Wiktionnaire:Actualités/039-juin-2018/en

This month, Lingua Libre has presented its pronunciation recording and uploading interface, and has uploaded several thousands of audio files on Wikimedia Commons and Wiktionary! The goal of this external tool, already presented in the July 2017 Actualités, is to ease the recording of word pronunciation, rather they are French words or from other languages.

Lingua Libre was designed with a special attention to the languages spoken in France and so it allows the linking of audio files with quality data about the people who have recorded them, while keeping their anonymity if they want it. The tool is still in progress, but it will soon enter its phase of mass diffusion, and will clearly improve a kind of contribution to the Wiktionary projects currently forsaken. It will also enable the animation of new contributive workshops, and offer to the Wiktionaries audio files in larger quantities!

• Preview of Lingua Libre
• 
  Choose a profile of speaker…
• 
  Then choose the words you want to record…
• 
  And here we go for the recording session!

This month, the number of examples in the French Wiktionary exceeds 350,000! This is a huge number, but what are we dealing with exactly? The illustrative examples are sentences presented after the definitions and that help the understanding of a meaning, but not only. The examples give information about how to use a word in a sentence, what words can surround it but also the kind of text in which they can appear. They are as useful as the definitions to understand the meaning of a word, but they first attest of the existence of words and their graphic shape, when the graphical shape as to be discussed. The examples are used to attest a use, and as so are a sort of specific source to lexicographical works such as the Wiktionary.

French Wiktionary offers an explanation about what the examples are and a help page to add examples. Because yes, is it necessary to remind it in the Actualités, the Wiktionary is a collaborative project in which all the content can be modified by anyone, including the examples. The choice of the examples is not easy because they have to be useful to the readers without giving an ideological vision, they have to be understandable even if extracted from their context and still be quite short, they have to stand for the diversity of uses without promoting one use over another. All these difficulties give birth to discussions in the project and beyond, in the community of lexicographers. If you have fifteen minutes free, and can read French, we would suggest the reading of the article L’exemple illustratif comme ingrédient microstructurel essentiel d’un dictionnaire monolingue (the illustration example as an essential microstructural element of a monolingual dictionary) by Mostafa BEN ABBAS.

The Wiktionary counts a growing number of examples, added by a growing number of persons, from various sources. It is a specificity of this project not to have established a corpus from which the examples have to be extracted. Any kind of source is eligible, written or oral (but it has to be transcribed), literary or popular, novel or press, scientific literature or vulgar song (for vulgar words, of course). It is hard to mention here every one who perform this volunteer work, but still we have to name François GOGLINS who may have added half of the examples in French Wiktionary. By the way, he says that "the accumulation of examples enables to locate the use of a word in time, and especially to illustrate its use out of its usual language (more abstract or comparative)."

Let's also name Unsui who has developed a measuring tool to give detailed monthly stats for the examples that allows to know for example that 36 % of the pages defining a French word contains at least one example. And to conclude, it is good to know that Le Grand Robert 2017 (one of the main printed French dictionary) offers 325,000 literary quotes and the Trésor de la Langue Français informatisé (academic French online dictionary) 430,000 examples extracted from its corpus. Today the Wiktionary is between these two, and aims at exceeding them before the publication of the next edition of the dictionary of the French Academy. — by Noé

Eggs or mushrooms? This subject remains unidentified! It was photographed in India by Dinesh Valke. Wikimedia Commons also is a collaborative project and your help is welcome to help identifying the subjects photographed!

The terminology commission of the French Committee for Cartography (CFC) offered a partnership in which its online dictionary was transferred to the French Wiktionary by JackPotte. The CFC is an association created in 1958 with the intention to contribute to the development of cartographic methods and techniques, to promote the research and exchanges in this field. A publication supported by this association is Glossaire de la cartographie (Glossary of cartography) written in 1990 and that the commission wanted available on the internet. Rather than to host it on its own website, the commission has preferred to include it in an online collaborative dictionary. The French Wiktionary now has a category Lexicon of cartography in French containing several hundreds of words!

If you want to participate, the list of the automatic importations still needs some human check, in order to control the conflicts with pre-existing definitions. See the category Definitions imported from CFC to be checked to contribute to the integration of these new specialized definitions.

An unidentified sponge photographed by Peter Southwood.

It was decided that the links to Wikipedia, Wikiquote, Wikivoyage, Wikisource and Wikiversity that appear with templates now add all the pages that use those templates in dedicated categories. This allows:

• the detection of potential mistakes in the languages to which they are linked
• the use of these categories in the cross-categories search tool Petscan
• the creation of graphs indicating the number of pages offering a link towards external projects, depending on the language of these projects. For example, for the links towards Wikipedia:

This graph shows that the template pointing to Wikipedia is used on many entries, but this template uses the parameter lang=fr (language is French) if there is no other information, so it can sometimes be used in entries in foreign languages, or point to entries that do not exist in the encyclopedia. One way or another, more than 140,000 French Wiktionary pages point to French Wikipedia! — by Otourly

A team of inspectors have fined some fish sellers on Marseille's Vieux-Port because they did not give the Latin name of their fishes. The news shook this small traditional market place where the catch is sold directly as soon as the boat lands. Often only the price is indicated, and sometimes it is even neglected. However, since 2014, a european guideline imposes the indication of the commercial name and scientific name of the species, the production or fishing method, the geographical origin, if the fish have been frozen and an expiration date. This is becoming difficult for people who sell the basic ingredients for bouillabaisse, a dish made of a mix of several fishes that are not sold for any other use. — by Romainbehar

An unidentified marine animal photographed by LBM1948.

Jean Richepin, Glossaire argotique, in La Chanson des gueux, 1881

Poetry with slang and a glossary to explain those words, what could be better to study the language used centuries ago? This is what Jean Richepin did in La Chanson des gueux. There are several hundreds of French slang words from the XIX^th century, with their grammatical classification and their equivalent in current French.

If some of these words are still used nowadays with the same meaning, such as daronne — and by the way, this challenge the etymology of this word given in the French Wiktionary — many of them don't have a page on the Wiktionary yet! Even better, all of the words of the glossary are used in the poem collection: there is at least one illustrative example for each word.

So let's thank Richepin who not only wrote nice poetry, but also gave us a useful tool for us XXI^st century readers, and a window on the language 150 years earlier. — by Dara

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

• Linguists Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch from the blog Ling Thusiasm broadcast on May 18th 2017 a podcast in English (available on Youtube) about the difficulties of the creation of a dictionary.

• Romain Filstroff, aka Monté, from the Youtube channel Linguisticae broadcast on June 28th 2018 a short Youtube video with a meditative side about semantic satiation and tongue-twisters.

Boosted by the Tremendous Wiktionary User Groupe, 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 June was about skin and gave birth to the thesaurus about skin to which Cbyd, Rapaloux, Automatik and Djiboun contributed!

For July, the suggested theme is sauces!