Uncleftish Beholding (1989)

https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/docs/uncleftish_beholding.html

by zetalyrae • 3 years ago

89 33 3 years ago

ling.upenn.edu

gaganyaan• 3 years ago

See also, Anglish:

https://anglish.org/wiki/Anglish

dang• 3 years ago

Writing scientific pieces with Germanic-roots only words in “Ander-Saxon.” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25805577 - Jan 2021 (1 comment)

Uncleftish Beholding: An Uploosening of English Cleanness (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23815161 - July 2020 (27 comments)

Uncleftish Beholding – A Text Written in “Anglish” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190784 - Oct 2019 (1 comment)

Uncleftish Beholding - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19198713 - Feb 2019 (76 comments)

Uncleftish Beholding: English minus the non-Germanic words (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7671549 - April 2014 (82 comments)

SideburnsOfDoom• 3 years ago

Also related:

"What Is Anglish? (anglish.org) " https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34960465 (51 days ago, 351 comments)

lordnacho2• 3 years ago

I feel like this is basically German. When I read German there's a lot there's loan words, though naturally those text here is deliberately without them. But German does seem to try to make its own words rather than mash up French, Latin, and Greek.

The loan word that sticks out is handy, which for some reason means mobile phone.

dkdbejwi383• 3 years ago

Handy, Beamer, Fenster, Kaffee, Fabrik, Literatur, gratis, Konservatismus, Palast, vegetarisch, Zucker, usw.

There are many loan words in German.

lordnacho2• 3 years ago

But any language will have a bunch, especially for foreign concepts. the question is how much you use them. You can't really write English without a pile of French and Latin.

jonas21• 3 years ago

"Handy" is arguably not a loan-word since "hand" is German. And it kind of makes sense for it to mean mobile phone since it's a phone you carry around in your hand. "Handphone" is used to refer to mobile phones in parts of Asia as well.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/handphone

tempodox• 3 years ago

…work is like unto weight manifolded by the fourside of the haste of light.

E = m c². Poetic.

DoreenMichele2• 3 years ago

Randomish thoughts:

The Greek word logos which gets translated as word but is also the root word for -ology meaning the study of (biology, archeology, etc) has a much richer meaning than just word. I am not in a position to do it justice but this is where we get the biblical In the beginning, there was the word and it can really be understood to mean something like "God had a thought and the world was thus born. He conceived it."

And so I have to wonder how much we use loan words for the additional layers of meaning they had to bilingual peoples trying to communicate about emerging concepts.

E = m c²

A friend of mine once told me this means matter is energy in slow motion.

If you have an interest in other languages, the mix of Germanic and Romantic words found in English can help you parse a number of related languages. Just find the closest cognate in English as your touchstone rather than solely looking up the correct meaning.

Flasche in German means bottle but its closest cognate is flask. Flask and bottle aren't simply interchangeable, but it can be less mental work to pair it that way than trying to remember two words that don't sound at all alike, especially since words in two different languages may not exactly match in meaning and usage anyway.

imbnwa2• 3 years ago

The Greek word logos which gets translated as word but is also the root word for -ology meaning the study of (biology, archeology, etc) has a much richer meaning than just word. I am not in a position to do it justice but this is where we get the biblical In the beginning, there was the word and it can really be understood to mean something like "God had a thought and the world was thus born. He conceived it."

Be very careful here. Antiquity doesn't have any notion of the mind/body dualism that we do

Soul/Body dualism, you say?

Well, in Platonism and Neo-Platonism, sure, but when Plato talks about our souls, prior to embodiment, once knowing the eternal arch-forms of things, knowing isn't thinking. Thinking is something bodies do. The space of the eternal arch-forms and the pure soul is a place of zero motion. Plato's entire framework follows from the notion that stillness is primordial. To have true knowledge, as the allegory of the cave implies, is to no longer have to think. Knowing as we do that Platonism will heavily influence early Christianity and Islam, we can sorta begin to see why the imparting of the Christian mysteria upon baptism has the property of ceasing all searching and finding, "I was lost, now I am found", it is the end of looking for answers, asking questions, it is the end of having to think about what to do.[0]

On that point, we can now start considering what Aristotle has to say about the soul with the guiding principle in mind that for Aristotle, motion is primordial. Hence in his metaphysical ontology, there must have been a First Mover to kick off the gear works of the universe. And when he gets to discussing what a soul is in De Anima (On the Soul), he says something like "its everything a living thing must do, to keep on being the the thing that it particularly is". This not only includes basic sustenance but all the other quirks that make a living thing that thing and not some other. This regularity does not cease until you are dead. Aristotle being a zoologist, you can sorta see why he would look at things this way.

So when we talk about what logos means, we have to be careful. When Aristotle opens his Metaphysics inquiring into the logos of being, he is not talking about the thought of Being, he more means the reason, 'the reason of being', the principle that gives it order (which, for Aristole, is motion).

When Jesus is said to be the 'word [logos] become flesh', it is that God is the reason/principle of existence, and God has become flesh, material, not that his thought became flesh and material.

This is why there is a hundreds-year debate over what this means, that God, the principle of existence, became flesh because this appeared an utmost contradiction. The whole point of the Trinity is to settle this debate by keeping the terms both separate and united: the Father (logos), the Son (flesh/material), the Holy Spirit (the transport between them).

If all that was meant was "God had a thought and it became flesh", there's no contradiction to chew on, the 'thought', in the sense we understand that term, is not God itself. Logos become flesh, really means 'the reason, for all being, itself started being right then, at a particular time, right there, at a particular place', as a particular material form: Jesus.

That's the contradiction in terms all of Christian antiquity struggled with and splintered numerous churches and heresies upon.

[0] Aside: the popular interpretation of Socratic dialogue, that by rigorous question and answer, we will arrive at the truth, is a misinterpretation that reduces Plato to, at best, the average capable scientist (the ancient world already had those for the standard of their time), and at worst, the average Redditor who 'questions everything and keeps an open mind'. The point of the dialogues is to demonstrate that all of our thinking does not get us to knowledge. In the Apologia, Socrates doesn't say he heard the Oracle's words, set out to find out who actually knows the truth, but fails because we all haven't sat down and thought hard enough; he says that no one knows that they don't know, and he says this after canvasing every astute tradesman, craftsman, artist, politician, people who think about what they're doing and are considered wise because of this. But the Oracle told Socrates that he is wisest: it is because he knows he does not know - true knowing is not thinking, soberly evaluating the results, and repeating the process: that's everyone he interviews!]

DoreenMichele2• 3 years ago

As I said, I am not in a position to do it justice.

I'm sure that whether I reply or not reply, I will feel I've done the wrong thing. Knowing I'm having that kind of day, I wanted to err on the side of manners and thank you for commenting.

frogulis• 3 years ago

Something that I've wondered about for a while: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sauerstoff

captainmuon• 3 years ago

I've just thought about this the other day and wondered if there are more appropriate germanic stems to use?

In German, science is "Wissenschaft", Dutch has a similar word. There is a cognate stem to "wissen" in English, "wit". Similar for atomic, I wonder if you could use an "deal" in an archaic meaning for splitting. Like "liekedeeler" in Low German means "he who splits the bounty equally" (a kind of pirate). So "undealing's wittery"? Or "wittery of notsplittables"?

(Edit: ah, it seems the author uses beholding for theory, and worldken for science which is pretty interesting. It's been a while since I've read it.)

And I've also been wondering if you could construct the opposite, only using the romanic parts of the language. You would probably get really corrupted medival french?

einr• 3 years ago

-schaft is cognate with English -ship so I think "witship" would probably be the least clumsy way of writing it. (It's "vetenskap" in Swedish, by the way -- same word)

anamexis• 3 years ago

Wouldn't wisdom be a more apt cognate?

NoGravitas• 3 years ago

And I've also been wondering if you could construct the opposite, only using the romanic parts of the language. You would probably get really corrupted medival french?

I reckon you'd basically get Interlingua (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua), which saw some initial use in scientific communication.

wrp2• 3 years ago

This is fun and all, but Poul Anderson should have talked to a linguist first. His idea was to show what modern English might be if it hadn't been so influenced by French, Greek, and Latin. The problem is that Anglo-Saxon was a dialect of Old Norse, not Old High German. He should have looked to the Scandinavian languages for inspiration. I think he was misled by the idea that English is a "Germanic" language.

bivargen• 3 years ago

No, Anglo-Saxon (or more correct Old English) is not a north-germanic language. Germanic languages per se are traditionally split into three branches: west- east- and north-germanic. English, as do German, belongs to the west-germanic branch. Though it is true that English for a time was heavily influenced by Old Norse (which as a precursor to the modern scandinavian languages sits on the north-germanic branch).

dghf• 3 years ago

A couple of linguists (one Norwegian) do argue that Old English/Anglo-Saxon died out in the wake of the Danish invasions, and that Middle English (and hence modern English) descends directly from Old Norse (with a large amount of vocabulary borrowed from Old English): https://www.apollon.uio.no/english/articles/2012/4-english-s...

This theory is far from uncontroversial, however.

wrp2• 3 years ago

I think you are misunderstanding what Poul Anderson was doing there. He was proposing that without the Normans, English would have drawn on the German lexicon. As the link in the sister comment argues, Old Norse had replaced German as an influence well before the 11th century. So Anderson's construction of hypothetical English vocabulary should have been based on Norse, not German.

eamonnsullivan• 3 years ago

Am I the only one who hears this in my head spoken by a character in Firefly, or maybe from the later chapters of Cloud Atlas?

boffinAudio• 3 years ago

At what point does a loanword simply become the derivation? I've always wondered if linguists describe this process ..

jpm_sd• 3 years ago

Every time this pops up, I think it says "Uncle Fetish" and a certain Terrance & Phillip song starts playing in my head...

oconnor663• 3 years ago

My favorite Wikipedia note on this:

The vocabulary used in "Uncleftish Beholding" does not completely derive from Anglo-Saxon. Around, from Old French reond (Modern French rond), completely displaced Old English ymbe (modern English umbe (now obsolete), cognate to German um and Latin ambi-) and left no "native" English word for this concept. The text also contains the French-derived words rest, ordinary and sort.

retrac2• 3 years ago

If you've ever wondered why English is described as a Germanic language, despite so much obvious French and Latin influence, this is why. Something like this is just not possible with (almost) 100% French/Latin vocabulary. The way thoughts are stacked up and laid out is, at heart, done like in the other Germanic tongues. In contradiction, the Latinate superstrate remains, to the present, an imported affectation, frequently incompletely comprehended by normally fluent audiences.

iskander3• 3 years ago

I tried to get ChatGPT to transform your post into only words of Latin origin but it could never quite get away from simpler common words that derive from Old English:

"Pertaining to inquiries concerning the categorization of English as a Germanic language, notwithstanding conspicuous French and Latin influences, such elucidates the rationale. An instance analogous to the aforementioned remains unachievable utilizing (approximately) 100% French/Latin terminology. The cognitional methodology's amassing and configuration remains intrinsically Germanic. In opposition, the Latinate stratum perseveres as an imported ornamentation, frequently insufficiently discerned via conventionally fluent recipients."

retrac2• 3 years ago

Heh. Still changed the last sentence a lot despite being intentionally all French-Latin to begin with, besides a couple unavoidable articles and prepositions.

wk_end• 3 years ago

English is classified as a Germanic language by linguists not because of any real properties of English-as-she-is-spoke now but because of its genetic heritage.

It's a little more subjective, but I also kind of disagree with the rest of your comment. Uncleftish Beholding uses Germanic vocabulary but the grammar and structure is modern English, so the fact that it's possible doesn't reflect anything, one way or another, on whether "the way thoughts are stacked up and laid out" in modern English is Germanic or Latinate. Broadly, the way thoughts are stacked up and laid out is pretty similar in either family (compared to, say, Japanese), but if anything modern English resembles French in this aspect just as much as it resembles German, notably in how English and French have both become mostly analytic, whereas German has remained comparatively synthetic.

The reason Uncleftish Beholding is possible whereas a Latinate version isn't is simply because commonplace grammatical words (articles and the like) remained Germanic in English, even when there were similar enough equivalents in French. But, again, the origin of a language's commonplace grammatical words don't determine a language's classification - genetics do.

tediousdemise• 3 years ago

Total nonsense.

Using valid words in one language doesn’t mean that they directly translate. Only the author knows the intended meaning—no one else would, without some sort of table that maps the nonsense expressions to the proper loanwords.

No one but the author would be able to decipher the true meaning of this essay, making it useless as a form of communication.

Uncleftish Beholding (1989)

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