Talk:French-Provençal

RFV discussion: March–July 2015

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French-Provençal

One citation, which I suspect might be the result of a bad translation. I've never heard Franco-Provençal called this. All the citations I can find use the term as an adjective meaning ‘from Provence in France’, and the hyphenated form as far as I can tell only occurs in the context of (bilingual) ‘French-Provençal’ dictionaries. Anyone familiar with it? Ƿidsiþ 11:28, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

French-Provençal is a morpheme-by-morpheme loan-translation of a foreign word (Franco-Provençal) in correctly English. I think we shouldn't consider it as a "bad translation", but as a rare form well conforming with accepted standards of the English language. The hyphen excludes the adjective meaning (‘from Provence in France’), to give the word his own sense. Meanwhile, the alternative form Franco-Provençal (foreign word) is a loanword, directly taken into the English language from French with no translation. Auvé73 (talk) 13:30, 13 March 2015 (UTC).

We can find here on this page a serious article saying: "(...) a linguistic challenge and a cultural operation, as an attempt to test and show all the expressive potential of his French-Provençal". On the more popular platforms, I found this page, where a traveler talks about "(..) an old French Provencal language known as Arpitan.", and this student explains that "(...) Standard French and Arpitan (French-Provencal) are spoken (...)", while a member of this forum tells us that "The French Provencal language (francoprovencal, arpitan, patois) is thought to have originated there and the area contains the largest numbers of speakers of this language". However, the words French-Provençal and Franco-Provençal seems very artificial and misleading, that why the synonym Arpitan seems to be more used nowadays on the internet... Auvé73 (talk) 13:38, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Meh. ‘Franco-Provençal’ is not taken from French, the language name was coined by GI Ascoli (francoprovenzale) and English borrowed it from there. Franco- is a perfectly normal English prefix. Your citations are a bit tepid – the first two are clearly translated, apparently by non-native speakers, the third is from someone completely unfamiliar with the language, the fourth…I guess it's OK…but one cite from an online forum…it's all a bit weak. No published citations? Nothing on Google Books? Ƿidsiþ 16:19, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

I have cleaned up the entry, removing the misleading etymology. Most citations on Google Books are irrelevant (being of e.g. "determine the French-Provençal boundary"). I can find a few citations of this as an adjective:

• 2013, Peter W. Edbury, The Military Orders: Volume 5: Politics and Power →ISBN

  Before the War of the Sicilian Vespers, at the priory of Messina three out of twenty two were French–Provençal.

I also found and added one more citation of this as a language name, but note that it also uses "Germanics"... I have labelled the entry 'nonstandard'.

I can also find citations of "French Provençal", which are arguably SOP:

• 2013, The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day →ISBN:

  Flatbreads from southern Europe, like Italian focaccia and French Provençal fougasse, have been popular in the United States for years (though not as long as pizza).

• 2010, The Translator as Mediator of Cultures →ISBN, page 139:

  AC's translations range from French Provencal poetry to cummings, […]

- -sche (discuss) 06:56, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

Cited, I think. Tagged as rare and nonstandard. - -sche (discuss) 07:02, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

So, passed. - -sche (discuss) 17:15, 29 July 2015 (UTC)