Talk:History of the English language

Article Checklist for "History of the English language"

Workgroup category or categories	Linguistics Workgroup [Editors asked to check categories]
Article status	Developing article: beyond a stub, but incomplete
Underlinked article?	Yes
Basic cleanup done?	Yes
Checklist last edited by	John Stephenson 03:33, 7 April 2007 (CDT)

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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)

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)