Talk:Great consonant shift

What was the shift that occurred? All that is mentioned are the consonants affected, not how they were affected. JNF Tveit (talk) 19:25, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Redirect discussions

 * The following discussion is closed. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
 * (Coming to this uninvolved since the page was listed at WP:ANRFC.) After reading through the discussions, this does seem to be a case where strength of argument supports the proposed redirection despite the number of opposers. The page has already been redirected by Fut. Perf, so I'm closing this section as requested. Jafeluv (talk) 07:04, 22 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Expanding on this a little: The main argument for the redirect was that the term "great consonant shift" is not used to collectively refer to the two separate consonant shift developments described in this article, but instead refers to Grimm's law specifically. After the initial discussion (with some confusion as to what the cited sources actually say), this does not seem to be disputed by anyone. There is also the argument that the two concepts presented on this page are not generally handled together in sources, and as such they should not be presented under one title here. No evidence to the contrary was brought forth in the discussion.


 * SteveBaker and others make the point that there should be an article about consonant shifts in general. The counter-arguments against simply renaming this page to consonant shift are a) that the Great consonant shift article should redirect to Grimm's law because the terms are sometimes used as synonyms; and b) that the current article has no content to merge into a more general article that is not already present in the Grimm's law and High German consonant shift articles. Anyone is of course free to start such a general article and summarize content from the more specific pages as appropriate.


 * Regarding specific opposing comments, Mythpage88's argument that there should be a non-technical intro for both consonant shifts seems to ignore the point that sources do not refer to the terms together like this. Vanisaac seems to agree that sources tend talk about these two concepts separately instead of discussing them as one subject, and admits that treating both subjects as an integrated topic could require resorting to original research – considering Wikipedia's widely accepted no original research policy this does seem to indicate that the subjects should not be treated together here. OrenBochman (BO) argues against putting the different laws of phonetic change into one article, but that is not really what is being proposed here – all such laws would continue to have their own articles after this change. As such, this would be no argument against redirecting this page to Grimm's law.


 * As detailed above, my reading of the arguments is that they support the proposed redirection of this page to Grimm's law. The numbers are divided (three supporting the redirection, four opposing and one seemingly neutral comment), but we are supposed to determine consensus by quality of argument, not by head count. Hopefully this clarifies how the decision was reached. Jafeluv (talk) 12:38, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

Redirect to Grimm's law
I propose redirecting this to Grimm's law. "Great consonant shift" seems to be an alternative, if very rare, name for Grimm's law (see for example and . I can find no evidence that "Great consonant shift" is used to refer collectively to both Grimm's law and the High German consonant shift, as the article currently claims. +Angr 20:47, 16 June 2009 (UTC)


 * The distinction between First and Second is clearly made in the referenced book which is available as page images on Google Books. Beginners who encounter the Great vowel shift article will naturally want to see a corresponding article on consonants, without getting into the phonological details in great depth.  The Grimm's law article does not go into the history of when and where the shifts occurred for each time period.  This would be good material to flesh out the Great consonant shift article. Greensburger (talk) 04:46, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

But of course this is not in any sense parallel to the Great Vowel Shift, which occurred in Tudor England. Only the "Great Thingy Shift" form of words is parallel. But as Angr says, "Great consonant shift" is really not widely used. --Doric Loon (talk) 05:33, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Right, it isn't widely used, and when it is used, it's used to refer to Grimm's Law, not to Grimm's Law + High German consonant shift. Even if it were true that beginners seeing Great vowel shift would expect to find a parallel article about consonants, that doesn't mean we can simply define "Great consonant shift" to mean what we want it to, if that term isn't actually used in the academic literature. (The argument is parallel to saying the beginner's reading about the Great Vowel Shift would expect to find an article called Small vowel shift as well, and then finding some other vowel shift in the history of English and calling it that.) Basically, there is nothing called the "Great consonant shift" in historical linguistics apart from Grimm's law, and we already have an article on that. If you want to expand that article, that's fine, but there's no reason for this to be a separate article. +Angr 13:29, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Oppose - Grimm's law is certainly related to the Great consonant shift article, but does not make a clear distinction between the First and Second shifts. The new article Great consonant shift is intended to be a short summary of both shifts for the beginner. The technical details in the Grimm's law article are for people who have more than a beginner's knowledge of the subject. I added a "Main article" link to the Grimm's law article. Greensburger (talk) 03:37, 25 June 2009 (UTC)


 * The point is, the two shifts are never lumped together as "the great consonant shift" except by this Wikipedia article. Only Grimm's law by itself is ever known as "the great consonant shift", and that pretty rarely. Grouping them together under this name is pure original research on your part. +Angr 08:20, 25 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Not OR. I got all the content from Lounsbury's book.  Do a Google search on ["consonant shift" "Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury"] and on page 35 you will find Section 38 headed "The Second Consonant Shift - The second consonant shift affected fewer sounds than the first, and not all parts of Germany were equally influenced ... Without giving the minutiae of the second, or High German consonant shift, the correspondence of ..."


 * The phrase "consonant shift" does not appear anywhere in History of the English Language by Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury. Your suggested Google search turns up exactly one hit, namely this very Wikipedia article. +Angr 14:23, 25 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Do a Google search, NOT a Google Books search. That was the way I found Lounsbury's book.  You should get two hits.  The search engine for Google Books is flawed because it could not find the word "gutturals" either.  Both "gutturals" and "consonant shift" are on page 35 of Lounsbury's book. Greensburger (talk) 14:39, 25 June 2009 (UTC)


 * On page 15 of Lounsbury's book, he refers to Grimm in connection with "The first or great consonant shift...". Hence Angr is correct that "great" does not apply to the second (High German) shift.  I have modified the article to reflect this. Linking the two shifts was Lounsbury's work, not mine. Greensburger (talk) 14:53, 25 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I did a regular Google search too, and Googling ["consonant shift" "Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury"] gets only one hit: this very Wikipedia article. And you must be looking at some other book than me, because page 35 of this book, which certainly calls itself History of the English Language by Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury, does not contain the words "guttural" or "consonant shift" anywhere on it. +Angr 16:09, 25 June 2009 (UTC)


 * After spending hours following false leads, I finally found page 35, and other pages I had referenced, in a book by Oliver Farrar Emerson, not in the book by Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury. The books have almost identical titles, which caused Google Books to be "helpful" by displaying a page from Emerson's book when it failed to find "consonant shift" in Lounsburg's book.  Sometimes it would say "no results found" as it did for Angr, but sometimes it would show thumbnail images of "related books" one of which was Emerson's.  But the Google page heading still said "Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury" so I naturally but falsely assumed that the page image shown was from Lounsbury's book.  I corrected the article.  Greensburger (talk) 03:38, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Okay, I found a copy of Emerson's book here. As you say, on page 15 he refer's to Grimm's Law as the "Great Consonant Shift". He does not use that term to refer to Grimm's Law and the High German Consonant Shift together. Therefore, my original point stands: the term "Great Consonant Shift" is not used in the literature the way it's used in this article; rather, it is used only as a synonym for Grimm's Law, so the Wikipedia lemma Great consonant shift should be a redirect to Grimm's Law, and this alternative name should be (briefly) mentioned there. +Angr 08:16, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
 * This article is for beginners that know that there was a consonant shift between German and English, but do not know the details. They would not know to look under "Great consonant shift" unless, like me, they had heard that term used.  More likely they would look under "Consonant".  So I agree that "Great consonant shift" should redirect to Grimm's law where there will be a short new section about the High German second shift.  For those who look under consonant, I suggest the present article be moved to a new article Consonant shifts (German and English) which will summarize both the Grimm's law shift from Indo-European and the High German shift on the same page to illustrate evolution of German consonants through both shifts.  The present talk and amendment history would remain with "Great consonant shift" which will redirect to Grimm's law. I already modified the present article to show "(great)" limited to the first shift. Greensburger (talk) 03:19, 27 June 2009 (UTC)
 * OK, so what you want to do here is an article that outlines consonant differences between German and English, not an article that has the specific name "Great Consonant Shift". That then raises the question: Why German? Why not Latin, or Persian, or Russian, or Dutch?
 * Alternately, if all you want is a non-technical explanation of Grimm's Law, try the Simple English Wikipedia… And a third choice is an article History of German consonants (that naturally should mention English only tangentially).-- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 18:31, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Redirect to Grimm's Law, 2012 remix
Three years ago I suggested that this article be merged with Grimm's Law on the grounds that to the extent the term "Great consonant shift" is ever used at all (which is hardly ever), it only refers to Grimm's Law. AFAICT no one has ever used it to refer to the sum of Grimm's Law + the High German Consonant Shift, which is what the article implies. However, the first time around only two of us (myself and the article's creator) discussed it and no consensus was reached. So now I'm doing a formal RFC and asking the wider community of Wikipedians, especially those interested in linguistics: shall we redirect this page to Grimm's Law? Angr (talk) 18:01, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Oppose per Greensburger's old rationale. It's a good non-technical intro to both Grimm's Law and the High German Consonant Shift. Mythpage88 (talk) 20:12, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
 * But where is the evidence that the term "Great consonant shift" is used as a cover term for both Grimm's Law and the High German Consonant Shift? Angr (talk) 18:40, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
 * I think that the only real problem this article has is a severe lack of sources. Mythpage88 (talk) 19:33, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
 * There are no sources for the article to have. This term is barely used, and when it is, it's used to refer to Grimm's Law only. It's never used to refer to Grimm's Law plus the High German Consonant Shift. Angr (talk) 20:47, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Then how come you haven't (to my knowledge) had a problem with the fact that "[t]here are no sources for the article to have" before? Mythpage88 (talk) 03:00, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
 * See the thread above. I've had a problem with this article for the last three years. Angr (talk) 19:15, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Opose - dont merge there are many laws involved in phonetic change for different languages. They need seperate citations and examples. putting them all in one article is counterproductive BO &#124; Talk 15:08, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
 * The trouble is that this article isn't about one thing. It's about a two distinct things, and pretends that they can be discussed together under a single name. Basically this article is a lie. Angr (talk) 18:40, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Oppose. This really seems to be concentrated on the consonant evolution of English, not only from PIE, but from Proto-Germanic as well. Grimm's Law is a larger, but also more general correspondence of consonants between IE families, not really within them. I think that merging with Grimm's Law would unfortunately stunt coverage to the IE correspondences, rather than to both IE and ProtoGermanic. I wish there were a better article title and more independent sources for the article, but it is quite possible that most sources are going to talk about either Grimm consonants or High German consonants, rather than both as an integrated topic; thus using much of the information out there is probably toeing up to WP:OR, so I think we're going to have to either be relaxed about OR on this article or live with a paucity of sources. VanIsaacWScontribs 06:17, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
 * How is being relaxed about OR or living with a paucity of sources (both of which are grave violations of Wikipedia policy) better than simply eliminating this article, which doesn't say anything that the articles Grimm's Law and High German consonant shift don't say, but does falsely imply that those two sound changes -- which are separated by several centuries -- can be grouped together under a single name? Angr (talk) 19:15, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Oppose merge - Support renaming. It seems that this article covers two distinct cases of consonant shifting.  Each of those is covered by its' own article - each of which is of a respectable size and goes into their particular topic in horrific detail.  So merging all three articles into one "consonant shift" article is not warranted.  If we're not going to merge them ALL together (on grounds of size), then it makes sense to have a "summary-style" article (this one) that points to two or more "main-articles" that do the heavy lifting of describing the detail of what each shift was all about.  Instead, I suggest retitling this article to simply "Consonant shift" (you can retain the current title as a redirect) - and to continue to summarize both of the other articles, explaining the "Great" consonant shift - while discussing consonant shifting in general...I bet there are other consonant shifts that have happened around the world and having a summary article to cover all of them would be "A Good Thing (tm)". SteveBaker (talk) 13:34, 2 August 2012 (UTC)
 * The proposal is not to merge all three articles into one "consonant shift" article. I guess "merge" isn't the right term; all I really want to do is make Great consonant shift into a redirect to Grimm's Law, since that's the only thing "Great consonant shift" has ever been used to refer to. This article doesn't actually have any useful content to merge into another article. But since we already have an article Vowel shift I guess it couldn't hurt to have an article Consonant shift to match. Angr (talk) 00:27, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Redirect to Grimm's Law or or delete. This article as it stands has no well-defined topic. There really is no such thing as a "Great Consonant Shift", and there certainly is no noteworthy tradition in linguistics to treat the two separate phenomena this article tries to cover under such a term. These are two different topics; each of which has its own article, and that's the way it should be. We don't do sets of "simple introductions" and "real articles" on the same topic; that's against the basic principles this encyclopedia is organised. And we don't do it for sets involving one common "simple introduction" and two arbitrarily chosen "real articles" either. What we could do, of course, would be a general article on "Consonant shift", dealing with the generic type of phenomenon, as a sub-article of the general Sound change, just as we already have a Vowel shift article. But having an article on just these two arbitrarily chosen consonant shifts, and promoting a neologism for them, really makes no sense. Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:25, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Redirecting now
Mythpage reverted my latest change with the claim that it was "blatantly against talk page consensus". I am not seeing any consensus here. What I'm seeing is a remarkable collection of arguments that are off-topic, incoherent, or indicative of a severe lack of basic understanding of the topic.

Mythpage88 claimed the article was "a good non-technical intro", at a time when the article looked like this:. That article was not only not "a good intro"; it was just plain wrong. Horribly, ridiculously wrong for the most part; and almost completely devoid of actual content for the rest. (Incidentally, it was still just as wrong after Mythpage was done working on it [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Great_consonant_shift&oldid=503011694]). – OB was arguing about a strawman, as if somebody was trying to merge articles about many different sound changes into one. The precise opposite is true: this article is committing the error of merging two unrelated sound changes into one now, and the proposal is to fix that. One has to ask: did OB read the article at all? If he did, he evidently didn't understand a word of it. – User:Vanisaac was making an argument based on the assumption that the two sound shifts involved are unified in that they are both part of the "consonant evolution of English". Which is wrong, because the High German shift is part only of the history of German and is completely irrelevant for English. The rest of his argument was just plain contrary to Wikipedia policy, blithely suggesting we should be "relaxed about OR". How can one take any of that seriously? – SteveBaker was making two suggestions that are mutually contradictory: if we were to turn this into a "summary article" covering the two sound shifts involved as two detail articles, that would presuppose that the sum of the two sound changes together forms a single, coherent topic – which, according to the literature, it simply doesn't do. If, on the other hand, we were to follow his second suggestion and turn it into a generic article on consonant shifts in general, that would imply not merely renaming but rewriting the whole thing from scratch. Hardly a word of what is now in it would remain in such an article; we could just as easily delete it and start entirely afresh on the new topic. Note, incidentally, that SteveBaker's opinion is diametrically opposed to the argument by OB.

So, where in all this is there a consensus about anything? Consensus on Wikipedia is not a head count; it's the sum of clueful, rational discussion among people who know what they're talking about. In this sense, the only consensus I'm seeing is to make this article go away. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:02, 7 August 2012 (UTC)


 * For the record, I agree with the redirect. On the rare occasions when the term "Great consonant shift" is used at all, it's used to refer to Grimm's Law, so a redirect makes more sense than a separate article. Angr (talk) 20:03, 8 August 2012 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.