Ben Crowder

Blog: #latin

13 posts :: archive

Greek and Latin vocab lists

This is cool: Haverford College has created a tool called Bridge that creates Latin or Greek vocab lists from texts and textbooks. For example, I was able to start with the vocab from Moreland and Fleischer’s Latin: An Intensive Course (the text we used in my first Latin course in college) and then limit it to just nouns and verbs. You can export to Excel/TSV as well. Pretty neat.

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On digital Greek and Latin texts

A good blog post by Gregory Crane (editor-in-chief of the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts) back in February about the Digital Loeb Classical library and the digitization of Greek and Latin texts:

We need transcriptions of public domain print editions to provide a starting point for work. These editions do not have to be the most up-to-date and they do not even have to be error free (99% may be good enough rather than 99.95%). If the community has the ability to correct and augment and to add features such as are described above and to receive recognition for that work, then the editions will evolve rapidly and outperform closed editions. If no community emerges to improve the editions, then the edition is good enough for current purposes. This model moves away from treating the community as a set of consumers and towards viewing members of the community as citizens with an obligation to contribute as well as to use.

The post has links to some fascinating projects I didn’t know about, like the Open Philology Project and the Homer Multitext Project.

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Coptic Latin

I was googling around for information on Latin vowel shifts (to see if the shift from adalter to adulter was unique or if the a to u shift happened with other words, too) and came across the Omniglot page on Coptic Latin. My first thought was: uh, what? (Mostly since I’ve studied both Coptic and Latin, and Coptic doesn’t have really anything to do with Latin. Greek, yes. But Latin?)

Turns out it’s a modern mashup of the Coptic script and the Latin language, invented by David Biliot to help his students start learning Catholic Latin (which I’m guessing is just another name for Church Latin or ecclesiastical Latin). Interesting idea. And, you know, there’s precedence for this sort of thing, since Coptic itself was a mashup of the Greek script (with modifications) and the Egyptian language.

Here’s the sample text from Omniglot’s page (which I’ve retyped using two different fonts, the second of which I find a bit more readable):

Transliteration: Omnes homines dignitate et jure liberi et pares nascuntur, rationis et conscientiae participes sunt, quibus inter se concordiae studio est agendum.

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