Proofreading Service - Pain in the English
Proofreading Service - Pain in the English

Your Pain Is Our Pleasure

24-Hour Proofreading Service—We proofread your Google Docs or Microsoft Word files. We hate grammatical errors with a passion. Learn More

Proofreading Service - Pain in the English
Proofreading Service - Pain in the English

Your Pain Is Our Pleasure

24-Hour Proofreading Service—We proofread your Google Docs or Microsoft Word files. We hate grammatical errors with a passion. Learn More

Username

jayles

Member Since

August 12, 2010

Total number of comments

748

Total number of votes received

228

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Latest Comments

“Anglish”

  • May 1, 2011, 5:31pm

1) 'The holy trinity' -> 'the holy threesome' ???? (but it sounds like a romp)
2) Usage of "of"; as I understand it this was used to translate the french "de" in both its partitive and possessive meanings by academics and church people from the middle english world. However it really is a non-germanic usage, and doubles the grammar,...
for instance: the sister of the duchess of York - > the Yorkduchess's sister.
(and what about duchess?)

“Anglish”

  • April 30, 2011, 4:26pm

"BTW, most "academics" are Francophiles and Latinophiles."
Is that what it takes to get a Latino woman?

“Anglish”

  • April 28, 2011, 1:22am

Or better
"Ongoing and end rating benchmarks need to be made clear and wrapped up." >??

“Anglish”

  • April 27, 2011, 9:17pm

Ængelfolc: you should be proud of me: I have actually used "wordstock" instead of "vocabulary" in a report to my boss: we shall see if it is understood or not.
However, it is so automatic to use Latinate words: for example:
"NB Continuous and final assessment criteria need clarifying and finalizing"
becomes:
'Ongoing and endtesting standards need to be made clear and ??????"
Can you suggest something (better)??

“Anglish”

  • April 25, 2011, 5:47pm

Ængelfolc: your putforwards are better than mine. But how are people supposed to know which are germanic and which are latin? Obvious to you and and everyone in the Sprachschuetzpolizei but not to your average Joe.
Sorry I forgot what you said about group, but that illustrates the problem. On the other hand I seem to have car keys but no car. Anfang Alzheimers?

“Anglish”

  • April 24, 2011, 12:34am

"file" is of course "NO-NO" french when it pertains to a filing system in an office; but "YES-OK" Germanic when one is filing one's toenails.
Straightforward enough!

“Anglish”

  • April 24, 2011, 12:28am

So let us take an example: "place" eg your place or mine?
Just looking in a thesaurus for words in lieu we have: (as verbs)
put.........norse
rest...........rester in french
lay ..............Ger liegen
leave ..........?? strong verb so Germanic
positon........french
consign...........french consignee
identify.............french
file .....................ah! don't think thats english
locate............latin locus
arrange .............frankish via french
categorise ................not germanic
rank.....................Rang in german?
Now what you're asking everyone to do is choose a Germanic substitute. But how is the layman or woman supposed to know which is which? (No-one is going to spend all day looking them up). People would HAVE to have an automatic Anglish checker like a spellchecker.
I've given you my guesses off the top of my head; have I got them all right? Is anyone but a fanatic going to know the difference? One would need simpler guidelines like no words with latin prefixes or suffixes. C'est tout!

“Anglish”

  • April 23, 2011, 9:22pm

Here is a list of latinate words included in the top 250 oftenest words in English:
person
use
place
states
general
part
during
govern
course
fact
system
form
program
present
government
possible
group
order
face
interest
case
problem
national
social
president
power
country

It would be really important either to find acceptable-to-everyone insteadwords
or faute de mieux just keep them on .

“Anglish”

  • April 23, 2011, 9:04pm

Well I would love to make Anglish work, and there are good substitutes for some common words like "person"; however there are also some common words such as "use" for which there is no ready allpurpose substitute. I don't believe that remanufacturing words for OE such as "benote" will do; it just makes the whole thing unintelligible to the average reader. Equally, subbstituting "wield", for me at least automatically brings to mind a picture of some Scots chief wielding a claymore, so "you need to wield a screwdriver" suggests impalement to me; it is a matter of connotations. Secondly it is not always possible to remanufacture all the derived words - so user, useful, useless, useable, use (noun) might come out as "wielder", "wieldful", "wieldless" "wieldable" - which are largely unintelligible to someone on the Clapham omnibus. "Workable" is not an exact substitute for useable either. So it's no USE trying to substitute everything.
On the other hand, there are many low frequency words that could just be dumped: this from Wikikpedia:
As with Latinate/Germanic doublets from the Norman period, the use of Latinate words in the sciences gives us pairs with a native Germanic noun and a Latinate adjective:

* animals: ant/formic, bee/apian, bird/avian, crow/corvine, cod/gadoid, carp/cyprine, fish/piscine, gull/larine, wasp/vespine, butterfly/papilionaceous, worm/vermian, spider/arachnid, snake/anguine, tortoise (or turtle)/testudinal, cat/feline, rabbit/cunicular, hare/leporine, dog/canine, deer/cervine, reindeer/rangiferine, fox/vulpine, wolf/lupine, goat/caprine, sheep/ovine, swan/cygnean, duck/anatine, starling/sturnine, goose/anserine, ostrich/struthious, horse/equine, chicken/gallinaceous, cattle/bovine, pig/porcine, whale/cetacean, kangaroo/macropine, ape/simian, bear/ursine, man/human or hominid (gender specific: man/masculine, woman/feminine).
* physiology: head/capital, ear/aural, tooth/dental, tongue/lingual, lips/labial, neck/cervical, finger/digital, hand/manual, arm/brachial, foot/pedal, sole of the foot/plantar, leg/crural, eye/ocular or visual, mouth/oral, chest/pectoral, nipple/papillary, brain/cerebral, mind/mental, nail/ungual, hair/pilar, heart/cardial, lung/pulmonary, bone/osteotic, liver/hepatic, kidney/renal, blood/sanguine.
* astronomy: moon/lunar, sun/solar, earth/terrestrial, star/stellar.
* sociology: son or daughter/filial, mother/maternal, father/paternal, brother/fraternal, sister/sororal, wife/uxorial, uncle/avuncular.
* other: book/literary, edge/marginal, fire/igneous, water/aquatic, wind/vental, ice/glacial, boat/naval, house/domestic, door/portal, town/urban, light/optical, sight/visual, tree/arboreal, marsh/paludal, sword/gladiate, king/regal, fighter/military, bell/tintinnabulary.

Note that this is a common linguistic phenomenon, called a stratum in linguistics – one sees analogous phenomena in Japanese (borrowing from Chinese for scientific vocabulary, and now English), and in Hindi/Urdu (Sanskrit, with many Persian borrowings), among many others.

So we need some pragmatic solutions IMHO.

“Anglish”

  • April 21, 2011, 5:52pm

oops junction 19