*"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…
What's making you happy this week? You are welcome to comment in any
language.
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )