I’ve been working on my translation tool for ancient Greek again. The calendar of Antiochus of Athens seems like a perfect text to translate using it. But the deficiencies of the software are still great. I’ve been adding code to handle numerals today, with modest success. Much of the trouble is in the unicode-to-betacode converter. That apostrophe at the end of the number is represented with a special unicode character, with an apostrophe, and a tilted accent. I’ve got the first two working, but not the third, not really.
But Coptic is written mostly in Greek letters. When I was typing some up earlier this week, I was very conscious of this. Why can’t I add some extra files to the code, and be able to look at Coptic text as well?
For Greek we have things like MorphGNT, where each word is listed in a text file, together with the base form, the part of speech, number, gender, etc. But I can find no evidence of such a thing for any Coptic text.
Anyone know what we have, in the way of electronic Coptic texts, and electronic XML Coptic dictionaries?
I can’t help feeling that, if we have the New Testament in Coptic in electronic form — and I think we do — that some kind of morphologisation shouldn’t be hard to do. I wonder if one could hire someone to make such a file?
Roger, contact Hany Takla of the St Shenouda the Archimandrite Coptic Society (HTakla@stshenouda.com). He may be able to name somebody for you.
Thanks for the thought!
J. Warren Wells comes to mind as someone who might be able to contribute in such a project. See http://sahidica.warpco.com/ and his Sahidica Yahoo Group at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Sahidica/. He has produced a number of electronic Coptic texts, recently offered for sale in Logos & Accordance formats.
I noticed that the Packard Humanities Institute collection has a nice little cluster of Coptic texts. According to a post on In Rebus [link] about the two CDs that the PHI has freely available:
I’ve ordered the CDROM’s today.