Imran Ghory wrote:
On Sun, 16 May 2004, Timwi wrote:
Am I the only one who thinks this is unbelievably redundant?
I agree totally (but then again I thought that (the english) wiktionary should only define english words in English), but there's not much that can be done about it, becuase words in differnet langauges aren't reflective. That is just because A in language 1 means B in language 2, it doesn't mean B in language 2 means A in language 1. So it's not possible to have a single list that's shared by many languages.
Firstly, I think you're thinking on the wrong lines. If A is a possible translation for B, then B is always also a possible translation for A. (Two words are possible translations of each other if their meanings have a non-zero intersection; this property *is* reflexive.) Of course that doesn't mean that B is *always* translated as A, but at least it means that the graph represented by words and their translations is undirected.
Secondly, that's only one part of the redundancy. Even if the graph were directed, it would still mean that every Wiktionary would build that same graph, when building it once would really be sufficient.
Timwi