Talk:Ætheling

Requested move 20 February 2015

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: moved per request. Favonian (talk) 17:58, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

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Aetheling → Ætheling – This is the correct spelling, as shown in the article. Dudley Miles (talk) 13:38, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

• It's spelled "atheling," according to Oxford. In other news, Beowulf is no longer with us. The eigenvector (talk) 15:11, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Comment, Can anyone clarify the extent to which search engines permit searches beyond the range of a-z and 0-9 now and historically? there seems to be a shortage of references to Ætheling but I'm wondering if this may have been due to technological restriction. GregKaye 16:24, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Points supporting my proposal:

1. Search engines have no problems with Æ and Ae. If you put Æthelwulf or Aethelwulf into Google, in both cases the first link is the Wikipedia article on King Æthelwulf of Wessex. Similarly with Wikipedia - search on Aethelwulf and the first item is Æthelwulf disambig.

2. Æ is almost always used rather than Ae in Wikipedia, e.g. Æthelred of Wessex, Æthelbald of Wessex, Æthelwold ætheling, Æthelred the Unready, Æthelwold of Winchester. For consistency with usual Wikipedia practice this article should be Ætheling.

3. Histories of the period almost always spell it Ætheling, e.g. The New Cambridge Medieval History III, A Biographical Dictionary of Dark Age Britain, The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England, Frank Stenton's Anglo-Saxon England. We should follow the usage of the most authoritative histories. Dudley Miles (talk) 18:35, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

• Oppose. The best source for spelling is a dictionary or other widely available reference, not a specialist work. Any style guide will tell you this. The MOS recommends New Hart's Rules, The Chicago Manual of Style, and MLA. NHR recommends Oxford spelling, which I gave above. CMOS and MLA recommend Merriam-Webster, which also gives "atheling." So does American Heritage, Random House, and Collins. Britannica uses "aetheling." OneLook lists twenty online dictionaries for this word. Not one uses the proposed form. As for specialist works, New Cambridge uses both "aetheling" and "atheling." The article should be written in modern English, not Anglo-Saxon. The eigenvector (talk) 02:39, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

I do not think your point about New Cambridge Medieval History is important. Volume 1 uses Aetheling and volume 4 Atheling. The vast majority of histories of the period use Ætheling, including volumes 2 and 3 of New Cambridge, and the Handbook of British Chronology in addition to the books cited above. However the question of whether we should follow dictionaries or specialist works raises a broader question as almost all Wikipedia articles use Æ, so I have raised this at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms#Æ or Ae?. Dudley Miles (talk) 10:15, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

• Support most modern works use the Æ or æ form now, there is a clear trend in historical works to use this instead of "a" or "ae". This includes not only highly specialized works like the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England but also works meant for the more general public like A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons. As an aside, I actually prefer the non "æ" forms, but they are definitely no longer in the majority. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:24, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
  • Perhaps you could look at this ngram or this one? They understate the number of books that use the ligature since the OCR misreads many of them as "ae." Even so, it's clear that "atheling" (the dictionary form) is far ahead of the other forms put together. The eigenvector (talk) 13:59, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
    • But the problem with ngrams is that they are for all works at all times - not the recent move to return to using æ (it was used often in Victorian works also). I work in this area - I read the sources. The current scholarship uses æ much more often, but an ngram won't reflect that. Ealdgyth - Talk 16:53, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
    • Also note that neither of those ngrams display ANY result for "ætheling" - the only results displayed on the chart are for "atheling" and "aetheling" - which tends to tell me that google is not recognizing the "æ" at all. See this book cover about Æthelred, where it is clearly "Æthelred" but google has the title displayed as "Aethelred" ... which is plain wrong, given the picture. So I'd say google ngrams are going to be useless here, since a book clearly using an æ on the cover (and throughout - I own the book), is shown from their database as "ae"... Ealdgyth - Talk 00:24, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
      • The ngrams I gave are not for "all works at all times." I restricted to 1990 to 2008. As I mentioned above, "æ" is obviously being misread as "ae." But that wouldn't effect the numbers for "atheling," which is clearly the majority form. The ngram can handle "Æ", as you can see here. "Atheling" is a modern English surname, so this graph has problems too. But it beats cherry picking a few works that agree with your position. The major dictionaries all give this word as "atheling" and do not suggest any variants. I think the burden of proof is on those who claim the common name is something else. The eigenvector (talk) 01:19, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

        Just to respond to your use of "cherry picking": the works I listed included everything related to Anglo-Saxon history I have at my desk in which I could find an index or which I could search on Google Books. These sources are the ones I used for the twenty featurd ed articles on Anglo-Saxon history I've written, so these are reliable sources and represent a good cross-section of the standard works on the topic. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:47, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

        How about A Short History of England (2013) by Simon Jenkins? This is a recent best-seller and was well reviewed. So I don't think there is any question that it represents the mainstream of current historical writing. I didn't see anything about athelings, but it's Athelstan and Ethelred, not Æthelstan and Æthelred. The eigenvector (talk) 03:04, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

• Support. For reference, here is a similar previous discussion. I think we should go by the form used in reliable sources. Some sources from my shelves for aetheling/atheling/ætheling:
  • (2) aetheling: Campbell, Anglo-Saxons; Kirby, Earliest English Kings
  • (2) atheling: Brown & Farr, Mercia; Whitelock, English Historical Documents I. Note that both of these sources use "æ" for other forms.
  • (5) ætheling: Swanton, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England; Yorke, Wessex in the Early Middle Ages; Keynes & Lapidge, Alfred the Great; Lapidge, Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England.
  • (4) not in book, but æ used for similar forms: Higham, An English Empire; Bassett, Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms; Clemoes, Anglo-Saxon England 5; Colgrave & Mynors, Bede
  • (2) not in book, but ae used for similar forms: Walker, Mercia; Zaluckyj, Mercia.

  There's room for discussion, but the preponderance in reliable sources is clearly for "æ", and I think that's the best choice. Please feel free to list additional sources that support one spelling or another. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:54, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

• Oppose per WP:UE, which I guess should be clarified to "modern English", where we have just 26 letters. If it ain't a/b/c/d/e/f/g/h/i/j/k/l/m/n/o/p/q/r/s/t/u/v/w/x/y/z or punctuation, it doesn't belong in an English-language article title. Red Slash 16:54, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
  • WP:UE says "Wikipedia generally uses the character æ to represent the Anglo-Saxon ligature." It thus endorses the ligature, the opposite of what Red Slash cites it as saying. Dudley Miles (talk) 16:59, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
  • (ec) You'll want to take that up with the folks at WP:AT ... since we have titles like Phan Đình Phùng, Thích Quảng Đức, and Karl Aloys zu Fürstenberg. And then there is the modern book about Æthelred (published in 2003). Ealdgyth - Talk 17:01, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
  • @Red Slash: can you comment on the fact that the policy you cite seems to directly contradict what you say? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:49, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
    • Oops. Support Red Slash 04:11, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
    • The cited passage is about how to write an Anglo-Saxon word. It is useful information for writing etymologies and so forth. But a title should be in modern English. The eigenvector (talk) 03:04, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
• Support consistent with normal Wikipedia practice except for Ana Ivanovic ... In ictu oculi (talk) 04:43, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
• Support, the Anglo-Saxons were nuts for ligatures. 63.117.186.3 (talk) 03:55, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.