
Linguistic purism in English - colinprince
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_English
======
ScottBurson
_The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English
is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don 't just borrow words; on
occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them
unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary._ \-- James Nicoll
(originally posted to Usenet!)

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tomc1985
The want of linguistic purity is superfluous, and contrary to how languages
develop. In the comforts of daily life polyglots fuse their multiple languages
together, creating a new dialect.

I'm no linguist but one can clearly observe this in japanese "Engrish" (which
is a real phenomenon abroad, my former sensei had stories of mispronounced
English being taught in schools and understood locally), or in hybrids like
Afrikaans or Portuguese. Or in any of the regional dialects that spring up in
mixed cultures.

"Pure" languages like Esperanto are neat, and I think they can serve a
legitimate and useful role at the world's table, but a language that fights
impurities has to constantly push against a strong current. (See: French.)
Real language is messy -- because if the majority of people break some rule of
grammar together, it becomes the new grammar!

Also, those examples of 'pure' Modern English were ugly/crude-
looking/inelegant :(

~~~
TelmoMenezes
> or in hybrids like Afrikaans or Portuguese

Portuguese is not a hybrid language, it's a romance language, a direct
descendant of Latin with some influences from classical Greek, the same as
Spanish, French, Italian and so on.

Modern English could more easily be classified as "hybrid" than Portuguese,
given how much it is influenced by both French and Germanic languages.

~~~
tomc1985
Portuguese is a pretty obvious mix of Spanish and French. I wasn't aware there
were other predominant influences (though there always are)

And you're right about English, there's a joke about how our tongue stalks
other unsuspecting languages in dark alleyways, knocking them out when
opportune to steal loose grammar and vocabulary

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
What makes Portuguese a mix of Spanish and French and not, as TelmoMenezes
says, yet another child of Latin? How do you categorize Romansh, Languedoc,
Galician, Sardinian, and all the others?

~~~
tomc1985
Most of the words I've encountered in written Portuguese appeared to be either
Spanish or French, or visually a combination of the two. It's another child of
Latin, alongside Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian, and others. I don't know
the history and I don't intend that Portuguese is a child of the two, only
that it is another product of the Latin echo chamber by way of its two most
visually apparent influences.

I've never had any purposeful encounters with any of the languages you
mention, though I would certainly like to!

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jhanschoo
[http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Main_leaf](http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Main_leaf)

Here's a wiki in Anglish. It looks very fun.

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katedye
It seems odd that Orwell advocated for English purism, 1984 makes it seem like
using 'base' English words as building blocks and eliminating unnecessary,
flowery language was synonymous with fascism (or at least not a good thing)

~~~
danharaj
The threat of newspeak is that it can render concepts unspeakable. Orwell
advocated using words better. A simple word that bears the right meaning is
better than a complex word that has nuance, but in having nuance is flabby. He
complains in particular that "prose consists less and less of words chosen for
the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like
the sections of a prefabricated hen-house." He claims that there is political
intent behind the trendy language of the day. He's probably right. I will walk
out of the conference room the next time someone tells me to "drill down" or
"circle back" or "touch base". I'll do it for Orwell.

Think of it as a cargo cult of language; play-acting at meaning-saying:
Language wielded like a ritual dagger instead of a tool.

You can recognize some examples of what he'd complain about if you pay
attention to that sense. I'm annoyed by lots of uses of English; I must be fun
to be around. I can't say they're misuses, but i dislike them. My favorite
might be "I would argue", followed by... the author making an argument? Why
the distancing? It's a verbal tick. It creates an air of passivity or
detachment which is immediately contradicted by the words that follow. I
suppose there's an idea these days that being detached and emotionless confers
objectivity and wisdom, but I can't say i know at all for certain why people
write or speak the way they do.

Language should stick to meaning like muscle to bone.

[http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit...](http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/)

~~~
sb057
I think Orwell's view of language is the same basic principle as engineering:
keep it as simple as possible. Don't make it too simple as to lose meaning,
but don't needlessly overcomplicate things either.

~~~
chillacy
Orwell used to be a proponent of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English)
as well.

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lgessler
It might be interesting to consider bodies some countries have created to
regulate language use. In particular, in some some cases (as far as I'm
aware), they do their best to purge the language of foreign loanwords. See
French's _Académie française_ and Hindi's _Central Hindi Directorate_.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
Interesting that you anglicized one instead of the other, that is, why not use
"French Academy" and "Kendriya Hindi Nideshalaya".

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girzel
I was going to comment that they're about a thousand years too late with this,
but then read the article and saw that that was precisely the point.

It's a lovely thought that, in this modern day, we might once again unlock our
wordhoards!

I once read a poem by Seamus Heaney (who also re-translated Beowulf) in which
the language of the poem itself recapitulated the development of English over
the centuries. It was really quite beautiful, though a bare five minutes of
Googling has not turned up the name.

edit: I think it's the Bone Dream sequence, from the collection North.

~~~
mc32
Yeah, I like his translation. I think in the intro he speaks about discovering
that the word 'þolian' in Beowulf was used pretty commonly by someone in his
family, in its modern incarnation, thole, and was fascinated by that
coincidence. [and the kicker, IIRC, was the speaker thought it more indigenous
(to Ireland) than the "regular" English words.]

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ludamad
Linguistic purism in English is a different topic now than it use to be with
English as an international language. I believe spelling reform to be the much
more fruitful topic.

~~~
getoj
A major problem of English spelling reform is that pronunciation varies widely
among native speakers. That problem is only made worse by an even greater
number of non-native speakers having appeared, with an even greater variety of
pronunciations.

If you say t'meito and I say t'mahto, and a Spanish speaker says tomato and a
Korean speaker says 토마토 and a Japanese speaker says トマト, none of which are
phonetically the same, it seems like spelling it 'tomato' is as good a system
as any.

~~~
ludamad
Standardize around US English because people are most exposed to its
pronounciation, IMO

~~~
jacalata
Which US English pronunciation exactly?

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
Texan.

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redsummer
Is there a spellchecker or style-checker which helps you write plain pre-
Norman English (or another "pure" form of English)? In it's simplest form it
could just be a dictionary of acceptable words. A more sophisticated version
would suggest "pure" replacements of impure words.

~~~
arctor
Pre-Norman English looks like this - "Wé Gárdena in géardagum þéodcyninga þrym
gefrúnon hú ðá æþelingas ellen fremedon". I reckon you'd have to sacrifice
quite a lot of intelligibility in your quest for purity.

~~~
wtbob
That's not quite fair. Sure, it'd be cool to bring back þ, ð, æ & ȝ, and maybe
even to have Anglo-Saxon as a kind of priestly or formal tongue. But that's
not needful. One can choose to use 'hearty' instead 'cordial' &c. I wouldn't
mind a tool which helped me choose words of Anglo-Saxon parentage rather than
Latin, when they exist.

