F, G, H, I and J "to-ified". Takes about 15 minutes per list.

RiotNrrd:But we do need to decide on a common format soon, so there is less to rework.

I will take yours and consider it the common format.

For that matter, feel free to take over A and fix the formatting of the verbs I did. I have spent many hours on the dictionary, but 99% of it was in translating rather than fixing existing translations (or fixing verb formats), so only a fairly small percentage of my work involved verbs at all. There is probably less to re-work, verb-wise, among what I did, than among what you did.

RiotNrrd:Well, I put in an hour or so, and "to-ified" the English translations of all the verbs in B, C, D, E, and R (Esperanto to English). It's not difficult work, but it can be a bit mind-numbingly repetitive.

Btw did you add transitivity information to those as well?

erinja:Btw did you add transitivity information to those as well?

No. I'm just working on the English words. As I mentioned before I have no reliable resource for the transitivities of English verbs, and therefore am not putting them in.

I'm simply doing a search of the Esperanto words using the format "(some letter)*i" (for example, "b*i"). I also have "to " copied to my clipboard. Once I get the list (which are, with a few exceptions such as personal pronouns and the like, all verbs), I simply mechanically walk down it, editing every word that has English translations and pasting the "to " in front of each one. I can more or less do about one word per second in that fashion, paying just enough attention to make sure that the "to " isn't getting put in inappropriate places.

RiotNrrd:No. I'm just working on the English words. As I mentioned before I have no reliable resource for the transitivities of English verbs, and therefore am not putting them in.

I am adding transitivities to the dictionary in both directions; that is, the transitivity of the Esperanto word, since it would presumably be a useful fact no matter what direction you're moving in (and since you should know already for English).

Nothing ever bothered me more about dictionaries than having to have a two-stage look up to find the transitivity, since it is so often included in one direction only!

erinja:For that matter, feel free to take over A and fix the formatting of the verbs I did.

I added "to" to each of the verbs in the A list, but otherwise didn't touch them. So, from a "to-addition" point of view, the A through J verb lists, and R, are now complete.

The format we talked about earlier was for displaying the Esperanto translations of English verbs, rather than the other way around. The transitivities of English verbs don't seem important to me, but that's probably because I'm a native speaker and don't need to think about them. I suppose if one is a non-native speaker of English, translating from Esperanto into English, the information is good to have. From an English speakers point of view, though, the transitivity information in the English word lists seems (to me) of little value.

We DEFINITELY need the transitivity information attached to the Esperanto verbs, though. For an English speaker learning Esperanto, that transitivity information is gold.

The format of the English translations seem to already follow a pretty consistent standard of simple comma-separated lists of words or phrases, so I kept to that convention as I worked through the letter-lists so far. I ran across just a few entries that had semicolons between them; I changed them to commas in keeping with the majority of already existing entries.

Note that that means we have different conventions for the Esperanto vs English word lists: commas between English words, but semi-colons between Esperanto words. Actually, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. The Esperanto words have both square-bracketed English explanatory texts and parenthesized transitivity abbreviations, which makes each block pretty big. In the English word lists there are no explanatory texts - the English words ARE the explanatory texts, after all. The verbs may have transitivity information attached, but the rest of the words won't, making each little block quite small.

So, to regurgitate the earlier example, "see" would look like:

see
[view] vidi (tr); [meet] renkonti (tr); [visit] viziti (tr); [understand] kompreni (tr); [date regularly] akompanadi (tr)

(with semicolons)

Whereas "preni" looks like:

preni (pren·i)
to get, to seize, to lay hold of, to pick up, to take

(with commas)

I should note that I'm a software engineer, and as such have a natural affinity for extremely picayune typographic expressions. I am always perfectly happy to delve down into really minor details. People can always feel free to tell me to shut the heck up and relax.

erinja:Do you have dictionary permissions yet? If not, I can give them to you.

I don't, but I'd be glad if you gave them to me.

I like how RiotNrrd gives explanations. I think I will do the same way: a French speaker learning Esperanto also has to know the transitivity of the verb.

That convention looks great, except that if you don't know what the word "preni" means and you look it up, you won't get its transitivity directly; you'd have to look up its translation first. I guess it's not as big of a deal - if an Esperanto verb is taking a direct object in whatever you're looking at, it's obviously transitive - but I can see some situations where that could be ambiguous.

hiyayaywhopee:... except that if you don't know what the word "preni" means and you look it up, you won't get its transitivity directly...

Unless I misunderstood, we shouldn't modify the Esperanto word list that is shared amongst all the languages. In my example, for "preni" to show transitivity information we would have to modify that list. We can list the transitivities of the English translations of "preni" ("to get, to seize, etc.), but that doesn't help if you are trying to find out whether "preni" itself is transitive or not.

Ideally, "preni" would look something like:

preni (pren·i) (tr)
to get, to seize, to lay hold of, to pick up, to take

But that would require modifying the shared list (unless I misunderstood Erinja). Which is exactly where that information belongs, actually. But that would affect all the languages, not just English, and we'd need to get wider buy-in on those sorts of changes.