False Friends of the Slavist/Editing help

As usual with wikibooks and the Wikipedia, you can edit all the pages of this module. Please, whenever you spot a mistake, correct it, and enter your own additions (new false friends etc.) if you like.

This page is designed to help with this task.

Correcting mistakes
If you spot a mistake on one of the pages of this wikibook, please click at the edit this page button at the top of the page, find the mistake in the opening edit box and correct it.

Adding a new false friend
If you want to add a false friend, just go to the respective page and click the edit this page button at the top of the page. An edit window opens, and you can enter your material.

Both for your convenience and to ensure that future design changes can apply to the whole module, use the following FalseFriends template:

Here, LG1 and LG2 are the abbreviations of the relevant languages (see above). Most other items to be entered should be self-evident. If you do not know the English translation, just leave it out, someone else will add it.

ID is an identifier tag ('anchor') that can be used to link different pages of the wikibook. You can just leave this spot empty if you edit only one page (but be sure to write the "|"!), or make up any name (preferably not just a number, which worked fine with the 'old' false friends that were entered by a computer program).

You can also just leave out "|MAPNAME" (in this case together with the "|", so that the last line can be just " }} ". If a map for the respective 'false friend' exists, this is the name of the map (more precisely, the part of the page name after "False_Friends_of_the_Slavist/Map_").

A possible way to fill this scheme might be:

Adding new data on a monolingual page
Whenever you enter new information on bilingual pages, it would be great if you could update the respective monolingual pages as well. (You find links to these pages at the head of each bilingual page, under the flags.) Of course this is not compulsory. If you do not do this, hopefully someone else will do it for you, so just go ahead and work on whatever you find interesting.

The structure of the monolingual pages is a bit different from the bilingual ones. Here, each 'false friend' looks basically like this:

ID and MAPNAME are the same as on the bilingual pages. The other items should be self-explanatory. If you want to add information about a new 'false friend', best of all copy-paste an existing model from the same page and adopt it to your needs.

Adding or modifying a map
Thanks to a quite sophisticated use of wiki technology, editing the semasiological maps (and creating new ones!) is now as easy as pie. You do not have to meddle with graphics, you just have to modify the data in a little table of the following structure:

In this table, enter an x into the second column of every language where you have data. (If the word does not exist in the respective language, enter only this x and leave the rest of the row free. In the resulting map, the x provides for a white country silhouette; without the x, the space remains grey.)

The numbers of the columns correspond to the numbers of the meanings below the table. In the table itself, enter the number of the respective column (not just an x!) for every meaning the word has in the respective language. Leave a space in those columns where the meaning is not represented in the language.

In the column 'word', enter the false friend in the language of the row (preferably with no spaced around it, e.g. |жена|), or leave the blank space as it is where you do not know the word. If you know that a no false friend of this kind exists in the respective language, enter Ø.

ID is the same as above. MapHeading may be the Proto-Slavic form of the compared words (with an asterisk before it and double apostrophes around it to make it italic, e.g. *mǫžъ ), the common phonetic form (in IPA transcription and in square brackets or slashes, e.g. [masa] ) the origin of a common loanword (e.g. German Schiene ) or anything else you consider representative of the false friend in all the languages compared.

For example, if you enter the following data, you get this map.

If you want to create a completely new map page, just copy the template above into a newly created page and fill the table as described.

Adding information on printed false-friends dictionaries
If you know a printed false-friends dictionary that is not mentioned yet on the corresponding page of this wikibook, you should add it in the sections both of the respective language pair and of the two languages involved.

If a section does not exist yet on any one of the three pages, add it immediately before. It should look like this:

Usually the citations begin with an asterisk (*), which makes them appear in a list with bullets in front.

Important: Do not use any equal signs (=) in the bibliographical data! They cause a software error, so that no books at all appear in the respective section. Use dashes (–), full stops (.), slashes (/) or anything like that instead.

Adding a new bilingual page
If you want to enter false friends in a language pair that does not exist yet, just click at the respective red X in the navigation table. In the edit box that opens you will have to enter the following templates to make the page look similar to the existing ones:

At the top of the page, write

with LANG1 and LANG2 being the internal symbols of the two languages:


 * bg for Bulgarian
 * bih (not bs!) for Bosnian
 * by (not be!) for Belarusian
 * cz (not cs!) for Czech
 * hr for Croatian
 * ka (not csb!) for Kashubian
 * lso for Lower Sorbian
 * mk for Macedonian
 * pl for Polish
 * rus (not ru!) for Russian
 * sk for Slovak
 * slo (not sl!) for Slovenian
 * ua (not uk!) for Ukrainian
 * uso for Upper Sorbian
 * yu (not sr or cs!) for Serbian

At the bottom of the page, write

Between the described head and foot passages of the page, enter new 'false friends' as explained above.

Adding a new language
Of course, there are more than 15 Slavonic languages, so the module can always be expanded. However, this means that the navigation table template has to be modified, and this is a task for someone who knows some HTML, and it is probably best done in some external editor. Apart from that, several new templates have to be created, namely:
 * /Lang-xx (with xx being the internal abbreviation for the new language) containing the name of the language in English
 * /Jaz-xx containing the name of the new language in the language itself
 * /Flag-xx containing the internal address of the flag for the new language
 * /Wiki-xx containing the internal address of the Wikipedia article about the new language (preferably in the language itself).

When opening a new monolingual page for the new language, note that the structure of a monolingual page is basically the same as the one of a bilingual page. Only instead of, you use  (with xx as above and SPEAKERS being the approximate number of speakers of the language).

If you want to draw new maps that contain information about the new language, you will also have to upload the respective shadings Image:FFmap-xx-1.gif, Image:FFmap-xx-2.gif, Image:FFmap-xx-3.gif, Image:FFmap-xx-4.gif, Image:FFmap-xx-5.gif, Image:FFmap-xx-6.gif and Image:FFmap-xx-7.gif and Image:FFmap-xx-x.gif, copy Image:FFmap-rus-_.gif to Image:FFmap-xx-_.gif and modify Image:FFmap-CountryNames.gif. If the symbolic territory of the new language intersects with the territory of an existing language, you will also have to modify the shadings belonging to that language. Apart from that, it is probably better not to touch the existing /MapConstructor but to create a new template on its basis, so that you do not have to edit all the map pages using the template.

So, if you would like to add 'false friends' in a language that is not covered by the navigation table and do not know how to do it, you can put a request at the discussion page.

What else can I do?
Have a look at the discussion page of the language(s) you are interested in most: Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Polish, Kashubian, Lower Sorbian, Upper Sorbian, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Macedonian, or Bulgarian. They all include a Proofreading Center where tasks to be done by speakers of the respective languages are listed.

Apart from that, see the main discussion page of this module, where more general questions of what should be done with this book are discussed.

If you know a Slavonic language well, you can also help with completing the semasiological maps. If you see that information about 'your' language is not yet included in the map, you can add it very easily, and this information can afterwards be used to complete the mono- and bilingual pages.