Anglish: A form of English “stripped clean of the last 1,000 years of non-Germanic influence, while also being brought up to date in terms of modern syntax, grammar and spelling.” (Source: Tom Roswell, guest-blogging at The World in Words.) Also known as New English. Its complement is Anglo-Norman Conventional Written English, or Ancwe.
Scholars and linguistic hobbyists have dabbled in Anglish for more than a century. Tom Roswell writes [punctuation sic]:
The Anglish movement has roots way back in the late 1800s when Elias Molee advocated an English purged of its Romance components. He made his case in two books; “Pure Saxon English” and “Plea for an American Language, or Germanic-English”. He proposed a language similar to Anglish called Tutonish, which was intended to be a “union tongue” for all the Germanic-language speaking peoples, with a schematised English syntax and a largely German- and Scandinavian-based vocabulary.
Modern ideas about New-English started around the mid-1800s with William Barnes, the Dorset dialect poet. He reasoned that if English words were closer to everyday speech, then the language as a whole would be easier to understand for the average speaker of Common English. He published a book along these lines, and gave some suggestions for new words which could be used to replace some of the more difficult borrowed words.
In 1989 an American science-fiction writer, Poul Anderson, wrote an essay in Anglish called “Uncleftish Beholding” (“Atomic Theory”). An early passage demonstrates both the familiarity and the pleasant strangeness of Anglish:
The firststuffs have their being as motes called *unclefts*. These are mightly small; one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts.
The Anglish Moot’s wordbook—“dictionary” in Anglish—includes “all known and suggested Anglish/New English words and their meanings”—but not, unfortunately, most of Anderson’s invented words, such as seedweight (gram) and waterstuff (hydrogen). There are entries for historical Old English words (pith, abaft, eady, meadow-month) and also creative inventions such as banewave (tsunami), mindsee (imagine), and limberhall (gymnasium).
(Via a tweet by Lynneguist.)