Apparently, there’s a group of people in the world that want to take the English language back to its original Germanic roots. In an interesting video that I stumbled across, the channel host describes a small movement to revert English back to its “purest form”. This essentially means that all of the Romance and Greek loanwords would be swapped out for words from Old English or other Germanic languages.
I find this fascinating, because it makes our spoken language sound much more interesting. Some people may find it strange to substitute words for odd Germanic counterparts, but I think it’s a fun little experiment.
For example, the video mentioned how the phrase “A famous actor I’ve seen on the television” became “A nameknown showplayer I’ve seen on the farseer”.
I personally did not think of this as weird, because of my studies with the German language. The German word for actor is “der Schauspieler” which literally translates to “Show-Player” and the word for “television” is “der Fernseher” which means “far-seer”.
I also found it interesting how so many basic sentence words are Germanic in origin. In the above sentence, there were only three words that were not of Germanic origin. These words can be traced to German and still recognizable, such as “seen” coming from “gesehen” or “on the” coming from “auf dem”
All in all, I feel like the movement to “purify” English is not worth the time, but I do see it as an interesting concept. I would personally do this if I had spare time just to see how different the language would become. What do you think? Would you like to see a “purified” English?