Talk:Franks/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

FRANCE Must change its name to Gallia

I think the country name of France its very very misleading.

Aachen is in Germany, German language descend from various old Frankish language versions. Franks were pure Germanic people until modern French people are not Germanic in linguistic genetic anthropological terms. (look the average french people: short stature average brown eyes dark hair lot of them have olive skin) they don't spoke germanic language, they speak neo-latino language. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Celebration1981 (talk • contribs) 15:21, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

About 30% of every modern French citizen has at least one grandparent born outside of France (I happen to have two: one from the Nederlands, and one from Poland). Your comment on the "French looks" is thus plainly stupid. Why don't you travel to Baden-Wuerttemberg in Germany. You'll see the people there look nothing like your stereotype of the "German looks". Idem in Hesse and Saarland. And similarly for most of southern Bavaria. Sorry to have to tell you this, but you speak like the Aryan proponents so dear to the Nazis. As for the French language being a Roman one, this is because the early kings of France converted to the Roman culture, thereby abandoning the barbaric Germanic manners of their ancestors. France has always been a land of immigration (thanks to its Jus Soli). Over 15% of French citizens have direct Italian ancestors, for example. Another 5% has African roots. Over 1% is Jewish. Over 3% have Polish origins. About 1% has Asian origins. And countless scores of Germans, English, etc... You're clearly ignorant. Definitely of anglosaxon origins, which you proudly honor. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.193.90.72 (talk) 18:28, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

lol bravo and i want just add that french are multiethnic there are blond, red hair , brown and dark hair people, people with white skin, freckles, black skin, olive skin , people with nordic, italian, celtic, arab, asiatic, african origin, and we're proud of our diversity !! we're not nazi like the first poster who must be ashamed of himself!!! (or herself) Well "pure germanic", we're in 1940 again, are you Hitler in disguise? Do you know concentration camp, Einzagruppen, holocaust ? are you still proud your pure germanic roots ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.92.63.131 (talk) 20:08, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

The French collaborated excellently with the Nazis, so better keep quiet...139.139.67.69 (talk) 11:16, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

and just add that the average brits, irish or germans people are too "short stature average brown eyes dark hair lot of them have olive skin" ( ex: Colin Farrell, Orlando Bloom, Catherine Zeta-Jones, John Lennon...) , blond hair blue eyes peoples come mainly from scandinavia and from Hitler's wet dreams. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.92.63.131 (talk) 20:23, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

There is no average french people : there are many latin people on the south, with dark hair, but there are also french of celtic descend on the west, with blue eyes and blond/red hair, and french of germanic/gaulic descent on the north with blond hair and blue eyes —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.57.245.132 (talk) 00:12, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Some of you people seem to descent from aliens... :lol: 139.139.67.69 (talk) 11:16, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

And to laugh a little bit more, just read this [1] and that [2] from Carleton S. Coon. No comment Nortmannus (talk) 19:57, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

Foreign

I don't know the etymology of the modern English word "foreign", but at least you have to wonder why there's a "g" in it. Can someone enlighten? L0ngpar1sh (talk) 18:56, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

According to T.F. Hoad's English Etymology, Oxford University Press, 94, p. 179. It was borrowed from Old French forain, forein(e). Its first meaning was "out of doors", pertaining to another alien ; pertaining to another region..The spelling, I suppose, corresponds to the old pronunciation something like "fore-ing". Its ultimate source is Gallo-Roman *FORĀNU, from *fora + suffix -anus < Latin forēs "door"Nortmannus (talk) 18:39, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Franks as the object of Dutch revisionism

What other sense does this timeline box of the Netherlands have here? On the top of the French box, lol. Sandertje, please refrain from this nonsense. thank you, kind regards 84.187.110.107 15:37, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

Those are big words 84.187.110.107 are you sure you know how to use them? I have some questions for you. Q - I: Which European nation(s) has national language of the Low Franconian group? Q - II:Into which present day language(s) did Frankish evolve? Q - III:Where did they start their conquest of the western roman empire?

I'll answer them too;

A - I: The Netherlands and Belgium A - II: Dutch, and in extent to Afrikaans A - III: The central and Southern Netherlands, and WestCentral Germany

The Dutch and the Netherlands and their infoboxes have every right to be included in this article. Sander 15:55, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

I would say a part of Belgium : Walloon language is a Romance language and the linguistic border between Wallon and Flemish has remained quite stable since the early Middle Ages. You should add northern France, where West-Flemish is still spoken nowadays. The situation is not the same there, the Romance Picard language (and now the French one) has gained continuously new territories up to the North from the 9th century until nowadays. Nortmannus (talk) 19:07, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Merger proposal

I have proposed merging Farangi into this article. The other (very short) article just discusses the word "Frank" as loaned out to Persian and then to Arabic and other Middle Eastern and South Asian languages. This kind of article is discouraged by WP:Wikipedia is not a dictionary, however the information might be of interest here. Jaque Hammer (talk) 20:00, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Why no ADs?

Why does this article completely lack ADs and such? If we were talking about something in the last 100 years then it would make sense not to have them, but this is much much earlier with a few things cutting close to the separation between AD and BC. Some of the things in this like "50" about the first Roman mention are only discernable when you see it was during the Roman Empire (ergo AD), but that's only if you know the Roman Empire began in 27 BC (and I'm not sure how many readers know that off-hand). Another example is when it talks about the Trojans and settling on the Danube in the fourth century. Now I think most people would have a general idea that Troy is 1.200 BC or so (or at least far back in the BC), but the fourth century is completely ambiguous-is it in the fourth century BC or AD (especially given the fact it was talking abotu Trojans before)? How is the reader to know? Could someone fix this or would anyone object to me putting them in? Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie | Say Shalom! 02:55, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

Too many boxes on the right

For someone trying to design an attractive article this one is a nightmare. Basically there are too many boxes of varying width on the right. You just can't put every box in the article. The question of how French are the Franks came up in the discussions above. The Franks are not French. They have nothing to do with France. Frankia was not France. The Franks were a confederation of Germanic tribes in western Germany. By conquest and expansion they took over all the west Germanic territories except those of the Suebi, who had gone into Bavaria. Eventually they got Bavaria. The Franks were all the Germanics except the east and the Scandinavians and of course the Anglo-Saxons who had departed. If we are going to go by nationality we need some German and Italian boxes in here also. Those two French side boxes need to come out; they are messing up the whole design. It would be nice to have some right space not occupied by an irrelevant or marginally relevant box. Moreover, they are repetitious. The bottom is the place for such boxes. You can put as many as are relevant on the bottom. There already is a French national box on the bottom. The article ought to making clear that the Franks have nothing whatsoever to do with the French. Clovis was not a French king. Neither were the Carolingians French. That language is later than those people. Frankia was as much Germany as it was France. That anyone can raise that question in the discussion means that the article is not doing its job. As a matter of fact almost every section now has a tag on it. And another thing, the Franks did not take over Gaul. Their border pushed to the south a bit, that is all. Eventually they got all of Gaul as part of empire-building. Furthermore, most all the empire-builders spoke Germanic. There is a better argument that Germany is the descendant of the Franks. I will probably get to this eventually and when I do all the boxes on the right are coming out unless they have specifically to do with the franks and the French are not the Franks. We just can't design a layout with all these numerous boxes thrown in there. Out, out, out! The French government goes out. The French nation goes out. The Franks were not either of those.Dave (talk) 06:10, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

North and east of the lower rhine

There's the middle rhine also but the rhine bends around so we need a river-based description.Dave (talk) 07:35, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Even down to the First Crusade

There is a contradiction here. How can it be even down to the first crusade when the modern word is firanja? It would be even down to the present time except that phraseology implies there is something remarkable about it. I found a good source that lists many of the Arabic words based on "Frank;" however, just Firanja is fine.Dave (talk) 07:49, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Last para unfixable as such

"The closest linguistic descendants of the Franks, the modern Dutch language speakers of the Netherlands and Flanders (the initial Frankish range) broke with this endonym in the 9th century. By this time Frankish identity had changed from an ethnic identity to a national identity, becoming localized and confined to the modern Franconia and principally to the French province of Île-de-France. In the 9th century, only today's Hesse and Franconia formed East Francia's stem Duchy of Franconia, while the Frankish homeland became part Lotharingia and did not bear the name of the Franks. Today only the people of the northern Bavarian region of Franconia, where Frankish settlement did not start until the 6th century, still refer to themselves as Franken."

When you finally figure out what this says it turns out to be essentially oversimple and unreferenced. The work cited is in Dutch, can't be found and has no page number. Where on earth did you get that and why? Unavailability is not a criterion. For the Dutch, well, this is the English WP and we want to see English references wherever that is possible and I refuse to believe only this Dutch work addresses these issues. Page numbers here are essential. If you have the book and still want to use it please put in the page numbers of the relevant material.

Now, "the closest linguistic descendants" is rather too much on the plate. The region spoke common west Germanic when the Franks began, which it shared with the future English and Frisians. At the time of the Holy Roman Empire all the mutually incomprehensible early modern languages had developed. Which one was closest to Frankish? Which Frankish? When? On what basis? This is a larger topic. I would suggest a separate section, even a separate article for it. Meanwhile let's dispense with the hasty generalizations.

Is Frankish an exonym? Well obviously to some it was but to others not. It depends on where, when and who. I would not even bring it up. Changed from an ethnic identity to a national identity? Well, it never was an ethnic identity. It was a confederation right from the start. The stem duchy - needs a sentence or two of explanation with a link. The stem duchy is on WP. Whether or not the Franks qualify is a bigger issue. You seem to be saying they went from a national name to an ethnic name. Make up your mind. This paragraph seems to want to be explaining what states still are called Francia, when and why it disappeared from everywhere else. So, until the ducks are all lined up I am setting this difficult paragraph aside. More work for readability.Dave (talk) 08:25, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Afranj

Gosh, thanks for the Arabic word. I reverted it, NOT because I disagreed with your judgement or your example. I happen to have a reference on that and your word is not in my reference. It is in a way - my ref, which is a book in English, uses the long form - al-ifranj, or something like that. My Arabic is minimal, but I know the al often gets contracted into the start of the word it follows. Most English speakers don't know any Arabic. I think a word in Arabic script is just fine. The only problem is, as I say, it is not in my ref as such. Can you supply another ref, say a dictionary, which can be in Arabic as long as it is also in English? Now, I have another question. If you know Arabic, why did you not put in the Arabic for the word given? If you don't know Arabic but a copying from somewhere, please do not meddle with the text unless you know what you are doing. Thanks.Dave (talk) 00:46, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

The to them, to them the

English allows the insertion of a phrase after the definite article. It is similar to ancient Greek in that way - qualifies the noun being made particular rather than the thing universally. To remove it from there makes the phrase gobble-de-gook. My suggestion is, if you don't know enough English to understand it, you are not in a position to better it, so please don't "correct" it. If you are just making changes without reasons, this is vandalism, especially since you have not identified yourself and have no login. Stating a reason gives the other editors a chance to discuss.Dave (talk) 17:35, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Discussion on physical appearance section

I reverted vandalistic cuts to that section by a new user. First of all, no discussion was offered. I disagree totally with the reasons given. You can't just step into the article and make big cuts as it pleases you. I am opening this discussion for the benefit of the new user.

Second, the material cut was referenced. The user seems to have believed the material was irrelevant. What was originally there was one quote from an ancient author proferred as "the appearance" of the Franks; that is, all Franks everywhere at any time. This can't stand. All the people of Germanic Europe were once the Franks. It has been customary for some authors to select one statement and characterize the entire people from it. The most famous is Tacitus' characterization of the Germans as the red-headed gigantic blue-eyed prototype of the German race. Look here, we can't have that. We are not racists here and are not writing in defense of the neo-nazis. If we are going to cover appearance we have to do it properly. The Franks are the people of Europe whether today or a few thousand years ago, with but minor infusions and removals. They are not a race of red-headed giants. The one statement given does not cover it. I work a bit slow but I am going to to cover the blondism question, which is also distributed by clines. As to whether the new user understands this concept, I am sure we can clarify it with some links and a sentence or two more.

Now, here is what I suggest. If you don't want to get into physical traits we can remove that and confine ourselves to dress and hair. There is quite a bit of material on that. There is not just one dress or one hair style over the whole 1000 years of Frankish existence. Another alternative is change the title and confine ourselves to ancient statements and the truth of them. In that case case we could entitle it, "Ancient views of the Franks." You can see the problem. If we profer this as truth on the appearance of the Franks than we have to get into this rightly. If we only profer it as ancient views then we don't, excpet I am sure we are going to want to say whether the Franks really are all blue-eyed and red-haired etc.

One more thing. Do have a concern for organization. Just hacking material out disorders it. This is not a free-for-all here but a regular process. Follow marquis of queesnbury rules please. To the new user, I say, you make a bunch of random changes to articles managing to attract at least one critical comment. Now you want to jump into this one without due process. No. If you want to try a reorg or a rewrite I do not mind. It will, however, be reedited by me. If you choose to do that please include your references and have good reasons for removing any referenced material of mine. You current reasons were not good. You can use this discussion to go further with the matter but until you present a convincing argument and follow the rules I am going to revert what you do. By the way I can talk to you better if you pick a user name for yourself. You don;t get to just jump into articles and wreck them at will. This is a collaborative effort. I got to go now. At some point in the not too distant future I wil be back to finish up on the eyes, the skin, the hair, the dress. Meanwhile I will be giving you some new-user guidance if needed. And, I really am quite flexible if you follow the rules. Rewrite or write some yourself if you would like. You probably should expect a lot of interfacing until you acquire more experience.Dave (talk) 05:48, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

I don't have precise studies about that, but as far as I know, the archeological excavations of Frankish cemeteries in the North of France show evidence that the Franks (women and children too) buried there, were taller with longer skulls than the indigenous Gallo-Roman inhabitants. That is just an average. I wrote examples of excavations made in the 19th to the 21th century in the article fr:Francs, but I did not really mention these facts. I am sorry but I am to lazy to translate it.Nortmannus (talk) 19:25, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you, Nortmannus. It is in fact the kind of thing I am looking for. The actual people have not changed much but it is nice to follow through on that. There is actually quite a lot on that plate. I may cycle through all the traits before I start with the details. I would like to handle the myth of the wild blue eyes (probably from eyestrain) and the blondism, showing that the Roman writers were in fact reflecting an intense fear of the Germans, those awful red-headed giants with the crazy blue eyes, everywhere crazy, crazy, argh! Those steely blue eyes shooting bullets from an airplane just like the Baron. They say he didn't die like the rest of us but wanders the skies, a true flying Dutchman. The Franks they say were a pure race brought up in the great outdoors who spend all their time dicng and killing people, nothing at all like you and me, who put our trousers on one leg at a time and worry about getting pneumonia. They're not like us, oh no, they're a race of uebermenschen. Too bad Nietsche spent so much time time in the mental hospital, maybe we could have got more of his great German insights. Anyway, I do have the book on the bog people, which is good for the hair and eyes, but I will check your examples when I get back to it. I left it to tend to some of the articles lower in the substructure. I do apologize for going so slow. The people want to see it all done right now, naturally. Moreover I think you are just being modest about the laziness. True discretion, the military knowlege of when to hold back, is the characteristic of the superior military race. I get a lot of that lately myself, but be patient sooner or later this Franks thing will be coming together, but without the innate superiority, I fear.Dave (talk) 00:35, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

I suppressed the sentence with the modern physical appearence of the French, it is clearly irrelevant. I don't understand, why studies about the height made in the 20th century can justify historical facts of the early middle-ages. Genetic researchs of that kind made in France nowadays don't mean anything, because France is the only country of Europe, that instead of being a country of emigration, was always a country of immigration, basically immigrants from the South since WWI. Before making these studies, we must be sure that the subject does not have foreign ancesters, then must be sure that the ancesters are from the same region, because there are (were) considerable variations among the stock populations inside France (more than every country in Europe) from the north to the south (if we exclude the descendants of immigrants), then we must have a deep knowledge of the country (its history, onomastic,..), of the people to understand that. It is such a big job, that it is quite impossible to make. We cannot trust such studies. Concerning the height, I own an interesting document about the variation of the Danes'height from the Iron Age to present time : Men : Iron Age = 1,75m ; Viking period = 1,71m ; Middle Ages = 1,73m ; 1850 = 1,65m ; present time = 180m (exactly my height). The bones come mainly from excavations in the cemeteries of Langeland Island. It means, that even among isolated populations, with zero immigration, the height can change.Nortmannus (talk) 11:00, 17 December 2011 (UTC) PS. Modern Romans in an Eastern French town (List of majors) ?

Conceding gracefully

I yield to public opinion. That does not mean I am through with the section. I am going to let you go ahead and shape the section and then see what we have, which should be the direction in which you would like to see it go. Just a brief recap. The section originally contained one ancient quote put forward as the way the Franks looked. That's not enough. The Franks covered most of Europe for a thousand years. Not only that, but generalizations drawn from a single statement are apt to be misleading. My thought was was to expand the section. I think now it might take more expansion that we can give it in this article. Also as you perceive I totally disagree with the rest of you about today's appearance being irrelevant to their appearance. The anthropologists tend to treat modern populations as descended from ancient ones. Coon certainly did that in Races of Europe. Unless there is a historical reason to think that the population changed I think we can say the moderns are pretty much like the ancients. There used to be a photograph on a paperback of Kramer's Sumerians showing an ancient Sumerian statue in modern garb. Uncanny. It can be however a large topic. If we are going to debate that in the article then we surely are going to stray from the topic. I really don't know what we should have there, only what we should not have. We should not have single statements or paragraphs with a quote or two from one or two ancient authors telling us that the Franks looked like this or that. We can have such quotes but the editor needs to establish distance with them and not profer tham as unqualifiedly true. Quite a lot can be done with the physical remains. What I want to do is step back and see what you do and go from there. For the hair and garb I would rely on the archaeological remains supported by the statements. That should do it I think and I believe we agree on that. You may not see me for a while as I am working through the Ripuarians and then will get through the Salians. By that time I will know what to say about them in the Franks. Those sections have tags. These articles basically have no or minimal references. There is a lot of work to do while you are solidifying your concepts of the physical Franks and what to say about it. Thanks for your critiques. Good luck on your work. Later.Dave (talk) 01:37, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

All right. Whatever further cuts you were going to make you would have made by this time. I see you left Geipel in but you seem to want to see connections between him and the Franks. There is material on that so it is only a matter of presentation. I'm not sure Geipel's main point got across. He is interested in clines rather than variations in height. Due to our improved nutrition we are probably all quite a bit taller than the ancients. The cline, however, is a statement of relative height, not really of height. The heights might vary a lot but not the clines. I have one objection, however, that the reader and novice editor did not understand the concept of the cline. It is just a line of demarcation. There are plenty of them on WP. However, some links and a sentence or two could be spent on clarification. My assessment is, you are interested enough in this approach for me to go on with it, provided I can keep the Franks clearly in it and explain cline a little bit. We have plenty of scientific articles that really are hard to understand, but I should concede something to the liberal arts audience. I note that some headings with no text have been deleted. That's all right, I have the outline in my mind. Easy to put back. Keeping all these cautions in mind I think I will pick up again on it; however, I may chose to begin with some of the deleted headings. You will have to be patient I think as I regard the lower-level material as higher priority and essential for summarization. Ciao. Do keep me posted on your thoughts.Dave (talk) 20:54, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Mythological origins

This needs to be clarified a little so I am doing a small amount of rewriting. The first sentence is too general. The mythological origin did not come from any great endemic national urge to create myths of origin, it came from two specific sources, Fredegar and the other mentioned. They were both building on gaps in Gregory's sources. So, they aren't the Frankinsh nation, they are a couple of monks with nothing much to do but sit around in monastery libraries inventing myths to cover gaps. The collective voice of the Franks - no way. For the rest, I think the first source should go first. We need a ref also. I found a good secondary source fortunately. Incidentally the connection to Troy seems to come from the similarity of Asca and Askr to Ascanius, but until I find that theory substantially stated somewhere I can't put it in.Dave (talk) 14:20, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

Changes by newsleep

Welcome to WP if you have not been on before. I see you moved some material around. All right. I see what you are trying to do. Of course you must already know you can't delete it as it is referenced. Move it, edit it, rework it - that is allowed I believe, as long as you follow what the author was trying to say (who is not me) and use his references. You can criticise the use of those references but I checked them and reformatted the refs and they look fine to me. But, you did make an unmentioned change - you deleted TOCright. As you did not give any reason I restored it. My reasons are plainly expressed elsewhere but I will go over it again. This is a very long article, has many subsections. The TOC is greater than a page. That is not good design in my view. You can't even read the article without going through this long TOC with too much blank space on the right. Very hard to use. One method of handling it is to put the pictures and boxes to the right. The article had that but the boxes selected were not very apt so in response to my criticism someone took them out. Another answer is TOCright. In my view this is a good-looking, useful, economic design, especially since I am putting in returns to it from the major topics. If you have a cogent counter-argument, let's have it. Otherwise your deletion causes a less pleasing effect. I would appreciate it if you would leave that alone. Of course I don't mean that if you have a more pleasing design you should not try it. You probably should discuss it, however, since there are four or so of us on it now. Thanks.Dave (talk) 01:19, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Cephalic Index

This text is just irrelevant. The only comment is completely unjustified and unreferenced and states an opinion that "the Franks would also" and then comments that no historic authors agreed with that opinion. So what is the purpose here? If you want to write an essay about cephalic index then do so. Otherwise tell me something about the Franks, which is why I came to read this article. The quality of the scholarship here is awful. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.14.187.38 (talk) 05:05, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

The entire "physical traits" section says nothing about the Franks. I removed it. Srnec (talk) 00:36, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Style of this article

There seems to be some impressive scholarship behind the recent editing of this article, but I find it now simply too difficul to read. The tone of the article is no longer encyclopedic in nature. It's become too scholarly, too academic, too mired in detail. This starts right at the introduction. The article is no longer particularly interesting or informative to the average reader. It seems to be aimed at English-speaking academics interested in certain arcane aspects of the subject, not at general readers who might want a logically sequenced, orderly overview of this subject. There's more I could say about this, but I'd like to just throw that on the table. I don't mean to insult anyone or denigrate the scholarship involved. I suppose in the end it's the style and detail that concern me. It is supposed to be encyclopedic in tone, but it feels like an academic treatise. In this article, one loses sight of the forest because of all the trees. Schildewaert (talk) 00:58, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

The article should be both scholarly and readable for the non-scholar. I agree, though, that recent edits have obscured the forest by concentrating on specific trees, often trees that belong in an entirely different forest. Srnec (talk) 16:10, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

Talk:Ferenghi

Related question at Talk:Ferenghi. --EarthFurst (talk) 11:42, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

The statue of Clovis and Saint Remi

This statue, actually, is pretty far from the Cathedral and is located near the Abbey of Saint Remi (also in Reims). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.77.33.1 (talk) 21:38, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

End of the Franks

When did the Franks end? I don't know, some say they have not ended yet. I think they were beginning to end the whole time they were Franks. We need a definite arbitrary end here to correspond with the definite beginning. Everything that begins must end. The beginning was the formation of a common confederacy, a socio-political event establishing a unity. The end therefore should be a socio-political event taking away that unity. That question was resolved by the Treaty of Verdun. That was the end without hope of reclamation of the common kingdom of the Franks. The beginning of the end must have been much earlier. This is my reasoning for following the majority view that Frankish unity ended with that treaty. Therefore I am restoring that idea to the introduction of the section on culture. If you have some better reasoning, by all means bring it up. Otherwise do not alter please without reasons.Dave (talk) 04:51, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

I think we should put some sort of timeline to help with this, I'm new or I would help.75.71.53.184 (talk) 16:38, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Salian Franks and Belgians

The assertion that the Belgians were celticized germans is not cited, and Wikipedia itself elsewhere explains that this is quite a controversial view. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.168.39.161 (talk) 03:22, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

there's a discussion about the celtic origins of the belgians (and their ancestors, the boii, which also gave bohemia it's name) in "the role of migration in the history of the eurasian steppe", andrew bell-fialkoff, 2000 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.48.181.93 (talk) 22:04, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

marvingi / merovech

i've searched long and hard and cannot find anybody else that has seen any relevance in the fact that ptolemy places a tribe called the marvingi at the confluence of the rhine and the main. could this have anything to do with merovingian (and therefore frankish) ancestry? one may note that the fact that the franks did not retain germanic legends of descent from odin is unusual if they were indeed a german confederation, and further note that the dominant religious practices in clovis' time were gallo-celtic (arduina) in nature. then again, i suppose a gallic continuity hypothesis is just too simplistic, isn't it?

It's not whether or not it's simplistic - it's whether or not this is in any WP:RS. If it is, no problem citing it. If it's not, please see WP:OR. Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 22:20, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

well, ptolemy was an ancient roman geographer writing from egypt. you need to be careful with him. what i'm doing here is throwing out a request for somebody in the field to address the issue, because i've never seen it addressed. i can't just jump from "ptolemy identified marvingi near the rhine" to "the marvingi ptolemy identified were the frankish merovingians", especially considering that the accepted scholarly opinion is that they were riparian (atlantic) franks. it's just that there are a lot of holes in the idea, and a lot of myths surrounding their origin. it's an idea, not an assertion.

I made an edit to Merovingian dynasty with a source. Some other stuff comes up at Google Books, but I don't have access to those books. Srnec (talk) 12:50, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

thank you.

and just to follow up on this: gregory of tours (who is usually considered the better source, apparently) claims the franks originated in pannonia rather than belgium. this is generally discarded as "nonsense" because it doesn't fit other evidence, but perhaps that dismissal is a little too hasty and ought not to be total. there's a source here: http://books.google.ca/books?id=yhaSRVnI1Y4C&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13&dq=franks+from+pannonia&source=bl&ots=hBrvPEEJcY&sig=_iUp9GQb-EDmH6Mh-dmrXOUO1WY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=q_brUrmaKuS22gXU9oGQAw&ved=0CG8Q6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=franks%20from%20pannonia&f=false (sorry for the ridiculous link) that briefly deconstructs the myth as incorporating tribes that moved from the east into the frankish confederacy. it doesn't mention the marvingi explicitly, but it's consistent with the idea that a large of amount of the frankish ethnogenesis was composed of tribes that do not have an extended history in the low countries. it's still not direct evidence, but it's building up towards a hypothesis.

i'm going to leave this alone, now, in hopes that somebody picks it up as a research topic and reports back here about it.

...except to point out that there's a historical movement of alans from pannonia to france that fits the entire narrative and could have merged with a few german tribes along the way. it's discussed in a relatively recent book, Deutschlands unbekannte Jahrhunderte, Geheimnisse aus dem Frühmittelalter by Richard Schmoekel (i can't read german).

Examples of derived words

Why are languages that don't use Latin scripts still in unnecessary language templates? These should be made straight text,--Kintetsubuffalo (talk) 15:35, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Frank haplotype

There are multiple problems with this addition. What we have is one obscure primary source that reports a small number of people buried in a Frankish cemetery had these haplotypes. It is completely impossible to conclude from this that all of the Franks were a particular haplotype - that is just not how it works. You can only conclude that those specific individual Franks were of that haplotype, or that the Franks included people of that haplotype. Anything else is going beyond the data. Likewise, the text as it stands is badly described and badly referenced. Most importantly, though, fixing all of this won't solve the problem, because it is both WP:PRIMARY and WP:UNDUE. Find for me a general (secondary) account of the Franks that accepts the conclusion of this study and deems it worthwhile information to include in their account, and then we can consider the appropriateness of including it. Until then it is just one unconfirmed, over-interpreted, badly cited and inaccurately summarized piece of non-noteworthy trivia. Agricolae (talk) 01:22, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

This study was done on behalf of the Minister of Culture of Netherlands(said in my source) and is directly hosted on the website of the Minister(link below). If you think i have misinterpreted this study, feel free to read it and tell me where i am wrong. --Tibatto (talk) 02:53, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

https://cultureelerfgoed.nl/sites/default/files/publications/lauwerier_2014_ram_222_merovingers_in_een_villa_2.pdf::I

I don't know what you think you are reading, but haplogroup J2 is mentioned exactly 8 times in the entire document (at least that turn up on a text search - seriously? citing a 240+ page document is the best you can do? they put those different numbers at the tops of all of the pages for a reason). Six of them appear in a single string of text on pp. 106-107 (translated):

"In addition, for all (possible) male individuals, in our previous study we tried to type the Y-haplogroup. This was only possible for individuals 15 and 20, to whom haplogroup J2 could be assigned. Our method could not further delineate within J2. For individual 15, previous research based on the Y-STR profile predicted haplogroup J2a1. This can now be refined to J2a1b (99% probability). For individual 20, based on the Y-STR profile, haplogroup J2b is predicted (100% probability). In both cases we confirm that the predicted haplogroups are the [previously] typed haplogroups. Y-haplogroup J2 represents 2.7% of Dutch men and is now relatively rare in the Netherlands. For the other male individuals too few characteristics are typed to reliably determine the haplogroup."

The only other two times haplogroup J2 is mentioned is in the table presenting the STR data on p. 107, where all it does it list the recovered STR counts for each locus and at the bottom name the haplogroup those numbers would represent. Later, on p. 109, it briefly mentions that the haplogroup of #15 is rare, representing 0.27% of the global population, and 0.14% of Dutch men, and that the isotope levels they read suggest individual #15 is not of local origin, and that having haplogroup J suggests the family line may have originated outside of Europe.

Nowhere does it say anything about J2 representing the haplogroup of the Franks, let alone that the Franks were exclusively of this haplogroup (European populations haven't been exclusively one haplogroup since before the last ice age). This is not a valid source for the text you added, as it says nothing of the sort. This is evidence that two Frankish men had different J2 haplotypes. It doesn't even say there were three typed samples as you represent in your edit. Any deduction about Franks as a whole from these two men is entirely your own (or perhaps that of some blog where you read it?) and completely without foundation. Any statement about Anatolia is your own original research. Any statement about it being interesting is your own opinion. None of it has any business being in the article. Agricolae (talk) 04:41, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

Having just read the source, I'm firmly with Agricolae, here. The addition of these haplogroups and especially the 'Anatolian connection' have no place in this article. Besides, you cannot draw general conclusions on a group based on a sample size of two. Kleuske (talk) 12:43, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

Looks at Table S6.34, individual 18 is positive for several STR markers belonging to J2a1b. --Tibatto (talk) 15:54, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

I am going to have to answer from memory, because the pdf link is now reporting an error, but this is not how it works. Many haplotypes are surprisingly similar across the majority of their loci, so you can't look at a bunch of data and conclude 'a lot of its loci match type XX, so I am going to decide it is type XX' unless you have recovered sufficient data from the locus or loci that specifically distinguish the types from each other. The authors, the experts who actually carried out this study, conclude that they recovered insufficient data to enable them to identify the haplotype of individual 18, so we don't get to draw our own conclusions. Agricolae (talk) 16:12, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

I agree with Agricolae, and I've seen dozens of discussions like this on WP over many years and I his position is the agreed position on Wikipedia. You have to remember that Wikipedia sets its goals low, so that they can be achieved by amateur editors: we just summarize things which are already published. We do not try to go beyond them (except maybe in the sense of better presentation!)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:15, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

The latest iteration has no mention of J2 being indicative of Franks - it doesn't even mention Franks, but we do have a detailed discussion that one skeleton was not identified by the authors of a study but somebody on a dead blog thought they could identify it? Why is any of this important enough to include in an article about the Franks, and not WP:UNDUE? Agricolae (talk) 16:44, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

I don't agree with what Tibatto has said, but I think the study should be on the page-- perhaps not in its own section, but in a subsection. Arguments that it is likely false seem to be OR on the part of editors to me, although they are probably in good faith. By the way the finds are far from implausible imo -- although J2 is not common in Western Europe it does have a significant present (2-5%) and this would be consistent with past finds that elites often have unrepresentatively high frequencies of rare haplogroups (often due to bottlenecks) -- one Pharaoh dynasty had R1b (which is typically at low frequency for Egyptians), T is quite rare overall but shows up in a lot of royals, etc. Of course these bottlenecks happen with plenty of things -- hence the redheaded Turkish sultans in a country where redheads are a quite small minority of the native population. The source for the genetics seems WP:RS to me: [[3]]. Although Tibatto used some dubious arguments and edit warred, you can't judge the material by his actions. This is relevant material that belongs on the page -- I will restore it, mentioning the specific context so that it is clear the page is not saying that all Franks were J2. --Calthinus (talk) 20:24, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Does the study really not even mention Franks Calthinus? If that is so then any kind of mention on this article (which is about Franks, and not DNA studies) is really implying a conclusion which does not come from the source?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 20:30, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Andrew Lancaster I could be wrong but this does look RS to me ([[4]], quoting this paper which does not load for me but its from a university [[5]]), and says this in the quote : The people found was buried at a Merovingian buriel site in Borgharen in the Dutch province of Limburg,... they were wealthy and buried with locals... [artifacts are] consistent with the Roman-Frankish transitional period. Late Roman to early Middle Ages. Individual N15 J2a1b-M67 99%. Individual N20 J2b-M102 100% (probably M241). As I said I could be wrong but this looks sufficient to me, and I will be looking for more on this later perhaps.--Calthinus (talk) 21:02, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Don't forget that no source is RS for something it does not actually say :) --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:26, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

It only mentions Franks early in the document, not where it is talking about the DNA. It makes no attempt to discuss the DNA results in the context of the Franks as a whole nor speculate what it means in terms of the larger tribe. The study concludes simply that these skeletons have these types (and based on isotope ratios, that one was not from where he was buried). They are appropriately mute on the 'big picture' that is being promoted here. Agricolae (talk) 20:45, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

I also see nothing like the claims that our article has been making lately.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:27, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

What is relevant for discussion now is whether what is [in this diff] is backed. I have clearly distanced myself and my edit from Tibatto's claims.--Calthinus (talk) 21:41, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

It isn't backed by a WP:RS, just some blogger's off-the-cuff remarks. Likewise, though, this isn't the only thing that is relevant - it could be fully supported amnd still be the case that the haplotypes of two specific members (with no reason to believe they are representative) may still be too trivial to merit mention in an article about an entire group of people. At the risk of an over-the-top analogy, in an article on Americans, we wouldn't give the DNA haplotypes of individual Americans, nor any other characteristics of individual members, unless we have a source that draws that exact conclusion. Such conclusions, about relative importance, is a decision that Wikipedia leaves to experts in the field in question, and then we emulate them. We have one, and only one, reliable source here, and all it says is that the person in burial 15 has one type, and 20 has a different one, and that is not about The Franks at all, just about two people in a Merovingian cemetery. Agricolae (talk) 22:02, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Who is saying the results are likely false? Nobody here has said that. (I have said that Tibatto's misrepresentation of the results is false, and I stand by that.) What I am saying is that the inclusion of the haplotypes of a couple of random Franks is WP:UNDUE because no source, not the authors and not any secondary source any one has come up with, think this is meaningful information indicative of the Franks as a whole, and that is what this page is about. Maybe it is WP:TOOSOON, that over time this detail will work its way into scholarly accounts of the Franks, but that is currently not the case. All of this speculation about the meaning of this result for the larger population, bottlenecks, Egyptians, etc., is impossible to support as relates to the Franks based on a paper that simply reports that two skeletons have this type - it is WP:SYNTH and WP:UNDUE. Please do not put this trivia back in until there is consensus for its inclusion. Agricolae (talk) 20:45, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

If I'm not wrong, I saw you saying it was unlikely to truly be the case either on 3RR or Tibatto's TP-- but this very interesting result piqued my interest. The way I wrote the text reflects what Rottensteiner discussed-- the jury is still out on why this more typically Near Eastern haplogroup was found in the remains with a wide range of viable theories. I wrote it specifically that way to avoid the reader think it implies one thing or another. I believe it is helpful to have this sort of interesting (and exciting) find on the page -- as you can see from the discourse in Rottensteiner it is generating discussion in the field, which is interesting and relevant. --Calthinus (talk) 20:57, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

By the way you say "no source" -- this is not the case: [[6]]: "Individual N15 J2a1b-M67 99%. Individual N20 J2b-M102 100% (probably M241)." --Calthinus (talk) 20:59, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

What I said on Tibatto's Talk page is that it is extremely unlikely to be the case that the Franks were EXCLUSIVELY J2 (that not a single member of their population had a Y chromosome that was not J2), because it is unlikely any population of the era was exclusively any haplogroup. That the result piqued your interest is insufficient for it to be noteworthy. Has it piqued the interest of any historian writing about the Franks? You say you wrote it so it didn't relate to the Franks as a whole, but if it doesn't relate to the Franks as a whole, why is it to be featured like this in an article about the Franks as a whole? Further, blog posts don't establish anything - they are not WP:RS, they don't count. A blog post only shows that the one person who wrote it is interested (or, given that the entire blog is dead, was interested as some point in the past). If the only place you find speculation about the meaning of a scientific result is on a blog then nothing whatsoever should be said about the meaning of the result on Wikipedia. In this case, the author is someone who was interested in J2, not someone interested in the Franks, so no, this post from a dead blog by someone interested in a different topic entirely does precisely zero to show that scholars who study the Franks think this is noteworthy. Agricolae (talk) 21:21, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

The blog actually quoted such speculation in the original. But there are some good points here. --Calthinus (talk) 22:41, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

No, it really doesn't. It quotes speculation that the cemetery location may be meaningful, that one horse arrived by trade or migration, that they took into account the preexisting burials (but not why or to what extent), and that #15 came from Dutch sand-lands, and his family line may have originated outside of western Europe. Anything about origin beyond this, such as that they may represent "Sarmatians or Thracians in Roman military service, Jews, Levantines or Avar invaders" is not derived in any way from speculation in the original. Most importantly, that these individuals represent prototypical Franks (and hence are relevant at all) is not something the original study speculated about. Agricolae (talk) 23:04, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

I am not doubting your good faith, I hope you didn't think I did. Let us discuss these sources as they come in. Posting the study I found below momentarily. --Calthinus (talk) 21:23, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Let me just expand on that last point of mine. There are two issues here - is the content reliable (policy WP:RS), and is the content noteworthy (WP:UNDUE)? If we, for the sake of argument, set aside the fact that this blog is not a reliable source, that would address only the first question. That someone compiling information on J2 thinks this study is noteworthy might (again, in this alternative reality where blog posts are considered reliable) make it noteworthy for a Wikipedia article on J2, but it would still not make it noteworthy for a discussion about the Franks. You would need to have a source written from the perspective of the Franks that mentions this to make it noteworthy here (and even then, it depends on the relative coverage given - if someone writes a 500 page book and only mentions the DNA result in a single sentence, it may be giving undue weight to mention it at all, given how much shorter our entire page is than that 500 page book). Agricolae (talk) 22:50, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

But this does not say J2 is the dominant haplotype for all Franks. (Honestly, from a sample of two men from one grave site that would be an insane conclusion to draw. They could be brothers, and they might be men with a Gallo-Roman male-line ancestry. Just for example.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:25, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Andrew Lancaster As I've said I agree the claim that J2 was some "Frankish" haplotype is incredibly unlikely, and [my edit] modified the material to make it clear that there is a debate (as seen in Rottensteiner) about whether the haplogroup was local or something else, and we don't know what to make of it yet. Also, they could not have been brothers (wiht the same father at least) as they had different haplogroups, J2a-M67 and J2b.--Calthinus (talk) 21:28, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

But like Agricolae says, we have 2 men from the Merovingian period. Are they Franks? (What is a Frank in this period, genetically speaking? The Merovingians origins were driven by a dynamic frontier situation with Romanized Germanic soldiers and the locals obviously ending up in some sort of new group.) The authors do not say so, but if we put it in this article which is not about DNA we seem to be implying it.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:20, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Well the view that one can define what a Frank is "genetically speaking" given the noted historical inter-group dynamics could be provocative. Anyhow, I can see now why it might not be the best idea to have archaeogenetic trivia on this page--- perhaps better on the page about the clades themselves. You two are right, it could be misinterpreted as generalizing to the group as a whole. --Calthinus (talk) 22:41, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Agricolae my apologies for all of this. This entire conversation would not have happened had I not mistook the commentary of the translator (Robert, thought it was a surname) for the commentary of the researchers whose work was translated. As I have already said in a previous post-- I'm sorry, you were right it does not belong on the page.--Calthinus (talk) 01:17, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

No problem - these things happen. Agricolae (talk) 01:24, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

Dutch study found

Here: [[7]]. Full disclosure I don't speak Dutch and I"m not comfortable relying on Google Translate for apparently(?) contentious issues, so anyone who does speak Dutch is greatly appreciated. Other relevant source discussing this material here [[8]], which has translated excerpts. --Calthinus (talk) 21:07, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

This academia.edu deposit is the same exact publication we have been discussing the whole time. Agricolae (talk) 21:37, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Agricolae The translated excerpts from Rottensteiner [[9]] don't appear?--Calthinus (talk) 21:42, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

The ones at the bottom? Yeah, that looks reasonable enough, but where does that list of scientific findings get you, with no more elaborate interpretation provided than that #15 wasn't local and may be from a male line that originated outside of Europe? It says nothing about The Franks, which is what we are talking about here. Agricolae (talk) 22:11, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Religion

The Franks were converted to Christianity before the Romans. When the Franks invaded Rome it was to convert them away from Trinitarianism to Arianism. It a fallacy to think that the Franks were pagans since they were Christianized in the first century, well before the Romans. The Reason why the Franks separated from the Roman Empire was over Catholicism. They were not barbarians as portrayed by popular history. Legends state that they were Christianized well before the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans. It is Catholic myth that they were not converted until the fifth century. The Franks were dead against any idea of a Trinity for God. God and Jesus were separated beings.

• What rubbish. No nation was Christianized in the 1st century, still less one which lay well outside the Roman Empire. What possible evidence is there for these "legends"? What legends?GPinkerton (talk) 23:30, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

No complete rubbish in this case, because unfortunaltely, both of you mixed up time lines and centuries. Representatives of Arianism were quite active in mission activities in the era of collapsing Roman Empire: As far as Central Europe, especially today's France and Germany is concerned, there had been remarkable mission anctivities. In fact, large regions had been pre-catholic Christian at the beginning of early medieval epoche. Regarding the Franks: If you take a look at the map and check where Weser-Rhine Franks (by some seen as "Proto-Franks") dwelled, these people must have been under Roman cultural and religious, hence partially Christian, influence. Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weser-Rhine_Germanic . Chances are that at least somes of the leading Franks had already been Christians, however not Catholics, at this point. Of course, Gregor of Tours and others would not admit this latter on, as Arianism had been "anathema" and not supposed to be mentioned in documents written by any Catholic clergymen. 188.99.27.209 (talk) 09:57, 5 October 2021 (UTC)