Help:Main

Spelling
The uncontroversial parts of Anglish spelling are used, such as le -> el and qu -> cw.

ea and oa from both OE long vowels and open syllable lengthening are changed to e_e and o_e when possible, yielding pleasant series like "speke", "speking", "spoke", and "spoken". Plausibly, e_e and o_e from Old English long vowels could be changed to ea and oa, but this yields unpleasant series like "write" and "wroat" (as opposed to "wrote"), so if this were to be done, a digraph for OE long i and u would be recommended, with no i_e and u_e series at all, due to the general lack of OSL on those vowels (with some exceptions like week and beetle). Also, words like "boast" and "yeast" keep the digraphs due to being followed by two consonants. Unfortunately, class 2 and 6 strong verbs will have a digraph in one tense and a simple vowel with a silent e in another tense, but only diacritics (é_e and ó_e for ee and oo, or ä_e and å_e for ea and oa (which would be unetymological for OSL)) could solve this. Long u is restored to ou when /au/ (and in words like tough).

Additionally, voicing distinction is dropped for fricatives (s/f/th), with the possible exception of end of words: -f for voiced and -ff for unvoiced, or -fe and -f when following a sonorant. This is because v introduces irritating irregularity into the system for writing long and short vowels, and essentially all minimal pairs are caused by loanwords. Using f allows things like efry for every (akin to hunger and hungry), luf for love, lif for live, liffing for living, and liffed for lived.

Distinguishing velar stops and their palatalized versions, the affricates, is extremely controversial. Tentatively, a solution without k and j will be used: chin/kin/chop/cut/deck/decking/retch/retching/reach/reaching/wrench/guess/jump/edge/hinge become chin/cin/chop/cut/dec/deccing/retc/retcing/reche/reching/wrench/gess/ghump/edg/hingh. The old gh is changed to h: night is niht, high is hih, and plough/plow is pluh.

Potentially, -ll could be shortened to -l, and some old consonant clusters could be restored, but these changes are unnecessary. Irregular spellings are corrected, such as "are" to "ar", "were" to "wer", "scythe" to "sithe", and so on. The biggest undecided change is whether to use th or not. Some hate thorn, but others seem to hate eth, so perhaps th should be the compromise. Unetymological diphthongs are dropped (neighbo(u)r -> nehbor).

Affixes
Verbal prefixes, except those productive in English, should be avoided in favor of phrasal verbs. No inflectional morphology beyond what is in modern English is restored or changed, nor are any pronouns. Native derivational morphology is restored, and compounding is more productive. New derivational morphology and analytical constructions exist (to replace -able, for example) as well and will be standardized here later.

Grammar
Double modal verbs are now allowed, and some new helping verbs exist, such as "wun (to)" ("used to", not a modal verb) and "thar" ("need to", a modal verb). Unsure which of these should require a "to" on the helped verb. Some non-modal helpers prohibit the "to" (make and let) or have it optional (help). Modal verbs can also be used in their infinitive, participle, and gerund forms. For example, "Being able to do that" becomes "Canning do that". "I would like to be able to see it" becomes "I would like to can see it". "I've been able to see it" becomes "I've could see it".

Lexicon
Some Old French words are allowed as long as they didn't kill off an English word, and fit into English phonology (this rule still removes most of them). Loanwords from Germanic languages are generally allowed (with some exceptions - "verboten" is verboten, because it means and is cognate with "forbidden", making it a useless loan), as well as Celtic languages (glen, slogan), as long as the spelling is updated.

Learned borrowings (words that skip natural sound changes) from Latin and Greek (or any other language, but these are by far the most common) are strictly prohibited, as they generally stick out sorely in English, and are the worst examples of English being intentionally damaged by those who thought Greek and Latin were superior languages.