Wiktionnaire:Actualités/026-mai-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 26 - mai 2017

• On Wikimedia Commons, the collaborative project which store medias for Wiktionaries and Wikipedia, the Picture of the Year competition ended May 9th and the winner is the picture with two ravens in London tower. This issue of Actualités will offer you some picture picked in the second round selected pictures. Thanks to all the participants, especially because that help Wiktionaries to provide better illustrations!

• As last year and l’the year before, dictionaries Robert and Larousse have published a list of new entries in the new edition of their dictionary (titled as 2018 edition). On the hundred news words, less than half a dozen are missing on French Wiktionary now, but will certainly be described before 2018.

• Véga, hieroglyph translator « VÉgA is already able to translate hieroglyph to French, English, German and Arabic... ». We already mentioned this toll in February 2016 Actualités!

• Do you speak French as an old white man? or another story of accent in films!

• QG Magazine published a article about Damso, a rap artist who made an album titled ipséité. The journalist used French Wiktionary to provide a definition but indicate a wrong link to the website, leading to identité !

Amphycribral vascular bundle of a fern rhizome, a picture proposed by Anatoly Mikhaltsov, finalist in Picture of the Year competition.

Last year, Actualités crew sneaked into the yearly conference of Wikimedia project, Wikimania. We offered a small talk about what we do to make French Wiktionary grow. We filmed this talk, which was in English, and you can find slides and video described in June 2016 Actualités.

This year, there are six proposals concerning Wiktionaries. Here is a journey through them!

• Bringing lexicographical data to Wikidata: supporting Wiktionary and beyond, presented by Lydia Pintscher, head developer for Wikidata. She participated at the Wiktionary meeting during Wikimania 2016 and she supported a constructive conversation between the dev team and contributors. This led to the creation of a page in French Wiktionary dedicated to cooperation with Wikidata.

• Kathabhidhana: Recording words for Wiktionary and preparing for an AI assitant, proposed by someone who received a postcard from Lyon recently after a series of consequences. His project is presented here and it is already in motion!

• Lingua Libre is a project developed in France to facilitate the recording of regional languages, not just with online software but also thanks to a network of speakers and a training course. Maybe Lyokoï will present it someday in Actualités!

• Etyltree: A graphical and interactive etymology dictionary based on Wiktionary, presented by Ester. She received a grant by the Wikimedia Foundation last year and she will present her results. She previously published a demo and she asked for it to be renewed (please support this!). Note that this tool can not process French Wiktionary data because of major differences in the way etymologies are designed, with less schematic representation and more detailed paragraphs in French Wiktionary.

• Language learners expanding Wiktionary, building better language processing tools, by Jake Ryland Williams, who is writing a proposal for a grant to develop the project he wants to present.

• WikiCheese, a project about cheese in which French Wiktionary contributors took part in a WikiFromage subproject to add and "spread" knowledge of over fifty pages of cheeses. It would "Brie" great to hear feedback on this project.

In 2016, a proposal about Hebrew Wiktionary was not accepted because of an overbearing number of proposals. This year, it may be even worse with almost 400 proposals! So, you're welcome to support the idea you most like among this bunch of proposals!

From mid-April to mid-May (from 04/20/2017 to 05/20/2017)

• French entries increased by 7,644 and quotations increased by 6,659. There is now 352,675 lemmas, 524,082 definitions and 391,657 quotation and examples.
• The three other languages which progressed the most are Sami (+ 7,726 entries), Italian (+ 6,107 entries) and English (+ 1,737 entries).
• Forty four languages were added in the project (here with French names): djingili (+3), dhangu-djangu (+3), gupapuyngu (+2), banggarla (+2), gurr-goni (+2), ngan’gityemerri (+2), ladji ladji (+2), lamu-lamu (+1), pirlatapa (+1), dyugun (+1), dalabon (+1), ngalakan (+1), doteli (+1), kumaoni (+1), ngayawang (+1), celtic languages (+1), pallanganmiddang (+1), rembarunga (+1), ngardi (+1), barranbinya (+1), ayabadhu (+1), gunya (+1), gudjal (+1), garlali (+1), thaypan (+1), umbindhamu (+1), umbuygamu (+1), gugu badhun (+1), wadjiginy (+1), wergaia (+1), garrwa (+1), worrorra (+1), gugu warra (+1), waray (Australia) (+1), wulguru (+1), flinders island (+1), yorta yorta (+1), yinggarda (+1), djambarrpuyngu (+1), jaru (+1), yulparija (+1), djamindjung (+1), margany (+1), muruwari (+1).

A female common kestrel wards off an attack of a male bird. Picture took by Andreas Trepte, finalist of Picture of the Year.

• In May 24,577 entries were created for 135 languages!

Last month's words

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

• Pages the most improved: this month, greetings for grallaire roi created by Bercours and på (a Danish word) by B Lemeux !
• Pages the most viewed
• Pages modified by the most people

More improvement

• There are 31,677 illustrations (images and videos) in Wiktionary entries, so 187 were added since last month.
• March 31th, French Wiktionary offer 271 thesauri for French ! That's four new ones: fleur , sept , douze and vase
• La page Wiktionnaire:Questions sur les mots a reçu en mai 166 questions, contre 148 en avril et 208 en mars.
• The page Wiktionnaire:Questions sur les mots received 166 questions in May, compared to 148 questions in April, 208 in March.

Detail of a picture of an half-naked woman, tooked by Patrick Subotkiewiez, finalist of Picture of the Year.

• Katy Couprie, Dictionnaire fou du corps , Thierry Magner editions, 2012.
• Graciela Chamorro, Decir el cuerpo. Historia y etnografía del cuerpo en los pueblos Guaraní , Editorial Tiempo de Historia, 2009.

Two books about the words to describe the body, but two very different visions.

In the first one, the terminology of the body stands as a frame for a graphic piece of art. Melting savvy words, curiosity and made-up words, precise anatomical plates, pictures and illustrations made by several techniques: this dictionary is an imaginative and transgressive holdall. Artistic view is everywhere, in the scathing but exact definitions an in the examples, sometimes invented, make this dictionary unique.

The second one is an historical investigation of a language spoken in South America in the 17th century, Guaraní. From those days, Montoya's work is the main one. He wrote a dictionary to help Jesuits to transmit their ideas to these new peoples. Graciela Chamorro, who speaks modern Guaraní fluently , investigated the vocabulary of the body in this historical source, to develop a better understanding of old Guaraní. Montoya's dictionary was not so much poorly-made, but had a lot of ideological bias. Thus, there are no words describing sexual intercourse of eroticism. Such ideas may appear in examples or in old books and were collected for the present work. This investigation include several old sources and gives shape to a lost society.

This two dictionary describe body words but the intention is different and also the way cultures appear. The vocabulary of body is full of taboo and disgust, but human mechanic have always be a source of curiosity. There is a whole literature dedicate to it, with ethnographical of lexicographical perspective. Wiktionary primary use the biological terminology, but notes can be added for historical information. The ethnological description is more for Wikipedia. The imaginary may appears in the quotations, but not on the description. Works like those two dictionaries will stay necessary to have a more sensible experience of the world. — a chronicle by Noé

LexiSession on flowers

Powered by the Tremendous Wiktionary User Group, LexiSessions aims to suggest monthly themes to put all Wiktionaries on the same page. Themes are suggested on Meta and announced every month in several projects.

May Lexisession was on flowers and drive to the creation of chaîne des cœurs‎, colchique and eranthis and the creation of a thesaurus of flower in French. For June, the topic is gigs!

Video This chronicle reviews videos about linguistics and French published during the month. France TV channel Public Sénat uploaded a short show, Les Mots de la politique in which words are described now and with the evolution in the political field. Not new but we missed it: the channel Les questions cons figure out how many words are in a French dictionary, by numbering every entries. And let's conclude with a song! les mots mélangés by Aldebert, with colloquial expressions crossed and mixed in a meaningless gibberish. Games Picture of a Papilio maraho butterfly taken by Peellden, finalist of Picture of the Year. Bouche cousue, monthly results! Bouche cousue is a fantastic word game with words in French. There are two modes: random word and word of the month. In both, words are to be guessed with several attempts at words of a similar lenght. For each try, the game gives how many letters are correct and placed but not which ones. Give it a go! The word of the month for May was platane! Here are the best performances! 1er Noé and Classicardinal (14) 2e egilli (26) Welcome June and a new word to discover!

Fun facts Did the dictionary of the month about the Guaraní language make you curious? Perhaps you would like to know more about this language? Well, that's great, as a team of French researchers have been working over the last six years in order to publish a huge corpus for this language! The project, found at Langas (in French), consisted of the digitisation of documents then subsequent translation from Old Guarani to Modern Guarani, and from Old Spanish to Modern Spanish. Several analyses have been made possible with this corpus, such as the ongoing creation of a diachronic search engine, which allows you to suggest all old spellings of a word from the current spelling in order to understand old texts better, the analysis of the evolution of grammatical systems that are unknown in our languages, and a better understanding of the colonial process, in religious and political aspects. Let's look at two interesting elements of this language. The first one is the evidentiality system. It is used by the speakers to specify the source of a knowledge that they are saying by distinguishing whether they know it from a direct experiment (for example: "it was raining just now, I saw it"), by an intermediary ("it was raining, someone told me"), by inference ("it was raining, the ground is wet") or by a shared global knowledge ("it was raining since the rain season always starts after the village party"). In some languages, such as the Quechua language, these elements are specified only at the beginning of the speech, whereas a French people would say "jadis" or "Les légendes racontent que ..." to specify when the story happens. In other languages, such as the Guarani language, it is mandatory to put the information in all the assertive sentences, like the verb tense in French, otherwise one appears as a dishonest or uneducated person. It is called system, because it is an information that is part of the grammar of the language, that is necessarily expressed. In the February Actualités, we were talking about numerals, actually this is another curious aspect of the Guarani language, which does not indicate at all the plural on the names, but only on the verbs and with two different possibilities! Depending on whether the action has taken place several times at the same time, what is called the internal verbal plurality (I have washed several plates afterwards) or at different times, which is described as an external plurality (I washed several plates at different times.). In both cases, the word to designate the plates will not take a plural mark. It is useless since the information is in the verb! The Guarani language offers many other specific features, that we will describe maybe in another issue of Actualités! — chronicle by Noé