Talk:basilic jaune

RFV discussion: May–November 2022

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basilic jaune

@-sche (Notifying PUC, Jberkel, Nicodene): I can't find any reference to "basilic jaune" as a specific plant outside of Wiktionary. If we are to keep this, we need to specify which plant is being referred to and include citations. Benwing2 (talk) 04:28, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

Why, I see it also in use; “specific plant” amongst basils usually means a cultivar, of which there are lots, very low-level taxonomy which at the time this term existed was poorly treated. My guess would be lemon basil, Ocimum × citriodorum. Fay Freak (talk) 12:03, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

Lemon basil smells like lemons. It doesn't look like lemons at all- it's green. It's been quite a while since I did any serious reading on basils, but I'm not aware of any yellow cultivars. Of course, basils are one of those plant groups that has a gazillion variations (purple, white variegated, dwarf, bush, "blue", anise, lemon, cinnamon, clove, etc., etc.,) so a golden variegated form wouldn't surprise me. Chuck Entz (talk) 15:38, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

Also, in that "use", it's hard to say whether the "onguent" or the "Basilic" is "jaune". Chuck Entz (talk) 15:43, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

Apparently this was on the Wanted Entries list that used to be in everyone's watchlists and I saw it used in old books and so added it. If it's only SOP for a basil that happens to have turned yellow (as some do when dying, etc), whoops. Certain longtime users did have a tendency to add crap to that list, which more than one other longtime user like me credulously created. - -sche (discuss) 19:08, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

Well, there are four cites in the entry (and another mentioned above), and at least two of them seem to treat it as a specific plant, listing it in lists of plants or equating it to (obsolete early forms of) taxonomic names; that we haven't been able to determine which specific plant it is is lamentable but no different to various Latin or Hebrew or Egyptian terms which refer to plants of uncertain identity. On the other hand, some of the other cites could be dismissed. It's very borderline. Maybe we banish it to the Citations: namespace pending better cites...? - -sche (discuss) 18:21, 6 November 2022 (UTC)

@-sche: just to muddy the waters further, the 1865 has "chryseos basiliscus, m. (χρύσεος) Apul. Sorte de basilic jaune, plante", but Latin basiliscus is basilisk, not basil, which would be Latin basilicum. This dictionary] is typical in cross-referencing to "chrysocephalus", defined as a basilisk with a golden head. It would be interesting to see the context in the original Latin text (probably Pseudo-Apuleius), which this traces back to. Pseudo-Apuleius was quite influential in medieval European herbal medicine, so the 1753 may very well trace back to it as well. Another oddity to the 1753 is the reference to "basilic noir", which I've never heard of. The world of medieval herbalism is full of confusion due to the rarity of/lack of access to manuscripts and to unreliable transmission of knowledge among practitioners, so I'm not sure whether this can be cleared up. You have to ask yourself: is a translation based on misreading a term for a creature as a term for a plant (if that's what this is) really a reference to a specific plant? Chuck Entz (talk) 22:22, 6 November 2022 (UTC)

I think I tracked it down, but everything just gets more confusing: this and this (at the bottom of the page) are obviously the same text, but there are critical differences in spelling that make it unclear whether it's talking about basil, basilisks, or some odd combination of the two. It may be due to sourcing from two different manuscripts with scribal errors causing the variation, or the printers making the errors in interpreting the same manuscript. My Latin isn't quite good enough to be absolutely sure what either one is saying, exactly- if they make sense at all. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:02, 6 November 2022 (UTC)

And here's a view of a manuscript (right-hand page, at the bottom), which seems to favor the "basilisk" interpretation, complete with pictures of red and yellow serpents, and with a plant that looks nothing like basil. There are enough scribal abbreviations to make it hard to figure out the exact text, so some confusion is understandable. I should also mention that these are copies of copies of copies by scribes who may not have been familiar with the plants themselves, so nothing definitive can be infered from the pictures. Sorry for the digression, but it helps to give a better idea of where the French term came from.

I would also point out that the 1865 says "sort de basilic jaune", not "basilic jaune", so I read it as "a kind of yellow basil". That is, the "yellow" is more a description than part of the name.

My take on this is that some people misinterpreted the Pseudo-Apuleius reference to being about yellow basil, and some cites may have been referring to a yellow remedy made from basil rather than a remedy made from yellow basil. That doesn't guarantee that "basilic jaune" didn't exist as a lexical item, but it makes it harder to be sure that our cites prove that it existed. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:07, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for that deep dive. I've moved the cites to the citations page. RFV failed. - -sche (discuss) 01:25, 7 November 2022 (UTC)