The Vietnamese Wiktionary

From: David Biggs

Date: Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 8:23 AM

dear colleagues-

i wish to point attention to the nascent vietnamese wiktionary, a developing VN dictionary with English definitions in the wiki universe. maybe the recent discussion of trao etc. could result in the creation of new definitions? its really an incredible resource since it allows scholars of Nom and Han to insert these unicode characters into the definitions and offers English-reading students of Vietnamese the opportunity to learn more about various aspects of the language in translation. if members of VSG put their collective wits to it, this could become a valuable resource for language learners.

here's the wiktionary blurb:

Designed as the lexical companion to Wikipedia, the encyclopaedia project, Wiktionary has grown beyond a standard dictionary and now includes a thesaurus, a rhyme guide, phrase books, language statistics and extensive appendices. We aim to include not only the definition of a word, but also enough information to really understand it. Thus etymologies, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms and translations are included.

Wiktionary is a wiki, which means that you can edit it, and all the content is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. Before you contribute, you may wish to read through some of our Help pages, and bear in mind that we do things quite differently from other wikis. In particular we have strict layout conventions and inclusion criteria. Learn how to start a page, how to edit entries, experiment in the sandbox and visit our Community Portal to see how you can participate in the development of Wiktionary.

here's the link for VN words with English definitions (the area where VSG scholars might most make a difference):

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Vietnamese

parallel with this is the comparably huge Tiếng Việt wiktionary with definitions and explanations of VN and other words in tiếng Việt:

http://vi.wiktionary.org/wiki/

While surfing, take a moment and check it out! Happy New Year!