Author: Roger Pearse

MorphGNT busted by “copyright”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This is something that makes me rather cross.  It seems that the MorphGNT project, run for years and years by Jim Tauber, has fallen foul of a sudden claim of copyright by the German Bible Society.  This in turn has torpedoed the ReGreek site, which used MorphGNT. 

For those who don’t know, MorphGNT is a text file, containing the “Morphologised Greek New Testament”.  The file contains loads of rows like this:

010101 N- ----NSF- βίβλος βίβλος
010101 N- ----GSF- γενέσεως γένεσις
010101 N- ----GSM- Ἰησοῦ Ἰησοῦς
...

The first column is book/chapter/verse, the next one part of speech (all nouns here), the next specifies the tense, Nominative, Genitive, Singular, Feminine, Masculine, the fourth column the word that actually appears in the NT (in whatever form), and the fifth column is the headword or lemma — the dictionary form of the word.

There are updates on the Open Scriptures blog, linking to a discussion group where surrender seems to be the only option under consideration.  They should, instead, seek legal advice.

I confess that I don’t understand how the German Bible Society have any claim or rights over this.  How can they claim copyright over any of this?  Are they claiming that the NT is *their* copyright?  What is needed, I feel, is a good lawyer to tell them where to get off.  I’ve submitted this story to slashdot.org.  Anyone got any suggestions?

Thanks to Mark Goodacre for the tip.

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More on John the Lydian

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It seems that at least some of the Tuebner editions of the works of John the Lydian are also on Google books. Daniel Abosso has written to tell me so, and to point out that the Bonn series text is defective, and the Latin translation sometimes quite wrong.  Here is the link (from a search for “lydi Wünsch”):

I still hope to get De Mensibus online.

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Another Eusebius update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The translation of the Quaestiones ad Stephanum/Marinum has now been revised all through the epitome, and as far as the end of the first fragment.  There will now be a delay, tho, for summer.

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More on the Homilies of Origen

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Comments on my post asking how to get an English translation of the Homilies of Origen were enthusiastic.  So I think we will conduct a little experiment with this one, and see if we can get somewhere. 

Today I have written to an academic/publishing person I know, and asked if they can find us a translator.  They have the contacts, and I am reasonably optimistic.  I’ve suggested a price of 3-4 p (UK = about 5-7 cents US) per word of Latin — because English and French translations already exist as a guide, reducing the labour — but negotiable (well, you have to be realistic).  I’d specify a condition that the first bit is done as a sample, and nothing is owed unless the sample is satisfactory.

I have also suggested no-one is committed beyond one homily at a time, neither the translator nor ourselves.  That reduces the size of financial risk and commitment down to something trivial.  We can always stop at any point, in other words; homilies we translate are an advance on nothing; those we don’t get to, well, we’re no worse off than now.  Of course I hope to do the lot!

Money comes from me in the first instance.  A couple of commenters stated their willingness to donate — much appreciated.  What I suggest is that we donate for a homily, and get our name on the bottom as “translation made possible by a grant from xxx” (or whatever wording you like).  A condition of the project is that everything becomes public domain. 

That’s all the project mechanics that I can think of; now, where to start?

I suggest the homilies on Genesis, unless anyone has a better idea? 

There are 16 homilies on Genesis.  A French edition in the Sources Chretiennes series exists, critical text and translation.  (And I have a copy!) 

Some numbers: the first homily, on creation, is 52 pages (i.e. 26 pages of Latin), about 8 words a line, 30 lines a page, i.e. 240 words a page, = 6,240 words, or about $400.  That’s a  big price, for a big homily; indeed the biggest of those on Genesis, which don’t otherwise run to more than around 20-30 pages (i.e. 10-15 pages of Latin, or about $200 each).  But I can stand that, as the price of the experiment.

Let’s see whether we can get a translator.

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What to do about offline Origen?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The homilies of Origen are all offline.  This is because the 19th century translators of the Ante-Nicene Christian Library (repackaged as the Ante-Nicene Fathers later) were selling their translations by subscription, and couldn’t get enough subscribers to translate these works.  Of 574 homilies, only 186 have survived, mostly in Latin translations by either Rufinus or Jerome.

Quite a few have been translated in various series during the 20th century.  But under our accursed copyright laws, these remain offline and inaccessible to ordinary mortals.

From time to time, I wonder what to do about this.  What can be done, I wonder?

I suppose that I could commission someone to make a translation.  But this would be costly, and also wasteful.  I hate the idea of spending my hard-earned to produce a translation of Origen’s homilies, when so many ancient texts remain untranslated.

I’ve toyed with the idea of getting someone who knows Latin to take a modern critical edition of the Latin text, and whatever translations exist in English, and produce a copyright-free version that way.  It’s always quicker and easier to translate something when someone else has done the heavy lifting and produced a first version.  I wouldn’t care whether the result was of publishable quality, so long as it was fairly true to the original.  But… who would I ask?  I could make such a thing myself fairly easily if laboriously, if I had time, but I don’t.

If I were a billionaire, of course, I would just buy the companies that own the existing versions, give the texts away, and then sell on the companies.  But I am not.

Are there any other alternatives?  It is deeply frustrating.  What can be done?

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LXX text marked up with part of speech, etc

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I was hunting around the web for a morphologised Septuagint text — one with the word, the part of speech (noun, verb, etc) and other details, plus the headword or lemma.  I remember doing this search a few years ago, so I know it exists.  This time I was less lucky.  In general there seemed to be less data available online, not more.

I can’t imagine the labour involved in taking each word of the Greek Old Testament, working out all these details, and creating a text file of it all.  It seems enormous to me.  But… to do it, and then let it just disappear, as if unimportant?  That seems even less believable, if anything.  Whatever is going on?

Somewhere there is a great database of morphologised French.  I can find webpages that refer to it; but the download site is gone.  This was state-funded; yet it too has gone.

Why does this happen?

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Works of Origen extant in Greek

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In the introduction to the CUA translation of Origen’s Homilies on Jeremiah, it states that only the following works  of Origen have survived in Greek: several sections of the Commentary on John; several sections of the Commentary on Matthew; Contra Celsum; On Prayer; Exhortation to Martyrdom; Dialogue with Heracleides; 20 homilies on Jeremiah; the homily on 1 Kings (1 Samuel) 28 (the Witch of Endor); plus a bunch of fragments from places like the Philocalia.  The remainder survive only in translation, mostly in Latin.

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A thought after reading Martial

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In English Publius tells me that the Roman empire did not collapse.
Why not pass me a glass of Falernian before you say more?

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More notes on QuickGreek

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m continuing work on a piece of software to help me translate from ancient Greek to English.  One problem has been the time taken before it finishes starting.  When it takes 10-20 seconds on startup, just to load the various dictionaries, you quickly weary of it.  If you want to look up two words, you find it very annoying.  Since I am running it repeatedly, to test things, I’ve got very weary of it.

I’ve now got the load time down to a couple of seconds.  This is still rather longer than I like, but obviously a lot better.  The downside of this is that it takes marginally longer to parse each word.   I tend to work with only a few hundred words at a time, so this is not too onerous.  The processing time for my test text (of 386 words) is about a second, which is acceptable if not wonderful.

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New Hypatia movie

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There’s going to be is a movie made about Hypatia, the late fourth-century Neo-Platonist and friend of Synesius who was lynched after venturing into Alexandrian politics.

Let’s welcome it.  It should stir up interest in late antiquity, particularly if they can make the Byzantine world glow with light and colour.  It doesn’t really matter if a shoal of false impressions get created.  What we need to think of is the impressionable teenagers staring open-mouthed at the screen and thinking “Wow! I want to know more about that.”  Some will go on to become academics, more will buy books about the subject, and a few will get rich in the stock market and fund archaeological expeditions.

Looks as if Cyril of Alexandria is being cast as the baddie — he’s going to be played by Actor-With-An-Arab-Name (i.e. Not One Of Us), while Hypatia will be played by the distinctly anglo-saxon Rachel Weisz.  But I can live with that, if the directors can; some of those Greeks may get quite shirty if a favourite saint is demonised, and they can be aggressive when they put their minds to it!

Update: The movie is called Agora and has already been made. A trailer exists here; with all the titles in Italian!  Thanks to Christopher Ecclestone for the link.

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