Whilst you would be forgiven for thinking this statement comes straight from the latest UKIP manifesto, it is in fact a quotation from The Anglish Moot, a fan-page promoting the use of the 'Anglish' language — that is, English with all foreign borrowings stripped away. Originally coined as a joke by humourist Paul Jennings, the notion of Anglish — a portmanteau of 'Anglo-Saxon' and 'English' — seems to have developed a certain cult following. Unperturbed by the fact that half of all our vocabulary pardon, word-stock comes from Latin or French sources, these purists have endeavoured to draft a manifesto in their desired tongue.
Unsurprisingly, it is as incomprehensible as it is ridiculous. Blaming and 'the hild of Hastings' for this linguistic contamination, the Moot moves on to theorise how 'the high score of beclouding Latinise words is an unneeded inkshed'.
Whilst it is hard not to treat such statements with mockery, more serious attempts have been made to prevent foreign imports from entering our language. Fighting against the 'needless inbringing' of Latin and French terms, popular nineteenth-century poet William Barnes coined a considerable number of scientific words based on Old English, such as birdlore for 'ornithology' or bendsome for 'flexible'. Similarly George Orwell had his reservations, which is all the more strange in light of his dystopian novel where the brain-numbingly simplistic language 'Newspeak' serves to control and severely limit freedom of thought.
Sadly, we cannot reduce this inward attitude towards language to the nationalist zeitgeist of the late 19th and early 20th century, as Donald Trump has proved. One of his first actions upon assuming the Presidency was to take down the Spanish-language version of the White House website, acting swiftly on his observation that "this is a country where we speak English, not Spanish' — despite the fact that the USA contains more Spanish speakers than Spain itself.
As well as feeding a nationalist agenda, reducing English to its 'origins' would lose some very useful characteristics that makes it such an expressive language. Broadly speaking, English can be split into three levels of formality or 'registers' — Anglo Saxon, French and Latin. This is significant, given how we all use language differently according to the situation. Think of a supervision essay.
