Talk:mélodiæ

mélodiæ
It’s very unusual to find a Latinate plural with a French character in it. --Æ&#38;Œ (talk) 09:45, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
 * It's also very unusual for that user to add an English entry. It just shows they're multilingually bogus... Chuck Entz (talk) 14:37, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
 * And prolifically so. Just looking through the last couple of days' worth of entries before he got blocked, I found that he's created English entries for:
 * Græce
 * Graece
 * fédération
 * fœdération
 * défense
 * émotion
 * désire
 * memoriæ
 * Considering the source, I'm tempted to just speedy them all. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:16, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
 * It's possible that it could be a plural of mélody, but is mélody itself attestable? --WikiTiki89 15:25, 10 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes. Delete all. SemperBlotto (talk) 15:20, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Agreed. Delete them all. They also added étymology, mélody, poëme, poët, and more. —Mr. Granger (talk • contribs) 15:31, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
 * OK, I've deleted everything I could find. I kept poëme on the basis of a discussion at Talk:poet where Widsith mentioned it's listed in the OED as an attested spelling, and I kept poët on the likelihood of its being attestable if poëme is. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:50, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, The OED does record poët as Middle English, but it also records poiet, poiette, poite, poyete, poyt, poyte, poete, poyet, poette, pooet, poeit, poete, pohete, poiet, poit, poyat, poyeit, poyit, poyte and pyit, none of them in modern English.  Do we need them?    D b f  i  r  s   18:51, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, but under a ==Middle English== header. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 22:03, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Agreed, that's the point I was making about poët. How does one draw the line between Middle English and obsolete archaic usage?  The citations at poëm clearly show that this spelling was used later than Middle English, and the same is perhaps true of poët, and also of some of the spellings I mentioned above.    D b f  i  r  s   09:51, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, of course there are no absolute boundaries, but if a spelling stops being used shortly after 1500, I'd just call it Middle English, while if it continues to be used through the 16th century, I'd call it obsolete or archaic (modern) English. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 22:09, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, that sounds about right. My problem is that many of the other variant spellings mentioned above continued in Early Modern English into the 1500s and even 1600s according the the OED.  Were they just remnants of Middle English or were they valid variants?  Perhaps we need a section for obsolete spellings separate from variant spellings where the implication is that they can be found in modern usage. Before spelling settled down in the 1600s, people seemed to spell words however they wished, so most words had lots of variants.    D b f  i  r  s   09:27, 22 February 2014 (UTC)