Wiktionnaire:Actualités/040-juillet-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 40 - juillet 2018

Last year it was a pair of ravens; this year a pair of frogs wins the Commons Picture of the year competition! Congratulations to its photographer Renato Augusto Martins!

• The Thai SWiktionary community has just agreed to create a space for thesauri on their Wiktionary. The technical follow-up is tracked on Phabricator.

• On July 25th, the French Wikipedia community considered that the Wikipedia article one-letter word mainly written by Racconish is a good article.

• During this highly footballistic month, journalists even did the etymology of the word football in european languages and especially in Croatia, whose team ended as a finalist, that for historical reasons calls this sport nogomet, from noga (leg) and metati (to put, to place), a particularity shared with Bosnia and Slovenia.

• The Commons Picture of the year competition just ended, and in August will take place a competition dedicated to overseas.

The three definitions of populism converging towards the ocean of the people… Or perhaps simply three zebras. 158 votes in the Picture of the year competition 2017 for this picture by Alandmanson!

In an article called « How to use the word "populist" properly » published in the French newspaper Le Monde on July 4th, Franck Nouchi, mediator of the newspaper, publicly answers to the question of a reader looking for an accurate definition for this word that more and more often appears in the pages of this newspaper. And it is far from being the only person to react to this increase of policies considered as populist by journalists, many of these people complaining by email.

The mediator starts by refering to two major books on this subject, then quotes Ernesto Laclau : "Populism is a concept as elusive as recurrent". He then directly questions his jounalist colleagues. Thomas Wieder, former chief of the political service, gives three periods and three definitionsː one for XIX^eth century Russia, one for the 40ies Latin America (peronism), and one for today, "a political thought that relies on the vision of the people facing elites, and a promotion of nationalism". He adds that it appears under different shapes, through different political parties not only considered as on the extremities. Jérôme Gautheret, correspondent in Roma, agreesː "I work in a country where all political forces could, more or less, be called populists". So he avoids "writing “populism” : it makes things complicated without being accurate". Eventually, Sylvie Kauffman, editorial director, concludes that populism describes emergent protean movements that we don't know yet how to define. — by Romainbehar

If we talk about populism… What do the Wiktionaries say about it? Following the article above, I compared the political definitions of "populism", corresponding to the third definition of Le Monde’s mediator, in different languages of the Wiktionary.

Thomas Wieder gives the following definition: "a political thought that relies on the vision of the people facing elites, and a promotion of nationalism". We see three main elementsː

• rely on the people,
• face the elites,
• nationalism, patriotism.

Let's see some european languages, chosen because they have graphies close to the French to avoid alienation of meaning and use of the word. (If you are speaker of these languages, do not hesitate to improve the translations!)

Definition	« rely on the people »	« face the elites »	« nationalism »	Other idea
français Discours politique favorable aux classes défavorisées, et souvent hostile aux élites. Political discourse favorable to the underprivileged classes, and often hostile to the elites.
suédois politisk rörelse som vädjar till folkets instinkter snarare än till eftertänksamhet och välgrundat förnuft political movement appealing to the instincts of the people rather than to thoughtfulness and well-founded reason				is not based on a thoughtful ideology
portugais estilo de fazer política, que consiste no uso de promessas demagogas, insuflações regionalistas, e atribuição de rótulos aos adversários eleitorais, com vistas a criar um clima de messianismo e segregacionismo político, de modo a beneficiar o seu praticante style of making politics, which consists of the use of demagogic promises, regional blowups, and labeling of electoral opponents, in order to create a climate of messianism and political segregationism, in order to benefit its practitioner				demagogy, divide and rule
anglais A political doctrine or philosophy that proposes that the rights and powers of ordinary people are exploited by a privileged elite, and supports their struggle to overcome this.
allemand Politik, abwertend: volksnahe oft demagogische Politik mit dem Ziel vor allem den Massen zu gefallen Politics, derogatory: popular demagogic politics with the goal of pleasing mainly the masses				demagogy
italien atteggiamento o movimento politico, sociale, culturale che ritiene il popolo unico depositario di valori positivi political, social, cultural attitude or movement that considers the unique people to be the repository of positive values
polonais popieranie idei politycznych i ekonomicznych, które są w danym momencie najbardziej popularne w celu łatwego zdobycia poparcia bez zwracania uwagi na rzeczywistą możliwość zrealizowania obietnic, zwłaszcza pod kątem finansowym supporting political and economic ideas that are currently the most popular in order to gain easy support without paying attention to the real possibility of making promises, especially in financial terms				demagogy
finnois poliittinen toiminta, jonka tarkoituksena on edustaa tavallisen kansalaisen tarpeita ja toiveita political activity designed to represent the needs and wishes of ordinary citizens

If most of (although not allǃ) the definitions mention the rely on the people, which is consistent with the latin origin of the word, the opposition to the elite is not systematical, and the notion of nationalism is never clearly quoted. On the contrary, the idea of demagogy as the exploitation of the passions of the mass in order to earn its trust without necessarily fulfilling commitments, is often associated to populism.

But as for the similar study I did on the word "peace" in the December 2017 Actualités, the definitions do not always mirrors the use that is made of a word. In French for example, populism often is associated to nationalism (people from here before people from elsewhere). So you should not always trust what you read on the internetǃ — by Dara, on July 9th 2018

Just like this shadow, the French Wiktionary keeps on extending. 133 votes on the Picture of the year competition 2017 for this picture by Dietmar Rabich!

From June 20th to July 20th 2018

• French got 3,181 more entries and 1,970 more quotes or examples. It now has 364,712 lemmas, 540,889 definitions and 352,178 quotes or examples.
• The three other languages that have developed the most are Northern Sami (+ 6,632 entries), Esperanto (+ 5,575 entries), and Gallic (+ 427 entries).
• Thirty-three new languages in the French Wiktionary this month: Kendem (+1), Kaxararí (+1), Koroshi (+1), Kwaami (+1), Kayabi (+1), Korop (+1), Krenak (+1), Kupto (+1), Kom (Inde) (+1), Konni (+1), Khaling (+1), Kilen (+1), Khamti (+1), Korku (+1), Kung (+1), Mahali (+1), Paraguayan Guarani (+1), Koireng (+1), Ngombale (+1), Chiriguano (+1), Germanic languages (+1), Kol (Bangladesh) (+1), Rahambuu (+1), Colac (+1), Koda (+1), Tangale (+1), Kodeoha (+1), Aurá (+1), Xingú Asuriní (+1), lKomo (+1), Krahô (+1), Amundava (+1) and Anambé (+1).
• There are 18,162 new entries in 210 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 38,118 illustrative medias (pictures and videos) in the French Wiktionary, meaning 656 more than last month.

• On July 31st 2018, the French Wiktionary gathers 344 thesauri in French and in total 509 thesauri in 55 languages!
  Six new thesauri this month: sauce (by Jpgibert), vine and almond (both by Stephane8888), telephone (by Noé), mail by Eiku and sauce in Minnan by Assassas77.

• On July 31st, the French Wiktionary counts 98,658 audio pronouciations in 100 languages (5,904 more than last month!) among which 22,008 in French.

• In July, there were 46 questions in Wiktionnaire:Questions sur les mots (WT:QM), when there were 56 in June and 65 in May.

• The new version of the Wikimedia statistics website now gives the number of pages seen by linguistic version of a Wikimedia project country by country. Interestingly, the Chinese Wiktionary is more consulted in France than in China (or any other country). You can also learn that since 2017, the consultation from a mobile phone has exceeded the one from computer. Contribution is far more important from registered users rathan than from anonymous, and this is partly due to the use of scripts that enhance the creation of verb conjugation pages for example.

Neology and dictionaries

Picture of Margaret Hamilton in 1969 and restaured by Adam Cuerden: 352 votes on the Picture of the year 2017 competition!

We often deal with new words in the Wiktionary, because language evolves and words can be integrated faster in the Wiktionary than in printed books, even if they are updated each year. Especially, printed dictionaries willingly do not include all new words because they lack space. So they are forced to a sorting mehtodology with criteria indicating the stabiliry of the words such as their frequency (number of appearances), their distribution (number of different sources), their orthographic variation, their semantic stability (by observing the context of appearance). New shapes are easier to identify than new meanings of a preexisting word.

New words mainly appear in specialized fields, while standard dictionaries are generalist. They often have fewer technical words, such as marine or economy vocabulary, because these terms can also be found in general works. But are dictionaries written for readers or for writers? Are the readers consulted in the choice of the words to keep and to describe? How to present the evolution of meanings across time in a few words, so that it is easy to understand a meaning depending on a context? It is these questions that Jean-François Sablayrolles, researcher specialized in neology, try to answer in a short but interesting universitary article in French about neology. An article even more interesting as it mentions the Wiktionary several timesǃ

And he is far from being the only one to worry about these words. Neologists track and study this part of human creativity. These specialists are interested in the production, the perception and the circulation of neologisms. Let's spend a little time on two different approaches. On one hand, there are planification organisms that create new words to fit to the evolution of society. In France, it is the Commission d’enrichissement de la langue française that publishes propositions in the Journal officiel and in the FranceTerme database. On the other hand, research groups hunt down new words appearing in the press or in litterature. For French, two projects are developing in parallelː Néoveille and Logoscope. The first one is a tool conceived for the scientific community whereas Logoscope is more open to the outside. It is a project that is developing jointly with the Wiktionary, towards which the Logoscope sends for the definitions of the new words detected. In exchange, the person in charge of the project, Christophe Gérard, offers a list of neologisms not described in the Wiktionary yet. This can help the Wiktionary to stay at the forefront of the language descriptionǃ — by Noé

Videos

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

• On July 12th Lyokoï offered an evening of live contribution using Lingua Libre, tool presented in last month's Actualités.

• PseudoSkull, a contributor to the English Wiktionary, made a live contribution session on July 14th.

• Romain Filstroff, aka Monté from the Youtube channel Linguisticae, offered this month a video about the language Farsi Hijra, a cryptolect used by a transgender community in India and Pakistan, and a video about Celtic languages.

Dictionary of the month

Hervé Lossec, writer of the dictionary of the month.

Hervé Lossec, Les Bretonnismes, Le français tel qu’on le parle en Bretagne, Morlaix, Skol Vreizh, 2016 (1st edition in 2010), 104 pages, 2 volumes.

It is holidays for most of usǃ And I often go to Britanny, where part of my ancestors are from. There, I cannot stop myself from buying books about languages. This year, I found an essential one about the French talked here.

Hervé Lossec is passionated by the Breton and French languages. At the crosroads of these two are bretonnisms in French and francisms in Breton. Not really being skilled in Breton (but I still have reference dictionaries, just in case…), I will mostly deal with his book about bretonnisms in French. Short, accessible and written with method, this book explains how Breton is expressed in local French. Rather it is through vocabulary or by the organization of words, many Bretons people speak French with a slight local touch, even more because they speak Breton without having studied it.

Indeed, a large part of the author's message is about the ridiculous contradication that encourages people to "speak French properly" while preventing them from knowing their mother language better (here Breton, but this is valid for all of the other regional languages in France), the result being that these people are inable to distinguish them both, as they do not know the second one well enough to distinguish the turns of phrase that come from it and that should not be used in the first one.

To bad for academism, French is locally tinted with unique colors where you can say that the sofas are faciles (easy), that ginger people are covered with pikoù-panez and where you can friquer potatoes. As well, you can go to bed with the doctor for fifteen days, but this is only because the preposition with has the meaning of because of, one of its numerous meanings. But it is also the case for other prepositions which are used with other meanings because of their litteral translations from Breton.

A real pleasure to read and a mine of information about a French different from the others. — by Lyokoï

LexiSession about sauces

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 July was about sauces and gave birth to two thesauriǃ

For August, the theme is sand!

The royal villa Kuha Karuhas pictured by BerryJ.