[Magdalen] Like I Was Puzzled.

[Scott Knitter]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 11:34 AM, Jay Weigel <jay.weigel at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am fascinated by language and languages and was a linguistics major in
> the dim past. I left that when I couldn't figure out how I would ever use
> it in the real world. Now I see that probably the semantics end would have
> been my niche and I could have specialized in translation issues...ah well.

I seem to latch on to things entirely theoretical, like what if we
"cleansed" English (a la the French Academy) and used only
Anglo-Saxon-derived words? I don't actually want this to happen, but
it's fun to pretend (and I was a notorious daydreamer in my school
days, so this feels natural to me). It's fun to think about words that
seem entirely native to our language and those that came in from
elsewhere and how we adapted them and use them now.

Some folks who have this same fascination have developed websites
about it. An interesting angle is how you come up with words for
things that didn't exist centuries ago, and one technique is to study
German cognates (words in German that have obvious similarities to
English words) and develop some new ones via that route. Or one can
revive an obsolete word.

Just discovered "Uncleftish Beholding" (Atomic Theory), a scientific
text written using only Anglo-Saxon-derived words.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding


-- 
Scott R. Knitter
Edgewater, Chicago, Illinois USA