Wiktionnaire:Actualités/037-avril-2018/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 37 - avril 2018

Detail of a lapis lazuli pictured by Ra'ike. You can click on the picture to display it totally.

Piece of an augelite in a quartz, taken by Carles Millan.

• As a joke of April 1st, the Républicain Lorrain announced that the platt language would become the first language of instruction in Moselle. Beyond humour, this newspaper regularly writes about cultural gatherings around this France language.

• The newspaper Le devoir published on April 16th an article by Anabel Cossette Civitella, Le dictionnaire papier, en voie d’extinction ? in which several lexicographers are interviewed and quickly tell the history of the relationship between dictionaries and the Internet, concluding that dictionary publishing is still doing rather well, mainly thanks to schoolchildren.

• In a column from the newspaper Le Soir, Michel Francard writes about floating agreements, and notably that of roues arrières (rear wheels), giving the suggestions indicated in various works, ending his retrospective with the Wiktionary!

• In a research article in French, Radka Mudrochová studies the apparition of the words hippie, yuppi, buppie, guppie, huppie, cheekie, luppie, muppie, scuppie, yettie, yuccie and yummie in French and Czech, relying on the Wiktionary amongst others. Only a few of these words are defined for now, so you should rather read the article to understand them !

• The Mozilla Francophone Twitter account (@mozilla_fr) advertised a tool called contextual Wiktionary. If you want to do a Wiktionary research wherever you are on the internet and with a bare click, this extension is made for you!

• An article by Dene-Hern Chen published on April 25th on the BBC website, The cost of changing an entire country’s alphabet, deals with Kazakhstan and the current change. A cultural choice that comes with shakings at every level of society.

In French, verbs take different shapes depending several parameters, several grammatical classes. The main variations are due to the subject person (I, you, he, she, we, they), to the tense (past, present, future) and to the the voice (active or passive). In other languages, other parameters can be used: the object of the sentence, indicated by an independent pronoun in French; verbal aspect that indicate an exact moment of the action and that is considered as perphrastic in French (start to…, to be about to…, to end with…); negation and others.

All of these verb shapes is what we call conjugation. The canonic shape, the only one to be in a printed dictionary is the citation shape and in French it is the infinitive, a nominal shape of the verb. In the Wiktionary, it is on the pages named after the infinitives that you will find the most information, amonst which the definitions.

The other shapes, the endings, also have entries! There are many benefits to have pages for the other shapes: tell their story when they are different, for example if there is suppletion, meaning when several verbs merge; improve the anagram research; allow the use of the Wiktionary to create spell checkers.

Besides the multiple pages for each verb shape, there also is in the French Wiktionary more than 32,000 conjugation arrays! Equivalent to the content of books souch as the Bescherelle, these arrays give synthetic views of every shape of a verb, with written representations of the pronouciation. These notations in international phonetic alphabet should be improved with audio files, but it would be a huge work that is still only beginning. Notes are also added for defective verbs, for which only some shapes can be used, such as sourdre.

On a technical perspective, these arrays are created thanks to many templates, that are schematic representations tha ease the layout. In the French Wiktionary, the list of all the the conjugation templates can make you realize the huge work that has been performed to be able to offer arrays as precise and easy to implement as possible, which also makes it easier to create an array as soon as there is a new verb.

To discover them, you just have to click on the links that are on the pages that define a verb shape, a small link (Conjugaison) that many readers may not see. This might be the weak spot of this aspect of the Wiktionary: a very low visibility for this content that equals commercial websites with a similar content! If you have any idea to improve it, do not hesitate! — by Noé

Fragment of amber pictured by Wolfgang Sauber.

From March 20th to April 20th 2018

• French got 2,293 more entries and 4,214 more quotes or examples. It now has 362,627 lemmas, 536,111 definitions and 345,894 illustrative quotes or examples.
• The three other languages that have developed the most are Northern Sami (+ 3,319 entries), Esperanto (+ 3,151 entries) and Portuguese (+ 839 entries).
• 39 new languages in the French Wiktionary this month: Barombi (+3), Kawe (+2), Wauyai (+2), Duvle (+2), Baima (+2), Legenyem (+2), Birri (+1), Bellari (+1), Baraadu (+1), Biritai (+1), Central Nicobarais (+1), Great Nicobar (+1), Biga (+1), Talur (+1), Bih (+1), Rasawa (+1), Mato Grosso Arara (+1), Chakali (+1), Awera (+1), Avá-canoeiro (+1), Guaja (+1), Arutani (+1), Saponi (+1), Chocho (+1), Teressa (+1), Apiaká (+1), Avava (+1), Iau (+1), Western Totonaque (+1), Chaura (+1), Fayu (+1), Eotilé (+1), Waigeo (+1), Ebrié (+1), Edopi (+1), Matbat (+1), Darmiya (+1), Yuchi (+1) and Demisa (+1)
• There are 13,246 new entries in 126 languages modified!

Words of the month

The pages of external stats tell us:

• what are the most viewed pages
• what are the pages modified by the most people

Other evolutions

• There are 36,865 illustrative medias (pictures and videos) in the French Wiktionary, meaning 592 more than last month.
• On April 30th 2018, the French Wiktionary gathers 329 thesauri in French and in total 490 thesauri in 54 languages!
  Six new thesauri this month : mine (filon) (by Lyokoï and many others), housing (by Noé), parquet (by Nonopoly), geometry, Euclidian geometry (both by Supreme assis) and mine in minnan by Assassas77.

• On April 30th, the French Wiktionary counts 89,728 audio pronunciations in 100 languages (61 more than last month) among which 19,872 in French.

• In June, there were 49 questions in Wiktionnaire:Questions about words (WT:QM), when there were 46 in March and 65 in February.

New categories

This month, the website has inventoried more than a hundred therapies in the thesaurus of therapies. Some of them belong to unconventionnal medicine.

Piece of jasper with dendrites, photographed by Lech Darski.

Fun fact

A fun fact of the French language this time. Years of existence were required to the Wiktionary to at last find words with several ligatures: œ or æ or both. This is due to the fact that these characters are rather rare in French, so having them twice in one word imposes particular conditions. And indeed all the words containing two o, ethel, or « œ », are words built by the merge of two words, identical or different, already containing the aforementionned character. The list is short and here it is: sœur de cœur, cœur de bœuf, œil de bœuf / œil-de-bœuf and nœud-nœud. But this is not how it happenned for the only word found with two a, ash or « æ ». This word is Ææa and comes from Greek. It comes from Αἰαία, another name for the Circé island. « æ » replaces αί. Identical in English, this graph with two ligatures is an archaism from a long time ago. Nowadays in French, and also since 1775 in the Dictionnaire abrégé de la Fable by Chompré, it is rather written Éa. Easy and short, but English-speakers preferred Aeaea.

Amongst these quirks, the worst of them, the word Œniadæ . It is the only known French word with both ligatures. This is strange, and due to the fact that the latin word was not Frenchified, which would have given « Œniades ». Yes, sometimes the process does not go all the way… Still I hope this fun fact will have made you want to search for archaisms in your language and, who knows, maybe prove that exceptions are not really unique… — by Lyokoï

LexiSession about mine

Boosted by the Tremendous Wiktionary User Group, the LexiSessions aim at offering monthly themes to dynamize all of the Wiktionaries at a time. The themes are suggested on Meta and announced on the Wikidémie, the main talk area of the French Wiktionary.

The LexiSession of April was about mine and gave birth to the thesaurus about mine and to a live contribution session by Lyokoï!

For May, the theme does not strike, it is strike!

End of the April Actualités: word minors strike.

This rubric offers a review of videos about lexicography, linguistics and French language published or discovered this month.

• FranceInfo offers an interview with linguist Aurore Vincenti about the dictionary she recently published about street words.

• Elles comme linguistes: Samantha Ruvoletto invites Marie Flesch, a PhD student expert on the subject, to talk about Emojis

• Linguisticae summarizes basic notions of what is a word and publishes a series of videos about the ethymology of last names and places' names, without clearly explaining the process of knowledge building.

• A very short video by the channel Monsieur presents autonomasia in French.

• Lyokoï keeps on doing live contribution on his YouTube channel: on April 12th on words linked to drunkenness and on April 26th on the thesaurus about mine. This video is online here: À la mine !! On va creuser des mots ! #LetsContribute4. Other live contributions are planned and will be announced on the Wikidémie.