This month, the illustrations will highlight the campaign Photographiez les Outre-mer which took place between 1 and 31 August. This photograph of by Frédéric Ducarme shows a couple of clownfishes, in the Marine Natural Park of Mayotte. You can click on the image to see the whole picture!
Since August 1st, all Wikimedia Foundation websites, including Wiktionaries, support forward secrecy, further protecting the privacy of readers and contributors to these sites by not allowing Internet service providers to know which pages are visited or modified.
Les Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia , French equivalent of Signpost, are celebrating their 200th issue this month with a set of interesting columns to celebrate! Congratulations to their team and good reading!
The famous English dictionary Merriam-Webster announces that he will remove the word love from his dictionary because no definition could possibly do it justice, according to ClickHole, a satirical site that was taken seriously by some colleagues from the English Wiktionary who did not immediately understand that it was false information.
On August 13, Corinne Bouchouchi published an article entitled Mais qu’est devenu ce bon vieux Tancarville ?! [But what happened to good old Tancarville?!] on the Obs website. In this article, she writes about the commercial history of this object which has several names according to the regions, but whose definition tancarville is, it seems, not found in all dictionaries since she quotes the French Wiktionary! The article even takes up the illustration on the Wiktionary page, which we owe to Béotien lambda, and crediting it correctly!
During summer, the pressure of current events is less and the French national press changes face. Summer notebooks appear in the various national dailies, each with sections that would not normally be found there. Thus, the daily Libération tests various activities which go from the British royal label to the shepherdess’s trade, proposes a series on the boats passed to posterity, is interested in these textual perverts that are Madame de Merteuil, Justine and the Count of Monte Cristo before coming to the famous asses of the Louvre. In Le Monde was published a short series entitled Histoires de langue [Language stories]. Muriel Gilbert devotes an article to the [$error errors that became rules] (such as the word nénufar becoming nénuphar in 1935), another to the feminisation of the language (and to the proximity agreement) and a last to the agreement of the [$participant past participle]. And Marion Hérold, in charge of the daily’s correction service, is interested in the dictation contest of the maison d’éducation de la Légion d’honneur, the regional languages in France and the first texts written in this vernacular language that will become French. Exciting, though too brief. Finally, Courrier International translates and publishes a series of articles about the language guardians ranging from Mexican rap to academics teaching ancient languages.
French Wiktionary missing words
For one year, the different language versions of the Wiktionaries have all been linked by a tool called Cognate. This automatically detects the existence of a page with a similar title in other versions and adds all links in the side column. Previously, these links were added by scripts that modified the pages in each project to add the links regularly.
A new interface using this tool was officially released online the 14th of August, the Wiktionary Cognate Dashboard, after months of development by Goran S. Milovanovic, big data expert funded by Wikimedia Deutschland. This interface offers several informations: number of pages shared between two selected Wiktionnaries, Wiktionaries forming connection nodes, a list of words present in the most Wiktionaries, a list of all entries present in one Wiktionary but absent in another, a list of entries present in a large number of Wiktionaries but absent in a specific Wiktionary.
Based on the latter tool, the contributor Otourly has produced a list of missing words in the French Wiktionary, all languages combined. This list, updated daily by him from the automated interface, is kind of a roadmap of the contents that have most interested the contributors in the other projects, and that could therefore be the most important to create here. This is not the content most sought by the readership, but the pages created, which could therefore be of interest to French-speaking readers in the future as well. Between the publication of this list and the publication of this issue of Actualités, over 500 entries have been created from this list by a dozen different people.
Statistics
From July 20 to August 20, 2018
+ 9,216 entries and 104 languages modified to reach 3,333,333 (August 30th) and 4,416 languages with at least one entry.
+ 3,347 entries in French to reach 365,642 lemmas and 542,594 definitions.
+ 4,242 quotations or examples in French to reach 354,450.
+ 8,174 pronunciations (including 1,953 for French) to reach, at August 31th, 100,928 audio pronunciations for 100 languages (including 23,222 for French).
+ 930 illustrative media (pictures and videos) in French Wiktionary pages, to reach 38,392.
+ 2 thesauri to reach 511 thesauri in 55 languages including 345thesauri in French! New thesauri are about sand (by Cbyd) and phonetics in Minnan (by Assassas77).
+ 17 new languages (names in French here): sanie, lepki, kuruáya, lawa de l’Ouest, lolak, lamkang, laomien, nyaheun, ambae de l’Est, proto-germanique, oy, polci, sou, lave, bai du Sud, bai du Nord, kwegu.
Top three languages with most addition after French is Northern Sami (+ 1,195 entries), Esperanto (+ 953 entries) and English (+ 834 entries).
To get out of the summer torpor, a new book announcing the end of the French language has just been published: in Défense et illustration de la langue française aujourd’hui, Michel Serres wants to alert us to “the invasion of our space and our relationships by an Anglophone sabir”.
The article by Aliocha Wald Lasowski, entitled Michel Serres at war with the “Franglish” has the merit of reminding us that the word ordinateur comes from the Littré with a religious definition: one who confers an order of the Church. In 1955, Jacques Perret gave it the meaning we know in a handwritten letter in which he proposed to translate the English word computer : “How about ordinateur [computer]? It is a correctly formed word, which is even found in the Littré as an adjective designating God who puts order in the world.” — a column by Romainbehar
LexiSession about sand
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 August was about sand and gave birth to one thesaurus. The first LexiSession was in August 2016, so this work is two years old!
In France, in the field of law, it is difficult to miss the codes of law published by Dalloz, with its red slices. Editing more than a thousand titles, it is not surprising to also find a book to decode them all, a specialized dictionary. This glossary is updated annually, at the same time as the most common codes, both to follow the aesthetics of the series and to update it by adding terms that have appeared in the discipline in the past year. This month comes out the 26th edition, which contains 6,000 entries, for less than 20 euros, which is cheap compared to other books in the series.
The introduction to the book (in fact, of the 23th edition, which I found by chance) indicates that the book is intended mainly for law students, and that it was born from the diversification of profiles of people interested in this social activity. It is a book that aims to clarify the vocabulary of the discipline and to disseminate the legal standard. But is this lexicon made by lexicographers? Well, no, it is the product of law professors and professionals from different areas of law. The definitions refer to legal codes rather than examples taken from a corpus, and there is no information on how to use terms in a sentence, nor their grammatical categories. However, the definitions are precise and clear even for the layperson of the field that I am.
This other dictionary does not claim to give definitions of all legal terms but focuses on private law. It offers detailed encyclopedic records rather than definitions, not just a sentence but detailing the inclusion of concepts in the discipline. Among the 1,400 entries, most provide references to legal codes but also a bibliography of articles and legal commentaries. This work is regularly updated, here again not by people trained in lexicography but by professionals in the discipline who observe the practices around them. Note also that this work makes the choice not to indicate Latin expressions, instead referring its readership to the Wiktionary!
However, the latter only contains a few 2,000 entries in la catégorie Lexique en français du droit and most of the entries could be improved even further! — a column by Noé
+ 9,216 entries and 104 languages modified to reach 3,333,333 (August 30th) and 4,416 languages with at least one entry.
+ 3,347 entries in French to reach 365,642 lemmas and 542,594 definitions.
+ 4,242 quotations or examples in French to reach 354,450.
+ 8,174 pronunciations (including 1,953 for French) to reach, at August 31th, 100,928 audio pronunciations for 100 languages (including 23,222 for French).
+ 930 illustrative media (pictures and videos) in French Wiktionary pages, to reach 38,392.
+ 2 thesauri to reach 511 thesauri in 55 languages including 345 thesauri in French! New thesauri are about sand (by Cbyd) and phonetics in Minnan (by Assassas77).
+ 17 new languages (names in French here): sanie, lepki, kuruáya, lawa de l’Ouest, lolak, lamkang, laomien, nyaheun, ambae de l’Est, proto-germanique, oy, polci, sou, lave, bai du Sud, bai du Nord, kwegu.
Top three languages with most addition after French is Northern Sami (+ 1,195 entries), Esperanto (+ 953 entries) and English (+ 834 entries).
External stats tools offers each month a list of most viewed pages and pages modified by the most people.
Wiktionnaire:Questions sur les mots [Questions on words] record in August 40 questions compared to 46 in July and 56 in June.
June Actualités mentioned the integration in progress from a specialized vocabulary of cartography and 38 % of those pages have been checked since! Your help is welcome to fulfill this collective task.
A list of expression including animals in French went created but there is no ox in the ditch yet.
and most of the entries could be improved even further!