Wiktionnaire:Actualités/017-août-2016/en

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!

Actualités - Numéro 17 - août 2016

• In an article from the website lemanic.ca entitled Les dictionnaires scrutés à la loupe ("Dictionaries under a magnifying glass"), Marie-Andrée Pedneault analyzes various dictionaries to guide readers. Sadly, she missed Wiktionary so Lyokoï sent her an invitation.

• In an article about WWOOF, the multilingual website Cafébabel quotes woofing from French Wiktionary, despite the English version of the same article mention urbandictionary.com.

• Starting a musical critique of artists who sign Abakos by a definition of abacost, an item of clothing at the origin of the name of the group, it is the idea of the article in Voir.ca and for that, it uses Wiktionary as its source!

• In his novel Flic et corse released in June 2015, Charles Pellegrini starts with the word "corsitude" and gives the definition from Wiktionary! It has been modified this month by Lmaltier, maybe in response to criticism from the author

The Catholic University of Louvain has just uploaded DicAuPro, an online dictionary of 1,700 French proverbs. While free, it requires an email address to obtain access to it. It consists of a digitization of 33 university essays (similar to QP in USA academic system) on the philology and etymology of French proverbs. At the moment, no copyright is indicated, which does not allow us to know whether it is possible to use the content in the Wiktionary. In any case, it is possible to use it as a source to enrich entries dealing with proverbs. The French Wiktionary already has the category "Proverbs in French" and the appendix "List of French proverbs," which are still incomplete at the moment!

From mid-July to mid-August (from July 20 to August 20) (Two updates included)

• 3,804 entries are added for French, and 1,513 citations. Now, there are 331,700 lemmas, 484,306 definitions and 300,490 citations.

• The three languages that have had the most entries added are Northern Sami (+ 1,239 entries), Italian (+ 630 entries) and English (+ 243 entries).

• New languages within the project are: Cung (+1), Bebe (+1), Evant (+1), Kirya-Konzel (+1), Nsari (+1), Kemedzung (+1), Xiaozhang Miao (+1), Datooga (+1), Pictish (+1) and Dugwor (+1).

• The last month has seen the addition of 6,925 pages in at least 58 languages!

• In this paragraph, language names are in French; no translation has been made into English names. New ISO codes in Wiktionary are: kirya-konzel (code: fkk), kodia (code: kwp), miao de Xiaozhang (code: miao de Xiaozhang), picte (code: xpi), mlabri (code: mra), sungwadia (code: mrb), magar de l’Ouest (code: mrd), langue des signes de Martha’s Vineyard (code: mre), mising (code: mrg), hmwaveke (code: mrk), mwerlap (code: mrm), mru (code: mro), maragus (code: mrs), hiw (code: hiw), koro de Vanuatu (code: krf), lo-toga (code: lht), lakon (code: lkn), lemerig (code: lrz), tigak (code: tgc), nume (code: tgs), lehali (code: tql), volow (code: volow), dorig (code: wwo), proto-vanuatu Nord-Central (code: proto-vanuatu Nord-Central) and mandaya (code: mry). Plus, the code arb is now a redirect to ar, both of which stand for Arabic, while mri is an alias for mi, both for Maori.

• The French Wiktionary now has entries in 4,008 languages!

Miscellaneous

• Wiktionary Quality: The entry embouteillage is promoted as being a "good entry."

• Illustrated dictionary: French Wiktionary now includes 26,543 pictures, an increase of 137 since last month.

• French Wiktionary includes 30,000 audio recordings, including 18,700 for French words.

• French Wiktionary has 455 pages of rhyme appendices and 30,000 conjugation tables.

First Lexisession about cats

Driven by the Tremendous Wiktionary User Group, the LexiSessions aim to propose monthly themes for focused contributions on all Wiktionaries, simultaneously. The first LexiSession was based around the theme "cat" and has led to the creation of the following Thesauruses on French Wiktionary:

• Le thésaurus chat en français in French
• Le thésaurus chat en breton in Breton
• Le thésaurus chat en anglais in English

These contributions were made by ten different contributors, adding up to 77 successive edits on the French Thesaurus entry. A satisfying degree of participation on the French Wiktionary. On the other hand, other Wiktionaries did not participate much. Of note, however, is that the English Wikisaurus entry for chat was created — the first Wikisaurus entry for French, and one of the first for a language other than English. It is possible that summer vacation slowed contributions, but low participation is likely due to the fact that editors on other Wiktionaries tend not to organize group projects. It is also to be noted that it was difficult to contact more than five hundred different linguistic communities to notify them of this new collective project. Hopefully, future LexiSessions will include more and more editors as time goes on, as well as a growing interest in readers outside of the project. For next month, the theme is cartography, with a focus on the names of different types of urban roadways!

New multilingual content

The Tremendous Wiktionary User Group is also promoting two new multilingual pages this month:

• Share information : to list scientific publications about Wiktionary, tools using Wiktionary database and conferences about this project.
• Wiktionarian skills list : this is an English translation of a local page in French Wiktionary made in February 2016. It aims to reflect on what contributors can learn by contributing to Wiktionary.

Alice Becker-Ho, Les Princes du Jargon, Gallimard Folio essais, 1993, ISBN 2-07-032848-1

Curiosity for etymology is often tied with a political vision and historically, it was mainly to prove that modern language has noble roots and descends from ancient and venerable languages. However a rich part of our lexicon came from slang and from the people Alice Becker-Ho called "dangerous classes." Among those popular etymologies, a large part came from European nomadic cultures, known mainly as Gypsies. They spoke diverse languages, but were in close contact with other Europeans, and many French words come from Romani, such as dèche (broke), bistro, or thune (money). Objectivity in etymology requires a mention of these possible origins, especially when they are so well-described and analyzed. This important piece of work sheds light on a very important aspect of etymology that language purists are not always fond of. Noé, September 9th, 2016.

Francophone Wikiconvention

The first Francophone Wikiconvention was held at Paris from August 19 to 21, 2016. It provided an opportunity for contributors from different Wikimedia projects, and in particular, Wikimédia France, to meet with each other.

Much time was dedicated to French Wiktionary, beginning with a conference by Lyokoï on the inclusion of languages in contact with French, at the heart of the Wikimedia Foundation's projects, then more directly in the presentation of the tool Lingua Libre, which will serve to facilitate recording audio samples for French words and regional languages of France. The title of the conference most centred around Wiktionary was perhaps too provocative (Why a good article on Wikipedia should not come from Wiktionary), as only six people came to participate in the discussion, out of 140 present at the meeting. The discussion was very short.

The other conferences and discussions that took place during the meals are difficult to reproduce here, but were enriching for the Wiktionary editors that were present. They touched on very varied themes, including, notably, the problem of gender equality, the contributions of autistic editors, and more practical aspects in editing tools.

A Wiktionary reunion was held on the second day, gathering together 17 people, several of whom were absent from the first reunion in Italy in June. Discussions were held over lunch, including on the translation of links with Wikidata (part of the discussion was transcribed here by Lmaltier. Don't hesitate to continue the discussion!). Finally, a Wiktionary-editing workshop was held in the afternoon, coinciding with an editathon on the Paralympic Games, which led to the creation of the Thesaurus entry on "handisport." Numerous links were created, and various projects benefited from this first meeting between Francophone editors.

This chronicle is an inventory of online videos about linguistics and the French language. Feel free to let us know about any others that you find!

• Linguisticae : this month, the 2nd FAQ on his channel.

• Lyokoï-Kun focuses this month on the character "Æ" for the seventh episode of Special characters.

• It seems that regional languages have discovered Youtube. This month, the fable: Le corbeau et le renard ("The Crow and the Fox") flavoured with local French from Normandie.

Statistics let us know which pages are the most modified ones. So, here are the most edited pages for July 2016! The exponents give the number of participants.

1. journalope⁶ (following a question about pronunciation)
2. cot cot codet⁵
3. Parasaurolophus⁵
4. tacon⁵
5. wesh⁵ (troubles with a popular etymology without sources)
6. travail⁵
7. planche à beurre⁴
8. quedaquer⁴
9. audimétrie⁴ (caused by the creation of the word auditimétrie, which has since been deleted)
10. Dromaeosaurus⁴

Note that lines 2, 3, 7, 8 and 10 were created by Castorepollux, which had to be reworked by several people in order to align them with Wiktionary guidelines.

The etymologies of words are often rather unusual. For example, délire (and the English translation "delirium") come from the Latin delirium — nothing out of place here — which itself comes from lira, which is the furrow created by a plough, with the prefix -de, which implies a movement away from something. One might wonder what a furrow has to do with it all. As it turns out, this comes from the legend of the foundation of Rome. Romulus is said to have delineated the boundaries of the city by digging a sacred furrow around its circumference. Remus, his brother, mocked him, followed by a dispute, in which he crossing the furrow repeatedly to show its uselessness. Romulus, growing frustrated, stabbed his brother with a sword.