Talk:Halle (Saale)

Opening comment
About Halle-Neustadt: Actually, the flats Halle-Neustadt were very sought-after by GDR citizens. The architecture is considered ugly by some, but this part of the city has an infrastructure and a concept as a whole other cities can only dream of. And there is absolutely no rational reason to dislike it. About the moving to other cities: _ALL_ east german cities except Dresden are shrinking massively, this has nothing to do with the architecture. 141.30.217.10 20:57, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Illustrations
I don't see why the largest photo has to be that stupid communist monument with the fists, which was demolished long ago. Halle has plenty of better monuments, e.g. the church where Handel was organist. Halle is his birthplace, afterall. Dunnhaupt 21:12, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

Template:Infobox German Location
Please introduce the Infobox German Location with image. It provides a coherent look among German cities. Lear 21 23:01, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

Saale?
I have never heard of "some references" that call this city by the name of its river, and I doubt they exist. Etymologically the Germanic root "hall" and the Latin root "sal" BOTH mean "salt".--dunnhaupt (talk) 15:06, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Requested move 2010

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. 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 move request was: not moved. Jafeluv (talk) 08:34, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

Halle, Saxony-Anhalt → Halle (Saale) — Original name of the city. See de:Halle (Saale). --Dэя-Бøяg, 18:40, 5 January 2010 (UTC)
 * No, it isn't. The German convention of differentiating cities with parentheses is a relatively recent innovation, younger than most editors. The original disambiguation is Halle an der Saale. We could move it there, since that (at least) occurs in English, or we could acknowledge that this is the largest and most known place called Halle, or we could leave well enough alone. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:20, 5 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree with you, we could acknowledge that this is the largest and most known place called Halle. Yes, it is: We could consider to move to -Halle- this and to -Halle (disambiguation)- the dabpage. If possibile. --Dэя-Бøяg, 00:57, 6 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Oppose WP:Use English, not German. 76.66.197.17 (talk) 06:11, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Oppose per Septentrionalis. We might indeed consider whether this is the primary topic in English, although I'm not entirely convinced that it is. Ucucha 10:48, 12 January 2010 (UTC)
 * 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. No further edits should be made to this section.

Requested move 2012

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion 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 proposal was moved. --BDD (talk) 20:17, 4 October 2012 (UTC) (non-admin closure)

Halle, Saxony-Anhalt → Halle (Saale) – I'm raising this again, 2 years after the last discussion because Halle (Saale) is now the official name of the city. It's the name that appears on all the signposts and is used on the city's official English website - see. If it were just called "Halle", I would go with the present name, but it isn't, and "Halle, Saxony-Anhalt" isn't official at all; it's a Wiki disambiguator. Bermicourt (talk) 07:17, 2 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Comment what about Halle, Saale ? -- 76.65.128.252 (talk) 08:18, 2 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Comment. Halle, Saale is a US/UK naming convention that only makes sense if Saale is a district, state or region. It isn't, it's a river. --Bermicourt (talk) 14:28, 19 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Rename to Halle an der Saale, which appears to be its actual official name. The version with parenthese is common German, but not common English. -- Necrothesp (talk) 12:01, 3 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Comment. I think Halle an der Saale is the old official German name. I like the construct, but I don't think it has any status anymore. --Bermicourt (talk) 14:28, 19 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Comment. I'm interested in looking at other options, but please provide references or evidence that they are widely used. Otherwise I recommend we go with the official name. --Bermicourt (talk) 14:28, 19 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Support; I think Bermicourt has hit the nail on the head. "Halle, Saxony-Anhalt" seems to be based on internal wikipedia convention rather than real-world usage. bobrayner (talk) 15:56, 23 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Support; Only problem with this is that it looks like a diambiguator which then does not fit into our disambiguation system. But that should no stop us from getting it right. Agathoclea (talk) 18:37, 27 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Support - I user it all the time because it's the official name, would be nice to have it as a direct link, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:00, 27 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Support. Another possibility is "Halle/Saale". On the Deutsche Welle site, gets 276 hits (15 in the last year),  gets 147 (10), and  gets one (zero). Kauffner (talk) 02:09, 1 October 2012 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. 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.

Name
As a reader, I don't get "Halle (Saale)" at all. I actually feel a bit of anxiety reading it, because I can't tell if the name of the city is Halle, or Saale, or what the parentheses mean. Could someone please fix it? I would fix it myself, but I don't know the right fix. Maybe it just needs an explanation of what the parens mean. Thanks. The Letter J (talk) 22:14, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

Etymology of Halle
It is a rather widespread idea that the name of the city is somehow connected to salt.

Yet, it was suggested by a professor of the German Language Institute of the Martin Luther University (I could look up the name of the professor if anyone's interested) that it is more likely that the name derived from what is now "hill" in English or "Halde" in German, as there is actually a noticable slope, called Hallesche Marktplatzverwerfung (market place fault). Incidentally, this fault is responsible for the saline wells.

There are several words related to "Halde", such as: Low German "hull", Old Norse "hallr", Gothic "hallus", or Swedish "hälla". These (especially the last one) closely resemble the word by which Halle was first mentioned: "Halla"; in the Deutsches Wörterbuch by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (Vol. 10) you'll also find the root "hal" (leaning) for "Halde", which basically is one of the older names of the city: "Hall in Sachsen" (Hall in Saxony).

So it is debatable whether or not "Halle" derives from salt or hill. Consequently, the article should either mention or omit both theories.

Kaizoebara (talk) 08:25, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

"Kreisfreie Stadt" - or not
As I understand it are cities and towns in Germany often either "Kreisfreie Stadt" (City without countryside) or not. Different, but similar to City or Town. (There also exists cities wich are "Bundesländer" or "countries, lands" as well as being a City but there are only three of those, Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen with Bremerhafen. I think it's of significance in Germany somehow. And we should perhaps mention which status German Cities and Towns have ? Boeing720 (talk) 03:20, 18 July 2015 (UTC)
 * All is explained at List of districts of Germany. Skinsmoke (talk) 12:27, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

What is this city actually called?
I'm a bit confused. Is the city called "Halle" in Welsh and "Saale" in some other language? Irish? German? A name like "XXXX (YYYY)" usually means the city is officially called the first name and also known as the second name, but this doesn't seem to be the case here. Or is it? The IPA in the lead seems to suggest it is actually "Halle on the Saale", but that's not what the article is called. What's going on here? Do the parentheses mean something else in German? Has the article been machine translated from German and never fixed? --86.185.119.15 (talk) 22:07, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
 * To my knowledge it is a German standard to name places by a nearby geographic feature if the name is found in other places, such as Halle. As the city of Halle in Saxony-Anhalt is located by the river Saale, it is named "Halle an der Saale", shortened to "Halle (Saale)" to distinguish it from other Halle's. Other examples are Freiburg an der Elbe/Freiburg im Breisgau, Frankfurt an der Oder/Frankfurt am Main etc. MoRsE (talk) 12:28, 12 October 2019 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Halle (Saale). Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20100825175656/http://www.junghans-gruppe.de:80/philatelie/html/33050.html to http://www.junghans-gruppe.de/philatelie/html/33050.html

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Cheers. —cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 03:14, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

"Largest Groups of Foreign Residents"?
The present content of the section Since German unity (after 1990) solely consists of a sentence about Halle being demoted as a regional capital, plus a long list of groups of "foreign residents", who collectively comprise less than 6 percent of Halle's population. I find this emphasis on the small number of foreign residents odd. Is this really the second-most notable thing about Halle since 1990? Is it some kind of POV-pushing about the immigrant population? Ketone16 (talk) 18:23, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I decided to remove this list since it was added in March and May 2018 by anonymous user whose IP address has been tagged for vandalism, the list has no citations to reliable sources, and it appears to be a product of POV-pushing that is prohibited under Wikipedia policy. Ketone16 (talk) 00:17, 11 October 2019 (UTC)