Talk:Lwa

Page link
Hi there, I think the Link "Pie" links to the wrong page !?
 * Fixed. However, as I know nothing about the loa in question, do you feel like populating that page? Deborah-jl 13:36, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Archetypal forms
I removed the passage "Also, unlike other Western gods, they are not easily categorised into archetypal forms." It is in direct contradiction with this passage on the page of Mambo Racine Sans Bout:

"Many lwa are archetypal figures represented in many cultures. For example, Erzulie Freda is a love goddess comparable to Venus, Legba is a lwa of communication comparable to Hermes or Mercury."

Graf Bobby 21:49, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Article: naming consistency
In the article, the forms lwa and loa are mixed. For example, section titles use lwa and the text below says ''loa'. WP articles should be consistent, so one form should be chosen and used consistently throughuout the article, while other should be mentioned, like any other alternative form should be. I won't do it since I'm not sure WHICH form should I retain. The article is named "Loa" though, and it is the widely recognized form. However, I cannot be sure if the "Lwa" form is perhaps more correct. --arny (talk) 18:38, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

I went ahead and changed "lwa" to "loa" throughout, because that seems to be the standard naming convention used in other Wikipedia article. Plus, Googling for "loa" and "voodoo" generates 140,000 results to only 20,000 for "lwa" and "voodoo." 76.27.211.75 (talk) 07:20, 29 November 2008 (UTC)


 * I know this is an old discussion at this point, but "Lwa" is now the accepted spelling in almost all reputable sources, as the "lwa" spelling is part of the standard orthography put forth by the Haitian government in 1979, and codified in English in a standardized English-Creole dictionary in 1981. That said, should we keep "Loa" as the article title and "Lwa" as the opening? Thoughts? Chiwara (talk) 18:55, 27 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Also, my google search today gave 71,000 results for "loa" and "vodou", and 91,700 for "lwa" and "vodou", so it seems "lwa" is the more common usage at this point, although by a relatively small margin.Chiwara (talk) 19:01, 27 March 2012 (UTC)


 * We should WP:USEENGLISH when we can. "Loa" is usually the accepted spelling in English and Louisiana Creole may very well have their own spelling as well differing from the "recent" Haitian orthography. Yes, we should continue to remain consistent. Savvyjack23 (talk) 06:02, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Removed "L'wha"
"L'wha" as an alternate spelling is now removed. There is no evidence to suggest that this isn't WP:OR. It has beenuUnsourced since 2001 by. A few recent books have been piggybacking this original research verbatim of the first line of this article since then and thus are not credibible.

Examples: The Amazing Adventures of David Walker Blackstone: Special Edition Prologue Issue (2014), copied verbatim from this article and presented as a published book!

The Esoteric Codex: Haitian Vodou (2015), copied entirely from Wikipedia.

Do not re-add unless there are significant sources pre-dating 2001. I've also added the "etymology" of loa or lwa, which comes from the French "les lois" (the laws). Savvyjack23 (talk) 05:59, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Eloah
Removed unsourced material [Loa derives from the Aramaic term Eloah which means Holy Spirit]. Interesting though. Discuss. Savvyjack23 (talk) 04:42, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

Requested move 18 April 2021

 * 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.

Moved as proposed. While not unanimous, consensus is clear. BD2412 T 05:05, 16 May 2021 (UTC)

– The spelling loa was common in English language texts of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s (such as Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen [1953] or the English-language translation of Alfred Métraux's Voodoo in Haiti [1972; orig. French edition 1959]) but was already being rejected by the early 1990s, at which point lwa had become the standard spelling in English-language publications (in turn following attempts to imitate Haitian Creole spellings more closely). Lwa is for instance the spelling used in major English-language studies of Vodou such as Karen McCarthy Brown's Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn [1991], Leslie G. Desmangles' The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti [1992], Kate Ramsey's The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti [2011], or Margarite Fernandez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert's Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santería to Obeah and Espiritismo [2011]. Several of these more recent texts also favour the Haitian Creole-based spelling Petwo over the older Petro. As a comparison, we title our main article on this subject Haitian Vodou - i.e. "Vodou", the spelling widely used since at least the 1990s, rather than "Voodoo", which was common in the mid-20th century. This article should follow this example and use lwa rather than loa. It is quite embarrassing for Wikipedia to keep using these very outdated spellings; we need to make things look professional. Midnightblueowl (talk) 14:02, 18 April 2021 (UTC) —Relisting. ~ Aseleste  (t, e &#124; c, l) 10:36, 26 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Loa → Lwa
 * Rada loa → Rada lwa
 * Petro loa → Petwo lwa
 * Support, being common in both scholarly sources and general sources including Britannica and the NYTimes  (Loa is however also used in general sources: NYTimes, BBC ) – Thjarkur (talk) 09:48, 19 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose. I think the WP:COMMONNAME is still loa, whether some modern sources have gone over to the other spelling or not. -- Necrothesp (talk) 10:06, 22 April 2021 (UTC)
 * It can be difficult to determine what is the COMMONNAME in a situation like this, but I'd argue that there is evidence that lwa is now the Common Name, not loa. If you Google "lwa Vodou", 220,000 results come up; conversely, if you Google "loa Vodou", only 170,000 results come up. Looking more specifically at Google Scholar, "lwa Vodou" brings up 2,550 results, while "loa Vodou" brings up only 1,590. When it comes to discussions of Vodou, lwa really does seem to be much more commonly used, both in scholarly and in broader contexts. Midnightblueowl (talk) 10:55, 1 May 2021 (UTC)
 * However, Googling "loa voodoo", still by far the commonest spelling among the general public, brings up 715,000 results! -- Necrothesp (talk) 14:56, 6 May 2021 (UTC)


 * Support Google Scholar results are three times higher for "Lwa vodou" than "Loa vodou", and much higher than any other variation of that. (t &#183; c)  buidhe  18:59, 3 May 2021 (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.

Recent move
The recent move does not reflect WP:COMMONNAME. and, both of you are not considering the fact that Louisiana Voodoo also shares the namesake for “loa” that does not always accommodate creolized spelling and as pointed out has over 715,000 search results in favor of! This was the primary reason why I had moved it back a few months ago. It is strange how I was not pinged to weigh in on this discussion that I had no idea was occurring. A 2-1 consensus, is a no consensus. Not sure how this passed. I will seek to gather a larger consensus on this absurdity. Savvyjack23 (talk) 07:12, 4 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Several editors have weighed in on the lwa/loa issue here (either at the article or its talk page) over the years; more to express support for "lwa" over "loa" (User:Chiwara and User:Nytoussaint against yourself, Savvyjack). Had I pinged all three, it could have been considered an attempt to weigh the debate in favour of "lwa", so my thought was simply to let uninvolved editors come to a decision on the facts at hand.
 * As for the issue of Louisiana Voodoo, it does complicate things, but to my mind is not sufficient to alter the clear argument that "lwa" is the more appropriate term. It does not seem apparent that the term "lwa/loa" even appeared in historical forms of Louisiana Voodoo; it is possible that it has only been adopted by some of the Louisiana Voodoo revivalist groups that have cropped up since the 1990s. Midnightblueowl (talk) 09:48, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

List and individual lwas
I noticed that of the lwas listed in the List section that have their own article, the majority of these articles are one- or two-line stubs; sometimes sourced, sometimes unsourced for over a decade, but in nearly all cases probably not deserving of a standalone article. Would it be an idea to merge these stubs into a slightly more elaborate list that, if available, mentions one or two lines of information about each entry? Lennart97 (talk) 21:40, 8 December 2021 (UTC)