Irregular forms

Each noun or adjective in Dacco which has an irregular plural or feminine form is marked with a hidden tag which indicates what exactly the irregular form is. Over the last few weeks we have modified the web version of Dacco slightly so that the tags become visible and the irregular forms are displayed at the end of each entry.

We mainly expect this additional information to prove useful to the student starting out on their 'path of Catalan enlightenment', but suspect that it could also prove useful for the more advanced student who might occasionally forget that an adjective ending in -c changes to -ques in the feminine plural form and not -ces or even, shock horror, -cas.

Dacco version 0.8 released

We are pleased to announce the release of the latest version of Dacco (0.8) which can be downloaded here.
New to this version of Dacco are the inclusion of beginners' and intermediate dictionaries aimed at speakers of both English and Catalan, and the addition of the first 'examples of words in use' to the Catalan-English dictionary for speakers of English.

In addition, 760 new words have been added to the Catalan-English dictionary and 783 words to the English-Catalan dictionary.

Catalan sound files make a reappearance

Some time ago we added some Catalan sound files to Dacco that had very kindly been supplied to us by two Catalan native speakers: Paco Rivière and David Gimeno i Ayuso.

However, we realised last week that these files had disappeared from the dictionary at some point when we were updating it and, in all probability, had in fact been missing for some time...

We apologise for the fact that the sound files have been 'off the air' for a while and hope you welcome their return. However, in our defense, if Dacco users fail to tell us when we've cocked something up, we can often remain blissfully unaware of the fact for quite some time!

Word lists - now in alphabetical order!

Anybody who followed our links to the Catalan-English word lists when they were first added to the site in January probably noticed that they were not perhaps as helpful as they might have been. That is to say, they were taken directly from the Catalan-English side of Dacco and the Catalan words were sorted alphabetically.

New versions of Dacco for beginners and intermediate-level learners

We recently decided to start making better use of the frequency information built into Dacco to create separate editions of the dictionary aimed at Catalan learners of different levels. Basically, we have mirrored the statistical principles used by Collins in the creation of their superb Cobuild dictionaries aimed at learners of English in order to determine 'basic', 'intermediate' and 'advanced' levels of Catalan vocabulary.

This has enabled us to use the main Dacco database of words in order to automatically create two new dictionaries: one containing what we consider to constitute a 'basic' Catalan vocabulary and another containing what we consider to constitute an 'intermediate' Catalan vocabulary (of course, the main Dacco dictionary itself represents an 'advanced' Catalan vocabulary).

Version 0.7 of Dacco now available for download

Although we have been very busy improving Dacco recently, adding new features and entries, we realized to our horror yesterday that it has been three months since we made a new release (time flies when you're having fun...) Anyway, a new release was duly packaged together last night and uploaded to SourceForge this morning.

Impending move from SourceForge to Ibiblio

We are pleased to announce that a recent application to Ibiblio to host the Dacco project has been successful. As a result, Dacco will shortly be moving from its current location at sourceforge.net to ibiblio.org.

There are a number of reasons for moving the project, the most important being: a notable increase in speed (and hopefully more stability), far more available space (Dacco's existing audio files are already perilously close to exceeding SourceForge's necessarily strict space limits), more freedom to develop and run programs that can: improve our search engines (make them smarter - enabling wildcard searches and 'one search accesses all dictionaries', for example), run our own verb conjugators, allow us to create an off-line version of Dacco that will allow users to access the dictionary via a simple click on any word in a Web browser or word processing document, etc. etc. (in short, it will enable us to add cool new features that we have been working on over the last few months but cannot currently implement via SourceForge).

We are very excited by the possibilities this move creates and hopefully it won't be long before Dacco users start noticing the changes.

Collocations

Eagle-eyed Dacco users may have noticed over the last couple of days that we are currently adding yet another new feature to our Catalan-English dictionary aimed at English speakers. If you take a look at the letter 'A' of the Catalan-English dictionary, you will notice that certain words ('abans', 'ara' and 'avui', for example) are now preceded by a small square with a (granted barely legible at the moment!) letter 'C' in it ('C' standing for 'collocation'). This little square is, in fact, a link to a page that contains further information about the word in question.

Collocations are basically word combinations that occur together by more than just chance (e.g. 'real estate', 'by the way', 'dead end'). What we are in the process of doing is compiling a list of 'frequent collocations' for individual words within our dictionaries.

Forums now open for discussion

This weekend has been spent installing phpBB, an open-source bulletin board system, onto the Dacco site in order to make it more interactive and provide Dacco users, and Catalan learners in general, with a space to discuss the dictionaries themselves (to point out any missing entries, any entries they disagree with, to suggest new features, to discuss the usefulness of existing features etc.) and to serve as a space where learners of Catalan around the world can come together to seek help, provide help and discuss their learning experiences.

New search facility

As of today, it is possible for Dacco users not only to browse the dictionary on line, but also to search for words using the new search boxes that have appeared at the top of each page.

This new feature will hopefully be useful in more ways than one. Whilst the most obvious benefit is that it allows users to find words quickly and easily without having to trawl through the entire dictionary, every word entered into the search boxes is logged together with a simple 'true' or 'false', depending on whether the search was successful or not (i.e. whether the word you were looking for was actually in the dictionary).