Talk:Mediterranean Lingua Franca

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Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of the . 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. 

No move as stated. As a by-product, the magazine was moved to Lingua Franca (magazine) and links to the dab page fixed by myself. There's a case for moving this article to Lingua Franca (language), but personally, I prefer the current descriptive title to the one with parenthesized disambiguator. Duja ► 09:13, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Mediterranean Lingua Franca → Lingua Franca — I think it's pretty obvious that the language deserves this space more than the magazine does. The magazine was after all named after the language. This article should be moved to Lingua Franca, and the page currently at Lingua Franca moved to Lingua Franca (magazine). —Alivemajor 08:59, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Survey

 * Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with  or  , then sign your comment with  . Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's naming conventions.


 * Oppose per WP:PRECISION which recommends "adding a parenthetical (bracketed) disambiguator to the page name: for instance when both spellings are often or easily confused." Lingua Franca and lingua franca differ by only one letter case.  Therefore so Lingua Franca should be moved to Lingua Franca (magazine) so the name can be redirected to lingua franca. —   AjaxSmack   18:41, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Partly oppose. There is an article named Lingua franca (small 'f'), which is the primary and original meaning of "lingua franca". This should take the primary topic. Mediterranean Lingua Franca should be kept as it is, or moved to something like Lingua Franca (language) if desired. However, I'd support that Lingua Franca (BIG 'F') should be moved to Lingua Franca (magazine) to avoid confusion. --supernorton 10:09, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Oppose one would think this is about latin or the linguisitics/demographics term lingua franca. The magazine should be disambiguated at Lingua Franca (magazine). 132.205.44.5 21:42, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Oppose - I follow suit, and support the revised move. --Eye of the Mind 23:15, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Discussion

 * Any additional comments:


 * Per Naming conventions (precision), and common customs here, lingua franca is the obvious primary use, and we seldom if ever disambiguate by capitalization only. I don't even see why is "Lingua Franca" capitalized here, as I render "Mediterranean lingua franca" as a descriptive phrase rather than a proper title. By that logic, the Lingua Franca should be moved to Lingua Franca (magazine), but this article should stay here (or at lowercase title). Duja ► 09:40, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * This language's name is "Lingua Franca". (The generic use described at lingua franca is named after this language.) If Lingua Franca redirects to Lingua franca, then this article should be moved to Lingua Franca language instead (or Lingua Franca (language) or something like that). --Alivemajor 00:20, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the . 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.

Dubious
Yeah, most of this article seems to have been just made up. It asserts in that 'lingua franca' translates from italian to 'free language'; this is not the case, and further contradicts the main lingua franca article. Another sentence that wafts the scent of BS is the final one, which asserts it is somehow connected to an enigmatic cant named Polari spoken by homosexuals and carnies. I don't know, it sounds like fiction. I know I'm not doing this properly, but honestly I don't care for wikipedians, and don't wish to learn and conform to your rules- and in the process become one of you. I do, however, appreciate wikipedia, and the work you pedants eventually mete between your bickering. So, this is I, just letting you know this article is a steaming pile of crap. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 115.64.205.174 (talk) 00:30, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

English words like "savvy" (from sabir) and "pickaninny" can be traced to Lingua Franca.


 * I've removed these two pending citation, at least "pickaninny". The OED gives:

The word is evidently one of those diffused around the Atlantic coasts through the Portuguese-based pidgins associated with trade (and esp. the slave trade) in the 17th cent. A Spanish origin is much less likely; although the diminutive adjective in -ino does occur in Spanish (cf. {dag}pequenino, {dag}pequennino (both 1200 or earlier), {dag}pequeñino (1549 or earlier)), such attestations are very rare in comparison to the usual diminutive pequeñito (1410 or earlier); the Cuban Spanish form attested in quot. 1849 is comparatively late, and may reflect borrowing from English. In support of the Portuguese pidgin origin there is the evidence of Sranan (see quot. 1796) and the occurrence of pickaninny in West African pidgins in the 19th cent. (current West African pidgins have the form pikin which prob. originated in Surinam and spread from there to Jamaica, thence to Sierra Leone (Krio), and West Africa more generally: see M. Huber Ghanaian Pidgin Eng. (1999) 85, 103). The theory that the word originated as a compound equivalent to Spanish pequeño niño little child or Portuguese pequeno negro (cf. Sranan pikien-ningre ‘negerkinderen, kreolen’ given by H. C. Focke, Neger-Engelsch Woordenboek (1855)) is unlikely.


 * - Francis Tyers · 09:21, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm inclined to agree -- this article is sketchy, and contradicts the main "lingua franca" article, which states that "lingua franca" means "Frankish language". The main article is correct, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: "Italian, literally, Frankish language", —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.232.18.214 (talk) 03:37, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Hello, Lingua Franca means "free language"
Hello, I am an Italian mothertongue from the Venetian countryside

I can say that Lingua Franca, in Italian means "Free Language", and NOT Frankish language. Its etymology comes from the latin francus, a "freed slave", that in Italian is a schiavo affrancato.

This is not the only example: for instance, in Italian words such as Zona Franca and Porto franco designate Duty-Free Zones. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.20.62.210 (talk) 12:00, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

It's true that in Italian "franco/a" often means free, it derives from a German word. However, it also means "Frankish" and I think that in the expression "lingua franca" it's correct that "franca" means French, since all Western Europeans were called "feringi" (Frankish) by Bizantines, also the Venetians and Genoeses, which were the biggest colonies of Westerners in Constantinople. So, the language was Frankish in the sense that it came from Western Europe. Lele giannoni (talk) 16:58, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Date of extinction
John Reed in "The war in Eastern Europe" writes that in Thessaloniki the different communities spoke each other in Italian. Likely, he mistook Lingua Franca for Italian. In fact in the Levant Lingua Franca was the international language. So, I think that Lingua Franca has been used until Balcanic wars and First World War created national states which forbade and avoided Lingua Franca. So, I think the true date of extinction should be about 1913. Lele giannoni (talk) 16:58, 27 October 2013 (UTC)
 * In Salonika, the main part of the population until the population transfers and the fire were Sephardim speaking Judeo-Spanish. Maybe that was Reed's Italian. --Error (talk) 01:56, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

What does 'franca' mean?
At the time, what did 'franca' mean? Did it refer to the Franks? I wikified 'Frankish' to link to Franks in the sentence 'The literal meaning of lingua franca in Italian is "Frankish language"'. Is this correct? If so, the article should further clarify that this refers to the Franks, a Germanic tribe. Kent Wang (talk) 02:10, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Um, if you realize you don't know, why did you add this misleading link? Did you read the article to which you were pointing, notably this section? Did you read the discussion on this talk page? It's probable that 'franca' in this context meant "Western (Latin) Christian in the medieval Mediterranean", maybe specifically traders (maybe not). Next question might be: why don't we have an article about that? Well, we actually have several relevant articles, including Levantines (Latin Christians), Crusaders, Frankokratia, and Frangistan. With some research, we might be able to do better. But not by guessing. --Macrakis (talk) 03:22, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Molière's Mufti: "Word-for-word" versus grammatically correct translation
In the section Example of "Sabir", it says that each Romance language has two versions: a "word-for-word" comparison of how cognates in that language match the words of "Sabir", and a grammatically-correct translation. However, I noticed that the French version had an extra word in the third line: "Si tu ne savoir", not corresponding one-for-one to "Se non saber". I edited the text to remove the "tu". (I have belatedly noticed that the reflexive "se" in the last line is likewise not in one-for-one correspondence, and would have also removed that.)

reverted this change (diff), with the comment:
 * Doesn't mean we need to use "Pidgin French" in any case a good translation is not always "word-for-word".

Per BOLD, revert, discuss cycle, I'm putting this here as the "discuss" part of the cycle. In response to the edit comment, I think that the aim of the section does mean that we need to use "Pidgin French" in the left-hand, unitalicised "translation"; the right-hand, italicised version is meant to be the "good translation", and so it's that one that is not word-for-word. It could be argued that the ungrammatical word-for-word translation could be gotten rid of, but I think the comparison of cognates is interesting and worthwhile, so should be kept. Thoughts? -- Perey (talk) 16:50, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

Franca & France.
Franks were the ancestors of the French. "Lingua franca" seems to be referring to French language more than the other language, but it's a pidgin, a mix. That's ambiguous. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A01:E35:8A8D:FE80:8DE3:BB0:1BF9:190B (talk) 14:59, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

External links mostly 404
Comment added by anon: I dont know how to format so please fix this - the links below no longer work as the site was moved to this: https://minds.wisconsin.edu/bitstream/handle/1793/8178/go.html but is also hosted by the library of congress at: http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20151007220702/https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/corre/www/franca/go.html Jim1138 (talk) 06:28, 17 August 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20090328135757/http://www.italica.rai.it/principali/lingua/bruni/lezioni/f_lll5.htm to http://www.italica.rai.it/principali/lingua/bruni/lezioni/f_lll5.htm
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20130614050823/http://www.site-moliere.com/pieces/bourg405.htm to http://www.site-moliere.com/pieces/bourg405.htm
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20130814063635/http://www.e-corpus.org/notices/9183/gallery/90575 to http://www.e-corpus.org/notices/9183/gallery/90575
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20090203083909/http://www.uwm.edu/~corre/franca/go.html to http://www.uwm.edu/~corre/franca/go.html
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20090409122609/http://www.uwm.edu/~corre/franca/edition3/texts.html to http://www.uwm.edu/~corre/franca/edition3/texts.html
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070702195648/http://www.uwm.edu/~corre/franca/edition3/index.html to http://www.uwm.edu/~corre/franca/edition3/index.html
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20090223181455/http://www.alger-roi.net/Alger/sabir/sabir.htm to http://www.alger-roi.net/Alger/sabir/sabir.htm
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20120325104348/https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/corre/www/franca/edition3/lingua5.html to https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/corre/www/franca/edition3/lingua5.html

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