More news on Eusebius of Caesarea’s Gospel problems and solutions. I’ve had an email from the lady who has been translating the coptic fragments of this work from Delagarde’s catena. Apparently this is now close to completion. She also tells me that Delagarde’s intro is interesting, and should be translated. This I will put elsewhere, as she is tied up.
One issue I have not explored is transcribing the coptic. I don’t know if it will be hard to do; I would think not.
There are various UTF-8 coptic fonts, the Brussels Coptic Database (http://dev.ulb.ac.be/philo/bad/copte/ ) works with the New Athena font ( http://apagreekkeys.org/NAUdownload.html ) and the text is about as hard to encode as greek.
Thank you very much for these details — I must see if I can find someone who (for money) will enter the Coptic.
Any ideas who’s involved with Coptic and might know of someone? Or where one could ask?
Well the colleague for which I realized the Brussels Coptic Database’s website (and for which I’m working on the V2 that includes the coptic texts themselves instead of just their references) has taught a number of students and has had them work on computer so I could ask him for names if you want. He works for the Classics departement of the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Trismegistos research project of the Katholiek Universiteit Leuven.
I would suggest writing to the grouplist: remenkimi@yahoogroups.com. They have experts in Coptic, and some hold high degrees on the language. They created new fonts and are working hard to revive Coptic. Some live in Egypt, and so it would be comparatively cheaper to ask them to do the transcription, without, I believe, any compromise of the quality of work.
Bryaxis, please email me some people I could talk to.
Dioscorus, thanks for the suggestion!
Hi Roger.
Logos Bible Software has a Coptic Keyboard that works with the windows keyboard manager stuff: http://www.logos.com/support/downloads/keyboards . We’ve also got another little freely downloadable .NET app, called Shibboleth, http://www.logos.com/shibboleth , that is designed to help make keying in of difficult scripts easier. Not all scripts, just ones we have run into that we need (so lots of ancient stuff and stuff valuable for text-critical purposes).
Aha. Most interesting – thank you!