Re: Reformed, Teutonic English

---"Gary L. Davenport" <gdaven19@...> wrote:

>    RTE is based on Standard English, with several sharp differences:
plural
> formation, reformed spelling, and vocabulary.
>
>    My ideas thus far are to reinstate all of the -(e)n and vowel
plurals
> that have switched to -(e)s, clean up Latin borrowings by using their
> original plural forms, and reform the spelling.
>    Anyone else who has similiar ideas or some pointers or advice,
contact
> me! I plan to take this as far as I can go, and any help would be
> appreciated.
   Hi, Gary!
   One of my side projects (that has been plodding along for about
eighteen months now) is Cleansed English. My immediate goals for it
are to replace words of Latin and French decent with good, wholesome
Anglo-Saxonate words that can still be found in Modern English. (With
the small exception of Latin ecclesiastic words that made their way
into Old English before 1066.) This involves a lot of compounding and
whatnot; for instance, the word "acceptable" is "folkcouth", "joy" is
"bliss" (or "dream" if I feel poetical), and so on. (I don't have my
notes, but the basic idea is that if an Anglo-Saxon word cannot be
used in place of the Latinate word, then a new formation is used,
mostly by compounding or making older prefixes and suffixes more
productive.
   I'm not going to reform the spelling, since I like English spelling
as it is (and please, no more debates on reformed spelling! :), but I
had not considered using the plural "-en" more often. Does anyone
happen to know the history of the plural "-(e)s"? Perhaps once I have
a large enopugh word list, I can start tweaking the grammar; I'm
generally freer in my grammar than most people (in my creative
writing, I have been known to reverse the order of nouns and
adjectives, fragment sentences, and other little poetical measures
that drive prescriptionists nuts.) My basic goal is to have something
that sounds like English, with maybe just a few unusual (but not
necessarily impossible) twists in the grammar, but doesn't make sense
to the casual listener.

   Babel Text (Sampled from the RSV and verbatim) in Cleansed English:

1. Now the whole world had one speech and few words.
2. As men moved from the east, they found an evenearth in the land of
Shinar and settled there.
3. And they said one to the other, "Come, let us make claystone and
burn them thoroughly." And they had claystone for stone, and clay for
stonebinder.
4. And they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a burgstead, with a
skyheap with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for
ourselves, lest we be scattered over the side* of the whole earth."
5. And the LORD came down to see the burgstead and the skyheap, which
the sons of man had built.
6. And the LORD said, "Behold, they are one folk, and they all have
one speech; and this is only the beginning of what they will do, and
nothing that they forespeak will be withheld from them.
7. "Come, let us go down, and there jumble their speech, that they may
not understand the speech of each other."
8. So the LORD scattered them from there over the side of all the
earth, and they stopped building the burgstead.
9. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD jumbled
the speech of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them
abroad over the side of the earth

   * I still haven't come up with an appropriate word to replace
"face" yet, so I fudged the metaphor a bit.

   I'm still looking for interested people to add words to the
vocabulary. It took me two hours to translate the Babel text, because
of the necessity of having to stop and look up words, check an Old
English dictionary, etc., so it's pretty slow going. It's a lot harder
than just making up words off the top of my head!
   :Peter
==
 _____      _____________________________________________________
   |  \   O) ...for Christ plays in ten thousand places,         )
  _|__/    | Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his         |
 / |eter   | To the Father through the features of men's faces.  |
 | |       | -Gerard Manley Hopkins, "As Kingfishers Catch Fire" |
 \___lark  (_____________________________________________________(O

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