“English”, “Anglish”, and “Englandish”

This post is just a quick note about terminology.

The English poet William Barnes (1801-1886) did more than probably anyone before him to work out a newly formed English English, an English cleansed of untoward foreign elements. Incidentally, a great book on him and his linguistic tinkerings is “The Rebirth of England and English” by Andrew Phillips which features a decent sized wordlist.

Barnes used the term “Englandish” to refer to English as it was actually spoken (as opposed to the true “English” which would not have such a profusion of Greek, Latin, and French). Likewise, I will sometimes use the term “Englandish” to mean “English as it actually is including all Greco-Latin and French elements”.

Anglish“, as stated last time, means “English as it could be if we were to make better use of its homeborn roots”.

Come to think of it, I may end up amending this post to become a full glossary of terms I use in the course of this blog.

 

[EDIT]

Link to book by Andrew Phillips:  http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Rebirth-England-English-William/dp/1898281173/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334751270&sr=8-1

3 Responses to “English”, “Anglish”, and “Englandish”

  1. þ says:

    Hmm, I can see such terminology becoming rather confusing…

  2. bryanajparry says:

    For sure, but I think we need to get terminology straight. “English” is ambiguous; do we mean English as it is, the “true” English minus Greco-Latin and French borrowings, some type of what I call “Anglish”, or else a reconstituted synthetic New Old English? “Englandish” is a term I unconsciously use, and which I think is a good and clear term meaning “English as it is”. I don’t like to use the word “English” in these discussions, really, due to its ambiguities.

    Incidentally, I, like you, am not (nor ever have been) happy with the term “Anglish”. But nothing strikes me as perfectly right. Your “Roots English” and your (former?) “First English” work well, but again, I don’t find them 100% satisfactory. No term seems quite fitting, but for now I will stick with “Anglish”, “Modern Old English”, “Englandish”, and “the Anglish-Modern Old English continuum”.

    Incidentally, I like your term “FLaG”, but have resisted using it for fear of overloading these entries with jargon.

  3. Tristan Laguz says:

    Hi Bryan,
    I’ve just bemarked that thou brookest “prohibited” instead of “forbidden” in thy orheaverright-forwise/notice. Would it be OK to use the latter, or is it not sicer, lawcraftily speaking? If so, it would be soothly sad that so well-known and sweetle-meaning English words can’t be brooked for weighty sakes. I’m asking since I want to make my own law-forwent/related texts as Anglish as mayly, but only so far as is lawcraftily alright.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: