| abstract
| - The aim of Anglish/New-English is: English with many fewer words borrowed from other tongues. Because of the fundamental changes to our language, to say that English people today speak English is like saying that the French speak Latin. The fact is that we now speak the international language, Ancwe (Ancillary World English). Unlike most nations, we no longer "own" our language. The Anglish/New English project is intended as a means of recovering the Englishness of English and of restoring ownership of the language to the English people. Robert of Gloucester, speaking in part of earlier centuries, in the mid to late thirteenth century said: ...the Norman could not speak anything then except their own speech, and they spoke French as they had idone at home, and had their children taught it, too, so that important men in this country who come from their stock all keep to that same speech that they derived from them; because, unless a man knows French, he is thought little of. But humble men keep to English and their own speech still. I reckon there are no countries in the whole world that do not keep to their own speech, except England only. (Little has changed.) King Edward I, when issuing writs for summoning Parliament in 1295, claimed that the King of France planned to invade England and extinguish the English language, "a truly detestable plan which may God avert". In the Cursor Mundi, an anonymous religious poem in northern Middle English dating from approximately 1300, appears the words: "Of Ingland the nacion". The Prologue starts: Þ,þ (thorn) = Th,th; lede = people; mast = most; quat = what; lauid = lewd (i.e., lay[men]) This can be translated into modern English as: In 1323 Henry Lambard, a cleric, was brought before a court and asked how he wished to clear himself of charges of theft. Lambard said in English that he was a cleric and was then asked if he knew Latin or French. He replied that he was English, and English-born, and that to speak in his mother tongue was proper. He refused to speak any other language except English. Refusing to give any other answer to the court, he was committed to another court to suffer peine forte et dure. Paul Jennings, who first proposed Anglish in the British satirical magazine Punch, admitted that it was intended as a joke. Leaving that to one side, as George Orwell argued, there are good reasons for removing non-English words from the language to create New-English and employing as many words as possible of Germanic origin. The adoption of Paul Jennings's joke name, Anglish, is not particularly fortuitous. A more serious approach needs to be taken. Firstly, the Germanic elements of the language, and the language itself, need to still be known as English. It is the other form of the language, which has lost so much of its Germanic vocabulary, that should have a new name, e.g., Monglish (mongrel English) or Langlish (Latinate English)*. David Crystal has shown in his encyclopedia of the language that so-called English is more like Italian than is it is like any other tongue.
* how about Anglous = Anglo-US or English-like, or Angloid = Anglophone idiom? Or Mix-E (mixed English) or Latish (Latinized English)? Or Latengo (Latino-English)? The New-English project, in order to succeed, has to be restricted to the language of England, as a regional language, and it must have the backing of academia and British state institutions, such as the BBC, much as Welsh has. Rather as in Norway, the initial take-up is likely to be remote from the capital city, i.e., North of the Humber, where everyday speech remains closer to the original English tongue. How can the necessary speech communities be brought into being? The most likely places are close to the Scottish border, Northumberland and Cumberland. The driving force will be so-called Scots, originally a Northumbrian tongue but much corrupted with Norman French and Latin. The earlier name for Scots is Inglis. As Scots is re-habilitated in Scotland, it will create the incentive for Inglis, cleansed of French and Latin, to be restored in the northern half of England (Inglelond). There will need to be a movement in England behind New-English as the national language, like Cymdeithas yr Iaith (The Welsh Language Society) in Wales. Somebody should call for folk from all over England, and the English speaking world, to a yearly Folkshiply Moot (national conference), maybe in Derby which has good rail links, to discuss the development and promotion of New-English as England's national language (folkshiply speech) and to partake in English cultural events and to use New-English as a living language. Beyond the ambition of creating a predominantly English vocabulary, cleansed of unnecessary foreign, mostly Latin and Greek words, there is a wide range of personal interpretations of what constitutes Anglish (New-English). Some may only wish to write making the best of such true English words as are available, avoiding borrowed words where possible, but accepting them where needed. Others may wish to take out all those borrowed words, and where there is no existing alternative true English word, to invent a wholly new word to go in its stead. These are perhaps the two most widely differing views on the Anglish/New-English project, and there exist many possible interpretations between them, hanging on a writer's personal view. Below are some of the more commonly asked questions regarding the Anglish/New-English project, but they are by no means exhaustive. Hopefully, the answers are informative enough to be useful, but short enough to be easily read.
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