A while ago I came across the CSS3 Ruby spec, but it seemed to only apply to East Asian texts. Then today I ran across it again (see User Agent Man’s post) and realized it’s perfect for glossing texts.
For example, here are the first few verses of the Chapter 2 exercise in Bennett’s An Introduction to the Gothic Language:
Kind of verbose, though. If I end up using this a lot, I’ll probably write a preprocessor that lets me use abbreviated syntax — something like this:
In::(in, into) dagam::(days) Hērōdis::(of Herod)
Sidenote: I was originally using a combining macron for the macrons (U+0304), but Georgia doesn’t do the combining correctly. Times New Roman does, though. Weird. I ended up just going with the precomposed characters. Oh well.
The collection contains eight stories including “La Belle au bois dormant” (Sleeping Beauty), “Le Petit Chaperon rouge” (Little Red Riding Hood), and “La Barbe-Bleuë” (Bluebeard).
This book marks the beginning of a series of fairy tale and folk tale collections that I’ll be publishing. (The original 1812/1815 German edition of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen is next and is almost done.) Future books in this series will include the Arabian Nights (including Galland’s original French translation), the eight-volume Russian collection by Alexander Afanasyev, Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, and Joseph Jacobs’ English fairy tales, among others. (And while there will certainly be an emphasis on the earliest editions of these tales, I’ll also be publishing English translations.)
If you know of any pre-1923 fairy/folk tale collections you’d like to see in this series, let me know.
Update: A donation came in today from a generous benefactor, so I’ll be releasing the app after all (in the near future).
Update 2: I ended up deciding not to release the app (and refunded the donation). It was a fun proof of concept and introduction to iPhone coding, but that’s about it.
For the last six months I’ve been working on Hwaet, an Old English dictionary app for the iPhone. It’s based off Bosworth & Toller (digitized by the Germanic Lexicon Project), and I also got permission from the Labyrinth Library to include their collection of Old English texts.
The app works (it’s fully functional). The dictionary’s there (although there’s still a bit of work to be done cleaning up the imported definitions — mostly errors from the digitization as far as I can tell), some of the texts are there (and I wrote a script that made it super easy to import the rest), and the project was going quite well.
So why am I not going to release it?
Mostly because I wanted it to be a free app. Apple requires developers to pay $100/year (and that’s a totally legitimate cost, considering what you get in return for it — I’m not complaining about the fee), and since I won’t be writing commercial apps anytime soon, I can’t justify spending $100/year on it. Especially not with a baby on the way.
Maybe someday I’ll write a web-based mobile version, but in the meantime, here’s what Hwaet looked like:
I’ve been in a bit of a Latin mood lately, so here is a short ebook of Cicero’s Catiline Orations in the original Latin, available in both EPUB and Kindle formats.
My second book release for today is Преступление и наказание (Crime & Punishment). This is an EPUB edition of Dostovesky’s novel (which I love) in the original Russian.
This marks my first attempt at creating an EPUB from a text in a non-Roman script (Cyrillic), and I was pleasantly surprised at how well it all went. I should note that Stanza displays the book just fine, but I haven’t yet tested it in iBooks.
I designed the cover in Photoshop. There’s a higher resolution version available on Flickr.
I’m starting to do some more language-related design work and thought I’d post a sample. This is part of a Latin declensions chart:
The colored part prints out darker, by the way, so it’s not quite as bright as it seems here.
Anyway, there’ll be more soon. I plan to focus on basic grammatical charts, though I might do some simple vocab lists and short texts as well. We’ll see — if you have any ideas or requests, let me know. The final charts will be released for free in PDF.
Update: I’ve finally finished the chart. It’s available on the Latin charts page. Enjoy!
I found this quote a long time ago in a festschrift for Thomas O. Lambdin and absolutely love it:
…Prof. Lambdin simply does not dabble in his languages. He attacks them, not only with zeal (though that is always present), but with a plan, to conquer them.
First, learn the basic grammar as it is commonly understood (or misunderstood), some basic vocabulary; read some texts. Then, like a linguistic pathologist, take the language apart: scrutinize the lexical bones, particularly those idioms, usually associated with the most common verbs, that present obstacles in every language; analyze the morphological muscles, render them unformidable; track down the syntactical tendons, overlooked by others. Meanwhile, put most of the dictionary on flash cards and commit it to memory. Now read the best of the literature like a native, until boredom sets in from lack of challenge, and it’s time to move on.
The number and range of languages that have been subjected to this process is remarkable: there are the Semitic languages, of course; but also Berber, Finnish, Turkish, Swahili, Hindi, Chinese, and some fifty or sixty others, it seems….
And when called upon to transmit his knowledge and understanding, another side of his extraordinary linguistic ability came into play; as a teacher of language, he is simply the best. It is one thing to be able to learn languages; it is quite another to describe them with such clarity that others are able to gain a similar understanding.
Occasionally, an available grammar would meet with his approval and be used. But more often, he would find the grammars too frustrating; if he did not feel comfortable with a language after going through a given grammar, he would not expect his students to. So he would write his own, a clear report of the dissection process described earlier, the morphology and syntax broken down into easily comprehended lessons, the vocabulary glossed in such a way that the words really do have meaning, and exercises, lots of exercises, written to ensure that the grammar and vocabulary make sense and are remembered, so that by the time the first texts are encountered, the language is an old friend, not a dimly perceived, refractory set of vaguely familiar forms.
For those doing research in older Germanic languages (Gothic, Old Icelandic/Norse, Middle/Old High German, Frisian, Old English, etc.), Sean Crist’s Germanic Lexicon Project is a great resource for old grammars and primers and dictionaries. He’s scanned several out-of-copyright books and put the images online, with a portion of those OCRed and/or in a nice text/HTML/XML format. My own digitization of Henry Sweet’s An Icelandic Primer is on the site as well (that’s where I originally got the images). I’m considering digitizing an early edition of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer but haven’t made up my mind yet.
