_ "felt," which was used to strain impurities from liquid, from W.Gmc. _*filtiz_ (see felt). Filter when from German to Latin to French to English.

revivial - comeback, requickening ... if you don't like the re- prefix then use the OE prefix - a- for aquickening (OE acwician: acwicende)

suggestion - a tuff one; the verb suggest is easy ... put forth, lay forth which would put forth _forelay_ or _foreput_ ... layout and outlay are alreddy taken ...OE has a matching meaning for the original meaning of suggestion:  "a prompting to evil" and that is _mislar_ (Incitement to evil, suggestion, bad teaching). _Gespan_ - prompting; _tyhting_ looks like the best choice.


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## LoboSolo

And there is sickroom: noun, a room in a school or place of work occupied by or set apart for people who are unwell.• a room occupied by an ill person.

sick call
sick leave

So a sickhouse would be good.


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## Alxmrphi

LoboSolo said:


> So a sickhouse would be good.



For 'hospital' ?
That's how it's done in the Nordic languages:

*Danish*: Sygehus
*Swedish*: Sjukhus
*Neo-Norwegian*: Sjukehus
*Norwegian Bkml*: Sykehus
*Faroese: *Sjúkrahús
*Icelandic*: Sjúkrahús

And other Germanic ones:

*Frisian*: Sikehûs
*Dutch*: Ziekenhuis


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## Vós

The France and Britain were historic enemies then one needed to learn the other lagangue one.

Oh sorry for my english, I probably builded bad the phrase.


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## LoboSolo

laurent485 said:


> *Moderator note:
> This is more or less the same question asked again. I therefore merged the two threads.
> Berndf*
> 
> I am doing a linguistic study on the evolution of English. Old English was merely a dialect of west germanic language brought to England by Saxons, Angles and Jutes and has undergone a lot of changes, especially influences from Latin and French on English vocabulary (fortunately there has been nearly no influence on English grammar and phonetic system). However, due to its mixed vocabulary (ONLY 25% of modern English vocabulary is native anglo-saxon words, while Latin and French loan words make up around 60% to 66%, source from Wikipedia). The result is that in Modern English there exists often two words for the same thing, one of Anglo-Saxon origin and the other of Romance origine.
> So I am wondering whether it is possible to revital the Old English, at least its vocabulary/wordstock (if I can say that) and to coin words from the Old English word stems to get rid of French and Latin influence. Icelandic language is a perfect example in that Icelanders always use words of Scandinavian origin to replace loan words from Danish, Low German and Latin. Moreover, I wish to know what native English speakers, especially Brittons think of the fact that there language is full of French and Latin words? French people are proud of the French language, although I think it rather ridiculous that French people or more precisely the Gaullish people had abandoned their authentic native language the Gaullish to adopt Latin and try to protect their language from influence from English.



Can it be done? Yes. ... Likely? No.

If your goal is to be rid of the French/Latinate words that came AFTER 1066 (not many came before but some did) and you let yourself brook (_use_) any word that is built from a Germanic root, then your job becomes *eaðra* (OE for _easier_). Don't forget that there are many French words that have a Germanic root ... like 'touch' ... and even some Latin words have Germanic roots. 

Do you keep the Greek-built words? I do but that is just me. However, many Latinates have Greek roots! I just posted a blog yesterday, Anglo-Saxon Names for the _Modern Military_, after mulling over words to brook instead of _military_, _army_, _navy_, _marine_, and air force.

As an _*eard*_-(OE for _native_)-English speaker, I find most Latinates to be snooty. However, I do find some to be *fornytlic* (OE for _very useful_).

I'll leave you with this: 


> Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like _expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous_, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers. -*George Orwell, *"*Politics and the English Language*" (1946)


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## jimreilly

LoboSolo answers: Can it be done? Yes. ... Likely? No.

And I think LoboSolo is quite correct. Try to imagine what would be necessary for such a thing to happen, for "cleansed" English to triumph, let's say in England. Some kind of great renewal of anti-French sentiment? Some kind of ur-Anglo demagogic leader? How would the mass of people wedded to their tellies get the word(s)? Would everyone have to go back to school? Or would it happen _via_ television (oh, sorry for the _via_). Would just the younger people be indoctrinated, and the new cleansed English triumph only when the oldsters die off? And even if it happened in England how many other places would be left untouched? Could it happen in the USA? You gotta be kidding! Canada? New Zealand? And then there are all those people the world over who have zealously studied English, Latinate words and all. Who's going to re-educate them? It might all make a good movie, sort of a cross between science fiction and a Utopian novel.

Meanwhile, in some humble home on a Navajo reservation one person will preserve English as it was spoken _circa_ (oops) 2011, that person having forgotten how to speak Navajo.


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## ericmonteux

I will be very direct : that was one of the project of ADOLPHE HITLER and the dream of all nationalist extremist  ! You begin to purify the words and atfter ......That's scare me very much this idea


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## berndf

ericmonteux said:


> I will be very direct : that was one of the project of ADOLPHE HITLER...


You'd be surprised. At the time there was a an organization which tried to "purify" the German language in such a way. It was the _Allgemeiner Deutscher Sprachverein_. When Hitler (his first name was actually _Adolph_, not _Adolph*e*_) came to power, they though he would be their ally but to everybody's surprise, Hitler took a very different stance:_Der Führer wünscht nicht derartige gewaltsame Eindeutschungen und billigt nicht die künstliche Ersetzung längst ins Deutsche eingebürgerter Fremdworte durch nicht aus dem Geist der deutschen Sprache und den Sinn der Fremdworte meist nur unvollkommen wiedergebende Wörter._ - Amtsblatt 6 (1940), S. 534.

_The Führer [Hitler] does not want such forcible Germanizations and does not approve of artificially replacing foreign words, which have long been vernacularized, by words which did not [arise from] the spirit of the German language and which reflect the senses of the foreign words only incompletely._​


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## koniecswiata

However, Hitler--or better said--the Nazis, did implement an agressive germanization program of names of towns and villages--especially in regions such as East Prussia or parts of Silesia.  It was part of a scheme to make town names look more "German" (as they understood it).  So, a name like "Czilln" --which was what it had been refered to in German for centuries--became something bland like "Schönhausen" (I don't know if Czilln acutally changed to that, but it was changed).  The regional character of certain regions was errased.  If the Nazis had been truly consistent they would have changed the originally Slavic names of Berlin, Lübeck, and Leipzig to things like "Frankenstein" or "Hohenlinden" or "Sachsenstedt"--or any other vaguely imagined to be more German name.  I suppose the point is that modern languages do NOT equally an imagined past version.


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## merquiades

berndf said:


> You'd be surprised. At the time there was a an organization which tried to "purify" the German language in such a way. It was the _Allgemeiner Deutscher Sprachverein_. When Hitler (his first name was actually _Adolph_, not _Adolph*e*_) came to power, they though he would be their ally but to everybody's surprise, Hitler took a very different stance:_Der Führer wünscht nicht derartige gewaltsame Eindeutschungen und billigt nicht die künstliche Ersetzung längst ins Deutsche eingebürgerter Fremdworte durch nicht aus dem Geist der deutschen Sprache und den Sinn der Fremdworte meist nur unvollkommen wiedergebende Wörter._ - Amtsblatt 6 (1940), S. 534.
> 
> _The Führer [Hitler] does not want such forcible Germanizations and does not approve of artificially replacing foreign words, which have long been vernacularized, by words which did not [arise from] the spirit of the German language and which reflect the senses of the foreign words only incompletely._​



Hi Berndf.  I'm sorry.  My level of German is limited so I can't come up with precise examples.  I remember an Austrian professor telling me once that even in the time of Kaiser Wilhem there was a germanization campaign going on.  It was in the context of railway vocabulary.  Fahrkarte not billet, or zug not train.  Am I right there?  That would mean it's a movement not necessary something dating from the Third Reicht.


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## LilianaB

Of course some languages have more words than other languages, which does not make them better. It is a fact. The difference in word count could be quite amazing.


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## LilianaB

What is your theory on the Slavic origin of such names and Berlin, Lubeck etc.? I am just interested.
Related to post 121.


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## terredepomme

LilianaB said:


> Of course some languages have more words than other languages, which does not make them better. It is a fact. The difference in word count could be quite amazing.


But it is quite hard to count the words, since some words get to be counted while some do not, and in languages which tend to have a descriptive policy(such as English) rather than a normative one would also count in more words used in daily life, informal speech, slang, dialect etc. than other languages would do. I know many Korean words that one would never find in any dictionary.
And the definition of "word" can become ambiguous. In Chinese or Japanese, you can practically "make up" new terms and it's often difficult to tell if these are actually lexicalized words or not.


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## LilianaB

merquiades said:


> Hi Berndf.  I'm sorry.  My level of German is limited so I can't come up with precise examples.  I remember an Austrian professor telling me once that even in the time of Kaiser Wilhem there was a germanization campaign going on.  It was in the context of railway vocabulary.  Fahrkarte not billet, or zug not train.  Am I right there?  That would mean it's a movement not necessary something dating from the Third Reicht.



Yes, you are absolutely right. The , so called Germanization of Silesia, is a much more complex problem than that. Silesia belonged to Poland in the 12th century, if I am not wrong. Since then it was going from one power to another, with periods of autonomic Silesian states. It is also questionable, whether Silesian is really Polish. It is a Slavic language, that's for sure, but...


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## Outsider

LilianaB said:


> Of course some languages have more words than other languages, which does not make them better. It is a fact. The difference in word count could be quite amazing.


Have you looked into it? Others havehttp://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1433378, and it doesn't seem all that clear a fact to me.

This previous thread is also of interest.


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## LilianaB

I do not know that much about Asian languages, however, I know that there is a difference in the number of signs necessary to read and write in such languages as Chinese and Korean. The difference is apparently quite big. There is something like simplified Chinese which uses fewer signs, but I do not really know that much about it.

The vocabulary size depends also on the personality of a speaker. There are more quiet regions apparently where farmers use 500 words, or at least used to use in the not that remote past. This was considered their vocabulary.


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## Outsider

LilianaB said:


> The vocabulary size depends also on the personality of a speaker. There are more quiet regions apparently where farmers use 500 words, or at least used to use in the not that remote past.


If you have a source for those two claims, I'd be interested in reading it in another thread. However, I fear that we're drifting away from the topic of this thread...


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## terredepomme

LilianaB said:


> I know that there is a difference in the number of signs necessary to read and write in such languages as Chinese and Korean. The difference is apparently quite big. There is something like simplified Chinese which uses fewer signs, but I do not really know that much about it.


I fail to see the relevance of writing issue with the size of the vocabulary issue here.
But just for the information, modern Korean actually uses fewer letters than the Roman alphabet.
And Simplified Chinese uses fewer strokes to write the signs, they do not use fewer signs. (Although very slightly fewer, because of merge of some characters)



LilianaB said:


> There are more quiet regions apparently where farmers use 500 words, or at least used to use in the not that remote past. This was considered their vocabulary.


It is probable that their lexical pool is bigger in other areas. They would know tons of words about agriculture, fauna and flora that a normal urban dweller would have never heard of.


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## LoboSolo

I don't think that the word tale is too meaningful. English is a now a mongrel tongue ... mostly a half-breed between Anglo-Germanic and French-Latin. From that alone, we get high tale of words. Throw in that English has eath word upspringing, and it the tale grows. The words are there now and cannot be cleansed from the tongue but we can show a greater liking to the Anglo-Germanic root words.

I have a very long list words that I can swap in and out ... and it grows almost daily! I think if I were to print it out, it would be nearly 30 pages. Many of the words are in a woodbook … bewried with dust!

For byspel, for the Latinate verb "to use" ... there is brook from OE brūcan - use, enjoy, possess, partake of, spend ... or (a little more befuddling) note ... from Middle English noten, notien ... from OE notian (“to make use of, use, employ, enjoy).

And don't bind yourself to just OE ... There were many Germanic words that drifted in (and out) during ME. 

Another word that drifted out was skift. It is a good one for "effort". Skift was also a verb whch meant to divide/portion out from OE sciftan (“To divide, distribute, allot, place, order, arrange”).

Huru was a good one that meant many things to include "especially".
Widderwin (also widerwin, witherwin) meant opponent, adversary. (Liken to widdershins = counterclockwise … still in the wordbook)

There are many that are still in the wordbook, if a little dusty:

advice/advise = rede
dern = secret
eath = easy
eathly = easily
umbe = around
wanhope (wan + hope) = despair, lacking hoping
wanbelief or unbelief instead of disbelief
wantrust or untrust for distrust

The list goes on!


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## LilianaB

Outsider said:


> If you have a source for those two claims, I'd be interested in reading it in another thread. However, I fear that we're drifting away from the topic of this thread...



Unfortunately, I cannot find the exact source right now. It was related to a group of islanders living on some islands in Scandinavia. I am pretty sure, it was Gotland, but I cannot guarantee it. It was the average vocabulary used by those farmers. Of course, the dialect itself, could have had many more words.

Maybe they did not need to name things. Maybe there is a different level of knowledge beyond giving names to things, but this is just pure speculation.


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## Ben Jamin

LilianaB said:


> The vocabulary size depends also on the personality of a speaker. There are more quiet regions apparently where farmers use 500 words, or at least used to use in the not that remote past. This was considered their vocabulary.


This sound like an urban legend. Even the langauges of peoples living on a very low technological level have many thousands words. The 500 words you mention refers probably to what they use every day, not to what they are able to say. An average American with a simple manual job will rather not use more words than 500 words in everyday's speech, while speaking about daily life, while he probably can use actively at leat 20000 and understand the double.


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## Ben Jamin

LoboSolo said:


> eath = easy
> eathly = easily



Why discard easy for eath?


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## terredepomme

> Why discard easy for eath?


Easy comes from French _aisie_, modern French _aisé_(although often replace by _facile_)


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## LoboSolo

Ben Jamin said:


> Why discard easy for eath?



As Terredepomme said it is from French, from Latin.

There are many such words in English that are post 1066 Latinates ... use (brook), clear (ME sutel, sotel, swutel), cause (sake), simple (displaced anfald, onefold), real(ly) (truly), very (truly, ferly), per (for; perhaps won out over mayhap), betray (bewray), blame (wite), cover (bewry), deprive (benim), disagree, deny, oppose (gainsay), equality (evenhood), example (byspel, bisen [byseen]), joy (wynn) ... many, many more.

BTW, most the English words in ( ) above, can still be found in the wordbooks, they're marked "obsolete" or "archaic" ... or Scottish! lol


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## LoboSolo

Here is a good list of words with the be- forefast. http://www.dailywritingtips.com/50-words-with-the-most-whimsical-prefix

Test yourself and see if you know them.


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## koniecswiata

LilianaB,
You can find information on the Slavic origin of various German city names.  Berlin apparently comes from "swampy place".  Others that can be added are Rostock (similar to Polish zatoka, just roztoka), Leipzig (lipa--tree), Drawehn (a region of Lower Saxony), Göhrde (a large forest in lower Saxony).  There are many.  It has to do with history--for the same reason. many German versions of names in Silesia or Pommerania were of Slavic origin.
LoboSolo, your experiment is interesting, but it shows how much of the language you are using is already pretty unintelligible to the average English-speaker without an interest or knack for etymology.  Eath, dern, bewried, umbe etc... might as well belong to some foreign language for all intents and purposes.


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## berndf

merquiades said:


> Hi Berndf.  I'm sorry.  My level of German is limited so I can't come up with precise examples.  I remember an Austrian professor telling me once that even in the time of Kaiser Wilhem there was a germanization campaign going on.  It was in the context of railway vocabulary.  Fahrkarte not billet, or zug not train.  Am I right there?  That would mean it's a movement not necessary something dating from the Third Reicht.


Yes, as I said, the driving force behind this was the _Allgemeiner Deutscher Sprachverein_. The _Verein_'s most active period was under his founder Hermann Riegel from 1885 (foundation of the _Verein_) and 1900 (Riegel's death).


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## berndf

LilianaB said:


> What is your theory on the Slavic origin of such names and Berlin, Lubeck etc.? I am just interested.
> Related to post 121.





koniecswiata said:


> LilianaB,
> You can find information on the Slavic origin of various German city names.  Berlin apparently comes from "swampy place".  Others that can be added are Rostock (similar to Polish zatoka, just roztoka), Leipzig (lipa--tree), Drawehn (a region of Lower Saxony), Göhrde (a large forest in lower Saxony).  There are many.  It has to do with history--for the same reason. many German versions of names in Silesia or Pommerania were of Slavic origin.


_
Lübeck_ (< W. Slavic _Lubice_) represents the westernmost extend of the Slavic language area in the Middles Ages (around 1000CE). At this time the area on the right side of the Elbe river east of Lübeck was as well as the area around the Saale river on the left side of the Elbe river were Slavic speaker at that time. The _Wendland_ area Koniecswiata mentioned ("a large forest in lower Saxony") was a Polabic speaking pocket on the left side of the northern Elbe river with obviously Slavic place names (_Lüchow, Wustrow, Gartow, ..._). Polabic (the W Slavic language originally spoken in the N-E, i.e. _Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,_ and the _Wendland_ region in Lower Saxony) become extinct in the mid 18th century. So did the W. Slavic languages in the _Saale _region. Lower and Upper Sorbic, the W. Slavic languages of the Lower and Upper Lausitz regions in SE-Brandenburg and E Saxony are still alive and are officially recognized minority languages.

I recon something like 1/3 of the place names in the areas described above are of Slavic origin.


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## LoboSolo

> LoboSolo, your experiment is interesting, but it shows how much of the language you are using is already pretty unintelligible to the average English-speaker without an interest or knack for etymology. Eath, dern, bewried, umbe etc... might as well belong to some foreign language for all intents and purposes.



And isn't that a shame? I don't usually use so many at once since it would overwhelm the average person but that is what the thread is about. I do try to spread them out. You can't edquicken (revive) the Old English words if you don't use them! Isn't that the ettle?


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## koniecswiata

And isn't that a shame? I don't usually use so many at once since it would overwhelm the average person but that is what the thread is about. I do try to spread them out. You can't edquicken (revive) the Old English words if you don't use them! Isn't that the ettle?  

--It may be fun, but it shows that it isn't really English anymore.  Old English, or this "Old-Englishized" language, is not English.  I know that sounds a bit provocative.


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## LoboSolo

> --It may be fun, but it shows that it isn't really English anymore. Old English, or this "Old-Englishized" language, is not English. I know that sounds a bit provocative.



So are you saying that since some folks don't know some words that those words are no longer English words? There are many, many words in the wordbook that I do not know. I learn a new word almost every day. Were they not English words before I knew them? 

It isn't that the words aren't English or that brooking them isn't English, it's the mindset that Latinates are better than the Anglo-Germanic root words. We have met the widderwin, and he is us.


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## LilianaB

You could speak Old English from time to time. That helps sometimes, when you like a language which is no longer in use.


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## LoboSolo

The natural development of the English tung was broken by the Takeover in 1066. Old English edquickening (revival) isn't about speaking with grammar framework of Old English but rather it's about:

1) keeping those words of Anglo-Germanic wordstock that are still to be found ... like eath, umbe, gainsay, quickening, asf
2) then reaching back to edquicken those words that have been lost to us ... like huru (especially), tungol (planet), tungolcraft (astronomy), asf 
3) ending the mindset that Latinates are better words or more "elegant"

You don't think that you're using Old English / Anglo-Saxon wordstock every day? <<< In that sentence that I just wrote, there was only one Latinate. The others were from OE roots. Almost all the words that I have used on this thread can still be found in the wordbooks. That is not "Old English" ... that is English. They are still there to be used. Why would anyone naysay using them?


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## LilianaB

I do not know if this is possible in any language, maybe over time. I do  not know if anybody can force people to use certain words instead of others. I like Old English, the way it sounds,


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## berndf

LoboSolo said:


> 3) ending the mindset that Latinates are better words or more "elegant"


Power and elegance of language is based on the choice of _appropriate _words to express what you are trying to say and not on some airy-fairy, nostalgic ideology about the alleged "purity" of a language in a distant past.



LilianaB said:


> I do  not know if anybody can force people to use certain words instead of others.


I hope not!


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## terredepomme

> Power and elegance of language is based on the choice of _appropriate words to express what you are trying to say and not on some airy-fairy, nostalgic ideology about the alleged "purity" of a language in a distant past._


I don't think he's talking about the elegance of language but the elegance of certain words. And it IS a general trend that latinate words have more sense of elegance and official-ness than their germanic equivalents. And it is also a general trend that the lexical pool borrowed from a group considered culturally superior tend to retain their authority. Such is the case with Sinitic words in Korean and Japanese which comprise the vast majority of vocabularity in fields like politics, science, etc instead of native Korean and Japanese words.
I do not necessarily agree with him that we should shun latinate words, but it is true that these words retain their power as the sophisticated vocabulary. Perhaps that is one of the biggest reasons why they were never replaced.


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## LoboSolo

> I do not know if this is possible in any language, maybe over time. I do not know if anybody can force people to use certain words instead of others. I like Old English, the way it sounds,



When I say ending the mindset, I don't mean forcibly. I like the way most old words sound as well ... that's the mindset that we need have.

@berndf ... let me give you a quote:

From _The Romance of Words_, 1912, Chapter 1. 





> The every-day vocabulary of the less educated is of Old English, commonly called Anglo-Saxon, origin ...



That mindset is STILL with us! To quote terredepomme: _And it is also a general trend that the lexical pool borrowed from a group *considered* culturally superior tend to retain their authority._ That is what happened after the Takeover in 1066 and still haunts us to this day.

@terredepomme 





> I don't think he's talking about the elegance of language but the elegance of certain words.


 ... YES! 

Is _appropriate_ better than _befitting_? Or _fitting_? Or _right_. I don't think so. I think "the _right_ words" is much better than "the _appropriate_ words". 

What is the word _language_ but Latin for tung? Why do I need to brook a Latinate when I have an Anglo word that means the same thing?

What is "airy-fairy" is the thought that Latinates are somehow more "elegant", better (superior), or more fitting (appropriate) than the Anglo-Germanic root words that they shoved aside. The so-called "educated" brook Latinates while "_the every-day vocabulary of the less educated is of Old English"_. This mindset is killing off words that have been in the English tung since the beginning. For byspel, the word meed (medu in OE) was one of the first OE words written. Meed is still with us, clinging to life in the OED ... marked as "archaic". Would it not be a shame to lose one of the first words written in English to a Latinate?


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## berndf

terredepomme said:


> I don't think he's talking about the elegance of language but the elegance of certain words. And it IS a general trend that latinate words have more sense of elegance and official-ness than their germanic equivalents.





LoboSolo said:


> When I say ending the mindset, I don't mean forcibly. I like the way most old words sound as well ... that's the mindset that we need have.
> 
> @berndf ... let me give you a quote:
> 
> From _The Romance of Words_, 1912, Chapter 1.
> 
> That mindset is STILL with us!


But this isn't really a reason to replace one barmy ideology by the opposite one, is it?

A truly great orator or writer wouldn't be impressed by either of them.


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## LoboSolo

> But this isn't really a reason to replace one barmy ideology by the opposite one, is it?
> 
> A truly great orator or writer wouldn't be impressed by either of them.



Yes and no. In the best world, I could brook either one and be understood ... and not judged as "uneducated" or "barmy" . As someone is more than halfway thru my Great American Novel, I cannot brook only non-Latinates and be eathly understood. On a challenge, I wrote a short story brooking very few and the editor told me not to use "so many Middle English" words. Of course, they weren't ME ... nonetheless, since we haven't been brooking these words much, brooking too many of them sends a reader to the wordbook way too often hinders the wynness (enjoyment) of reading it.

I'v been a free-speller since my high-school days when I found out that altho, tho, and thru were in the wordbook. I'v had many talks with teachers in HS and at the university about brooking these but I held my ground. Now add in that I'm somewhat of an "Anglisher", and many folks think that I'm more than a little odd. :O

Try on a few the old words ... sprinkle them out ... You may find yourself having a little fun doing it.


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## Alxmrphi

Sorry if the answer is hidden in the netherpages but what do you mean when you say 'brook'?
I've seen you mention it quite a lot on this page and I haven't got the foggiest idea what you mean by it. I looked in a dictionary and saw a definition of 'tolerate/allow', but that doesn't fit in the way you've been using it. So forgive my intrusion here, I was just curious and wanting to expand my vocabulary


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## LoboSolo

@Alxrphi ... Yes, the meaning in today's wordbooks often limit it. You must find an unabridged.

Webster's 1913 Unabridged:

*Brook* \Brook\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Brooked; p. pr. & vb. n.   Brooking.] [ME. broken, bruken, to use, enjoy, digest, AS.   brūcan; akin to D. gebruiken to use, OHG. pr?hhan, G.   brauchen, gebrauchen, Icel. br?ka, Goth. br?kjan, and L.   frui, to enjoy. Cf. Fruit, Broker.]   1. *To use*; to enjoy. [Obs.]    2. To bear; to endure; to put up with; to tolerate; as, young      men can not brook restraint. --Spenser.            Shall we, who could not brook one lord, Crouch to            the wicked ten?                       --Macaulay.   3. To deserve; to earn. [Obs.]


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## Meat

Pretty sure he uses it as "to use".

From m-w.com:

Middle English _brouken_ *to use*, enjoy, from Old English _brūcan;_ akin to Old High German _brūhhan_ to use, Latin _frui_ to enjoyFirst Known Use: 15th century


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## Alxmrphi

Oh I feel stupid now.
There's a verb in Icelandic (that I know is taken from Danish) which is *brúka*, meaning "use".
I don't know why I didn't make that connection before.


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## LoboSolo

Wiktionary has a good entry on it here.


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## Alxmrphi

LoboSolo said:


> Wiktionary has a good entry on it here.


Wow, it's related to "fruit".
Nice interesting piece of info there


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## LoboSolo

A good word for "to endure, suffer, tolerate" is *thole*. _To thole the winter's steely dribble._ --Burns.

I have no idea if the Star Trek writers knew of the word thole and when they created the "Tholian Web".

Another is *dree*. To *dree one's weird* is to "endure one's fate".


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## berndf

LoboSolo said:


> On a challenge, I wrote a short story brooking very few and the editor told me not to use "so many Middle English" words.


Words change their meanings. That is the most natural thing in the wold. _To brook_ simply doesn't mean _to use_ any more but _to tolerate_. Equally it doesn't make sense to call the language we use here _Dutch _only because it is derived from_ þeodisc_ which once meant English or the call bread "meat" just because "meat" meant "food" until about 400 years ago. Randomly using words in any meaning its etymons ever had makes language adds so much pointless ambiguity to a language as to render it completely useless. Using language which defies its primary purpose (namely to convey meaning) can never be good or elegant language and is certainly nothing to strive for.


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## Alxmrphi

> A good word for "to endure, suffer, tolerate" is *thole*


Ah yeah, that one I'm familiar with (þola).



berndf said:


> Words change their meanings. That is the most natural thing in the wold. _To brook_ simply doesn't mean _to use_ any more but _to tolerate_. Equally it doesn't make sense to call the language we use here _Dutch _only because it is derived from_þeodisc_ which once meant English or the call bread "meat" just because "meat" meant "food" until about 400 years ago. Randomly using words in any meaning its etymons ever had makes language adds so much pointless ambiguity to a language as to render it completely useless. Using language which defies its primary purpose (namely to convey meaning) can never be good or elegant language and is certainly nothing to to strive for.


I have to agree completely.
I was wondering how to word the same sentiments in such a good way.


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## LoboSolo

> _To brook_ simply doesn't mean _to use_ any more but _to tolerate_.



Oh that's not true. It may have picked up the additional meaning of to tolerate but it still retains its old meanings as well. The old meanings are still in the unabridged wordbooks. And the Scots, bless them, still use brook in the sense of "to use". Not only that, as you might expect, on forums discussing Anglish, it is used. So the old meaning isn't dead.

BTW, food (OE fōda) has been umbe since the early days. AFAIK, mete never meant bread. You can still use meat today, in context, in the sense of food. 

More meaningful tho is that you're, again, missing the point of edquickening old words and meanings (ed- = re-). You cannot do so if you take a pedantic, conservative, and timid stance. Many words over the centuries have been edquickened by writers being bold and reaching back for a word or a meaning. For byspel, armor ... "_The word might have died with jousting if not for late 19c. transference to metal-shielded machinery beginning with U.S. Civil War ironclads ..._". If folks back in the late 19c had taken your stand then the word would not have been edquickened and in broad use today.


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## berndf

LoboSolo said:


> Oh that's not true. It may have picked up the additional meaning of to tolerate but it still retains its old meanings as well. The old meanings are still in the unabridged wordbooks. And the Scots, bless them, still use brook in the sense of "to use". Not only that, as you might expect, on forums discussing Anglish, it is used. So the old meaning isn't dead.


Well it is. More comprehensive dictionaries also document historical meanings. That doesn't mean those meanings still exist. Also the 1913 Webster mark the the meaning _to brook = to use_ as "obsolete".



LoboSolo said:


> BTW, food (OE fōda) has been umbe since the  early days.


Yes. I never said anything to the contrary.


LoboSolo said:


> AFAIK, mete never meant bread.


I didn't say _meat _meant bread; I said _bread _was (a kind of) _meat_ in the sense of _food_.


LoboSolo said:


> You can still use meat today,  in context, in the sense of food.


Only if you intend to cause confusion.



LoboSolo said:


> More meaningful tho is that you're, again, missing the point of edquickening old words and meanings (ed- = re-). *You cannot do so* ...


Why should you? English is a living language. No ideologist decides on its development. Actual usage does. Influential authors may sometime succeed in (re-)establishing certain new (old) words. Larger scale re-designing a language only makes sense and only works in exceptional circumstances, e.g. the Modern Hebrew which is a "designed" language where vocabulary on purpose connected to Mishnaic Hebrew, undoing developments of Medieval Hebrew, similar to what you suggest.


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## LoboSolo

> to brook = to use as "obsolete"



Obsolete doesn't mean dead. My computer may be obsolete but it is still usable. Further, once marked obsolete doesn't mean that it can't be edquickened. For byspel, I often brook the word "eath".

The Webster's 1913 has it marked as obsolete.
The online M-W has it as "Scottish".
The OED doesn't have it at all!
dictionary.com and wiktionary make no reference to its usage but have it.
Wordnik even gives it scrabble points!

So was it mistakenly marked obsolete in 1913 or has it been edquickened? I don't know. I don't see it in widespread use. None the less, it seems that it is no longer obsolete. 

OTOH, there is the word stadtholder. The office of stadtholder was abolished in 1795. Outside of historical references, the word isn't in use ... I ween that it should be marked as obsolete but it isn't. So who is to say?



> Why should you? English is a living language.



The better frain is: Why shouldn't I? I'm not the one who is trying to pigeonhole the meaning or use of a word. We both agree that English is a living tung ... That, for me, includes old words and old meanings.


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## berndf

LoboSolo said:


> Obsolete doesn't mean dead.


In linguistics it does. Dictionaries distinguish between _obsolete _(word no longer in use) and _obsolescing _(word still in use but use is increasingly rare and considered archaic).



LoboSolo said:


> The online M-W has it as "Scottish".


I find it only under "Scots" which is different from "Scottish". Different languages can use words differently. In German e.g. _bekommen _(=_become_) means "to get". This doesn't mean _to become_ can be used with this meaning in English.


LoboSolo said:


> The OED doesn't have it at all!


That would surprise me. You have to bear with me until tonight. My OED copy is on paper and at home.


LoboSolo said:


> ...wiktionary make no reference to its usage but have it.


Here: _1. (transitive, *obsolete, except in Scots*) To use; enjoy; have the full employment of._



LoboSolo said:


> The better frain is: Why shouldn't I? I'm not the one who is trying to pigeonhole the meaning or use of a word. We both agree that English is a living tung ... That, for me, includes old words and old meanings.


Fortunately, it doesn't mean that ideologists rein.


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## Hulalessar

It is fun to speculate what English would have been like without the Norman Invasion and the later influx of Latinate words, but it is wholly impracticable to propose seriously that the lexicon of Modern English should have all "foreign" words excised and the gaps filled by new words based on Old English. LoboSolo wants to go even further and ignore semantic shift. Will we be required to use "silly" to mean "happy"?

All languages are rich but rich in different ways. English has the benefit of three registers based on the origin of the words used: the English, Anglo-Norman and Classical. By all means let those who wish to favour the English do so, but the plain fact is that you cannot get very far without imposing a strain on the language by ignoring the Anglo-Norman and Classical contributions. "Bring a stool to the board and eat your meat" just does not mean the same thing as "Bring a chair to the table and eat your supper". I am not saying that with some ingenuity long passages cannot be produced, but is the effort worth it?

Some may point to what has happened in Icelandic, but Iceland has a small homogeneous highly literate population with a strong sense of history. English is spoken by millions in many different cultures.


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## Scholiast

Greetings all:

This has all been a highly entertaining correspondence. I have withheld so far, but may draw now what German Philologists might call a _Bilanz_?

1. Everyone agrees that English is of remarkably various origin, both in formal grammar, past and present usage, and contemporary flexibility.
2. The English vocabulary is, among modern spoken languages, probably the richest, at least in terms of the sheer number of words or stems registered by professional lexicographers, of any currently in use around the globe.
3. Modern English is, for all its admixtures in loan-words, absorption of grammatical and lexical things from other tongues - Celtic, Latin, Norman-French, Amerindian, Hindi, Chinese and other sources - still grammatically a Germanic tongue.
4. The dialects of English, from Glasgow to New England, Saskatchewan and Australia always develop their own local lexical, orthographic and phonological formulations, and are bound to do so. That is in the nature of the Darwinian evolution of language.
5. Any attempt to "purify" English, by rejecting the Latinate or other classical roots, and to re-adopt the A-S forms, would be absurd: we might accept y-clept, y-bounden &c. in Christmas carols, but we shall not stop talking about "politics", "religion" or "sport" (of Anglo-French origin), "scoundrel" (likewise).

This is what makes English such a magnificent medium for poetry - we will concede to the Italians, Germans and Russians their supremacy in music, and to the Dutch, Renaissance Italian artists and some others, theirs in the related fields.

But precisely because of its long and richly mixed history, we can concede to none in poetry - including that of the Authorised Version of the Bible, whose anniversary we contemplate and celebrate this year.


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## berndf

Scholiast said:


> But precisely because of its long and richly mixed history, we can concede to none in poetry - including that of the Authorised Version of the Bible, whose anniversary we contemplate and celebrate this year.


How true. The poetry of the most widely acclaimed poets in English History, Chaucer and Shakespeare, is characterized drawing on all the facets of the this wealth of words in the English language of their respective times.

On the other hand, neither French, nor Italian, nor German poetry have to submit to English poetry either (I don't now enough about Russian to judge). The great poets of these languages have found their own ways so created magnificent poetry. Watching Shakespeare plays in translation is almost invariably a disappointment (especially in German, not only because even Schlegel's magnificent translation can't match the original but even more so because German stage acting and directing tradition cannot capture the subtle comedy you find even in Shakespeare's darkest dramas). But the great performances of Goethe in German or Molière in French do not have to hide behind Shakespeare in any way.

Concerning the the poetic text of the Bible (all in the OT), I appreciate the forceful language of the KJV (as well as Luther's, btw); but it does't stand the comparison with the Hebrew original. Poetry is always at its best when enjoyed in its native environment.


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## Scholiast

Dear berndf



> But the great performances of Goethe in German or Molière in French do not have to hide behind Shakespeare in any way.
> 
> Concerning the the poetic text of the Bible (all in the OT), I  appreciate the forceful language of the KJV (as well as Luther's, btw);  but it does't stand the comparison with the Hebrew original. Poetry is  always at its best when enjoyed in its native environment.



Maybe this should have been put in a PM, but I would like publicly to declare that I so much value your scholarship and contribution on this one.

I do enjoy Goethe, Schiller, Hans Sachs and Molière too, Brecht indeed. And Luther's Bible, which I absolutely acknowledge has been as formative and influential on modern German as the King James Bible on modern English, is a terrific monument of scholarship and in the best sense spirituality.

Sadly, my Hebrew is very scanty, but this I work on still. But I shall always love nevertheless the Coverdale English (in the BCP), while accepting its scholarly imperfections.

I should have added:

Tieck wasn't so bad, after all - and my favourite German poet is Heine.

If this was out of place, please delete and regard as a PM.


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## berndf

Scholiast said:


> But I shall always love nevertheless the Coverdale English (in the BCP), while accepting its scholarly imperfections.


Don't get me wrong, I don't want to belittle the great bible translations. And why shouldn't you love the Coverdale Bible? I just find the original even better.

BTW: Our Friend LoboSolo will particularly enjoy reading the Coverdale Bible for all its archaisms, e.g. he still uses_ to deal _in the original sense of _to divide_: _Then God *deuyded *ye light from the darcknes, and called the light, Daye: and the darcknes, Night_ (Genesis 1.4&5).


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## Kevin Beach

I'm sure that most people posting in this thread have seen the Anglish Moot site: {link}. I find its rendering of the book of Genesis powerful and direct: {link}. Somehow, the "Anglish" words have more muscle than the ones we are used to.


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## merquiades

Kevin Beach said:


> I'm sure that most people posting in this thread have seen the Anglish Moot site: {link}. I find its rendering of the book of Genesis powerful and direct: {link}. Somehow, the "Anglish" words have more muscle than the ones we are used to.



Wow.  Thanks for sharing. So interesting.  I wasn't aware such a movement existed.  The "I have a dream speech" in anglish is amazing.  Unfortunately, I don't understand Anglish at all.  Is there an opposite movement that exaggerates Greco-Latin and Norman-French roots?


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## terredepomme

> 2. The English vocabulary is, among modern spoken languages, probably the richest, at least in terms of the sheer number of words or stems registered by professional lexicographers, of any currently in use around the globe.


Enough anglocentricism. How would you ever know if it is the richest of all languages? There are thousands of languages around the world, have you counted them all? You cannot make a comparison of mere number of words to draw a conclusion that a vocabulary is richer than the other. Not all languages require a new word to create a new meaning; some simply combine existing words. Japanese and Chinese can use their Hanzi combination to make practically an infinate number of "words." But I would never claim that they are richer than other languages since I speak only several languages and the vast majority of human languages are beyond my knowledge.



> But precisely because of its long and richly mixed history, we can concede to none in poetry


And others will not concede to you. Literature is not your football tournament where the nations compete to select a winner. Literature is valuable because it expresses a specific psyche of a society through that society's language. Poetries in different languages simply perform different roles instead of being superior or inferior to one another.



> absorption of grammatical and lexical things from other tongues - Celtic, Latin, Norman-French, Amerindian, Hindi, Chinese and other sources


Non-Latin and non-scandinavian roots of English are exagerrated. Celtic influence on English is negligeable. Amerindian lexicon is also quite limited, and can be seen in just about every European language of the American Continent, inclueding Quebec French. Hindi, Chinese, and "other sources?" Name ten Chinese and Hindi words that have entered the English vocabulary except for those that are directly related to Chinese and Indian societies and cultures.
The English being a significantly more "open" and "diverse" language is more or less a myth. Its primary foreign roots are Latino-French, and for other sources, it accepts foreign loanwords just as much as other languages do, to my knowledge.
Korean, Japanese, and Chinese accepted tens of thousands of European words(or better said, "casques") during the 20th century to express the imported ideas from their civilizations. The only difference is that most of them were translated with their Hanzi roots. It shows that 1)you don't need to import directly new words to enrich a language's vocabulary 2) the East Asian languages are just as open to foreign influence as English or any other European languages, but in another form.


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## LoboSolo

berndf said:


> In linguistics it does. Dictionaries distinguish between _obsolete _(word no longer in use) and _obsolescing _(word still in use but use is increasingly rare and considered archaic).



Then explain how eath was marked obsolete in Webster's 1913 Unabridged yet isn't marked so now? Either the wordbook made a mistake or folks kept using despite Webster's marking it obsolete. Either way, just because Webster's marked it as obsolete didn't mean that it couldn't be brooked. Remember, wordbooks are only tools. They're very useful tools but they are not the end-all when it comes to words otherwise the tung would never change. A wordbook may list a word as obsolete because the editors believe that _as far as they know_, it is no longer brooked, but that in no way limits the brooking of it by folks.


Truly, think about. Of all the millions of words brooked every day, how does a small group of editors decide which are obsolete and on what criteria? Who brooks "repast" for a meal? Why isn't this word "obsolete"? Is it because there might be a few folks somewhere who put on a formal invite? I don't know. Who brooks stadtholder?


I will say that it felt odd the first few times that I brooked "brook" instead of "use" ... But then, I never brooked "brook" as a verb before anyway. I never brook it for "tolerate". Meh ... So it was only a matter of brooking a little known verb. 







 Originally Posted by *LoboSolo* 


...wiktionary make no reference to its usage but have it.



> Here: _1. (transitive, _*obsolete, except in Scots*_) To use; enjoy; have the full employment of._




My quote was referring to eath. But since you brought it up, ... obsolete except in Scots ... So if I were a Scot then I could use it in that sense and expect you to understand me? You'll find that the Scots have kept many old words alive! I found that out at the after-rugby-game party with the team from the Scottish regiment. It wasn't just the accent that was throwing me off at times it was the old words!





berndf said:


> Different languages can use words differently. In German e.g. _bekommen _(=_become_) means "to get". This doesn't mean _to become_ can be used with this meaning in English.





We're not talking about importing a German word or brooking the meaning of German cognate. Apples and oranges. 





berndf said:


> I find it only under "Scots" which is different from "Scottish".




You'll have to take that up with M-W:


*Definition of EATH*
_Scottish_
*:* easy




berndf said:


> That would surprise me. You have to bear with me until tonight. My OED copy is on paper and at home.


I hope eath is in your paper copy. It's not in my electronic version on my computer nor when I looked online.


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## berndf

LoboSolo said:


> We're not talking about importing a German word or brooking the meaning of German cognate. Apples and oranges.


Exactly, nor are we talking about importing words from Scots into English.



LoboSolo said:


> You'll have to take that up with M-W:
> 
> 
> *Definition of EATH*
> _Scottish_
> *:* easy


I know, some dictionaries (American ones in particular) have dropped the distinction. As Scots used to be a literary language in its own right, I prefer to keep it.


LoboSolo said:


> I hope eath is in your paper copy. It's not in my electronic version on my computer nor when I looked online.


It has it, marked_ Obs. exc. Sc._


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## LoboSolo

Hulalessar said:


> It is fun to speculate what English would have been like without the Norman Invasion and the later influx of Latinate words, but it is wholly impracticable to propose seriously that the lexicon of Modern English should have all "foreign" words excised and the gaps filled by new words based on Old English. LoboSolo wants to go even further and ignore semantic shift.



I'll agree that it would be impracticable and even unwanted to cleanse the tung and wordbooks of all outlander words. But there is no reason why we can't tilt the usage back towards Anglo-Germanic root words. 

Anent the semantic shift, it is eath to see that somehow brook gained the extra meaning was that a semantic shift that should have stomped down at the time it was happening? And as Bernf points out, above from wiktionary, it seems that the old meaning is still in play in Scotland. Why should the Scots get to brook it as such and not the rest of us?

Believe it or not, I don't dislike all Latinates. While I find most of them weak and dull, there are few that I like. I like the words "prey" and its sibling "predator". To me, they ring of evil and darkness. Putting in a few Latinates for "flavor" is ok. 

There are many, many good Anglo-Germanic root words that were displaced after 1066 that, in the natural evolution of the tung, likely would not have been. For byspel, there wouldn't be a "parliament" (from Old French). It would more likely be the witanagemoot.


It's the thought that Latinates are better or more "elegant" or, as in the quote above, that words of Anglo-Saxon are used by the "uneducated" that I find bothersome. Does it not bother anyone that we offer Latin to school kids but not classes in Old English / Anglo-Saxon? We teach a dead outlander tung but not our own.



Hulalessar said:


> "Bring a stool to the board and eat your meat" just does not mean the same thing as "Bring a chair to the table and eat your supper". I am not saying that with some ingenuity long passages cannot be produced, but is the effort worth it?



Yet we have the "Board of Directors" rather than the "table of directors" and we "board" folks for the night rather than table them, we offer "room and board" rather than "room and table". You left out "evening" on the meat for supper. OE choices for supper were:


æfengereord n. evening meal, supper
æfengereordung f. supper
æfen-giefl, -gifl n. evening repast, supper (Repast? Does anyone ever brook that?)
æfenmete m. supper 

Having said that, supper is, in the end, of Germanic upspring.


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## Scholiast

Greetings once more



terredepomme said:


> Name ten Chinese and Hindi words that have entered the English vocabulary


With pleasure - but not a scientific, let alone exhaustive, list:

bandana
bangle
Blighty
bungalow
cheetah
chicane(ry)
chit
cot
cushy
dinghy
gung-ho
jodhpur
ketchup
kowtow
loot
pundit
pyjamas
silk
typhoon

And from Celtic:

bard
ben
bird
bog
brogue
cairn
clan
crag
galore
slogan
trousers
(best of the lot) whisk(e)y


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## berndf

Scholiast said:


> With pleasure - but not a scientific, let alone exhaustive, list:


You forgot a very important English word of Chinese origin (Cantonese to be precise): *tea*.


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## terredepomme

> cheetah, ketchup, bandana, bangle, bungalow, typhoon, kowtow, pyjamas, jodhpur, cot, dinghy, pundit


As I've said, except for those that are directly related to Chinese and Indian societies and cultures. These all designate animal species, products, customs, or natural phenomenons originating from India or China. Just because they can be sometimes used analogically does not mean that they have gone through enough abstraction process to be a word detached from its specific designation of a Chinese or Indian importation. Then practically anything would be able to be considered as loanwords: Spaghetti and samurai would be Italian and Japanese loanwords. You can pronounce all the names of Chinese teas in English and say that they are English words just because you pronounced or spelled them in English. Also, most of these words can equally be found in Korean, Japanese, and French by the way.

The only words that meet my criteria would be


> chit, cushy, loot, gung-ho


Three Indian words and one Chinese word. The influx of Indian loanwords is not surprising due to its colonial contact with India that lasted for centuries. It is worthwhile to mention that Korean and Japanese have many Indic words as well although they had only distant contacts with india, and in their case, the Indic words are mostly not related to anything specific from India, but rather totally abstract concepts: baka(stupid) in Japanese(from san. moka), geondalbae(gangster) in Korean(from san. gandharba).

And also





> chicane(ry)


comes from French chicaner.


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## terredepomme

> You forgot a very important English word of Chinese origin (Cantonese to be precise): tea.


As I've said, a specific product or custom imported from a country maintaining the original name is nothing special, just like we call the sushi as sushi and not rice-fish. And for this word, almost every language that I am aware of has accepted this word in the same way: Cha in Korean, Japanese and Mandarin, thé in French, Tee in German, and most of all thee in Dutch, where the English got it from.
It's from an Amoy(Min) dialect by the way, not Cantonese.


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## LoboSolo

berndf said:


> Don't get me wrong, I don't want to belittle the great bible translations. And why shouldn't you love the Coverdale Bible? I just find the original even better.
> 
> BTW: Our Friend LoboSolo will particularly enjoy reading the Coverdale Bible for all its archaisms, e.g. he still uses_ to deal _in the original sense of _to divide_: _Then God *deuyded *ye light from the darcknes, and called the light, Daye: and the darcknes, Night_ (Genesis 1.4&5).



A friend once told me that I wouldn't be able to understand the early translations of the Bible ... I amazed him that I understood much of the passage he gave to me to read. I have found that old writings that I had once shunned are now more enjoyable (in-wynn-able?). 

Once the old spellings are cleaned up, we should be able to read and understand those old writings but sadly, most cannot. One shouldn't need to have so many words glossed. A word like widderwin (also widerwin, witherwin[e]) shouldn't make us scratch our heads ... we should know the forefast widder- (as in widdershins) means contra-, against- ... someone who is against you winning is your opponent, adversary, or enemy ... your widderwin. But you can see how much flak I'm taking for brooking an older meaning of the verb "to brook" in place of "to use" so you can only imagine what would happen if I threw out widderwin!  ... OTOH, maybe because it did truly die out, it could be edquickened more eathly! Without so much controversy.


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## Alxmrphi

It's not flak! It was just a genuine case of never having heard that usage before in English. When people don't use words among each other it is a case of a sort of linguistic transformation into a permanent archaic nature (a fancy way of saying _death_). It's not like it's a rare word that only pops up every now and again, with a meaning of 'use' I'd expect it to be quite common. I'm all for the Germanic languages and their native wordstock (through knowing Icelandic and starting to learn Swedish) I grow to make all sorts of nice bonds with certain words of a Germanic nature. At the same time I can't deny that Latinate terms do come across as much more scientific and academic. I am also fully aware that it's our collective conditioning that brings these nuances along and has nothing to do with their inherent nature at all. But at the end of the day, many of them go back to the same root anyway and we're just looking at different paths.. 'brook/fruit', 'father/padre', 'fire/pyre' so any social attitudes we attach arise from our culture and our conditioning, which can clearly be attributed to Latin being the language of science and advancement when English needed so many new words to describe new concepts.


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## LoboSolo

berndf said:


> Exactly, nor are we talking about importing words from Scots into English.
> 
> I know, some dictionaries (American ones in particular) have dropped the distinction. As Scots used to be a literary language in its own right, I prefer to keep it.
> 
> It has it, marked_ Obs. exc. Sc._



Well, I think I see a basic disagreement between us. You seem to view Scottish-English  (Scots) as a separate, foreign tung. Whereas I see it as nothing more than just one of the many sub-groups … American-English, British-English, Australian-English, asf. You place words in Scottish-English as off limits to be used by the rest of us … Do you do the same with American-English? Are words used by Americans but not by Brits also off limits? I wouldn't say that "y'all", a Southernism is off limits to the rest of the English speaking world just because it is mainly used by folks in the South.


Since the Scots were farther away from the French/Anglo centric seat of power, it isn't amazing that they have kept more of the true English words and meanings that you seem to be naysaying. And that's the real irony … you seem to be placing Scottish-English in the category of a foreign tung, when it has more true English words and meanings than Latinate heavy tung that the rest of use. And I think it is fair to say that some of that is part of American-English due to immigration.


So we'll just have to agree to disagree … I no more think of Scottish-English as a foreign tung than I do Australian-English … a little odd at times maybe, but not foreign. Would help you to know that I do have some Scottish ancestry? (I'm an all-American mutt with genes from several parts of Europe and American Indian.) Does that make it ok for me brook the words in the way the Scots do?


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## Alxmrphi

> Well, I think I see a basic disagreement between us. You seem to view* Scottish-English (Scots) *as a separate, foreign tung. Whereas I see it as nothing more than just one of the many sub-groups … American-English, British-English, Australian-English, asf. You place words in Scottish-English as off limits to be used by the rest of us … Do you do the same with American-English? Are words used by Americans but not by Brits also off limits? I wouldn't say that "y'all", a Southernism is off limits to the rest of the English speaking world just because it is mainly used by folks in the South.


Scots is not Scottish English.
Scottish English and Scots are different on a multitude of levels. 
Some people view Scots as a separate branch of one of the many West Germanic dialects that developed in parallel with the dialects that came to be Old English.
Others see it more of a later offshoot, but it is absolutely not to be considered a variety like a simple variant like you have Californian English or Alaskan English, that's what Scottish English is, not Scots.

You're also talking about words as if they have an inherent English quality... Scots can still be viewed as a foreign tongue and be equally Germanic. Most of these words are present in Nordic languages, too, which are much more foreign and not "true English". "True Germanic" would be a more fitting label here. Saying they come from a different variety doesn't undermine they have the same roots as where English came from. It seems to not be clear in this discussion that English is not some offshoot of a long-standing development, which is what it is. English is no starting point for anything, purely a name for a continuum that's been going on since time immemorial.



> So we'll just have to agree to disagree … I no more think of Scottish-English as a foreign tung than I do Australian-English … a little odd at times maybe, but not foreign. Would help you to know that I do have some Scottish ancestry? (I'm an all-American mutt with genes from several parts of Europe and American Indian.) Does that make it ok for me brook the words in the way the Scots do?


That's what berndf (and I) think as well, because it's Scottish English.
Scots, however, different case and we'd (I think) both not be in agreement on putting it on par with Australian English.

I've studied dialectology and we've had a large focus on linguistic trends and the linguistic situation of Scotland with its three languages (as is termed in the literature on the topic), Scottish English, Scots & Gaelic.

As Wiki puts it:



> Focused broad Scots is at one end of a bipolar linguistic continuum, with Scottish Standard English at the other.Consequently, Scots is often regarded as one of the ancient varieties of English, but with its own distinct dialects. Alternatively, Scots is sometimes treated as a *distinct Germanic language*, in the way Norwegian is closely linked to, yet distinct from, Danish.



So as a lot of discussions were about this misunderstanding, I felt it was necessary to clear this up so everyone's on the same level about what is being referred to when talking about this, as it was causing a bit of confusion that hopefully now is clarified. What the Ulster-Scots agency has to say about Scots is also similar:



> Scots is part of the West Germanic family of languages.  Other West Germanic languages include English, Dutch, Flemish, German, Afrikaans, Frisian and Yiddish.  The Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) are North Germanic languages. The East Germanic languages, including Gothic, one of the earliest Germanic languages, are all now extinct. Scots (and Ulster-Scots) is descended from the Northumbrian dialect of Anglo-Saxon which was brought to the British Isles approximately 1,500 years ago. Modern English is derived from the Mercian dialect of Anglo-Saxon.


So even here, it's pointing to varieties of Germanic dialects brought over at the same time as other vareities of dialects (that later went on to become English) were brought over, with a split in what formations took hold and geographic distributions. As the bunch of Scotland was Celtic speaking until a few hundred years ago, when English took over it was like a planting of RP forms with different accents, as it was introduced via the schools. That's why Scottish English (and Welsh English, which is spoken alongside Welsh where I am now) don't have any considerable variation, because English is "relatively" new over the last few hundred years (a fact which would surprise many people in the UK who don't really know about linguistic history).


----------



## Scholiast

Dear all

Of course "Scots English" does not exist.

There is Ayrshire Scots, Braidscots, Highland Scots, Fife Scots, Lallands and the best English is famously spoken in Inverness. And then there's the Gaelic.

Just have a laugh, rather than being all so worried!

"Tha mi airson Gàidhlig ionnsachadh." 

L


----------



## LoboSolo

Alxmrphi said:


> It's not flak! It was just a genuine case of never having heard that usage before in English. When people don't use words among each other it is a case of a sort of linguistic transformation into a permanent archaic nature (a fancy way of saying _death_). It's not like it's a rare word that only pops up every now and again, with a meaning of 'use' I'd expect it to be quite common. I'm all for the Germanic languages and their native wordstock (through knowing Icelandic and starting to learn Swedish) I grow to make all sorts of nice bonds with certain words of a Germanic nature. At the same time I can't deny that Latinate terms do come across as much more scientific and academic. I am also fully aware that it's our collective conditioning that brings these nuances along and has nothing to do with their inherent nature at all. But at the end of the day, many of them go back to the same root anyway and we're just looking at different paths.. 'brook/fruit', 'father/padre', 'fire/pyre' so any social attitudes we attach arise from our culture and our conditioning, which can clearly be attributed to Latin being the language of science and advancement when ...



I don't know how often you'v seen it as a verb. For me, I can only recall having even heard brook as a verb once ... ONCE ... and that was many years ago. So it's not like it is a great leap for me. If you visit any of the Anglish forums, you'll see it instead of "use". So for me, I'v seen it much more as "use" than as "tolerate". The other choice, that has been put forth, would be to edquicken the OE versions of "note" ... 

notian to enjoy: use, employ, 'note'
benotian - to use, consume ['benote']

Then you have the problem of very common use of "note" as "to mark, annotate" (and benote also means to annotate).

I'v even seen "bebrook" to distinguish it from "brook" which didn't make much sense to me for a few reasons.



> ...English needed so many new words to describe new concepts.



A common myth. OE had words like tungolcraft for astronomy, leech for physican that were displaced. Dog-leech was found in ME for a vet (many folks say dog-doctor or animal-doctor even today). Many, if not most, of our scientific words came thru Latin but are rooted in Greek. Still, would it have been hard to have earth-lore for geology? Life-lore for biology? Nowadays we see the departments of "life" sciences and "earth" sciences. So it would not have been hard to make words from the English stock. I think it is a crutch to say that we "needed" Latin.

In 1600, William Gilbert, an Englishman struck the word electricity. He knew about amber. He likely knew the word amber from the French (I don't know if he knew of the Arabic roots of the word). Rather than using the Old English word for amber, stær, to upspring a word, he went to Latin. Amber in Latin is electrum (from Greek, ήλεκτρο (ilektro)) and then made a Latin word electricus ... badda boom! To be fair to him, scientific texts were usually written in Latin, he probably knew the Latin word or had a Latin wordbook. Did he know of the OE word? I can't say. Which highlights the how lowly English was treated. But he could have just as eathly struck the word by Latinizing the OE word for his writ (assuming he knew the word stær).


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## LoboSolo

merquiades said:


> Is there an opposite movement that exaggerates Greco-Latin and Norman-French roots?


It's called academia.


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## Alxmrphi

> Is there an opposite movement that exaggerates Greco-Latin and Norman-French roots?
> 
> 
> 
> It's called academia.
Click to expand...

That is true 

<< anyway >>

Yeah English was treated lowly, but the natural process of things means if you have a whole continent of people communicating in one way via Latin, to standardise and come up with your own official words WITHOUT the support of an Academy that regulated the language, is nigh-on impossible. If you've got all these people on the continent talking about something, and you invent your word, you're naturally going to think in that arena you will use those words, not calque an English translation and go back and demand everyone use that one. A lot of Greek did pass through Latin, but also a lot of Latin that wasn't from Greek. If the Inuits had been the pioneers of science and all those people up there had conferences in igloos about science, our language would be full of that, too. It's not "simply" the case that English was frowned upon. When English isn't the language of science or high-culture, because that language is a lingua franca throughout Europe, not spoken natively, how can you ever expect discussions and more familiarity to be in English and not the language in which all the works of literature are written?

What you've called a "common myth" about English not having words for new concepts isn't true. What you've quoted are words that were coined based on the concepts and attempted to be introduced into the language. English did have a lack of words and had multiple options on how to resolve the issue, creative native words based on systems of compounding (which it did), or adopt via French/Latin/Greek the various words already out there in the ether that most educated people were familiar with. Like I said, without any sort of regulation it's a very difficult task to get people to not use the words they see everywhere else. I do like your ideals a lot on this issue, but there is a sort of level of blindness that devotion to a cause can lead to, and I think that's at play here.

It's also by no means a special case. You can't put a high or a low (or, sorry to go Latinate) but prestigious and non-prestigious language together, one with new concepts and ideas detailing innovations in technology and not see this sort of osmosis-like effect of words seeping through. I didn't know about "note" (but is also good to know because I'm pairing up more words I didn't know were used in Older English, (c.f. Ice. '_nota_', 'to use').

I guess what I'd bring to the table in terms of this sort of debate is why is it so necessary to change the past and what has happened? I don't particularly view the past history of events as a bad thing so I don't see why anything needs to be "amended". If English was bullied in the past and seen as quite lowly, then by now that has been reversed a hundredfold/thousandfold by looking at how many of the thousands of languages on this planet now view English as the language that people need to learn and are adopting all sorts of words from us. Yes, a lot might be Latinate words, but as it stands today they can't be considered not English. There are loads of words people won't even recognise as not-native. So English does have its high position now, so I don't see why anything needs to change.


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## berndf

LoboSolo said:


> Well, I think I see a basic disagreement between us. You seem to view Scottish-English  (Scots) as a separate, foreign tung.


_Scots _is a separate language and _Scottish-English_ is a variety of English (or as Scholiast pointer out rather a group of varieties). _Scots _has its own literary tradition and its own spelling conventions. Actually, linguists don't care about the distinction between language and dialect but since we this is a cultural discussion, the distinction is meaningful.

You rejected my analogy with German _becommen_. Why than is Scots for you a variety of English and German not? Scots and English separated about 600 years ago and German and English about 1500 years ago. Where do you draw the line and why? This discussion is about reconnecting to Old English, i.e. English as it was spoken in 1066. At that time Old English and Old Low German (aka Old Saxon) were closer than English and Scots are today. Maybe a little further apart than US and. British English but not much.


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## Hulalessar

You simply cannot wind the clock back and expect the millions of English language users all over the worlds, whether native speakers or not, to suddenly decide to abandon the words they know and have been in use for centuries and adopt different ones. It would be like asking them to adopt Punjabi words wholesale. Old English is a foreign language today. Many of the words we have today, apart from having multiple meanings, have subtle overtones that dictionaries cannot explain. New words, wherever they came from, would lack those overtones and multiple meanings. In the unlikely event that such a radical change was forced through - and it would have to be forced through - the literature of the past 500 years would become just as unavailable as Anglo-Saxon literature is today. That ancient literature may become slightly less opaque, but there is not a lot of it around. You would also have the problem of standardisation. Anyone looking at the revival of Cornish or the discussions over what the standards should be for Occitan or Rumansch will see what they are faced with.

By all means wage a campaign to cut out overuse of Latinate words. But that campaign is already being waged up to a point by plain English movements. The advice that where faced with the choice of two words to use the shorter is essentially advice to go for the non-Latin word and has been around for ages.


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## terredepomme

Alxmrphi said:


> Yeah English was treated lowly, but the natural process of things means if you have a whole continent of people communicating in one way via Latin, to standardise and come up with your own official words WITHOUT the support of an Academy that regulated the language, is nigh-on impossible. If you've got all these people on the continent talking about something, and you invent your word, you're naturally going to think in that arena you will use those words, not calque an English translation and go back and demand everyone use that one.


Well the Germans did exactly that. They came up with Germanic calques with most of the Latinate terms, even though Latin was still the dominate academic language for them as well.


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## berndf

terredepomme said:


> Well the Germans did exactly that. They came up with Germanic calques with most of the Latinate terms, even though Latin was still the dominate academic language for them as well.


Not really. Only few of these neologisms survived and most of them were technical terms of Latin-bases neologisms themselves, like _Fernsehen_ for _TV_ (literally _far-seeing, far-wathing_), others like _Fernsprecher _(literally _far-speaker_) for telephone survived only because the term was used by the post office it had a legal monopoly on telecommunication services and equipment; since the lifting of this monopoly, I've never heard this beastly word again.

When you read 18th century text You'll find only few Latinate loans being reversed. Most of them were short-lived, non-assimilated vogue terms when it was "chique" to use French words as it is "cool" today to use Anglicisms.


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## terredepomme

> When you read 18th century text You'll find only few Latinate loans being reversed. Most of them were short-lived, non-assimilated vogue terms when it was "chique" to use French words as it is "cool" today to use Anglicisms.


My knowledge on German is limited but it seems to me that for most Latinate words there are always German equivalents, some of them archaic but some used more often than the Latinate loanwords. For example Erdkunde for Geologie, Rechtschreibung for Orthographie, Zahnarzt for Dentist. Of course there are obsolete Germanic equivalents such as Gotteswissenschaft for Theologie, but I remark that in most cases Germans have prefered Germanic words instead of importing French words, whereas the English abandonned "tooth-drawer" for the more chic French word "dentist(e)." (which just literally means "toother" btw.)



> '''Dentist figures it now in our newspapers, and may do well enough for a French puffer; but we fancy Rutter is content with being called a tooth-drawer'", Edinburgh Chronicle 15 September 1759, retrieved from Etymonline.


The Germans, on the other hand, were generally content with their Zahnarzt(tooth-doctor), even though they had the word der Dentist.

But I don't know if these are actually neologisms that corresponded to the need to translate latinate loanwords or existing words that assumed the role of similar latinate words.

Just a small remark, we are, of course, speaking about Greek(Greco-French?) loanwords here as well, such as geologie or telephone.


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## berndf

terredepomme said:


> My knowledge on German is limited but it seems to me that for most Latinate words there are always German equivalents, some of them archaic but some used more often than the Latinate loanwords. For example Erdkunde for Geologie, Rechtschreibung for Orthographie, Zahnarzt for Dentist. Of course there are obsolete Germanic equivalents such as Gotteswissenschaft for Theologie, but I remark that in most cases Germans have prefered Germanic words instead of importing French words, whereas the English abandonned "tooth-drawer" for the more chic French word "dentist(e)." (which just literally means "toother" btw.)


As I said, except for technical terms (in controlled environments). _Erdkunde _e.g. is a high-school term. You would never hear or read _Erdkunde_ in university but only _Geographie_. In ordinary language, _Erdkunde_ is often used in a semi-derogative way, meaning basic geographical knowledge as taught in high school as opposed the "real", scientific geography.

_Orthographie _and _Rechtschreibung_ are and have always been both commonly used words. There is no significant trend.

A dentist has always been called _Zahnarzt_ in German; the term _Dentist _has never been seriously used (relative frequencies). BTW: In English, a _dentist_ is not an alternative word for _tooth-drawer _but is a genuinely different profession. A _dentist_ has undergone university training in a medical department possesses license comparable to that of a physician. A _tooth-drawer_ has no medical training. This service had traditionally been provided by barbers in Europe before before a dentist's license became mandatory for anyone offering services of dental surgery.


terredepomme said:


> Just a small remark, we are, of course, speaking about Greek(Greco-French?) loanwords here as well, such as geologie or telephone.


Of course.


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## terredepomme

> A tooth-drawer has no medical training. This service had traditionally been provided by barbers in Europe before before a dentist's license became mandatory for anyone offering services of dental surgery.


Well I doubt the French word dentiste has always meant someone with a medical training; it probably meant the same thing as someone who does the simple task of drawing rotten teeth but later came to mean a professional doctor. But I can't find enough etymological information on this matter.

I don't want to challenge a native speaker on the history of his language, but really, I can think of so many German Latinate calques that I can't really believe that the Germans did not make at least a moderately successful effort in Germanizing Greco-Latin words.

Zusammenhang(context), übersetzen(translate), Eindruck/Ausdruck(impression/expression), Umstand(circumstance), Gewissen(conscience), überwachen(surveil), entdecken(discover), Einfluß(influx), Einheit(unity), Einfuhr(import), Lehnübersetzung(calque), und so weiter(et cetera). 

Did the English make any of such efforts? They made calques of some Germanic words like loanword(Lehnwort) or superman(Übermensch), but for Latin or Greek words, I sincerely can't think of any, at least among those that survived.

And then there are German words that have preexisted but assumed the new meanings of foreign words, such as Viertel for quartier(fr. neighborhood), and Geschichte for history(as a modern social science).


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## LoboSolo

berndf said:


> _Scots _is a separate language and _Scottish-English_ is a variety of English (or as Scholiast pointer out rather a group of varieties). _Scots _has its own literary tradition and its own spelling conventions. Actually, linguists don't care about the distinction between language and dialect but since we this is a cultural discussion, the distinction is meaningful.
> 
> You rejected my analogy with German _becommen_. Why than is Scots for you a variety of English and German not? Scots and English separated about 600 years ago and German and English about 1500 years ago. Where do you draw the line and why? This discussion is about reconnecting to Old English, i.e. English as it was spoken in 1066. At that time Old English and Old Low German (aka Old Saxon) were closer than English and Scots are today. Maybe a little further apart than US and. British English but not much.



OK, let's try this again. This forum has been eating my posts! ... Sometimes it just eats it and other times it kicks it back for a "security token". Not sure if it is the binding to the net or a browser problem. I'm trying a different browser this time.

Let's start with the 900-year difference that you posted between the different tungs separating. That alone should be enuff. I'v read very little about Scots but from what I'v read it is an offspring or an offshoot of Old English. Indeed, I would go even further and say that it was been English that as drifted from the OE core due to the Norman seat of power being in England rather than Scottish-Anglo-Saxon that drifted.

I'v seen this come up on other forums and a lot of seems political to me. Those who want a more free-standing Scotland hype up the differences.  I stay out that of that brawl ... I hav ancestors on both sides of the wall (Hadrian's Wall) so I don't have a dog in that fight (indeed, I have ancestors from all over northern Europe along with American Indian). One should note that Americans began doing the same thing after the Revolution ... change spellings and hyping up the differences. Some even called the tung American rather than English.

Next, "become" is a common and well used verb in English whereas "brook" is not. Most folks know brook as a bubbling stream rather than as a verb. My first thoughts when I saw "ne brook" was that it meant to dam up ... as in stopping the flow of the spring. That may have led to it gaining the meaning to "tolerate". Regardless, it's eath to take a little known verb and its little known meaning and use it as such. I'v seen brook much more as "to use" than as "to tolerate". In fact, personally, I'v only seen as "to tolerate" once that I can even recall.

Scotland and England have a tangled history. There are Scottish Regiments in the British Army and Scottish members of parliament. So one shouldn't be amazed to find words flowing from one side of the wall to the other. AFAIK, there are no German regiments nor German members of parliament in the UK. ... An aside here, I would expect to see more German words in American English due to the large German immigrant population ... and maybe even more "Scottish" words since there is also a large number of folks of Scottish descent.

So taking a Scottish word or meaning of a word would be much more common than taking a German word. When I see a word marked "chiefly American" or "chiefly Scots", it doesn't even come into my mind that American or Scots is a separate, distinct tung.

Now, I'v also read that American English began diverging the moment the first settlers arrived. That would put us about 100 years behind the Scots on your timeline. We also hav different spellings, a literary tradition, and a separate source of new words ... so by your criteria, does that make American English a different tung? Should I refer to as American? (Or maybe North American so as not to exclude the Canadians). If so, then American is truly a Germanic-Romance tung since the blending had alreddy taken place before its founding.

Is that what we want? Do we want English broken up into separate tungs like Latin? Latin>>>Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian ... English >>>Scots, American, Australian, Indian, asf.


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## LoboSolo

@Almrphi,

While it's on my mind ... there is another OE word for use ... nytt and it's offsprings:

(y=ü)
nytlic useful, profitable. [Ger. nützlich]
fornytlic very useful
nytlicnes f. utility
nyt(t)nes f. use, benefit, convenience.
nytt I. f. use, utility, advantage; duty, office, employment; supervision, care,  II. adj. useful, beneficial, helpful, profitable
nyttian to enjoy, use ['nutte']
nyttol useful
nyttung (i) f. profit, advantage

I don't recall seeing a benyttian which would be like Ger. benutzen but it might be there somewhere.

<<<Anyway>>> To quote George Orwell: 





> To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from.



It's not the scientific words that I find bothersome tho many of those could be s


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## berndf

terredepomme said:


> Well I doubt the French word dentiste has always meant someone with a medical training; it probably meant the same thing as someone who does the simple task of drawing rotten teeth but later came to mean a professional doctor. But I can't find enough etymological information on this matter.


The word dentist entered English only in the mid 18th century.



terredepomme said:


> I don't want to challenge a native speaker on the history of his language, but really, I can think of so many German Latinate calques that I can't really believe that the Germans did not make at least a moderately successful effort in Germanizing Greco-Latin words.
> 
> Zusammenhang(context), übersetzen(translate), Eindruck/Ausdruck(impression/expression), Umstand(circumstance), Gewissen(conscience), überwachen(surveil), entdecken(discover), Einfluß(influx), Einheit(unity), Einfuhr(import), Lehnübersetzung(calque), und so weiter(et cetera).


Can you tell me which Greek or Latin loan words this words are supposed to have replaces? I am not aware of any. Most are obviously calques but I am not aware of any loans which had actually entered German before and which they should have replaced. The only one I could think of would be "Import" but "Import" and "Einfuhr" have always co-existed since both were introduced (about 300 years ago).



terredepomme said:


> Did the English make any of such efforts? They made calques of some Germanic words like loanword(Lehnwort) or superman(Übermensch), but for Latin or Greek words, I sincerely can't think of any, at least among those that survived.


Why should it? Contrary to German, English had all these words already as loans and didn't have to create calques. German has a significant number of Latin loans (some of them so old, people aren't aware that they are of Latin origin, like e.g. _Wein = wine_) and some of them as recent as the 19th and 20th century. But it never had this vast number of Latin and Romance loans as English has and had to create equivalent words, some of them were created as calques, some as loans.


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## berndf

LoboSolo said:


> Let's start with the 900-year difference that you posted between the different tungs separating. That alone should be enuff. I'v read very little about Scots but from what I'v read it is an offspring or an offshoot of Old English. Indeed, I would go even further and say that it was been English that as drifted from the OE core due to the Norman seat of power being in England rather than Scottish-Anglo-Saxon that drifted.


So why do the 900 additional years matter if the 600 years shouldn't matter, especially if you want to reach back 1000 years to Old English? Where do you draw the line and why? When you define Scots as "English which has drifted off" I could equally say English is nothing else but German having drifted off. Of course I am not saying that, but if I entered the same shaky ground you are walking on, I very well could with exactly the arguments you've been bringing forward. And, BTW, Scots has not split of Old English but off Middle English.



LoboSolo said:


> Now, I'v also read that American English began diverging the moment the first settlers arrived.


Most authors date the BE/AE split around 1750 though you can find many changes in BE being reflected in AM up to the mid 19th century. This of course apply to standard language and not to dialects. Let's take the most obvious difference: non-rhoticity in BE: In the 18th century, non-rhotic pronunciation is attested in London dialect and as non-standard in BE until the mid 19th century and had therefore never become standard in AE (of course there are non-rhotic dialects in AE but that has nothing to do with the development in BE).


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## LoboSolo

terredepomme said:


> Did the English make any of such efforts? They made calques of some Germanic words like loanword (Lehnwort) or superman (Übermensch), but for Latin or Greek words, I sincerely can't think of any, at least among those that survived.
> .



Many! Many French/Latin words were taken in with minor changes, some without change, others were calqued, or a half/half like "because" ("by cause" modeled on Fr. "par cause"). There are few listed towards the end of this writ: ENGLISH: A FRENCH LANGUAGE By Alexandre Kimenyi

I spotted a few mistakes but it's mostly right.


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## berndf

LoboSolo said:


> There there is what the Norman-French scribes did to the spelling ('ou' for 'u', changed the 'u' to 'o' before 'n' or 'm', words can't end in a 'v', asf)


Why should it matter if you can't write 'v' word finally? Old English didn't have a 'v' at all. If you want to revive OE you need to abolish "v" altogether.
 Can you tell me what you have in mind by OE "'ou' for 'u'"? If you are thinking of changes like _hus_ becoming_ house_, this has nothing to do with Anglo-French but reflects a sound change within Old English.



LoboSolo said:


> ... 'b' to det and dout, asf), and many more things *that truly need to be undone*.


Why? Just give me one reason.


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## Kevin Beach

Looking at the arguments on this thread, it occurs to me that I could put up an equally good argument for reverting to the English of pre AD 1945/50. Reading literature from 60 to 100 years ago reveals a much more elegant use of language, often with simpler words, that we use now. Yet many who have been brought up alongside the language of computers, mobile phone texts, hip-hop-speak and sound-bites would protest that there is no need because they have a perfectly good modern language that enables them to communicate.


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## Alxmrphi

Kevin Beach said:


> Looking at the arguments on this thread, it occurs to me that I could put up an equally good argument for reverting to the English of pre AD 1945/50. Reading literature from 60 to 100 years ago reveals a much more elegant use of language, often with simpler words, that we use now. Yet many who have been brought up alongside the language of computers, mobile phone texts, hip-hop-speak and sound-bites would protest that there is no need because they have a perfectly good modern language that enables them to communicate.


The interesting thing about this sort of position is that you can trace ongoing changes that reveal a state of consistent lamentation which goes to show language actually was never elegant in a sense like the way they professed, in any sort of real sense, but completely synthesised and programmed by the culture and experiences of the people of the times. The people 50-100 years ago would have said 50 years earlier was when everyone spoke more correctly and language is 'going to the dogs'. Even before them, these great writers of 150 years ago had nothing but admiration for the language of 200 years ago, and so on and so on. It's really interesting to read written articles in a timeline where people show this ideal and it just completely ridicules the logic of it consequently.

The sort of language we're talking about here, email communication and other types of language will probably seen as a throwback to a better time of more linguistic competence by speakers of English who aren't going to be born for another 30/40 years. It's a natural trend and completely human in nature, but subjective and not inherent to the actual linguistic forms, but geared by a culture of rejecting contemporary change 'of-the-day', because therein lies the nature of change and opinion on linguistic issues, the novelties present in the formation of a speaker's native language rejects novelties and often naturally finds themselves at odds with them because of their unfamiliarity, and tends to follow the ideal that language of their time and before was therefore more majestic, elegant and in all senses of the word, better.

I think it'd be amazing to be able to look at every speaker's parents and get a clip of them speaking, going so far back as they sound Victorian, then like from the Middle Ages, then the early settlers (/invaders), and then you've got no distinction with Dutch/German, completely different languages, Proto-Indo-European and its ancestor that we sadly don't know anything about. It all goes to show that change happens on a generational level and human beings, with our nature like it is, has a constant urge to complain about what's unfamiliar to us and rejecting change. I think writing has a big part to play, holding back change and reinforcing the idea that we have something that should be immutable, which is a wrong assumption to take from its existence. 

This is why, in this thread, the change has external factors but it's still something that would have happened in one way or another, so I also sort of reject the idea of an Anglish revolution because we're trying to head backwards to something that has naturally run a course, we need to be looking at the present day and in the future, not reinforcing the idea that we have this leech-like decay sucking all the beauty out of the way we speak, and as a result we have to revert to a 'better time'.


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## LoboSolo

berndf said:


> So why do the 900 additional years matter if the 600 years shouldn't matter, especially if you want to reach back 1000 years to Old English? Where do you draw the line and why? When you define Scots as "English which has drifted off" I could equally say English is nothing else but German having drifted off. Of course I am not saying that, but if I entered the same shaky ground you are walking on, I very well could with exactly the arguments you've been bringing forward. And, BTW, Scots has not split of Old English but off Middle English.
> 
> Most authors date the BE/AE split around 1750 though you can find many changes in BE being reflected in AM up to the mid 19th century. This of course apply to standard language and not to dialects. Let's take the most obvious difference: non-rhoticity in BE: In the 18th century, non-rhotic pronunciation is attested in London dialect and as non-standard in BE until the mid 19th century and had therefore never become standard in AE (of course there are non-rhotic dialects in AE but that has nothing to do with the development in BE).[/SIZE]



I'm beginning to think that either you'v missed wholly missed the point of the thread or are being froward. I find it hard to believe that you can't see the difference.

So let's step thru this and see where we'v gone astray in our thinking.

If one wanted to cleanse the tung of Latinates, then one would have to pick the spot in time where the shift happened. That spot is late in 1066 when the Norman-French took over Britain. The whole ettle of Anglish is to take a guess at what English might be like had Harold won instead of William. The next few years were a bloody slaughter of the Saxon athels and thanes. For about 100 years, English, for all practical purposes stopped being a written tung (Kemmer). During this time, not only were many OE words were lost or displaced by French/Latin words but English was shoved down and thought of as the tung of peasants. Anybody who was somebody spoke French and Latin ... and thus the stage was set for even more Latinates. We still tholing that mindset.

That's why we sometimes go back nearly 1,000 years to find words and meanings ... We go back to the time that we either lost them or began to lose them. (BTW, Iceland has delved back into the history of its tung to put new meanings to old words to brook in them in the modern world ... so it's not without precedence).

So, from that viewpoint, the Scots, being further away from the center of power of French overlords, were the most likely to keep many of the words and indeed they did. It seems that Scots is closer to the OE roots than English! I said that Scots is an offspring (desendant) or offshoot of OE ... I should have said offspring of OE or offshoot of Early Modern English (The year 1500 [yur 600 years] would be slightly past ME). The fact that it is more of offshoot Early Modern English only strengthens my argument. If you think of Scots as a separate tung (I don't, but "in argumento" let's say it is), then English and Scots are siblings (brother and sister). Whereas German and English are distant cousins. 

So yu want to say that there is no difference between taking an old meaning of a little-used English word that is still being brooked by the sister-tung (and in the English wordbook) and taking the meaning of German cognate from a line that split off 1,500 years ago (yur number) of the many-times-removed cousin tung of well-used English word? Truly, you think that's the same? I ween that it's NOT EVEN CLOSE! And I think yu know that. To follow yur analogy to its end, then we might as well go back to the PIE root and say that all PIE offsprings are in play which means that we can take the meaning of any cognate over the PIE world that we want.

In the end, the verb "to brook" is being used instead of "to use" on more than one forum. I wasn't the first and I won't be the last. It's spreading. It may be time to take off that obsolete/Scots tag.


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## LoboSolo

berndf said:


> Why should it matter if you can't write 'v' word finally? Old English didn't have a 'v' at all. If you want to revive OE you need to abolish "v" altogether.
> Can you tell me what you have in mind by OE "'ou' for 'u'"? If you are thinking of changes like _hus_ becoming_ house_, this has nothing to do with Anglo-French but reflects a sound change within Old English.
> Why? Just give me one reason.



*<Deleted by moderator: Watch your tone!>
*
English needs to undo the "reforms" of the past. 

As for the 'v' ... there should be no final 'e' after hav, giv, liv (the verb), definitiv (Old French definitif, -ive, from Latin definitivus ... no 'e' in the Latin!), or any "-ive", "-ite", or "ine" word where the 'i' is short. This has been a common item on spelling reform lists for over a hundred years.

I did research "thou" some time ago and found it was initially pronounced as "thu". The change to 'ou' did not reflect a change in pronunciation but rather the pronunciation followed the spelling. For route, I say the 'ou' as the 'ou' in house like 'ow' but many pronounce it as "root" which reflects the French way. 

"Wound" as in an injury was spelled "wund". The 'ou' should be 'u' in yu, yur, yung, asf (again, all on spelling reform lists). Group (from OF groupe) should be grupe more like the German Gruppe.

Anent the 'b', in the words were "det/te" (from O.Fr. dete, from L. debitum) and "dout" (from Old French doute (noun), douter (verb), from Latin dubitare ... displaced OE tweo), the 'b' was added back in later by Latin loving scribes. It had nothing to do with pronunciation. They also put the 's' in iland on the mistaken thought that it was akin to isle. They need to be undone since the letters weren't there when we took the words in and they aren't pronounced.

Is that reason enuff for yu?

These are the eath ones along with dropping the 'a' in words like ready to reddy or redy ... also on the reforms lists. We hav to be able to get the eath ones out of the way before moving on to the harder ones.


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## Alxmrphi

> I did research "thou" some time ago and found it was initially pronounced as "thu".


Yep, just like Icelandic has it today.


> The change to 'ou' did not reflect a change in pronunciation but rather the pronunciation followed the spelling. For route, I say the 'ou' as the 'ou' in house like 'ow' but many pronounce it as "root" which reflects the French way.


Noooooooooo no no, that's not true in this instance.
The high back vowels became diphthonhgs during the Great Vowel Shift, it didn't apply in Scotland which is why they still say [mu:s] in the [hu:s].
It wasn't a case of spelling changing any sort of pronunciation. That's quite basic knowledge in the history of English (I don't mean that with any offence or anything like that).


> "Wound" as in an injury was spelled "wund". The 'ou' should be 'u' in yu, yur, yung, asf (again, all on spelling reform lists). Group (from OF groupe) should be grupe more like the German Gruppe.


Same as above, it was the vowel that changed. I can point you to a lot of literature on the topic if you're interested. There's always Wiki to start off with:



> Middle English [uː] was diphthongised in most environments to [ʊu], and this was followed by [əʊ], and then Modern English [aʊ] (as in _m*ou*se_) in the eighteenth century. Before labial consonants, this shift did not occur, and [uː] remains as in _s*ou*p_ and _r*oo*m_ (its Middle English spelling was _roum_).



About this part:


> Anent the 'b', in the words were "det/te" (from O.Fr. dete, from L. debitum) and "dout" (from Old French doute (noun), douter (verb), from Latin dubitare ... displaced OE tweo), the 'b' was added back in later by Latin loving scribes. It had nothing to do with pronunciation. They also put the 's' in iland on the mistaken thought that it was akin to isle. They need to be undone since the letters weren't there when we took the words in and they aren't pronounced.



This only happened to Latinate words anyway though, so if they're all going to be gone anyway, then there's no need to worry about this change, right?
Those people felt that you should be able to see etymology through the words and that they were more reflective of that, but true it was nothing to do with pronunciation.

About *why* the GVS happened, there are many different proposals, but not one that I know of that is linked to French. The mainstream view (in my experience) is the one that puts the Black Death at the root of the upheaval of Medieval society and with a third of our population killed, suddenly the lower classes became the middle class and caused a huge shift, which later meant massive movements to London and that there the new developments in some people's speech took hold and became standardised. Other people also attribute it to the Black Death but say it was more that the higher classes didn't want to be classed as the same as the newcomers who had inherited all this wealth and they needed a way to socially diversify themselves and shifted their pronunciation in a sociological way (like what Labov saw on Martha's Vineyard in his famous study about phonological change and social adaptation).


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## berndf

LoboSolo said:


> As for the 'v' ... there should be no final 'e' after hav, giv, liv (the verb), definitiv (Old French definitif, -ive, from Latin definitivus ... no 'e' in the Latin!), or any "-ive", "-ite", or "ine" word where the 'i' is short. This has been a common item on spelling reform lists for over a hundred years.


I am sorry having to tell you that, but you need to familiarize yourself with the morphological history of English a bit better. The final -e in many English verbs are remnants of conjugational suffixes which which decayed in late Middle English. The infinitive form of have developed as follows: Proto-Germanic _hebjanan_ > Old English _hefian_ (there are alternative forms but this one is the ancestor of the later forms) > Early Middle English _haven_ > Late Middle English _have_. The decay of the final -e happened very late in Middle English and is hence not reflected in spelling: English spelling by and large corresponds to Late Middle English  (~1450) when spelling was standardized (read about "Chancery English" in any textbook). The analogy to French loans (adjective) might have helped preserving the spelling but it reflects Middle English pronunciation and is not an "invention" by reformers.

In addition, _-v _in the end of a word was as foreign to Old English as it was to Old French, just the reasons were different: Old French was a language characterized by _terminal obstruent devoicing_ while in Old English, like in other Germanic languages of that era, /v/ did not exist as a phoneme in its own right. It was merely an alternative pronunciation of /f/ used between vowels. It is a reflex of this that we still pronounce and spell _wolf_ with an "f" (< OE _wulf_) and the plural _wolves_ with a "v" (< OE _wulfas_).



LoboSolo said:


> I did research "thou" some time ago and found it was initially pronounced as "thu". The change to 'ou' did not reflect a change in pronunciation but rather the pronunciation followed the spelling. For route, I say the 'ou' as the 'ou' in house like 'ow' but many pronounce it as "root" which reflects the French way.
> 
> "Wound" as in an injury was spelled "wund". The 'ou' should be 'u' in  yu, yur, yung, asf (again, all on spelling reform lists). Group (from OF  groupe) should be grupe more like the German Gruppe.


Alex explained this already. Just one addition: It is one of the earliest stages of the GVS and is therefore reflected in spelling. E.g. the diphthong in _name_ is not reflected because it happened much, much later and is therefore not reflected in spelling. If it had happened as early as the shift _hus(e)>house_ then you would have a spelling like _nayme_.
@Alex: The reason why it is not reflected in Scots is because Scots is derived from Northumbrian which dialect speakers pronounce _house_ [hu:s] to this very day.



LoboSolo said:


> Anent the 'b', in the words were "det/te" (from O.Fr. dete, from L. debitum) and "dout" (from Old French doute (noun), douter (verb), from Latin dubitare ... displaced OE tweo), the 'b' was added back in later by Latin loving scribes. It had nothing to do with pronunciation. They also put the 's' in iland on the mistaken thought that it was akin to isle. They need to be undone since the letters weren't there when we took the words in and they aren't pronounced.


This happened only to Latinate words you want to get rid of anyway. That's why I am confused why you care.



LoboSolo said:


> Is that reason enuff for yu?


if you want to revive old forms, you shouldn't transcribe the "gh" in enough as "ff". the digraph "gh" transcribes the Middle English letter "yogh" which had many allophones. In this case its pronunciation was [x], the sound in Scottish _lo*ch*_.



LoboSolo said:


> These are the eath ones along with dropping the 'a' in words like ready to reddy or redy


In Middle English "ea" transcribed the sound [ɛ:] (the same "e" as in _b*e*d_ but longer. Modern English doesn't have this sound any more), i.e. ready was pronounced [rɛ:di] before the GVS and that's why it is spelled like this.


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## Alxmrphi

> @Alex: The reason why it is not reflected in Scots is because Scots is derived from Northumbrian which dialect speakers pronounce


No, not Scots.
Scottish English. Plenty of people who won't have any sort of familiarity with Scots would still pronounce it like that.
It's just a change that didn't go up that far, maybe for historical reasons, divisions etc, I've got a memory of exactly why in my head from a Dialects course but I can't find any link to it, it was to do with the fronting of [o:] which moved out of the way and didn't bump [u:] up to a diphthong, and is often used as evidence for positing the push-chain hypothesis of GVS, rather than the pull-chain one.


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## berndf

LoboSolo said:


> I'm beginning to think that either you'v missed wholly missed the point of the thread or are being froward. I find it hard to believe that you can't see the difference.
> 
> So let's step thru this and see where we'v gone astray in our thinking.
> 
> If one wanted to cleanse the tung of Latinates, then...


I think you fail to see that you haven't provides us with a reason why we should "cleanse the tung of Latinates" in the first place. The thread was initially a kind of thought experiment, if this is possible but you actually claim one should really do that. And you should give us a reason why.



LoboSolo said:


> The whole ettle of Anglish is to take a guess at what English might be  like had Harold won instead of William. The next few years were a bloody  slaughter of the Saxon athels and thanes. For about 100 years, English,  for all practical purposes stopped being a written tung (Kemmer).  During this time, not only were many OE words were lost or displaced by  French/Latin words but English was shoved down and thought of as the  tung of peasants. Anybody who was somebody spoke French and Latin ...  and thus the stage was set for even more Latinates. We still tholing  that mindset.


Bearing a chauvinistic grudge against what the horrible Normans and French allegedly did 1000 years ago is a pathetic reason. All these words have long become part of the English cultural heritage. "[T]ak[ing] a guess at what English might be  like had Harold won instead of William" is indeed an intriguing though experiment. But please leave it at that.


And, out of curiosity, why do you want to "cleanse" English only of Latinates imported after 1066, why not of Latinates imported during the Old English period, like _wine, pear, to spend_, and many more? And what do you want to do with other non-Anglo-Saxon loans into Old English, like _sky_ or _they_?


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## berndf

Alxmrphi said:


> No, not Scots.
> Scottish English. Plenty of people who won't have any sort of familiarity with Scots would still pronounce it like that.


As do people in Northumberland.


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## terredepomme

> The word dentist entered English only in the mid 18th century.


...Yes I never contested that. What I stated was that the French word dentiste existed in French way before that and probably originally had a similar sense to that of the English word tooth-drawer.



> Can you tell me which Greek or Latin loan words this words are supposed to have replaces? I am not aware of any. Most are obviously calques but I am not aware of any loans which had actually entered German before and which they should have replaced. The only one I could think of would be "Import" but "Import" and "Einfuhr" have always co-existed since both were introduced (about 300 years ago).


Well they are "calques" which means, by definition, they have replaced a certain foreign word. I think there is a misunderstanding here on the "replacement" of foreign words; By replace I do not necessarily mean a foreign word that enters a language, stays around for some time and then get replaced but also those who get replaced from the beginning, as were the case of these words.
And for the Germanic words among my list that have survived *along *its Latin equivalents, you have Kontext, Translation, Impression/Expression, Unität, et cetera.



> Why should it? Contrary to German, English had all these words already as loans and didn't have to create calques. German has a significant number of Latin loans (some of them so old, people aren't aware that they are of Latin origin, like e.g.


...I don't fully understand, what you mean they "already" had them as loans? They accepted these words at some point during the history, so they could have come up with calques as well instead of phonetically integrating them to English. On the other hand, the Germans could have just done like the English had and import directly Latinate vocabulary as "Konscienz." So it seems to me that it was just a matter of choice.


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## berndf

terredepomme said:


> By replace I do not necessarily mean a foreign word that enters a language, stays around for some time and then get replaced but also those who get replaced from the beginning, as were the case of these words.


Then we've talked cross purposes. In the context of this thread we would be talking about replacing loanwords only, wouldn't we?


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## terredepomme

> In the context of this thread we would be talking about replacing loanwords only, wouldn't we?


I was just responding to Alxmrphi's claim that 


> if you have a whole continent of people communicating in one way via Latin,  to standardise and* come up with* your own official words WITHOUT the support of an Academy that regulated the language, is nigh-on impossible.


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## berndf

terredepomme said:


> I was just responding to Alxmrphi's claim that


Ok, sorry for the confusion.


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## berndf

Alxmrphi said:


> The high back vowels became diphthonhgs during the Great Vowel Shift, it didn't apply in Scotland which is why they still say [mu:s] in the [hu:s].
> It wasn't a case of spelling changing any sort of pronunciation.
> ...
> About *why* the GVS happened, there are many different proposals, but not one that I know of that is linked to French. The mainstream view (in my experience) is the one that puts the Black Death at the root of the upheaval of Medieval society and with a third of our population killed, suddenly the lower classes became the middle class and caused a huge shift, which later meant massive movements to London and that there the new developments in some people's speech took hold and became standardised. Other people also attribute it to the Black Death but say it was more that the higher classes didn't want to be classed as the same as the newcomers who had inherited all this wealth and they needed a way to socially diversify themselves and shifted their pronunciation in a sociological way (like what Labov saw on Martha's Vineyard in his famous study about phonological change and social adaptation).


That is a very interesting question. What catches the eye is that some vowel shifts happened in a similar fashion in many West Germanic languages/dialects...

More in a separate thread here.


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## Hulalessar

Alxmrphi said:


> The interesting thing etc.



Spot on!

Suggesting that English should be "purified" is like suggesting the English should "purify" their eating and cut out any foodstuffs that were not around [inert any number you like] centuries ago. Who can imagine the English abandoning potatoes? They would not take to the argument that Henry VIII never saw a potato.


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## zyandx

To me ,these ideas are wrong.Under a pratical point of view,we are near to what we call "impossibility",suddenly we should come back to 1500 years ago and to speak a completely  new language.
Under a theoretical point of view,these ideas are wrong too.Why "composites" countries like USA or India or South Africa should underline "only" the germanic element?But also in England ,why we should underline "only" the germanic element?
To purify.To purify means "erase, delete a foreign element".But is it really a foreign element? All know the fable,at some point in the history Angles and Saxons arrived in England,but they were all Angles and Saxons? Not, it is the answer.They were a composition of germanic peoples.
They were so in large numbers that they erased preexisting element.Not ,it is the answer ,no sources says the germanic area was overpopulated neither archaeological excavations suggests it.The sources and archaeological excavations says that the germanic area was underpopulated.They or something else killed all preexisting element.Not,it is the answer.
For example ,Ine Of Wessex laws.300 years later the first arrivals,Ine wrote specific laws for the so called "preexisting element", you can verifiy it.As Ine ,other kings, before and after Ine,wrote specific laws for the "preexisting element".These laws ve been variously interpreted.
It is not important what is the right interpretation , what it is important it is that we have a proof that 300-400 years later there is a so strong presence of this "preexisting element" that you need specific laws for it.What happened it is a fusion with this element ,not a ethnic cleansing.
This element is partially also a latin element,so what we should purify? and why?


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## merquiades

I've been following this thread passively for some time now. I see the revival issue as more or less "fun" like a poet choosing carefully and making use of the elements of the language he wants to emphasize.  This can be pure rhetoric or for some desired artistic effect. I think there's nothing wrong with resurrecting these old words.  In the same tone, I could open my own new thread, calling it Norman revival and state my desire to cleanse English of the archaic germanic element. 
In reality I think I'm probably using half germanic half latinate words in this post which is what English has become in the 21st century.  I could not imagine getting by without the French-Greco-Latin part of our language.  It's an integral part of the make-up of English nowadays.  I'd even go so far as to state it's part of the force of English, even a treasure to keep. The best quality of English is it's available to adopt and assimilate thousands of loan words.
The common English speaker, when he or she reads Anglish, does not identify with it and surely doesn't understand most of it either.  It seems foreign.  That's why such a purifying movement can never take root.
Yet I do think the old English revival has merit in itself, is a good exercise and has its role to play.


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## Abu Talha

I read that in 1966 Paul Jennings wrote a series of articles for _Punch _in "Anglish". Here is a specimen: 





> ... the Clash of Hastings; of how in that mightytussle, which othered our lore for coming hundredyears, indeed for all the following aftertide till Doomsday, the would-be imaginers from France were smitten hip and thigh; and of how not least our tongue remained selfthrough and strong, unbecluttered and unbedizened with outlandish Latin-born words of French offshoot. Our Anglish tongue, grown from many birth-ages of yeomen, working in field or threshing-floor, ringing-loft or shearing house, mead and thicket and ditch, under the thousand hues and scudding clouds of our ever-othering weather, has been emulched over the hundredyears with many sayings born from everyday life.
> Source: http://thisamericanstrife.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/no-more-norman-conquest/


Does anyone know if these articles are available today?


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## Destruida

LoboSolo said:


> A good word for "to endure, suffer, tolerate" is *thole*. _To thole the winter's steely dribble._ --Burns.
> 
> I have no idea if the Star Trek writers knew of the word thole and when they created the "Tholian Web".
> 
> Another is *dree*. To *dree one's weird* is to "endure one's fate".



Those are words I've heard used quite frequently.


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## LilianaB

I think to purify English would be totally utopian, and I don't see a reason why one would want to do it, however, I have been wondering if there are any fringe newspapers or journals printed in Old English, or fora, perhaps. That might be interesting. I like Old English myself.


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## terredepomme

> ... the Clash of Hastings; of how in that mightytussle, which othered our lore for coming hundredyears, indeed for all the following aftertide till Doomsday, the would-be imaginers from France were smitten hip and thigh; and of how not least our tongue remained selfthrough and strong, unbecluttered and unbedizened with outlandish Latin-born words of French offshoot. Our Anglish tongue, grown from many birth-ages of yeomen, working in field or threshing-floor, ringing-loft or shearing house, mead and thicket and ditch, under the thousand hues and scudding clouds of our ever-othering weather, has been emulched over the hundredyears with many sayings born from everyday life. Source: http://thisamericanstrife.wordpress....rman-conquest/


 Wouldn't be more like: France -> Frankland, Imaginers -> Inbuilders(?), remained -> overlived?


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## Angelo di fuoco

terredepomme said:


> And for the Germanic words among my list that have survived *along *its Latin equivalents, you have Kontext, Translation, Impression/Expression, Unität, et cetera.


Don't know where you got your list, but from the words mentioned in this very short list only Kontext does sound as German to me... Eindruck/Ausdruck (but: Expressivität and ausdrucksvoll/expressiv), Einheit (and, by the way, et cetera.../usw.).



terredepomme said:


> ...I don't fully understand, what you mean they "already" had them as loans? They accepted these words at some point during the history, so they could have come up with calques as well instead of phonetically integrating them to English. On the other hand, the Germans could have just done like the English had and import directly Latinate vocabulary as "Konscienz." So it seems to me that it was just a matter of choice.


They did, but at some point there was a purifying tendency... some Latinisms and Gallicisms were replaced, some not, in some cases both the foreign word and its German calque survived.
Submiss/unterthänig... well, Schiller would have used submiss... an average contemporary German wouldn't even understand what "submiss" means.


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## Angelo di fuoco

Scholiast said:


> This is what makes English such a magnificent medium for poetry - we will concede to the Italians, Germans and Russians their supremacy in music, and to the Dutch, Renaissance Italian artists and some others, theirs in the related fields.
> 
> But precisely because of its long and richly mixed history, we can concede to none in poetry - including that of the Authorised Version of the Bible, whose anniversary we contemplate and celebrate this year.



You'll probably have to concede to the Chinese... let's say, Tang poetry. Or to some other Asian nation (I think of the Indian subcontinent - there surely is something which I don't know of), whose poetic tradition is yet some hundreds (or thousands) years older.


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## Angelo di fuoco

berndf said:


> How true. The poetry of the most widely acclaimed poets in English History, Chaucer and Shakespeare, is characterized drawing on all the facets of the this wealth of words in the English language of their respective times.
> 
> On the other hand, neither French, nor Italian, nor German poetry have to submit to English poetry either (I don't now enough about Russian to judge). The great poets of these languages have found their own ways so created magnificent poetry. Watching Shakespeare plays in translation is almost invariably a disappointment (especially in German, not only because even Schlegel's magnificent translation can't match the original but even more so because German stage acting and directing tradition cannot capture the subtle comedy you find even in Shakespeare's darkest dramas). But the great performances of Goethe in German or Molière in French do not have to hide behind Shakespeare in any way.
> 
> Concerning the the poetic text of the Bible (all in the OT), I appreciate the forceful language of the KJV (as well as Luther's, btw); but it does't stand the comparison with the Hebrew original. Poetry is always at its best when enjoyed in its native environment.



The history of Russian poetry isn't nearly as long as that of English, French, or Italian (which, I think, is the oldest of them all: Dante's sonnets were written long before Shakespeare's), but Pushkin isn't in any way inferior to Shakespeare, and is, alas, the classical example of an untranslatable poet.
As for Chaucer... sorry, but I don't really think he is really enjoyable for a modern English reader without lots of linguistic comments, whereas Dante (e. g. in his sonnets) is yet (but I'm not sure if this state of things will hold on for long) enjoyable for a modern Italian reader without lots of linguistic comments (but his Divine Comedy isn't really comprehensible without knowing much of the cultural, i. e. historical, philosophical, political, theological context of that time).


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## terredepomme

I for one oppose this "word bag" view of languages, where a language is basically considered as a lexical bag that simply hoards different words, and the more words it possesses, the better or "richer" it is. A language is not a simply a total sum of words and the number of vocabulary(which can hardly be measured anyway) does not necessarily determine the "richness" of a language. Nor does having diverse etymological origines tell much about the width of the lexical pool.


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## Angelo di fuoco

terredepomme said:


> As I've said, except for those that are directly related to Chinese and Indian societies and cultures. These all designate animal species, products, customs, or natural phenomenons originating from India or China. Just because they can be sometimes used analogically does not mean that they have gone through enough abstraction process to be a word detached from its specific designation of a Chinese or Indian importation. Then practically anything would be able to be considered as loanwords: Spaghetti and samurai would be Italian and Japanese loanwords. You can pronounce all the names of Chinese teas in English and say that they are English words just because you pronounced or spelled them in English. Also, most of these words can equally be found in Korean, Japanese, and French by the way.
> 
> The only words that meet my criteria would be
> Three Indian words and one Chinese word. The influx of Indian loanwords is not surprising due to its colonial contact with India that lasted for centuries. It is worthwhile to mention that Korean and Japanese have many Indic words as well although they had only distant contacts with india, and in their case, the Indic words are mostly not related to anything specific from India, but rather totally abstract concepts: baka(stupid) in Japanese(from san. moka), geondalbae(gangster) in Korean(from san. gandharba).



Sorry to contradict you, but...


> cheetah, ketchup, bandana, bangle, bungalow, typhoon, kowtow, pyjamas, jodhpur, cot, dinghy, pundit


declining them as not having entered the English vocabulary is ridiculous. On this basis, we'd have to deny Spanish the "citizenship" of a lot of arabisms like atarazana (dockyard), zanahoria (carrot), alcalde (mayor), ataúd (coffin, alongside Latinate - and more rarely used - féretro), alfombra (carpet), alcatifa (some kind of carpet, besides other meanings), algazara (clamour), algarabía (uproar) etc...
I won't speak for all, but I'd think that, alongside the perception of a word as related to some specific culture (spaghetti = Italian) or opposing abstract & concrete, the perception of a word as foreign or genuine and its phonetic "naturalization" is of utter importance.
 E. g. pyjamas, typhoon, bungalow, bandana, pyjamas, ketchup, are also found in Russian. Pyjama isn't perceived as a foreign word, but rather as a specific item of clothing, not (!) related with India. Bungalow: has an exotic flair in Russian (isn't declinable, like a lot of recent neuter gender loanwords), but in the English language I don't think this word is exclusively related to a specifically Indian type of building. Typhoon: specific scientific (meteorologic) vocabulary, geographically limitated, but then... should we deny hurricane - Hurricane - huracán - uragano its citizenship (origin: Taíno language) because it is a natural phenomenon? In German, I'd say yes (because of its distinctly foreign English-American flair in spelling and pronunciation), for the other languages I'd say no (Bellini's "I puritani": a hurricane - uragano - in Scotland? yet it is so). Bandana: in Russian, somewhat exotic (a recent loanword - I think, via English), but not specifically related to India. Ketchup: doesn't have nothing exotic about its phonetics or morphology neither in English nor in Russian and is so common nowadays that most natives wouldn't think of it as a foreign word (a different case is German, where its spelling hasn't been adapted). 
Going on with words not present in Russian: kowtow (existing as a verb!) isn't related specifically to Chinese.
Silk is definitely naturalized, because it's presence is so old and because silk is now quite common in European (culturally) countries. Tea:also naturalized (which isn't true for a lot of specific sorts of tea). Chai (in German: a specific sort of mildly spiced tea, usually prepared with milk) definitely not. When I first heard that word used in German I thought: since when do Germans use the Russian variant of this loanword instead of their own "Tee"?


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## terredepomme

My point was that most of those words have arrived alongside with the specific objects or phenomenons they designate. And such importation of vocabulary is of course present in all languages, not just English, as you have pointed out.


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## LilianaB

Hi, Angelo. I agree with you that those particular words may come from Hindi or other languages of India, but don't forget that English is an Indo-Eurpean language so many stems can be the same as in languages that come from Sanskrit. Not every word in English that is similar to a word in Hindi, for example, has to be a loan.


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## Angelo di fuoco

I don't forget anything in this case, but the words in this list don't seem to be Indo-European cognates, unlike "огонь", "ignis" & "Agni", "domus" & "дом". They entered English (and other European languages) quite recently.


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## Abu Talha

Abu Talha said:


> I read that in 1966 Paul Jennings wrote a series of articles for _Punch _in "Anglish". Here is a specimen: Does anyone know if these articles are available today?


Found them:
1066 and All Saxon


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## Ruh Muhaccer

berndf said:


> There would be a historic parallel. The “Deutsche Sprachverein” tried to rid German of all non-Germanic words. Fortunately, they did not succeed but quite a few differences between German German on the one hand and Austrian and Swiss German on the other hand can be trace back to this effort (e.g. _Bürgersteig_ instead of _Trottoir_). The silliest proposal was to replace _Nase_ with _Gesichtserker_. I did not happen during the Nazi period but a few decades earlier. But purification of populations was indeed what followed as we all know.
> 
> But it could be an interesting exercise to try to find out if the surviving OE roots would suffice to make yourself understood at least in simple every-day contexts.


I really hope you are still alive and that you and other people will see this. I just made an account so I could spread awareness regarding your false information. The drive was not nationalistic. They were impelled by Enlightenment ideas, such as rationalism and scientific advancement. They realised that the overfilled German scientific and aristocratic language were unnecessarily impeding swift and powerful education. The simple reason is that all the words of Latin origin are not analysable to a German speaker but in cases were the base word has become naturalised (form-en, aus-form-en, ver-form-en, förm-lich, kreis-förm-ig etc.). Take the word distance composed of dis- and stantia from stare "to stand". A German who does not know Latin does not even have the dimmest idea that it is related to standing. So they revived "Ab-stand". 

Regarding your false claim that "nose" was supposed to be "Gesichtserker", even the most basic etymologies refute this common rumor. In fact, the German purifiers would have regarded "Nase" for naturalised, if it were not Germanic already. It is a shared word not a boroughed one from Latin. 

And lastly what are you talking about? The purifcation had its peak in the beginning 19th century back when Adelung, Campe, Kant and other great philologists and thinkers where alive. It preceded the Nationalsocialists by a century. More ironic yet, the Nazis where the ones that dissolved the association because they did not want further Germanisation. One reason is of course, that these types of undertakings, wherby higher language is made more accessible, are weakening the primacy of the elites. So in an indirect way you are defending proness to oppression of the common people by your uneducated lamenting.


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## berndf

The story about Gesichtserker is indeed a rumour as I know now. The rest is true. The motivation of the Deutscher Sprachverein was chauvinistic but that doesn't mean there is an relation to Nazis. I have never claimed there was one.


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## Ruh Muhaccer

berndf said:


> The story about Gesichtserker is indeed a rumour as I know now. The rest is true. The motivation of the Deutscher Sprachverein was chauvinistic but that doesn't mean there is an relation to Nazis. I have never claimed there was one.


Hello berndf,

I did not say you claimed it has a direct connection to the Nazis. That is why I asked what you were talking about, to make sure I did not miss something. Your clarification then, has left me more befuddled than before though. There is no denial that there was a whiff of chauvinism, which is quite natural given the geopolitic situation back then but it was taken up and continued by the Enlightenment philosopher. You may read Kant's statements on language and Campe's introduction to his "Verdeutschungswörterbuch". It is clearly outlined, they did it for rationalist purposes.

But forget about that. I just want to ask you why you think it was fortunate they did not succeed? What is wrong about making the language easier? Is it the fact that you would not have liked even greater difference between Swiss German and German? I agree that replacing everyday words is unnecessary but surely you would agree that the scientific language should be as easy as possible? Example: "Superpositionsprinzip" if we called that "Überlagerungsgrundsatz" as some did, a physics student would not be required to learn additonal Latin wordstock and could just focus on physics. 
I want to mention that the Christian mystics  have always sought to germaninfy things. Why? - To empower the simple people that wer not multilingual or read the bible in Latin etc. That is why Meister Eckhardt preached in German. The word "Gegenstand" for object and "Unterstand" for subject, wherof the purifiers thought they came up with, were actually already coined by the mystic Johannes Tauler all the way back in 1300. Sad that "Unterstand" did not make it with "Gegenstand".


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## Hulalessar

Ruh Muhaccer said:


> The drive was not nationalistic. They were impelled by Enlightenment ideas, such as rationalism and scientific advancement.


Nationalism, or perhaps more accurately chauvinism, was not always absent from ideas expressed by Enlightenment thinkers. A significant one is the belief by many French intellectuals that the French language is an improvement on Latin and superior to all other languages as a means of expressing ideas clearly. In the case of German speakers, there have been periods when some of them have felt the need to escape from the perceived, if not actual, cultural hegemony of Southern Europe. Music is a case in point. Mozart was keen to show that operas could be in German. Certainly in the 19th century some German speaking composers were writing musical directions in German rather than Italian.

There are always people keen on "simplifying" language when it does not need simplifying. It is by no means the case that students have significant problems with unanalysable Latin or Greek words; they just learn the words. I have never studied German, but I know from being told and the experience of following the libretti of many German operas that not all German compounds are transparent. It is not immediately obvious that "Wasserstoff", "Sauerstoff" and "Stickstoff" refer to gases. In English I had no problem with "hydrogen", "oxygen" and "nitrogen" before I knew their etymology.

The promoters of words like "Wasserstoff", "Sauerstoff" and "Stickstoff" may have thought they were being liberal, but they were of course promoting Standard German at the expense of all the other varieties. What is considered liberal in language policy depends on time and place.


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## Ruh Muhaccer

Hulalessar said:


> Nationalism, or perhaps more accurately chauvinism, was not always absent from ideas expressed by Enlightenment thinkers. A significant one is the belief by many French intellectuals that the French language is an improvement on Latin and superior to all other languages as a means of expressing ideas clearly. In the case of German speakers, there have been periods when some of them have felt the need to escape from the perceived, if not actual, cultural hegemony of Southern Europe. Music is a case in point. Mozart was keen to show that operas could be in German. Certainly in the 19th century some German speaking composers were writing musical directions in German rather than Italian.



Whether a feeling of cultural superiority plays a role does not matter to be frank. The truth, and I am saying this as someone who spent entire years of his life on the matter, is that they was overwhelmingly impelled by the fact that German was slowly overturning Latin as the primary language of instruction. Until then being academic meant, being well-versed in Latin at least to some degree. So the former quasi bilingualness faciliated the massive imports but then the of a perceived difficulty with the emergence of a new linguistic environment emerged together naturally.
Now why does chauvinism not matter as I indicated in the beginning? Because it was not the only reason. And so long there is another justification it cannot be dismissed for a partial vice. I put so much emphasis on that, because commonly it is held these things happened forcibly out of idealogic phantasizing only inspite of having practic grounds.



> There are always people keen on "simplifying" language when it does not need simplifying. It is by no means the case that students have significant problems with unanalysable Latin or Greek words; they just learn the words. I have never studied German, but I know from being told and the experience of following the libretti of many German operas that not all German compounds are transparent. It is not immediately obvious that "Wasserstoff", "Sauerstoff" and "Stickstoff" refer to gases. In English I had no problem with "hydrogen", "oxygen" and "nitrogen" before I knew their etymology.



This I do not understand. Aside from the fallacy of composition commited - since no one ever said all words invented are immaculate and a part of them being ambiguous and faulty does not imply that the rest was unnecessary - what strikes me is your statement that "they just learn the words". No one challenged that. And it is not as though "Germanified" words are always intuitively understandable, and how could they? One needs to acquiant himself with the concept along with it. No one argues that if such undertakings succeed everyone turns into scientist at once.
The problem, next to easier acquistion, is that if there is very poor lexical entanglement retention and memorisation is crippeled aswell. That is the contextual, relative aspect. However even individually words in classic languages tend to be more fathomable sensually which plays into the former too. The problem of poor lexical interwoveness is also clearly criticised by Nietzsche (cf. his treatise "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"). And I find it hard not to see his point. In brief, lexicon with a low degree of cohesion is like an anchorless ship which becomes adrift whereby the distancing from the initial idea and impression, wherupon the specific word was contrived and attributed to, is just exascerbated.
If you want a clear idea of a lack of this lexical embeddedness, take a look at the Turkish language of Turkey. Where indeed words were coined in the 1930s fascist rage to replace the Arabic and Persian variants, but not according to Turkish grammar. They came up with alot of seemingly Turkish, but in reality hybrid words, they used French suffixes, made some up completely etc (e.g. the replaced the productive nisba ending in cins-i (sexual) with the French -el, now people say: cins-el but the -el is still not productive. Because of this words are misconstrued and everyone uses them like it beloves them essentially having caused a minor Babylonian speech disaster.

The German philologist in contrast were mostly very careful and composed in their approach. They did not trod down the road of sudden, radical replacement, but tried to augment the distinctiveness of words. Even endorsing "foreign" words, if that meant that shades of meaning would be lost other dismissing Germanification because they were too inconclusive (such as "das Allgemeine" for "Publikum") or at least maintaining them till a proper, good word was found. It is not a boorish endeavour but one that requires genuine love, knowledge and keenness of mind.
I advise you sincerely to read the introduction of Joachim Heinrich Campe to his "Verdeutschungswörterbuch", which is freely readable on Google. I cannot put it better than he did and do not want to defend what can defend itself on its own, if only heeded and carefully examined.



> The promoters of words like "Wasserstoff", "Sauerstoff" and "Stickstoff" may have thought they were being liberal, but they were of course promoting Standard German at the expense of all the other varieties. What is considered liberal in language policy depends on time and place.



Lastly I want to ask you, what you mean by liberty here and how it relates.


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## Hulalessar

Latin as the medium of instruction and international communication was abandoned all over Europe. It may be taken as significant that Newton first published his _Principia _in Latin in 1687, but his _Opticks _in English in 1704. Latin and Greek continued to be mined for terms to express new concepts. This may not have been necessary, but it happened. It is a phenomenon which happens in many places.

Simplification can amount to dumbing down. When it comes to language young people are more adaptive than many adults think. If they move to where they need to learn a new language they will pick it up quickly. Even without moving they learn foreign languages. If they can learn a whole new language, a few new words in their own language does not present them with any special difficulty. Supposed simplification can be no more than an excuse for purification.

Whether intentional or not, the tenor of post 230 is that German compounds are transparent to German speakers.

I use "liberal" in the general sense of being progressive and promoting democracy and individual rights. In post revolutionary France French was promoted as the national language as it was felt that if people could not communicate personally with government they were disenfranchised. What happened though was not just that French was promoted but that regional languages were actively discouraged, which was not so liberal. Today, the liberal view is that regional languages need to be preserved, if not actually encouraged or revived. That is not necessarily liberal from the point of view of the speakers of endangered languages as they may regard their language as part of what they are trying to escape from to get a better life.


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## pollohispanizado

Hulalessar said:


> I use "liberal" in the general sense of being progressive and promoting democracy and individual rights. In post revolutionary France French was promoted as the national language as it was felt that if people could not communicate personally with government they were disenfranchised. What happened though was not just that French was promoted but that regional languages were actively discouraged, which was not so liberal. Today, the liberal view is that regional languages need to be preserved, if not actually encouraged or revived. That is not necessarily liberal from the point of view of the speakers of endangered languages as they may regard their language as part of what they are trying to escape from to get a better life


Liberal and conservative should perhaps be viewed as two opposite points on a circle instead of two ends of a linear scale: if you go too far one way or another, you end up at the point you were trying to get away from.


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> Whether intentional or not, the tenor of post 230 is that German compounds are transparent to German speakers.


There is certainly some truth in it. Unless you have payed good attention in Greek class in school, as an English speaker you need a dictionary to know what _entomology_ is whereas a German with only mediocre education can correctly guess what _Insektenkunde_ is.


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## Penyafort

berndf said:


> There is certainly some truth in it. Unless you have payed good attention in Greek class in school, as an English speaker you need a dictionary to know what _entomology_ is whereas a German with only mediocre education can correctly guess what _Insektenkunde_ is.


But Insekt is Latin, being _in-sect.um_ a calque from the Greek _en-tom.on_. To 'purify' it, that should have been either _Kerbtiereskunde_ or a calque with _ein-?_ and _geschnitten?_ or something along the same lines.


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## berndf

The point here is that _Insekt _and _Kunde_ are everyday words. The point @Ruh Muhaccer made was that the campaigns replacement of foreign loans had nothing to do with etymological "purity" but rather was a drive to replace nontransparent loans by more systematic terms based on well known basic words to simplify and to a certain extend "democratise" language by replacing words that only people with elite level education would understand by words readily understandable by the general public.

I do not completely agree with him but I concede that there is an element of truth in this description.


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## Hulalessar

As to German compounds, just because the elements are recognisable does not mean that the meaning is transparent. With "Sauerkraut" what you see is what you get; "Sauerstoff" could mean a whole lot of things and is incidentally a misnomer based on the belief that oxygen was a necessary constituent of acids.

My point is that the whole exercise of Germanisation was misconceived because people do not have a problem assimilating new words. We can compare campaigns to simplify English spelling. They are unnecessary because despite the complexities most people master it; "bad spellers" only get the odd word wrong.


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## Pedro y La Torre

Hulalessar said:


> My point is that the whole exercise of Germanisation was misconceived because people do not have a problem assimilating new words. We can compare campaigns to simplify English spelling. They are unnecessary because despite the complexities most people master it; "bad spellers" only get the odd word wrong.


Not sure I agree here. Latinate words are not readily understandable in English, even to the educated. Ratiocinative would have most people heading for the dictionary. Building up terms from native compounds is a reasonable idea.


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> My point is that the whole exercise of Germanisation was misconceived because people do not have a problem assimilating new words.


If it justifies the effort is indeed questionable. But the end result is indeed that Germans by and large have less need to consult dictionaries to understand the meaning of complex words.

[crossed]


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## Hulalessar

I do not want to overstate my case and posts 241 and 242 make valid points. I would tbough make a distinction between rare words and words which, if not necessarily used everyday, are well understood despite being Greek or Latin. _Diagnosis_, _schizophrenia _and _thrombosis _are understood by people who do not know their etymology. If you have learned Latin or Greek you may not need to consult a dictionary as often as someone who has not. The point is though that there are two ways to learn "difficult" words: one is to be told what they mean or look them up in a dictionary and the other to spend years learning classical languages.

When aged nine I started to learn to play the piano all the directions were in Italian. It did not present me with any special difficulty and I have never heard anyone complain. Children who do ballet get to know some French. If "ratiocination" was a move they would know the word!

At age eleven I started to learn Latin and French. If eleven year olds can take on a whole raft of new words in two foreign languages they can take on far fewer new words when doing science. We are apt to forget just how great the learning capacity of children is.


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## Penyafort

These days literacy rate is of almost 100% in all European countries so there are no difficult words, just lack of exposure. One just has to think about how many weird words we've easily learnt during this pandemic. Languages like the Romance ones have doublets for the same Latin word in popular local evolution and in learned usage (Spanish _escuchar _'listen' vs _auscultar _'listen by auscultation') and in some cases the learned one has become more common nowadays than the 'popular' one (_capítulo _vs _cabildo_, _fibra _vs _hebra_, _rápido _vs _raudo_, etc). The more you see a word the less weird it sounds, regardless of its origin.


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## Pedro y La Torre

On the other hand, anglicisms are running absolutely riot in French and most people have no idea what they mean without looking up the words. For instance, pollsters on television are busy talking about "le rolling quotidien" meaning a rolling poll. At first I had no idea what the hell the TV presenter was on about before he pointed to a weekly tracking poll on the big screen beside him. If he had said "sondage roulant", it would have been immediately understandable. There are many such examples.


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## pollohispanizado

Pedro y La Torre said:


> On the other hand, anglicisms are running absolutely riot in French and most people have no idea what they mean without looking up the words. For instance, pollsters on television are busy talking about "le rolling quotidien" meaning a rolling poll. At first I had no idea what the hell the TV presenter was on about before he pointed to a weekly tracking poll on the big screen beside him. If he had said "sondage roulant", it would have been immediately understandable. There are many such examples.


France and Spain adopt anglicisms in weird ways. They are never as straight forward as the ones that are used Latin America or Québec (_faire du_ _footing_???? Really, France?... Though, it seems to be something that happens in all of Europe: apparently in Italy, one doesn't go to the spa, but instead to _la_ _beauty farm_ ).


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## Red Arrow

I think Dutch biology books are easier for Dutch speakers than English biology books are for English speakers.

The sentiment that "you just have to learn the new words regardless of how transparent the etymology is" doesn't work if every paragraph has multiple new words and you can consistently guess the meaning in one language (Dutch), but not in the other (English). The opposite is incredibly rare (English miticides, Dutch acariciden)

(But Dutch and Flemish universities like using American "international" textbooks so this advantage is partially lost. Eventually you have learnt all Greek and Latin roots that you need to know so then the problem is partially solved, but you still can't talk with laymen as effectively as in Dutch).

I already had this discussion in another thread.


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## Penyafort

There's also that feeling that Greek has been useful in your life in order to understand doctors when they speak.


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## pollohispanizado

Penyafort said:


> There's also that feeling that Greek has been useful in your life in order to understand doctors when they speak.


I wonder if in Greece they use international standard scientific Greek roots. When I look up words of a more scientific register, it seems to me that the roots are used somewhat arbitrarily in the same way that languages of Europe use English words to create pseudo-anglicisms whose components are real words but are used to create terms that are nonsensical to native English speakers.


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## Penyafort

pollohispanizado said:


> I wonder if in Greece they use international standard scientific Greek roots. When I look up words of a more scientific register, it seems to me that the roots are used somewhat arbitrarily in the same way that languages of Europe use English words to create pseudo-anglicisms whose components are real words but are used to create terms that are nonsensical to native English speakers.


Let us wait for a Greek to tell us about it, but I know that at least those which make some sense can be seen in Greek too, such as _pediatrician, ophthalmologist_, etc. -in spite of the fact that the word for eye in Modern Greek is completely different.

But obviously when we've mixed things creating Greco-Latin hybrids as we did with_ tele+vision_, they prefer to keep it all Greek (teleórasi), logically.


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## pollohispanizado

Penyafort said:


> us wait for a Greek to tell us about it, but I know that at least those which make some sense can be seen in Greek too, such as _pediatrician, ophthalmologist_, etc. -in spite of the fact that the word for eye in Modern Greek is completely different


Yeah, I forgot to point that out: all the Greek roots used in science are all from Ancient Greek dialects, which just adds an extra layer of arcanity.


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## Hulalessar

Red Arrow said:


> The sentiment that "you just have to learn the new words regardless of how transparent the etymology is" doesn't work if every paragraph has multiple new words and you can consistently guess the meaning in one language (Dutch), but not in the other (English). The opposite is incredibly rare (English miticides, Dutch acariciden)


I agree that once you get into specialist areas it is different from learning two or three new words in a physics lesson when you are 13. Faced with having to learn all at once the names used in botany to describe leaves is a serious memory task for anyone who does not know Latin - see here: Glossary of leaf morphology - Wikipedia.


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## Hulalessar

pollohispanizado said:


> I wonder if in Greece they use international standard scientific Greek roots. When I look up words of a more scientific register, it seems to me that the roots are used somewhat arbitrarily in the same way that languages of Europe use English words to create pseudo-anglicisms whose components are real words but are used to create terms that are nonsensical to native English speakers.


I strongly suspect that that is the case. The Ancient Greeks of course did not have any language they could mine for technical terms. They had to use everyday words and assign special meanings to them. Since they had no choice they presumably saw no problem. Today a mathematician would find to odd to talk a ball rather than a sphere.


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## Perseas

pollohispanizado said:


> I wonder if in Greece they use international standard scientific Greek roots.


Yes, we use them. We usually adjust the components to the Greek morphology, e.g. oxygène> οξυγόνο (not οξυγένο).
Many components are inherited from ancient Greek since they don't exist in Demotic.

Some examples:
*βιοψία* [viopsía] < Fr. biopsie < bi(o)- = _βι(ο)-_ + αρχ. _ὄψ(ις) -ία_]
*αιμάτωμα* [emátoma] < Fr. hématome < hémat(o)- _= αιματ(ο)-_ + -ome _= -ωμα_
*αντισηψία* [andisipsía] < Fr. antisepsie < anti- _= αντι-_ + αρχ. _σῆψ(ις_ ) -ie _= _-ία
*αυτισμός* [aftizmós] < Ger. Autismus < αρχ. _αὐτ(ός)_ + -ismus _= -ισμός_
*βιόσφαιρα* [viósfera]_ < _Fr. biosphère_ < bio- = βιο- + anc. σφαῖρα_
*ρινορραγία *[rinorajía] < New Latin rhinorragia < rhino- = _ρινο-_ + -rragia _= -ρραγία_



Penyafort said:


> _pediatrician, ophthalmologist_, etc. -in spite of the fact that the word for eye in Modern Greek is completely different.


*οφθαλμός* is the scientific term for eye, but it's widely known/used in Greek. Ophthalmologist is *οφθαλμίατρος* in M. Greek (ιατρός=doctor).
pediatrician is *παιδίατρος* [peδíatros] < Fr. pédiatre < pédiatr(ie)


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## Włoskipolak 72

According to one study, the percentage of modern English words derived from each language group are as follows:





It's a nonsense to say (or think)  something like that let's ''purify English''?  
So we should ''purify all European languages'' !?

Oh la la  , c'est la vie !


Allowance – from the Old French word _alouance_ (payment)
Apostrophe – from the French word _apostrophe_
Attaché – from the French word _attaché_ (attached)
Apéritif – from the French word _apéritif _
Avant-garde – from the French word _avant-garde_
Aviation – from the French word _aviation_
Bachelor – from the Anglo-Norman word _bacheler_ (_bachelier_ in modern French)
Baguette – from the French word_ baguette _(stick)
Ballet – from the French word _ballet_
Beret – from the French word _béret_
Bon voyage – from the French phrase _bon voyage_ (have a good journey)
Brunette – from the French word _brunette_
Bureau – from the French word _bureau _(desk, office)
Cabaret – from the French word _cabaret_
Cadet – from the French word _cadet_
Champagne – from the French word _champagne_
Chauffeur – from the French word _chauffeur_
Chic – from the French word _chic_ (elegant)
Cliché – from the French word _cliché_
Connoisseur – from the French word _connoisseur_
Cul-de-sac – from the French word _cul-de-sac_ (bottom of the bag/sack)
Debris – from the French word _débris_ (broken, crumbled)
Déjà vu – from the French words _déjà_ (already) and _vu_ (seen – past participle of ‘voir’)
Delegate – from the Old French word _delegat_
Detour – from the French word _détour _(from _détourner_)
Dossier – from the French word _dossier_
Eau de toilette – from the French word _eau de toilette_
Elite – from the Old French word _elit_ (chosen)
Energy – from the Middle French word _énergie_
En route – from the French _en route_
Envisage – from the French word _envisager_
Expatriate – from the French word _expatrier_
Facade – from the French word _façade_
Faux, as in faux fur – from the French word _faux_ (false)
Faux-pas – from the French word _faux pas_
Fiancé – from the French word _fiancé_
Film noir – from the French word _film noir_ (a film genre)
Gallery – from the Old French word _galerie_
Gastronomy – from the French word _gastronomie_
Gateau – from the French word _gâteau_
Gazette – from the French word _gazette_
Heritage – from the Old French word _eritage_ (_héritage_ in modern French)
Homage – from the Old French word _homage_
Hotel – from the French word _hôtel_
Identity – from the Middle French word _identité_
Illusion – from the Old French word _illusion_
Insult – from the Middle French words _insult_ (noun) and _insulter_ (verb)
Irony – from the Middle French word _ironie_
Jubilee – from the Middle French word _jubile_ (modern French jubilé)
Kilogram – from the French word _kilogramme_
Lacrosse – from the Canadian French word _la crosse_ (the stick)
Laissez-faire – from the French word _laissez-faire _(leave things to take their course)
Liaison – from the French word _liaison_
Literature – from the Old French word _littérature_
Machine – from the Middle French word _machine_
Magnificent – from the Middle French word _magnificent_
Maisonette – from the French word _maisonette_
Massage – from the French word _massage_
Menu – from the French word _menu_
Metabolism – from the French word _métabolisme_
Metro – from the French word _métro_
Musketeer – from the French word _mousquetaire_
Navy – from the Old French word _navie_
Neutral – from the Middle French word _neutral_
Nocturnal – from the Middle French word _nocturnal_
Novel – from the Old French word _novel_
Occasion – from the Middle French word _occasion_
Omelette – from the French word _omelette_
Optimism – from the French word _optimisme_
Papier-mâché – from the French word _papier-mâché_
Parasol – from the French word _parasol_
_Poetic – from the Middle French word poétique_
Premiere – from the French word _première_
Purify – from the Old French word _purifier_
Recipient – from the Middle French word _récipient_
Rendez-vous – from the French word _rendez-vous_ (appointment)
Reservoir – from the French word ‘réservoir’ (collection place)
Restaurant – from the French word _restaurant_
Ricochet – from the French word _ricochet_
Rich – from the French word _riche_
Ridicule – from the French word _ridicule_
Risqué – from the French word _risqué_
Sabotage – from the French word _sabotage_
Salad – from the French word _salade_
Sentiment – from the Old French word _sentement_
Silhouette – from the French word _silhouette _
Solicitor – from the Middle French word _soliciteur_
Souvenir – from the French word _souvenir _(memory)
Soufflé – from the French word _soufflé_
Soup – from the French word _soupe_
Technique – from the French word _technique_
Television – from the French word_ télévision_
Tournament – from the Old French word _tornoiement_ (_tournoiement_ in modern French)
Uniform – from the Middle French word _uniforme_
Utensil – from the Old French word _utensile_
Valid – from the Middle French word _valide_
Variety – from the Middle French word _varieté_
Vinaigrette – from the French word _vinaigrette_
Zest – from the French word _zeste_


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## Pedro y La Torre

No-one doubts that English has lots of foreign words. Sometimes this is no barrier to comprehension. Sometimes it is. Generally, I see no problem with creating native-based compounds, as Old and early Middle English used to do.


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## Hulalessar

Pie charts like those in post 255 are not very informative if you do not know what corpus has been looked at and how a word is defined. Are words like "dimethylsulfoniopropionate", "pneumoconiosis" and "estoppel" included? Are "sulphur", "sulphurous", "sulphuric", "sulphate" and "sulphide" treated as one word or two? Are dialectal words included? Are archaic words which people know but are never or rarely used included? Are neologisms included? Is slang included? How often do you count a word with multiple meanings like "set"?


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## Hulalessar

Pedro y La Torre said:


> No-one doubts that English has lots of foreign words. Sometimes this is no barrier to comprehension. Sometimes it is. Generally, I see no problem with creating native-based compounds, as Old and early Middle English used to do.


Physicists have started using words like "charm", "quark" and "string". It would be interesting to know what they are in German and French.


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## berndf

Those expressions are not translated.


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## Red Arrow

Dutch snaartheorie = string theory

The Dutch word "string" only means thong, nothing else.

(This is a circle of false friends: English thong ≠ French tong/tongue = English slippers ≠ Dutch slipjes ≈ English thongs)


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## Pedro y La Torre

Quark isn't translated in French. String (corde) is. String theory is la théorie des cordes.


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## Penyafort

Włoskipolak 72 said:


> According to one study, the percentage of modern English words derived from each language group are as follows:
> 
> View attachment 69212
> It's a nonsense to say (or think)  something like that let's ''purify English''?


What's more, the extent of the purification should be established first. 

Should it get rid of non-European words? Then it'd be more or less easy. 

Of non-Germanic words? This is what is usually implied, I guess. Making English look Germanic by depriving it of that Romance 60%. That would be quite difficult.

Of non-English words? That would be going to the root and imply going back to the properly English formation of West Germanic words, excluding the whole influence of Scandinavian medieval loanwords, for instance. So eggs should be said _eys_, bags should be _pokes_, and some words such as legs would be intellectually challenging, either forcing the word bone to have a double meaning, as in Dutch, or having to adapt it in a German way, leaving bone for 'leg' and using knock for 'bone'.


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## Quiviscumque

Hulalessar said:


> Physicists have started using words like "charm", "quark" and "string". It would be interesting to know what they are in German and French.


And perhaps "purifying anglophones" like this move, but we the rest of the world feel a little umconfortable ; we'd rather English-speaking scientists resorted to the old fashioned Greek, in such a way that everybody -regardless of their mother tongue- would be equally annoyed.

In Spanish _charm_ and _string_ are easily translated: _encanto_ and _cuerda_. For _quark_ the Academy's proposal is_ cuark_, but as far as I know nobody uses this hybrid.


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## Red Arrow

I am not saying we should purify English, but if we were to do that, it would make the most sense to me to all Germanic words and all ordinary Romance and Greek words. So keep all Romance and Greek vocabulary used by 13 year olds.

Purism comes in different shapes and forms. For instance, Standard Afrikaans is very puristic compared to Dutch and they make a lot of compounds words and loan translations where Dutch uses loanwords from English. However, these compound words are not necessarily very pure. Metro in Dutch is metro, in Standard Afrikaans it's moltrein (mole train). But the word trein comes from English, which borrowed it from French. So Afrikaans purism works like this: loanwords were okay in the past, but *new* loanwords are not okay 

In the 1800s and 1900s, the Netherlands had several puristic movements that tried to cleanse the Dutch language from "German influences". They were mostly unsuccessful. _Woorden zoals afzet, bespreken, betwijfelen, bewonderen, inburgeren, belevenis, steekproef, volkorenbrood, toerekeningsvatbaar, opleven, verhouding, verkeer, voorwoord en vrijgevig zijn volledig ingeburgerd  _(pardon my German  ) _en weinigen beseffen nog dat het leenwoorden zijn_. It is odd that they desperately wanted Dutch grammar to be a copy of German, but Dutch vocabulary had to be as little German as possible. Also, all medieval German loans were fine, because they weren't perceived as German anymore.

Other puristic movements were very successful. Some people here like to complain about how unsuccessful the Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands movement in Flanders was (1940s and onwards) because Flemings "still don't speak Standard Dutch", as if a movement is only successful if it reaches its goal completely. I would rate the movement 9/10 in terms of successfulness.

My point is that the


Penyafort said:


> either forcing the word bone to have a double meaning, as in Dutch, or having to adapt it in a German way, leaving bone for 'leg' and using knock for 'bone'.


In Dutch, *been* usually means leg (sometimes bone) and *bot* means bone.


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## apmoy70

Hulalessar said:


> Physicists have started using words like "charm", "quark" and "string". It would be interesting to know what they are in German and French.


Αre you interested in Greek?
*«Γοητευτικό»* [ɣo̞.ite̞ft̠iˈko̞] (neuter) = _charm_ < fem. *«γοητεία»* [ɣo̞.iˈt̠i.a]; _quark_ is left untranslated, transliterated into *«κουάρκ»* [kuˈark] (neut. indecl.).
_String theory_ is *«θεωρία των χορδών»* [θe̞.o̞ˈɾi.aˌt̠o̞nxo̞rˈðo̞n], *«χορδή»* [xo̞rˈði] (fem.) is _strinɡ_ < fem. *«χορδή» kʰŏrdḗ*.



Red Arrow said:


> Dutch snaartheorie = string theory
> 
> The Dutch word "string" only means thong, nothing else.
> 
> (This is a circle of false friends: English thong ≠ French tong/tongue = English slippers ≠ Dutch slipjes ≈ English thongs)


String is _thong_ to us too, *«στρινγκ»* [ˈs̠t̠riŋɡ] (neut. indecl.).


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## Red Arrow

Red Arrow said:


> My point is that the...


...re is no reason to be so hostile towards purisms (as is very common on this forum and other English speaking forums). If native speakers find the new "pure" neologisms useful, then they will become widespread like any other word. If native speakers don't find them useful, then they won't. Purisms should be treated like any other word.

Funny anecdote: I remember learning in school that I shouldn't say duimspijker because it's a "purism", Standard Dutch is punaise. Notice the hypocrisy?


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## berndf

Red Arrow said:


> ...re is no reason to be so hostile towards purisms (as is very common on this forum and other English speaking forums). If native speakers find the new "pure" neologisms useful, then they will become widespread like any other word. If native speakers don't find them useful, then they won't. Purisms should be treated like any other word.
> 
> Funny anecdote: I remember learning in school that I shouldn't say duimspijker because it's a purism, Standard Dutch is punaise. Notice the hypocrisy?


We are not talking about individual etymologically "pure" words but pur*ism* as an ideology.


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## JeanDeSponde

Hulalessar said:


> Today a mathematician would find to odd to talk a ball rather than a sphere.


For a mathematician, a sphere is the _surface_ of a ball... two exactly defined, yet different objects...!
If not TLDR: say the radius of the thing is R; than a _sphere _is where distance to the center is exactly R, when a _ball _is where distance to the center is equal or less than R.


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> Today a mathematician would find to odd to talk a ball rather than a sphere.


The German mathematical term is native: _Kugel_. _Sphäre _is only used in figurative senses (like_ höhere Sphären_)


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## JeanDeSponde

berndf said:


> The German mathematical term is native: _Kugel_. _Sphäre _is only used in figurative senses (like_ höhere Sphären_)


Ball (FR: _boule_): _Kugelkörper_ oder _Vollkugel_?


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## berndf

JeanDeSponde said:


> Ball (FR: _boule_): _Kugelkörper_ oder _Vollkugel_?


I don't understand the question.


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## JeanDeSponde

Sorry, Berndf. I just wondered what the German word was for [mathematics] _ball_ vs _sphere_ (Hulalessar referred to a mathematician's view).
Now I understand that my question is *slightly* out of topic...


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## berndf

Ah OK. _Kugel _is the general term for _sphere _in mathematics. The terms _Kugelkörper _and _Kugeloberfläche_, are used when context requires distinction between the inside and the surface of a sphere, respectively. _Vollkugel_ is a explicit refers to both, the inside and surface of a sphere. If the Greek term _Sphäre _is used in mathematics (which is seldom done), it is synonymous with _Kugeloberfläche_.


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## Red Arrow

Dutch distinguishes sfeer (sphere), bol (mathematical ball) and bal (physical ball). For clarity, you can also say boloppervlak (ball surface).


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