Wiktionnaire:Actualités/024-mars-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 24 - mars 2017

• A short article point out the picky vocabulary of French library. Is it the same in other French-speaking regions? If you know that, please share your knowledge in Wiktionary.

• The economic newspaper Les échos published an article on the jargon of human resources and conclude by an invitation to read Wiktionary for more translation of smurf!

• Swiss French-speaking newspaper RTS published a short lexicon of disinformation based on dictionary and French Wiktionary, in which some words are defined, sometimes nicely like for post-vérité (post-truth), théorie du complot (conspiracy theory) or fake news (not translated in French). Others need care like hoax and fact-checking (not translated in French neither) or are missing like faits alternatifs (alternatives facts).

• qdictionnaire is a dictionary available for Windows, Mac OS and GNU/Linux, update in 3.0. It is based on Wiktionary data for definitions and synonyms, and Wikiquote for citations.

• Christophe Pallier and Christophe Coupé were invited on the radio-show « La Méthode Scientifique » on France Culture. This discussion was about languages in general. The linguist Colette Grinevald also participated in this show.

Border of the Laguna Miscanti, north Chile, by Diego Delso. This picture was on Wikimedia homepage March 5th.

From mid-February to mid-March (02/20/2017 to 03/20/2017)

• French entries increased by 4,259. There is now 349,653 lemma and 510,316 definitions.
• The three other languages which most progressed are Sami (+ 3,529 entries), Italian (+ 2,127 entries) and English (+ 517 entries).
• One new language added this month (French name): tourangeau (+1).
• In March, 11,859 entries were created for 54 languages!

Last month words

Statistics pages give some insight of the evolution of the project:

• Pages the most improved
• Pages the most viewed
• Pages modified by the most people

New lexicons

• Starting of Lexicon of triathlon in French
• List of syncope in French

Miscellanous

• There is 31.265 illustration (pictures and videos) in Wiktionary entries, 263 added since last month.
• March 31th, French Wiktionary offer 263 thesauri in French.
• The page Wiktionnaire:Questions sur les mots received 208 questions. It was 221 in February, 230 in January.

Detail of the Valle de la Luna, in Chile taken by Diego Delso, featured picture of March 19th.

André Pégorier, Glossaire des termes dialectaux permettant de trouver le sens d’un grand nombre de toponymes de la Nouvelle Carte de France, Ministère des travaux publics et des transports, Institut géographique national, Commission de toponymie, Paris, 1963, imprimerie de l’Institut géographique national, 440 pages, inset maps.

For people interested by toponymy, stability of location names over time and space is often a subject of a questioning, sometimes a headache. Thus, for example, the Semois river becames the Semoy river flows from Belgium to France and La Selle-en-Hermoy village is called La Selle-en-Hermois depending on the time or the scripter. Considering the microtoponyms, chaos is total, transcriptions appears to be randomly done by topographers who do not understand local languages and conflicts between countrymen and geometers might be strong.

For a united and centralized state like French Republic, it was impossible to stand. In 1950 was then created the Toponymy Commission of the National Institute of Geographic and Forestry Information. This office aims to collect all the microtoponyms of France, in Europe and oversea. The task was to compile bibliographies (mostly local monographs) to gather around 40.000 toponyms each year, between 1950 and 1961, when this book was published. Topographers in this commission described around 500.000 microtoponyms. A large portion of those are written in a very unconventional way. Names from obscures dialects or forgotten languages written for the first time in this glossary.

This commission hired André Pérogrier to edit this work in a document published in 1963.

This document commence with an introduction that describes the methodology and the notation in used this the core of the document: an alphabetical list of toponyms. It is conclude with a bibliography. A short Supplément des noms de lieux de la France d’Outre-mer : glossaire des termes dialectaux

This glossary were revised twice and the third edition, of 2006, was checked and completed by Sylvie Lejeune and Elisabeth Calvarin. This one is available online for free. — a chronicle by François GOGLINS

Notes

LexiSession on French words in other languages

Powered by the Tremendous Wiktionary User Group, the LexiSessions aim to suggest monthly themes to put all Wiktionaries on the same page. This eighth topic was on French words in other languages, but it seems it was not a great success. As usual, the lack of feedback is not a proof of inactivity.

April Lexisession will be on the vocabulary of book and library.

Videos This rubric reviews videos about linguistics and French published during the month. Fabien Olicard discuss influence of words on the mind structures and on perception. Akira Okrent present in English some words that came from French sentences. Elles comme Linguistes : This time, dab, a borrowing from English slang and a curious story (definition in French) ! Linguisticae+Langues de Cha’ : A video about popular believes on linguists skills. L’insolente linguiste : A new channel by a québécoise linguist who describe words and usages and she starts with bon matin (definition in French) and egoportrait (definition in French)! Avec ou sans accent ?! is a short documentary on France accents. Game Bouche cousue Bouche cousue is a fantastic game with words in French. There is two modes: random word and word of the week. In both, words are to be guessed with several attempts of words. For each try, the game give how many letters are correct and placed but not which ones. News: Now it will be word of the month instead, to provide better results next month! Have a try!

Fun facts Every linguistic community develop a vocabulary, according to their needs, a jargon or a sociolect. A similar situation is occurring in the European Union, as pointed by our fellow Treehill, who looked at a publication by Jeremy Gardener, Misused English words and expressions in EU publications. This document is available online and the first pages reveals the harvesting process and the methodology of definition, as well as a definition of Standard English in this work — the one in use in United-Kingdom and Ireland — opposed to the one in use in the multilingual institutions of EU. He did not plan to forbid these usages, but want to arise consciousness of users in a way to correct themselves when they communicate with English native speakers, people who will not understand the meaning of words like valorise or creations like actorness or planification. Ingroup communication is probably more efficient with this vocabulary, despite synonyms in English, but for outgroup communication, it will be gibberish. An American author, Jack Vance developed a fiction on this topic, Languages of Pao (1958) in which a planet is handled by bureaucrats who developed a new language based on the languages speak by the different professions. This new language is a patchwork pictured as a creole designed for mutual understanding but becoming a cryptic language, only understand by bureaucrats, isolated from the people they are supposed to govern. Jargon of European institutions is not a language yet, it is not opaque nor incomprehensible. Works like this one by Jeremy Gardner helps users of this variety to identify specificity in a way to be able to switch lexicon similarly as a register switch. This jargon will evolve with European administrations and Wiktionary will integrate and describe this new usages with the help of the corpora produced by this community. — a chronicle by Noé