Uncleftish Beholding: An Uploosening of English Cleanness (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Uncleftish Beholding: An Uploosening of English Cleanness (2018)

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49 pointssamclemens27 comments

> These scientific words, like hydrogen, oxygen, and many others, are very important since they filled lexical gaps that English had. English is known for its robbery from the lexicons of other languages, but this is not a bad thing. Loanwords improve the precision of speech by providing more options to say one thing by filling lexical gaps.

This gives me the feeling of getting things “standardly backwards”, just like semiconductors described in terms of negatively charged, positive-mass electrons moving in one direction rather than positive-charge negative-mass ‘holes’ moving in the opposite direction. It’s not that English lacked words for these concepts and that it imported them integrally meanings et al.

That isn’t what’s happening at all. New concepts are arising as our scientific understanding expands. As a consequence, a vacancy in the lexicon is needed to succinctly and unambiguously address these new concepts. Loan words are a very convenient manner of getting these new ‘labels’ we need: they’re not already present in our language so they do not risk causing ambiguity, and by the same token probably have less ancillary baggage and implications involved. Foreign words are thus phonetically stolen wholesale but conceptually are probably quite warped, or at least made far more precise and specific than they are for speakers of the language from which the word was ‘borrowed’ (just as in English itself, vague terms such as ‘mass’, ‘work’, and ‘force’ were given very precise technical meanings to enable succinct but accurate conversation).

This is actually not so weird if you speak a Germanic language (which you do, but I mean the ones on the other side of the sea). Of course Latin has long crept into German and Scandi languages, but there's significant pieces left. Things like sourstuff and "choking-stuff" (nitrogen) are still there in chemistry textbooks.

Likewise with other technical jargon like average (cut: schnitt, snit, etc) and density (mass-fill). In the end though it's much easier to switch to English, because everyone speaks it nowadays.

The first thing I tell any new doctor I go to here in Germany is that she ought to use the “technical” (Latin/Greek-derived) terms for organs, diseases and procedures when speaking with me, because I’m more likely to know those than the “simple” (common language) equivalents.

What's an example of those in German? In English I find it kind of unnecessary that we use a Latin word for adjectives when we have a Germanic noun already; wolf, dog, neck, liver, and kidney but lupine, canine, cervical (already ambiguous depending on if we're talking about cancer or vertebrae), hepatic, and renal. Anyone learning English will effectively have to learn a whole other set of words for the "concerning" adjectives because some fancy lad writing his treatise in like 1600 was too cool to say "kidneyish failure." Or how we don't say "life science" for biology, but if I were learning Chinese once I had those two words I could guess the term for "biology" just fine

> In English I find it kind of unnecessary that we use a Latin word for adjectives when we have a Germanic noun already; wolf, dog, neck, liver, and kidney

While "dog" does go back to Old English, it's actually of unknown origin and you won't find it in any other Germanic languages except those that borrowed it from English. It displaced the ancestral Germanic word "hound" which has taken on a more specialized meaning in English.

Huh I'd never thought of that but of course. Interesting! Girl is also an odd word like that. TY!

You mean „Bauch“ instead of gastro-? I also find the Latin terms easier but I had to study Greek and Latin anyway. But my mum had to learn a ton of Latin terms in med school in the 50s, when she’d only been speaking English for three or four years (went to med school in an English speaking country). I asked her about it when I was studying the languages as languages and she said it was such a small deal proportion to all the other things she had to learn that she didn’t even notice. But it has helped her talk to other doctors from other countries.

In general linguistic conservatism is a good idea simply because you want to think about the topic, not the words themselves (though in specific there are words with changing). But reading, say, Ulysses is exhausting!

You do make a good point that organic chemistry is going to be a far bigger deal for anyone learning medicine, a separate vocabulary for some words isn't a huge compared with all the new knowledge, and in fact a separate vocabulary from day-to-day maybe helps see things with new eyes. Also getting every doctor to agree on terms is a pretty good idea. I was thinking more for patients who want to know more about their conditions, or even just anyone reading a book who finds the word "lupine" and has to go look it up when they already knew "wolf."

As an expectant mother, I've memorized Mutterkuchen (“Mothercake”) for placenta, Gebärmutter (“Gebären” - birth) for uterus, Gebärmutterhals (“Wombneck”) for cervix, because while my doctor uses the Latin-derivates with me (as I requested her to), the Hebammen (midwives) who teach prenatal classes and make home visits to you and your baby the first few weeks out of the hospital really don’t, and I strongly suspect hospital personnel will avoid the “advanced” vocabulary upon hearing me sound like a Texan attempting to speak German.

TY!! Very interesting and good point I hadn't thought of: internationally agreed upon synthetic words actually can give second language speakers a leg up when their native language has the same words. Kind of an inversion of the original purpose of the specialized language, which is cool. Many happy returns for your little one!

There's an Anglish community on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/anglish/

Someone has written software to help Anglishizing words and text, yes? If not, someone will, right? This is a great thesis project for a student of computer science and linguistics.

I doubt it's been software (I suspect wetware), but Anglishisation during my lifetime has included:

   soldier => warfighter
   legislator => lawmaker.

(the prof who made the game of Life would now and then play a game where one must say what one would like to in just words that have no more than one "sound" to them.)

What constitutes a "sound"? (Googling "Conway linguistic game" just brings up the Game of Life)

It's a way to say "syllable" with less than one of those. This text in the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/16/science/john-conway-math.... calls it "One Bit Word Game". I think "slab" might be a good choice, too, 'cause it sounds like the long word it stands in for. This game is hard, but in some tongues, it may be worse, if there are just a few slabs that can be used and most words have more than one.

“Warfighter” is one of the more recent of a series of invented terms for members of the American military. “Soldier” strictly implies a member of the Army, and since we have four going on five branches of the military now, simply listing them all (soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and...spacemen?) is awkward. The previous catch-all term of “servicemen” is considered sexist, on top of not sounding nearly as macho for whatever that’s worth.

Servicemen or servicewomen does make me think of a service station more than martial forces.

I the phrase 'Uncleftish Beholding' gave me brain damage. Now my inner monologue sounds like it was written by George R.R. Martin.

Closer to Tolkien—who was, after all, a professor of anglo saxon.

I like to use "uncleftish beholding" as a sort of test for possible future hires. If someone has the will and the patience to decode at least a bit of it, then we are into something.

Genuinely unsure if this is a parody of interview techniques or not.

Not appropriate for an interview, but more a long-term thing to play with interns.

I shuffle each pile of resumes and throw half in the trash. I don't want to hire unlucky employees.

I thought it was easy to read...

This sounds like a fantastic way to filter out non-native English speakers. Also anyone lacking exposure to archaic English, since "cleft" is rarely used outside of constructions like "cleft chin/palate".

"cleave" is of course alive and well but not everyone realizes "cleft" is a past participle of "cleave". "cleaved" is much more common as a verb where I'm from and "cleave" is not a very common verb to begin with.

So far the only person who was not amused by that test has been the English teacher!

I think that the test is actually better for people who do not recognize any of the non-latin roots. That way, they have to deduce everything from the context, which is indeed possible.

I will be helpful for German candidates, since most of the words used come from German

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