Sign-ups to the French Language forum

Unfortunately there have been a few instances of spam postings appearing on the French Language forum over the last few days. So while I assess the situation, I've taken the decision to moderate all sign-ups to the forum for the next few days. This means that people signing up to the forum will experience a delay-- hopefully of just a couple of hours or so-- between signing up being able to participate in the forum, chat room etc, and I apologise in advance for this inconvenience.

Improvements to the French dictionary

Some improvements have been made to make the French-English dictionary cope a little better with lookups of feminine and plural forms. In most cases, looking up a feminine or plural form will now direct you to the entry for the base form. (In total, around 20,000 extra plural forms and around 6,000 feminine forms are now accepted in this way.)

Further work is underway to improve the dictionary's ability to recognise feminine and plural forms of nouns and adjectives and these improvements are due to be released over the coming days.

Information about the French spelling reform

The site's French grammar tutorial section contains some new information about the French spelling reform (rectifications de l'orthographe, 1990).

What may be of particular interest to learners and writers is that, as well as explaining the main reforms proposed, this section also reports on some partial results from a survey conducted last year on French speakers' opinions about the reforms. The survey revealed just how unpopular some of the proposals are: for example, the proposal to re-spell j'appellerai as j'appèlerai received the approval of only 20% of respondents. Some proposals that more clearly rectify an anomaly were more popular: just over half of respondents reported that they prefer the form cèderai over the traditional spelling céderai.

French forum: "follow thread" feature enabled

A change has been made to the gubbinry of the French Language forum that means that the "Follow" option should work in many cases where it didn't before. When you ask a question or get involved in a discussion on the forum, you may wish to click on the "Follow" button at the bottom of the page. You will then receive an e-mail when a new post is made to that thread, be it a response to your question or a continuation of the thread.

Updates and fixes

As mentioned in a previous post, the French Linguistics site was moved to a new server over the weekend.

Following this move:

- The French dictionary is being updated to include the latest additions and corrections. This means that some dictionary entries may be temporarily unavailable today while the data is being uploaded.
- A few minor corrections have been made for problems caused by compatibility issues with the new server. In particular, automatic translation quotes should now function correctly provided that the document submitted to the system is in a format recognised (currently DOC and DOCX files are recognised; for a translation quote for a PDF file, you may still have to submit it by e-mail: see the main translation service page for more details).
- Other "housekeeping" tasks are currently underway on the new server, such as running checks on the database. These may have a slight impact on the performance of the site over the next day or so. Thank you for your patience!

Happy New Year and Server Move

Happy New Year to all users of the French Linguistics web site!

The French Linguistics web site is currently being moved to a new upgraded server. This will likely cause the site to be periodically unavailable today (Sunday). Your patience is appreciated...!