Talk:Q6598

Interwiki conflict
Items involved: Q6598Talk, Q1051958Talk	Status:    resolved
Should be checked. Infovarius (talk) 18:39, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Label in English

Hi y'all,

@Verdy p: changed the label of this item from « cayenne pepper » (lowercase) to « Cayenne pepper » (uppercase), when I reverted he reverted me (and again). Let start a discussion (I started on his talk page but a broader page is better).

Here my main point: the vast majority of attestations in English use the form « cayenne pepper ». Attestations can be found in many different sources, Dictionaries (the Webster or the Cambridge, to name only two well-known English dictionaries) and books (Internet Archive), pretty much everywhere. This Google ngram seems pretty explicit.

That alone should be enough to put the lowercase but here some more arguments.

• The first revert by Verdy was with the comment « "Cayenne" is a proper name (a city in French Guyane) » but sources seems to indicate that's the opposite, the name of the city from the pepper (Webster, etymonline).
• The second revert was « nope: the true used English name is "chili", the form "Cayenne pepper" comes from French usage (from an area where it was cultivated and exported, that never spoke English) » the etymology is important (and should be sourced for the named after (P138) statement) but not really relevant here, the first sentence of Help:Label says « The label is the most common name that the item would be known by. » (and further « Labels begin with a lowercase letter except for when uppercase is normally required or expected. »).

@Sjoerddebruin, Romaine: you edited this label, what do you think?

Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 18:17, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

PS: it would be useful to have Lexemes to store the findings.

Hi VIGNERON, The Dutch Language Union (Q152299), the authority that defines how words should be written in Dutch, has published a list in what the language Dutch should be written. They have a page for cayennepeper and they write it with lowercase. This is of course different from how English words should be written. I leave this subject to English native speakers. Romaine (talk) 18:26, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks Romaine but here the question is about the label in English, not in Dutch . VIGNERON (talk) 18:29, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

"The references" never says it came from the name "cayenne" but from an amerindian language (not written "cayenne" or "Cayenne" at all!).

When English stated to use the orthography "Cayenne" it was in direct reference to the city name whose orthography was better known than the ameridian language with variable/unasserted orthography. Yes may be now it is used without the capital in some vernacular usages (but not everywhere: English is very inconsitant with usages of capitals). Even the references in biology (taxonomy synonyms) cite the name with a capital (note: there's no capital on "pepper").

The lowercase form is even more ambiguous as it related to various kinds of chilis (including the "red hot chili pepper"). Note that this term is actually not a specy but a "cultivar" (and cultivars in taxonomy usually take the conventional capital, and is written between quotation marks, after the capitalized order name and the lowercase specy name, sometimes with a "TM" indicator if it is protected by a trademark, for example cultivars of apples, roses, tulips, and standardized/normalized products found in commercial catalogs and official market authorizations, or cultivars that are protected by official origin labels). Verdy p (talk) 18:33, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

@Verdy p: yes, the references says the name comes for the Tupi language, so what? As I said, etymology doesn't matter much (plus, sources seem to disprove you point of view).

It may be a cultivar but it has a vernacular name, which is the most common name and not capitalized. And label can be ambiguous (see Help:Label#Labels can be ambiguous).

Please provide sources so this discussion can move forward.

Cdlt, VIGNERON (talk) 18:50, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

The Tupi language source is only supposed, not proven (the exact language is not determined).

The first attested word that came to English came as "cayenne" or "Cayenne", at a date where capitalization was no even used as of today, when the Latin script was not written with out modern forms (mostly handwritten, without capitals and under a very different style, or ALL CAPITALIZED in the rare printed documents or when carved in 3D). May be that word came from a transcription of local aural speech. But at that time the city of Cayenne was created and was then known because it was an harbour and ships were travelling between Europe, the Caribbean and Africa for the triangular commerce and development of slavery. The autochtone ameridians were initially welcome, some of their words were adopted but with approximations when writing them down, and merchants started selling the spices under convenient names in French, Spanish and English, borrowing the same name used for the small Guyanese harbor (or from anywhere else in Central America where these red chilis were also cultivated). These spices were new in Europe, but turned to be very popular throughout Central America and Caribbean; in Europe and North America, the locations were these spices were originted were naturally confused under a single name.

Anyway if you look at vernacular names in use in Engllish, you'll find a lot of variants, in US it is better known as "red chili" (but it is also confused with the South American country, so Cayenne was preferable).

And looking on the internet, I can find various mix of capitalization in English (including on the same page). Most resellers avoid the issue on their products by writing in full cpitalized or with leading capitals on each word (including "Pepper"). It's quite hard to find any rule in English. Now it's like "Paris mushrooms", or "Toulouse sausage", or "Cantonese rice": the English city names have won everywhere to fix the ortyhography (even if the products come from elsewhere). An known exception is "hamburger" (because it was confuged by the two separatable terms "ham" and "burger", forgetting its German origin). Verdy p (talk) 19:43, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

@Verdy p: ok but what is « the most common name »? Implied: today, for this item and with sources. I've given sources that use the lowercase variant, do you have more of equally good references with the uppercase variant? Cdlt, VIGNERON (talk) 20:02, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

It is definitely cayenne pepper and not Cayenne pepper in English usage, despite its origin in a proper name. Asaf Bartov (talk) 20:29, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Summoned by Wikimedia Telegram group. In running prose it's "cayenne pepper", see e.g. BBC Food for reference. Deryck Chan (talk) 11:01, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

French interlanguagelink

Hi everybody. I am not sure about this linkage by Ellicrum. The current wikidata item is about the cayenne pepper according to English language (type of Capsicum annuum). The French page “piment de Cayenne“ is a disambiguation page, given that this common expression can refer, in French, to various species of pepper (see Taxonomy). Thing are not very clear to me. Should we remove the link? If anyone could give a piece of advice, I would appreciate. Perhaps VIGNERON or Verdy p? Regards. --Ideawipik (talk) 12:50, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes, It think we should revert it. Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 12:57, 12 January 2020 (UTC)