Stephen Forrest wrote:
On 9/19/05, Jack & Naree jack.macdaddy@gmail.com wrote:
fact displaying it in a dialect of English - we've got Wikipedia in Scots, Wikipedia in Middle English, but when you click on Wikipedia English, you get spelling errors, sloppy grammar and garbled syntax; in short the American dialect of English, trying to hijack the term English.
Middle English does have an ISO 639 language code, enm. But I wouldn't even want to think about how a wikipedia would work, given the number of variant spellings -- Anglo-Saxon was at least usually spelled consistently within a dialect, but the confusion introduced by the Norman Conquest left Middle English writers seemingly making up spellings as they went along.
Yes the influence of French spelling was bound to do that. :-)
Ec