Gioland71

Hello,

if you wish to make a posting, fell free to do so, but always within the boundaries of courtesy and respect. If you have issues with some of my corrections on the ballet pages, please note:

1) I took Vaganova ballet classes with a Russian teacher. This does not make me an expert, but as I own Ms. Vaganova's book on ballet technique, I use it to help me with the corrections;

2) I am taking classes with a teacher who is a certified Cecchetti teacher. Again, this does not make me an expert, but I am lucky enough to own Beaumont's book on Mr. Cecchetti's ballet technique;

3) I can read, write and speak French. This helps with the vocabulary, n'est-ce pas?

--Gioland71 19:14, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Hmmm...

Looking at your edit summary, you're right. Seems I got a little confused as far as howto's went...sorry! Two One Six Five Five ^τ _ʃ 17:22, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

I know my writing style is a little pedantic sometimes; it's a heritage of my baroque first language writing skills. Feel free to change the wording, if you like... Gioland71 (talk) 13:09, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

Ondine

May I alert you to a discussion on merging Ondine (Sir Frederick Ashton ballet) into Ondine (Henze)! — Robert Greer (talk) 18:40, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Ashton / Henze / Ondine / Undine

I regret to inform you that the party who wanted to merge Ondine (Ashton) into Undine (Henze) has been unable to accept Wiki. administrator DGG's determination that the two articles should remain seperate. Your comments on Talk:Ondine (Ashton) would be welcome! — Robert Greer (talk) 16:45, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Ballerina

I've been busy with New York City Ballet's spring season, my summer vacation (Sweden) and now their coming winter season and not gotten back to Ballerina since your apt remarks in April — and am taking the liberty of transferring this (slightly shortened) conversation to your talk page on the grounds that (1) we are in perfect agreement and (2) the rest of the English speaking world is wrong (skip down to continued from above.)

Plural

Does interest anybody that the correct Italian plural for prima ballerina is: prime ballerine And for prima ballerina assoluta is: prime ballerine assolute Just to be fair to the original language ... Gioland71 (talk) 21:06, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

loan words

I mostly work in the Scandinavian languages; and Swedish, at least, handles loan words well; English does not. "Ballerina" has been made a naturalized citizen, plural "ballerinas;" and, for lack of plural adjectives in English, "prima ballerina" becomes "prima ballerinas", which isn't so bad. While "prima ballerina assolutas" is wrong on all counts, neither you nor I are going to get the rest of the English speaking world to change their wicked ways. While fifty million Frenchman can be wrong — and on the Internet often are — Google remains an effective way of determining usage. Prima ballerina assolutas has 21 "hits" vs. 9 for prime ballerine assolute and prima ballerinas 19,900 to 1,690 for prime ballerine; if one restricts the searches to English the figures become more extreme; 12:1 and 18,400:40. Pity the poor male ballet dancer, with foreign sounding danseur or ballerino to describe what he is! Robert Greer (talk) 23:52, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Italian

This is why I haven't changed the entry. It would be silly to try to teach Italian to hordes of English people, but it still pains my ears to hear "pizzas" "calzonis", "gelatos", "ballerinas", "lattes" etc.. It would be fair though to point this out in the article, so that the English speakers are aware that this is not a perfect loan - and won't use it while visiting Florence. In Italian we use "footing" as translation for "jogging", but this must be pointed out in the corresponding entry so that Italians do not sound like idiots if they tell their friends in the UK 'they're going "footing"'. Gioland71 (talk) 16:51, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Some possible corrections...

"Ballet master" usually refers to a teacher in the more advanced classes/professional level - more or less the male equivalent of "ballet mistress". In English I heard "dancer" or "danseur" for a male dancer. As for the rankings, I have no clue whether there are official rankings in the main companies - in Italy (teatro alla Scala) they have primo ballerino for the main male performer and étoile for both male and female primi ballerini assoluti. Gioland71 (talk) 16:59, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

continued from above

It would be silly to try to teach English to hordes of English people, let alone Italian! Most English speaking balletomanes distinguish between dancer (any genre, either gender) and danseur (male, ballet) and manage to pronounce the latter more or less correctly. Most if not all American ballet companies have but three ranks; principal dancer, soloist and corps de ballet; the Royal Ballet and Paris Opera Ballet of course make finer distinctions. The Royal Danish Ballet adds character dancers to the three titles used in America, and the Royal Swedish Ballet has hovdansare (singular and plural; things get more complicated in the determinate), literally court dancers. The latter is a recent accretion, a total of seven having been created since 1990, and the title is dealt out by the court, so it has been bestowed upon at least one danseuse who is not with the Royal Swedish; to wit, Anna Laguna, Mats Ek's wife and prima ballerina with the Cullberg Ballet, of which he was balletmaster and his mother Birgit founder. And balletmaster can refer to any of a number of things. — Robert Greer 17:40, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

prime

I wish you were right, Giovanna, but am mortally certain that 99 Americans out of 100 (and 98% of the ballet audience) will prounounce the first half of prime ballerine as they pronounce prime steak or prime time and then prounounce the second half the same as ballerina or come up with something worse: ballerine as rhymes beanie.

The root of the problem is not just that prime is a common word in English; it's that a final e is almost always silent. Please trust me on this; I'm a card carrying stage director and translator, albeit of Scandinavian languages, and have to deal with similar problems in my own and others' translations.

Americans aren't stupid, but they don't travel abroad and don't learn foreign languages. Geography is a contributory factor to this; I haven't been to all 48 states (nor to all the countries of the E.U. for that matter) but an American family can vacation for decades in the continental U.S. and not repeat a state (especially given the current exchange rates for the dollar, the Euro and the pound). — Robert Greer (talk) 19:23, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

locution of three words

You spoke of prima ballerina assoluta as being "a locution made up of three loan words." In a perverse way this is how English speakers treat the plural; they consider the three words to constitute one, a noun (the trailing adjective being wholly alien to English) and then, naturally from their point of view, tack on an -s making it prima ballerina assolutas. The suggestion of prima ballerinas assoluta has much to recommend it — it inflects the noun but not the adjectives, which English most emphatically does not — but is only attested once via Google outside our discussions, albeit by none other than Mindy Aloff (Barnard College dance department) in her Dance Anecdotes: Stories from the Worlds of Ballet, Broadway, the Ballroom, and Modern Dance. — Robert Greer (talk) 00:09, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

I quit over these guidelines

Given what I have read so far, we should give our readers no credit. Hence, the most likely English spelling would be "prima ballerina assolutas" because it is obvious that the noun must be the last one, just like in "first principal dancers". What really bothers me is the idiotic wikipedia guidelines: while documenting myself, I realised that they favour the "mock-up" pronunciation over the IPA (for English), the use of the English spelling over the native ones, so that English people can rightly teach Sweden how to spell Bjorn Borg, and recommend people to use the Anglicized pronunciation of foreign words, even if they are not yet absorbed into English!!! And the level of knowledge of the people who made these recommendations is frankly abysmal; some of them don't even know that the "standard" pronunciation of some terms changes whether they are nouns or verbs! Or that it is not really Kosher to make a verb out of any word! Gioland71 (talk) 15:22, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

I think the open wikipedia model is a failure. It does not work because there is no way to discriminate editors who are competent in their fields from those who are just moderately informed (e.g. 15 years old who have never read a book in their life). Just check the Glossary of ballet page at tendure. Some goes for the policy-makers. Who is ensuring they are competent? Is there anywhere a QA of them??? So many work-hours are spent by good-willing editors for documentation (who sometimes are accused of doing "original research") and fixing edits by people with good intentions but no knowledge whatsoever. I have better ways to use my time. I quit. Gioland71 (talk) 15:22, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Ondine

Important! - Round up what few ballet enthusiasts you know on Wikipedia and get them to vote on the proposed merging of the Ondine articles that would see the article about Frederick Ashton's production of the actual ballet, being merged into one about the music.

See here: - Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Classical_music#Straw_Poll

And please vote to oppose this change, as this music would not have been written had it not been for Ashton's ballet!!!

Thank You

Crazy-dancing (talk) 20:16, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Polite Notice - Possible solution to Ondine merging

I am creating this notice to invite all interested parties to vote on the proposal to merge Undine (ballet) and Ondine (Ashton) to a new article at Ondine (ballet). You can read the discussion and add your vote to the poll at:

• Discussion
• Poll

Look forward to seeing you there to help resolve this situation, thanks! Crazy-dancing (talk) 11:28, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Flore et Zéphire

Hello, Gioland71. You have new messages at Robertgreer's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Rasta Thomas

Rasta Thomas will turn 30 years old on July 18, 2011, and I would LOVE for him to be the featured article of the day on that day. I'm calling foryou your help to join in on taking this article to greatness, and giving Rasta a little love.--Esprit15d • talk • contribs 20:47, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
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