Talk:Mont Ventoux

message: I have heard elsewhere that Ventoux is "not part of the Alps", and I didn't believe it then, mostly because I've seen maps, showing convincingly that Ventoux is part of the Alps. It may be considered a peripheral part, but a real part nonetheless. I don't know who started the myth that it was separate from the Alps, but can we please abandon it here? --Stemonitis 15:09, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The fact is that the Mont Ventoux is very much a stand-alone mountain, surrounded by plains. It is not part of the Alps per se, but may be considered as being located at the external limit of what is sometimes called "Pre-Alps". Maybe the following description from  could be translated and inserted into the WIkipedia article" "Le Mont Ventoux est l'un des derniers contreforts sud-occidentaux des préalpes françaises". olivier 11:26, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Part of the Alps? 

message: The following assortment of googled direct quotations on Petrarch and Mont Ventoux are from  the  deprecated article, Birthday of alpinism. They should not be included as quotes (that's what Wikisource is for) but some of them may be useful citations for this article, or a future one on Petrarch's letter. 
This is a pure dump; I would not have put Famous First Facts between Burckhardt and Mattingly. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:37, 30 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Petrarch

message: In a letter dated April 26 of the year 1336 by the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch to Francesco Dionigi of Borgo San Sepolcro, a close friend of Petrarch's who was an Augustinian monk, he gives his account of the ascent. Petrarch was about 30 years of age when he did the ascent.Timeline of Petrarch's life. This letter reads in part:"Today, I ascended the highest mountain in this region, which, not without cause, they call the Windy Peak. Nothing but the desire to see its conspicuous height was the reason for this undertaking."The Ascent of Mount Ventoux, a letter to Dionisio da Borgo San Sepolcro - Familiar Letters
*Mentioned here; will belong in article on letter. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:58, 30 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Quotes

message: ===External Links===
* Fleeting Moments: Nature and Culture in American History By Gunther Paul Barth, a book describing Petrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux related to man-in-nature and religion.
* New York Times 1999 article by Michael Kimmelman in "environmental writing" talks about the significance of Petrarch's ascent in 1336.
* Article talking about Petrarch's ascent of Mount Ventoux as the potential intellectual precursor of Columbus crossing the Atlantic. 
* Article of Petrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux influencing mountaineering to this day and its metaphorical significance.
*Petrarch was the first self-consciously literate educated person to climb a mountain just for the vista.
*Article analyzing the letter dated April 26, 1336, and philosophical significance.
*Article describing backcountry skiing on Mount Greylock, in western Massachusetts, which holds forth Petrarch as a model for understanding the power of mountaintops: .
===Summary===
I see no reason why any of this randomly googled pother belongs in this article, or any other. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:32, 1 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Notes and References

message: I see no reason why any of this randomly googled pother belongs in this article, or any other. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:32, 1 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Summary

message: The holm oak is an evergreen not a deciduous tree.  The correct term in the context is hardwood and I will edit to correct.MidlandLinda (talk) 15:19, 25 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Holm Oak is not deciduous. 

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thread_title: File:Provence ventoux simpson1.JPG Nominated for Deletion

message: The ancient names given in the introduction are really questionable. While Vintur is still just plausible as Latin or Gaulish, Ven-Top looks nothing like either Gaulish nor Latin; -p at the end of a noun is extremely atypical for Latin if not impossible, and in Gaulish would only appear after the disappearance of a final vowel (perhaps in Late Gaulish) – but the spelling still looks really strange and un-ancient. Other language versions of Wikipedia (and Wiktionary) mention forms like Vinturi, but only French Wikipedia really explains the issue in any detail: the attested form in Latin, in the 2nd century AD, is VENTVRI or VINTVRI, which is apparently a dative presupposing a Latin nominative Vintur with two short vowels. However, the "Gaulish god of the summits" appears to be baseless speculation.
*Ven-topp, on the other hand, is merely a reconstructed form – on which basis remains unclear –, that, with its double -pp at the end of the word, looks even less than Latin or Gaulish, and, I'd say, is plain impossible according to the phonotactic rules of either language (certainly in the 2nd century AD or earlier). Rather, it looks like (West) Germanic from about the 4th century AD on, which is supported by the given meaning 'snowy peak' – see Wiktionary.
Or rather, like a compound of a word from an entirely unattested and speculative late form of Gaulish, (certainly significantly later than the 2nd century AD!) *ven, from Proto-Celtic *windos, with West Germanic *topp. Had such a compound been formed and attested in a Latinised form in the 2nd century AD, the expected form would be *Vindotoppus, compare Vindobona and Vindolanda.
This would be conceivable in principle, although there do not seem to have been any Germanic speakers anywhere near the region at the time (only significantly further to the north, on the lower Rhine and the upper Main). And of course, *Ventopp is incompatible with this. It's a purely speculative, arbitrary reconstruct (i. e., not even a plausible hypothetical reconstruction) that is plain incompatible with what we know of Gaulish, Latin and even Germanic in the 2nd century AD – let alone earlier.
At French Wikipedia, doubts about this reconstruction are also noted, especially its inability to explain the attested form Vinturi, whose stem ends in -r rather than -p(p), i. e., a completely different consonant (there's no plausible way /p/ could have changed into /r/). And finally, looking at the references in French Wikipedia, a certain Paul Peyre (apparently a serious Provençal linguist and etymologist) is cited and Encyclopédie Ventoux, which may be Le mont Ventoux. Encyclopédie d'une montagne provençale (2007), though the ultimate source given (in Peyre's work, apparently) is Bullet, 1784! It's not even clear what Peyre says about it – perhaps he merely mentions it in the context of a review on historical attempts to etymologise the name and makes the observation found in French Wikipedia itself: that it is a completely implausible, amateurish, scientifically untenable attempt to explain the name.
If Ven-topp is really an 18th-century concoction (which I strongly suspect: I've seen "Celtic" words on Wikipedia several times before in attempts to explain toponyms etymology, curious words that were no more Celtic than Elvish is, and at least in one case I was able to trace it back to a similarly old book still set in blackletter; keep in mind that Celtology has made incredible strides in the 20th century, while ancient Celtic languages were barely known before, and are still obscure to non-linguists and most amateur etymologists), we can safely dismiss it. While there were a few pioneering brave souls working on historical linguistics using methodically rigorous principles already in the 17th and 18th centuries, in the wake of the Scientific Revolution, their work appears to have been largely isolated and the comparative method did not become more mainstream before the 19th century.
I have seen outdated scholarship naively cited at face value in Wikipedia before, but rarely a case this extreme; I suspect it (or similar cases) comes from a work (perhaps an encyclopedia) that was uncritically used because it was in the public domain – and thus handy for the editor as it was easily available on the Internet: a cardinal mistake. It's as if, in biology, a Wikipedia article passed off an 18th-century taxonomic scheme, perhaps by Linné himself, as current, or presented the steam engine as an exciting new invention. Etymology as done by actual 21st-century scholars, however, like historical linguistics in general, is just as much a science as biology or physics is, and we've come a long way since Voltaire's (alleged/apocryphal) dismissive quip about etymology. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:31, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gaulish