Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Old Gallo-Romance

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Sandstein 06:11, 16 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Old Gallo-Romance

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This whole page is WP:OR. It claims a single historical document, the Strasbourg Oaths, as the only extant example of "Old Gallo-Romance" but general scholarly opinion is simply that this document is the oldest example of Old French. There are some older minority opinions that the Strasbourg Oaths don't show enough specifically Old French characteristics to make them Old French, but this opinion is not currently accepted. There is no entity called "Old Gallo-Romance" described in the scholarly literature. The closest would be the reconstructed languages Proto-Gallo-Romance or Proto Northern French. Benwing (talk) 23:35, 8 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Agree 100%. CapnPrep (talk) 23:56, 8 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

No strong opinion, but I'll remark that I am one person who has edited this article - mainly just to make the table better. I was interested in the Strasburg oaths themselves. I had just assumed the term Old Gallo Romance had a clear mainstream meaning. (I think I've seen it in other articles in WP?) If it does not, for example if the term is used but not in any way the field clearly agrees upon, then it should presumably be merged to Old French for example. HOWEVER, just reading the deletion proposal on its own terms, if the term has a clear meaning as a term referring to a designation which is not universally accepted, then perhaps the article should not be deleted but adjusted, to explain that Old Gallo Romance is a term sometimes used to distinguish older forms of the language which evolved into French? BTW the article as currently written does not claim the Strasburg oaths to be the only exemplar.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:44, 9 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: The article does refer to the Sequence of Saint Eulalia but this is almost 100% agreed to be Old French. There is little disagreement about the Strasbourg Oaths being Old French either; it's simply that their spelling is vague enough that some expected early Old French features (e.g. diphthong /ei/) are not visible. But there are plenty of clear, undubitable indications that the language at this stage CANNOT be ancestral to Old Occitan. In general, you just can't find "Old Gallo-Romance" at all in the scholarly literature. As for the other WP articles mentioning it, all those mentions are OR and I've removed them. Benwing (talk) 10:10, 10 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

OK, that response makes perfect sense to me.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:46, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. — • Gene93k (talk) 18:48, 9 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I don't really know anything about the topic, but I note that there is no directly corresponding French article. The French article corresponding to Gallo-Romance languages starts with the words, "The Gallo-Romance languages (or the Gallo-Romance [language]) are a traditional classification category of the Romance languages." This suggests to me that the Gallo-Romance languages are sometimes referred to (at least in French) as if they had been a single language. The "Old" part appears to be where the original research is located. I would expext that the closest approximation to "Old Gallo-Romance" is Vulgar Latin. Hans Adler 19:16, 9 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, this is a convenient and commonly-accepted branch of Romance, but that doesn't mean that these languages all go back to a single identifiable language (other than VL, of course, which is also just a convenient label for something rather more complex than a single language). Additionally, all of the translations of the Oaths appear to be OR, esp. the "Late Latin" translation. If there is anything to be salvaged from this article (e.g. sourced information about the evolution of the two-case system for nouns), it could go into Gallo-Romance languages. CapnPrep (talk) 12:30, 10 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think there's much to be salvaged. I just added some more stuff in the section on Gallo-Romance languages in Romance languages, which maybe should move to Gallo-Romance languages. I also have a bunch of text I've written about the evolution and dissolution of the case system in the old Romance languages which hasn't yet made it to the article. Benwing (talk) 17:15, 10 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I should also add, that it might be possible to reconstruct a "Proto-Gallo-Romance" as a putative ancestor of the Gallo-Romance languages (with different "Proto-Gallo-Romance"s depending on which languages you include in the G-R languages). But none of these are the same as the language of the Strasbourg Oaths. Calling this language "Old Gallo-Romance" rather than "Old French" is the OR. Claiming that the language of the Strasbourg Oaths is an ancestor of Old Occitan is OR, and demonstrably false to boot. Agreed on the OR of the Late Latin translations. Benwing (talk) 08:50, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

NOTE: I just added Old Gallo-Romance Language to the AfD request. It's just a redirect to Old Gallo-Romance, but should get deleted at the same time if we delete the page itself. Benwing (talk) 15:10, 10 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think at this point in the discussion it's appropriate to !vote delete both. Hans Adler 06:27, 15 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.