Uncleftish Beholding
"Uncleftish Beholding" is a short text by Poul Anderson, first published in the Mid-December 1989 issue of the magazine Analog Science Fiction and Fact and included in his anthology All One Universe. 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, 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; 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."
To illustrate, the text begins:
It goes on to define firststuffs, such as waterstuff, sourstuff, and ymirstuff, as well as bulkbits, bindings, and several other terms important to uncleftish worldken. Wasserstoff and Sauerstoff are the modern German words for hydrogen and oxygen, and in Dutch the modern equivalents are waterstof and zuurstof. 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.
Glossary
The vocabulary used in "Uncleftish Beholding" does not completely derive from Anglo-Saxon. Around, from Old French reond, completely displaced Old English ymbe and left no "native" English word for this concept. The text also contains the French-derived words rest, ordinary and sort.The text gained increased exposure and popularity after being circulated around the Internet, and has served as inspiration for some inventors of Germanic English conlangs. Douglas Hofstadter, in discussing the piece in his book Le Ton beau de Marot, jocularly refers to the use of only Germanic roots for scientific pieces as "Ander-Saxon."