Anglish

Have you ever analyzed politicians' speeches? Like, really analyzed? Back in the day when our leaders weren't trying to visit suffering upon every single human being other than themselves, every word a politician ever spoke into a microphone was meticulously crafted. English is a very rich language, and despite meaning the exact same thing, "We will fight and we will win" has a very different vibe from "We will do battle and we will achieve victory." The former is no-nonsense, down to earth. Simple, but clear. It pierces straight through to the heart of any listener, and it puts the speaker and the listener right there in the middle of the action. In contrast, the latter is poised, refined. It maintains a level of cool sophistication and detachment. It's erudite and prudent, keeping its sights set on the horizon and the bigger picture rather than the here and now.

So why are these two sentences, synonymous on the surface, so different? The answer lies in the etymology of the words that compose them. "Battle" was loaned from French, and "victory" traces its roots all the way back to Latin. However, "fight" and "win" are both native English words, dating all the way back to Old English and the days of the Anglo-Saxons. Native (or "inborn," since "native" also comes from Latin) English words tend to feel more homely and familiar to people, whereas words loaned from languages ("tongues," anyone?) like French, Latin, and Greek carry an air of academia and education. That's because that's the exact purpose for which they were loaned into English in the first place: so snooty intellectuals could show off how big their brains were. The catalyst for these languages coming into contact with English was the Norman invasion of England in 1066. So sometimes people wonder: if the Normans had been defeated at Hastings and English hadn't been exposed to this foreign influence, what would it look like?

"Anglish" is a go at answering that frain. First of all, we'd be wielding inborn words instead of inkhorn dookenings of French, Latin, and Greek. The thing we brook to find a word's meaning would be not a "dictionary," but a "wordbook." The "television," with its unsightly blend of Greek and Latin, would be a "farseer." And sometimes an outlandish word, like "peace," has unseated an inborn one, so we'll bring the old one back: "frith." This isn't to say we'd never take outlandish words into English; it's but smart to borrow terms from other tongues for things we don't have in ours, like "karma" or "kimono." But where something has an inborn word with no flaws to speak of, there's no grounds for choosing to say it with someone else's words. Why, I daresay our speech would look a lot like this here sidewrit!

Okay, enough of that. I'm not good enough at it to keep it up for the whole leaf, so I'm going back to English. The idea behind Anglish was proposed in 1966 in a series of articles published for Punch Magazine. And in 1989, an American writer wrote a short article called Uncleftish Beholding, which explained atomic theory entirely in Anglish. Atoms are "unclefts" because people once thought them unable to be "cleaved," or divided, and various elements are given new names. Hydrogen is "waterstuff," and uranium is "ymirstuff." This article, I think, was what really convinced people that Anglish had legs as a pursuit. It's gained a respectable community in the modern age, to the point that one person even curates The Anglish Times, where he writes short, infrequent news articles in Anglish. The most recent one at the time of writing is a few short paragraphs about the death of an actress.

Obviously, it's kind of a stretch to call Anglish a conlang, but it didn't really fit anywhere else on the website. Regardless, as a translator, the possibilities presented by Anglish intrigue me. In work and in leisure, I deal with a lot of different characters I need to give voice to, especially in fantasy settings. Anglish, or at the very least a heightened awareness of etymologies, could be a valuable addition to my toolbox in giving life to my work. I could, for instance, have a character speak in Anglish for stylistic effect. Make them stand out, you know?

Now, the level of Anglish I've shown you so far? That's about as far as my interest goes. But the rabbit hole goes much, much deeper. You see, if you think about it... A lot of the conventions of English spelling are there because of overhauls imposed by the French. But if the French had never exerted influence over English, we wouldn't spell things like we currently do, now would we? For that reason, more dedicated Anglishers will reexamine spelling and try to revert it to how it once was. For example, "about" would be spelled "abute," and the name of the project would be spelled "Anglisc." They'd even revive forgotten letters like thorn, eth, and wynn.

At this point, we're starting to get pretty hard to read for the uninitiated, but don't worry. We can go deeper. English used to have a lot of grammar that died out as the language evolved. Sure, Anglish is supposed to be an offshoot of modern English and not a return to Old English, but fuck it. If you're not suffixing your second-person singular verbs with -est and calling people "thou," are you truly living? And while we're distorting the original concept behind Anglish, all that Norse vocabulary is pretty sus. Sure, it's Germanic, but it's still loaned. Get rid of it! Say goodbye to "angry" and hello to "wroth!"

By now, you're getting into the kind of territory where "I am" has become "cham," and if you're still using "you," you're spelling it as "geƿ." You've thrown so many innovations into your dialect of Anglish that your speech looks unlike anyone else's, and if you're one of the gonzo users, your writings look like they have more in common with Dutch than with English, making them wholly impenetrable without considerable study. Your quest for Germanic purism has long since discarded the original definition of Anglish, and if it weren't for the things you talk about in the rare instances where you use Anglish to talk about something other than Anglish itself, one might be forgiven for wondering if there wasn't some kind of weirdly nationalistic motivation behind your thorough dismantling of even the slightest foreign element in what is now well and truly a conlang.

Of course, even if the Normans had lost at Hastings in 1066, English would have taken influence from continental Europe's languages one way or another as history went on and technological advancements made the world smaller. It's highly unlikely it would have maintained a single, pure form for centuries on end, for the simple reason that no language does. The Japanese that Sei Shounagon used in The Pillow Book all those centuries ago is no more readable to modern Japanese speakers than Chaucer is to modern English speakers; "Classical Japanese" is an entirely separate class in Japanese high schools from "Modern Japanese." English would've inevitably taken influence from foreign languages no matter how much people railed against inkhorn words, and that's a beautiful thing.

If you want to know more, you can check out the Anglish wiki, which has more reference material than you can shake a stick at, plus a surprising amount of reading material in Anglish, ranging from the Anglish Lite that I prefer to the hardcore stuff that the real nerds go for, though it's mostly the latter. Now if you'll excuse me, I've stared at enough "neƿlie" unearthed spellings for one day.