ANGLISH: English without the 'foreign' bits

What would English have been like if William the Conqueror had been William the Conquered? How would we be speaking if our language had never come under the influence of French, Latin or Greek? The answer is: Anglish.

In this video:
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Learn to speak Anglish
🗣 See how great speakers (e.g. Churchill) make use of Anglo-Saxon words
📕 Hear about historic attempts to rid English of borrowed vocab
🇺🇸 Watch me REWRITE THE US CONSTITUTION!

==LINKS==

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==CHAPTERS==
0:00 Introduction
1:00 What is Anglish?
2:55 "To be or not to be" in Anglish
4:03 The Anglish Times 1
5:03 Winston Churchill's Anglo-Saxon
6:25 NordVPN
8:22 How to write in Anglish (Anglish Times 2)
11:42 Inkhorn Controversy
15:02 Rewriting the US Constitution
16:03 Anglish Constitution

[RobWords]

Is English better for the all the import words? I personally think yes (the more words the merrier!). Let me know your opinion.

[vazqcon]

I find it comforting as a Romance language speaker to be able to understand Anglish because it makes me feel like I have really learned the language and have acquired a decent amount of vocabulary and that I'm not just "englishifying" Spanish.

[martinstent]

Tolkien was a great master of Anglish. In fact the Lord of the Rings is written almost entirely in Anglish! There are some latin based words which he couldn’t reasonably avoid, but in the general case he always used the words with old English etymology. And he did it masterfully!!

[pnadk]

For a scandinavian person, Anglish is very logical and easy to understand.

[BlinkyLass]

Just noticed the use of the word 'outrageous' in Anglish Hamlet. Outrage has the appearance of a native word, but it's actually from Old French _oltrage_ (related to _ultra_) and not out + rage, as people later interpreted it. Rage was also another French loanword. Just goes to show how deeply French dug into English that it's not always easy to tell what's native.

[Waychums]

As a Spanish speaker I’ve always appreciated the Latin/French borrowings because it felt almost like someone just handed me a cheat code to learn English. At the same time it made English feel a little lame since a lot of the time practicing the more “learned” vocabulary felt as though I was just pronouncing Spanish words funny. That’s why Anglish sounds really cool to me. I’m not much of a History person so I couldn’t really describe the time period it reminds me of, but I feel like I’m reading English as some cool ancient warrior would speak it.

[jensschroder]

Anglish is much easier to understand as a German without being able to speak French or Italian.
The Anglish words feel familiar or can be easily deduced from familiar ones.

[zippofeldman]

As a Swedish speaker, this was really cool to see since Swedish is a Germanic language like English, but has nowhere near as many loanwords. Many of the Anglish words have a clear equivalent in Swedish with roughly the same meaning, and that Anglish constitution I could almost entirely translate into Swedish and make it sound very similar.

Also as an Icelander (another Germanic language) in the comments said, using ”other” for 2nd is exactly what happens in Swedish too, where ”andra” means both other and second

[aum]

As an Italian that lived in UK for almost 9 years, I’ve appreciated pure Anglish. I often felt like I was walking with a boot on one foot and a shoe in the other when speaking bastardized English.
Anglish sounds unfamiliar initially, but then it makes complete and straightforward sense and it’s enjoyable to compose new words from simpler ones: “word book” instead of dictionary, “hundredyear” rather than century. I like it and I think it would be less confusing to learn Anglish because it would be more consistent.

[migra]

03:34 In German "Klang" is the noun and “klingen” is the verb.

[ДанилоКомненић]

This reminded me of Croatian effort to crate Slavic Croatian words for many things so to replace foreign words. As a Serb I actually love it! They saved Southslavic words from being forgotten. Even the old words for months is so beautiful ❤️

[matheussandbakk]

As a both a Norwegian and someone who's learning German, both germanic languages, it's neat to see that the new Anglish words used literally tranlates the exact same way to these languages

Like obviously these languages also borrow, but even a lot of the borrowed words have native alternatives. For television for example, us Norwegains usually just use the abbreviation of "TV", however the proper Norwegian word is "Fjernsyn", which in German is "Fernsehen", both literally meaning "Far sight" or "Far seeing"

[_Erendis]

Thanks for this video, Rob. I always learn something from your videos. This one reminded me of the documentary from 2000, The Adventure of English, where they discussed the Inkhorn Controversy, and in detail how the language changed over the centuries. In every episode of the series the host gave examples of new words introduced into the language from extremely far and wide. Because of watching that series I tried reading an interlinear translation of Beowulf, and slowly started picking up on how the grammar and vocabulary changed between back then and today. I agree that the old words 'hit harder, ' which can be important in certain contexts. The introduction of French in 1066 and beyond affected the grammar of Old English dramatically-- it's why we have the type of sentence structure we use nowadays.

[proinsiasbaiceir]

The Dutch word for ‘other’ is ‘ander’. In one phrase ‘ander’ is still used in the sense of ‘second’. In auctions the autioneer will say: ‘eenmaal, andermaal, verkocht!’ Literally: ‘one time, second time, sold!’. In ‘atheling’ Dutch speakers will recognise their word for nobelman: ‘edele’ (less known: ‘edeling’) and German speakers their word ‘Adliger’. And in ‘frith’ Dutch speakers will recognise ‘vrede’ and German speakers ‘Frieden’. This word is also found in the first name ‘Frederick’, Dutch ‘Frederik’, German ‘Friedrich’. The word ‘foroned’ seems to be al literal translation of the Dutch ‘verenigd’ and even more the German ‘vereint’. (One = 'een' (Dutch), 'ein' (German).

[annsidbrant]

I like Anglish! As a Swede, I find it mostly very easy to understand. Take "frith", for example. It is clearly the same word as the Swedish "frid" or "fred". Understanding the meaning of "Queen Elizabeth the Other" wasn't hard, but I was stumped at the word "Atheling", until I realized that it is the same word as the rather old-fashioned Swedish word "ädling", nobleman. Anyway, the Danes that conquered much of English back in the tenth century - and of course you should say "hundredyear" instead of "century", like we in Sweden say "århundrade" - Well, back to my point: When the Danes conquered much of England, they could supposedly speak to the English - or Anglo-Saxon? - people living there and make themselves understood, because the English and Danish (and Swedish) languages were so very similar back then. This was before the time of William the Conqueror, after all, and the first huge influx of French into the English language. Ah, Anglish! ❤

[scorpio]

I speak English almost as a native language as I've been learning it from a very young age in tandem. And I do think the English words seem to "hit harder". it's quite the fun exercise to write only in Anglish just after watching your video. On the other side of the world, Japanese, Korea, and Vietnamese had all wanted to get rid of their Chinese loan words and none of them prevailed. The truth is, human civilization have always mingle and borrowed from one another, whenever one feels the other is superior or yields a better fit. I don't see how we would ever go backwards.

[aramisortsbottcher]

6:00 There is no joke hidden here, is there?

[clarabartha]

And yet, I understood most everything so it's very intuitive. One interesting observation is that my mother tongue, the Hungarian language is often a literal interpretation of something where the derivatives of more complex words or concepts are just amalgamations of two or more other concepts, nouns or descriptors. Quick example is 'testvér' which means sibling but the word taken literally means 'body-blood'. So it, too in some ways is hard-hitting or primal in its communicativity...if that's a word, and if not, it is my gift to you. ; )

[serbianspaceforce]

Anglish in some ways reminds me of newspeak. Words like askthink and name-known evoke a similar sense of the familiar but strange

[robertjenkins]

I think it's useful to have multiple loanwords that mean basically the same thing as a native word, because from there people can fine tune distinctions to add layers of nuance, connotation, context, and register (formal, casual, scientific, etc.). Foreign-origin words also provide adjectives: for example, _heart_ (noun, native origin) versus _cardiac_ (adjective, Greek → Latin → French). None of {heart-like, heart-shaped, hearty} meant exactly the same thing as _cardiac_ ("pertaining to the heart"). You could let the noun double as an adjective, but maybe it is better to have another word (cardiac).