Month: December 2008

The last person to see a complete Diodorus Siculus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The splendid efforts by Bill Thayer to scan the still-massive  remains of the Universal History by Diodorus Siculus have reminded me that the complete text still existed in 1453.  N. G. Wilson in Scribes and Scholars p.72 tells us of a well-established fact, stated by Constantine Lascaris who says that he saw a complete copy of the work in the imperial palace in Constantinople, and that it was destroyed by the Turks. 

Scribes and Scholars is a masterwork, but one of its defects is the casual attitude to referencing.  But by chance a French correspondent asked me about this very event, and in order to give him a page reference, I pulled down the French translation by the excellent Pierre Petitmengin, D’Homère a Érasme.  I was surprised, but delighted, to find on page 48 a reference for this statement: Patrologia Graeca, t. 161, c. 918.  One of the reasons why the French edition is useful is that it does fill in some of the gaps like this.

It would be nice to have Constantine Lascaris’ words in English, but that must wait another day!

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Rheinisches Museum 93-147 (1950-2004) now online and free

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It’s available in PDF form from here, courtesy of the German Research Foundation.  This journal contains quite a bit of patristic-related material.  This is because the editor, Bernd Manuwald, applied to that foundation for a grant to do it.  Well done Dr Manuwald!

I understand that he is also applying for money to digitise the remaining issues.  Frankly he looks like a hero to me.

The last three years are not available online.  This protects the subscription income from universities, where the very latest articles are needed.  But it is a mark of Bernd Manuwald’s vision that he has limited the offline material to just that range. 

None of us ordinary mortals will care that the last three years are not freely available.  It is rarely a matter of concern to the interested amateur to keep up with the very latest papers.  But the audience for a century of material is wide.

Later: Adrian Murdoch at the ever-excellent Bread and Circuses blog has picked up the story, and tells us that ZPE is also available freely online, although I can’t actually find it on that site.  Come on gents at the ZPE: if you’ve done the work, make it obvious where it is!

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Visiting Luxor in December

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This morning it was -0.5 C, and I had to scrape the weather off my car before going to work.  But I shall be off to Luxor in Egypt in a week or two, where the temperature today is 24 C in the shade.   Luxor (from al-Uqsa, “the palaces”) is an Egyptian village with a lot of hotels built on the ruins of ancient Thebes of the Hundred Gates, and across the river from the Valley of the Kings.

The 25% collapse in the value of the pound is not great news for me, and I was looking for Egyptian currency online when I came across a non-commercial site on visiting Luxor.  Luxor Travel Tips appears to be a gem. 

Since I went to Luxor last year, I was able to verify what they said about the layout of the airport on arrival, and what you have to do in what order.  It was bang on.  Recommended.

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Downloadable dictionaries

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It would be very helpful to be able to lookup words in French within our little translation applications.  But where to find the data?

I was able to find some simple downloadable files, made by Tyler Jones at

http://www.june29.com/IDP/IDPfiles.html

Unfortunately these are quite small.  The French consists only of 3,000 words, the German of 8,000 and so on.  And really we need much more detail.

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Making your own translation tools

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I am a profoundly lazy man, in some respects anyway.  I hate pointless labour.  And what can be more pointless than the way many of us translate?

Imagine getting a French text in front of you.  The process goes something like this:

You read the first sentence.  You type an English version into Word.  Then you look back to the book.  A few moments of searching along the line, and you find the second sentence.  You know most of the words, but not all, so you type in a couple of them in an electronic dictionary.  Then you look back again at the page, to get the whole sentence, and spend time again fumbling for it in the mass of text.  Then you write another sentence.  And so on.

Frankly all this switching to and fro is annoying and pointless.

What we need, surely, is to turn the French into an electronic form, split it into sentences, and put each sentence on a separate line.

We could go further.  Machine translators for French are quite good.  Let’s run the electronic text through one of those.  Then split the translation into sentences, and interleave them with the French.

Won’t that be much easier?  We no longer have to find a text in a page in a book; it’s immediately above the line.  We have the machine translator’s vocabulary; that will reduce the amount of looking up.  In short, it’s easier and quicker and less painful.

I’ve written a little utility that does the splitting into sentences and the interleaving.  I use it with a machine translator, and just paste the output back into my utility.

Of course it’s limited in what it does, but the output is a  nice word document with interleaved French and English.

It’s making working on Agapius much easier anyway!  If only there were some way to hover a mouse over a French word and get a full dictionary entry.  Are there any French dictionaries in XML form?

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