Wiktionnaire:Actualités/021-décembre-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 21 - décembre 2016

• An article from the blog Un mot après l'autre indicates that the French Academy updates its dictionary and deletes words, amongst which abuseur, académiste, amusoire, assoter, baladinage, baliverner…
• For New Year's day, a radio journalist from Europe 1 tried to find different ways to wish a happy new year in metropolitan France. It gives a nice map of "happy new year". We advise you to carefully read the article, which presents the limits of this research.
• A wonderful applause for the success of the impressive French Wikisource project to digitize 100 books in 100 days! Their first attempt did not succeed but the second one finally did on December, 23th! Congratulations to all of the participants for this huge effort! During the past year, 724 books were added... Great score!
• Français de nos régions come back this month on germanisms in French in the francophone Switzerland. A rich article that gives us many words : boiler, chablon, stempf (stemp, stempel, stempfel), poutser, poutzer, faire la poutze, witz, être à la strasse, schlaguer, moutre, fatre, kotzer, petler, schneuquer, stöck (steck, stökre, stäkre or chteucre)…

Detail of a photograph of a railway proposed by Ibex73 for January monthly photo challenge.

Obituary: The contributor using the pseudonym Coyau (d · c · b) passed away at the age of 38 on December, 6th 2016. He was contributing since November 2005 on Wiktionary and brought 16,290 edits, mostly in 2010 and 2011, part of which corrections and creations. His last contribution here was an improvement of the entry shitstorm on November, 19th 2016. He also was an active contributor on Commons, Wikidata, Wikipedia and Wikisource. We are losing a great contributor and offer our condolences to his family and relatives.

A first Oc-a-thon dedicated to Occitan took place in Pau at the beginning of December in order to train speakers to use and contribute to online collaborative projects. It was organized jointly by the Institut Occitan Aquitaine (InOc Aquitaine), Lo Congrès Permanent de la Lenga and Wikimédia France. Two francophone Wiktionary contributors assisted,Lyokoï and Noé. The association blog also dedicated an article to the event, that include a short report by the local TV channel France 3 Aquitaine.

At this occasion a a portal was created on the Wiktionary to shed light on the 17.000 Occitan words already described in the francophone Wiktionary. Moreover, two Occitan thesauri were initiated with fruits and music as well as seven names of musical instruments in Occitan: flabuta, graile, tamborin, bramatopin, acordeon diatonic, acordeon cromatic, bodega.

Close to 800 words and expressions in Occitan were recorded and will be uploaded to Commons in the following months to enrich the French and Occitan pages of the Wiktionaries!

In two days, a dozen of people were trained to contribute, in a studious and warm environment. This project is part of the Langues de France project, represented on the spot by some of the team members: Lyokoï and Noé, Unuaiga, also developper of the Dico d’Òc presented below and Xenophôn, employee of Wikimédia France. Other events of this type are planned, including Alsacian and Breton!

Dico d’Òc, dictionnaire du Congrès permanent de la lenga occitana, en ligne.

For once, the dictionary of the month comes before the statistics as it is linked to this month's focus !

The Dico d’Òc is more than just an Occitan dictionary, it is fifteen dictionaries (8 French-Occitan, 5 Occitan-French and 2 historical dictionaries) and so five variants of the language (auvergnate, gascon, languedocian, provencal, vivaro-alpin) in a modern digital tool, free and easy to use! A priceless resource for this southern France language for which it is difficult to find good resources. The technical tool does not simply compiles diverse dictionaries but it relies on a new lexicographical collective writing: an Occitan dictionary named Lo Basic. This work is finished but modestly considered as temporary by its authors because the work of describing a language seems neverending. It is part of a powerful dynamics of creation that led to the creation of specialized lexicons including neologisms on childhood or e-commerce for example, which are unified and available on tèrm’Òc; BaTelÒc, a collection of text written from the XIXth century to now; a database of flexions enabling the creation of spellcheckers or other text-based works on. None of this is published under an open licence (so it is not reusable as such in Wiktionary) but it is available freely online and will favor the diffusion of this beautiful language of France.

From mid-November to mid-December (precisely from 11/20/2016 to 12/23/2016)

• French have 10,736 new entries. This language reaches 336,542 lemmas and 494,193 definitions.
• The three other languages which most progressed are Sami (same du Nord, + 2,698 entries), Swedish (suédois, + 738 entries) and English (anglais, + 455 entries).
• New languages this month are (with French names here): mangue (+1) and nawdm (+1).
• 15,950 pages for at least 70 languages were extended this month!

Miscellanous

• There are 30,345 illustrative medias (pictures and videos) in Wiktionary entries, meaning 334 more than last month.

• Featured entries of Wiktionary: marotte is promoted as a good content.
• On January 1st 2017, French Wiktionary offered 253 thesauri in French.

Detail of a photograph of the inside of a W48 Grundplatte phone proposed by CatalpaSpirit for January monthly photo challenge.

LexiSession on gifts

Boosted by the Tremendous Wiktionary User Group, the LexiSessions aims at proposing monthly themes to energize all of the Wiktionaries simultaneously. The fifth LexiSession dealt with the subject "gifts" and has led to the creation of a French thesaurus about "gift" and in Chinese !

Participation on other Wiktionaries is difficult to measure because communities are diverse and feedback rare. Still, the LexiSessions take no rest and January's theme will be cars !

This chronicle is an inventory of online videos about linguistics and the French language, in French.

• Elles comme Linguistes : The two linguists argue against the myth about linguists speaking many languages!
• Linguisticae : A binomial video about dyslexy and another one on French of the future.
• Idée reçue - Max Bird: a video about woodpeckers (pic-verts) displays a quote from French Wiktionary and comments it...but talks about it later as if it was Wikipedia. Too bad!
• Langue de Cha’ describes briefly the Korean alphabet.

Words of the month Starting with this issue, new statistics! The new tool Wikiscan tells us many things. Let's try it this month with three different kinds of information! The most increased pages couteau (by Supreme assis) salope (by Classiccardinal) gouet (mainly by Supreme assis) boisson alcoolisée (created by TAKASUGI Shinji) Grands Lacs (created by TAKASUGI Shinji) → See the whole list The most viewed pages wesh thyroïde nymphomane first name pédéraste → See the whole list Pages edited by the most people petit bras (13) salope wesh pâquerette congolexicomatisation → See the whole list

Fun facts We all know what plays on words are. They are mainly based on the phonetical resemblance of some words. But there are plays on words based on the resemblance or layout of graphical notations of words (letters, glyphes, ideograms, etc.) For languages with alphabets, they are mostly associated with rebuses. For example in French: D${\displaystyle \quad \quad }$I${\displaystyle \quad \quad }$NER = diner sans cérémonie (diner sans cérémonie means « dinner without formality ». But you can cut sans cérémonie into céré mon ie, that sounds exactly like sans serrer mon I, which means « without squeezing my I ». Then, the word diner without tightenning the letter I gives D${\displaystyle \quad \quad }$I${\displaystyle \quad \quad }$NER.) DU BRDEAUX A VORE : du Bordeaux sans eau à votre santé (sans eau sounds like sans O which means « without O », and santé sounds like sans T which means « without T ». Then you just have to write Du Bordeaux without the letter O and à votre without the letter T. Over all, this sentence means « some Bordeaux wine without water, and cheers (literally "to your health") ».) L’ N : L’oncle Sophocle (L’oncle Sophocle means « uncle Sophocles ». But Sophocle sounds like sauf ocle, which means « except ocle ». If you write l’oncle without the letters of ocle, you get L’ N.) English speakers, if you know any plays on words of this kind in your language, let us know ! Pieces of glass photographed by Ryanx7. And to conclude, an ideographic play on words in Japanese! In Japan, a person reaching 99 years old is said "to be in his white year". This comes from the fact that the kanji for the number "one hundred" is 百, made of "one" 一 and "white" 白. So if you take "one" off from "one hundred", which arithmetically gives 99, you get the kanji that means "white".