deduct #Anglish #PlainEnglish

March 7, 2018

The word deduct is very Latin-sounding. Which is no surprise, because it is Latin:

early 15c., from Latin deductus, past participle of deducere “lead down, bring away;” see deduce, with which it formerly was interchangeable. Technically, deduct refers to taking away portions or amounts; subtract to taking away numbers. Related: Deducted; deducting.
–Etymonline, http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=deduct&allowed_in_frame=0

The natural Saxon word would be “take away”. But it is interesting to see that “technically” deduct means to take away amounts, whereas subtract means to take away numbers. I’m not wholly sure if anyone follows this usage, to be honest. But if they do, us Anglishers have two options.

  1. Just replace both deduct and subtract with “take away”.
  2. Try to find another word so we can replace both words.

In option two, English has the handy little word “dock”. You can dock a tail, and you can dock wages. Both cases, we are taking about “portions or amounts”.

Therefore, it seems clear: in non-technical usage, both subtract and deduct can be replaced with either take away or dock, but in technical contexts, subtract becomes take away and deduct becomes dock.

© 2017-2018 Bryan A. J. Parry

featured image from http://www.funpawcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Ear-cropped-and-tail-docked.jpg

 

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Gite #PlainEnglish #Anglish

February 1, 2017

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I love house-buying shows. Mostly they look at homes in Spain or Portugual. But today they were looking in France. Just when you thought estate-agent-speak couldn’t get worse than bijou, cosy (=cramped), and the like, I learnt a new word: gîte. After about three minutes, and hearing it several times, the word had already begun to irk me. After an hour, I was ready to start stabbing.

So far as I can tell, the word means a small cottage or annex, self-catering. The Oxford English wordbook defines it as:

A stopping-place, lodging … a furnished or self-catering holiday home, usu. in a rural district.

Call me a “luddite” if you will, but what is wrong with (French-style) self-board holiday home/cot(e)? Or if that’s too overly specific, what about hire holiday home?

I think gîte, even without its little letter-hat (gite), is needless,  pretentious, dreck.

© 2017 Bryan A. J. Parry

featured image from http://www.hotel-r.net/im/hotel/fr/gîte-61.jpg

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Century #Anglish #PlainEnglish

January 17, 2017

20thcentruyfox

The twenty-first century, a test century in cricket, a Roman century led by a centurion. Century means, as we all know, one hundred — of anything. The words come from the Latin centuria. But why bother with “century” at all? We have the word hundred! And the madness doesn’t stop there.

We have homegrown words for ten, hundred, and thousand. Yet we borrow the words for the same periods of years: decade, century, millennium? German gets by quite well with homegrown Jahrzehnt, Jahrhundert, and Jahrtausand; literally, ‘year-ten’, ‘year-hundred’, and ‘year-thousand’. So why can’t English?

Of course, in English we can just say things like “ten years” or “tens of years”. But a lot of the time this doesn’t quite work. These are descriptive phrases, when what we sometimes really want is one noun that pithily expresses the same concept. So in step decade, century, and millenium as our lexical saviours.

Yet it wasn’t always so.

Century only came into English in the 1530s with the sense of “hundred”. It only took on the meaning “period of a hundred years” in around the 1650s as a short form of the phrase “a century of years”. Likewise, decade only came into English in the mid-fifteenth century meaning “ten parts”, it acquiring the sense of “period of ten years” in the 1590s. And millennium, in the sense of any thousand year period, is only recorded from 1711.

So what did we say before then?

Confusingly, the Old English word for decade was hund. Century was ældu, as in eld, elder, old. Compare Modern Idelandic öld ‘century’.

These wouldn’t work for nowadays English. So what should we do?

  • When you can swap decade, century, or millenium out for the following phrases with no awkwardness or unnaturalness, then do so: ten years, tens of years, a hundred years, hundreds of years, a thousand years, thousands of years.
  • When you mean a group or amount of, then say tenfold, a group of ten, hundredfold, a group of hundred, thousandfold, a group of a thousand.
  • When you want to say “the twentieth century” (and so on), say “the 1900s” instead — like in Swedish.
  • You can also say ton for hundred, especially in money or speed or sport.

And when these don’t work, I say that Germanising “year-ten” is too un-English. I put forward the following.

1. Ten-year, hundred-year, thousand-year

“I met your Mum three ten-years ago”: cannot be mistaken for “ten years ago”.
“The Battle of Hastings was almost a thousand-year ago”: cannot be mistaken for “a thousand years ago”
“The twentieth hundred-year was a time of great change”: cannot be mistaken for anything.

2. I also put forward, on the analogy of “century of years” being simplified to “century”, these: ten, hundred, thousand.

“It’s been hundreds since England had a separate parliament”
“Tens ago, mobile phones was science fiction”
“Stonehenge was built thousands ago”

3. Swedish also provides a good model with hundratal: hundred-deal. Deal of course can mean amount or quantity, as in “a good deal of rain”.

ten-deal, hundred-deal, thousand-deal.

© 2016-2017 Bryan A. J. Parry

featured image from http://i.ytimg.com/vi/MK7sju6Ka8E/maxresdefault.jpg

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New Old Spellings #PlainEnglish #Anglish #PureEnglish #SpellingReform

January 2, 2017

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We spend a lot of time talking about Anglish words, but almost no time talking about spellings. The why is that I try to smuggle Anglish in. Non-standard spellings, however, draw attention to themselves. Therefore, I have only touched on spellings briefly (for example, see here). However, 1066 and all that left its mark on our spelling system, too. Many spellings were changed soon after the Conquest as the old English scribe class were killed and slowly dispensed with, Normans taking their place. For example, <cw> was respelt as <qu> on the French model: cwen became quen (now queen) almost overnight. However, other less radical changes have also happened over the years since then. This post looks at these spellings, specifically those changed based on an unright understanding of their origin (?erstspring ?upspring ?first-spring).

Before I go on, remember that my notion here at Wrixlings is not to create what might have been had history panned out differently — that is something I call “Modern Old English”. Rather, I try to inliven the Saxon heart our of present speech. Therefore, I do not say we must bring back ash <æ> or yogh, or spell <wh> as <hw> (OE hwearf ‘wharf’) or put an <h> back in words like lord (OE hlaford, would therefore perhaps be hlord if 1066 and all that had not happened). Therefore, I do not respell <qu> as <cw>: the grounds are that everyone can plainly understand <qu> for /kw/ — even tho the spelling is quite absurd, and French.

1. ACHE

Originally, there were two words: ake (deedwork/verb), ache (nameword/noun), as per speak (workword) and speech (nameword). Eventually, ache fell out of the language in favour of ake for both verbs and nouns (just like we used to say “reek” (deedword) OE reocan and “reech” (nameword) OE riec). However, it was felt by the 1700s that ake probably came from the Greek akhos, and so the spelling was changed accordingly (Greek kh / χ is rendered <ch> in English; see the arch– of words like archaeology, from arkhe / αρχη). Sadly, the word doesn’t come from Greek, but the Old English acan (deedword) and æce (nameword).

So let’s spell it AKE.

2. AGHAST, GHASTLY, GHOST

The letter g can “soften” to a “j” sound (or to a “y” sound in Old English: geong ‘young’). The letters <h> and <u> can “stop” it: guest, spaghetti. We don’t say these as “jest” and “spajetty”, do we? But this softening only can happen before e, i, and y. So why is there a <h> in these words before <a> and <o>? Oh yes, because that’s how it’s done in Dutch(!)… How does that make any sense?

The first two used to be spelt without the <h>. So let’s spell them AGAST and GASTLY once again. “Gost” might be troublesome as it may imply a rhyme with “lost” — although not needfully; see “host”! It comes from Old English gast; this <a> developed into a ‘long’ o elsewhere too. Sometimes it was spelt like this: OE stan –> ModE “stone”. And other times it was spelt like this: OE bat –> ModE “boat”.

So let’s spell it either GOST, GOAST, or GOSTE. I reckon the first two are best.

3. ANCHOR

The Old English word was ancor, taken from the Latin ancora (see, we did borrow sometimes in Old English too!). This itself probably comes from the Greek ankyra ανκυρα. None of these words have a <h>! Indeed, the word only began being spelt with an <h> in the late 1500s — after having spent around 700 years in English spelt without it. The decision is clear:

Let’s spell it ANCOR. Mark that “anker” would also clearly word on the grounds of saying (banker, wanker), but not on wordbirth.

4. AXE

This word was spelt æx in Old English and ax until around two hundred years ago. It is still spelt ax in the US, Canada, and increasingly now, Australia. The <e> was added for no apparent reason whatsoever.

Let’s just bin axe and spell it AX.

5. CRUMB, THUMB, LIMB, NUMB

Old English cruma, þuma and lim. Numb was earlier spelt as nome, from the OE root niman. Never had a <b> sound in there. Although the related words crumble, thimble and nimble do. And then there’s dumb and lamb and comb, which used to be said with a /b/, but no longer are, yet are still spelt with a <b>. What a mess.

I suggest taking the <b> out in all cases, etymological and otherwise: CRUM, DUM, LAM, LIM, NUM, THUM.

Only keep it where it is pronounced: CRUMBLE, THIMBLE, NIMBLE. Keeping the <b> in some related words but not others may trouble you, but it shouldn’t. For example, we write DECEIT and DECEPTION, not “deceipt”, which is an analogous case. In the case of “comb”, we need to show the way the vowel is said, so as with “ghost” above, we have either COAM or COME. COAME is even possible.

Maybe COAM to stop us mixing it up with the verb to come.

6. ISLAND, ISLE

Island represents Old English igland, from ig ‘isle/island’ + land land. It was thought to come from the Latin insula, hence why folk added the <s>. Although, by that logic (?through-thought) why wasn’t it spelt “insland”? The idea for <s> probably also took hold due to the word isle which actually is ultimately from the Latin insula. However, rather ironically, <s> was often lost from Latin to French (French fenêtre, Latin fenestra) — as it was in ISLE, too! We borrowed the word from French in the late 13th century as ILE.

Therefore: ILAND, ILE

If you want a homeborn word for isle, we do of course have ait and eyot which in some way represent the “i” of island.

7. SCYTHE

Influenced by Latine scissor ‘carver, cutter’ and scindere ‘to cut’. The word actually comes from Old English siþe and should be spelled again as once it was: SITHE (as in lithe, writhe, and so on; note: the letter þ is the exact equivalent of <th>).

8. TONGUE

This is a funny one. I often see it misspelt, by native speakers(!), as “tounge”. Why? They know how to say it, but they also know the spelling is a tad “funny”. So they take a guess. The OE was tunge and would naturally have lost the final <e>. Additionally, lots of words of this kind had their <u> changed to an <o> before <n, m> as the scribal writing of the time made them easily confusable. That’s why “come”, which rhymes with “hum”, isn’t spelt with a <u>. Therefore, this could be changed to tong or tung. But given that tong would be misleading, and the regular spelling would be with a <u> (see hung, rung, sung, and fellows):

I say this needs to be put back as TUNG. Altho it is true that some Northerners give this a spelling pronunciation of “tong”.

9. WHORE

Who, whooping cough, and therefore whore, right? Wrong. Actually, in Old English it was hore, and only began to be spelled with a <w> in the early 1500s. Let’s set this straight and bring back HORE.

10. OTHER WORDS

There are many other words we might respell. For example, see our little talk about <u> being changed to <o> as in tongue and come. There are a great deal of words that fit this mould exactly: wonder, monk, wolf, and so on. These could be respelt wunder, munk, wulf (see thunder and sunk). Or another idea: could could be respelt as coud. It comes from can, and was cuðe in Old English, but gained an <l> by analogy with would and should (which come from will and shall, words that DO have an <l>!). But both of these cases, wonder and friends and could, go beyond the bounds of this post. Could is indeed also false etymology, but one based on homeborn not outland words. And the case of wonder and fellows is about wonky former scribal habits — not incorrect etymologising. Maybe we’ll handle those kinds of spelling in another post.

11. SUMMING UP

Therefore, if we go down the road of Anglish spellings, we have changed the following from:

ache, aghast, anchor, axe, comb, crumb, dumb, ghastly, ghost, island, isle, lamb, limb, numb, scythe, thumb, tongue, whore

to:

AKE, AGAST, ANCOR, AX, COAM, CRUM, DUM, GASTLY, GOAST/GOST, ILAND, ILE, LAM, LIM, NUM, SITHE, THUM, TUNG, HORE.

You might wanna check out a similar (but old) post by a fellow Anglisher here: New Spellings.

© 2016 – 2017 Bryan A. J. Parry

featured image the first lines of the manuscript of Beowulf: By anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet – This file has been provided by the British Library from its digital collections. It is also made available on a British Library website.Catalogue entry: Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, ff 94r–209v, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30380424

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Hybrid #PlainEnglish #Anglish #PureEnglish

December 19, 2016

toyota_yaris_hybrid

hybrid (noun) c. 1600, “offspring of plants or animals of different variety or species,” from Latin hybrida, variant of ibrida “mongrel,” specifically “offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar,” of unknown origin but probably from Greek and somehow related to hubris. A rare word before the general sense “anything a product of two heterogeneous things” emerged c. 1850. The adjective is attested from 1716. As a noun meaning “automobile powered by an engine that uses both electricity and gasoline,” 2002, short for hybrid vehicle, etc.

hybridize (verb)

From the Online Etymology Dictionary

We can see indeed from our day-to-day experience that the words hybrid and hybridize are growing in popularity. But what’s wrong with our own Saxon words for these things?

The nameword (noun) is either: cross, crossbreed, or mongrel. I suggest a further word: blendbreed. Obviously, as far as “hybrid” cars go, “cross” is probably the best fit. We might also say half-and-half or half-half cars. And note that mongrel can (but needn’t) have negatives tones, whereas cross and crossbreed are more judgement-free.

The deedword (verb) can therefore either be: cross, crossbreed, and blendbreed.

© 2016 Bryan A. J. Parry

featured image from http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XggVsuU-4bs/T6c-uQx-47I/AAAAAAAAAJg/2LnX1gmPlV0/s1600/Toyota_Yaris_Hybrid.jpg

 

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Labour

December 2, 2016

image

Let’s have a workers’ revolution and purge our speech of the word “labo(u)r” and its derivatives, coming as it does from Latin labor. What are the plain, Saxon English alternatives?

Labour (n) = hard work, slog

Labour (v) = work hard, slog, slog away

Labour Day = May day, Workers’ day

The Labour Party = The Workers’ Party

Labour union = workers’ union

Go into labour = begin/start giving birth

Belabour = overwork, overdo, over-egg

Labourer = worker, unskilled worker, hand(y) worker [that is, “manual labourer”]

© 2016 Bryan A. J. Parry

featured image from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Isn’t_Working

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Collaborate

November 14, 2016

3dbad47

The verb “to collaborate” can easily be put into plain English by saying “to work with”. Indeed, this is exactly what “collaborate” means in Latin: com– ‘with’ + labore ‘to work’. But what about “collaborator” and “collaboration”? The fairly useless word “collaborate” looks like it’s being buttressed by these two words, as well as by the negative, traitorous sense. Indeed, perhaps “collaborator” is slowly coming to mean something like “traitor”, and thus the time might be right for “collaborator” to be shuffled off.

We could turn the verb phrase “work with” into the phrasewords “withworker” and “withworking”. However, “with” when used as a kind of prefix actually means “against”; look at “withstand” (stand against, resist), “withhold” (hold back), and “withdraw” (draw back). The reason for this weirdly counter-intuitive situation is that in Old English, “with” (wiþ) meant ‘against’. The meaning of wiþ changed under the influence of phrases like “fight with”. The eremost (original) English word for the concept of “with” was “mid” — this still lives on in words like “midwife” (literally, ‘with wife/woman’).

So we have two choices here.

  1. Extend the nearly-dead usage of mid- to mean “with” and with- to mean “against”, even though it runs counter to how these words work when not compounded/prefixed.
  2. Write off current with- and mid- as relics, patterns too irretrievably lost to bring back, and make a new prefix with-.

Option one gives us midworker and midworking. Option two gives us withworker and withworking.

© 2016 Bryan A. J. Parry

featured image from https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/p/7/005/068/2bd/3dbad47.jpg

 

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The Battle of Hastings: 950th Mind-day

October 16, 2016

image

Think upon this: the 14th of October 2016 marks the 950th mind-day of the  Battle of Hastings, the day that wrixled (changed) everything! (Note anniversary: Old English mynddæg ‘mind-day’; ‘year’s-day’ would also fit the Germanic mould). It was on this day that Harold, king of the English, was felled, and the conquest of England by the Normans began.

How would the English language be different if 1066 and its fallout had never happened? Nobody knows for sure. But here’s some thoughts.

  1. We still would have borrowed words, including from French, just as the other other Germanic languages have done. However, we would likely have borrowed far fewer. See Article I of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for a good example.
  2. However, funnily enough, the fewer words that we would have borrowed would be more obviously French as they would have had less time to become Anglicised, aka, bishop-shifted. Set English adventure, menu, and point by Swedish aventyr, meny, and poäng, for example. The Swedish words more closely keep to the French pronunciation.
  3. We wouldn’t necessarily have kept up the Old English alphabet with its various letters. This is down to English already using other forms in the Old English period itself, such as <th> instead of <þ> and <ð>, and <uu> instead of wynn (keep in mind that <uu> is the old form of <w>). And the loss of yogh (the Middle English development of the Old English form of writing <g>) had little to do with 1066 and all that. However, I feel that, owing to the eventual dominance of Wessex, the late West Saxon use of <þ> and/or <þ> along with perhaps <æ> would likely have kept them in our alphabet up to nowadays. Yogh may have, too, but wynn would almost certainly have been replaced.
  4. Other spellings would be changed (or, rather, wouldn’t have changed). For example, the use of <qu> for /kw/ would likely not have been used, <cw> being used in its stead (see analogues crab and club, and Old English cwene “queen” for comparison; <k> is only used to keep the /k/ sound where would otherwise go soft, for example, king). Other changes are less obvious but no less sure. Take olden long i, which became said as “eye” after the Great Vowel Shift, so now we have win (OE winn) and wine (OE win). However, olden long u came to be spelt the French way (compare Anjou, bijou, frou-frou). Yet, after the Great Vowel Shift, this came to be pronounced as in out. Therefore, without 1066 and all that, ancient long u, just like its brother ancient long i, would have carried on being spelt as it was. So what we now know of as house, out, and cow (<ow> being the word-final variant of <ou>; compare out, bout, and bow), would have stayed as hus, ut, cu.

Whatever other changes would have happened, English still be very much its own beast, the black sheep of the Germanic language family. But I should point out, Anglish and the project of this site, is not a try at making English as it would have been had the English won the Battle of Hastings. Rather, Anglish and this project is about uncovering the English roots of English, to come up with a more Saxon, plainer English.

© 2016 Bryan A. J. Parry

featured image from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayeux_Tapestry#

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New Animal Names (Bishop-shifting)

July 23, 2014

chimpanzee-jane-goodall-intro

I spoke before about a different way to make Saxon/true English words. Instead of coming up with outlandish new words formed from pure Germanic roots, why not simply anglicise current words? For example, instead of replacing electricity with something odd albeit beautiful like ghostfire or sparkflow, why not merely call it “lecky” (that is, an anglicisation of ‘electricity’)? The advantage? Such words are more familiar, more likely to be adopted, and often already are in use. I call this process “bishop-shifting” on the analogy of what happened in English to the Greek word episkopos (–>bishop). I discuss bishop-shifting in detail here: https://wrixlings.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/bishop-shifting/.

One application of this idea is to animals. Here’s a few animal names that I’ve bishop-shifted.

alligator –> gator, gater
This might have the slight smack of the southern United States, but let’s not be prejudiced against Southern Americans. The form gator/gater is so thoroughly English-sounding, I think more people should use it (just as we gladly use chimp and others).

The word “alligator” actually comes from the Spanish el lagarto [de indias] “the lizard [of the indies]”. “Gater” is, therefore, a bishop-shifting exactly analogous to, well, “bishop”. That’s because English words are generally stressed on the first syllable, so the first stressed syllable is taken to be the beginning of the word, and the rest is lopped off: alligator, episkopos (bishop). Note also what is technically known as the “excrescent” r in the English form — we say “alligator”, not “alligarto” which would be closer to the Spanish — just as “potato” and “fellow” have been altered to “tater” and “feller”.

chimpanzee –> chimp
Long-established short-form, this’un.

cockroach –> roach
The word “cockroach” is already somewhat anglicised; it was borrowed from the Spanish cucaracha. But roach is a now commonly heard, even Englishier form.

crocodile –> croc
Ultimately from the Greek krokodilos meaning “pebbles-worm”, apparently from its habit of basking on pebbles. We might wish to fully make this English by spelling it ‘crock‘.

elephant –> elpend
This might seem like a weird one, but I include it for interest’s sake only. You see, elpend was the form in Old English! And ivory was known as elpendban: ‘elephant-bone’.

hippopotamus –> hippo
Note that “hippopotamus” comes from the Greek meaning “river-horse”, and was glossed in Old English as sæhengest* ‘sea-horse’. Hippo is, indeed, what I call this animal: I don’t remember the last time I said or heard hippopotamus when discussing the animal.

kangaroo –> kanga, roo
I’ve heard both “kanga” and “roo” used, although my wordbook here only lists “roo”.

mosquito –> mozzie, skeeter
This Australian English word, mozzie, is a great example of bishop-shifting. I already use this myself; not from affectation, but because my whole family lived down under for years, and so it has always been a part of my wordhoard! The full form, mosquito, comes from the Spanish word meaning ‘little’ fly: mosca ‘fly’ + –ito diminutive suffix.

In the southern United States, they also have skeeter which is also lovely, but takes the other way round: lopping the beginning of the word off. Thanks to Natasha for pointing that one out.

Of course, we also have thoroughly English “midge” and “gnat”.

narwhal –> narwhale
A narwhal is a kind of whale with a long horn on its head. Truly majestic, like something from a middle-ages myth. The word comes from the Norse nahvalr which literally means ‘corpse-whale’ apparently due to the corpse-like colour of the whale’s skin. The spelling has already been made more English (hv->wh), so why not let’s go one step further? So narwhale is a half translation, just like English ‘iceberg’ which is from Dutch ijsberg which means ‘ice-mountain’.

pigeon –> pidge

The word pigeon comes from Old French and replaced the English word culver  (which was culufre in Old English), which itself was borrowed from Latin columbula(!) We do in truth have our own word for it, which is dove. The meaning of dove has now narrowed to a few kinds of pigeon in particular, pigeon being the general term (compare hound, which was formerly the overall word but now is only some kinds, dog being the overall word: altho note that “dog” has a murky birth but is likely homeborn in any case).

I try to use dove, and sometimes, half-jokingly, town-dove, street-dove, and rat-dove and ratty dove for the general greyish pigeons we get. Wood pideons, I always grew up calling woodies, or in Anglish wood doves.

But now to the bishop-shift. I have used, and heard from other people, the nonce/one-off word pidge enough times to put it in this list. It isn’t in the OED, but it is in Urban Dictionary.

rhinoceros –> rhino
This comes from the Greek meaning ‘nose-horned’. Who says the long form nowadays?

Conclusion 

This may all seem boring compared to exotic-sounding formations such as riverhorse or pebble-worm (the meaning of ‘hippopotamus’ and crocodile’ in the original Greek). But are you really going to start calling them ‘pebble-worms’…? And ‘riverhorse’? They look more like ‘swamp-whales’, to me. But ‘croc’: that might be a passable, truly English form.

I’ll add to the list in this post periodically. So please, come back in about ten years to see how it’s grown. Or just suggest words yourself!

 

Footnote:
*That is, hengest as in Hengest and Horsa, the legendary brothers who led the Germanic conquest of Britain after the fall of Rome. Hengest meaning “horse” or “Stallion”, the English equivalent which lives on in Swedish as häst “horse”. Wow, this blog is so informative, eh.

Chimpanzee image taken from http://media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2011/10/chimpanzee-jane-goodall-intro.jpg

Updates:

27.08.2014 cockroach –> roach

24.01.2017 mosquito –> skeeter; pigeon –> pidge

 

© 2014-2017 Bryan A. J. Parry

2 Comments | bishop-shifting, vocab | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by bryanajparry

The Secret Vice

April 13, 2012

So, what’s this blog all about, then?

Well, unfortunately, I am a rather sad little man who derives pleasure from making up languages.

Wot??

Yes, I invent languages. For fun(!)

What’s even more unfortunate is that my name isn’t “J. R. R. Tolkien”, and so I won’t make a penny from this. It really is a total and complete waste of time(!)

J. R. R. Tolkien, author of “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit”, spent most of his life creating languages. You may not know this, but he didn’t make up his languages in order to flesh out his books; rather, he wrote his books in order to flesh out his languages! Yes, read that sentence again. Y’see, languages, real languages, actually have speakers and peoples and cultures behind them. So, Tolkien’s approach may seem perverse, but it actually makes sense; Quenya, Sindarin, Westron and all his other languages could never hope to achieve any authenticity or depth unless there were people to speak the languages. And people have cultures. And nations. And religions. And history. Lots and lots of history. And thus an epic was born.

Tolkien called his hobby the “secret vice”. It’s my secret vice, too. I used to think I was the only person in the world who did this type of thing. And then I discovered Tolkien (aged eleven or twelve). Since then I’ve found out that there are plenty more odd-balls like me out there. They mostly call it “conlanging”. So I guess I’m a “conlanger”.

But I don’t just make languages up from scratch. I like playing with language in all sorts of ways, including “legitimate” hobbies like poetry writing.

So then, this blog will talk about “conlanging” and creative and artistic use of language and linguistics. I’ll mostly focus on my own projects which include: Germanic / “Pure” forms of English, international auxiliary languages, and “artistic” languages for my own fantasy world. I’ll also make forays into other people’s projects and languages and linguistics in general.

So if that sounds like thrilling fun, then stick around! But if it sounds like the deranged ravings of a tedious bore, then you probably aren’t reading this sentence, anyway.

Enjoy!

Bryan Parry

April 2012

5 Comments | artlang, auxlang, conlang, glossopoeia, quenya, Tolkien | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by bryanajparry

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