Comment by psychoslave
Comment by psychoslave 7 hours ago
I already mentioned last month I was working on a appendix in Wiktionary for synonym of Esperanto terms constructed with the mal- prefix[1]. Actually it's a bit more generic as it also encompasses a few other antonymic prefixes, but mal- is the main tool in that category.
With more than 300 references and around 1500 entries, covering more than all the lemma given in the reference dictionary Plena Ilustrita Vortaro de Esperanto, I now consider it achieved. Well, apart some formatting of references where I still need to fix issues related to import of template/modules from an other wiki. :D
To give a perspective, in one of the Esperanto sentence collection referenced in the appendix, I found a bit more than 7000 terms mal- words, which once stripped of the most common inflection and affixes went down to 3000 entries. I didn't check in details this remaining set, but my guess is that the remaining difference was still mostly due to less frequent affix combinations that my naive filter didn't catch. For recall Esperanto is a highly agglutinative language and encourage the use of a regular affix set to express many derivative terms from a common stem, so empowering expressivity though combinatorial reuse. So only twice the size of the proposed entries in the appendix is a very low figure.
I initially had this project ideas years ago, and it came back to my mind as I started to contribute to the port of Raku into esperanto[3]. This came back as we were going through the considerations for the lsb routine, where LSB stands for Least Significant Bit. The common way to express least is malplej (countryman-of-most), which is generally ok but can be instead replaced by mej, for example if terseness is a highly weighted desired trait. That allows for example to use mejpezbit’ instead of some alternative synonym like malplej signifa duumaĵo.
[1] https://eo.wiktionary.org/wiki/Aldono:Pri_antonimoj
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plena_Ilustrita_Vortaro_de_Esp...