Talk:paprika

Several notes - Noun - it can be plural or singlular "paprikas" and "paprika", as the word "paprika" refers to both the ground pepper and the whole pepper. In case of the whole pepper, it can be counted. Paprika ranges from mild sweet to pungent or hot. Paprika color also ranges from dark (#A00000) to (#DA0000). Libertate Libertate

I've corrected the plural. I don't know about the color value and try to stay away from that. --EncycloPetey 04:49, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

mild sweet cultivar of the pepper family Capsicum annuum

It's in clear widespread use; google books:"a paprika" gets 14,400 hits. Granted not all of them refer to this sense, but enough do. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:14, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm not so sure at all. If it were in widespread use, it would not be unrecorded in Oxford and Merriam-Webster and American Heritage. Please cite use in at least three sources according to Wiktionary:Criteria_for_inclusion#Attestation.

The Google Books results seem to almost all be of the kind "a paprika sauce" etc. and the rare vegetable senses i found seem to be used by clearly non-native speakers.

Even those results that seem to support your claim in the Google summary like "producing a paprika that is more standardized and more uniformly available than the European growers offer" reveal that this is used as shorthand for the spice. That quote, for example, is from "Peppers: The Domesticated Capsicums - Page 73", which specifically says: "paprika always refers to a ground product prepared of ... varieties of capsicums". Here's a university webpage which specifically says "In most languages, paprika denotes the dried spice only, though in some (e. g., German) it is commonly used for the vegetable bell pepper" and it lists all names used for the plant in English (and 62 other languages) and paprika is not among the English names!

See also these http://www.plantsystematics.org/ and http://www.itis.gov search results:

• Capsicum annuum = Pepper, Cayenne Pepper, Cayenne Pepper, Ornamental Pepper
• paprika = COMMON NAME: paprika NOT MATCHED! --Espoo (talk) 19:48, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

I wouldn't say having 14,400 hits means it sees "clearly widespread use" as that phrase is meant in the CFI. Nonetheless I think any RFV will pass it. If you doubt it (Espoo or anyone), RFV it — after checking for citations yourself.​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:59, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

(after edit conflict) @Espoo: Maybe, but since there's a difference of opinion, you need to take it WT:RFV rather than just deleting it. Add the template {{rfv-sense}} to the line, then use the "+" in the box it generates to create a section at RFV, and explain why you think it should be deleted. If nobody comes up with citations to support it after a certain period of time, it will be deleted. Chuck Entz (talk) 20:09, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

After looking at your contribs, I see you've been around here longer than I have. Apologies for the unnecessary explanation. Chuck Entz (talk) 20:18, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

@Msh210 yes, thought there is no other countable sense, so the uses of "paprikas" and "a paprika" have to refer to something. Mglovesfun (talk) 20:14, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

I've just sent the sense to RFV. google books:"a paprika" does not quickly find suitable citations for me; it mostly finds "paprika" used attributively to modify a noun.. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:43, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

I have no objections. Mglovesfun (talk) 20:46, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

misleading picture

Even if we can find evidence for extremely rare use referring to the plant or the vegetable not used as a spice, we should replace the current picture with these from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paprika:

A small bowl of Spanish pimentón

Packaged ground and whole dried paprika for sale at a Belgrade marketplace.

Hungarian Paprika Vendor, - Budapest Great Market Hall

The various shapes and colors of the capsicum fruit used to prepare paprika.

--Espoo (talk) 23:24, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

translations from rfv-failed sense

a pepper (a vegetable)

• Arabic: فلفل حلو m pl (fulful ḥulu)

  Egyptian Arabic: فلفل رومي m pl (felfel romi)

• Armenian: please add this translation if you can
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 甜椒 (tiánjiāo)

• Dutch: paprika (nl) f
• Esperanto: papriko
• Finnish: paprika (fi), vihannespaprika
• French: paprika (fr) m
• Georgian: წიწაკა (c̣ic̣aḳa)
• German: spanischer Pfeffer m, Paprika (de) f
• Hungarian: paprika (hu)
• Japanese: ピーマン (pīman), 甘トウガラシ (ama tōgarashi) (甘唐辛子), トウガラシ (tōgarashi) (唐辛子 (ja))
• Norwegian:

  Bokmål: paprika m

  Nynorsk: paprika m

• (deprecated template usage) {{trans-mid}}
• Persian: please add this translation if you can
• Polish: papryka (pl)
• Romanian: ardei (ro) m
• Russian: (lit.: pod pepper) стручковый перец m (stručkóvyj pérec), (lit.: sweet pepper) сладкий перец m (sládkij pérec), (lit.: Bulgarian pepper) болгарский перец m (bolgárskij pérec), паприка (ru) f (páprika)
• Serbo-Croatian:

  Cyrillic: па̀прика f

  Roman: pàprika f

• Slovene: paprika (sl) f
• Spanish: pimiento (es) m
• Swedish: paprika (sv) c
• Turkish: dolma biber (tr), dolmalık biber (tr)

RFV

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for verification.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

---

Rfv-sense: A mild sweet cultivar of the pepper family Capsicum annuum.

google books:"a paprika" does not find any immediately obvious attestations of this sense. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:40, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Cited, either that or I've unwittingly cited a different countable meaning, one which we lack. Note the title of the 1995 book is 'Peppers: The Domesticated Capsicums'. Mglovesfun (talk) 20:59, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

"Using the trio of paprikas gives more flavour than you'd get using a single paprika" does not seem to select the plant sense in exclusion of the dried spice sense, right?

As regards "strings of red paprikas hang outside to dry in the autumn", it seems it is the fruits that hang outside rather than the plants.

Even if the plant sense manages to be attested, it could be that it is neither more common nor older than the second sense, so it should not occupy the first place among the senses. But that would have to be researched and verified. --Dan Polansky (talk) 21:26, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Yes, as explained on Talk:paprika, most if not all of the Google Books results written by native speakers i've looked at so far seem to use it as shorthand for the spice or as an adjective referring to the spice (a paprika sauce/recipe etc.) Some results seem to use it a bit loosely even for the fruit, but only when they are quoting Hungarians or other non-native English speakers and have been clearly influenced by non-native use, but even these seem to always explain at some point what paprika "really" is. For example, the first Google Books result for "a paprika" that seems to be a possible attestation for the cultivar sense, "a paprika fruit contains up to six per cent sugar", uses it loosely in the adjectival sense of a paprika-producing fruit / a fruit used to make paprika, which is made clear when the same source says on p. 15: "Just about the only thing that is indisputable is that paprika is the dried, ground pod of the sweet red pepper (Capsicum anuum)."

We may need to add the sense "dried, not yet ground fruit as sold for use as a spice (to be ground at home)".

More specifically, if we do find some rare cases of paprika being used in the cultivar sense, we need to point out that almost all native speakers never do that and would consider such usage not English. We can of course include even very rare usage if it satisfies CFI, but we should clearly label it as such and should point out that the word is never used that way by most native speakers. In addition, we should point out that this extremely rare usage also violates common name usage listed by scientific organizations.--Espoo (talk) 22:01, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Somewhat related... I recently added the Dutch term paprika and simply gave it the translation paprika, with the understanding that it referred to the fruit (as that is what the Dutch term refers to). So if this term ends up not referring to the fruit, the Dutch definition will need to be changed. —CodeCat 21:37, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Yes, i tried to fix those erroneous translations in some languages in my reverted edit which was too bold, as i now see, but which was a good faith application of the policy encouraging bold edits because i thought no native speaker would object to it. This whole mistake was caused by the creation of this article by a non-native speaker. Wiktionary seems to be hellbent on keeping in anything, even blatant nonsense, once it's slipped in and until its non-existence has been proven. Looks like that policy should be turned upside down because even CFI speaks only about proving existence and doesn't even explain how to prove that something is not used by native speakers. --Espoo (talk) 22:01, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

I note we do now have a second countable meaning, the 'fruit'. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:39, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

Oh wait, I thought I was supposed to be citing the fruit sense. So what plant to peppers come from? Are they just called 'pepper plants' or what? Mglovesfun (talk) 15:26, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

google books:"paprika plant" gets a few dozen relevant hits, google books:"paprika shrub" gets one, google books:"paprika flower" gets a few, google books:"paprika patch" gets one . . . I don't think this is an important sense of the word, but we might as well include it. —Ruakh_TALK 16:10, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

@Espoo the non-native speaker who added this definition is... SemperBlotto (talk • contribs)... Mglovesfun (talk) 16:14, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

Regarding attributive use (Dan Polansky's comment above), google books:"a paprika field" gets five hits. Surely this isn't a field of the color paprika, or a field of the spice. So it either refers to a field of the fruit or a field of the plant. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:35, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

All of those hits support an English definition like "a field where they grow what ends up in imported paprika tins." They are all set in central Europe, especially Hungary. I do not think that most users of paprika consider it as naming a fruit virtually identical to the (bell) peppers they can find at their local grocer. DCDuring TALK 16:43, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Maybe most users don't, but that doesn't mean no users do. —Angr 16:52, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

I suppose (to DCDuring) that's possible just unlikely. By way of comparison google books:"orange plantation" gets 5900 hits, but google books:"orange juice plantation" gets no hits. So I'd put your idea under the heading of "extremely unlikely". Mglovesfun (talk) 16:53, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

@Angr: There may be folks in the food industry who have some idea that the species of plants are the same, but that would be require a usage context.

@MG: I am reasonably sure that normal folks believe that paprika, like most herbs and spices, but unlike salt, comes from a plant and requires some processing. What I doubt is that they have any specific knowledge beyond that. If we want to include encyclopedic facts that have been vetted on Wikipedia (something attestation has no necessary bearing on) relating to the referents of word, which facts are unknown to all but a few users of the words, we can continue to do so. I just don't think we have yet produced evidence that normal people necessarily believe that paprika the spice comes from something called a paprika plant or that there is a fruit called a paprika. DCDuring TALK 17:48, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Except for the discussion at Wiktionary:Tea room#Term for the fruit where CodeCat said she would call bell peppers "paprikas". AFAICT no one else from Ireland answered; maybe it's Irish English to call the fruits paprikas, just as it's apparently Australian English to call them capsicums. —Angr 17:58, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

It may also be a Dutch influenced thing. But my father (a Dublin native) calls them paprikas too, that's where I got it. —CodeCat 19:11, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

I was just a tad US-centric above ("normal" above should be read "normal in the US"). How words are used closer to the home of paprika and to languages that use paprika as the word for what some in the US call bell peppers is beyond by ken. DCDuring TALK 20:08, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

@DCDuring, your idea that the five citations of 'a paprika field' on Google Books refer to a field of what will ultimately become the spice paprika and NOT the plant itself, this is possible but it is plausible? I cannot think of a parallel that works. If someone says to me "the boat caught 100 tuna" I don't think that "the boat caught lots of that which will eventually become tinned tuna" but rather "the boat caught lots of tuna fish". Mglovesfun (talk) 23:58, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

You were advancing these cites in support of "A mild sweet cultivar of the pepper family Capsicum annuum." The cites support only the idea that there is a field-grown plant of some type that is the source of paprika. They support no element - not a single word - of the definition given. DCDuring TALK 00:10, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

DCDuring's hypothesis about "paprika" in "paprika field" not referring to the plant seems rather plausible when you consider the results of google books:"opium field" and google books:"opium plant". From what I have found in “"opium"”, in OneLook Dictionary Search., no major dictionary has "opium" as referring to a plant, and yet "opium field" and "opium plant" are easy to find. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:13, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Is "A mild sweet cultivar of the pepper species Capsicum annuum" really distinct from "A dried but not yet ground fruit of sweet pepper (bell pepper) or chili pepper sold for use as a spice"?

Anyway, I've asked editors of the Wikipedia article if they have input. If they can confirm that it's used in Irish English, or some other context, we'll at least have that to go on when looking for citations.

FWIW, the Wikipedia article explicitly claims "In many European languages, but not in English, the word paprika also or only refers to the Capsicum fruit itself." - -sche (discuss) 17:53, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

As DCDuring used to say, clocked out and deleted as uncited... and partially redundant to "a dried but not yet ground fruit of sweet pepper (bell pepper) or chili pepper sold for use as a spice". - -sche (discuss) 07:40, 12 November 2012 (UTC)