DCDuring

Hello, DCDuring, and welcome to the Simple English Wiktionary!

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Good luck and happy editing!--Brett 15:16, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Real welcome

It's great to see you here, and for all the right reasons.--Brett 15:43, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I didn't realize this was your thing. I've gotten to be appreciative of Longman's DCE, which had been sitting unused on my desk for quite a while. I'm really impressed by the overall approach and by the specific choices they've made. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it. DCDuring 00:34, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

It's the one I recommend to my students. It's not perfect on the theory side: it's got will as forming "future tenses" and it has the odd participle verb listed as an adjective, but it's still quite good. Of course, with Adam Kilgarriff working on the data side of it, frequencies and choices of examples are great. I'd like to see more full example sentences rather than fragments and more consistency in the defining style would be nice. For example, serve has:

1. to give someone food or drink, especially as part of a meal or in a restaurant, bar etc
2. if food serves two, three etc, there is enough for that number of people

I don't see why you wouldn't have both as if clauses or both as to infinitive clauses.

By the way, I noticed you were looking at readability indices. I don't think any of the existing ones make sense for the kind of writing we have. If you're still going to follow it up, though I'll send you a paper I wrote a few years ago critiquing a formula that J.D. Brown put together, along with a Perl script for a revised version that a buddy of mine wrote for me. As I said though, it's really designed for dealing with paragraphs.--Brett 00:56, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

BNC1

Well, what a surprise to see you here ;) I was just looking again at the BNC lists, and wondering whether we could get a bot on en.wikt to Categorise entries into the groups of thousands (possibly also add a counter like the Gutenberg one but more tasteful). This would then allow reasonably efficient looking up of the commonness of words and thus a good metric of how widely understood the definitions are. Conrad.Irwin 15:52, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

That's what I'm talking about (I think)! I thought I would see how hard it is to overcome my enjoyment of complex words and idioms to actually keep it simple. I'd left a note on the readability discussion on your talk page about this. I wonder what we would have to do to add some Americanisms/American spellings to BNC. Some of it is easy (ise/ize, our/or); some not. I suppose we could add any real words in the top 3000 or 5000 from the TV frequency list. But I've got very basic learning to do about BNC, like inflected forms etc. DCDuring 00:31, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

The headword list is UKian, but the complete list has 'merican spelling too.--Brett 00:35, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Notwithstanding, it still might be nice to check the TV freq list for any differences in relative frequencies. Is there anything else that would provide supplementation of American high-frequency words. Is it likely to be more than 10% addition? My fella 'muhrcans'd be much obliged fuh the hep. DCDuring 00:42, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Mark Davies has a new free corpus of American English. You can buy the stats from him, or you can painstakingly get them yourself here.--Brett 01:04, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Prepositions

What's with the list of prepositions? You've piqued my curiosity.--Brett 01:08, 10 July 2009 (UTC)