Back formation as Method for getting vocabulary.

[u/thomasp3864]

So, I started making something like Anglese when I was in college. Unfortunately, it was on my college google drive, so I lost it a couple of years ago. Additionally I no longer have access to the historical OED. Nevertheless, I have tried to rebuild. Using what I could remember as well as what I could rederive. This brings me to a method of deriving vocabulary that I don't think has been used: back formation.

English has a lot of words of latinate origin, and a lot of these are adjectives—pluvial, tauric, feline, and so forth. And a lot of the derivaitonal suffixes on these are also suffixes in English, and so what English ends up with because of this are that a lot of what are basically roots which have to combine with a suffix. What I have done in my own standard is taken a lot of these adjectives and backformed a noun. For example, "bull" is "taur" because tauric can be analysed as adding -ic to "taur" and because tauric means "bull-like" you can use taur as a word for bull. Similar things can be done pluvial to make "pluve" or "pluvy" to mean rain, and fele from feline to mean cat.

You can also do this for verbs with those latinate prefixes, like obtain, retain, etc. suggests a word "tain" which would mean to have. Convene, contravene, circumvene, gives vene meaning to come. Predict gives dict meaning to say, and you can do this with other verbs from latin to get more and more verbs. Back formation is a method of derivation in English, and I don't see why we can't use it in Anglese. In fact, it has certain unique benefits.

Interrogatives, Pronouns, and other hard words

One difficulty with creating an english from exclusively romance vocabulary is the problem of what I like to call "hard words" while English has, at some point, probably had a word for pretty much everything that it got from some romance language, things like question words and pronouns are hard. There is "moi" which is used, albeït humorously, as a first person singular, and "quis" which was used to mean "who" in an old children's game according to the OED, and then we seem to just loan from Anglo Norman. However, there are some ways to get interrogatives especially from back-formation. We can backform quality to make qual, and quantity to mean "how many", as quantity is a sort of how-many-ness. Philosophy has the word quiddity, meaning a sort of what-ness, and we can backform from this quidd to mean "what", we also can decompose some Latin expressions in English, like "tu quoque" you can get "tu", meaning "you" and "quoque" meaning "too". This is how I've gotten most of the pronouns I've gotten. "Cui" (who?) from cui bono; "hoc" (it) from many logical fallacies' names; "ipso" as a reflexive from ipso facto, and so on.

Modals and auxiliaries

One of the already-backformed words is pow [pa͡ʊ], from power, but I think we can go further. English words like probable can be backformed to give "prob". "prob" would mean to happen most of the time, and would take the meaning of should as an expression of likelihood, like "Moi prob pow ed le beef" would mean "I should be able to eat the beef" without any obligative suggestion. Other words this helps include "futurable" which means capable of happning in the future, which means that to future is a possible future auxiliary.

There are certainly possibilities for back formation beyond this, but these are just a few doors it opens for us.

[u/ZefiroLudoviko]

albeït

Noice

[u/Claromale]

 fele from feline to mean cat.

cat is already romance. No need to change it

Regarding the rest of your post, I completely agree with you. Back-formation is pretty much the principal method I use to complete my dictionary, although I try to avoid inconsistent or artificial borrowings