Talk:Provençal

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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)

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

"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

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)

[edit] 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)
  • 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)
  • 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)
  • 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)
    • 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)
    • 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)
  • 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)
    • Speaking of illiteracy, diacritical is not a noun. Tim Q. Wells 17:18, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
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.

[edit] "Language"

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)

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

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)

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)