lollardfish (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lollardfish) wrote2003-10-22 07:35 pm
lollardfish) wrote2003-10-22 07:35 pm
Latin and the Personal Computer
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.
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.
no subject
Or is this not the Paul, and instead another Paul?
B
no subject
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.
no subject
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
no subject
"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).
no subject
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.
no subject
Thanks.
no subject
In his own footnotes to Ada, supposedly written by Vivan Darkbloom (a side character from Lolita), Nabakov has this to say:
A cursery google search would suggest that G. Steiner, at least, is a real person.
no subject
Cause by translating the saints' relics from Byzantium to Venice, the meaning of both the saint and both locations could, potentially, be transformed.
no subject
no subject
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!
no subject
Ah.
Er.
Damn. Can't think of anything.
no subject
no subject
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!