User:Hurlebatte

Reddit Posts I Want to Record

Why initial /dʒ/ is questionable

Initial /dʒ/ is not native to English, it was brought into English with French loanwords. That being the case, without French influence it's quite likely that English, like other Germanic languages, would avoid allowing [dʒ] to show up at the beginning of syllables.

Modern English is conlangy too

I want to whine about something. There's this certain hypocrisy some detractors of Anglish are guilty of. They try to belittle Anglish by pointing out its conlangy elements, but Modern English has conlangy elements too. In medieval and early modern times the average scribe was a Romeaboo, and they deliberately replaced many native, natural words with New Latin conglangy inventions. But I've never seen Anglish's detractors mention that, or express disapproval of that.

Three stages of Anglish

Whenever we've tried to classify the different kinds of Anglish our classifications would kind of break down because we would try to come up with narrow boxes which few people neatly fit into. I think I've come up with something better. I think there are three main approaches to Anglish which everyone pretty neatly fits into, and which explains their preferences.

1) The Modern Purism Approach

This is the earliest approach, as seen in works like Uncleftish Beholding. With this approach you take Modern English, cut out non-Germanic loanwords, then work with what's left.

2) The Historical Purism Approach

This approach developed next. I didn't witness this myself, but I think what happened is after the Anglish Moot was founded and people began trying to use Anglish for more than writing a couple articles, they noticed how limited Anglish is because of its small vocabulary. Since a dead inborn word is still an inborn word, the Anglish Moot began looking to historical forms of English to strengthen Anglish's vocabulary.

3) The Healing Approach

This is the latest approach. I've seen a shift in this direction on the Anglish Moot (they no longer use made-up country names), but the strongest form exists on Reddit and Discord. The goal of this approach is to restore English's inborn vocabulary, but not to reject loanwords like monkey, tiramisu, and Indonesia which don't threaten inborn words.

What to call Celts

Today *Wales* and *Welsh* refer to modern Wales and modern Welsh, but these words used to be English's terms for *Celts* and *Celtic* (more or less). I found this a problem since if I reverted these words to their old meanings then we'd lose the ability to talk about Wales and Welsh in the modern sense.

I think I found a solution. Wales in today's sense seems to have been called Northwales in Old English. I think this was to distinguish Wales from Cornwall (or Cornwales, if you'd rather) to the south. So if we revert the Welsh from being *THE WELSH* back to just being *the Northwelsh* (Norwelsh for short), that'll allow us to revert *Welsh* back to meaning *Celtic*. I don't think the Norwelsh should mind this reversion too much since *Welsh* is outlandish to them anyways, and if we want to be polite we should call them by their native name anyway.

By the way, this reversion also opens up the terms Britwales and Britwelsh to mean Britons and Brythonic.

P.S. Here's evidence Northwales meant Wales as a whole and not but northern Wales.

"þa cyningas on Norþwealum, Howel, ⁊ Cledauc, ⁊ Ieoþwel, ⁊ eall Norþweallcyn hine sohton him to hlaforde"

Here are three names of kings of "Northwales". One is Howel the Good (Hywel Dda), who was a king of southern Wales. So that seems to confirm to me that southern Wales as we know it today was inside Old English's "Northwales".

P.P.S. It looks like the Celtic Gauls were called pretty much Gallwales. So that confirms that the Anglo-Saxons didn't limit the term to British Celts.

Modernisations

I think I'm going to start swapping out -ness for -ing in a lot of revived words. I'm talking about words like *akennedness* (birth, incarnation). I think it should be *akenning*. -ness seems to have had wider meaning in Old English, and it sounds weird in New English when brooked like that. I do the same thing with Old English -end, where it turn it into -er most of the time.

Compounds

Something I've noticed is that a lot of us, me included, don't use compounds to their full potential. For example, I recently translated *Religious Peace of Augsburg* as *Liefy Frith of Augsburg*. This isn't too bad on its own, but as too many words ending in -y pile up in a single document it begins to sound kind of childish and wonky. It later hit me that I could've made a compound: *lieffrith* (religion-peace). *The Lieffrith of Augsburg* has a more Old Englishy slash Germanic feel to it, and using such compounds can do a lot to make Anglish sound less childish.

Slavish calques are bad

What should the Anglish word for *astronomy* be? The answer seems obvious: starlore. Well I say no. I do like calquing Greek and Latin sometimes, but this is a time when slavishly mimicking Greco-Latin would weigh Anglish down.

Starlore, if you look at the bits that make it up, should truly mean "the science of stars" not "the science of outer space as a whole". The word astronomy being misleading doesn't mean our Anglish match of it also has to be misleading. Our word for "the science of outer space" could be rodderlore. Starlore would then be the branch of rodderlore which only deals with stars.

Rodder is an Anglish word built from Old English *rodor*. As far as I can tell, this rodor word pretty much meant "that stead where the stars and planets are". They likely thought the rodder was a big roof which the stars were stuck to, but today we know the rodder is a big gap.