Some Nerdy Linguistics Fun: Anglish

[Maedhros_Nelyafinwë]

I'm sure some of you know about this already, but just today, I discovered Anglish, which is a "made-up language" including only English words of Germanic or Anglo-Saxon origin, and omitting the French and Latin based words. It also has aimed to take some modern words and reconstruct them as if English were still composed of Germanic words and conventions.

Reading it, I immediately noticed it sounded archaic, and specifically Tolkienish. I'm sure Tolkien was particularly interested in Germanic languages, so this doesn't really surprise me. As a Silm fanfic writer who likes to dabble with making my language sound more elevated and archaic, I thought it would be fun to put the prologue of my fanfic in a few various Anglish translators and see what it came up with. And to those of you who also write and are interested in archaic language, you might also enjoy these translators for inspiration.

I put the actual output in a separate PDF document and am attaching it here, since I ran my prologue through 3 different generators and the output is long. So feel free to follow along in the PDF, as the rest of this post is an analysis of the output. And here's the original prologue.


Translator 1: https://bark-fa.github.io/Anglish-Translator/
If you go to the official Anglish page, this is the translator they link. But I didn't really like this translator for a couple reasons. One, it messed up the formatting, placing punctuation at the end of the paragraphs into the beginning of the next paragraphs. It also seemed to translate some words out of context. For example:

morgoth would not brook the foul weather as a forgive to rest

The original text was "Morgoth would not use the foul weather as an excuse to rest." The translator seemed to use the wrong meaning of excuse here, like excuse the verb instead of excuse the noun.

Another example of the context being wrong:

he seemingly liked to think it wasn’t worth it to bother someone else over the aches and pains he thought of as youngling

The original word was minor instead of youngling. The translator seemed to think I was talking about an underage person when really I meant minor the adjective.

There are some things I like, though. For example, I think "the barrow kingdom of Himring" sounds pretty epic, though I wouldn't actually use it in a fanfic since nobody knows barrow is supposed to mean mountain.

I also liked this:

her love had miraculously survived horrors beyond minds eye

I liked mind's eye as a substitute for imagination. That, I might actually consider putting in the fanfic.


Translator 2:

Anglish 2.0 Translator ― LingoJam

lingojam.com

I definitely liked this translation better. First of all, it didn't butcher the formatting so badly. Second of all, I thought it had more epic words and phrases, and it was a bit more natural sounding than the other one too. It still had some words translated with the wrong context, though.

A couple random phrases I liked (changed words in bold) :

she could not show to a lord unsummoned

raiwen worried about anyone hapless enough to be out in such elements, but namely her love.

It was hard for him to swallow that his bedevil in angband and thangorodrim had changed him forever

I like use of the word bedevil instead of torment. I don't think I'd actually use that in the fic because no one would understand what it means, but I think it sounds cool.

However, this translator isn't without its faults. It absolutely butchered poor Maitimo's dialogue here. (But maybe that could be fitting in the story, because being out in Cold-Cold the Ever Cold for a week has killed off most of his brain cells, as @Tyelkormo the Fair put it.)

“i figured there’s no frum i couldn’t draft this character:kite tonight. It is a mere answer to a trade proposal from azaghâl, which i had already decided to swallow. ”

RIP Maitimo. You'd better not send that letter if you're talking like that.


Translator 3: ChatGPT
Finally, I asked ChatGPT to translate the prologue into Anglish. The result was definitely the most polished of the three, not messing up the format at all, and all the words contextually made sense. However, not being an expert in Anglish, I can't be sure how many Anglish words ChatGPT actually used. It seemed to me like ChatGPT also used some other archaic-sounding words that may or may not have actually been Anglish. But it definitely came up with the nicest-sounding result overall, if not the most accurate.

Yet on top of her uneasy feelings of dread and her swiftly beating heart, she also fought wrath in her mind. She understood his need to guard the lands; Morgoth would not take the foul weather as an excuse to rest, so neither should the warriors of Himring. But she didn’t understand why they couldn’t ease their strivings a little during the dead of winter.

But they seemed in good cheer as they dismounted and hailed each other

Raiwen found Maedhros in his chamber, which was a broad room with a scarlet canopied bed, a great oak desk piled with books and writings, and a cupboard filled with all sorts of wrappings and herbs. Torchlight gave the stone walls a warm glow. Gold-framed likenesses of all his six brothers, and his parents and nephew, hung on the walls. He himself was bent over his work desk, writing something with great heed.

See what I mean? It's a really nice blend of archaic words with modern readability. It's honestly very tempting to just run everything in the fic through ChatGPT in this manner because I really like the style it comes out with when you ask it to translate to Anglish. But I don't want to fall into lazy writing habits so I'm not going to do that.

What I will do, though, is pick and choose some of the words and phrases I liked from all three of these generations and incorporate them into my prologue, and I might continue to do this with the fic in general, because I love experimenting with a slightly archaic writing style that can still be understood by a modern audience.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts! And if you want to experiment with the translators and post some output here, feel free.

 

[Server Room Gremlin]

It certainly gives it a more 'archaic' feel. But I don't know if it gives it a more 'Tolkienian' feel, since while he did study the Anglo-Saxon language (and wrote things in it), he didn't limit himself to using the words which originated in Old English. 🤔 He just used the most suitable word for what he was trying to describe. Of course, learning more of these old words would be a good way to add to your vocabulary, so you can more easily do the same.

In the Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings, I can see the later medieval influence on the language used, because I'm more familiar with this than I am with the Anglo-Saxon period, and I know which words are similar to the French/Latin ones.

Some things in the Silmarillion remind me of the legends of King Arthur and his knights (particularly in Gondolin). And many of the well known stories about King Arthur's knights were created in medieval France, long after the Norman invasion of England.

 

[Server Room Gremlin]

Also, the 'translating words out of context' could present you with another issue: that of correct grammar.

It was hard for him to swallow that his bedevil in angband and thangorodrim had changed him forever, in more ways than one.

'Bedevil' is a verb. To bedevil someone is to torment or harass them. The noun is 'bedevilment'. E.g. 'His bedevilment in Angband'.
I don't know if this was any different in the past, but I've never seen 'bedevil' used as a noun myself.

 

[Server Room Gremlin]

Finally, I asked ChatGPT to translate the prologue into Anglish. The result was definitely the most polished of the three, not messing up the format at all, and all the words contextually made sense. However, not being an expert in Anglish, I can't be sure how many Anglish words ChatGPT actually used.

I do agree the ChatGPT one is the best in terms of grammar, and it's the easiest to read. It's not purely Anglish though. For example, it does use the word 'torment' which is almost exactly the same as the French 'tourment', and its origin is Latin. Same with 'nephew' (similar to French 'neveu').
I noticed in the Lord of the Rings, the Rohirrim don't use 'nephew', instead saying something like 'sister-son' (meaning the individual is the son of their sister). Perhaps Tolkien tried to avoid the French or Latin words more with the Rohirrim.

 

[Vorondil]

I noticed in the Lord of the Rings, the Rohirrim don't use 'nephew', instead saying something like 'sister-son' (meaning the individual is the son of their sister)

They say the same thing in Beowulf, which is probably where Tolkien got it from.