Plurals in Wiktionary cause "loading dictionaries..."

[Joydeck]

For years, I have been using Aard Dictionaries on a Nook Simple Touch eReader. The offline dictionaries are magnificent.

However, in the last year or two, I have an irritating problem with plural words in Wiktionary. The problem arose, I suspect, after upgrading either Wiktionary or, less likely, Aard. My version of Wiktionary is enwiktionary-20140221.aar, and my version of aarddict.android-1.apk is v.1.6.11.

Whenever I touch a singular hyperlink inside Wiktionary, the singular word displays correctly but, half a second later, Wiktionary vanishes and Aard shows "Loading dictionaries..." before returning me to Aard search results a few seconds later. I am forced to search Aard for the singular word.

Is this a known bug? Is there a fix?

[itkach]

Never heard of such behavior before. It sounds like application crashes when following link and system immediately restarts it. I doubt it has anything to do with plural vs singular (the app is blissfully ignorant of any such things), more likely one of the dictionary files it tries to access when following these links is corrupted.

in the last year or two

1.6.11 was published almost to years ago, in June 2014, enwiktionary is older still, so if this started in the last year and not two is has to be something else, maybe system update or corrupted dictionary files.

[Joydeck]

Thank you for responding. My problem possibly began on 24 June 2014, the day I updated to enwiktionary-20140221.aar. I only upgraded aarddict.android-1.apk to v.1.6.11 a week ago.

The "loading dictionaries..." problem is not intermittent but utterly predictable, and occurs every time I search for a plural word, select Wiktionary from the search results, and select any hyperlink for the singular of the word inside the Wiktionary page. The problem does not occur with any other Wiktionary hyperlink, and all the other Aard dictionaries work fine.

I mostly use Aard from within CoolReader. For instance, when I search for the verb "jumps" in Aard, select a Wiktionary entry for "jumps" in the search results, and select a "jump" hyperlink inside the "jumps" Wiktionary page, the Wiktionary page for "jump" does appear. However, half a second later, Wiktionary vanishes and Aard shows "Loading dictionaries..." for a few seconds, before returning me to Aard search results for "jumps". My only recourse is to search Aard for the singular "jump".

Following your advice about a possible corruption in the Wiktionary dictionary file, today I downloaded and verified enwiktionary-20140221.aar. I believe I also tried this a year ago. Sadly, the problem with plural words remains. It seems strange that no one else has reported this problem. Could the Nook Simple Touch itself be a factor?

[itkach]

I just installed 1.6.11, downloaded enwiktionary-20140221.aar and tested on an Android 5.1 phone - I can't reproduce what you describe. Following singular links works fine, whether article is opened from Aard lookup results or from CoolReader. It does look like app crashes when following these links on your Nook, but without being able to reproduce this on my device and without any logs I'm not sure what I can do to help.

[Joydeck]

Thank you for your trouble. Plurals in Wiktionary did work for me prior to 2014. I guess I could rebuild my rooted Nook Simple Touch from scratch, if I find the time.

[Joydeck]

Good news.

Rebuilding my root did not resolve the problem with plurals. Actually, I now understand it is a problem with selecting any grammatical variant of the searched-for word within Wiktionary.

The problem relates to aarddict.android version 1.6.11 because aarddict.android version 1.6.9 works just fine! It took a while to locate the old version of the app. incidentally, I believe aarddict.android version 1.6.10 has the same issue.