Talk:History of English

message: Are there alternate theories of the history of English?  Actually I know there is at least one, that of M. J. Harper, as presented in The History of Britain Revealed (namely that English was spoken in Britain long before the Anglo-Saxons arrived, and that Beowulf is a good example of "not-English" rather than "proto-English").  So my question really is, is his theory so marginal that it shouldn't be mentioned at all?  Or should it be mentioned to be refuted, or relegated to the loonybins of the English Department?  Or is it legitimate to discuss? --Richardson mcphillips (talk) 22:19, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Not only are there are alternate theories, but there is little to no historical evidence of an "Anglo-Saxon" invasion or any sort of invasion by "German tribes."  By the time the Frisian/Anglo/Saxon coastal dwelling peoples came over to the British Isles, they were themselves living very much in a settled agricultural society, based around towns and villages, with little to no evidence of "tribalism."  Further, there was no war-like invasion.  Frisian, Anglo and Saxon tradespeople and, especially, bureaucrats were *hired* by the local landowners to come and improve farming practices and feudal organization in early medieval England.  As a result, many of these Anglo-Saxons themselves became landed, married into the pre-existing clan system, and instituted what we now know today as "British monarchy."  There are even studies of the DNA of these people (and to call them "Germanic" is a stretch, as German is not yet a language and the so-called Teutonic languages have multiple places of origin/linguistic pumping, so it's certainly a biased term that linguists have taken under recent consideration).  At any rate, the Anglo-Saxons and Frisians did migrate to the Isles and began to take up administrative positions in what we would call the "upper" parts of society (Britain was much less class structured under the Celts).  New patterns of land use, imported from the Continent, pushed Celtic people further west, but obviously, the Welsh, the Gaels and the Celtic speakers in Ireland did not convert to Anglo-Saxon.  No one knows for sure how many Bretish/Pictish words still remained in the local vocabulary in, say, the year 900, but the entire region now known as England had been Romanized prior, so there was some linguistic displacement (both in syntax and in morphology/phonology) throughout the entire era.  Anyway, this article is no longer usable as a reasonable reference for the subject for high school or undergraduate students, it is further off base than it is on base.LeVeillé (talk) 22:57, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

text: I looked M. J. Harper's book up. Apparently his theory includes the idea that Modern English existed from medieval times, and that it gave rise to modern European languages. This seems highly implausible to me, and I haven't heard it before. — Eru·tuon 23:37, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: English is de facto a German dialect with several armies and navies, which was an important reason for both world wars.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.114.125.90 (talk) 13:33, 29 April 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, that made no sense.LeVeillé (talk) 23:04, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

text:  I'm not the top expert in this area, but I teach History of the English Language at the university level and have the strong sense that Harper's argument is highly marginal. The subtitle of his novel is sensationalizing ("the shocking truth about..."), the publisher is not an academic press, and the few reviews at amazon.com are very mixed. Jk180 (talk) 15:52, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

text: Totally WP:FRINGE, and should not be mentioned. Johnbod (talk) 16:13, 22 September 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: an anonymous author (that's not his real name) who is also anti-evolution and a selfpublished book? No. Doug Weller (talk) 20:02, 22 September 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: He's pro- book advances; I'm not sure more than that can be said with certainty! Johnbod (talk) 20:47, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

text: I don't know any Celtic languages, but I speak fluent English and German and have taught both at the university level. English sure seems to me like a Germanic language, and not just because of the vocabulary. The verb forms (as you move from present to past to part participles) and the word order are extremely close in English and German. Celtic could certainly be more important to English than is currently recognized, but that claim would need extensive evidence and discussion by scholars. As far as I know, specific DNA markers and specific languages have no direct, meaningful connections, and languages have been adopted or abandoned for all sorts of reasons. Jk180 (talk) 16:55, 19 March 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Part of the problem is calling the entire group "Germanic" when there's no clear evidence about when "Germanic" diverged from PIE.  Many DNA branches have specific linguistic affiliations (not sure where you're getting facts that would deny this; obviously, there are major exceptions but when there are, I can assure you that geneticists and geographers look for explanations and if possible, so do historians).  We might as well call the entire group of languages "Nordo-Anglo-Teutonic" rather than Germanic.  English has only a little in common with, say, Old Frankish (which is always classsified as Germanic).  The stem language from which Anglo, Saxon, Frisian, German, Dutch, Norse, etc all descend probably ought not to be called Germanic and would not have been named this had not German linguists been so much at the forefront of the 19th century discussion.  BTW, there *is* extensive debate about this among linguists at every linguistic meeting involving the topic.LeVeillé (talk) 23:04, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

text: I thought the surprising lack of vocabulary of Celtic origin in Old English was always something of a puzzle to scholars! This is still fringe nonsense. Johnbod (talk) 17:39, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

text: McWhorter does not say English has its roots in Celtic languages. He says "English started out as, essentially, a kind of German." He just says that the requirement of using "do" in yes/no questions comes from Celtic, that's it. --Beirne (talk) 21:58, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

text: I haven't followed McWhorter's argument about a possible Celtic origin of "do," but I know that "tun" (do) is used in German today even though it's viewed as incorrect. Elementary school children living near Frankfurt, Germany frequently use this construction very much like we do in English... until they are corrected by teachers and parents and told not to use it. A child might ask, for example, "Tust du essen?" (lit. Do you eat?) rather than the form that they are taught is correct: "Isst du?" (lit. Eat you?). Here's an English-language source that aligns with my observations of German children's use of "tun," but the author (David Briggs) connects it not to children but to specific modern dialects of German and cites a source explaining that the use of "tun" as an auxiliary verb was stigmatized in Early New High German: https://aeon.co/conversations/does-english-have-any-special-merits-that-set-it-apart-from-other-languages German speakers today sometimes continue to play with this "incorrect" use of the auxiliary verb form after they've grown up a bit. See, for example, the German-language exchanges at http://www.poppen.de/community/topic/25987-was-tust-du-essen/ It seems unlikely to me that small children and speakers of different German dialects are imitating English syntax; I think it's more likely that they're using analogy, drawing on other common question constructions that do use auxiliaries in German, such as "Hast du gegessen?" (lit. Have you eaten?). None of this has any direct bearing on what Old English and Old German were actually like, but it may every so slightly suggest that Germanic languages have always had the option of building questions with "do" and did not need to borrow that feature from Celtic. A possible Celtic origin is an interesting idea, of course, but I'm not yet convinced! Jk180 (talk) 01:26, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

text: Let's please stick to philologists specializing in historical Germanic linguistics here. Marginal theories outside of this discipline, including some espoused by McWhorter, are WP:UNDUE and should be treated as such. :bloodofox: (talk) 09:02, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: How about we stick to comparative linguistics and not philology at all?  There are very few juried journals in philology dealing with this important topic.  Further, spoken and written language do not necessarily share the same history or evolution.LeVeillé (talk) 23:04, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

text: You wrote that the Celtic Hypothesis "is a growing idea based on sound evidence." If it is a growing idea, we should cite reliable sources that present it as such. If it's based on sound evidence, we should cite reliable sources that discuss that evidence. I don't think it's acceptable to argue that it should be mentioned on this page because it is mentioned on another page of Wikipedia. (I'm very skeptical of the idea that English could only have gotten the "do" of yes/no questions from Celtic. In an earlier contribution to this thread, I cited several sources demonstrating the use of "do" in yes/no questions in German.) Jk180 (talk) 21:40, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

text: This is just your opinion. If a theory has backing from scholarly opinion and is not fringe (which if it is scholarly and has a relatively wide scholastic base it obviously is not) then mention of it should occur for completeness sake. Urselius (talk) 07:37, 19 October 2016 (UTC)

text: Again just your opinion; an encyclopaedia, even one as flawed as Wikipedia, should aim to be encyclopaedic. Schrijver states that the sound shift seen in Old English from away from its continental ancestor, from c.450 to c.700 is the result of contact with a substrate language, i.e. thorough Old English being spoken by the native speakers of another language. I believe that the majority of philologists are of the opinion that Old English was not merely an idiom transplanted directly from the continent. If, as most scholars assert, Old English was a product of insular processes then there should be some mention of what these processes may have been. There is far too much published material on the 'Celtic hypothesis' for it to be entirely ignored in the text of this article. Urselius (talk) 07:37, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: I do not believe that you are correct in repeatedly dismissing counter-arguments as "just your opinion." I teach History of English Language at the university level. The standard textbooks, written by experts, do not refer to a Celtic hypothesis. Baugh and Cable's History of the English Language talks about the "slight influence" of Celtic on English and focuses on vocabulary, not the periphrastic "do" or other alleged connections. You offer what look to me like unsupported assertions (such as "I believe that the majority of philologists are of the opinion that..."). Current, university-level textbooks are a reasonable place to find what actual linguistic consensus exists on the subject of Celtic influence on English. Jk180 (talk) 19:32, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

text: Short answer: no. Mostly even the earliest Pre-Proto-Germanic language is not really thought to have existed at 6,000 BCE, still less on the North Sea coast.  Not that anyone actually knows. Johnbod (talk) 23:27, 31 October 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  no alternate theories? 

message: I tweaked the article with... In 1611, the Revised King James Version of the Bible was released using the 24-letter English Alphabet. It was the 1629 1st Revision King James Bible Cambridge that established the 26-letter Modern English Alphabet and English Gematria. 2603:3020:BE7:A000:5490:8C43:B4E5:7CA7 (talk) 15:59, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Please cite  a reliable published source per WP:RS. Thanks. BilCat (talk) 19:32, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  King James Version Alphabet 

message: I believe the Early-modern English section of the History of English page should include mention of the King James Version (KJV) English bible translation. Since it was written during this era in 1600's and is one of the most widely identified examples of Early Modern English with language, terms, and verses many people still read, use, and understand today. As a means of assisting readers with an understanding of what Early-Modern English is by providing a highly influential global example. 
The far less widely known Beowulf manuscript, the Cantebury Tales and the Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson are mentioned in the Old English, Middle English and Modern English sections respectively. It may also be appropriate and beneficial to subsequently mention the New King James Version (NKJV) English Bible translation in the Modern English section. Since this English Bible translation was written during the Modern English Era in the 20th century and is also better known than mentioned examples, being one of the most universal English Bible translations.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kyle Steven4 (talk • contribs) 02:59, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Mention of King James Version (KJV) English Bible translation in the Early Modern-English section