Saturday, February 7, 2009
Lucretian Updates
Based on the recent lack of news on this site, you might assume that the Latin Lexicon is dormant or stagnant. Yet nothing could be further from the truth! In fact there's been quite a bit of behind-the-scenes activity!
Let me start out by apologizing for not updating more often. This semester has turned out to be rather more packed with excitement than the last one. Since I've been short on time, I allowed blogging and site documentation slip.
In terms of back end coding, there hasn't been much activity. I've cleaned up a few bugs here and there. For instance, I cleaned up a UTF8 bug on the Word Study Tool.
But in more interesting news, I've been a busy beaver correcting words that appear in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura Book III. For the last 5 semesters our classes have focused on Augustan poets. Since the vocabulary is somewhat stock among those guys, I ended up doing very few corrections to the dictionary entries themselves. But since Lucretius uses a whole new set of vocabulary, the amount of "cleanup" is massive! This is a good thing, since words which contain errors get fixed and the Latin Lexicon slowly improves in quality.
Since the news/blog section of this site gives the first impression to new visitors, it might look bad if the front page isn't regularly updated. Good impressions are the best impressions, so I'll try to update more regularly despite the crazy-busy semester I'm having.
On that note, it's back to the grindstone for me. Valēte!
Update: To the parsing engine I added a couple of pronouns: quisquam and quidam, since Lucretius is so fond of them.
Let me start out by apologizing for not updating more often. This semester has turned out to be rather more packed with excitement than the last one. Since I've been short on time, I allowed blogging and site documentation slip.
In terms of back end coding, there hasn't been much activity. I've cleaned up a few bugs here and there. For instance, I cleaned up a UTF8 bug on the Word Study Tool.
But in more interesting news, I've been a busy beaver correcting words that appear in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura Book III. For the last 5 semesters our classes have focused on Augustan poets. Since the vocabulary is somewhat stock among those guys, I ended up doing very few corrections to the dictionary entries themselves. But since Lucretius uses a whole new set of vocabulary, the amount of "cleanup" is massive! This is a good thing, since words which contain errors get fixed and the Latin Lexicon slowly improves in quality.
Since the news/blog section of this site gives the first impression to new visitors, it might look bad if the front page isn't regularly updated. Good impressions are the best impressions, so I'll try to update more regularly despite the crazy-busy semester I'm having.
On that note, it's back to the grindstone for me. Valēte!
Update: To the parsing engine I added a couple of pronouns: quisquam and quidam, since Lucretius is so fond of them.
Labels: blog, bugs, lucretius, parsing engine, pronouns, utf8
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
As promised, more updates...
I have no major updates, just small ones.
I cleaned up a bit more backend code so smallish bugs are slowly disappearing.
One of the most important things I've been doing lately is making the site "search engine" and "standards" friendly. I set the language to English officially, except on certain tags which are known to contain only Latin. On those, I set the language to Latin with the lang attribute. Also, I've been cleaning up the code to conform to XHTML 1.1 strict standards. Although my pages are not perfectly strict yet, they're definitely coming along.
Next, I cleaned up the styles on the flashcards page, since I hope students might start using that feature.
Finally, I added a couple of more paradigms. I added the relative indefinite pronoun (quicumque, quaecumque, quodcumque) and the reflexive pronoun (sui, sibi, se, se). You should know that the sui, sibi, se, se are listed alphabetically under a non-existant pronoun su. It makes sense, doesn't it, to conform with the tu, tui, tibi, te, te paradigm? I expect some experts will think this is weird, but since my database lexical entries for pronouns are entirely nominative, I didn't have much choice. Besides, I don't think it's a big problem. It happens in Greek dictionaries all the time where the "unknown" lexical form is listed with the asterisk/star, denoting a "probable but unattested form".
Enjoy!
I cleaned up a bit more backend code so smallish bugs are slowly disappearing.
One of the most important things I've been doing lately is making the site "search engine" and "standards" friendly. I set the language to English officially, except on certain tags which are known to contain only Latin. On those, I set the language to Latin with the lang attribute. Also, I've been cleaning up the code to conform to XHTML 1.1 strict standards. Although my pages are not perfectly strict yet, they're definitely coming along.
Next, I cleaned up the styles on the flashcards page, since I hope students might start using that feature.
Finally, I added a couple of more paradigms. I added the relative indefinite pronoun (quicumque, quaecumque, quodcumque) and the reflexive pronoun (sui, sibi, se, se). You should know that the sui, sibi, se, se are listed alphabetically under a non-existant pronoun su. It makes sense, doesn't it, to conform with the tu, tui, tibi, te, te paradigm? I expect some experts will think this is weird, but since my database lexical entries for pronouns are entirely nominative, I didn't have much choice. Besides, I don't think it's a big problem. It happens in Greek dictionaries all the time where the "unknown" lexical form is listed with the asterisk/star, denoting a "probable but unattested form".
Enjoy!
Labels: bugs, indefinite, language, pronouns, reflexive, relative, search engines, standards, strict, styles, xhtml
Monday, August 11, 2008
Paradigm Updates
I spent a few minutes today and added the demonstrative pronouns is, iste and idem and the paradigms for R type possessive pronouns noster and vester/voster. I also added the three defective verbs, coepi, odi and memini. Finally, I added the eo and ferre verb conjugations.
Labels: defective, demonstrative, paradigms, pronouns, verbs
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Prettying up the Joint
So I haven't had as much free time as I wanted this week. I've been busy at my day job getting everything "taken care of" before my last day there on August 13th. After that, I'll just be contracting with them for 5 hours a week, because I'll be a full time teaching and grading assistant for the University of New Mexico Foreign Languages and Literatures Department. I'm pretty excited about that!
Nevertheless, I had a few hours free tonight, so I did some sprucing up. I made some icons, fixed some style sheets and squashed some small bugs. There are a few things I want to include before the semester starts:
Nevertheless, I had a few hours free tonight, so I did some sprucing up. I made some icons, fixed some style sheets and squashed some small bugs. There are a few things I want to include before the semester starts:
- Add a few pronoun paradigms: is and iste for sure.
- Add some verb paradigms: perhaps volo verbs.
- Fix up the database backend, especially in the realm of update cascades (it's technical, and you're probably wondering what that means -- don't worry, it'll make things better).
- Speed up the morphology lookup. It's not slow by any means, coming in at approximately 100 milliseconds per word. But still, I think I can get it down to 40ms. Every bit helps, especially if this site ever gets popular!
- Make a new database and web server. Right now it's being graciously hosted at the place I work here on campus (Natural Heritage New Mexico). I've been the system admin there for about 5 years, but now -- as I wrote earlier in this post -- I won't be there for very much longer.
Labels: bugs, database, icons, NHNM, paradigms, pronouns, style sheets, UNM, verbs, web server