Talk:County of Namur

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the current article[edit]

Some notes on the state of this article.

Prehistory and Roman period: Mention of the gau and later county obviously does not belong into that section. Gau is a germanic word and the organisation of the county also dates into the frankish rule rather than Rome (or prehistory).

The Merovingian period: Only the first sentence of that section concerns the merovingian period. The most logical solution would be to rename the section (medieval period?). Some of the content of that section is also oversimplified, possibly outright wrong, I will try to work on that if I get the time.

I can't say much about the rest of the article, but one thing of note is that no sources are provided for any of the material.--Caranorn (talk) 16:50, 16 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I translated it from the dutch wikipedia. Omegastar (talk) 17:37, 16 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Languages[edit]

Light blue: Bilingual areas in the 8th century

It seems unlikely that Dutch or its predecessors or variants were ever a major language in the county of Namur, much less the most important. Upon looking at [1], I can't find a single one that asserts or implies that Dutch was ever one of the main languages of the County of Namur, and even the image at right, which has the largest Dutch-speaking claim of any of them, doesn't even come close to Namur. I think, therefore, that the language in the infobox should stay as some combination of French and Walloon until somebody actually provides a proper source one way or the other. Oreo Priest ^talk 10:37, 11 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I dont know much about this myself, but i would like to add that in the Netherlands, most Walloon place-names and even some northern french place-names have Dutch non-identical names (for example, the French city of Lille has the Dutch name "Rijsel"). These are remnants of the influence of the Dutch language that used to stretch out much further then it is now. Namur is called Namen in Dutch. The best known example of this is Dunkirk - which is a French city now, but the name is a corruption of the Dutch word "Duinkerken" (which means Dune-church). Again, i dont know wether they actually spoke Dutch in the past in Namur, but the Dutch language did reach pretty far into belgium in the past. Omegastar (talk) 17:10, 11 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It did indeed reach much farther than it did today, but moreso to the west rather than to the south. I had long assumed that the 'Old Dutch' in the infobox was correct, but after searching for about half an hour, I came up with exactly zero evidence that Dutch use stretched as far south as Namur. I also didn't come up with any positive statements of the County of Namur tending towards one language or the other, but I think in the absence of evidence that it was Dutch, French/Walloon makes much more sense, for reasons that I think are self-evident. Better than my rationale, however, would be an actual reliable source with a proper statement about it. Oreo Priest ^talk 09:45, 12 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]