Hwaet!

[icepixie]

Interesting link of the day: The Anglish Moot, a Wikipedia-like wiki written using only words of Anglo-Saxon/Germanic origin and excluding loanwords from languages like French or Latin. It leads to interesting things like the article on The Banded Folkdoms of Americksland, or "translations" of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" and MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech.

Related: Uncleftish Beholding, or atomic theory written using only English words of Germanic origin.

I never realized how much I love words with non-Germanic etymologies. Those were fun to read, but it would drive me crazy to have to speak like that.

Comments

[celamity]

They forgot to eradicate all traces of Welsh grammar.

And I don't think 'English' means what they think it means.

(Recommended book on the topic: 'Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: the Untold History of English' by John Whorter)

[icepixie]

They forgot to eradicate all traces of Welsh grammar.

I think they were leaving the grammar as it is, because it would be unreadable if they went back to Old English grammar. (I never did entirely wrap my head around cases when I took my one semester of it. I know lots of languages have them and other people find them easy, but I just failed at them.) Which does somewhat defeat the purpose, but as a practical guideline for a thought experiment, I can see why the did it.

Thanks for the book rec!

[fallingtowers.livejournal.com]

Heh! Thanks for the links - I'll forward Uncleftish Beholding to my flatmate, the physics Ph.D. student, immediately. Maybe she'll get a laugh out of it while she's spending Sunday in a lab...

[icepixie]

I have a feeling that will make more sense to a physics-minded person than it did to me. :)

[fallingtowers.livejournal.com]

She sent back an enthusiatic response, in which she pointed out slight mistakes in the original text. Also in "Anglish". I <3 living with a total nerd.