Tatoeba: Collection of sentences and translations

It might be good to review Tatoeba:

It has Walloon entries and could be used to find more Walloon natives and potentially reach out to them for info/resources

This person is apparently native Walloon? https://tatoeba.org/en/user/profile/yanagi

But sadly there are no recorded samples presently. I think this would be another good thing for a Walloon speaker to submit recordings too. I pointed out Omniglot previously.

Outside of Tatoeba, Lucyin Mahin maintains a Wallon version of Wikipedia and has contribued heavily to wikimedia.

José Schoovaerts is another person from Belgium, who is heavily interested in documenting the language.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a phonetic notation that is really what we need to get a number Walloon words documented in. For the few words I have heard, I usually recognize them in the non-standard phonetic written formats that various people have tried to write the lanugage in. The problem is everyone who has tried to write it has each done so a little differently. And then there are words written by various people that I have likely never heard and so I cannot really determine how one would say what they wrote.

The IPA is just as confusing and sadly really only benefits lingusitic people in my opinion. The realistic way we learn how words sound is from hearing them. So for the average person, that is what needs to be developed, a sampling of recorded words with their English and French spellings.

The is another somewhat interesting Facebook group called "Walloon lexicon." The about info says "Because I love the Walloon language, I share with you the history of its vocabulary."

Here is a recent post:

Walloon word of the day : cabasson \kabasɔ̃\
Dialectal form : (?)
Origin :
From Spanish "cabezón" (big-headed, stubborn), cabeza (head) + the suffix -ón.
From Old Spanish cabeça, from Vulgar Latin capitia, from a feminine singular of Latin capitium, diminutive of caput (head).
From Proto-Italic * kaput (head), from Proto-Indo-European * káput- (head), from * kap- (sixteen, hold), possibly of substrate origin.
-ón probably from the ending of Latin words belonging to the Third Declension (-ō, -ōnem), from Proto-Indo-European * -h₃onh₂- (?).
Meaning :
Cabesson = headrest, caveçon.

Interesting posts, but how would the words sound if spoken? Well the only real clue is that mysterious IPA representation: \kabasɔ̃\

Fortunatly there is a tool for reading International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) notation aloud at: http://ipa-reader.xyz/

This is also good. If you use French to English, you will get the IPA for the French word, plus a sound clip of the pronunciation
http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/french-english/

French to IPA dictionary:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/open-dict-data/ipa-dict/master/data/fr_FR.txt

Making Grain Bundles - David Chaudoir & Francis Jauquet

Walloon virtual assistant ?

When my aunt and uncle were telling of their trip to Belgium and bringing a group of visiting Belgians around in the 1990's, I was in high school, I seriously considered taking a French class. Back then, area immigration was at a standstill (unlike the last ~20 years), as the last group were the Hmong. I had other interests in tech-ed, so I never persued that idea. And today I could just kick myself. At the time I figured I'd never use it and likely forget what I would have learned. I was also aware there were differences between Walloon and French and figured learning French might lead to some counter productive mixed ideas that "this must be like this etc".

I never envisioned that actual genealogical records would one day be available in their native French form on the internet. The internet wasn't quite a thing back then. So that is where I kick myself today.

There is still a lot of truth to the if you don't use it, you loose it logic. So enter in virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa. Could this be a way to keep fluent when you don't have anyone to talk to in French or Walloon?

Back in 2012 a bit before these things became more common placed, I did experiment with ASR (auto matic speech recognition), or what some people may refer to as voice recognition. I'm a bit more of a hacker and a coder than a gadget obsessed techno-weirdo, so at the moment I haven't picked up any of these virtual assistants.

But if you could ask Alexa in French what the weather is, I could see some value to this technology.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/2/22088394/amazon-alexa-multilingual-support-italian-german-french-shopping-fire-tv

https://www.engadget.com/2018-06-06-alexa-finally-comes-to-france.html

Netradyle

For earlier Belgian family members, the place to start is the Netradyle website, and the best page to jump into Netradyle is at https://www.netradyle.be/actes/. You will probably want to immediately translate the page to English. (Alternative site is: http://www.wallonia-asbl.be/actes/)

Netradyle is the work of the Perwez Genealogical Circle (club). It is social group of locals who gather to discuss and work on genealogy matters. Part of their efforts has been to index birth/baptisms, marriages, and deaths plus some miscellaneous items from communities in northern Wallonia, and they present this information in the “actes”= records, section of their website at the above website.

You can search through the “actes” in a variety of ways. The most straightforward is via the “direct search” box in the upper left of the actes page. For example, if you put in the name Lempereur, select baptisms/births, and click “Checker” = Search you will get a list of 320 birth/baptism records (birth if after 1796; baptism if before 1796). If you scroll down to #156 and click, you will get this:

Alternatively to this direct search procedure, you can use an advanced search, or you can use the long table of village names on the right side of the “actes” page, and search by type of acte and name in just the village of interest.

Once one has the information from the Netradyle records, it is fairly straightforward to find the actual document that is indexed. For example, to see the actual Marriage Registration above, one goes to FamilySearch and locates the records from Thorembais-les-Béguines, specifically the marriage records that include the year 1839. These are arranged by date, so ones simply browses to the date 10 July in the 1839 records, and wallah!

For Thorembais-les-Béguines, go to the familysearch find a collection under records, and in the search box type "Belgium". You'll see all the collections for the country. "Belgium, Brabant, Civil Registration, 1582-1914," is the collection we want since Thorembais-les-Béguines is part of the Walloon Brabant Province.

Belgian Roadside Chapels

When covid started last year, Fr. Edward Looney the pastor at St. Francis & St Mary's of Brussels started doing a virtual tour of the various Belgian Chapels.

The wayside votive chapels of Northeast Wisconsin are a religious tradition brought from the old world. In the 1850s, Belgian immigrants began settling in northeast Brown, northwest Kewaunee, and southern Door counties, bringing their cherished culture and customs. Primarily devout Roman Catholics, they made their homes in a wilderness where crude roads and few churches made it difficult to assemble and practice their faith. To compensate, some settlers continued the Belgian tradition of building a family chapel, often to give thanks for prayers or to honor the Blessed Virgin Mary or a special saint.

The Belgian Wayside Chapels are evidence of the historic faith of the Belgian settlers, and of the determination of their modern descendants to preserve the Belgian culture and way of life. Today, more than a dozen of these chapels are lovingly maintained, often by descendants of the families who built them.

Fr Looney started a Facebook page for his virtual tour and visits. https://www.facebook.com/BelgianRoadsideChapels

That prompted me to try and create an online map for the chapels. You'll find paper brochures in most of the chapels that were produced by the Belgian Heritage Center a while back. However since they encompass three counties the map lacks resolution. For anyone who isn't adventurous when it comes to rural roads that map mighth be problematic.

http://belgianchapels.org/

Fr. Looney has now created a gofund me page to "create aprofessional documentary and submit it to major Catholic and secular media outlets like EWTN, Catholic TV, Shalom World, Wisconsin Public Television, PBS Wisconsin, and others."

https://www.gofundme.com/f/faith-along-the-road-documentary

I am surprised how often they get visited. Most have a guest book in them. I haven't seen one that didn't have an entry more than a week old. And while a number of the visitors have Belgian last names, there are plenty of Illinois tourists checking them out... then the more odd entries like folks from Czechoslovakia, Hawaii etc.

Some early history

Every now and then I like to look at what recent books have been added to the Internet Archive collection that you can borrow/check out.

The following is from "The growth of the Belgian Nation" by: Jan Albert Goris published in 1946:

Belgium has also at all times evinced a spirit of expansion. Although the Belgians have occasionally been reproached for being stay-at-home folks, history seems to contradict this accusation. A few years after Caesar conquered Belgium, Walloon soldiers were fighting in the ranks of the Roman legions. Later they took part in ail the big European battles, during the wars of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Considerable numbers of Flemings and Walloons followed William the Conqueror to England, and later the weavers of Flanders settled in Great Britain by thousands. There were Belgian migrations to Pomerania, Silesia, Hungary. And at the time of the great voyages of exploration and discovery, natives of Ghent peopled the "Flemish Isles" which later were called the Azores.

This helps explain why you'll find some people with the same surnames in England as you do in Belgium.

And as early as the 9th century, miners and iron workers came to Sweden from southern and eastern Belgium, along with neighboring areas in France. Most of the Walloons were iron workers coming from the Liege and Namur regions, along the Meuse River.

Belgian Population Registers

Ron Flemal has spotted some Belgian Population Registers on FamilySearch that are helpful to settlers in the Door and Kewaunee County areas.

I am reposting it here like I do a number of things since things get lost on social media due to the walled garden effect and generally don't get indexed by the search engines, etc.

The population registers are as close as you get to the United States census records. Kristine Smets' wrote a very good overview of the Belgian population registers, explaining the background and what you can expect to learn from them.

Film#: 008895560 (DGS) https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/1395667?availability=Family%20History%20Library
There are a few neighborhoods on this continuous film, an area of interest; Emimes begins at image 831:

Emines, Namur Population Register 1846-1866: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QHV-Y3GZ-DD41?i=830&cat=1395698

Film#: 008895560 Neuvilles and Gilots, of Emines, Belgium (beginning at image 954): https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QHV-Y3GZ-DZY2?cat=1395698

Film#: 008897195 (DGS) Saint-Denis, Namur Population Register 1846-1900: https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/1409269?availability=Family%20History%20Library

Film#: 008897195 Delwiche of Saint-Denis, Belgium (beginning at image 92): https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QHV-13G6-6611

Film#: 008897195 Jeanquart of Saint-Denis, Belgium (beginning at image 119) https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QHV-B3G6-66N7?cat=1409267