If you wind back when the borrowings started happening in great number, you get to a time when English was mostly "purely" Germanic. That's what this project is - as if Old English had continued on without being influenced from French etc.

Don't the Celtic or other pre-Saxon dialects have the better claim to seniority, rather than the tongue of the Saxon invaders?

https://www.britannica.com/place/United-Kingdom/Anglo-Saxon-...

King Arthur definitely would've spoken something more like Welsh

borrowings have always happened.

and as regards early english, did you ever see phillip larkin describe it as "ape's bumfodder"? luckily we replaced it with many, many borrowings, so much so that looking at AS english is prainful on the brain - and uneccessary.

Of course, at different times it happened to more or less a degree, and from different languages. It's all arbitrary, but this project chose an arbitrary precision of "pure" Germanic English. It's their choice and doesn't feel ideologically motivated, more so in the spirit of conlang (constructed languages).

> only a quarter to a third of modern English vocabulary can be legitimately described as having purely English

does that make sense? are we dealing with recursive definitions of english here?

> "pure" Germanic English

something there never has been?

No, there was a definite period of history when English was highly Germanic and lacked influence from non-Germanic languages.

Think of it as English as it was when the concept of England originated.

True, but only a quarter to a third of modern English vocabulary can be legitimately described as having purely English or Germanic origins. It might as well not be "English" at this point.

Probably the Germanic languages of the Anglo Saxons- it's called Anglish, after all.

what it is called (which is a kind of advertising) is no evidence of where this came from.

This is turtles all the way down. All Germanic languages are highly related to the other Indo-European languages. The Latin alphabet we use to write can be traced back to Egyptian Hieroglyphs. People just like to pick arbitrary points in an evolutionary timeline and use those points to create in-groups and out-groups.

But if you take that view, you can't define anything. You can't even say it's the Latin alphabet. We must constantly ignore the "turtles" for many things in daily life. So yes, it's arbitrary but that's not a problem. It's just what they chose for the project.

I'm not saying it's a bad project. I think it's cool, but the words "pure" and "native" don't make sense to me to describe it.

They said that "native" is not Anglish, they should have used "inborn", which means their about page is not written in Anglish...