Wiktionnaire:Actualités/029-August-2017
Wiktionnaire:Actualités is a monthly periodical about French Wiktionary, dictionaries and words, published online since April 2015. Everyone is welcome to contribute to it. You can sign in to be noticed of future issues, read old issues and participate to the draft of the next edition. You can also have a look at Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia. If you have any comments, critics or suggestions, our talk page is open!
Local Highlights
- A great deal of work has been done on the pages about example conventions, help for examples, thesaurus conventions and thesaurus help, to offer better support to French Wiktionary's users and contributors.
- A demonstration system on Wikidata's support of lexicographic data was released online. Once in place, the lexicographic data on Wikidata can be reused by the various Wiktionary projects if they wish. The July 2016 Actualités had already written about this ongoing project.
- The association Zerfa for the Shawiya culture took advantage of Wikimania 2017 to train and start contributing on the French Wiktionary:Zerfa-chaouie on Radio-Maghreb. You can follow their contributions on their Facebook page!
- After the August break, the monthly meetings around the Wiktionnaire in Lyon are back for their third year! Every first Thursday of the month, six to twelve contributors meet in an association bar dedicated to languages in order to talk about their current projects, to contribute together on a topic, to present the project to passers-by, to finish putting Actualités together late (hum hum) or simply to have a drink, or several (hum hum) and to have fun! It is open to everyone, amateurs and novices alike!
Global Highlights
- In the issue released in August 2017, Le Monde diplomatique dedicates a double page to the distribution of the different writings over the planet. The Latin alphabet and its derivatives are dominant, but 22 other main alphabets are used.
- Le Monde has published a game, inspired by the dictionary game, which involves guessing the meaning of a rare and little-known word. And is mistaken about the meaning of the word "hiératique"!
- The New York Times compiled a short portrait of the sociolinguistic situation in Singapore, with several different languages according to the generation, old people speak Hokkien, a dialect of Minnan, adults speak Mandarin and the youngest ones English.
- A new Tahitian-French dictionary has been released and it contains 2,300 new words. For a volume of 700 pages, the Tahitian Academy has produced an important work in order its language remains alive. With, for example, the addition of "moʻo tua taratara" the new translation for "iguana".
- The impression with respect to the number? The Quebecker Ianik Marcil talks about the evolution of French in Montreal in the face of commentator's feelings, which is often the basis of fake news.
- In a post explaining how Quebecisms get into the petit Robert, the lexicography lover Guy Bertrand brings us his vision of French in Quebec. A rare point of view since it comes from a "top-of-the-range francophone speaker" ...
- This month, Français de nos régions publishes a cartography of the rivalry between Quebec City and Montreal regarding the use of French in Canada. We can clearly see the influences of the two cities on the surrounding communities, and this with more or less precision depending on the usage and the words concerned.
What about Wiktionary projects?
- The German Wiktionary celebrates the milestone of hundred thousand lemmas in German! The French Wiktionary has 47,209 pages of German lemmas but 301,104 pages describing French lemmas, the language of the project! There are even more lemmas than that, by distinguishing nouns and adjectives that are on the same page en by adding proper nouns, one reaches 20,270 lemmas in German and 354,339 lemmas in French, as given in the monthly statistics.
- The English Wiktionary just terminates a vote in order to rename the Wikisaurus into Thesaurus, a term more well-known, and similar to the one used in other languages.
- The Spanish Wiktionary has modified its logo for a vector version which retains the indication of a pronunciation and the phrase El diccionario en castellano de contenido libre [the dictionary in Spanish with free content].
The Russian Wiktionary adopted in the spring the decision to stop allowing the creation of new pages by unregistered users, in order to facilitate the deletion of unwanted content by volunteers who check the creations.
We do not read the languages of all Wiktionary projects, so feel free to report any interesting discussions that take place elsewhere!
The end of magic links
MediaWiki software is what supports the Wiktionary, Wikipedia, and many other wikis. Many developers are constantly working on its improvement and a operation in progress is aimed at the disappearance of magic links. Magic links are links of an unexpected and non-standard form since they are composed of only a series of letters and numbers, without tags around them. The most commonly used magic link is the one that allows you to indicate the ISBN code of a book, which is particularly useful to make sure of the edition quoted in a source.
Rather than having an extra weird form to learn for these links, the {{ISBN}} template has been created and implemented on all pages of the French Wiktionary. It works in the same way as other models, and will allow the reader to arrive to an internally managed publication database in the future, without advertising or purchase proposals. For the moment, the results proposed on the French Wiktionary by the special page Reference Works redirect to Wikipedia.
To allow for the disappearance of magic links, MediaWiki developers created la catégorie Pages utilisant des liens magiques ISBN and JackPotte coded a bot to automatically replace links. He then created la catégorie Pages avec ISBN invalide which will ensure the correct use of the {{ISBN}} template in the future, by displaying an error message to contributors entering an incorrect number sequence and allowing a watchful eye by those who wish to invest in correcting the added ISBN identifiers. — a chronicle by JackPotte and Noé.
Statistics
- From mid-July to mid-August (from 07/20/2017 to 08/20/2017)
- French entries increased by 1,765 and quotations increased by 1,924. There are now 354,339 lemmas, 527,143 definitions and 327,821 quotations or examples.
- The three other languages which progressed the most are Northern Sami (+ 2,215 entries), Ancient Greek (+ 352 entries) and Shawiya (+ 262 entries).
- Five languages were added in the project (here with French names): massalat (+1), ixcatèque (+1), langues delaware (+1), tangam (+1) and keo (+1).
- In August 5,467 entries were created for 72 languages!
- New lexicons
- For specific kind of historical morphological changes:
- Words of the month
Statistics provided by Wikiscan:
- Miscellaneous
- There is 32,281 illustrations (images and videos) in French Wiktionary entries and 109 were added since last month.
- Up to the 31th of August 2017, French Wiktionary offer 281 thesaurus in French and a total of 424 thesaurus in 53 languages!
Six new thesaurus this month: cirque [circus], blague [joke], énigme [enigma], objet [object], lien [link] and serpent [snake].
- The Questions on words page (WT:QM) records in August 143 questions, compare to 124 in July, 112 in June, 166 in May, 148 in April.
Dictionary of the month
Ben Schott, Schottenfreude, Éditions du sous-sol, Paris, 2016.
The over-composition capabilities of the German language are well known. The British writer Ben Schott, author of the Miscellanea, opens this lexicon of one hundred and twenty German words, all over-composed, with a quotation: "the German language is rich and fruitful enough to give birth to words of its own and capable of designating any idea that might be expressed"[1]. He sets out to create the words that humanity had hitherto lacked in order to express notions that were known to all but which lacked their own signifier.
Thus, at the end of the summer, you may remember that feeling you had at the beginning of the holidays, especially as a child: the feeling that the holidays would never end. Sommerferienewigkeitsgefühl, in a way. The word, immediately intelligible to a German speaker, is composed of summer, holidays, eternity and feeling.
Yet, back to work, what about the torment of having to work every day with colleagues? The Plauschplage certainly exists! Is it as painful as the Rollschleppe, that feeling that takes hold of us when we have to climb the steps of a standing escalator?
With a lot of humour, the author identifies moments in our existence, describes them with a word and comments on them. Who has never felt like they have lost a parking ticket soon after they had it in their hands? It is the Dokumentverlustpanik! The perfectly symmetrical images of a Wes Anderson film provoke a feeling of fullness, the Ebenmäßigkeitsentzückung, while the attempt to restart a dream once awake (Traumneustartversuch) is doomed to failure.
This book is a combination of a Franco-German dictionary, a collection of portmanteau words and essays on common and little described feelings and sensations. That is enough to avoid the Sonntagsleerung — the feeling of emptiness experienced on Sundays, even more painful if, living in the provinces, you are sensitive to the Provinztrübsinn - the sluggishness of small towns.
A word is especially intended for lexicography enthusiasts and readers of the Wiktionary: it describes the fact of finding the word you were looking for at the precise moment when you were getting your hands on the dictionary in which you hoped to find it. It is the Dudenblitz, which could be translated as "Wiktionary flash" — but for that we need two words... — a chronicle by Trace- ↑ Charles Follen, A Practical Grammar of the German Language, Hilliard & Gray, 1870.
LexiSession on the circus
Powered by the Tremendous Wiktionary User Group, LexiSessions aim to suggest monthly themes to put all Wiktionaries on the same page. Themes are suggested on Meta and announced every month in several projects.
August LexiSession was about circus and results on the creation of a thesaurus of circus in French. Plenty words should still be added, and you are welcome barnumize this vocabulary with us!
September suggested theme is peace!
Videos
This chronicle reviews videos about linguistics and French published during the month, do not hesitate to add videos and channels that you find!
- Elles comme Linguistes : Two videos, the first one on borrowings and the second one on funny etymology.
- Linguisticae : He comments on how English can cause flights crashes. Well, language misunderstandings more than the language itself is to blame.
- Arte made an episode of Karambolage show on the uses of French language, especially on uses of numbers.
Curiosity
There is certain words only used in singular or only in plural, due to a peculiar meaning or history, such as crème de la crème or whereabouts. These phenomenon are described as singularia tantum and pluralia tantum. Those words are very commons in every languages, but only few of theme as be clearly tagged in the singularia tantum in French and pluralia tantum in French and this task does not bring so much attention to the contributors. In comparison, English Wiktionary is much more advanced for singularia tantum in English and pluralia tantum in English
Moreover, plenty entries have be created in plural, without the corresponding entry in singular, because the Wiktionary is still in progress. To fix this, le Wiktionnaire have a maintenance automatized category to track missing singulars.
At this points, this three categories only have about hundred entries, so you are welcome to fill the first two and to empty the last one!
Anciens numéros
- 2015 : avril, mai, juin, juillet, août, septembre, octobre, novembre, décembre
- 2016 : janvier, février, mars, avril, mai, juin, juillet, août, septembre, octobre, novembre, décembre
- 2017 : janvier, février, mars, avril, mai, juin, juillet, août, septembre, octobre, novembre, décembre
- 2018 : janvier, février, mars, avril, mai, juin, juillet, août, septembre, octobre, novembre, décembre
- 2019 : janvier, février, mars, avril, mai, juin, juillet, août, septembre, octobre, novembre, décembre
- 2020 : janvier, février, mars, avril, mai, juin, juillet, août, septembre, octobre, novembre, décembre
- 2021 : janvier, février, mars, avril, mai, juin, juillet, août, septembre, octobre, novembre, décembre
- 2022 : janvier, février, mars, avril, mai, juin, juillet, août, septembre, octobre, novembre, décembre
- 2023 : janvier, février, mars, avril, mai, juin, juillet, août, septembre, octobre, novembre, décembre
- 2024 : janvier, février, mars, avril, mai, juin, juillet, août, septembre, octobre, novembre, décembre
- 2025 : brouillon du prochain numéro