@HolyMackerel - I understand your position, and certainly don't equate you with some of the loonier ideas on this page. But I do find this 'Anglish' business at best a fantasy based on a misunderstanding of how languages develop and the history of English, but at worst something rather nastier, bordering on linguistic cleansing.

Meanwhile, there's a real revolution to be made, viz. in the way we treat dialects, where as you rightly point out, many of these old words still exist. In a recent case in Teeside, a head teacher sent a rather condescending letter to parents, telling them to correct their child should they hear them say certain things, which included: 'nowt', 'yous' (like in the West of Scotland), 'gizit her', and 'he was sat there'. No doubt with good intentions she was trying to get them to use Standard English. But this can be done without denigrating their home language. Indeed studies on both sides of the
Atlantic show that a comparative approach enables students to handle Standard English better.

http://stancarey.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/theres-nowt-wrong-with-childrens-dialects/

Let's have more dialect on the BBC, for example, not less. It's already acceptable in drama and comedy programmes, and poses no great problems for viewers and listeners. This is the real heritage we should be defending.

Your talk of the Gorbals reminds me of a time I was sitting in a pub in the Borders and overheard part of a conversation between two men. One had said something that the other found difficult to believe. "Aye", said the first, "Ah saw it wi' me ane twa een".

@Gallitrot - according to David Crystal, the period of greatest French influence was not that of the Conquest, nor that of the eighteenth century inkhorns (who were in a minority in the educated classes anyway), but from the 13th century, when Paris was the capital of world culture as they knew it at the time. This was not snobbery but a genuine desire amongst the educated classes to benefit from that culture. And remember, Latin was the not only the language of the Church, one of the most powerful institutions of the period, but also the language of international discourse. This was the way people like Erasmus and Thomas More could communicate, and many people at the time chose to be tri-lingual. Yes, there was social pressure to be considered educated, but apart from that, nobody was forcing anything on anybody.

Whether people like it or not, this all part of the rich fabric of the history of the English language. Why regret any of it? (Apart from two hundred years or so of prescriptivism, granted!) That's what I can't fathom.

@Hairy Scot - "Nor I", would be pretty formal, I think. "Nor me" sounds more neutral to me. Some possible answers, in descending order of formality, the numbers are the number of hits in the British National Corpus (when followed by a comma or full stop):

Nor I. (12)
I don't either. (0)
Nor do I. (19)
Nor me. (16)
Me neither. (10)

http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

@HolyMackerel - The beauty, no, I grant you. But the size and variety of the language does reflect the diversity of sources, to which you are quite right to add Norse and Gaelic. The latter might not have much influence outwith Scotland and Ireland, but Norse languages had a great influence on English in much of England. And it's not only French and Latin, there are all those other languages such as Dutch and the languages of the Indian subcontinent which have also enriched our language so much. Should we favour Anglo-Saxon over them as well? What are yacht and hullabaloo in Anglo-Saxon? It is this very diversity I celebrate, not any so-called "linguistic purity".

Not that it would work anyway; as the French language authorities are finding out with their attempt to ban "hashtag" .

I can quite understand having an interest in Old English. It's the attempt to impose an Anglo-Saxon only policy on English that I hold no truck for. It suggests that after Chaucer everything went downhill, which is absolute nonsense. I'm highly suspicious of any sort of purity in these matters, especially when all the major English-speaking countries are becoming increasingly multicultural. I totally agree with JJMBallantyne and douglas.bryant on this one. But then those two usually do talk a lot of sense in these pages.

@Holymackerel - As far as I can see, apart from poem (1540s replacing ME poesy), all your examples are in fact from the earlier part of Middle English or even earlier:

place - c1200 (or earlier) - conflation of Old English plæce and Middle French place, both < Latin platea < Greek plateîa (replaced Old English stow and stede);
use - mid 13th century - Middle English usen < Old French user < Latin ūsus (replaced Old English brucan);
music - mid 13th century - Middle English musike < Latin mūsica < Greek mousikḕ

Origins and dates from Online Etymology Dictionary and Dictionary.com.

Moreover, one person's 'corruption' is another person's enrichment, and what I personally like about English is the eclectic way it has evolved; the fact that is not pure bred but a loveable mongrel. It gives us more choice: climb or ascend, fast or secure, ask or question. A choice especially useful to poets and exploited as early as Chaucer, who used both Old English "hous" and "mansioun" recently arrived from Old French. To quote De Quincey - "Neither part of the language is good or bad absolutely, but in relation to its subject". According to David Crystal (The Stories of English) - "the main legacy of the Middle English Period was the enhancing of lexical stylistic choice. Lexical doublets became available ... in many cases there were triplets of the ask / question / interrogate type." "In 1200, people could only ask; by 1500 they could question (from French) and interrogate (from Latin)".

Why is it, I wonder, that English probably has more words than any other language? What's so wrong with glorying in the richness of the language we have, rather than wishing for some form of ethnically pure language that, thank God, we haven't?

http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/is-it-true-that-english-has-the-most-words-of-any-language

@John Gibson - and your second example has the advantage that the possessive pronoun comes after "child", so it now has an antecedent. But I agree with you that the last is probably most natural.

@John Gibson - I think you've got a very good point. Instead of trying to recreate some phoney purist language which never existed (there were Latin elements in the various languages that melded into Anglo-Saxon before they even hit these shores), why don't we cherish and nurture the very real heritage we do have: regional dialects. Those forms of speech that too often in these pages are referred to as "lazy" or "uneducated", by people who know no better.

@Anthony123 - Sorry, that link doesn't work any more. The publishers must have changed their policy, which is a great shame, as I and others have often used it as a reference in these pages. Here's another that should give you the picture (until they get round to restricting this one too). It was referred to in my original MWDEU link:

http://books.google.pl/books?id=w8nH2APfNGMC&pg=PA183

@David Teangue - it's not an advertisement, it's simply the book's page in Google Books. Until very recently the whole book was available to read online at Google Books, but unfortunately the publishers seem to have changed their policy. So at the time goofy's link was quite genuine. By the way, it's the best 28 dollars I've ever spent on a book. Here's some of the entry:

"A number of the critics acknowledge that such usage (i.e. - meaning to present) goes back to the 17th century .... Gift did not become a controversial verb until it began to appear with some regularity in American newspapers and magazines ... Most of the criticism of this verb has been from American sources ... [it has] a long history of respectable use in Scotland ..."

They go on - "Its detractors say the usual things about the impropriety of using a noun as a verb, but that obviously doesn't stand up against 400 years of historical evidence ..."

And they conclude - "There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the verb gift. It is, however, an uncommon word, and an unpopular one as well. Unless you're Scottish or a gossip columnist, you probably won't have much occasion to use it"

I'm Scottish, so that's OK, I'm allowed to use it. But seriously, you (and a lot of other people, admittedly) may not like it, but how on earth does its use impoverish the language? And how exactly is it an abuse? Is it an abuse every time somebody coins a new word, or starts using a word in a different way or with a new meaning? If people had stuck to that rule, English would indeed be a poorer language. The truth is only time will tell. If it catches on, they'll look aback in a hundred years and wonder what all the fuss was about. If not, as looks likely, you've nothing to worry about.

@Anthony123 - Yes, some people have problems with "impact" as a verb now, but there was an earlier controversy in the 1960s over its use as a noun to mean "effect" etc. At that time some people thought it should be limited to the meaning of something physically hitting something, so they didn't like uses such as - "This will have a significant impact on the economy".

See Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage - http://books.google.com/books?id=2yJusP0vrdgC&pg=PA526

But I do agree with the second half of your comment.