Uncleftish_Beholding
Uncleftish Beholding
Short text written in English using exclusively Germanic words
"Uncleftish Beholding" (1989) is a short text by Poul Anderson, included in his anthology "All One Universe".[1] It is designed to illustrate what English might look like without its large number of words derived from languages such as French, Greek, and Latin,[2] especially with regard to the proportion of scientific words with origins in those languages.
Written as a demonstration of linguistic purism in English, the work explains atomic theory using Germanic words almost exclusively and coining new words when necessary;[3] many of these new words have cognates in modern German, an important scientific language in its own right. The title phrase uncleftish beholding calques "atomic theory."[4]
To illustrate, the text begins:[5]
For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.
It goes on to define firststuffs (chemical elements), such as waterstuff (hydrogen), sourstuff (oxygen), and ymirstuff (uranium), as well as bulkbits (molecules), bindings (compounds), and several other terms important to uncleftish worldken (atomic science).[6] Wasserstoff and Sauerstoff are the modern German words for hydrogen and oxygen, and in Dutch the modern equivalents are waterstof and zuurstof.[7] Sunstuff refers to helium, which derives from ἥλιος, the Ancient Greek word for 'sun'. Ymirstuff references Ymir, a giant in Norse mythology similar to Uranus in Greek mythology.