The Missing Language: Latin

I own Verbum 5 and was really looking for Logos to beef up it's support for Latin in Verbum 6. I understand that the company was started by non-Catholic Christians and study is mainly guided by Greek and Hebrew.

As a Catholic, and someone who has studied Latin and reads Ecclesiastical & Medieval Latin, mostly related to the Church, I would like to suggest you beef up your Latin. There are far more works written in Latin than Hebrew and Greek combined! And as many Catholics fail to realize, it still is the official language of the Church.

It would be awesome, wonderful to have the same kind of tools you offer for Greek and Hebrew!!!

Three is an important number... it would be nice to have the third sacred language added.

Your Brother in Christ,

Mark

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Comments

George Somsel

Agreed

Matt Hamrick

[Y][Y]

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/723945#Comment_723945

We've seen the first step- a Latin morphology. We just need to purchase enough for the Verbum staff to expand (in numbers not weight).

Veli Voipio

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/723950#Comment_723950

[Y]

Mike Pettit

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/723952#Comment_723952

The great works of the reformation and its later developments are also largely written in Latin as well, much of it still untranslated.

NB.Mick

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/723950#Comment_723950

We've seen the first step- a Latin morphology. We just need to purchase enough for the Verbum staff to expand (in numbers not weight).

With morph-searching possible and the Dictionary of Latin Forms serving as an analytical lexicon (L & S as the "real lexicon"), Logos has come quite a way during my limited time with it. We can search for lemmas

We can analyze morphologically tagged Latin text (BWS is not really filled much)

...and even untagged text.

The next step needed would be - to the best of my knowledge - an internal gloss database. This gloss database alone would drive functionality like automatic Word List documents. Of course, this would also be helpful not only for Verbum, but also Noet. I think
To really fly a bit like the other languages, a D-R Reverse Interlinear to the Vulgate would be needed - this would drive lots of Logos/Verbum's full functionality, if I'm correct it would e.g. allow to just activate the BWS translation ring for Latin.

George Somsel

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/723970#Comment_723970

The next step needed would be - to the best of my knowledge - an internal gloss database. This gloss database alone would drive functionality like automatic Word List documents. Of course, this would also be helpful not only for Verbum, but also Noet. I think

To really fly a bit like the other languages, a D-R Reverse Interlinear to the Vulgate would be needed - this would drive lots of Logos/Verbum's full functionality, if I'm correct it would e.g. allow to just activate the BWS translation ring for Latin.

Bite your tongue. They've made a mess of learning Greek and Hebrew with their reverse interlinears. Don't encourage them to do that with Latin as well. With interlinears you'll NEVER learn the language.

Veli Voipio

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/724022#Comment_724022

They've made a mess of learning Greek and Hebrew with their reverse interlinears.

I agree, although I admit I use true interlinears [:$], but they have the option to hide the gloss and other lines [A]

George Somsel

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/724025#Comment_724025

but they have the option to hide the gloss and other lines

Which would make it like any simple text so why not simply buy the unadorned text?

NB.Mick

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/724022#Comment_724022

They've made a mess of learning Greek and Hebrew with their reverse interlinears. Don't encourage them to do that with Latin as well. With interlinears you'll NEVER learn the language.

I think you may be largely correct with forward interlinears that are used as a crutch to save learning vocabulary and parsing. A RI is primarily aimed not at: how do I understand/translate that original phrase (which isn't even printed in the original word order), but at: how did the translators come up with this, is there a basis for the translation.

However, my remark wasn't directed towards learning the language (even though there are great resources for learing Latin). For Logos, a RI is a database representation of a text and I understand that basically the database part is what drives large parts of the functionality.

George Somsel

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/724039#Comment_724039

They've made a mess of learning Greek and Hebrew with their reverse interlinears. Don't encourage them to do that with Latin as well. With interlinears you'll NEVER learn the language.

I think you may be largely correct with forward interlinears that are used as a crutch to save learning vocabulary and parsing. A RI is primarily aimed not at: how do I understand/translate that original phrase (which isn't even printed in the original word order), but at: how did the translators come up with this, is there a basis for the translation.

However, my remark wasn't directed towards learning the language (even though there are great resources for learing Latin). For Logos, a RI is a database representation of a text and I understand that basically the database part is what drives large parts of the functionality.

Rationalization

NB.Mick

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/724044#Comment_724044

[:D]

Veli Voipio

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/724031#Comment_724031

Which would make it like any simple text so why not simply buy the unadorned text?

I don't use Greek-English interlinear much anymore, just sometimes to quickly verify my (mis)understanding.

One thing that helped me in learning Greek was the Greek audio, it is far closer to the natural language use. (I have a sound card in my computer that I can set to "recital hall" audio mode and then I can imagine myself listening to the text in an ancient synagogue - quite fun and useful!)

***

For the Hebrew I often still need the interlinear to find the meaning of the sentence. But the Hebrew interlinear has an inherent problem with the right-to-left script. Thus I often use the Andersen-Forbes clause visualization because the text proceeds vertically in both, should I call it inter-vertical?

****

For Latin, I feel a tree structure visualization would more useful than the plain interlinear, but has anybody seen such a product?

Louis St. Hilaire

I own Verbum 5 and was really looking for Logos to beef up it's support for Latin in Verbum 6. I understand that the company was started by non-Catholic Christians and study is mainly guided by Greek and Hebrew.

As a Catholic, and someone who has studied Latin and reads Ecclesiastical & Medieval Latin, mostly related to the Church, I would like to suggest you beef up your Latin. There are far more works written in Latin than Hebrew and Greek combined! And as many Catholics fail to realize, it still is the official language of the Church.

It would be awesome, wonderful to have the same kind of tools you offer for Greek and Hebrew!!!

Three is an important number... it would be nice to have the third sacred language added.

We're working on it.

Latin is important both to Noet and Verbum, and we have a few projects going that will result in improved Latin support, but keep in mind that the kind of detail and precision found in the tagging of the Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic Biblical texts is the accumulation of thousands of hours of work over a couple of decades mostly focused on the relatively small corpus of Scripture and a few closely-related texts. We have a ways to go with Latin.

Our first focus is on improving (i.e. disambiguating and correcting) the automated morphological tagging of the Vulgate (and probably some key classical texts for Noet). This requires a human editor with knowledge of the language to essentially go through every single word in the text, so the solution for the broader corpora of classical, patristic, medieval and modern ecclesiastical Latin is likely to remain the kind of automated tagging currently found in the Vulgate and Perseus and Loeb texts.

However, we plan to expand this tagging (in particular, to medieval and ecclesiastical texts) and hope to improve it using the results of the editorial work we carry on the tagging of the Vulgate and other core texts. While this kind of tagging doesn't remove the need to filter out false hits on ambiguous forms, it does allow for easier dictionary lookups and morph and lemma searches across these texts.

Mark Vincent Franks

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/724093#Comment_724093

Great to hear. However, a simple "enhancement" for me who reads Latin fairly well... but has a need to look up words here and there - more often than I like, admittedly - I recognize nearly all the words, yet my brain seems to freeze from too many concussions or advancing senility (not sure)... is the ability to either single-click or mouse-over a word that I'm at a loss to remember and have Whitaker's Words parse it and desplay it right there. I don't want to have to double-click and have a seemly random Latin dictionary come up in my second pane or have to copy the word in to Latin Word Forms (Whitaker's Words) like I have to do now... It slows me down. In my screen shot below, I had to copy "perhiberet" to have Whitaker's Words parse it. When I double-clicked on it, Collin's Latin Dictionary came up. When I clicked on :"factus", Lewis & Short came up... just to give you an example of the "randomness" I am writing about here.

The mouse over you have now just doesn't buy me much: a list of what the word's voice, case, gender, etc. With Whitaker's Words, you get that plus possible meanings. Also, I want the rendering to be right there where the word I am mousing-over is so that I don't have to scan down to the bottom of the page to read it. When I move the mouse it disappears and my reading is more smooth and progresses faster.

Also, would be great if these tools (at least Whitaker's Words) were available in the iPad/iPhone versions as well.

SineNomine

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/724220#Comment_724220

In my screen shot below, I had to copy "perhiberet" to have Whitaker's Words parse it. When I double-clicked on it, Collin's Latin Dictionary came up. When I clicked on :"factus", Lewis & Short came up... just to give you an example of the "randomness" I am writing about here.

That you should be able to fix by prioritizing Words using the Library pane.

Louis St. Hilaire

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/724220#Comment_724220

is the ability to either single-click or mouse-over a word that I'm at a loss to remember and have Whitaker's Words parse it and desplay it right there. I don't want to have to double-click and have a seemly random Latin dictionary come up in my second pane or have to copy the word in to Latin Word Forms (Whitaker's Words) like I have to do now... It slows me down.

I've fixed some metadata that should cut down on some of the apparent randomness you're seeing. Specifically, Collins Latin Dictionary will no longer show up if Lewis & Short or Dictionary of Latin Forms have an entry for the word.

Nonetheless, like SineNomine, I also recommend prioritizing your Latin dictionaries if you want to control which ones show up when you double-click. (Here's a basic tutorial, if you're not familiar with prioritization.)

The other thing I would recommend for saving clicks is opening the Information panel from the Tools menu. This will show the beginning of the dictionary entry and (in a morph-tagged text) the parsing when you hover (or, if you prefer, you can change it to update only when you click from the Settings menu on the panel).

If you're interested in technical details, some of the other randomness you're seeing probably has to do with the fact that Lewis & Short only has headwords for lemmas (dictionary forms), while Dictionary of Latin Forms is an analytical lexicon that has headings for all (or most) forms of a word.

In the Clementine Vulgate and the Perseus and Loeb texts we have gone in and parsed the words ahead of time, tagging them with the lemma and morphology. As a result of this, you're able to jump straight from the text to a lemma-only dictionary like Lewis & Short. Other texts, like our medieval and modern ecclesiastical texts, haven't had this tagging performed on them yet, so they will only go straight Lewis & Short if the word happens to be in the dictionary form like "factus". For other forms, it will fall back to the Dictionary of Latin Forms.

Once we apply lemma tagging to these texts, you will see more consistent behavior across your library. Sorry this is confusing at the moment.