*"To be, or not to be"* A phrase from Shakespeare's *Hamlet <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet> *is "To be, or not to be, that is the question"*.*
Chris Koerner from WMF Discovery published some interesting information about the verb "to be", and how on-wiki search deals with it, in this issue <https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/discovery/2018-April/001652.html> of the *Discovery Weekly Update*: "The English verb "to be" is kind of weird—the infinitive "be" and participles "being, been" start with "b-", while the preterite forms "was, were" start with "w-", and the present forms "am, is, are" start with vowels. The conjugations originally come from three or four different verbs! Why "three or four"? Wiktionary disagrees with itself a bit, listing four on the etymology of "is" [5] and three on the etymology of "be". [6] The conflation goes back at least to Proto-Germanic, [7] so German is similarly weird. [8] Dutch has a greatly simplified paradigm, but still shows some trace of the multiple sources. [9] Other languages, including ASL, Arabic, Bengali, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Indonesian, Japanese, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian at least partly avoid this mess by having a zero copula. [10] For search on-wiki, we deal with this problem in part with stemming [11] and stop words. [12] "[5] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/is#Etymology_1 [6] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/be#Etymology [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic_language [8] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sein#Conjugation [9] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zijn#Inflection [10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_copula [11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stemming [12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_words"; *Legal case ends well for Greek Wikipedia administrator*From the Wikimedia Blog: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/04/18/greece-legal-case-ended/ *Photos from the 2018 Wikimedia Conference in Germany* Some photos of the 2018 Wikimedia Conference are available on Commons <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Conference_2018>. Here are a few: * https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_ Conference_2018,_Group_photo.jpg * https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_ Conference_2018_by_ZUFAr_01.jpg * https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMCON18_Sweets_Table_1.jpg * https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMCON18_by_Rehman_-_Posters_(2).jpg * https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Conference_2018_%E2%80%93_091.jpg What's making you happy this week? You are welcome to comment in any language. Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
