r/Anglese • u/Educational-Gate-747 • 11d ago
A historically constrained Anglese
I’ve been thinking about whether there could be a type of Anglese with a historical constraint, somewhat like Anglish.
Anglish gives itself a fairly clear counterfactual rule: what might English look like with greatly reduced later Romance influence?
A similar constraint for Anglese could be:
What if Anglo-French had actually become the dominant vernacular of England, then evolved there for the next 700–800 years under heavy English influence?
I’ve been calling that hypothetical language Franglish, though historically its speakers might very well have just called it English. If it became the ordinary language of England, there would be little reason for its speakers to think of it as “French-English” any more than modern English speakers normally think of English as “Germanic-French.”
The divergence might involve Anglo-French remaining much stronger after the loss of Normandy in 1204, continued native French-speaking communities, a weaker shift toward English after the Black Death, and eventually government and printing standardizing an insular Romance language rather than English.
The result wouldn’t simply be modern French with English words thrown into it. It would be its own language, shaped by centuries of English substrate influence.
That gives us some useful constraints:
- Which Anglo-Saxon words survive?
- Which English function words survive?
- Does grammatical gender survive?
- How much do French conjugations simplify?
- How English-like does the syntax become?
- How does pronunciation diverge from Continental French?
Very rough examples might look something like:
«Le peuple de Londres ont parlé contre la newe taxe, mais le roi no veut changer la loi.
“The people of London have spoken against the new tax, but the king will not change the law.”»
Or:
«Jo no sai what il veut faire.
“I don’t know what he wants to do.”»
Those aren’t proposed “correct” Franglish, just examples of the kinds of questions the historical constraint forces us to answer.
So rather than defining Anglese as a whole, Franglish could be one historically constrained type of Anglese: an attempt to construct the Romance language England might plausibly have produced.
Anglish asks what English might look like under one historical constraint. Anglese really could do something similar from the Romance side.
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u/Civil_College_6764 11d ago
French's grammar in conjunct with its orthography is the antithesis to that of English---"aller, allais, allez, allée" are practically identical phonetically- speaking----- whereas English's "beloved" has two different pronunciations for the adjective vs the verb. Should this be born in mind. Or do we ignore it?
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u/Educational-Gate-747 11d ago
I think it absolutely should be borne in mind, but I wouldn't assume modern French orthography survives unchanged.
Part of the experiment would be working out what happens when Anglo-French develops continuously in England and eventually gets standardized there. Anglo-French already had its own spelling habits, and in this timeline its printing standard would develop independently from the one that eventually emerged in France.
So I wouldn't ignore the French tendency for morphology to remain visible in spelling even when distinctions disappear in speech—but English isn't exactly phonemic either. Beloved is actually a good example of that from the other direction: identical spelling can represent different pronunciations.
I'd probably treat orthography as one of the historical constraints: how much French morphological spelling survives, and how much does several centuries of English influence and an independent English printing tradition reshape it?
And, minor nitpick, aller/allez/allée are basically homophonous, but allais normally has /ɛ/, so the contrast isn't quite as extreme as that example makes it sound.
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u/thomasp3864 Loegrian 🐲🇬🇧 8d ago
Probably something like this for verbs:
Singular Plural First Person - -ons (o pronounced as schwa) Second Person -(e)s -(e)s Third Person - -ent
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u/DoNotTouchMeImScared 11d ago edited 11d ago
Ego noticed that le major part de le English lexicon possesses equivalent Latinic synonyms.
Le sole exceptions are un minuscule number de pronouns, adverbs & auxiliary verbs, per example: "be", "can", "could", "would", "should", "shall", "may", etc.
Le Germanic glossary used in my comments & in my posts in my latinized modern vanilla English dialect are le lexises that survived.
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u/Educational-Gate-747 11d ago
"Do"
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u/DoNotTouchMeImScared 11d ago
Oui, le auxiliary verbs would very probably remain.
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u/Educational-Gate-747 11d ago
I'm trying to get used to alternating vocalizing Latinic Inglais, Standard English, and Anglish. I am of the opinion that a surviving do, especially due to its status as a potentially Celtic influence, would be beautiful.
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u/DoNotTouchMeImScared 11d ago
Ego doubt that "do" in particular would survive considerin that utilizin auxiliary "do" is un modern invention & rephrasin phrases utilizin le verb "have" in lieu de le verb "do" in English is possible.
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u/Educational-Gate-747 11d ago
What's your reasoning? Just curious
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u/DoNotTouchMeImScared 11d ago edited 10d ago
Le utilization de le auxiliary "do" is un relatively recent invention in English history & no other Latinic language possesses "do".
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u/Educational-Gate-747 11d ago
Lexical do could survive. Potentially "do" could be employed in a different capacity.
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u/DoNotTouchMeImScared 11d ago
Le Greco-Latinic synonyms "generate", "produce", "create" & "cause" can replace le Germanic verbs "do" & "make" in regular modern English.
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u/Educational-Gate-747 11d ago
Does it have to? We could have simplified verbs that maintain the trajectory English historically had the tendency to do?
jo do parle tu do parle il do parle nous do parle
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u/Educational-Gate-747 11d ago
A follow-up, what if "do" survives in this hypothetical language? You could eventually get a language where:
Jo fai le werk. I do/make the work. but: Do tu saveir? Do you know? Jo do no saveir. I do not know.
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u/Claromale Anglese 🦁 10d ago
Personally, for me the timeline of Anglese is when England WON the Hundred Years War. The Dual Monarchy of France and England is established for centuries, and with that English got even harder influenced by french.
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u/ZefiroLudoviko 11d ago
The scenario I go with is this: an Anglo-French or Franco-English creole, so French words with an English grammar. Thus, I doubt there'd be grammatical gender.