In the spirit of experimentation which led me to write my commentary posts only just before the actual post goes live, I’ve decided to try doing the weekend open thread posts a bit differently too. Being my place to soapbox and/or discuss all the interesting things I’ve seen or done through the course of the week, they have nevertheless been a bit sparse of late, and so I’ll be fiddling with them as the week goes onward instead of writing them all on Friday.

To kick us off, I was poking around TVtropes and came across a reference to Poul Anderson’s neat little piece Uncleftish Beholding, of which you’ve probably heard. I’ll therefore kick the description of it down to the following footnote[1]. As an aside, it was originally a goal of mine to try to do the same thing with my writing; it’s more difficult than it looks, so I gave up on it.

That’s not the interesting thing, though. Studying Russian as I am now (and German as I once was), I occasionally come across lamentations about how borrowings from English and other languages are ruining the purity of the tongue[2]. I’ve always taken it for granted that English speakers never really cared, and so of course I find an article on Wikipedia which proves me wrong. In reading about ‘inkhorn terms’, a pejorative name for borrowings from Greek and Latin (usually), I discovered that English has already had the debate. It’s just that we had it from about 1550 to 1650.

That’s only a marginally interesting sub-issue, though: more interesting are some of the words that those against imported words came up with. I do wish English had words like inwit (conscience), endsay (conclusion), yeartide (anniversary), and crosslikening speechlore (comparative linguistics).

Interesting stuff.

[1] It’s a description of basic atomic theory written using only words of Anglo-Saxon descent, except for a few which Anderson either forgot about or decided weren’t worth the trouble. Some other author whose name escapes me at the moment called it ‘Ander-Saxon’.
[2] German example. A bit tongue in cheek. I can offer no better Russian example than the verb гуглить (googlit’): to Google it.