Talk:Picentes

Sabines ???
they were a sabellic people, more exactly southern Picenes from Le Marche/Northern Abruzzo some of them deported by the Romans in Campania and Lucania and known as Picentes Cunibertus (talk) 23:30, 22 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Oversimple, Bert. You can't take Strabo too seriously. They aren't named after woodpeckers, I don't think, do you? Let's see what comes up.Dave (talk) 13:38, 29 August 2010 (UTC)


 * You seem to be having a great problem formatting a reference. May I recommend template:cite book?
 * We need enough information to identify the book and the idea(s) in the book. English sources, please, Bert, unless the information is only in the Italian source. Remember now, we are not proposing new scholarship, so your personal opinions don't count. I know we are so used to giving opinions all over the place in daily life (mainly wrong) that this also is difficult for you to follow. It's difficult for me to follow. I can't regard most of your refs as refs. Keep working on it.Dave (talk) 15:01, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

I used probably Devoto, Gli antichi italici (1931), but I have also the Italia omnium terrarum alumna of 1988 with a specific chapter I Piceni by Maurizio Landolfi I didn't use. Cunibertus (talk) 15:16, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Poponian
it is not so obscure, at least according Landolfi, it is the own endo-ethnonym of the oscan-speaking Picenis Cunibertus (talk) 11:27, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I'll do the best I can with it. Bear with me while I reorganize this a bit. I'll try to use your material wherever I can. Until the final version gets out some of your bad English - pardon me - and confusions are likely to stay for the moment. Thanks.Dave (talk) 11:31, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Whose historiography?
I removed this at least for the time:

"In contemporary historiography it is firmly established the use of "Piceni" instead of "Picentes" despite Giacomo Devoto reserved the first term for the Pre-Indo-European culture attested archaeologically throughout the Picenum (Novilara Stele) and the second to the Italic people (ie Indo-European) recalled by the Classical sources."

Oh is it? Whose historiography? You have to say that because I do not see it anywhere. This is a modern distinction, not an ancient one. The modern distinction we are using is north Picene and South Picene. What you want to do is redefine some ancient terms using this modern distinction. This is original research. Where did you get that? Moreover, it makes some assumptions not tenable now without justification, that some archaeology corresponds to some hypothetical prehistoric ethnic group. All that has to be developed. If we are going to do it we need an archaeological section. I'm not sure it should go here, but maybe. Lastly, this is bad English. I hardly understood it. The reference to Devoto is totally out of context - we have not developed Devoto in the article. What was HIS view? I grant you the topic of the provenience of North Picene should be covered somewhere but this does not do it in any sense.Dave (talk) 11:54, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Editor confused
"In the Greek classical sources the Piceni are sometimes confused with other pre-Roman peoples of Italy, a confusion exacerbated by the presence of a group of Picentes settled from 268 BC in Campania near Salerno (but also in Lucania) by the Romans as consequence of their revolt of 269 BC. As evidenced in Scylax, it is likely that the people of Piceni was also confused with that of the Iapygian Peucetii. Another possible confusion about the Piceni inferred from ancient sources was with the Senones (the Gallic founders of Senigallia, on the northern border of Picenum); this ambiguity may reflect the actual or cultural similarities between the Gauls and Piceni, or the fact that they, in the northern regions (Ager Gallicus), had at least partially assimilated Celtic characteristics."

I removed this unreferenced material, as it did not sound right. Confusion? What confusion? Everyone knew who those Picentes outside of Picenum were. How do you think we know? I'm going to cover it in the history shortly. As for the Gauls, first you invent an ambiguity then you speculate to "explain" it. If you think there is or was a confusion you need some refs here on it. I don't know of any. We don't want your explanations either. Let's have some history here. Are you a historian? Maybe you should try to become one. For the Scylax, what? More explanation would have been called for. Too late now. As for Salernum, you have that backward. Salerno was founded as a colony to keep the tranplanted Picentes in line. There were already in residence, and weren't any happier there than they had been up north.Dave (talk) 15:18, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

The Italian "sources"

 * Giacomo Devoto, Gli antichi italici, Firenze, Vallecchi, 1931.
 * Maurizio Landolfi, I Piceni in Italia omnium terrarum alumna, Garzanti-Scheiwiller, 1988.

These were never actually used as sources - the editor threw the last name out as a "reference" on a few phony ideas. Editor, you have to give a full reference, you can't expect the reader to read all the works of those authors in Italian looking for an idea you thought you might have remembered. Surely you can see that. But, this usage underscores some of the problems of taking articles from the Italian WP. For one thing, that WP is much smaller and has many fewer editors; that is, many fewer skilled editors and consequantly a higher percentage of juveniles and non-experts. So, in my opinion, the articles tend to be of lower quality. But let us only consider the good quality articles: they are translated into English by persons speaking mainly Italian, so the English is mainly bad to begin with. Then they are faced with the problem of references. If the Italian articles have any references they are in Italian. We can't have English articles with all Italian references, so someone has to locate the English references, a job that is far less entertaining than translation. So, it does not get done. What you end up with you might as well not even have bothered to do. It is both incomprehensible and in areas where there is a little comprehensibility, the material is wrong. The only possible benefit of spending time on this process is creating place-holder "articles" on Italian topics. There is some benefit there. Whether hundreds of wrong place-holder articles is worth the trouble I cannot say. Until skilled English-speaking editors can get around to them they are not worth much. These are my opinions of course and in no way represent those of the WP admin.Dave (talk) 11:01, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Szemerenyi sentence
Oswald Szemerényi,The name of Peicentes in ''Sprache und Geschichte. Festschrift für H. Meier,''Munich, 1971, pp. 531-544, supposes a reverse procedure, namely that the ethnonym Picentes 'is derived from the name "Picenum" through a form Picenetes* not attested'.

Whatever this is supposed to be, it needs some development. Who uses Peicentes and when and why does it suppose such a transition? Reverse procedure from what? If this is reverse, what is forward? Plucking incomprehensible statements out of context is not a good idea. Give the source of the usage and summarize the theory and the objection. Do it in English, please. Thanks.Dave (talk) 17:51, 4 September 2010 (UTC)