Textbooks for Germanic languages should be written in Anglish, not English

During the past 400 years much good and bad has befallen the folk of the Banded Folkdoms and set-backs, whilst at times ill-boding and dreadful, have not stopped them from going forth and showing themselves to be world leaders in so many fields, such as starfaring, healcraft and witcraft.

Let's say you just started learning Norwegian and your textbook has given you this sentence to decipher.

Åtte snikskytter spre seg rundt huset og dekte alle balkonger og innganger.

After doing your best to do it yourself, you turn the page to check the answer, which is:

Eight snipers spread (themselves) around the house and covered all balconies and entrances.

That's a good translation when reading a book translated from Norwegian into English. But wait a second, this is a textbook for the student of Norwegian, is it not? What if this was the English translation instead?

Eight sneakshooters (snipers) spread themselves round the house and decked (covered) all balconies and ingoings (entrances).

The second translation is clearly the better one for a student of the language, given that the objective of this textbook is to help the student learn the language as quickly as possible.

The prevalence of Latin and French vocabulary in English is a bit of a crutch for English speakers when they embark on the study of another Germanic language, whereas speakers of other Germanic languages usually have an easier time learning other Germanic languages. That's why the general consensus among Norwegians for example is that German is an easier language to learn than Spanish, whereas for those in the US and even Canada the opposite would be true. But there is one way to give the English speaker a leg up in learning a Germanic language, and that's by using Anglish.

What is Anglish? There are different definitions of just what constitutes Anglish, but it's basically a modified form of English that uses as many Germanic words as possible. That means replacing words like impossible with unmightly, miserable with sorrowly, coast with searim, discover with onfind, and degenerate with misborn (misborn actually sounds like a much harsher insult than degenerate, BTW). The end result looks something like this:

Deutchland (English: Germany) is a folkdom in north middle Europe, often grouped with Western Europe for eretidly and Kithship rows. The rikeupheld name is the Bandish Folkdom of Deutchland (High Deutch: Bundesrepublik Deutschland). It has 80,000,000 folk and has the third largest wealthhood in the world. The most spoken tongue is High Deutch from the south of the country. In the north Saxon parts they have Low-Duetsch and Frisian, siblings and the roots of our own English.

Big towns inclose Berlin (the headtown), Bonn, Munich, Stuttgart, Koeln, Bremen, Hamburg, Karlsruhe, Nuremberg and Dresden. Most folk of the land dwell in these towns.

Deutchland is cleft into thirteen shires and three bandish towns: Baden-Württemberg, Bayern, Berlin, Brandenburg, Bremen, Hamburg, Hessen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Niedersachsen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Rheinland-Pfalz, Saarland, Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Schleswig-Holstein, Thüringen.

Anglish is therefore a modified version of English that carries a much larger share of Germanic cognates than modern English, but at the same time is almost perfectly legible even to those who have never seen it before; in short, it's a partial restoration of the advantage English speakers used to have when learning other Germanic languages.

Some examples of this commonality can be seen in this page, and here are a few:

relinquish - offgive (from OE ofgiefan), cf. Dutch opgeven, German aufgeben

survive - overlive (from OE oferlibban), cf. Dutch overleven, German überleben, Norwegian overleve

correction - righting (from OE rihting), cf. German Berichtigung, Norwegian rettelse

Considering that to truly learn a language takes years in any case, there is a lot to be gained from the creation of textbooks for Germanic languages that first teach the student to read Anglish, and after that then proceed to learn the chosen Germanic language with the explanations now written in Anglish instead of English. In this situation when English can already be written almost entirely comprehensibly using more Germanic vocabulary, there really is no reason to keep on using a large amount of Latinate vocabulary, as it is quite out of place and doesn't help the student at all. You would still naturally want to keep using modern English in textbooks used by aspiring translators and interpreters, as these people have already learned the language to an extent that the cognates are now a distraction, and they need to be able to quickly switch from one language to another...but the vast majority of language students do not reach this level for quite some time, if ever.

The only roadblock in creating these textbooks would be a standardization of the type of Anglish to use. It would probably be best to create three varieties of the language (yet still quite similar): one for West Germanic languages (German, Dutch, Frisian, Afrikaans), another for Scandinavian languages, and a final one for Icelandic and Faroese, which have the most "pure" Germanic wordstock of them all.

Thus, the Anglish used to learn the first two groups would refer to anthropology as anthropology since even these Germanic languages use the Greek loanword, but for Icelandic it would refer to it as manlore, since that is a proposed Anglish word that corresponds better with the Icelandic mannfræði. The same would go with meteorology, which would be unchanged except in the Icelandic textbook where it would be referred to as weatherlore (veðurfræði).


Sound like a pie in the sky idea? It's not. It's just one example of a controlled natural language, a phenomenon that already exists. ASD Simplified Technical English is an example of this in the aerospace industry, where only a certain kind of English can be used to avoid ambiguity when giving intructions to people, especially those that don't speak English as a first language. Anglish would simply be another controlled natural language used for a single task - the learning of other Germanic languages for students with an English-only background. The only thing Anglish needs is an agreed upon standardized form, and then it'll be ready for use.