When I was a child, I spoke like a child. Now I am a man and I speak like the King of England!
English is three different languages in a trench coat. It’s all borrowed to some degree.
Most linguists formally classify English as Germanic (West Germanic, alongside Frisian, Dutch and German, though one Norwegian linguist made a case for it being North Germanic), though some people refer to it as a Romance-Germanic creole. It is quantifiably true that, if you want to read Old English, knowing Icelandic will be more helpful than knowing modern English.
But there are heaps of borrowed words in that text? “Friendly” stems from old germanic, so does “land”… how is there no etymologist checking for “foreign” words? Oh wait, english is but a mix of bad french and bad german… But still. I expected a bit more effort to replace “foreign” words…
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English is a Germanic language, so Germanic words are fine, foreign just means latin, greek, french…
so Germanic words are fine
Not all Germanic words; it depends on how they found their way into the vocabulary. For example something like “sky” should be still removed, even if Germanic - because it’s an Old Norse borrowing.
“Friendly” and “land” are inherited, not borrowed. Those are two different processes and Anglish only gets rid of the words from one, not from the other.
“English” is not a mix; “English vocabulary” is. (Just like the vocab of most other languages.) A language is not just its vocab just like a mammal is not just its fur. The core of the language (its grammar) is pretty much what you expect from a Germanic language after some aggressive erosion of the case system.
English didn’t get many words from “German”; the inherited vocab is from “Proto-Germanic”. The name might be similar but they’re different languages, Proto-Germanic is the parent of English, German, Swedish, Icelandic, Gothic, etc.
People often point out the “French” (actually a mix of French and Norman) loanwords in English. Sure, there’s a lot of them, but as Anglish shows they aren’t structurally that important. On the other hand, the text couldn’t get rid of “they”, even if it’s a borrowing from Old Norse - the old third person plural “hīe” would probably have ended as “she”, just like the feminine singular.
That’s an interesting experiment. I like how it “vibes” from informal to ancient.
