LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM: Anglish

[Michael Everson]

On 11 Jan 2012, at 15:35, Sean B. Palmer wrote:

>> To start with this sort of "cleanspeech" sounds like a very, very broad notion
> 
> Well Anglo-Saxon isn't very "clean", and even the very name of it shows a compounding of the dialects of two peoples. As James Joyce
> says:
> 
> "You tollerday donsk? N. You tolkatiff scowegian? Nn. You spigotty anglease? Nnn. You phonio saxo? Nnnn. Clear all so! 'Tis a Jute."

My, my, how I despise Joyce. But never mind. 

> And there are various dialects of Anglo-Saxon, Mercian, Kentish, Northumbrian and the like.

Language tag "ang"...

> I know that there are some questions around this cultural dimension, and I was going to include a reference to a recent paper on linguistic purity that mentions Anglish, but I didn't think it was relevant. I like Anglish just as I like English Scots.

Except that Scots is a community language, spoken by a huge number of people, which has coherent linguistic descriptions and literature.

> It may be broad, but there is always a hierarchy of usage from broad language families down to an individual's idiolect. A language tag is going to always going to be an umbrella for some variance. At any rate I'm not going to defend or denounce my submission particularly far, because the subtag should be admitted or not on its own merits, independent of rhetorical skill in the pro- or anti- camps. I'm not proselytising!

I understand.

The problem with "Anglish" or any other form of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_linguistic_purism is that there is no community agreeing on what this is. A series of ad-hoc choices are made to decide what non-Romance word to substitute for "decide" (choose, settle on, make up one's mind, reckon out, bychoose, shut through, beshut) or "substitute" (asetting (Cf. NHG Ersatz < ersetzen), speller (>OE 'speliend') (that is, one who spells for another)) or whatever. 

What's at http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Special:WikiActivity is not the same as what's at http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/firstenglish/index.htm nor at http://ednewenglish.tripod.com/index.htm -- and what relation do those three attempts at tongue-tidyness have to do with William Barnes 1878 and David Cowley 2009?

> I know moreover that you are already familiar with Anglish, and I'm sure you and Doug Ewell will assess the submission competently, and I
> will bow to whatever you decide.

So far I'm not convinced that there is a coherent entity to be tagged. 

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/