Alternative English - how different would it look without borrowings?

Thank you for reading the second instalment in my 'Alternative English' series of articles. If you haven't read my introductory article, I'd strongly recommend you do so before reading this entry.

Why are there so many strange colours in the text, you might ask. What's wrong with me? Well, I've colour coded each word and affix in the opening three paragraphs of this article to show where each word and affix (i.e., a prefix or suffix) comes from.

Words and affixes in blue¹ have their origin in French, those in red are borrowed from Latin (either medieval or classical, often via French), those in green are from Greek, those in gold are taken from Old Norse, and the remaining words in black are of native Old English origin.

Borrowed words in English

You may know that the English language has borrowed (or stolen, if you prefer) many, many words from other languages throughout much of its recorded history.

As I mentioned in my introductory article, the invasion of England by Norse tribes from 800-1000 AD resulted in a large wave of borrowed words from Old Norse, even in the basic layer of vocabulary.

Then came the Norman invasion in 1066, which triggered a massive influx of French loanwords into English over a period of centuries. And since the Renaissance, English has borrowed numerous words and affixes from Latin and Greek.

Now, I asked you to imagine that the Viking invasions and the Norman Conquest had never happened. This is all purely hypothetical - and somebody who has a much greater historical knowledge than I do might argue that these invasions were inevitable - but suppose English had never borrowed a massive influx of words from Old Norse and French as a result of these conquests.

How different would English be?

Well, it would certainly bear many more similarities to its closest Germanic relatives than real life English does. There would be far more cognates (related words which come from the same ancestral language) between English and its close relatives Dutch and German if much of the native word stock had not been replaced or reinforced with Norse, French and Latin equivalents.

It's estimated that only 26% of all English words are of Germanic origin (and that includes borrowed words from Old Norse). 29% are from French, 29% are from Latin, 6% are from Greek, 4% derive from proper nouns, and the remaining 6% are from other miscellaneous languages or have an unknown or obscure origin.

It's not unusual for a language to borrow such a high proportion of words from other languages - Japanese and Korean have borrowed wholesale from Chinese in the past - but it's obviously true that the vocabulary of Modern English would be vastly different if the majority of words and affixes were descended directly from Old English.

No doubt, we would make far more use of native prefixes and suffixes such as for-, gain-, out-, through- and -ing, whereas Latin, French and Greek affixes such as pro-, pre-, co(n)-, super-, -ous, -ance, -ation, -al would be considerably rarer if English hadn't borrowed so extensively from these languages.

Creating new words instead of borrowing

Taking things one step further, imagine if this hypothetical English language was resistant to borrowing words from other languages in general. All other Germanic languages have borrowed some words from French, Latin and Greek, but none of them have done so to the same extent as English. 

Certainly none of the other Germanic languages have had their native words for take, give, get, egg and they/them/their replaced by equivalent words from another Germanic language!

Some Germanic languages, mainly German and Icelandic, prefer to create new words using roots that already exist in the language, rather than simply borrowing a word from another language.

For instance, the Icelandic word for 'computer' is tölva, a portmanteau word created from native roots which literally mean 'number prophetess.' One of the German words for 'computer' is Rechner, which means, and is cognate to, 'reckoner.' However, Computer (an English borrowing) is also found in German.

I'm just staring at my laptop number prophetess, dear.

Perhaps if English had developed in relative isolation, without any great influence from another language, then we too would have relied on our own word stock to create new words instead of borrowing wholesale from other tongues. 

Maybe in this hypothetical English, the word for computer (a word with Latin roots) would have turned out as reckoner or rimer².

My aims

What I will attempt to do in the next few articles is to construct an alternative English language which is free of Norse loanwords, and has only a modest number of borrowings from French and Latin. I will replace most borrowed words with native words, using only the attested word stock found in Old English manuscripts. 

It will be possible to work out, through regular sound changes, how these Old English words would have turned out if they had survived into Modern English. To give you one example, ugly comes from Old Norse uggligr, meaning 'fearsome, horrible in appearance.' 

A good native replacement would be forlainly, which derives from the Old English word forlegenlic.

To give another example, language is a borrowing from the Old French word language, which itself has its roots in the Latin word for tongue, lingua. So what word might English have had if it hadn't borrowed language? 

Well, there's always tongue as in 'mother tongue,' but Old English also had two words þēod and þēodisc, both meaning 'language.' Had these words survived into Modern English, they would have become thede and thedish (to rhyme with Swede and Swedish, respectively.) The study of Linguistics could have been called Thedelore.

I hope this has whet your eatlust (appetite.)

My beliefs

I must stress that there is no underlying ideology associated with this project. I do not believe that the English language would be any better or richer if it was free of Norse or Romance loanwords, nor do I subscribe to the idea that borrowing between languages is an inherently bad thing. 

In fact, mutual influence between different languages is commonplace, and I think that English almost certainly would have borrowed many words from French and Latin, even if the Norman Conquest hadn't happened. Instead, I'm simply interested to see how English could have turned out if certain historical events had not taken place.

It turns out I am not the first person to attempt a project like this. There is, in fact, a website devoted to reconstructing and promoting a new version of English with most of its loanwords replaced by Old English-derived equivalents. The project is called 'Anglish,' and you can find the website here. 

It makes for an interesting read, but the ideology behind Anglish seems to be a type of linguistic purism. That is, the proponents of Anglish argue that English would be better off if as many loanwords as possible were replaced with native Old English-derived words. Longer words would be easier to understand, because they would be built up from English rather than French, Latin or Greek roots. Replacing consanguinity (a Latin word) with samebloodedness would be a good idea, according to the Anglish project.

Anglish does allow Old Norse loanwords to stay because, presumably, they are closer to English than French and Latin borrowings are. Although I think their viewpoint is flawed, some of the words that have been proposed are very interesting, and their methodology is pretty sound.

Next up

In my next article, I will go into much greater detail concerning the vocabulary of English, and where most of the non-native words come from. I will give some more examples of words and even sentences where most or all borrowed words have been replaced with words derived from native Old English roots.

Footnotes

1 - Blue is a borderline case. It comes partly from Old English blǣw, and partly from Anglo-Norman blew / blef, which itself was borrowed from a Germanic source.

2 - Or rhymer. Despite its Greek-looking appearance, rhyme is actually a native English word. The verb rhyme derives from Old English rīman, meaning 'to count, reckon, tally up.' Its spelling was altered from rime to rhyme on the incorrect assumption that it was connected to the word rhythm, which really is Greek.