This morning I spent driving around, picking up some medicine for my girlfriend’s cat, and then taking her out to lunch. After lunch, in my last post I uploaded the Life of Isidore of Pelusium (BHG 2209). This afternoon I scanned in the Greek for a miracle story of St George, the miracle of the demon (BHG 687k); and ran it through ChatGPT. It’s in the comment to this old post here.
I’d still like to do a translation of the 8 letters of Isidore of Pelusium to Cyril of Alexandria. I have the Greek for this, thanks to the TLG. Although tomorrow morning a cheese scone beckons, so it may have to wait a bit.
This evening while sitting in the bath I began to think about what else we could do with this interesting combination of imperfect OCR, plus the ability to get AI to correct the scan errors, and some other languages than Greek and Latin.
A little while ago I used Google Docs to scan in some Ge`ez – which worked -, and then I tried to get AI to translate it. The last bit failed completely. I think, given time, that Ethiopian languages will become possible.
I wonder how long ago that attempt was? I think it was two years ago, after I encountered a legend about Abba Garima copying the bible in a single night. (Indeed it was! Amharic, rather than Ge`ez tho. See here and here.)
The technology has come on quite a bit since then. I must try again.
What other languages might we do this with? Well, what about Armenian? Or Coptic?
Interesting thoughts!
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