r/anglish

6.6K archived posts · Dec 2011 – Sep 2026

The Anglish Reddit

r/anglish

Anglish is how we might speak if the Normans had been beaten at Hastings, and if we had not made inkhorn words out of Latin, Greek and French.

Created Jul 17, 2011

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6.6KArchived posts

What is Anglish

Anglish is how we might speak if the Normans had been beaten at Hastings, and if we had not made inkhorn words out of Latin, Greek and French.

So, we say things like 'hearty' instead of 'cordial', and 'wordbook' instead of 'dictionary'.

Why We Do It

While there are many grounds for Anglish, English words grounded in Old English are often more friendly and meaningful to English-speakers. As Ernest Hemingway once wrote to William Faulkner:

“He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”

How We Do It

Where there are native and borrowed words meaning the same thing, we choose our living inborn words. Such as: ‘inborn’ (an Old English build) rather than ‘native’ (a French word thrust into English through the Norman overlordship).
Where there is an inborn word whose meaning was narrowed or upset by a borrowed word (most often influenced by French, Latin, or Greek) we bring back the inborn word's older meaning. Such as: ‘deer’ to mean any kind of ‘animal’, one of many more French words thrust into English through the Norman overlordship.
Where the inborn word died out from being swapped with a borrowed word, we bring back the dead word, from Old or Middle English, in a New English shape. Such as: inborn ‘frith’ instead of French ‘peace’.
Where there is a outlandish coining for something latter-day and inborn (often Latin and Greek, for scientific, or ‘inkhorn words’), we look upon the Old English-sprung wordhoard (vocabulary) to craft new words. Such as: ‘wirespel’ rather than ‘telegram’, a coining by William Barnes; and we widen the meaning of a word like ‘mote’ to stand in for ‘particle’).
Where English and its forebears (Old and Middle English) has no word for something, such as a new and foreign concept, we can allow for the utilitarian borrowing, as expected of a natural language, and only nativise the spelling. Such as: ‘karma’, borrowed as is; and shifting the Norman-French spelling of a word like ‘sugar’ to ‘sucker’; a shape of the word English might have, were England not under Norman yoke when sugar first landed.

Hƿi are sum þings spelled like þis? / Why are some things spelled like this?

For the sake of readability, we ask that you kindly write your Anglish in either the Anglish Spelling standard, or keep to standard English spellings.

https://anglisc.miraheze.org/wiki/The_Anglish_Alphabet

If you wish to spell things your own way, then kindly also write it out in standard English, so that everyone can understand you.

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