So… Brexlish?
3 Likes
Had come here to do just that!
1 Like
William Caxton was a proud Kentishman and native speaker of English, thank you very much.
He printed the Canterbury Tales and Le Morte d’Arthur, both works written in English, and did his own translations of French and Latin works into English so he could print them for the local market.
It is in the introduction to one of those translations that he described how he chose what dialect of English to use, in his famous story about the traveller trying to buy “Egges”. The executive summary is that there were so many dialects of English at the time, many barely mutually intelligible, and so much change in language, that whatever choices he made were going to upset somebody, so in the absence of being able to please everybody, he may as well please himself and everyone else could try to keep up.
Many of our current spelling conventions were first fixed by Caxton.
11 Likes
- Common Brittonic (ancestor of Welsh, Breton, Cornish and Cumbric)
- Pictish, inasmuch as it had diverged from Common Brittonic (the latter probably changing under the influence of Latin)
- Primitive Irish (ancestor of Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx), in parts of western Wales and possibly the west coast of Scotland
- Latin
I think that’s the major ones.
7 Likes
Some things never change. 
Also, obligs:
9 Likes
For example, “embiggen” is a perfectly cromulent word.
11 Likes
Bríttene ígland is ehta hund mila lang ⁊ twa hund brad ⁊ her sínd on þis iglande fif geþeode: Englisc ⁊ Brittisc ⁊ Wilsc ⁊ Scyttisc ⁊ Pyhtisc ⁊ Bocleden.
The Island of Britain is eight hundred miles long and two hundred wide, and here on this island are five languages: English, and British, and Welsh, and Scottish, and Pictish, and Book-Latin.
(ASC E, Peterborough Chronicles)
Yes, they listed six languages, but to be fair it should be more like “Brittisc [oþþe] Wilsc” “British or Welsh”, because British and Welsh as languages were the same thing.
“Scottish” was what we’d now call Old Irish, the Q-Celtic language spoken by the Irish Gaels, both in Ireland and in the Dal Riada in the southwest of what’s now Scotland. (Both when the Chronicles were first being composed and this introduction was cribbed from Bede, and when Bede first wrote his Ecclesiastic History of England in Latin in about 731.)
“Pictish” we’re not sure exactly what it was (except that it wasn’t mutually intelligible with either Old Irish or Old Welsh/British), but the going theory is that it was a P-Celtic language.
10 Likes
Sounds like a perfectly cromulent variant.
7 Likes
I don’t when Welsh and Cumbric diverged, but if it was before Bede’s time, maybe that was the distinction he was making? He was a Tynesider, after all.
3 Likes
A quick look tells me that it’s thought that Brytthonic was splitting into Cornish, Welsh, and Cumbric at about 600AD, and further that there was a lot of potential confusion, given that Cymri and Cumbri sound pretty much the same, Latinised as Cambria and Cumbria respectively, but both were called “Welsh” by the Anglo-Saxons, although in Northumbrian (and hence Scots) it became “Wallis” instead of “Welsh” < wilsc.
It’s likely that the two terms “British” and “Welsh” were used because they were more-or-less synonymous, although Wiki references a c.1200 Life of St Kentigern, which talks about Kentigern moving from Wallia (Wales) to Cambria (Cumbria), so by then at least they were recognised in English with different names.
In any case, while they would have been recognised as different regions at the time of Bede, the languages were still so close as to be recognised as the same language, just as Mercian and Northumbrian were both English, despite their differences.
5 Likes
The whole “ghoti” gag has a long heritage, often attributed to George Bernard Shaw. I myself thought Jonathan Swift came up with it, but apparently I am wrong as well.
But I did find a neat little article about it:
3 Likes
Exactly. That is the point that bothers me as well! And even then, those arguing for purity, never, never, never get it right, insisting some common words of that snapshot are foreign, or that some word that was borrowed actually originated in the supposed pure language.
7 Likes
Three words made up by my four year old son:
Anatizement
Sarcostic
Verdascent
They have meanings but the meanings don’t have anything at all to do with the etymologies our adult minds would pattern-recognize.
He also used to say “Oped” (pronounced “ohpt”) instead of “opened”. Their little brains try to make english logical and I figure he somehow intuited that open is “op” with the -en suffix and just replaced it with -ed to create a past participle.
7 Likes
This is how irregular verbs become regular
6 Likes
And how rare declensions become rarer.
3 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
