@jayles - Meaning?

@AnWulf - " I said Gaelic, which is a broader latter day word for the Celtic tung which is broken into sundry dialects (or sunder tungs even) to inhold Brythonic Celtic tho I don't think there are any speakers of Brythonic left. ... So my bad ... Let me say it this way: I don't speak a Gaelic/Celtic tung. English is a Teutonish tung so it's a red herring to bring up the Gaelic/Celtic dwellers that were there before the Saxons."

First, Gaelic is not a broader latter day word for the Celtic tongue. Celtic languages are divided into two families - Goidelic and Brythonic. Goidelic includes Scottish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic and Manx, Brythonic includes Welsh, Cornish and Breton, and the Celtic language spoken in England before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons. But that's not the point, one which you always avoid. You are forever criticising the Normans, without ever holding the behaviour of the Anglo-Saxons to the same account. That sounds to me like double standards. But why let stupid historical objectivity get in the way of your narrative?

I wonder what happened to the claim that "An ongoing work that came to a screeching halt when Lucky Bill had a Frenchman put over the church in England" - gone off into another round of polemic. Incidentally, the Ormulum wasn't "setting the Bible into English", it was a commentary in English verse explaining the meaning of certain bible texts; something rather different from a bible translation, especially given the Church's position.

And why will you never address the point that the entry of French words into English came in two separate periods; the second from choice.

But what's the point? I really can't be arsed anymore to try and have a rational conversation with someone who holds a 900 year-old grudge, harping on about "Lucky Bill" every opportunity he gets. Someone who twists history to suit his own agenda, and accuses people who simply use normal English of holding French and Latin "in awe". Or people who use normal British spelling of paying "homage" to the French. You really do live in a world all of your own. If all this, and accusing your opponent of "whingeing", is the level of your debate, it's really not worth my time.

The Anglish thing used to worry me, as I felt my language was threatened by what I consider a very bad idea. But now I've read a bit about the "pure English" movement, I've realised my fears were completely groundless. While many if not most of the inkhorn terms you so despise are still with us, few of the "English" substitutes have survived. (I got my list from an English course at Towson University - http://pages.towson.edu/duncan/inkhorn.html). And the same with more modern coinages. The linguistic purist movement in English is about as significant to mainstream English as a Trekkie convention. But at least (most) Trekkies know they're living in a fantasy world.

And don't confuse linguistic purism with the Campaign for Plain English. They do sterling work, and have had a very positive effect on the use of English by official bodies, businesses and professionals. But their principles are based on common sense, not prejudice.

@jayles - I'll return your question. Why use "Moon eclipse", when we have a perfectly good expression already. (Unless you are a believer in "pure English" - A pure English that many of us have some difficulty in understanding, have no interest in, and are getting a bit fed up with!). As for "appeal to people", I was thinking of people in general. There's nothing wrong with one individual using whatever words they like, but one individual isn't going to make much difference, especially if other people haven't the hell idea what you're talking about. Language is first and foremost about communication. Or have I missed something?

Another thing completely missing from your derivation-based pruning system is any mention of how words sound. Now for me "lunar landscape" sounds much better than "moon landscape" - probably something to do with alliteration and a balanced number of syllables. You no doubt deny yourselves such wonderful words as cacophony - doubly damned - four syllables and Greek to boot. How do you think poets choose words if not by sound?

I quite agree with you about plain English, but I imagine the Plain English Campaign would give short thrift to your "wordstrings, frith, requickening". Whatever they are, they are not plain English!

@jayles -But that's exactly what already happens. Words that are useful stay, those that aren't, or that don't appeal to people, drop by the wayside. And 'lunar' has stayed because some people obviously found it useful. Why limit yourself to one word when two or more give you more choices, just because one word can do the job adequately. Yes, 'moon landing' sounds fine, but 'a moon eclipse'? And what about when you have two 'moon somethings' in the same sentence or paragraph. Don't you like the possibility of variety?

Why limit yourself to 'huge' (now that AnWulf has passed it as fit for consumption) when you could vary it with "enormous, vast, colossal" etc. Why on earth would anyone want to reduce the language to only those words we "really need" - it would be so boring! Not to mention what would happen to prose and poetry. Oh well, I don't suppose we "really need" them either. I really don't understand this reductionist approach to language.

It's a dialectal variation on the "historic(al) present" (aka dramatic or narrative present) used, for example in jokes:

"This horse goes into a bar and orders a beer. Sorry, says the barman, we don't serve horses here. Oh, so you don't serve beefburgers, then? says the horse."

in newspapers - "Weather causes chaos on roads"

It's often used with "say" and "tell" - "Maggie tells me you two are getting married" - "She says you're to give her a ring sometime".

And there's a non-dialectal version of first-person "says"in narrative dialogues where "I say" is inverted:
"Have you come to help me", says he. "Not exactly", says I.
"Is that right?" says I, showing it to him. "It is, my lord," says he, looking at me as if I had two heads.

It seems we can also use it with "we"

"But the film's producers at Allied Artists found the scene unnerving (damn right, says we) and requested that director Don Siegel add a happy ending" (Google Books)

@fbf - Firstly, let me make it clear I am only talking about British English, and as with one or two other grammar points, we do indeed have dealer's choice, as you put it. And as I said before, I personally like having those choices.

In British books, at least, 'running backwards' is way ahead of 'running backward', but 'running forward' leads 'running forwards'. British newspapers show a similar story, all for running:

Guardian - backwards 15, backward 8, forwards 21, forward 84
Independent - backwards 67, backward 0, forwards 1, forward 24
Telegraph - backwards 90, backward 1, forwards 7, forward 73

The figures for forwards are overblown as they include talk of rugby forwards. SAl;l together very strange: we seem to strongly prefer 'running backwards' but 'running forward'.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=running+backwards%2Crunning+backward&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=18&smoothing=3&share=

@Anwulf - " Every time one writes the -our ending in English, then you're giving "homage" to France" - This is the sort of balderdash that really does your cause no good outside the little band of the faithful.

"talking about the Saxons and the Celts is a red herring. I don't speak Gaelic". I wasn't talking about the Gaels; I was talking about the Britons the Anglo-Saxons displaced, and occasionally (according to the Anglo-Saxon scribes, not just Gildas) massacred. I don't suppose the Anglo-Saxons were any better or worse than any of the other groups of invaders at the time, but the way you keep going on about the Normans, you'd think the Anglo-Saxons and the Norsemen were absolute angels in comparison. (perhaps you agree with Pope Gregory - "Non Angli, sed angeli"). Interesting that the Anglo-Saxon language survived the Normans, but Brythonic Celtic more or less disappeared from the land of its birth. No mention

"So they get a by too" - Sorry! Haven't a clue what you're on about.

"The Takeover, in the end, brought in some 10,000 French/Latin words! Of those, about 75% are still with us."- I wonder why? Linguists usually reckon that it's because they were found to be useful. Words that aren't drop out. But I realise that doesn't square with your ideology. Seeing you're studying the influx of French words into English, perhaps you could comment on suggestions that the greater quantity of French words came into English in the 13th and 14th centuries, after the anglicisation of the Norman nobility, or are people like David Crystal wrong?

"many books of the Bible were put into Old English. An ongoing work that came to a screeching halt when Lucky Bill had a Frenchman put over the church in England'

I'm afraid this is where you get a bit free and easy with history. I presume you're talking about Lanfranc (who was in fact Italian, though he'd been living in Normandy for some time.) In fact William was quite happy to keep his predecessor Stigand until was deposed 1070. Not by William, but by Rome (he had already been excommunicated by five popes, and was the richest man in England, after the royal house).

Lanfranc was certainly a friend of William's, but he was also his own man, having built a reputation as a leading conservative theologian. Rightly or wrongly, he thought the English church was corrupt and out of step with the mainstream church in continental Europe, and I accept that he replaced many English clergymen with Frenchmen and other foreigners, but as far as I can discover, this had more to do with theology and church politics than Normanisation.

The translation of the Bible into English is a well-ploughed furrow on the Internet, and I have found absolutely no evidence that there was any "ongoing work" to come "to a screeching halt". There had been some limited translations of some of the bible stories (not literal bible translations) starting with Caedmon, and including those of Æfred, but these seem to have ended with Ælfric of Eynsham in about 1010. I can find absolutely no evidence of any attempts to translate any parts of the bible into English between 1010 and Wycliffe in 1384, apart from a limited translation of the psalms in 1325. But perhaps you know better.

Mind you, had there been attempts to translate the bible into English, Lanfranc would have certainly clamped down, as he would have done if there had been similar attempts to translate the bible into French. For the Catholic Church had decided in 600 that the only version of the bible allowed to exist was in the Latin Vulgate, a decision they didn't rescind until the 16th century. They were terrified of ordinary people being able to interpret the bible for themselves.

"The Bible was dangerous. To handle its text directly, as would be necessary in providing translation, would have been to court disaster. ... The prohibitions against the vernacular translation formulated on the Continent were symptomatic of the general European development." (Cambridge History of the Bible)

What Lanfranc did do was make changes to versions of the Vulgate bible existing in England to bring them into line with Continental scholarship.

"There was yet another wave after the Restoration when the Norman begotten monarchy came back from … Where else? … FRANCE!" - Sorry, but could you explain to me exactly how the Stuarts were "the Norman begotten monarchy". As for your hatred of France, that's your problem.

To everyone else, sorry to go in such detail about such a small point, but AnWulf throws this out as though it were a historical fact, when there seems to be absolutely no evidence to back it up. But "why doesn't this amaze me?"

@porsche - I've just noticed this (a year late, but never mind) - "Actually, if a particular manner of speech is unacceptable in a particular social context, then wouldn't that be the very definition of "linguistically inferior"?" - I'm surprised at you, as you're usually pretty sensible about these things.

Standard English is simply the dialect that got lucky, and no dialect is superior or inferior in linguistic terms. And nor are non-standard dialects necessarily less complex or less grammatical than Standard English; they all have their own grammatical logic.

All we can say "if a particular manner of speech is unacceptable in a particular social context" is that some people see it as "socially inferior", that's all. So no, it certainly wouldn't be the very definition of "linguistically inferior", if such a concept existed.

Is a Yorkshireman "linguistically inferior" because he says "He were in't pub, stood at t'bar"? Or "there's nowt wrong with brass" or "tha shouldn't have done that, lad" ? Of course not. Linguistically different, that's all.

This is from Dickens - Tom Tiddler's Ground:

"But this morning I comes along this road here, looking for a sunny and soft spot to sleep in, and I sees this desolation and ruination. I’ve lived myself in desolation and ruination; I knows many a fellow-creetur that’s forced to live life long in desolation and ruination; and I sits me down and takes pity on it, as I casts my eyes about."

Dialect yes, but "linguistically inferior"? Poppycock.

From several commenters - "conversate is not a word" - so how are we discussing it? - or "it is not a word; it is slang/ebonics". If slang and dialects don't have words, what on earth do they have? Is the F-word not in fact a word then. If I say "I can't be arsed to get out of effing bed today" - what are "arsed" and 'effing', as being slang they can't possibly be words. Apparently.

There seems to be rather a lot of snobbery (and not a little ignorance of how language works) in some of these comments. You'd certainly never hear anything like this from somebody who studies language, i.e. a linguist. What is that makes some people "get off" on criticising other people's language, I wonder?

Personally I like having the choice; it's a bit like among and amongst (which is also frowned on in the US). Sometimes one fits the surrounding words better, sometimes the other. But we also seem to prefer one or the other in certain contexts. We usually say 'backwards and forwards', but wouldn't say 'look forwards to seeing you', for example.

It also seems that the backwards with an S is more common than forwards with an S. In British-published books Google Ngram shows 'going backwards' ahead of 'going backward' but 'going forward' in front of 'going forwards'. And the same pattern is true for 'lean, move, run'.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=run+forward%2Crun+forwards%2Crun+backward%2Crun+backwards&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=18&smoothing=3&share=

Interesting question. Now you've got me wondering just how we Brits do use the two versions.