Talk:History of the English language

A Mess

This entry needs considerable work. The material on Proto-English is dubious (though the list of early loanwords should be kept, I think), and it's distracting that the article at first quotes medieval sources on the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, and then tells its readers that this history has been deemed spurious! What's needed early on here is a better genealogy of English, identifying its lineage all the way from the Centum/Satem split on down though the Old Germanic languages.

The later parts of the entry are slightly better, but could use more detail on specific grammatical and phonological changes (where's the Great Vowel Shift?).

I'll be working away with hammer and tongs at this, as time allows.

Russell Potter 09:42, 24 November 2006 (CST)

change name

I suggest we change the name to English Language, History the goal is to get the major keyword first. Richard Jensen 00:47, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

No problem with that. Objections? John Stephenson 03:26, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

I think we should wait until this larger issue is sorted out at CZ Talk:Naming Conventions. I have seen a colon proposed as well as a phrase; not sure if anyone is thinking about commas (that would look more like an index entry to me than a main title. And Richard, bear in mind, which keyword appears first won't affect keyword searching. Russell Potter 04:05, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

New pages

I'm still new to Citizendium, so forgive my barging in, but it seems odd to me that this page is separated from the main article on "English." It would seem to much more logical to include a section on the history of English in that main article, and then make separate articles on "Old English" and "Middle English." And, if wanted one can even add an article on "Early Modern English" which would include the period from, say AD 1500 to 1800 or so. This would be more in line with traditional practices in separating the periods of the Germanic languages (including English) in the handbooks. It would solve the naming problem of this page as well. Michel van der Hoek 10:04, 25 April 2008 (CDT)

I agree. I'm not an expert on the history of the language, so when I created a set of new pages using material from this page, I added approximate time periods in the introductions which others might wish to modify. I also removed some sentences from this article which seemed to me were on shaky ground as far as theoretical linguistics goes. I reduced the material on this page to reflect its presence on the new pages, and have also created an even shorter history section at English language. Please hack away! John Stephenson 02:26, 26 April 2008 (CDT)

An interdisciplinary topic

This should be an interdisciplinary topic, encompassing the linguistics, history, literature, politics, and education workgroups. People who have written on the topic are from those disciplines. Stephen Ewen 17:57, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

Let's leave history out. We have our plate full with about 100,000 topics without getting into other disciplines. Richard Jensen 18:01, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

Page disbanded

After a suitable period of waiting, I have decided to go ahead and delete the content from this page. The relevant portions have been moved to the appropriate pages, mostly to English language. I propose that this page and the talk page be deleted. Michel van der Hoek 15:32, 1 July 2008 (CDT)

See also 'merger'. John Stephenson 03:10, 2 July 2008 (CDT)