Re:Linguistic purism in English
by redsummer on Tuesday May 17, 2016 @02:00AM
(#11711589)
Is there a spellchecker or style-checker which helps you write plain pre-Norman English (or another "pure" form of English)? In it's simplest form it could just be a dictionary of acceptable words. A more sophisticated version would suggest "pure" replacements of impure words.
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Pre-Norman English looks like this - "Wé Gárdena in géardagum þéodcyninga þrym gefrúnon hú ðá æþelingas ellen fremedon". I reckon you'd have to sacrifice quite a lot of intelligibility in your quest for purity.
That's not quite fair. Sure, it'd be cool to bring back þ, ð, æ & ȝ, and maybe even to have Anglo-Saxon as a kind of priestly or formal tongue. But that's not needful. One can choose to use 'hearty' instead 'cordial' &c. I wouldn't mind a tool which helped me choose words of Anglo-Saxon parentage rather than Latin, when they exist.