Talk:Provençal dialect

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Untitled[edit]

Arnaut Daniel : This is obviously "Langue d'Oc" but is this archaïc Provençal ? Ericd 01:45, 28 Sep 2003 (UTC)

It seems Arnaut Daniel was born in Périgord this must be Occitan

Provençal is a dialect of Occitan. According to every edition I've ever seen of the Divine Comedy, Arnaut's words are in Provençal (though composed by Dante). Kricxjo 02:56, 28 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Seems to be a real mess. Some good linguist or medievalist will be a real help. It's seems many English texts use the word Provençal (or Occitan) to design Langue d'Oc as a whole.

There were two medieval languages in France :

  • Langue d'Oï, spoken in the north, that became French language,
  • Langue d'Oc, spoken in the south.

Both had a lot of dialects and sub-dialects and were very different from modern forms of the language. For instance, François Villon is generally edited with the text in old French (langue d'Oï) and a translation in modern French.

Today there are two main dialects of Lange d'Oc with many subdialect :

  • Occitan : SW of France
  • Provençal : SE of France

The Rhone is generally considered as the "border" but Provençal is spoken in some place on the SW of the Rhone like Nimes. French people generally consider Occitan & Provençal as two languages but from a linguistic POV there are obviously dialects of a unique language.

IMO the text of Dante is in some archaïc form of Langue d'Oc. But its a language that is different from the classic Provençal of Frédéric Mistral.

It might be old Occitan Arnaut Daniel was born in Périgord his native dialerct must have been some ancient form of Occitan.

It might be old Provençal :

  • Dante was Italian and Provençal was spoken in some areas in Italy ;
  • Arnaut Daniel may have used another dialect than is native dialect for poetic purposes.

Ericd 09:53, 28 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Date of "Jews granted freedom of residence in France"[edit]

"Shuadit or Judeo-Provençal is considered as extinct since 1977. It was spoken by the Jewish community around Avignon. When Jews were granted freedom of residence in France the dialect declined." -- This seems to imply that Jews were granted freedom of residence in France sometime fairly close to 1977. As I understand it, this actually occured during the reign of Napoleon. Can somebody clarify this? -- 23 december 2005

Requested move (2006)[edit]

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was don't move. —Nightstallion (?) 09:57, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move
Add *Support or *Oppose followed by an optional one-sentence explanation, then sign your vote with ~~~~
  • Support Tim Q. Wells 21:40, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - "Provencal" is not an English word, it's merely a way of writing "Provençal" without accents. We have many articles written using non-English accents - see Nîmes and Dauphiné for instance, linked from the intro to this article. — sjorford (talk) 16:23, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose — Provençal is written in the Latin alphabet, 汉语 is not. The cedilla helps mark out the correct pronunciation too. --Gareth Hughes 16:59, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - for the above reasons and that's what redirects are for. (Although it pains me: I tried to get Māori language changed to English with no luck. At least ç [unlike ā] is an ASCII/ANSI character.) LuiKhuntek 08:15, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • The English language uses some of the Latin alphabet. That does not mean it uses all its characters. The cedilla is just as foreign to the English language as 汉语. Because the English langauge has such a complex spelling system, it will not actually help people to know how it is pronounced unless they know the language where the cedilla comes from. People who speak English natively will probably not know what a cedilla is and what it means unless they speak a langue-d'oïl language. If we will spell Provencal "Provençal" because the diacritic helps people know how it is pronounced, then why don't we spell "night" "nīt?" I see almost no reason to start to use diacritics in English unless to impress others or to get rid of ambiguity without changing the whole spelling like "nīt." One example is the term "langue-d'oïl languages" would be confusing to many people without the diacritic because one might think of oil without it and would not know to look it up in a dictionary. Any English speaker should know to look up the word Provencal in the dictionary to see how it is pronounced instead of taking the risk of pronouncing it wrong. I do not care whether the cedilla is an ASCII/ANSI character because that does not automatically make it English. This article should be anglicized to "Provencal language." Tim Q. Wells 01:18, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • The English alphabet uses all of the letters of the Latin alphabet plus j and w. The former is a variant of the latter, older system: they use the same base set of graphemes. Provençal uses the same base set including a few additional letters, one of which is an alteration of c — ç. In contrast, Chinese uses a totally different writing system, based on different underlying principles: the two systems have no graphemes in common. The example of night and nīt is equally misleading: they are both sample sets of graphemes of the Latin alphabet, and it just so happens that the first set is an English word, and the second set contains a diacritic. I wonder which letters of the English alphabet 语 looks like, because I think that ç looks a little like c in cat. Therefore, I think "just as foreign" to be rather rhetorical. --Gareth Hughes 01:49, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose The English language regularly uses letters with diacriticals, mainly in words with a foreign origin, but some of them now pretty well naturalised - for instance fiancé, café, Noël. I have consulted several dictionaries and other works in English that I happen to have at hand, and all of them spell Provençal with the cedilla. In fact other than in the context of the present discussion I have never seen it spelled without. By all means keep the version with a plain c as a redirection page (which will help people searching) but to drop the cedilla from the title of the article would just look plain illiterate. --rossb 23:18, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Speaking of illiteracy, diacritical is not a noun. Tim Q. Wells 17:18, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

"Language"[edit]

I myself come from Nice and I was wondering about the definition you give to language. My point is that in France, the definition of a language is pretty different from the definition of a dialect. A dialect is mainly spoken, while a language is spoken, written, having both a grammar and a dictionnary. In that sense, the "Provençal" I know about is not a language, but a dialect, not having a dictionnary or a grammar to my knowledge. On the contrary, the Niçard, as you call it, has a dictionnary and a grammar, and is written, so is actually a language, not a dialect. Being a bit proud of my homeland I'm a bit disappointed of seeing Niçard classified as a sub dialect of a dialect (the Provençal). And I'm not so sure it is so much connected to Prvençal. Palleas 17:22, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Did you heard of Frederic Mistral ? Ericd 10:26, 18 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The definition given by Palleas isn't a linguistically sound one. Even were that to be a valable definition, Provençal possesses both dictionaries and printed grammars.

I'll gladly admit I was a bit extreme... It wasn't a good day... I'll also admit what I said was mainly bullshit, I talked without verifying what I had once been told - my bad. But actually, there was a real question in all that: how do you define a language? At what point a dialect ceases to be one, and becomes a language? Palleas 15:12, 20 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That is a good question, and one that doesn't really have an answer. People argue over this all the time for different reasons, often political. There really isn't a scientific way of determining when a dialect becomes a language, though mutual-intelligibility is often used as a criteria to describe dialects, though there are plenty of cases where this criteria is insufficient. There is no good answer. Still it's increadable that you could claim provençal isn't written. What about the troubadors? Provençal was the most important language in southern Europe 800 or so years ago! And even more recently, what about Mireio ? "Canto uno chato de Provenço. Dins lis amour de sa jouvenco, A treves de la Crau, vers la mar, dins li blad. . ." As for Nicard, many would argue that it isn't even a dialect of Provençal, just a 'parler,' but again that's political. Someone from Carpentras is likely to claim that their Provençal is THE langue d'oc while someone from Barcelona is likely to have a different opinion.

All this stuff is an urban legend. There is a scientific way of determining what is a language. See Abstandsprache/Ausbausprache. Get involved in linguistics! --Aubadaurada 01:50, 3 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"A question about pronunciation"[edit]

In the article, it's stated: "The prononciation always remains the same, the two norms (mistralian and classical) are only two different ways to write the same language." But what would the pronunciation be like for a phrase with two apparently significantly different representations, such as la bono amigo and la bona amiga, or li bonis amigo and lis bonis amigas? 75.3.68.20 (talk) 13:48, 12 August 2011 (UTC) Hello, I am not sure I understand completly your question but :[reply]

  • La Bono amigo is a mistralian form of a Rhodanien dialect of Provençal. The same statment in Maritim dialect of Provençal language would be la Bouano amigo. Both are written la bòna amiga in the classical norm of occitan (thus, you may choose wether to read in Maritime (ò=oua) or Rhodanien (ò=o). In both cases, amiga=amigo.
  • Li Bonis amigo is again a Rhodanien in mistalian norm form (Maritime = Lei Bouaneis amigo ; whether you choose to pronounce it in the Maritime or the Rhodanien form, you spell it Lei Bòneis amigas in the classical norm.

You may need to know that a couple of decades ago, the classical norm used the mistralian forl li, and bòni(s) for both li/lei. Know, though, it is the contrary.--Lembeye (talk) 22:49, 6 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 28 April 2016[edit]

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: No consensus to move  — Amakuru (talk) 20:51, 21 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]


Provençal dialect → Provençal language – Harmonization with Gascon language. – Article editor (talk) 03:39, 28 April 2016 (UTC) --Relisted. George Ho (talk) 06:18, 7 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Article editor and Dicklyon: This is a contested technical request (permalink). Anthony Appleyard (talk) 05:02, 28 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Probably we should talk about whether it's more properly a language or a dialect. Being parallel to another title is a weak rationale. Dicklyon (talk) 03:52, 28 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. This article has a horrible smell of POV and political, rather than linguistically valid, content to it. Source (or remove) the claim in the lede that In the English-speaking world, "Provençal" is often used to refer to all dialects of Occitan, but more properly it refers to the dialect spoken in Provence (my emphasis and wikilink) for a start. Then we might consider the proposed title change... but my guess is that it still won't wash. Andrewa (talk) 20:05, 6 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Andrewa: There's one problem with that statement: It assumes that the entity this article is about is universally agreed to be a dialect of some broader language (i.e. Occitan) and not a separate language from the other Occitan varieties, and hence that then appending "language" instead of "dialect" has to mean that the term in the article's title refers to all of Occitan. --JorisvS (talk) 20:42, 6 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@JorisvS: It's not clear to me which statement you mean, as there are several statements in my post.. including one from the article, which I quoted and challenged. Perhaps that is splitting hairs, I'll just guess that you are challenging one of my statements, and that you mean that I am the one making the assumption you cite. I am making no such assumption. There is very little that is universally agreed about dialects versus languages, according to my teachers when I studied language survey. That is much of the problem here. I am still of the opinion that the article needs some fixing before we can decide whether or not to move it, and that this is far more important than the article title in any case. (BTW, have a look at WP:stringing, which reads in part Generally colons and asterisks should not be mixed, but best not to try to fix it now, at this simple level of indentation it's harmless. Just something to note for the future.) Andrewa (talk) 01:16, 11 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The statement in italics, which you actually took from the article. That combined with "Then we might consider the proposed title change" can lead to the interpretation that if it can be verified that "Provençal" often refers to all of Occitan, only then that is grounds for moving this article. That would be an oppose for all the wrong reasons. First, in that case its topic would be the same as that of our article Occitan language and it should be merged; secondly, the "only then" part depends on whether the current topic is unambiguously a dialect, not a separate language. However:
Dialects vs. languages is a mutual intelligibility thing. Mutual intelligibility is caused by sufficient differences in lexicon, grammar, and pronunciation, which are objectively determinable by themselves. Mutual intelligibility is a continuum, but in principle objectively measurable. The boundaries of what's still mutually intelligible and what's not are fuzzy, but that fuzziness is usually in where one could say that one language ends and another one begins, only rarely whether a group of varieties has sufficient internal diversity to justify it being a close-knit language family. As for Provençal, Ethnologue, 15th ed. said (the reference is in the article):

Dialects: Transalpin, Niçard (Niçois), Maritime Provençal (Marseillais, Toulonnais, Varois), Gavot (Alpin, Valeien, Gapian, Forcalquieren), Rhodanien (Nimois), Dauphinois (Dromois). Gascon, Languedocien, and Limousin are structurally separate languages (F. Agard). Provençal and Languedocien (Occitan) are separate languages (P. Blanchet 1990). No Provençal variety is universally accepted as the standard literary form. Niçard and Northern Gavot (Valeien and Gapian) are more difficult for other dialect speakers to understand.

If there are varieties of Provençal that have difficulty understanding each other (which means actually borderline different languages), then there's no way other Occitan varieties can be sufficiently mutually intelligible to be dialects of a single language. In spite of this, is quite common for such varieties to be grouped as a single 'language' for sociolinguistic reasons, not proper linguistics. This is also why Ethnologue abandoned their codes for the various Occitan varieties: It is not improved understanding of the linguistic situation per se that leads them to change their classification; instead, changes can be requested. Extreme cases of the effect of sociolinguistics are the Chinese languages, almost all Romance languages of Italy, and German: all include varieties that are distinctly different from one another, no-brainers in terms of different languages in a purely linguistic sense (the Chinese languages are more diverse than the Romance languages; those Romance languages of Italy belong to very different branches of Romance; basically the same thing is true of German). The converse also happens: Varieties that are linguistically no-brainers in that they are dialects of a single languages can become seen as distinct languages (e.g. the various national languages of Serbo-Croatian). Even a combination of both is possible(!): the Hindi languages are often perceived as a single "Hindi" languages, yet Standard Hindi and Standard Urdu, which are structurally both varieties of a single language (Hindustani), they are commonly seen as different languages. It's this sociolinguistic influence that can lead to apparent arbitrariness in what are languages and what are not, not linguistics. --JorisvS (talk) 18:18, 11 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
(Yet, the mix of one asterisk and colon isused to be necessary to get the desired layout for comments to votes.) --JorisvS (talk) 18:18, 11 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Unconvinced. No change of vote. Andrewa (talk) 11:04, 21 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. I was rather neutral, but the above discussion with Andrewa has made me clear that I shouldn't be. --JorisvS (talk) 18:18, 11 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose for now. At least in medieval studies, "Provençal" or "Provençal language" means the broader language(s) spoken across the languedoc/"Occitan" region, not just that found in Provence. See, for example, this book, where the issue is discussed on page 17. As such, I imagine Provençal language will be confusing if applied here, for the form of Occitan spoken specifically in Provence. If "dialect" is problematic I'd suggest something along the lines of Provençal (variety).--Cúchullain t/c 14:22, 16 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Which thus, despite the term, has nothing to do with this article, but with Occitan language. --JorisvS (talk) 16:09, 16 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
It means that "Provencal language" is ambiguous with Occitan language and therefore isn't a suitable title for this article.--Cúchullain t/c 16:52, 16 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
No, all it means that if this article is moved, it would need a hatnote to indicate that. There are countless instances where two different topics could be referred to using the same term, but that doesn't mean we're going to avoid that term altogether when selecting an article title. --JorisvS (talk) 17:02, 16 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Doing that means demonstrating that the Provence variety of Occitan is the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC of the term "Provencal language" over. That's certainly not the case at least in medieval studies, where Occitan language is frequently intended, and looking at Google Books and the incoming links suggests it's not the case more broadly either. "Provencal language" should point to disambiguation.--Cúchullain t/c 17:08, 16 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
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.
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