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Latin and the Personal Computer
Oct. 22nd, 2003 07:35 pmI love technology.
Ok, maybe love is too strong. But I really like it! I like it that via email and chat I can stay in touch with America. I like it that I can read local papers. I like it that I can sometimes watch American sports, despite the pain and anguish of the Red Sox. Again. Go Vikings! All these things are great.
But this weekend I downloaded a program that translates Latin. Some of my medievalist friends who might read this journal may be shocked, they may drum me out of the geeky Latinists guild, they may mock me incessantly. But honestly, Latin is hard. Even squirrely 13th century Venetian church Latin with a vaguely Romance-esque word order is hard. Harder, maybe, than a lot of the classical ilk. Anyway, I essentially have a dictionary on my harddrive. When I hit a word I don’t know, I type it in and it gives me all the possible options, or can be directed to select the most likely one given some context. It even has a ‘cope with medieval spelling’ option. It would be utterly useless, as a program, if I hadn’t done years of Latin, but I already can’t imagine how I’ve been doing my translations without it.
Latin is all about options – words pop up and you need to figure out all the potential parts of speech, then isolate the most likely one, then build your translation (ok, so, most of the time this happens pretty fast, and one just reads). The program takes out the long first step. It takes out the ‘flip through the dictionary and try to figure out the root of this wacky word’ step. And when the program fails, I still have my Oxford Latin Dictionary and Niermayer’s medieval Latin wordlist at hand. But really thanks to this program, the last few days have been enormously productive.
Today I worked through a text from 1222 on the Translation (think translocation) of St. Paul the Martyr from Constantinople to Venice. Highlights included a monent when the guy carrying the casket with the saint lied and told the sailors on the ship that it was packed with a glass object painted with gold, to make them be careful with it and to have them stop asking questions. The writer felt a little sheepish about the lie, I think, and embarked on this long digression to explain, as Proverb 8 of the bible tells us, that acquiring knowledge is better than gold, and that the entire enterprise is about the virtue and knowledge of the saint, so the lie was ok. It’s a beautiful piece of Christian logic. The saint may not have been so sanguine, because when I left for the day our heros were in the midst of a terrible shipwreck, and crying out to god about their sins, and moaning, as if their eternal souls, and not their bodies, might be about to be swallowed by the waves. I suspect Paul will save them though.
Ok, maybe love is too strong. But I really like it! I like it that via email and chat I can stay in touch with America. I like it that I can read local papers. I like it that I can sometimes watch American sports, despite the pain and anguish of the Red Sox. Again. Go Vikings! All these things are great.
But this weekend I downloaded a program that translates Latin. Some of my medievalist friends who might read this journal may be shocked, they may drum me out of the geeky Latinists guild, they may mock me incessantly. But honestly, Latin is hard. Even squirrely 13th century Venetian church Latin with a vaguely Romance-esque word order is hard. Harder, maybe, than a lot of the classical ilk. Anyway, I essentially have a dictionary on my harddrive. When I hit a word I don’t know, I type it in and it gives me all the possible options, or can be directed to select the most likely one given some context. It even has a ‘cope with medieval spelling’ option. It would be utterly useless, as a program, if I hadn’t done years of Latin, but I already can’t imagine how I’ve been doing my translations without it.
Latin is all about options – words pop up and you need to figure out all the potential parts of speech, then isolate the most likely one, then build your translation (ok, so, most of the time this happens pretty fast, and one just reads). The program takes out the long first step. It takes out the ‘flip through the dictionary and try to figure out the root of this wacky word’ step. And when the program fails, I still have my Oxford Latin Dictionary and Niermayer’s medieval Latin wordlist at hand. But really thanks to this program, the last few days have been enormously productive.
Today I worked through a text from 1222 on the Translation (think translocation) of St. Paul the Martyr from Constantinople to Venice. Highlights included a monent when the guy carrying the casket with the saint lied and told the sailors on the ship that it was packed with a glass object painted with gold, to make them be careful with it and to have them stop asking questions. The writer felt a little sheepish about the lie, I think, and embarked on this long digression to explain, as Proverb 8 of the bible tells us, that acquiring knowledge is better than gold, and that the entire enterprise is about the virtue and knowledge of the saint, so the lie was ok. It’s a beautiful piece of Christian logic. The saint may not have been so sanguine, because when I left for the day our heros were in the midst of a terrible shipwreck, and crying out to god about their sins, and moaning, as if their eternal souls, and not their bodies, might be about to be swallowed by the waves. I suspect Paul will save them though.
