Interlinear books are bilingual translations where the original has a translation right below each word or expression. Try them out on Interlinear Books.
For multilingual verb conjugation, try CoolJugator - a tool that can currently conjugate in dozens of different languages. It also recognizes forms and provides examples for each verb.
And these are real articles, not bot-created ones. At the moment it looks like this:
A few articles:
Came across this page yesterday from the Portuguese Wikipedia offering suggestions for editors for expressions that avoid being either too Brazilian or European. Some of the suggestions are there simply to avoid using either ô or ó:
Instead of autônomo or autónomo, use: autárquico, independente, livresome others are neutral but much longer:
Instead of açougue or talho, use: local de venda de carnewhile others are just as short neutral expressions:
Instead of puxa-saco or engraxador, use: bajulador, aduladorToo bad the list is so short as a list at least ten times this size would have made a great reference. A good pt-pt dictionary will show when an expression is European or Brazilian upon looking it up, but a list of this nature I have yet to see anywhere else. Read more...
The following are the results of an interesting test that took about 15 minutes to do, one that I assumed would not work but actually turned out some pretty interesting data. The test was as follows: count the number of users on a Wikipedia that claim some sort of German language proficiency, and then use that number compared with the total number of users for a rough gauge of how much interest / ability there is in German by country. Some Wikipedias like Czech simply did not seem to use these user tags, but most did, and the results actually came into line with what one might expect:
Small link roundup again today:
--- As of a few days ago the Italian Wikipedia has 1 million articles.
--- Asteroid 2012 DA14 will be one of the closest flybys we've ever seen, and in addition to this it is a particularly large object: 50 metres in diameter compared to our usual 5 - 10 metres or so. This combination of close distance and large size makes it an interesting enough encounter that NASA has just released a video on the flyby.
--- This article in French says that German is more and more popular in schools...in Senegal.
If you've visited Wikipedia this week you may have noticed the following:
Today's links are:
--- This National Geographic article on Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan. While I assume I would still prefer Almaty for its larger size and better climate, if this happens then I would consider living in Astana for a time:
With the core of the capital near completion, Nazarbayev has ordered his architects to explore the possibility of building another huge tent that would shelter a climate-controlled "indoor city" of 15,000 people.I've always thought controlling a city's climate makes sense, and doing so would not necessarily require a perfect 20C temperature every day. Massive forestation for windy cities is one easy example of how a climate can be moderated, and simply connecting more areas through underground tunnels is an easy way to 'paraterraform' parts of them. There are quite a few examples of subway stations that are connected by underground malls, for example.
„1 нова статия“ — между 1 и 15 март 2012 г. ще се проведе инициативата „1 нова статия“. Целта на проекта е с общи усилия, в рамките на две седмици, Българската Уикипедия да се разшири значително. Начинът, по който това ще стане, е като всеки, който посети БГ Уикипедията между 1 и 15 март, напише по една нова статия. За повече информация и все още липсващи статии в Българската Уикипедия, посетете страницата на инициативата.The gist of the campaign is this: if you visit the Bulgarian Wikipedia between those dates, please write a new page. The current number of articles is 126,000+, and shouldn't be too different in three weeks.
Because of this:
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| Die Neamţ-klooster in Roemenië. |
If you go on the Bulgarian Wikipedia today you'll see this image:
A summary of what I've come across over the past few days:
A Latin - English interlinear text. These literal interlinear translations are my favourite way to read a language I know a certain amount of but am far from fluent in, and even more so with a language like Latin with a fairly flexible word order and a lot of declensions. More modern textbooks should have sections like these, possibly with English in red and a pair of red glasses attached if you want to try the text without the translation first.
More on Afrikaans at the universities of Pretoria and Stellenbosch: Pretoria here, Stellenbosch here.
An article here on Spain's recognition of exceptional Spanish-language programs (educational programs that is, not TV) in the United States.
The Serbian Wikipedia right now has this article on the front page:
Kind of cat busy today so here are some links that are taking up room on the top of Chrome right now:
An article here from the Globe & Mail on Georgia, the first in a series. It begins with Svaneti.
Wikipedia in Latin asks us today if we know that "...anno 1868 primum textum lingua Protoindoeuropaea (sc. Fabulam Schleicheri) scriptum esse?" (the first text in Proto-Indo-European, Schleicher's Fable, was written in 1868?)
An article here from Space.com talks about the possibility of a moon around Vesta, one of the first thing Dawn team members will be looking out for. Dawn is now just 25,000 km away from Vesta. It's been almost 6 days since the last image was released (taken on the 1st at a distance of 100,000 km) so we're due for another one very soon. Arrival is on the 16th, so just three days from now.
One of my first posts ever here was on how impressive the Afrikaans Wikipedia is in spite of its low article count. The community there has always concentrated on article depth and size, and gives almost no heed to the number of articles. That's a good thing for the Wikipedia itself, though on the surface it does give the impression that it's smaller and less useful than it is, and that's a pity.
A discussion in the community area there a few weeks ago also talks about this. Most of it is in Afrikaans but a bit is in English. Some info from that (not an exact translation, just a rough gleaning of the concept):
"We have 2.6 articles per 1000 mother language speakers. That is comparable with languages such as Spanish (2.1), Portuguese (3.2) and Swahili (3.1) but we are doing badly in comparison with English (10.3), German (10.0) and French (11.0), and very badly compared with Dutch (30.1), Norwegian (58.8) and Finnish (44.2).The second idea is particularly good. People that use Afrikaans will be likely from South Africa, they will be attracted to information on it and will be able to more easily contribute than other subjects, and this could become a positive cycle (the opposite of a Catch-22). More information = more people coming to read it, more people coming to read it = more potential information.
How can we improve this? I have a few ideas:
1. How about the large Afrikaans newspapers (Beeld, Die Burger, etc.) try publishing one of our articles every day? ... the newspaper would also ask people to support the project.
2. What is the Afrikaans Wikipedia for? Is it just for linguistic pride, or is it something truly useful? Most people that speak Afrikaans also know English...thus we should have articles that are better than those in the English Wikipedia. We have to be useful. It is naturally impossible to be better than English in all aspects, but we can be more useful in some parts, such as issues relating to South Africa. Animals, rivers, mountains, sport, literature, music, cities, towns, suburbs, roads, schools, churches, universities, buildings, personalities, history, etc., etc.
The German Wikisource is one of the largest out there, and wading through it can take up a large part of your day before you know it. Though the amount of content contained within is too large for any one post to show, there are some parts in particular that I've found to be either very interesting or head-scratchingly WTF. Below is a small exhibition of some of the images there that have made an impression on me, both good and bad.
A picture from an alpine expedition (Montanvert to Eismeer) for a book published in 1792:
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