Meaning of pseudo-English | Babel Free

Definitions

1. Lexical borrowings from English that do not correspond directly to English word usage.
   uncountable
2. A structured artificial language that uses English words in order to be more user friendly for English speakers.
   uncountable
3. Nonsense text or speech that resembles English in some way.
   uncountable
4. English-language jargon or dialect that does not reflect the way most people speak.
   derogatory, uncountable

Examples

“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.”

“There is a strong feeling that pseudo-English is more "user friendly" than symbolic notation.”

“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".”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

CEFR level