So I created this app for reading basic Latin texts. The idea of the app is to have a Latin text with translation of each word under the paragraph line, which makes it easy to grasp the meaning but also focuses on reading the original Latin text.
It only has one book, if I finish it I might add others.
I used OpenAI to do the translation which looks pretty good for me, with the caveat that... well... I do not know Latin. This approach will not probably work for more complex texts.
This mode of reading works for me, not sure if is of interest to anyone else.
The app source is on GitHub if you are interested:
https://github.com/aleris/duplex-lectio
A couple of details about the dev process:
I'm not sure this is actually an approach I'd recommend. I was recently asked to give some supplemental English tutoring to a Chinese brother and sister, 9 and 5 years old. The 5-year-old could already use and understand 'simple' sentences such as "what do you see?" and "where is your brother?", though I'll note that the subject-auxiliary inversion required by a question of that form isn't exactly a simple concept.
I got them a copy of The Cat in the Hat, and their mother objected that it was too advanced for either of them, because most of the verbs in The Cat in the Hat are in the past tense, which apparently isn't covered within the first four years of Chinese English instruction.
You can't learn what you're not exposed to, but you can learn a lot of what you are exposed to in a language.
People lose track of that every time they dunk on Duolingo.
This is a really cool tool -- I often read latin texts with the original on one page and the translation on the other, just because I think it's interesting to see how they wrote/spoke at the time, but for the most part certain words or declinations throw me off guard. Inline literal translations really help there.
That being said, I noticed whilst reading some of the texts that the inline literal translations are still in latin, e.g. in "Part IV. I Some Barbarous Customs", most of the translated text is just latin. I guess OpenAI won't take all our jobs just yet!
I do have one suggestion for improvement though. Many of these texts have translations that are already in the public domain (older translations). It would be helpful to display the original Latin and a fluent English translation side by side, whilst still being able to toggle the literal translation on or off. This setup would make it easier to compare the original text with a fluent English translation, similar to the format used in some bilingual books.
https://dictionary.nuenki.app/get_definition?language=LatinC...
The code is here: https://github.com/Alex-Programs/nuenki-dictionary
However, feel free to use the API for small scale usage; the API can handle ~5 orders of magnitude more requests than it currently receives.
You can see that each word has many different definitions. It's very difficult to do a word-by-word translation that takes context into account, though I'm going to attempt it at some point using a small LLM that merely picks from Wiktionary data for a https://nuenki.app hover mode.
That being said, I'm surprised though, that the translations are GPT generated, so not sure how trustworthy this actually is. Domain foreign users have to be able to trust that learning resource are proof-read / accurate.
Not to say it's worthless, but you may want to note that the translations were done automatically and may contain errors.
Lots of words and phrases have multiple meanings and connotations in their origin language and it’s not usually possible for a translation to bring the richness into the target language.
(I’m going to butcher this because I don’t have the text in front of me, but) Thomas Aquinas composed several hymns for the feast of Corpus Christi, one of which is “O salutaris hostia”, which contains a reference to “fer auxilium” which is often translated to “bring help”.
The choice of the word “fer” isn’t the most obvious choice for “bring”, though. Some translators have speculated that Aquinas chose “fer” because of how close it is to “ferculum”, which is a litter or wooden frame upon which spoils are carried, which refers to the crucifixion.
.... I think that’s right.
Anyway if you have a gloss along with a translation, it’s easier to include context like that as footnotes on individual words/phrases.
Well, if you asked me how to say "bring" in Latin, that would be my first choice, and the irregularity of the verb tells us that it's very common in general, though not necessarily for this.
Lewis and Short has "In general, to bear, carry, bring"; "In particular, to move, bring, lead, conduct, drive, raise", which seems to hit the concept of "bringing help" squarely in the center. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=fero&la=la#lexi...
Does this sound like something you'd be interested in checking out?
OpenAI also does not know Latin. This is either a tool to troll people that can read Latin or a tool to help people “learn” a made up vaguely Latin-shaped set of gibberish that ChatGPT nondeterministically generated. This only works for a definition of “Latin” that is a sort of vibe wholly detached from structure, syntax, or vocabulary.
vaguely Latin-shaped set of gibberish that ChatGPT nondeterministically generated
I am building a sanskrit reader[1] and needed a feature that allowed users to tag words with notes/meaning. ruby annotations work wonderfully for that.
[1] Site: https://www.adhyeta.org.in/
Backend: https://github.com/s-i-e-v-e/adhyeta
(The vocabulary features require a login, which is not open to the public as of yet.)
This is how the interface looks like/works, when logged in.
https://www.adhyeta.org.in/a/images/z85.png (ruby annotations can be seen floating above the source text)
https://www.adhyeta.org.in/a/images/z88.png
The "app" is laid out exactly the same way as the www version is. The only difference is that it provides tools to manipulate the status of words. Login is required because vocabulary progress has to be tracked on a per-user basis.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ru...
Useful when you're at a very low level of a language. Past B1 or so, it's mostly looking up individual words.
And yes, this is not helpful beyond a point. But most people never reach that point. So, any help is useful.
Anybody happen to know of a Latin OCR software that could grab the text parts from Latin documents? Have an interest in translating the Etymologiae of bishop Isidore of Seville, since its one of the main reference texts for education in the middle ages. Just 280 pages of Latin's a bit much for hand copying to text files.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymologiae
[2] Archive.org https://archive.org/details/etymologiaeaddde00isid
I just tried the same thing with the linked Latin text and Gemini Experimental 1206. The results appear below. Perhaps someone who knows Latin can tell us how accurate the glosses, translations, and grammatical explanations are.
I have the worst time with transcripts, and email conversations.
They are not always so good, however, with more granular aspects of language, particularly the way words are written or pronounced—the problem the models have with the word “strawberry” is well known. I’ve also seen them struggle with the meanings of words and sentences in isolation, as a lack of context can confuse them (as it can confuse people).
In the case of emails or transcripts, the text might contain mistakes or non-standard language that might trip up the LLMs as well.
In any case, at least for major languages and non-critical applications, I think LLM’s are a great way to understand what is written in another language.
It would be nice to be able to add the macrons or even acute accent characters to show emphasis syllables as another toggle-able option -- ChatGPT seemed to do OK with that task for me just now.
On my bucket list whenever I win the Powerball and can stop working full time
Especially after having had to learn Latin the "old fashioned way", which is basically like learning English via analyzing and translating Shakespeare word by word, musing about the meaning of each words position. All while hardly being able to produce your own sentences
I can imagine a click interaction (click on a word/phrase, learn more about the grammar, etc). What kind of interactions would people like for reading texts like this?
(this is so useful for Chinese too!)
Some people struggle with who/whom but in fact it’s the same as “he” versus “him”: if you replace “who” with “he” in the sentence and it sounds wrong then you should be using “whom”.
And the latin case is made muuuch more extreme due to the fact that we read poetry and stuff written in the yambic hexameter, which would have also been quite alien sounding to an average roman citizen on the street.
Word order does matter a bit in Latin, but much less than it does in English. "Dog bites man" and "man bites dog" are different due to word order. In Latin you can write "canis hominem mordet" in _any_ order and have it mean "dog bites man" because that's the only thing those nouns in those cases can mean. To do "man bites dog" you have to say "homo canem mordet" (again, in any order). Conventionally, though, you end a sentence or a subordinate clause with its verb, and the subject that matches up with a verb is usually the one closest to space-wise.
The first thing that stood out to me with the translation is that it goes word-by-word, and doesn't have any room for ambiguity.
For instance, in the first line, "profectus est" is the third-person singular perfect form of the deponent verb "proficiscor" based on context, but it could also be the perfect passive form of "proficio" (which my brain initially gravitated toward, as one of the many derivatives of "facio"). I'd be a bit worried about picking the wrong one if given the word out of context. Or even just picking the wrong translation for a word: for the second sentence, using the word-for-word translation, I might try for "He long was spent at Periander, king of the Corinthians" when "He long dwelled at the house of Periander, king of the Corinthians" would read more naturally, using different translations for "apud" and "versatus erat".
Further, if you don't treat these pairs as holistic verb forms, you get very confused by just reordering words: "Arion, after he is having traveled abroad, ..." vs "Arion, after he traveled abroad, ..." And, it can cause some issues with relative ordering of events (where it's common to move between verb tenses to indicate that some events happened further in the past -- pluperfect vs perfect especially).
And, if you treat "erat" as "was" all the time (as is the case with "versatus erat"), you'll interpret pluperfect (which implies finality) as imperfect.
Later in the first paragraph, I'd run into a little bit of trouble with the ablative absolute ("Ingentibus opibus ibi comparatis"): "Great wealth there acquired" would more literally be translated as "With great wealth having been acquired", or, taking some liberties with the translation, "After he acquired great wealth, ..."
Moving on to the second heading: yes, "ut" is most commonly used as part of a result or a purpose clause with the subjunctive, but a newer reader might not understand why we use the subjunctive here instead of the infinitive. The most literal translation might be "The sailors make a plan such that they might rob and kill that man", but yes, once you're more used to the language, you'd translate it simply as "The sailors make a plan to rob and kill him".
I think the interlinear is realy good at showing one translation (and isn't super distracting) -- do you imagine more like footnotes/etc type things?
I also wonder about jotting down translation notes while reading -- when seriously trying to translate a text, writing down notes in the margins or between lines (if there's appropriate spacing) helps a ton. At least until you're familiar with the grammar and the constructions, laboring through the translation is a huge help.
For someone like me who is reasonably familiar with the grammar, but might be rusty on the actual vocabulary (having last needed to use it in any semi-serious context more than a decade ago), I could see myself referring to the existing app's translation on occasion to give me some ideas regarding the actual words. But I don't know how helpful it is for someone newer to the language, who'd need more than just vocab.
Another commenter also mentions the possibility of pairing the Latin text with a well-established English translation. That might also be interesting; I could certainly muddle my way through a translation without knowing the grammar, but I would make plenty of mistakes if I didn't stop to think about cases and verb forms. What I think would help most is to perform a surface reading, followed by a refinement to make the text more idiomatic.
For instance, taking one of the sentences in the second paragraph: "Pecunia omni nautis oblata, vitam deprecatus est." My surface reading would look something like... "With all money offered to sailors, he begged his life." I might then refine that to "Having offered the sailors all of his money, he begged for his life."
This, people want so badly to shit on stuff online that they don't consider that different people have different wants and needs.
Using it in either makes the output useless as a tool to learn anything about both sets of text
It's far from useless as an aid to comprehend the Latin text.
It's been over thirty years since I last studied Latin, but I still remember enough to be able to tell that this tool would be useful for a learner, even without perfect accuracy.
A couple of points:
- If you natively speak a Romance language, learning Latin by example is going to be really easy for you. This doesn't belong in a comparison with anything else.
- Germanic speakers have no special advantage over any other Indo-European speakers.
- You might be interested to know that while Mandarin verbs don't inflect for tense, the negative particle does, so you have to observe a distinction between past and present tense whenever you're negating a verb.
我不理解 I don't understand
我没有理解 I didn't understand
I had a user report that pinyin was looking funny on Reddit. Turns out they use a system font stack which includes Verdana (and so only shows up on Windows), and Verdana does really poorly with Pinyin ruby (iirc it was a generic ruby thing, not just Pinyin).
I just replaced it with a custom system font stack without Verdana.
Not a difficult fix, but something to be aware of.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/rp