Talk:Ship

message: The design considerations section seems out of place in this page... perhaps this information should be moved to the shipbuilding page? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Confuciou (talk • contribs) 03:31, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Design considerations section 

message: At the end of the Nomenclature section, the article states, "Ship (along with nation) is an English word that has retained a female grammatical gender in some usages, which allows it sometimes to be referred to as a she without being of female natural gender.[13] However, Wiktionary traces it back through Middle English schip, Old English skip, Proto-West-Germanic *skip, and Proto-Germanic *skipą, all of which were neuter. I think a better explanation is needed as to why ships (and some other vehicles) are sometimes treated as feminine.
--  Solo Owl   03:54, 12 March 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: That's not for us to judge, Solo Owl. We depend on reliable sources and when they disagree, we report the disagreement. Something published in the Cambridge University Press is as reliable as it comes. The entirety of Chapter Four in the reference given is devoted to this question. If it's incorrectly paraphrased, then it would be good to suggest how to improve the entry, here. HopsonRoad (talk) 02:54, 13 March 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Feminine gender 

message: The section "Asian developments" seems to be unsupported by references, particularly the references given: for instance "The first sea-going sailing ships were developed by the Austronesian peoples from what is now Taiwan." None of the three references given at the end of that paragraph specifically state this. Since it is a major statement of fact, unless someone can promptly come up with an authoritative source that supports this, much of this text should be deleted. 
There are other problems in this section: "Austronesian rigs were distinctive in that they had spars supporting both the upper and lower edges of the sails....". Whilst this is broadly true, in a section on the sailing rigs of early and pre-history, it is a huge omission to not mention that Egyptian sailing vessels had a yard and a boom on their square sails - something that can be clearly seen in many of the surviving contemporary illustrations that have survived (and are discussed in chapter 2 of Casson's Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World.)
The section "Mediterranean developments" completely ignores the trade in grain that supported the major cities of this time. Quite simply, the classical era cities (e.g. Rome) could not have existed without deliveries of grain by ship. Casson's paper The Grain Trade of the Hellenistic World makes this point for part of that time period. There are many merchant ship wrecks in the Mediterranean that are evidence of this trade, as well as the extensive written records that document it. Surely some mention is needed.
The article does not cover 1200 BC to 1300 AD – a quite impressive gap in which we saw, at a minimum, the development of the Viking longship and the Cog (ship). Nor is the extensive trade in wine from (present-day) France to England mentioned – a trade that gave us the word ton for measuring the size of ships. This started in the article's 2,500 year time gap with the Romans, then arguably had a pause with the collapse of the Roman Empire and then was going strong from about 1000 AD onwards.
There is probably a lot more to comment on, but this is a start. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 13:45, 12 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Prehistory and antiquity