Talk:History of the English language

Article Checklist for "History of the English language"

Workgroup category or categories	Linguistics Workgroup, History 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)