Uncleftish Beholding and language purity
Hello, and welcome to the first installment of my newsletter! I originally had a different topic planned, but the amount of going places and tracking down paper zines and flyers from 50 years ago answering the question I asked made me decide to talk about something else first. (I might get back to the other one eventually.)
Recently on tumblr, a post crossed my dash about Poul Anderson’s 1989 story(ish) “Uncleftish Beholding,” originally published in Analog Magazine. Except the poster said only that “somebody” wrote it, and, being the type of person who prefers attribution over “somebody,” I reblogged it to name the author. I didn’t have a lot of time when I was scrolling tumblr that day, so I left it at that and the note that we read it in grad school. That post gets notes every couple of days, and I kept thinking I should write a little more in depth about it. And then I thought, hey, that sure would make a great newsletter topic! So here we are.
My MA thesis advisor is a bit of a nerd, as is his dissertation advisor, and when we discussed language purity in … I forget which class, exactly, but it was probably History of German my first semester, he had us read “Uncleftish Beholding.”
If you’re unfamiliar with the piece (I was, though I’d heard of Poul Anderson), it is a translation of atomic theory into an English where there were no borrowings from Latin/Romance languages or Greek, just the nice Germanic roots, known as Anglish. He wrote it, according to both my advisor and Wikipedia, to demonstrate what linguistic purity might look like in English.
If you’re a certain amount of online (or above a certain age), you’re probably thinking of James Davis Nicoll’s quip from Usenet: The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
Which is not inaccurate, as far as quips go!
OK, what IS linguistic purity and why is it a problem?
Linguistic purity (or language purity) is the idea that a language should only contain words from itself, and no borrowed words. So English should only have words with English roots, French only with French roots, etc. France has the Académie Française to protect the French language from being flooded with Anglicisms. It’s not an official government entity, and I don’t know how much influence they have on day to day French, but they exist. In Germany, there’s Duden, who doesn’t attempt to protect the German language or prescribe how it should be used; it describes it. (They make dictionaries but also a lot of reference materials on grammar and teaching tools for kids and academic-level linguistics texts.) No, for the language peevery, you have to go to the Verein Deutsche Sprache, who stand for the protection of the German language against Anglicisms and for the fostering of German as a language of science and culture.
To be fair, though, English does have an outsized influence on international science and culture. A person can move to Berlin with basically no German skills and get a job in tech that’s entirely in English, and years later have basically no German skills. It’s not exactly ideal. But the solution to that problem isn’t “complain about Anglicisms destroying German;” it’s rather more complicated.
On the flip side, sometimes you do need to protect a language. Icelandic is a national language spoken by under half a million people, and they have a language institute that turns borrowed words into calques or adapts them to Icelandic, so that their language doesn’t die out. Additionally, there are thousands of endangered languages around the world with anywhere from a handful to 10,000 or so people who speak them, and people are working to document them before they die out or to revitalize them so they don’t get that far. Part of revitalization can be using native roots to coin new words for concepts they could easily borrow from another language in order to show that the language is alive, not relegated to the state it was in a hundred years ago. The revitalization of the Cherokee language is an ongoing project that has been successful in both keeping the language alive and in making it accessible to modern technology (e.g. creating fonts and keyboard layouts for computers and mobile devices).
The difference here is that big national languages like French or German aren’t in any danger of going extinct. German has some 100 million native speakers and another 30 million people speak it as a second language. Even if, as I experience regularly here in Berlin, groups of people from different countries speak English together because it’s the only language everyone has in common, the Germans still speak German together, the French people still speak French together, and people who want to practice either of those languages participate in German or French. (Meanwhile, my French vocabulary has grown to include a few more vulgarities, but the extent of my French is still Je ne parle pas français (‘I don’t speak French.’)
Linguistic purity and the 19th century nationalist movements
The 19th century was an era of Empire and of Enlightenment, but also of nationalism. On one hand, many of the nationalist movements presaged the ones we know today. On the other hand, some of them were anti-imperialist and wanted the right to define their own nations and govern themselves. The revolutionary movement came to a head in 1848, but the larger and more powerful imperial forces won in the end.
You’re probably wondering what this has to do with language purity. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was very large and encompassed a lot of ethnic groups and languages (especially Slavic ones). Within most of the Empire, there was bilingualism between German and the local language. Because of this long-standing contact situation, there were a lot of German loan words in the Slavic languages inside the Habsburg Empire, and linguistic purists (usually with a side of nationalism) wanted to replace them with proper Slavic words as a matter of ethnic identity (Thomas 1997, 2003).
But this sort of linguistic nationalism didn’t only occur in imperialized places. At the time, Germany wasn’t a country yet; the Holy Roman Empire had been dissolved by Napoleon’s victory in 1806, and after they kicked him back out a few years later, most of the former HRE became the German Confederation in 1815. (The country we know as Germany today was founded in 1871. Sort of. It’s complicated, and no one teaches pre-1871 history in any of the departments I studied in.)
So you had a bunch of German-speaking intellectuals in the middle of the 19th century trying to define what made someone German: was it where they were born, what language they spoke, how they identified themselves? Because the great German-language writers like Goethe and Schiller wouldn’t have understood themselves as German, but it was important to these nationalist intellectuals to be able to claim the great German-language writers as German. (It’s complicated! For a more detailed discussion of both 19th-C linguistic nationalism and the history of the German language, I highly recommend Joe Salmons’ A History of German, especially chapter 6.7, on prescriptivism. Joe has a sense of humor that makes a subject that could be desert levels of dryness interesting. He’s also my MA advisor’s dissertation advisor.)
Ethnonationalism by any other name
would smell just as rancid. Linguistic purity cannot be disentangled from ethnonationalism, because the core ideology of both systems revolves around defining an identity via the exclusion of Not Us and a narrowing down of what’s included as Us. And that’s why it’s a problem. (Plus, in most cases, it’s just silly.)
Back to Poul Anderson
You can find the text of the essay around the internet if you look for it; it’s probably not exactly legally available digitally, so I won’t link to it here.
The work he put in to figuring out how to re-calque the borrowings in scientific language was pretty cool. Some of them are direct translations of the German words, like Wasserstoff/waterstuff for hydrogen (Greek ‘water producer’), Sauerstoff/sourstuff for oxygen (Gk ‘sour’ + -gen), Stickstoff/chokestuff for nitrogen. I particularly enjoyed the use of bernstone for electron (German Bernstein ‘amber,’ which is what Gk elektron means.) So Anderson had to have the etymology of the scientific words and a good etymological dictionary of English. A lot of effort for a clever bit of stunt writing. (Though lbr: I would also do this kind of stunt writing if I had time.)
It’s disorienting, a bit, when you’re used to reading about science with all these words borrowed or invented from classical roots. “The firststuffs have their being as motes called unclefts. These are mightly small” sounds strange and, dare I say it, uneducated – because Latin and Greek are the language of science and education! Because 500 years ago, Latin was the language of academe, not English.
There’s more to this disorientation than this perception that we talk about science in Latin or Greek. Words with Germanic roots are perceived as more homey or earthy, or less elevated. We joke about using “25-cent words” when we use words with Latin roots if there’s a perfectly suitable English word for the same thing. Why’s that? During the period of Norman rule of England, a lot of French words made their way into English – but primarily among the language of the court. That’s why we have cows and swine but beef and pork, and why our nice Germanic swear words like shit feel so nice and earthy but feces feels formal and artificial. (OK, there’s even more to it than that, but this post is already getting too long.)
“Uncleftish Beholding” is an experiment in imagining an English without borrowed words (can you do it? I can’t). That Anderson chose atomic theory – one of the most important theories of today – to translate into Anglish seems to be a deliberate stance-taking. He could have chosen something a little older, like germ theory, or something out of date, like phlogiston theory, but he chose the theory that gives our age one of its epithets, juxtaposing the modern with the faux-ancient. In all honesty, I find it difficult to read “Uncleftish” because I’m so used to my nice Latin and Greek borrowings and I have to translate it back in my head for it to make any sense. Even as a German speaker who has studied dead Germanic languages, the Anglish words are meaningless to me.
And I think that’s the point Anderson was making: linguistic purity is an absurd notion, and trying to get rid of Not-Us words won’t improve anything.
News and Notes
I keep hoping to hear about the submissions I have out (translations into English of a German writer’s work) so I can share that with you, but we’re still playing the waiting game, and I want to send my first real newsletter.
Thank you for reading!
CD Covington
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