User:Physchim62/About Catalan

Entry name
The name of the entry is the word or phrase you are defining.

Capitalisation: Catalan does not capitalise words as often as English, so the entry name will usually begin with a lower case letter. In particular, Catalan, unlinke English, does not capitalise nouns of language or nationality: the Catalan for "Catalan" is català, with a lower case "c". Other types of proper noun are usually capitlaised.

Diacritics: Catalan uses five diacritics: the acute accent (accent agut, é, í, ó, ú), the grave accent (accent grau, à, è, ò), the dieresis (dièresi, ï, ü), the cedilla (c trencat, ç) and the centered dot (doble el·la, l·l). These should always be included. Ç and l·l are not considered separate letters for the purposes of alphabetisation. Relatedly, Catalan does not use the letter ñ, for which the sound is systematically written as ny.

The essentials

 * 1) Language header. Lets you know the language of the word in question (== Catalan ==). It is almost always in a level two heading (see How to edit a page for some basic terminology we use). When there is more than one language header on a page, the languages should appear in alphabetical order with Translingual and English gven priority.
 * 2) Part of speech header. May be a misnomer, but it seemed to make sense when it was first chosen. It is the key descriptor for the grammatical function of the term in question (such as 'noun', 'verb', etc.). The definitions themselves come within its scope. This header is most frequently in a level three heading, and a page may have more than one for a single language.
 * 3) Inflection line. This is the line immediately following the part of speech header. In the simpleest entries, this will be the entry name in bold, followed by gender and number (for nouns and adjectives). Advanced users should make use of the standard inflection templates provided.
 * 4) Definitions or Translations. These appear as a numbered list in the part of speech section immediately following the inflection line, though it is a good idea to include a blank line in between for ease of editing.

A very simple example
This is a simple entry for the word política, and shows the most fundamental elements of an article:


 * 1) the word's language (as a level 2 heading);
 * 2) its part of speech or "type" (as a level 3 header);
 * 3) the inflection word itself (using the correct inflection template or the word in bold letters);
 * 4) a definition (preceded by "#", which causes automatic numbering);
 * 5) links in the definition or translation for key words.

This example can be copied and used to start an article or section of an article.

Preferred order of sections
The part of speech section will often include simple translation(s) into English in place of definitions, but there may be subsections.

Following is the preferred sequence for these standard sections:

Please note that the Noun header is only one possible part of speech that may appear as the header. If the entry being created is for a Catalan verb, then "Verb" should appear in place of the word "Noun" in the example above.

Most English entries use an inflection template immediately following the part of speech header. For Spanish entries, the following templates are available.

For lemma Noun entries (singular forms of nouns, not plurals [Note: It is not yet clear whether to treat the feminine form of certain male/female noun pairs (e.g. amiga) as its own lemma form or as a gender-inflected non-lemma form of the masculine form.]):


 * for masculine countable nouns
 * for feminine countable nouns
 * for countable nouns which have forms of both genders
 * for masculine uncountable nouns
 * for feminine uncountable nouns

For lemma Verb entries (the infinitive):


 * for verbs ending in -ar
 * for verbs ending in -er
 * for verbs ending in -re
 * for verbs ending in -ir

For lemma Adjective entries (usually masculine singular):


 * (see template page for information about indicating feminine form)

For non-lemma noun, verb, and adjective entries (e.g. plurals of nouns, feminine and forms of adjectives, and verb forms that do not end in -r or -re), may be used instead: