Wiktionary:About Catalan

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Application-certificate Gion.svg This is a Wiktionary policy, guideline or common practices page. Specifically it is a policy think tank, working to develop a formal policy.
Policies: CFI - ELE - BLOCK - REDIR - BOTS - QUOTE - DELETE - NPOV - AXX

Contents

[edit] Creating Catalan entries

[edit] Entry name

The name of the entry is the word or phrase you are defining.

Capitalisation: Catalan does not capitalise words as often as English, so the entry name will usually begin with a lower case letter. In particular, Catalan, unlike English, does not capitalise nouns of language or nationality: the Catalan for "Catalan" is català, with a lower case "c". Commonly capitalisation occurs in proper nouns referring to a singular entity such persons, places or often institutions, but not for an nouns referring to an abstract concept or groupal entitys such ethnicity, language's... The word "God" (Deu) is an exception.

Diacritics: Catalan uses five diacritics: the acute accent (accent tancat, é, í, ó, ú), the grave accent (accent obert, à, è, ò), the dieresis (dièresi, ï, ü), the cedilla (ce trencada, ç) and the centered dot (ela geminada, l·l). These should always be included. Relatedly, Catalan does not ever use the letter ñ, for which the sound is systematically written as ny.

[edit] The essentials

  1. Language header. Lets you know the language of the word in question (== Catalan ==). It is almost always in a level two heading (see Wiktionary:How to edit a page for some basic terminology we use). When there is more than one language header on a page, the languages should appear in alphabetical order with Translingual and English gven priority. For Valencian words, see "Regional forms" below.
  2. Part of speech header. May be a misnomer, but it seemed to make sense when it was first chosen. It is the key descriptor for the grammatical function of the term in question (such as 'noun', 'verb', etc.). The definitions themselves come within its scope. This header is most frequently in a level three heading, and a page may have more than one for a single language.
  3. Inflection line. This is the line immediately following the part of speech header. In the simpleest entries, this will be the entry name in bold, followed by gender and number (for nouns and adjectives). Advanced users should make use of the standard inflection templates provided.
  4. Definitions or Translations. These appear as a numbered list in the part of speech section immediately following the inflection line, though it is a good idea to include a blank line in between for ease of editing.

[edit] A very simple example

This is a simple entry for the word política, and shows the most fundamental elements of an article:

  1. the word's language (as a level 2 heading);
  2. its part of speech or "type" (as a level 3 header);
  3. the inflection word itself (using the correct inflection template or the word in bold letters);
  4. a definition (preceded by "#", which causes automatic numbering);
  5. links in the definition or translation for key words.

This example can be copied and used to start an article or section of an article.

==Catalan==

===Noun===
{{ca-noun-f|pl=polítiques}}

# [[politics]]
# [[policy]]

[edit] Formatting Catalan entries

[edit] Preferred order of sections

The part of speech section will often include simple translation(s) into English in place of definitions, but there may be subsections.

Following is the preferred sequence for these standard sections:

 == Catalan ==
 === Alternative spellings ===
 === Etymology ===
 === Pronunciation ===
 === Noun ===
 ==== Usage notes ====
 ==== Quotations ====
 ==== Synonyms ====
 ==== Antonyms ====
 ==== Conjugation ==== (''Note: Only for verb entries'')
 === Related terms ===
 === See also ===
 === References ===

Please note that the Noun header is only one possible part of speech that may appear as the header. If the entry being created is for a Catalan verb, then "Verb" should appear in place of the word "Noun" in the example above.

[edit] Inflection templates

Most English entries use an inflection template immediately following the part of speech header. For Catalan entries, the following templates are available. Please do not use subst:

[edit] Nouns

For lemma Noun entries (singular forms of nouns, not plurals [Note: It is not yet clear whether to treat the feminine form of certain male/female noun pairs (e.g. amiga) as its own lemma form or as a gender-inflected non-lemma form of the masculine form.]):

  • {{ca-noun|m|plural}} for masculine countable nouns[1]
  • {{ca-noun|f|plural}} for feminine countable nouns[1]
  • {{ca-noun|m|-}} for masculine uncountable nouns
  • {{ca-noun|f|-}} for feminine uncountable nouns
  • {{ca-noun|mf|plural}} for countable nouns which have the same form in both genders[1]
  • {{ca-noun-mf|plural}} for countable nouns which have different forms in each gender
[1] The plural may be omitted if it is formed simply by adding -s to the singular.

See Template talk:ca-noun for additional details for dealing with other special cases.

[edit] Verbs

For lemma Verb entries (the infinitive):

[edit] Adjectives

For lemma Adjective entries (usually masculine singular):

  • {{ca-adj}} (see template page for information about indicating feminine form)

[edit] Other entries

For non-lemma noun, verb, and adjective entries (e.g. plurals of nouns, feminine and forms of adjectives, and verb forms that do not end in -r or -re), {{infl}} may be used instead:

  • {{infl|ca|noun form|feminine plural||singular|paraula}}
  • {{infl|ca|verb form|first person singular present indicative||infinitive|parlar}}
  • {{infl|ca|adjective form|feminine plural||masculine singular|bàsic}}

Other parts of speech (e.g. adverbs, prepositions, etc) are not inflected in Catalan, and so there are no inflexion templates. In these cases, the correct category has to be added to the entry, as in the example below. Althernatively, {{infl}} may be used.

== Catalan ==
=== Adverb ===
'''dessota'''

#[[below]]
#[[under]]

[[Category:Catalan adverbs]]

Contactions of prepositions with articles (e.g. pels) are not considered lemma forms, and so are categorized in Category:Catalan preposition contractions.

[edit] Sorting

Diacritics (including ç and l·l) are not considered separate letters for the purposes of alphabetisation. Unfortunately, the MediaWiki software treats them as such, which means that extra care must be taken to ensure that alphabetical lists can be correctly compiled. Each of the inflection templates (see below) has an optional sort parameter, which can be used to add a version of the word without diacritics to ensure correct sorting. Where a proper noun (or abbreviation) starts with a capital letter in Catalan, the sort parameter should also be set to the version of the word starting with a lower case letter.

[edit] Verb conjugations

There are more than 100 different conjugation types in Catalan, but many of these are only "irregular" in one or two forms (often the past participle): more details can be found at Appendix:Catalan verb conjugation.

The "Conjugation" section should start with the type verb (if any), e.g. "as cantar" for a regular first conjugation (-ar) verb. The full conjugation is then given using a roll-up conjugation template. For regular verbs, the following conjugation templates are available:

For irregular verbs (including verbs ending in -er), the template {{ca-conj}} should be used: see the template for its fifty parameters.

[edit] Reference templates

The following reference templates are available for Catalan entries:

[edit] Regional forms

The "standard" form of Catalan is usually taken to be the dialect known as Central Catalan, traditionally spoken in the region of Barcelona and used by the Generalitat de Catalunya (as well as at least two-thirds of Catalan speakers). Apart from this, there are four major dialect groups within the Catalan "linguistic system".

A large majority of words are written identically in all major forms of Catalan, and for this reason alone it makes sense to treat them as a single language system in a dictionary such as Wiktionary. Where regional forms exist for a given word, the simplest solution is to include an "Alternative spellings" section immediately below the language header, as in the example for seva below:

== Catalan ==
=== Alternative spelling ===
*[[seua]] {{Valencian}} {{NOcc Catalan}}

=== Adjective ===
{{infl|ca|adjective form|feminine singular||masculine singluar|seu}}

#[[his]], [[her]]

=== Noun ===
{{infl|ca|noun form|feminine singular||masculine singular|seu}}

#[[his]], [[hers]]

[edit] Valencian

Valencian is the llengua pròpia of the Valencian Community. It is the form which is used institutionally by the Generalitat Valenciana, and is overseen by the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua (AVL). It has a slightly different orthography from Central Catalan, known as the Normes de Castelló (1932), although most words are written identically in the two forms (c.f. US English and British English). A second orthography, known as the Normes del Puig, has had official usage in the recent past but is currently less used.

The question as to whether Valencian is a distinct language from Catalan has been the subject of intense (and occasionally violent) political debate. The consensus among academic linguists, supported by the AVL itself, is that Valencian and Central Catalan are two dialects of the same "linguistic system". This views has been supported by the Spanish courts, in so far as they have insisted only mutual recognition of certificates of linguistic ability issued by the two autonomous communities.

[edit] North occidental

North occidental Catalan is the dialect spoken in the regions of Lleida and Tortosa. It is very similar to Valencian, but receives far less official usage.

The term "North occidental" is prefered here to "Northwestern", as the latter name might be ambiguous to English speakers. The language spoken in the extreme northwest of Catalonia is not Catalan at all, but Aranese, a form of Occitan.

[edit] Balearic

Balearic (or balear) is the term generally used to refer to the dialects used in the Balearic Islands. While each of the islands has a distinct dialect, there are sufficient similarities between them (and common distinctions from other forms of Catalan) to make it convenient to discuss them together.

The Government of the Balearic Islands is committed to preserving and promoting the specificities of the Catalan spoken on its territory, in which it is advised by the University of the Balearic Islands.

[edit] Rossellonese

Rossellonese (rossellonès) is the dialect traditionally spoken in the region of Rosselló, now the French département of the Pyrénées-Orientales. It is mostly of academic interest: in so far as Catalan is used officially in this region today (e.g. by the Conseil général des Pyrénées-Orientales or the French Education Ministry), it is Central Catalan.

[edit] Categories

[edit] References

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