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Wiktionnaire:Actualités/037-April-2018

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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
Picture of a blue stone.

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

Highlights

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.
  • 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!

Conjugations

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

Stats

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:

Other evolutions
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 [e.nja.de]. 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.

Dictionary of the month

Alain Foucault, Jean-François Raoult, Dictionnaire de Géologie, Dunod, 2005, ISBN 978-2-10049-071-4

Following some people's insistence, it is time for me to surrender… My first dictionary, not the first one I had in my hands, but the first one I bought with my own money, is the Dictionary of Geology written by Alain Foucault and Jean-François Raoult. I bought it during my geoscience studies and it was very helpful. It is a particular dictionary because it does not stop to only one science's notions. Indeed, geology today is far from being a close system and it exchanges with the infinitely small, with chemistry and particles physics in mineralogy, and also with infinitely big, astrophysics for planetology. So a good geology dictionary has to describe large fields of science.

Focussing especially on a tool for understanding, Foucault and Raoult's dictionary is essential if you discover or work in this field. It only describes words used in French, mentions the different ways to write a word when they exist and regularly add some encyclopedic notions when they are necessary to understand the definition. It also automatically gives an English traduction, one or more if there are shades in the meaning.

I took this dictionary to almost all of my field experiments, it suffered water and some pink stuff i could never identify; it is warped and torn and many would have thrown it away already. But I think I will keep it for a long time. Because it made me love words and their description. And I only recently read the introduction (one page and a half, efficient writers) and understood the vision of a « useful » description of the language. This dictionary is not made for lexicographers, it really is made for geologists and passionates: by them and for them.

The book gathers corrections and add-ons of many people thanked in the introduction, proving that a collective work was achieved. But it is also at the end of this introduction that we learn that Jean-François Raoult died in 1987, not long before the third edition of this dictionary and that since then Alain Foucault still keeps his friend's name as first writer for the following editions. Someday I would like to meet the author of this dictionary, because there are few things about the story of this work and it would deserve some extra lines about it in here… — by Lyokoï

Videos

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.
  • 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.

Anciens numéros


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