“Friendly” and “land” are inherited, not borrowed. Those are two different processes and Anglish only gets rid of the words from one, not from the other.
“English” is not a mix; “English vocabulary” is. (Just like the vocab of most other languages.) A language is not just its vocab just like a mammal is not just its fur. The core of the language (its grammar) is pretty much what you expect from a Germanic language after some aggressive erosion of the case system.
English didn’t get many words from “German”; the inherited vocab is from “Proto-Germanic”. The name might be similar but they’re different languages, Proto-Germanic is the parent of English, German, Swedish, Icelandic, Gothic, etc.
People often point out the “French” (actually a mix of French and Norman) loanwords in English. Sure, there’s a lot of them, but as Anglish shows they aren’t structurally that important. On the other hand, the text couldn’t get rid of “they”, even if it’s a borrowing from Old Norse - the old third person plural “hīe” would probably have ended as “she”, just like the feminine singular.
EDIT: if the downvotes are due to some incorrect piece of info, please, say it. I tried to make the comment as accurate as possible, but something might’ve slipped, dunno.
Alternatively, if something that I said is unclear, please also say it and I’ll do my best to clarify it.
I for one, thank you a lot for your clarification. I am a native german speaker and by no means a linguist - so I appreciate your effort to make some of these historical processes clearer.
I was just a bit disappointed becuase I expected something else… there is a german book by Ze do Rock (a native brasilian for that matter) who tries to invent “Siegfridisch” a language that gets rid of all “foreign” words. No more “street (strasse)” for that is from latin, instead he uses “way (weg)” which is germanic. Also, the german wort “schreiben” stems from latin “scribere” and has to be replaced with the english “write” (ritzen) since that is what the celts did… and I was hoping this newspaper would do something similar :-)
“Friendly” and “land” are inherited, not borrowed. Those are two different processes and Anglish only gets rid of the words from one, not from the other.
“English” is not a mix; “English vocabulary” is. (Just like the vocab of most other languages.) A language is not just its vocab just like a mammal is not just its fur. The core of the language (its grammar) is pretty much what you expect from a Germanic language after some aggressive erosion of the case system.
English didn’t get many words from “German”; the inherited vocab is from “Proto-Germanic”. The name might be similar but they’re different languages, Proto-Germanic is the parent of English, German, Swedish, Icelandic, Gothic, etc.
People often point out the “French” (actually a mix of French and Norman) loanwords in English. Sure, there’s a lot of them, but as Anglish shows they aren’t structurally that important. On the other hand, the text couldn’t get rid of “they”, even if it’s a borrowing from Old Norse - the old third person plural “hīe” would probably have ended as “she”, just like the feminine singular.
EDIT: if the downvotes are due to some incorrect piece of info, please, say it. I tried to make the comment as accurate as possible, but something might’ve slipped, dunno.
Alternatively, if something that I said is unclear, please also say it and I’ll do my best to clarify it.
I for one, thank you a lot for your clarification. I am a native german speaker and by no means a linguist - so I appreciate your effort to make some of these historical processes clearer. I was just a bit disappointed becuase I expected something else… there is a german book by Ze do Rock (a native brasilian for that matter) who tries to invent “Siegfridisch” a language that gets rid of all “foreign” words. No more “street (strasse)” for that is from latin, instead he uses “way (weg)” which is germanic. Also, the german wort “schreiben” stems from latin “scribere” and has to be replaced with the english “write” (ritzen) since that is what the celts did… and I was hoping this newspaper would do something similar :-)