"Any Latin word which English willingly took in and not thrust upon it as an unneeded inkhorn term should be deemed fine, this will also include Norman French words such as 'war' or ' part' that were accepted into the language as they filled a niche one expects... probably some even after the Overthrowing which were just plain useful - though that is obviously harder to prove."

Yeah, that's almost my position too. I have a blanket policy of accepting pretty much anything borrowed before the mid 1100s or so, and anything not from French, Latin and Greek. I mean, we borrowed potato and kangaroo because they were new things to us, but administer and corpulent? Nuh-uh. I can understand why the cut off should be after the Norman invasion, as that's when the social structure of England changed and impacted the English tongue. But what happened at 450 which is so important?

Ængelfolc: "I give you that there are some Latinates can be thought of as "true English"- kitchen, street, wine, cup, and other early borrowings before the year 450."

Can I ask why the cutoff is at 450, and not any other year? Why are words borrowed after that not good English? But those borrowed before are?

Jayles here is my answer to 1:

http://rootsenglish.wordpress.com/2012/09/01/there-has-never-been-a-better-time-for-roots-english/

Jayles, I will answer your asks on my blog in good time.

But for 2, I can only say what I've always believed, that if we lessen the FLaG words in English, then it makes no odds whether there are some (or even many) left. Getting rid of all would be great, but fewer is the true goal. Though I often seek to write with none, I know that it cannot always be done. Even we can only get rid of 1 in 10, that is still something worth our hard work.

I've come up with five questions that I think it would be great to hear answers on from anybody interested in Anglish. They seek to get to the root of what and why we do what we do, and hopefully spur some discussion on them. I think that everybody's view is a little different, but I wonder if there are main "strands" so to speak.

The questions are here:
http://rootsenglish.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/5-asks-for-anglishers/

Yeah, the purity thing is irrelevant. There is no such thing as a pure tongue, and Anglish isn't seeking to make one. You'll go mad working towards that.

The issue is about control. It's about who chooses whether and what words are said. The common person--who knew neither French nor Latin nor Greek--would never have chosen and *could never* have chosen many of the words we say today. Yet because of the social power of the elite who preferred those tongues, we took in a great deal of those words. The same or a like thing happened with Chinese in Japanese, French in Russian, Arabic in Turkish and Urdu, and doubtless many tongues.

But we don't have to say "the past is past". We say these words every day, and every act of saying these words makes anew their existence. We can still choose not to say them; to say where we can a word with the same meaning but not from French, Latin, or Greek, and where there is no word, think up something that might work. The first decision to bring them into English was made maybe six or seven hundred years ago, but the choosing to keep them in English is made every day, by ourselves. We must say whether or not linguistic elitism is something we agree with, and if not, throw out such words and not hand them down to another generation.

There will always be an English tongue, but what it says about us can and will shift if we want it.

Goofy:"But all these words were borrowed from French. The might be from a Germanic source if you go further back, but that doesn't change the fact that they were borrowed into English from French."

You see, that's my issue with a lot of Anglish summed up. I don't care one bit about how "Germanic" a word is, or for making English "more Germanic". That's nonsense to me. I care only that words came in to English from certain sources--specifically French, Latin and Greek--because many folk at the time were of the opinion that they were "better" languages. I don't agree that one language is better than another--English is equal in worth to Swahili, Chinese or Aymara--and that means I reject words brought into English on that belief. I want to root out linguistic snobbishness or elitism, not foreignness.

It makes all this playing with word origins so irrelevant, as knowing where a word came from into English is relatively easy, and anything beyond that doesn't matter. When I see people insist that "allegiance" can stay because it's "Germanic" but "cup", "wall", and "beer" have to go because they're ultimately not, it makes me weep for the meaninglessness of it all. There's an awful lot of aimless and worthless work on what could be--no, is--an interesting and worthwhile attempt to re-evaluate how we look at our language.

I've laid my thoughts out very clearly, and I wish others would do the same so that they can reflect upon on them:http://rootsenglish.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/1-on-good-grounds/

Hey goofy, you're a good guy, and right to challenge what folk say. I don't know enough to comment on any given word, but I believe you when you say that we need to show how something happened and not just "find" an OE word that "seems to fit".

For me, the most I'm willing to say is that an existing word influenced the meaning and acceptability of a new word, even if it did not influence the sound. An example would be "blue", which always makes me wonder why on earth it was ever borrowed from French. It was though, and we can only say that the existing "bleo" helped by being so near. The same would go for table, market, sound, plant, turn and various Latin borrowings which were borrowed in OE and through French.

The picture is complex, and our understanding must acknowledge that if we're to make something lasting.

http://rootsenglish.wordpress.com/

Aaaaand I'm done here. If anybody would like to talk to me, or read my stuff with chatter about the US Civil War and how awful government is, my blog is at: http://rootsenglish.wordpress.com/

Jayles: you should see my family, they're all frekes!

Seriously though, I think something like "body" or a variant might work. Many sentences with "person" in can be slightly rewritten to take anybody, nobody, somebody, everybody, and just body. After all, that's one of the meanings the word used to have, and supposedly does still in Scots. So, "I know a body who play tennis semi-professionally," wouldn't be the start of the zombie tennis invasion! In fact, that sentence could easily take "somebody" as it is, so we see how it fits (albeit roughly) with how the language already works.