| | I suppose this really deserves more of a response than "I don't know", even though I have little to say about it. As you're probably aware, I've been importing the dated entries from Webster 1913 and flagging them with <nowiki>{{webster}}</nowiki>. Most of them are valid, and I'm skipping terms that seem absolutely silly, and in the few cases where a bad one gets through, I suppose an RFV or RFD will eventually get it. W1913 included Chaucerian words (and those of other Middle English authors), and actually W1913 has a strong bias towards "known classics", by which I mean that if (say) Sir Thomas Browne invented a word, and used it, and nobody ever used it before or since, Webster still included it because it was in a famous book. That's rather like our <nowiki>{{nonce}}</nowiki> tag. So, to your point: I don't actually know the rules (or accepted scholarship) regarding what is modern English and what is Old (or Middle) English, though I can see how a lot of Chaucerian terms fall outside anything anyone would use today (such as {{term|wikke}}, which doesn't look like English as ''we'' know it at all). If you want to move them to Middle English, I'm fine with that, but you have to realise that I'm doing basically a supervised mass import of an entire dictionary, which wasn't so discerning about different eras of English, and I'm not particularly familiar with Middle English (I've read Chaucer and others, but I'm not a qualified linguist, and certainly not a historian), and I'm basically going to import what I see, as long as it's Google-Books-attestable. I am happy for you to move entries to another "language" and I imagine it makes sense, but there are not many of us and I'm working on the "something is better than nothing" basis. [[User:Equinox|Equinox]] [[User_talk:Equinox|◑]] 22:15, 30 November 2011 (UTC) | | I suppose this really deserves more of a response than "I don't know", even though I have little to say about it. As you're probably aware, I've been importing the dated entries from Webster 1913 and flagging them with <nowiki>{{webster}}</nowiki>. Most of them are valid, and I'm skipping terms that seem absolutely silly, and in the few cases where a bad one gets through, I suppose an RFV or RFD will eventually get it. W1913 included Chaucerian words (and those of other Middle English authors), and actually W1913 has a strong bias towards "known classics", by which I mean that if (say) Sir Thomas Browne invented a word, and used it, and nobody ever used it before or since, Webster still included it because it was in a famous book. That's rather like our <nowiki>{{nonce}}</nowiki> tag. So, to your point: I don't actually know the rules (or accepted scholarship) regarding what is modern English and what is Old (or Middle) English, though I can see how a lot of Chaucerian terms fall outside anything anyone would use today (such as {{term|wikke}}, which doesn't look like English as ''we'' know it at all). If you want to move them to Middle English, I'm fine with that, but you have to realise that I'm doing basically a supervised mass import of an entire dictionary, which wasn't so discerning about different eras of English, and I'm not particularly familiar with Middle English (I've read Chaucer and others, but I'm not a qualified linguist, and certainly not a historian), and I'm basically going to import what I see, as long as it's Google-Books-attestable. I am happy for you to move entries to another "language" and I imagine it makes sense, but there are not many of us and I'm working on the "something is better than nothing" basis. [[User:Equinox|Equinox]] [[User_talk:Equinox|◑]] 22:15, 30 November 2011 (UTC) |
| | + | : Sorry, if I may chime in here? I think the most common definition for the beginning of modern English is the 16th century, in particular the writings of Shakespeare. Linguistically the clearest dividing line is the Great Vowel Shift, which is thought to have started shortly before Shakespeare's writing. But in a more practical sense, it's probably not very useful to treat Shakespeare's language the same as the language spoken today. That's why modern English is often split into Early Modern English (until the middle or end of the 17th century) and Modern English proper. But our definition of English includes both and that doesn't always make sense. From a historical perspective, any 'stage' of a language as we know it lasts a few hundred years. Literary Old English lasted from the 8th to the 11th century, Middle English from the 12th to the 15th, Modern English from the 16th to the 21st. Seen in that light, English is long 'overdue' for a new period in its history... —[[User:CodeCat|CodeCa]][[User talk:CodeCat|t]] 22:46, 30 November 2011 (UTC) |
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