pseudo-English
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: pseudo English
Etymology: From pseudo- + English.
Senses: examples: text: Then and now Back in 1981 when I wrote the first article on this subject (The Incorporated Linguist 20, 104, 1981), Naples was in the throes of a boom in the use of English (or rather pseudo-English) in local facias and tradenames.
ref: 1985, The Incorporated Linguist: The Journal of the Institute of Linguists:
topics: human-sciences
linguistics
sciences
glosses: Lexical borrowings from English that do not correspond directly to English word usage.
examples: text: There is a strong feeling that pseudo-English is more "user friendly" than symbolic notation.
ref: 1983, Laurie A. Russell, David M. Weintraub, APL 83, Conference proceedings, Washington, D.C., April 10-13, 1983:
text: The possibility of verbal encoding of mathematical formulas into pseudo-English has deliberately been built into COBOL; for example, "compute velocity times time giving distance" is nothing but syntactic sugar for "distance := velocity · time".
ref: 2014, Jenny Cheshire, Dieter Stein, Taming the Vernacular: From Dialect to Written Standard Language, →ISBN:
topics: computing
engineering
mathematics
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
sciences
glosses: A structured artificial language that uses English words in order to be more user friendly for English speakers.
examples: text: However, even then, pseudo-English is a useful intermediate output since it can be used to update the dictionaries, to refine the partitioning methods, and to derive rules for syntactic analysis.
ref: 1959, Proceedings of the Eastern Joint Computer Conference - Volume 16, page 152:
text: Pseudo-English has been reported to me by several mothers of three-year-olds. One Bengali-speaking mother provided me with an audio recording of her daughter using it while talking on a toy telephone to an imaginary English-speaking friend, and I videotaped a Japanese boy using this medium with English-speaking adults and children at the nursery school.
ref: 1988, Deborah Tannen, Linguistics in Context: Connecting Observation and Understanding:
text: In Pseudo-English (i.e. a non-existent English or language), questions are formed by means of mirror inversion of the word order in corresponding declarative sentences.
ref: 2005, Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs, Babel: revue international de la traduction:
glosses: Nonsense text or speech that resembles English in some way.
examples: text: But he could not write or speak English in a manner tolerable to any Englishman; and although he knew nearly all the words in the language, it was dictionary knowledge, and so different from an Englishman's apprehension of the same words that it was only a sort of pseudo-English that he knew, and not our living tongue.
ref: 1879, Michael Montgomery Fisher quoting someone else, The Three Pronunciations of Latin, page 79:
text: What fevers Barzun, of course, is the artificial pseudo-English that schoolma'ams, whether in panties or in pantaloons, try to foist upon their victims, and the even worse jargon that Dogberrys in and out of office use for their revelations to the multitude.
ref: 1971, Elizabeth Margaret Kerr, Ralph M. Aderman, Aspects of American English, →ISBN, page 75:
text: One of the problems in writing about the new pseudo-English lies in finding the right nomenclature. Terms like jargon, gobbledygook, cant, argot, and so on have their uses; but they apply poorly here, partly because the new "English" covers all of these and more and partly because there is something nonlinguistic and inhuman about it.
ref: 1978, A. M. Tibbetts, Charlene Tibbetts, What's happening to American English?, page 7:
text: In his diabolical joke-typist persona, Perec murdered the English language, but his aggression was directed as much towards the unfunny ghastliness of scientific pseudo-English as towards the language itself, which he knew well and could bend quite effectively to his own humour.
ref: 1993, David Bellos, Georges Perec: a life in words : a biography, page 261:
glosses: English-language jargon or dialect that does not reflect the way most people speak.
Related terms: pseudo-anglicism