Talk:martial art

RFV discussion: January–July 2014

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martial art

Rfv-sense: by restriction, martial arts originating from East Asia and Southeast Asia; often practiced as a meditative medium, e.g. aikido, judo, kyudo. How is that different to the primary sense? ---> Tooironic (talk) 23:37, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

Isn't that more of an RFD thing? --WikiTiki89 23:42, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

I would have thought that it makes sense: a martial art includes boxing, or bartitsu, or olympic fencing, or Fechtshule, or SCA combat. And that sense is broad and inclusive. And yet, ask most people what they mean by "martial arts", and they will start talking about Shaolin and Karate and Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee and flying spinning back-kicks. The latter sense is semantically restricted, but it is that restricted sense which is more commonly understood. --Catsidhe ^{(verba, facta)} 00:28, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

In my experience, people only call martial arts the Asian martial arts. I have yet to see an average person mentioning fencing or boxing as a martial art. But how do we distinguish between a distinct sense and incorrect use of another sense? — Ungoliant ^(falai) 12:15, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

That might be so, but finding cites that unambiguously mean the restricted sense is quite another problem. A quick book search seems to show that when writers want a restricted sense they will use a modifier like "Chinese martial arts" etc. By the way, the search terms <"martial art" boxing> and <"martial art" fencing> both get numerous hits indicating that these are widely considered to be martial arts. SpinningSpark 12:43, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

I think the confusion here is that most popular martial arts are Asian, but not all. No one would dispute that krav maga, capoeira, etc. are martial arts. It seems to be only the boring ones like wrestling and boxing that aren't cool enough to be referred to as "martial arts" by some people. --WikiTiki89 16:42, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Failed. — Ungoliant ^(falai) 21:09, 6 July 2014 (UTC)