New website with ancient Greek works: TextCritical.net

[LukeMurphey]

I have the sources documented here: http://lukemurphey.net/projects/ancient ... nt_Sources. All of them are public.

The works are indeed from Perseus with the exception of the Greek New Testament and LXX (those came from Biola). I fixed some issues in the Perseus works and published them in GitHub (https://github.com/LukeMurphey/perseus- ... oman-texts). The lemma definitions came from Diagenes. The wiki has all these details.

Note that the files under the test directory are for unit tests and are not complete works.

[TimNelson]

Regarding the glosses, I suspect Nigel is asking "whence cometh the database".

Also, it might be useful to be able to annotate a work with all words that occur less than eg. 10 times in *another* work. For example, suppose I know all words that occur more than 10x in the New Testament (alas, I'm not there yet), and wanted to read Xenophon's Anabasis. I'd be able to get a version of the Anabasis which footnotes all words occurring less than 10x in the NT. That could be handy. That's not an "in a hurry" feature, just a "nice to have".

That sounds a bit odd; it does make me wonder how predictable it is that one will turn from any one item in Greek literature to any other item in Greek literature. I suppose that most BG participants who go on to read other Greek texts do start out with the GNT. I did too, but that was an accident; the following year I was reading Homer and then went on the year after that to read Aristotle and Sophocles. I would think that implementation of such a feature would require some sort of calculation of what's most likely to be read next. How random might that be? Consider the thread Stephen Hughes has started on what to read after Xenophon's Oeconomicus?

Carl, what I'm suggesting here is that the user interface make it possible, when selecting a work, to choose another work (or works plural, as Jonathan seems to be suggesting) for which you already know vocabulary, and then footnote any vocabulary the user doesn't know. This would be done dynamically and computer-generated. This is not a perfect system, but it would be a nice feature to have. So it would also be possible to generate a similar list for the NT once someone has read, for example, Homer and Xenophon.

And perhaps each principal part should be treated as a separate word for this purpose? That's a thought I've been toying with ...

Interesting idea. In my first year of Greek, the lecturer finished the basic textbook (Wenham, in 2011, when it was out-of-print - I think we were the last class in the world using it), and went on to teach from Wallace (in particular, the meanings of the cases and tenses). Actually, it wasn't from Wallace, it was from material that our lecturer had developed himself before Wallace's textbook was written. I found this frustrating, because it felt like I was trying to go from the first floor to the third floor, and the second-floor landing was missing. I eventually figured out that the missing piece was derivational morphology (for the non-linguists, this means prefixes and suffixes that turn words into other words, like the prepositional prefixes (εἰσ-έρχομαι) or some of the suffixes (ἔργον + -της = ἐργάτης)), so I ended up doing a project unit on this. It also means I've spent a fair bit of time wrapping my head around verb morphology, at least as far as forms go (funtion is a different matter). It seems to me that, once you've learned λύω (thematic), δίδωμι (athematic), and the suppletives (verbs derived from multiple roots; there are 9 of these in the NT), most of the rest should be easily inferrable.

Or are you separating them not because of the potential confusion about forms, but because of a perceived difference in meaning?

[cwconrad]

Regarding the glosses, I suspect Nigel is asking "whence cometh the database".

Also, it might be useful to be able to annotate a work with all words that occur less than eg. 10 times in *another* work. For example, suppose I know all words that occur more than 10x in the New Testament (alas, I'm not there yet), and wanted to read Xenophon's Anabasis. I'd be able to get a version of the Anabasis which footnotes all words occurring less than 10x in the NT. That could be handy. That's not an "in a hurry" feature, just a "nice to have".

That sounds a bit odd; it does make me wonder how predictable it is that one will turn from any one item in Greek literature to any other item in Greek literature. I suppose that most BG participants who go on to read other Greek texts do start out with the GNT. I did too, but that was an accident; the following year I was reading Homer and then went on the year after that to read Aristotle and Sophocles. I would think that implementation of such a feature would require some sort of calculation of what's most likely to be read next. How random might that be? Consider the thread Stephen Hughes has started on what to read after Xenophon's Oeconomicus?

Carl, what I'm suggesting here is that the user interface make it possible, when selecting a work, to choose another work (or works plural, as Jonathan seems to be suggesting) for which you already know vocabulary, and then footnote any vocabulary the user doesn't know. This would be done dynamically and computer-generated. This is not a perfect system, but it would be a nice feature to have. So it would also be possible to generate a similar list for the NT once someone has read, for example, Homer and Xenophon.

And perhaps each principal part should be treated as a separate word for this purpose? That's a thought I've been toying with ...

Interesting idea. In my first year of Greek, the lecturer finished the basic textbook (Wenham, in 2011, when it was out-of-print - I think we were the last class in the world using it), and went on to teach from Wallace (in particular, the meanings of the cases and tenses). Actually, it wasn't from Wallace, it was from material that our lecturer had developed himself before Wallace's textbook was written. I found this frustrating, because it felt like I was trying to go from the first floor to the third floor, and the second-floor landing was missing. I eventually figured out that the missing piece was derivational morphology (for the non-linguists, this means prefixes and suffixes that turn words into other words, like the prepositional prefixes (εἰσ-έρχομαι) or some of the suffixes (ἔργον + -της = ἐργάτης)), so I ended up doing a project unit on this. It also means I've spent a fair bit of time wrapping my head around verb morphology, at least as far as forms go (funtion is a different matter). It seems to me that, once you've learned λύω (thematic), δίδωμι (athematic), and the suppletives (verbs derived from multiple roots; there are 9 of these in the NT), most of the rest should be easily inferrable.

Or are you separating them not because of the potential confusion about forms, but because of a perceived difference in meaning?

Sorry about quoting all of that, but I think that my response is directed to "all of that." My concern here is that "we" are building bigger and better interlinears that serve neatly to enable readers to interact with texts involving vocabulary and perhaps morphological details that one has not yet mastered (perhaps not even begun to master). Clay Bartholomew just recently pointed to the neat new "interlinear" at Tyndale House, a really remarkable tool. My concern is an old and recurrent pedagogical concern: the use and abuse of software tools to teach and consolidate and enhance the work of one learning to understand and read an alien language. I've seen some claims that I really consider outrageous about software that can impart real reading ability for ancient Greek or Hebrew without any resort to books or conversation or personal instruction. I think the troublesome element is that the user can always have immediate access to a gloss that gives a satisfactory, if not fully adequate, answer to a reader's question: what's λαγνεία? what form is καταλειφθέντα?

It may be that I, who at age 80 do feel reasonably comfortable with electronic resources, am waxing nostalgic over print media and pencil-and-notebook learning and rote memorization of principal parts of verbs. But I am still, for what it's worth, remembering how I found myself with open lexicons and grammars and notepads and pencils spread over a grad student's desk, suddenly reading Homer and Herodotus with ease. I really wonder whether I could have done that without having memorized principal parts of 80 or so Greek irregular verbs and having written down notes on certain words several times in the same notebook and having pondered the examples of usage in different contexts in the lexicons. The question, I guess, is how much useful information can be made accessible immediately to a reader confronting a text that has never been seen before, something like Xenophon's treatise on hunting, Cynogetica? I may simply be expressing an anxiety, but I really do wonder whether what "we" are doing here is inventing bigger and better interlinears.

[Jonathan Robie]

Carl, what I'm suggesting here is that the user interface make it possible, when selecting a work, to choose another work (or works plural, as Jonathan seems to be suggesting) for which you already know vocabulary, and then footnote any vocabulary the user doesn't know. This would be done dynamically and computer-generated. This is not a perfect system, but it would be a nice feature to have. So it would also be possible to generate a similar list for the NT once someone has read, for example, Homer and Xenophon.

And perhaps each principal part should be treated as a separate word for this purpose? That's a thought I've been toying with ...

It may be that I, who at age 80 do feel reasonably comfortable with electronic resources, am waxing nostalgic over print media and pencil-and-notebook learning and rote memorization of principal parts of verbs. But I am still, for what it's worth, remembering how I found myself with open lexicons and grammars and notepads and pencils spread over a grad student's desk, suddenly reading Homer and Herodotus with ease. I really wonder whether I could have done that without having memorized principal parts of 80 or so Greek irregular verbs and having written down notes on certain words several times in the same notebook and having pondered the examples of usage in different contexts in the lexicons. The question, I guess, is how much useful information can be made accessible immediately to a reader confronting a text that has never been seen before, something like Xenophon's treatise on hunting, Cynogetica? I may simply be expressing an anxiety, but I really do wonder whether what "we" are doing here is inventing bigger and better interlinears.

I certainly hope that's not what we're doing - at least in the software I'm working on. But it is certainly a danger.

I'm interested in software that focuses attention on the Greek text per se. If the software promotes learning the forms and understanding how the verbs relate to each other in a sentence, I think that's a good thing. If the software provides an instant translation or drowns people with meta-language, I think that's a bad thing. If the software calls attention to patterns in verb usage that the user might not have otherwise noticed, I think that's a good thing.

Good software can help people learn the principal parts. Bad software bypasses the need to learn principal parts. Good software focuses on providing experience with the Greek text per se, not with meta-language or translations - but good software may well provide access to a lexicon, a grammar, a search facility that allows people to find other examples, etc.

Not everybody has a live teacher or a group that can converse in Koine Greek. Good software might make it easier for people to interact actively with the Greek language. At least, that's the notion we're playing with now.

And software is not the enemy of paper. Currently, I'm using software to generate paper handouts for classes on Sundays ...

[cwconrad]

[And software is not the enemy of paper. Currently, I'm using software to generate paper handouts for classes on Sundays ...

I appreciate your whole comment in response to my question, Jonathan. But I thought you told me that you were using those handouts in your Sunday classes because people had gotten rusty with their recognition of forms -- their parsing. That's an aid to using the text for discussion, but it does seem like something that an interlinear does.