Anglish and Esperanto, Esperanto and Anglish

One strong point that Anglish, which Esperanto lacks, has is a larger cultural background from which to draw on. Esperanto just came from the egg in comparison to the language history that Anglish has drawn from.  Beowulf, centuries of Anglo-Saxon settlement of England, and actual historical sources from which to draw material from are better than one century of mixed results. I will not introduce here examinations of these examples, but just to show what is the scope of each respective language.

There are some inconsistencies of the premises of Anglish. Take the word ‘abbot’ which comes from an old English word but the word ‘abbey’ comes from the old French and is thus off limits. They both drive from the same Latin source, but since one form of the word is from OE and the other from OFr, the first is acceptable but the other is not. So the etymological sense cannot preserve different forms of the same word. This division shows etymology as a guide for language construction can be inconsistent.

By removing the suffixes, we see that the root word is that same. Also it has not been determined which words should be used for the same term. This problem and other considers make Anglish like the Ecclesiastical text project in that both can point to a source from which to draw their material, but all their ducks have not been placed in a row. The raw material is there but decisions have not been made yet that are accepted so that we can talk about use. Those projects are in the in progress phase.

So perhaps it is not fair to compare Anglish with Esperanto. Anglish is a subset of English, while Esperanto is its own language. Going back to the ‘abbey’ example, Esperanto would not suffer from this problem because of its resource to take word roots and add affixes to make new words. Anglish is cumbersome because correct usage depends on etymology, which has shown to not give a consistent result. For this reason, Anglish cannot function on a level as Esperanto as a working language. Perhaps more could be said about this latter.