Wiktionnaire:Actualités/022-janvier-2017/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 22 - janvier 2017

• The city of Washington D.C. in the U.S. considers opening a museum dedicated to linguistics and languages (article in English). There is already a language museum in Paris, Mundolingua! This museum, located at 10 Rue Servandoni, 75006 Paris will welcome the conference Wiktionary: Beyond a Dictionary on Thursday, February 16th, 7:30pm, presented by Lyokoï and Noé!
• In the article Beliefs and skepticism in Google searches / confirmation bias, dated January 26, 2017, Serge Bret-Morel observes the definitions and relations that appear to the Internet users when they do a Google search containing the words astrologie, horoscope and zodiaque. He points out several pages from Wikipedia and the definition of zodiaque in the French Wiktionary, that he considers as technically wrong.
• Philippe Blanchet denounces glottophobia in an interview: "Rejeter un accent, c’est toucher à l’identité de l’être" (Rejecting an accent is like rejecting one’s identity.), a concrete affirmation for the Wiktionary, where all variants are legitimate in the description of a language.
• Pronuncify is a tool developed since October 2015 and currently in version 0.31 since January 28, 2017. This tool is useful in command lines and enables the registration of pronunciations under the .ogg format from lists of words. These new files can then be sent straight to Wikimedia Commons while being categorized. The technical part is very similar to what is being developed at the Lingua Libre project.
• Fransin is a project for phonetic transcription of simplified French. Its promoters used Wiktionary for their work.
• The PhD student Kaja Dolar is currently working on collaborative dictionaries as linguist, discursive and social objects while Charlotte Siarri-Mesana defended last year a thesis about new words attested between 1990 and 2012 in the Nouveau Petit Robert Electronique 2012, comparing this French dictionary to the Wiktionary. These theses are not yet available but Actualités will keep you in touch!

Detail of a photograph of Furong, China, proposed by Chensiyuan during the January-February Monthly Photo Challenge.

From mid-december to mid-january (from 23/12/2016 to 20/01/2016)

• French wins 9,235 entries. There now are 337,728 lemmas and 496,018 definitions.
• The three languages that most improved are Spanish (+ 2,126 entries), Nothern Sami (+ 2,081 entries) and Latin (+ 701 entries).
• The new languages in the project are : Angevin (+2), Tera (+2), Bukit (+1), Margi (+1), Bakumpai (+1), Peranakan (+1), Kamwe (+1) and Daba (+1).
• This month, there were 16,240 new entries in at least 83 languages !
• The new language codes of the project are : Bakumpai (code : bkr), Nothern Sorsoganon (code : bks), Bukit (code : bve), Boga (code : bvw), Kamwe (code : hig), Tera (code : ttr) and Central Proto-Tchadic.

Others

• There are 30,647 illustrations (images and videos) in the Wiktionary articles, meaning 302 more than last month.
• Quality of the French Wiktionary : the entries couteau, râteau et gros-cul are proposed as good entries.
• On February 1st 2017, the French Wiktionary had 257 thesauri ! Four more than last month and thirty-one more than January 2016 !

This month, in tribute to Peter Mark Roget, we will focus on a part of the project that is not the dictionary but that progressively improves it : thesauri. This word designates two different objects :

1. (lexicography) a list of words related to a concept, making it easier to talk aout it ;
2. (documentation) a structured list with descriptors to ease the indexation of documents.

In French Wiktionary, you can find the first one, in pages starting with Thésaurus: and often followed with a sign . Note that second meaning is more familiar for people working with computers or in libraries. Thesauri ease access to new vocables and catch related words but also offer a semantic way to navigate in Wiktionary.

A previous point was made last year, in Actualités January 2016 and we want to do a new one to observe the evolution.

Number of cumulated thesauri between 2004 and 2017

The number of thesauri is increasing. Evolution is quite the same as last year for creation of new thesauri (figure above) but 25% increasing in data quantity (figure beneath). New thesauri started with a better quality and older thesauri had gain also. There is several way to explain this evolution. The first one may be a systematic link to associate thesaurus added in Wikipedia related pages. It may have raised the quantity of readers coming from Wikipedia. Another explanation may be the creation of thesauri during public events like the one on handisport during a collaborative event on Paralympic Games. Last dynamic is the Lexisession, evoked in Actualités and quite popular. New creation drive new people to read the other thesauri and to improve them. Stats on new contributors are not available yet, so we'll be talking back about it next year!

Evolution of French thesauri data quantity from 2004 to 2017

Comparison with other wiktionaries

Outside of English and French Wiktionaries, other projects just started during the last year, impulsed by Lexisessions. English tradition of thesaurus is older than in France and Wikisaurus are based on several books in the public domain. There is 1.506 thesauri now in English Wiktionary, slightly more than last year. Growing seems similar but we lack time to make a proper measurement like for French. Another difference is that thesauri in other languages than English are less developed in English Wiktionary than non-French thesauri in French Wiktionary. The Wikisaurus du chat (French for cat) is quite lost surrounded by animal speaking a foreign language. Well, see you later on a thesauri or next year for a new episode! — a chronicle by Noé

Robert Édouard, Dictionnaire des injures, précédé d’un petit traité d’injurologie, Claude Tchou éditeur, 1967

1967. France is bored, and one knows what results of that. Maybe to relieve boredom, Claude Tchou published a peculiar dictionary: "Le Dictionnaire des injures, précédé d'un petit traité d'injurologie" written by the mysterious Robert Édouard. The author says he wanted to write a "dictionary of current insults" and not a "pantheon of insults in French literature". This book is 610 pages long, illustrated with black and white pictures and drawings. It as three parts:

• The third one, revealed by the title, is an alphabetical list of insults, from A bas ! to Zut !. Every entry provides synonyms and also words to answer appropriately. There are 9.300 insults, from various register, from "face de nœud" to "Belzébuth".

• Prior to this list, there are 30 pages with categorized lists of insults divided in four tombereaux : Mankind, Nature, Society and Customs.

• To introduce these two documents, there is the first traité d'injurologie . 20 chapters and 290 pages, studying historical, sociological, economical, sanitary and phonological aspects of insults. The author assumes that insults die when used in literature, and is aware his own dictionary may send some of them to the grave. In the last chapter, he is concerned by the future of insults and suggest to the youths to create new insult and to build an "Institut des Hautes Etudes Injurologiques" . He also suggests a manifest for this domain, that nowadays is a real field of investigation.

This book has been reprinted several times. The dictionary alone in 1979, by Tchou, and then in 1983 by Sand & Tchou; finally in 2004, a complete reprint in two volumes by 10/18, directed by Michel Carrassou. — this article was written in French by François GOGLINS and merely translated to English by Noé (please do not send him insults for the many mistakes!)

Notes ↑ French National Library says very little about Robert Édouard , and it might be a pseudonym. ↑ This is a pun with the expression Tombereau d’injures proposed by the author. ↑ We are talking about youth people in 1967. They have 50 more years now and they did nothing about this shit, total losers.

"The train of your insults rolls on the rails of my indifference." - a famous quote from the film La Classe américaine. The picture is from Kora27 made for January monthly photo challenge.

LexiSession about cars and vehicles

Boosted by the Tremendous Wiktionary User Group, the LexiSessions aim at proposing montly themes to energize all of the Wiktionaries simultaneously. The sixth LexiSession dealt with was on car and vehicle and ease to the creation of thesaurus of car and of the thesaurus of vehicle !

But also to the illustration of the following entries: taxi, limousine, voiture-bar, banquette, bolide, auto-école, levier de vitesse, coffre de toit.

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

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

• Elles comme Linguistes : This month, this duo speaks about pronunciation with Du lait ou du lait ?
• Linguisticae : A new video on the concept of predicate and a new serie of rhetoric analysis with already three videos: enumeration (Jean-Luc Mélenchon), antithesis (Nicolas Dupont-Aignan) and hyperbole (François Fillon).
• A short video to present English Wiktionary

Words of the month Now, more stats with three categories! The most increased pages (all five by Classiccardinal) gros-cul gros cul crépitophile panivore hydroprêtre → See the whole list The most viewed pages avoir maille à partir golden shower encaustique BDSM nymphomane → See the whole list Pages edited by the most people budgétivore (11) planetă super-locuibilă amour planeta superhabitable pute → See the whole list Games New year, new projects: welcome to the games section ! We offer you to try bouche cousue, a game loosy based on the Motus french TV show (that make a pun in French, motus et bouche cousue, equivalent at ). The goal is to find a given French word by suggesting words, with the only information of the number of letters that are at the same place as the correct word. There are two modes: the random words mode, in which you will have to find 6- or 7-letters French words from the French Wiktionary database; and a "word of the week" mode, in which your score is registered. In the next issue, we will award the best players! If you have any feedback, you can contact DaraDaraDara who developed the game with the help of the community. Detail of a small train station, proposed by Tulumnes during the January monthly photo challenge.

Fun facts You may have heard of the legend of the hundred words used by Inuits to talk about the snow. This tale is famous enough to have a proper article in Wikipedia. But, the notion of word in a language is tricky, especially in polysynthetic languages. On a given root, it is possible to add a substantial amount of suffixes to create a large number of words which, in other languages such as English of French, will be clauses or full sentences. For example, Inuit can have a word for "recently fallen snow already became solid". It is well-known that prominent topics or main activities of a community will be visible in the vocabulary. Touaregs have a whole lexicon on dromedaries, Sami people about deers (including names for every weeks, used to pick names for the animals in a livestock). Each people have his own concerns. Well, and for French, we have more than hundred synonyms of penis. Snowshapes proposed by Kristian Pikner during the January Monthly Photo Challenge. And, if we look at neige in French, we also have plenty words, as noticed by monsu.desiderio: " des racines aussi variées que neige, pleige, congère, avalanche, lavanche ou lavange, blizzard, poudrerie, bourrasque, flocon, fondrière, giboulée, névé ou niévé, gel, regel, glace, cristal... Des adjectifs pour désigner la neige : poudreuse, sèche, fondue, compacte... Des dérivés savants : nivéal, nivôse, niviforme, nives. Des mots composés : boule de neige, bonhomme de neige, pelotes de neige, chasse-neige, tourmentes de neige, fonte des neiges. Des dérivés : neigeux, enneigé, enneigement, déneiger. Des verbes régionaux : nèvoler (Savoie), pelucher (Lyon), pleiger (Suisse)." Nevertheless, we can point out a constant in Inuit and Yupik languages. All this languages distinguish two kinds of snow, "fallen snow" and "falling snow": Kalaallisut  : aput / qaniit Inuktitut  : aput / qanniq Yupik : qanikcaq / qanuk Alutiiq : aniuq / qaniq This binomial distinction is not found in Aleut language, qaniix has the same origin but both meanings. — this article was wrote by Unsui