Latin and the Personal Computer

[lollardfish]

I 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.

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Paul? I thought Venice was all about Mark. How many does one city need, anyway?

Or is this not the Paul, and instead another Paul?

B

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Venice is mostly about Mark, and all saints are carefully kept subservient to him. But this is Paul the Martyr, anyway, who I think is a 4th century Roman martyr, but am not quite sure ... Still an important saint, but not THE saint paul.

On the other hand, the text does say that as Saint Paul (the) predicted glory for Rome, so too does the arrival of Paul the Martyr in Venice predict glory for Venice.

And I shall make MUCH of that statement.

[haniaw.livejournal.com]

This sounds really fabulous. Now there will be more hours in the day for peripheral activities like eating and sleeping. :-) Is this a free download? Where is it?

I think the best thing I took in school was Latin. Even though I obviously do not use it in my everyday life the way you do, I think taking it did something to my brain which made learning other languages (any other languages) that much easier. This has come in really handy.

...Hania

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

The program can be gotten from: http://www.software-partners.co.uk/ (http://www.software-partners.co.uk/) and selecting 'Latin Translation.' Interestingly enough, the software company wrote me to give me my registration number, and then added:

"I am looking into the marketing of this product and if you have time could you possibly let me know why you are buying it? I hope you don't mind me asking, I would be very interested to know. BlitzLatin is unusual because we have hundreds of copies downloaded every month and (sadly) nothing like this volume of sales, and I'm trying to understand this discrepancy."

So I told him that it claims to translate Latin, and there are tons of students who want that, but that it's actually only really useful if you already know Latin. And most people who really know Latin and use it and would find the program useful, are, honestly, kinda technophobes (or at least not technophiles like me).

[creidylad.livejournal.com]

It is my eternal regret that I never took Latin in high school. I've made a few stabs at becoming self-taught, but it's not as easy as, well, something that is easy to teach yourself.

The gymnastics involved in medieval logic is, I think, what makes the middle ages so appealing to those who study it earnestly, and is the reason that period texts read so endearingly poeticly -- the author's needs and desires are always transparent through the attempts at what passed for objective narrative. (If one even believes that the medieval mind cared about objectivity.)

As for translating things across continents and words across languages.... there is a wonderful line towards the beginning of _Ada_ by Vladimir Nabakov in which he takes a jab at the bad nineteenth century renderings of Russian novels into English by talking about Anna Karenina being 'transfigured' into English. I've always loved this observation -- that by translating, we, by nature, transform.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Neat. Would you quote that here? I might steal it ... the word translate in Latin, of course, means to 'carry across', and is the phrase used to describe the act of moving a relic my means fair or foul. But being able to start a paper with a posh quotation about Nabokov would be keen!

Thanks.

[creidylad.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, I don't think a direct quotation is going to be of much use. Here it is, just in case:

"All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike," says a great Russian writer at the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transifgured into English by R. G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880). That pronouncement has little if any relation to the story to be unfolded now, a family chronicle, the first part of which is, perhaps, closer to another Tolstoy work, Destvo i Otrochestvo (Childhood and Fatherland, Pontius Press, 1858).

In his own footnotes to Ada, supposedly written by Vivan Darkbloom (a side character from Lolita), Nabakov has this to say:

p. 3 - All happy families etc.: mistranslations of Russian classics are ridiculed here. The opening sentence of Tolstoy's novel is turned inside out and Anna Arkadievna's patronymic given an absurd masculine ending, while an incorrect feminine one is added to her surname. "Mounta Tabor" and "Pontius" allude to the transfigurations (Mr. G. Steiner's term, I believe) and betrayals to which great texts are subjected by pretentious and ignorant versionists.

A cursery google search would suggest that G. Steiner, at least, is a real person.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

That's a pity. I was hoping Nabokov said, in some snarky clever Russian way, that by translating, we transform ...

Cause by translating the saints' relics from Byzantium to Venice, the meaning of both the saint and both locations could, potentially, be transformed.

[creidylad.livejournal.com]

Well, YOU could say it, in an unsnarky American way :)

[mizzlaurajean.livejournal.com]

I took a few different languages in school. While I wish they would have started language programs before middle school when ones brain has become less elastic and the ability to acquire new language has dropped off the face of the planet making it a real task to learn. I do not regret not taking Latin, I was far to lazy and was more interested in getting a taste of this and that.
While I would readily have Latin implanted or downloaded to the brain, I think it admirable and fasinating that you know Latin, it would seem anyway fewer and fewer of us learn such languages these days.

By the way whats that snail mail address of yours again and is there anything American you'd like sent your way? I absolutely love sending mail!

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm. Um. I like mail. I like things. But ... the things I miss I can't get (like sports games, cause american vhs won't play on my VCR), um ...

Ah.

Er.

Damn. Can't think of anything.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Wait! I need my nice warm Irish wool sweater! And then I need you to come pick it up and take it back cause it won't fit in my suitcas

[zinzinzinnia.livejournal.com]

I think my kids always think I'm irredeemably weird when I trot out the Latin roots of words that come up as vocabulary in the day-to-day scheme of things. "How on earth does she know that?" is probably one of the few things that pop into their minds, along with "Why would we ever need to know this?" and "She's making that up."

But it was the Latin that made a word-hound out of me, and it was the Latin that enabled me to understand the concept of declensions, giving me a head start amongst my Old English classmates, and Latin is fabulous for doing the crossword!

They still teach it at my school, but the classes tend to average about 6 people. This year I have a student in my grade 11 class who is one of those 6, and *she* is the one who gets all the neat language stuff that makes the others squint fitfully at the etymological scribbles on the blackboard. Yay for her!! Maybe one day *she'll* get to go study in Venice for a season!