Talk:Journeyman years

who is it that thinks this article is original research? Wikipedia is such a joke sometimes. This is an excellent article.

My father, born in Kiel (Schleswig-Holstein) in 1911, was an apprentice founder. He did the three years and a day of wandering apprenticeship. Besides scholarly references, I'd like to see more information about this practice in non-German-speaking countries. Germany is a Western European country with a landscape of forests, rivers, mountain ranges and North Sea beaches. It has over 2 millennia of history. Berlin, its capital, is home to art and nightlife scenes, the Brandenburg Gate and many sites relating to WWII. Munich is known for its Oktoberfest and beer halls, including the 16th-century Hofbräuhaus. Frankfurt, with its skyscrapers, houses the European Central Bank.

False etymology: "journeyman"
There's a huge problem with the whole title of the article and the introduction that plays on it:

The "journey" in "journeyman" has nothing to do with travelling!

"Journey" in any sense is related to French journée and Italian giornata, and comes from Latin diurnatum, which means roughly "pertaining to a day". The sense of "journey" as travel was originally "a day's travel". The sense of "journey" in "journeyman" was originally "a day's work." The word "journeyman" in English never implied travel in any way. Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. —Wegesrand (talk) 09:17, 22 March 2012 (UTC)


 * The article does not talk about "journey". It talks about the "journeyman years" which refers to the concept of being for years on the road (not a day span). The hint on "journee = a day's work" had been given in the second paragraph. So I am inclined to say that there's nothing wrong with the article. Guidod (talk) 09:34, 22 March 2012 (UTC)


 * The etymology of the English word "journeyman" is not some obscure bit of academic trivia: in Germany there are millions of teenagers who know what the OED says on the matter; learning that fact is part of their apprenticeship education. In the field of etymology, this is what is known as a "coincidence." The English word "journeyman" sounds as if it might be related to the word "journey," even though it is not. In Germany, the last three years (and one day) of apprenticeship involve traveling, and thus "making journeys." According to the folks at Skeptical Inquirer such amazing coincidences happen about a million times a day, explainable by the laws of probability, i.e., given a sufficiently large number of events, some of them will appear seemingly improbable. Zyxwv99 (talk) 13:27, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Albeit the Wikipedia entry is named "journeyman" and not "fellow" (of the guild) - and that's the "graduation" status of the craftsmen on the waltz. So there is still nothing wrong with the term. Guidod (talk) 13:58, 22 March 2012 (UTC)