Talk:Nieuwpoort–Dunkirk Canal

Article title
The original title of this article, Canal de Furnes, is confusing and incorrect, and is being renamed to "Nieuwpoort-Dunkirk Canal".

This article is about the canal that connects the towns of Dunkirk (fr. Dunkerque) in France with Nieuwpoort in Belgium. This canal is known as the Kanaal Nieuwpoort-Duinkerke in Dutch, and the Canal Nieuport-Dunkerque in French, and similar terms in other languages.

Wikidata d:Q2123210 for this article already connects this article with the aforementioned Dutch and French articles, so it's clear what the intent of this article is. Wikidata also connect to six other languages as well, all of which call it some variant of "Nieuwpoort-Dunkirk Canal", the only exception being English which has it as "Canal de Furnes".

There is another expression in French, "Canal de Furnes" that is used only in France (the Belgian French don't use it), and only to refer to that portion of the canal running in France, namely from Dunkirk to where the canal hits the border at Veurne, Belgium. Veurne is called Furnes in France, hence the name of the canal. (So to the French, I guess, "Canal de Furnes" is sort of like calling it "the From-here-to-the-border Canal", which kind of reminds me of the famous Steinberg cartoon of New York City's view of the world.) Anyway, even the French call it the Canal Nieuport-Dunkerque the rest of the way till it hits the Ganzepoot in Nieuwpoort just before emptying into the North Sea, but nobody else uses that term for just half the waterway, every other country uses "Nieuwpoort-Dunkirk Canal" or equivalent for the whole thing.

My conjecture about this article, is that it had to have been written by a French person, or conceivably by an English-speaker living in France near the canal. So just out of curiosity, I checked the creator of the page, and their French talk page pre-dates their first contribution to English Wikipedia by a year.

So: what do English sources say? There are not a lot of references to this canal in English. Most web search results show a grab bag of different names by cyclists and other travelers, some of them obviously foreigners writing in English, some of them perhaps native English speakers, using a variety of names "translated" into English, more or less, from whatever variant of the name they are hearing locally, like, "Dunkirk-Nieuport Canal", "Dunkirk-Nieuwpoort Canal", and sometimes the other way round, like "Nieuwpoort-Dunkirk canal" depending I suppose on which way they're biking. And some of them write "Canal de Furnes" on their blogs when they're in the French part, because that's what they hear there. In any case, the point is that so far I don't see a consensus by reliable sources in English.

Given that, I think we should go with what pretty much everybody in the world calls it, at least if we are to trust the titles of eight different articles on Wikipedia. And in English, that works out to be "Nieuwpoort-Dunkirk Canal". Mathglot (talk) 00:42, 21 March 2017 (UTC)