Template talk:sth

RFD
is Shelta, a cant or argot from Ireland. Go on, try to convince me that this isn't just an extreme form of Hiberno-English. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 01:14, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Have you seen Shelta? I can't make anything of the "old" Shelta at all. I really don't see how you can convince anyone that that is English. While it may not be a full language because it borrows its grammar from English and Irish, we've split languages in the past that have far better mutual intelligibility than that. 01:41, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Deliberately scrambled Irish vocabulary grafted onto first Irish, then English language structure. It's like a weird combination of pig Latin and double Dutch in another language substituted for most of the significant words of English. You'd have to be a word-game fanatic fluent in both Irish and English to figure it out without help. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:14, 19 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Keep. It's neither a dialect of English nor a dialect of Irish, and is incomprehensible even to people who speak both. —Angr 08:40, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Keep per Shelta, can't really think that's English. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:43, 19 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Keep, especially for the sake of older Shelta. Some references do consider Shelta an English-Irish creole, but creoles are still separate languages. Other references (Creolization and Contact, ISBN 9027252459 make the case that it is or was a full language: "Material in Shelta from the 1890s shows structural features  which are not of Hiberno-English origin. Some of these can be attributed to Irish Gaelic, others cannot.  It is possible that, since much of the lexicon of Shelta derives from non-Irish and non-English sources, the mysterious elements in the lexicon may be the remains of the language underlying Shelta which was then swamped by elements from Irish, first of all, and then from English.  In modern Shelta with its English-derived structural framework we may be witnessing the later stages of a process of language intertwining which began at a time when English was unknown to Shelta-speakers." (This last line is a reference to the theory, advanced e.g. by Kuno Meyer, that Shelta originated in the 12th or 13th century, at a time English did not even exist and Middle English was unknown to the Cant's speakers.) Modern "Shelta" continues to move closer to English, and there may be cases where it's hard to determine if a word from a more anglicised text is Shelta or English, like can be hard to determine if words from Denglisch texts should be considered English or German (or neither), but we should still keep the code. - -sche (discuss) 00:28, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Good point about older Shelta. But how do we relegate off some of the newer stuff (which can come closer to English than even, say, questionable Scots)? In any case, withdrawing due to heavy opposition to deletion (and partial convincement of yours truly). —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 19:04, 23 February 2013 (UTC)