I for one, thank you a lot for your clarification. I am a native german speaker and by no means a linguist - so I appreciate your effort to make some of these historical processes clearer.
I was just a bit disappointed becuase I expected something else… there is a german book by Ze do Rock (a native brasilian for that matter) who tries to invent “Siegfridisch” a language that gets rid of all “foreign” words. No more “street (strasse)” for that is from latin, instead he uses “way (weg)” which is germanic. Also, the german wort “schreiben” stems from latin “scribere” and has to be replaced with the english “write” (ritzen) since that is what the celts did… and I was hoping this newspaper would do something similar :-)
Originally Anglish was a lot like Siegfridisch - a single guy (Paul Jennings), replacing borrowings with new expressions coined from native words, just for fun. Jennings framed this as how English would be if the Normans were defeated in 1066, and he published it in a satirical magazine (Punch).
It does look more serious nowadays, though. Anglish started out in 1966, and the people picking the idea up focused a lot on making it more consistent. (And also because Jennings wasn’t being as playful as Zé do Rock.)
Kind of off-topic, but can you believe that practically nobody knows Zé do Rock here in Brazil? Even if a chunk of his stuff is written also in Portuguese. (He also plays with the language, his “brazileis” is… weird, but in a good way, to say the least.)
Wow. Thank you again for your detailed answer. I might have a look into Mr. Jennings and the Punch magazine.
Hats off to Zé and to you for sharing your love for language(s) and teaching me a fair bit about that :-)
Cheers!
I for one, thank you a lot for your clarification. I am a native german speaker and by no means a linguist - so I appreciate your effort to make some of these historical processes clearer. I was just a bit disappointed becuase I expected something else… there is a german book by Ze do Rock (a native brasilian for that matter) who tries to invent “Siegfridisch” a language that gets rid of all “foreign” words. No more “street (strasse)” for that is from latin, instead he uses “way (weg)” which is germanic. Also, the german wort “schreiben” stems from latin “scribere” and has to be replaced with the english “write” (ritzen) since that is what the celts did… and I was hoping this newspaper would do something similar :-)
Originally Anglish was a lot like Siegfridisch - a single guy (Paul Jennings), replacing borrowings with new expressions coined from native words, just for fun. Jennings framed this as how English would be if the Normans were defeated in 1066, and he published it in a satirical magazine (Punch).
It does look more serious nowadays, though. Anglish started out in 1966, and the people picking the idea up focused a lot on making it more consistent. (And also because Jennings wasn’t being as playful as Zé do Rock.)
Kind of off-topic, but can you believe that practically nobody knows Zé do Rock here in Brazil? Even if a chunk of his stuff is written also in Portuguese. (He also plays with the language, his “brazileis” is… weird, but in a good way, to say the least.)
Wow. Thank you again for your detailed answer. I might have a look into Mr. Jennings and the Punch magazine. Hats off to Zé and to you for sharing your love for language(s) and teaching me a fair bit about that :-) Cheers!