Comment by hk__2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hk__2 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been learning Italian for a few years and one thing that’s frustating is searching for words I don’t know. Italy has a lot of local languages/dialects that influence regional variants of Italian; it’s common to see dialectal words enter the mainstream Italian language. The largest dictionary, Treccani, is very good but often misses words that are either too recent / vulgar / dialectal.

There are various other big dictionaries and websites specific to different dialects, but I don’t want to have to search on each of them by hand.

I’m currently working on a meta-dictionary, which is a fancy name for unique search engine for all the dictionaries I can find out there. It’s not finished but so far it works great; I use it almost daily.

I started with Phoenix (Elixir framework) and Svelte to learn them but I ditched Phoenix because it was a hell to work with how implicit things are there (no import; just assume that variable is defined "somewhere") and went back to a very basic Python Flask app that serves an API for Svelte.

Nothing very fancy on the tech side but it’s interesting to deep dive in the languages of Italy and learn a lot of things about both Italy and linguistics at the same time.

I've been burned by this in the past (also for Italian, but also Japanese).

Do you find this issue persists even if you attempt to search the Italian internet for definitions/usage examples in Italian?

Or is this problem specific to finding information in English about Italian terms?

The difference here is between an n problem and an n^2 problem (if the site expands and wants to accumulate definitions from each language/dialect to ~several supported major languages, for example).

Anecdotally, I've found that once I got to the point where I could read Italian well enough to use Italian dictionaries when I don't understand the word, finding the information on the Italian internet has been much easier. Of course, certainly there have been dialect words and slang I haven't found (which I attribute to some of the words being in a dialect mostly spoken by older Italians who don't use the internet).

I do search for definitions/usage examples in Italian. Thinking more about it, I think most of the frustration comes from the Treccani iOS app, which is very helpful because you have all of Treccani offline, but it hasn’t been updated in years and so it’s missing a lot of what you get on their website.

> The difference here is between an n problem and an n^2 problem (if the site expands and wants to accumulate definitions from each language/dialect to ~several supported major languages, for example).

Yeah; here it’s not an issue because I only search for Italian dictionaries, I voluntarily exclude any sort of Italian<->French/English/etc dictionary because I learn a lot more when I stay in one language instead of translating.

> (which I attribute to some of the words being in a dialect mostly spoken by older Italians who don't use the internet)

Yes. Even in the case of Neapolitan, which is still very active, it seems that all the studies of the language were done before the Web, and so you find a lot of good paper dictionaries in Naples, but pretty much nothing online. Most of the content is found on some random blog where someone listed 300 verbs in Neapolitan or an AltaVista page where someone wrote the meaning of a couple hundred words.

wiktionary

On the commandline using sdcv[0] with a generate stardict from wiktionary[1] is a great combo.

https://github.com/Dushistov/sdcv https://github.com/BoboTiG/ebook-reader-dict

Yes, but it’s not sufficient. It has ~50k words in Italian, which is half of what’s in Treccani (~115k) or De Mauro (~120k). Also, definitions are often of much better quality in the Treccani dictionary.

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