Wiktionnaire:Actualités/030-septembre-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 30 - septembre 2017

The team in charge of the website Linguee has announced the release of a new free automatic translator called "DeepL". For the time being, it allows translation between seven languages: German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch and Polish. It is presented as being more efficient than its competitors.

• An article in the newspaper Ouest-France reviews the different representations and definitions of the clitoris, including the Wiktionary in its collection process. However, the proposed definition does not appear to be much more precise than the ones in the printed dictionaries.

• Le Figaro is horrified by the absence of the word coulrophobia in the printed dictionaries, while the clowns phobia is described as such in the Wiktionary since 2010.

• Le Soir, a Belgium newspaper, for its part, is interested in adding the word zinneke into dictionaries and is affected by the fact that it has not yet found zieverer (or zieverier) which is present in French Wiktionary since 2011.

The dictionary Le Petit Robert celebrates its 50th anniversary and it is valiantly resistant to the Wiktionary. It is the title of an article in the newspaper Le Matin Dimanche.

• The Turkish Wiktionary has just changed its logo to adopt a new version of the English Wiktionary logo, without the ochre tiles.

A fleuron by an anonymous author, excerpted during the digitisation of the book Guerino detto il Meschino by Andrea da Barberino.

Fleuron excerpted during the digitisation of Picturesque New Guinea by John William Lindt.

Among the thousand riches of the Wiktionary is the Questions on Words page, which allows anyone to ask questions about the meaning of a word, or to find a term from a definition. It is a space of sharing that works thanks to a dozen of volunteers who respond politely and humorously to the many questions asked, sometimes pertinent but often written by people a little lost in browsing the Wiktionary website, or confusing the Wiktionary with Wikipedia. This page is accessible from the left menu and works as a complement to the Suggest a word page, which allows you to suggest a missing word in the Wiktionary by reporting a quotation to certify its use.

The Questions on words page forms an interface with the readership, allowing both questioners and answerers to learn all sorts of things about words and filling gaps in the Wiktionary. It is a space that allows us to know the needs of readers, and to guide creation towards less well-rounded areas. Reading this month's discussions, you may discover that the act of splitting a diamond is the clivage (in French), that the wordplay if pacem para umbrellum screw pacem has been reused enough to have a page to describe it, that is still not known how to call two people who wear the same clothes nor how to call someone that is good only during holidays or that Lady dye is a tying dye brand of South Africa! If you have any scholarly questions, or fun remarks to share, don't hesitate to participate!

From mid-August to mid-September (from 08/20/2017 to 09/20/2017)

• French entries increased by 3,686 and quotations increased by 2,144. There are now 357,235 lemmas, 530,718 definitions and 329,965 quotations or examples.
• The three other languages which progressed the most are Northern Sami (+ 5,655 entries), English (+ 1,952 entries) and Welsh (+ 1,838 entries).
• Four languages were added in the project (here with French names): celtibère (+3), bukusu (+1), laki (+1), tangam (+1) and kurde du Sud (+1).
• In September 17,044 entries were created for 100 languages!

New lexicons

• Categories for handisport in French, for triathlon in Italian and for handisport in Italian.
• Creation of Internal plural forms in Breton.

Words of the month

Statistics provided by Wikiscan:

• Most popular pages
• Most modified pages

Miscellaneous

• There is 32,597 illustrations (images and videos) in French Wiktionary entries and 316 were added since last month.

Up to the 30th of September 2017, French Wiktionary offer 285 thesauri in French and a total of 429 thesauri in 54 languages!
Four new thesauri this month: paix , assimilation , linguistique and savon .
Assassas77 created the first thesaurus in Tagalog, about cooking!

The Questions on words page (WT:QM) records in September 196 questions, compare to 141 in August, 124 in July, 112 in June.

SMS dico, Éditions Michel Lafon, 2001.

Fleuron extracted from Trente poésies russes by Paul Collin.

In the 2000s, a new mode of communication emerged, the SMS, characterized by a mainly phonetic writing and sequences of symbols representing the sender's emotions if viewed at 90°. Taking advantage of this enthusiasm, a French telephony company and a fast food chain created these small dictionaries for pictograms, which have nothing to envy at our current emojis.

With 3 dictionaries of 100 pages of 10x10cm, their list of pictograms far exceeds all those ever used. Starting from the usual :-/ I'm skeptical or :'-) I cry with laughter, we arrive very quickly at V:o| Guy not understanding why no one wants to talk to him without suspecting that he has an alligator on his head or (°>FX8< Bald female vampire wearing a monocle, with a long nose, one teeth broken and trimmed with a butterfly knot.

While some pictograms, like the previous examples, seem esoteric, others show a certain logic of construction element by element. For example, we have *<(:-) Santa Claus and, just after that, *<(8-)= Santa Claus skiing with a tie. We can see here that Santa Claus is only a basic cheerful face :-) to which we have added a cap with pompon *<; we can then deduce that the eyes in 8 represent a pair of ski goggles, and that = represents the tie.

Nevertheless, we also find symbols that can have several meanings when placed in the same place, which induces either difficulty or polysemia: :*( I weep softly following :,-( To cry, * indicates a small tear; B*) I have the moustache and fancy glasses, B being the fancy glasses, * means a moustache; :* Kisses and |* A kiss (with closed eye), * means a kiss.

As for the construction of the work itself, it is divided into chapters: a majority are common to all the dictionary volumes (Have you seen your face for the facial pictograms, Animals for the animals or Abbreviations for the sentences in SMS language, on which I do not dwell in this chronicle), while some of them are kind of focus (Cowboys seen from aircraft or Climbing on the wall, which gives rise to the least reusable pictograms).

In summary, this dictionary fulfils its function as an advertising medium: funny enough to be kept on your shelf (and even reviewed in the Actualités of the Wiktionary!) without being relevant.

— a chronicle by Dara

French Wikiconvention in October!

Coming soon: the second French WikiConvention in Strasbourg from 19 to 21 October 2017!

With a wonderful program on Friday, October 20:

• 13h30: Wiktionary: beyond the dictionary, an all-public presentation of the Wiktionary content
• 17h: Nature of sources and neutrality in the Wiktionary projects, a discussion on the specificity of the descriptive approach to language
• 18h: a meeting with contributors of the Wiktionary projects or interested people

And as a bonus, the day before, on Thursday, October 19, at 14h30, a presentation of Lingua Libre, a project presented in last month's Actualités.

If you can go to Strasbourg, you will also have the chance to meet part of the Actualités editorial team!

A fleuron by an anonymous author, excerpted during the digitisation of the book The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe.

Videos

This chronicle reviews videos about linguistics and French published during the month, do not hesitate to add videos and channels that you find!

• Elles comme Linguistes : this time, a topic that interests us closely, since it is talking about how to enter a word in the dictionary. A quick explanation that does not forget the Wiktionary by the way!
• Linguisticae : a long video to come back to the French president's incorrect remarks about Villers-Cotterêts.
• Langue de Cha’ : She returns with a new video on the history of writing in Korea.
• Andrea Heckler is an American woman living in France who offers several videos in English, notably on English words used in French and English words whose the use in French seems weird.

LexiSession on peace

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

September LexiSession was about peace and was an opportunity to create a thesaurus of peace in French. Plenty words still can be added, so you are welcome to contribute to this theme in the future!

October theme is punishment!

Let us finish this issue with a cul-de-lampe by an anonymous author, excerpted during the digitisation of the book Նոր-Ջուղայի դպրոցները by Տիգրան Աբգարյանց.