Linguistic purism in English

{{see also|Middle English creole hypothesis}}

English words gave way to borrowings from Anglo-Norman following the Norman Conquest as English lost ground as a language of prestige. Anglo-Norman was used in schools and dominated literature, nobility and higher life, leading a wealth of French loanwords to enter English over the course of several centuries—English only returned to courts of law in 1362, and to government in the following century.{{cite book|last1=Kay|first1=Christian|last2=Allan|first2=Kathryn|title=English Historical Semantics|chapter=A brief history of the English lexicon|year=2015|publisher=Edinburgh University Press|isbn=978-0748644773|pages=6–24}}

Notwithstanding, some texts of early Middle English engaged in linguistic purism, deliberately avoiding excessive Anglo-Norman influence. Layamon's Brut, composed in the late 12th or early 13th century, espoused several features of Old English poetic style and used a predominantly Anglo-Saxon vocabulary.Ackerman, Robert W. (1966) Backgrounds to Medieval English Literature. 1st. New York: Random House, Inc. Ancrene Wisse, of the same era, allowed for French and Old Norse loans but maintained conservative spelling and syntax to keep with Old English.{{cite journal | last=Tolkien | first=J.R.R. |author-link=J.R.R. Tolkien | year=1929 | title=Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad | journal= Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association | volume=14 | pages=104–126 }} Ayenbite of Inwyt, a Kentish translation of a French treatise on morality written about a century earlier, used calques to avoid borrowing from French.{{cite news|last=Herman|first=Louis Jay|title=Remorse From Dan Michel to James Joyce|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/08/opinion/l-remorse-from-dan-michel-to-james-joyce-386189.html|work=The New York Times|date=8 January 1989|access-date=25 January 2021}}

Controversy over inkhorn terms—foreign loanwords perceived to be needless—persisted in the 16th and 17th centuries. Among others, Thomas Elyot, a neologiser, borrowed extensively from abroad in support of "the necessary augmentation" of English.{{cite journal |last1=Vos |first1=Alvin |date=October 1976 |title=Humanistic Standards of Diction in the Inkhorn Controversy |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/4173916 |journal=Studies in Philology |publisher=University of North Carolina Press |volume=73 |issue=4 |pages=376–396 |jstor=4173916 |access-date=25 January 2021}} Linguistic purists such as John Cheke opposed this borrowing in favour of keeping English "unmixt and unmangled".{{cite web |url=https://spartacus-educational.com/John_Cheke.htm |title=John Cheke |last=Simkin |first=John|date=September 1997 | website=Spartacus Educational |access-date=25 January 2021}} Thomas Wilson, a contemporary of Cheke, criticised borrowing from foreign languages as seeking an "outlandish English".

File:William Barnes poet.jpg, a 19th-century poet and linguistic purist]]

With the influx of new industrial and scientific terms from Greek and Latin, linguistic purism saw renewed interest in the 19th century.{{cite book|last1=Langer|first1=Nils|last2=Davies|first2=Winifred|title=Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages|year=2005|publisher=De Gruyter|isbn=3-11-018337-4|pages=103}} American statesman Thomas Jefferson observed in an 1825 letter that "a taste is reviving in England for the recovery of the Anglo-Saxon dialect".{{cite web |url=https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-5648 |title=From Thomas Jefferson to J. Evelyn Denison, 9 November 1825 |publisher=National Archives and Records Administration |website=founders.archives.gov |access-date=28 January 2021}} Dorset poet, minister, and philologist William Barnes coined several words to promote "strong old Anglo-Saxon speech", including speechcraft for grammar, birdlore for ornithology, and bendsome for flexible.{{cite book|last=Barnes|first=Williams|title=An Outline of English Speech-Craft|year=1878|publisher=C. Kegan Paul & Co.}} Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins discussed Barnes in an 1882 letter to Robert Bridges, lamenting the "utter hopelessness" of Barnes's purism but nonetheless writing in support of it, claiming that "no beauty in a language can make up for want of purity".{{cite book|title=Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages|first1=Nils|last1=Langer|first2=Winifred|last2=Davies|publisher=Walter de Gruyter|year=2005|page=328}} Charles Dickens emphasised the importance of Germanic elements of English during this period, stressing that a writer should not "seek abroad" for new words.

The fifth rule of vocabulary in The King's English, published in 1917, suggests that writers should "prefer the Saxon word to the Romance". In his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language", George Orwell criticised the extensive use of "foreign" words in English. Australian composer Percy Grainger, a contemporary of Orwell, invented a "blue-eyed English" that he perceived to be linguistically pure and preferred the use of English words in the place of traditional Italian music terms. One year after Grainger's death, philologist Lee Hollander emphasised in his 1962 translation of the Poetic Edda—a collection of Old Norse poems—that "Germanic material must be drawn upon to the utmost extent ... because of the tang and flavor still residing in the homelier indigenous speech material".{{cite book|last=Hollander|first=Lee M.|title=The Poetic Edda|year=1986|publisher=University of Texas Press|isbn=0292764995|page=xxviii}}

Paul Jennings coined the term "Anglish" in a three-part series in Punch commemorating the 900th anniversary of the Norman conquest of England. Jennings's articles, entitled "1066 and All Saxon" and published in June 1966, envisioned an England in which the conquest had failed and included linguistically pure English passages; Jennings gave "a bow to William Barnes" as an inspiration.{{cite magazine |last=Jennings |first=Paul |date=June 1966 |title= 1066 and All Saxon |magazine= Punch |location= London}} In 1989, science fiction writer Poul Anderson released a similarly-written text about basic atomic theory called Uncleftish Beholding composed almost fully of Germanic-rooted words. In 1997, Douglas Hofstadter jokingly entitled the style "Ander-Saxon".{{cite book|last=Hofstadter|first=Douglas R.|title=Le Ton beau de Marot|year=1997|publisher=Basic Books|isbn=0465086454}}

The September 2009 publication How We'd Talk if the English had Won in 1066 by David Cowley updates Old English words to today's English spelling, seeking mainstream appeal by covering words in five grades ranging from "easy" to "weird and wonderful" and giving many examples of use with drawings and tests.{{cite web|url=https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/how-wed-talk-if-the-english-had-won-in-1066-david-cowley/1137949846|title=How We'd Talk if the English Had Won in 1066: New Edition 2020|website=Barnes & Noble|access-date=25 January 2021}} Paul Kingsnorth's 2014 The Wake is written in a hybrid of Old English and Modern English to account for its 1066 milieu,{{cite web |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/02/the-wake-paul-kingsnorth-review-literary-triumph |title=The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth review – 'A literary triumph' |last=Thorpe |first=Adam |date=2 April 2014 |website=The Guardian |access-date=2021-01-08}} and Edmund Fairfax's 2017 satiric literary novel Outlaws is similarly written in a "constructed" form of English consisting almost exclusively of words of Germanic origin.{{cite book|last=Fairfax|first=Edmund|title=Outlaws|year=2017|publisher=Bokos|isbn=978-0995296503|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MA03swEACAAJ}} An online newsletter called The Anglish Times has regularly reported on current events without non-Germanic borrowed words since January 2021.{{Cite web |title=News Written In Anglish |url=https://theanglishtimes.com/ |access-date=2022-11-15 |website=theanglishtimes.com}}

• Linguistic purism
• Word family
• Constrained writing
• Plain English, a variety of English written specifically for clarity
• List of Germanic and Latinate equivalents in English

{{Reflist}}

{{English nationalism}}

{{Germanic languages}}

{{English dialects by continent}}

Category:Forms of English

English

Category:English nationalism

Category:Germanic languages

Category:History of the English language