Wow. Thank you again for your detailed answer. I might have a look into Mr. Jennings and the Punch magazine. Hats off to Zé and to you for sharing your love for language(s) and teaching me a fair bit about that :-) Cheers!

I for one, thank you a lot for your clarification. I am a native german speaker and by no means a linguist - so I appreciate your effort to make some of these historical processes clearer. I was just a bit disappointed becuase I expected something else… there is a german book by Ze do Rock (a native brasilian for that matter) who tries to invent “Siegfridisch” a language that gets rid of all “foreign” words. No more “street (strasse)” for that is from latin, instead he uses “way (weg)” which is germanic. Also, the german wort “schreiben” stems from latin “scribere” and has to be replaced with the english “write” (ritzen) since that is what the celts did… and I was hoping this newspaper would do something similar :-)

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…

Diesen witz kenn ich noch von ner schallplatte von “herricht und preil”. Die schlaglinie lautete allerdings in etwa: “eine große dürre wird kommen - sie glohm ja ga nich, wie dürre die is”