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"Anglish", or Linguistic Purism in English :

Contemporary Examples

Lee Hollander -

Translation of the Poetic Edda (1962)

Background

Paul Kingsnorth -

The Wake: A Novel (2014)

  • "Although Anglo-Saxon lexemes comprise only a relatively small part of the total modern lexicon, they provide almost all the most frequently used words in the language." (Crystal)

  • Throughout its history, many writers and scholars have espoused the alleged benefits of so-called 'pure' English, that is, English that relies principally on its native Anglo-Saxon vocabulary rather than its borrowings from languages like Greek or Latin
  • Among these individuals: Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and George Orwell

  • This concept of a 'purified' English (often called 'Anglish') has taken many forms over the years, ranging from aesthetic experiment to moralistic crusade
  • " 5. From the south the sun, by the side of the moon

heaved his right hand over heaven's rim;

the sun knew not what seat he had,

the stars knew not what stead they held,

the moon knew not what might she had.

6. Then gathered together the gods for counsel,

the holy hosts, and held converse;

to night and new moon their names they gave,

the morning named, and midday also,

forenoon and evening, to order the year. "

  • "when i woc in the mergen all was blaec though the night had gan and all wolde be blaec after and for all time. a great wind had cum in the night and all was blown then and broc. none had thought a wind lic this colde cum for all was blithe lifan as they always had and who will hiere the gleoman when the tales he tells is blaec who locs at the heofon if it brings him regn who locs in the mere when there seems no end to its deopness"

Poul Anderson - Uncleftish Beholding (1989)

George Orwell -

Politics and the English Language (1946)

  • " The firststuffs have their being as motes called *unclefts*. These are mightly small; one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts. Most unclefts link together to make what are called *bulkbits*. Thus, the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts, and so on. (Some kinds, such as sunstuff, keep alone; others, such as iron, cling together in ices when in the fast standing; and there are yet more yokeways.) When unlike clefts link in a bulkbit, they make *bindings*. Thus, water is a binding of two waterstuff unclefts with one sourstuff uncleft, while a bulkbit of one of the forestuffs making up flesh may have a thousand thousand or more unclefts of these two firststuffs together with coalstuff and chokestuff. "

  • 'firststuffs' = elements 'waterstuff' = hydrogen

'sourstuff' = oxygen 'bulkbits' = molecules

'bindings' = compounds 'unclefts' = atoms

  • "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."

  • "I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

' [...] time and chance happeneth to them all. '

Here it is in modern English:

' [...] a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account. '"

Works Cited

Anderson, Poul. Uncleftish Beholding. All One Universe. New York, NY: Tor Science Fiction, 1997. N. pag. Web. 28 Nov. 2016. <https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language.artificial/ZL4e3fD7eW0/_7p8bKwLJWkJ>.

Crystal, David. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print.

Hollander, Lee M. The Poetic Edda. 2nd ed. N.p.: U of Texas, 1988. Web.

Kingsnorth, Paul. The Wake: A Novel. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2015. Web.

Orwell, George. "George Orwell." Horizon 13.76 (1946): 252-65. Politics and the English Language. Web. 28 Nov. 2016. <http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/>.

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