Alteutonik (was: Intergermansk)

On Thursday, January 27, 2005, at 09:57 , Muke Tever wrote:

> Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
>> "Pure saxon English", published by Rand-McNally, 1890
>
> I've actually read this one, mid-last year.  Subtitled "or, Americans
> to the front", it starts out as a plea for spelling reform,
That's interesting.

> which, after a while, owing perhaps to some of the difficulty of making
> reformed English spelling look any good,
It is difficult, isn't it? Especially getting a system that does not do
violence either to words of Latin origin or to words of Saxon origin.

> mutates into a full-out conlang, expurgating Latin roots, and even
> importing some other
> Germanic ones,
Right - that would make spelling reform easier   :)

So the description "Anglo-Germanic" in one of his earlier books is about
right: English 'purged' of French & Latin, with the gaps, so to speak,
filled in from Germanic sources.

> and even uses q and (ISTR) upside-down i as vowel signs.
Well, I guess lower case |q| looks like a hand-written lower case |a| with
a descender, and upper case |Q| is used as a vowel in SAMPA. X-SAMPLA &
CSX. He was obviously ahead of his time   ;)
==============================================

On Thursday, January 27, 2005, at 08:38 , J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:
[snip]
> Could it be that this old use of "German" would refer rather to "Germanic"
> than to "modern German language"?
Maybe.

> I guess that the guy's main purpose was to
> build a conlang that supposed England was never invaded by the normans (at
> least never by French speaking ones).
Seems he started out with spelling reform and finished up making a conlang
  :)

But I don't think he was doing a "what if" conlang (like Brithenig, for
example) but rather something more like a future 'purified' English. But
it does seem to have developed as he worked on the language as the titles
of some of his later books specifically talk of an "international language"
  - presumably for all the Germanic-speaking peoples rather than a global
auxlang, at least the name 'Alteutonik' would suggest that.

Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
===============================================
Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

Reply