Uncleftish Beholding

Common card · No. 386936

"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 (with no indication of its fictional or factual status) and included in his anthology All One Universe (1996). 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: For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we...

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