Author: admin

I made a couple of small changes to the search interface, mostly by adding keyboard shortcuts:

• When you visit the page, the cursor is automatically placed in the search box. Just start typing because there’s no need to click on the search box!
• You can press the up and down arrows to scroll through the list.
• You can press the enter key to view a word.

I will also duplicate these changes on the English to Latin search page.

Next I coded an inflectional ending for the “ancient passive infinitive” in -ier. Lucretius is fond of using words like vocārier instead of vocarī (Allen and Greenough, New Latin Grammar, 183.4).

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.

It’s finally here and up and running!

I bought a new server. Did you know you can get slightly older computers, but still really powerful, for super cheap? People and businesses upgrade and then basically give their computers to discounters for nothing! I got this server for $144, with tax, shipping and an extra year’s warranty. I’m very impressed.

Also, U.N.M (University of New Mexico) gave me a static IP address on their network, so we have a super-fast internet connection.

So, if you’re used to this site being slow, get ready for serious changes! In general, moving to this new server on this new internet connection has increased the speed by an order of magnitude (from 300ms per request to 15ms per request). Wow!

But that’s not all folks! I’ve also done some back-end coding to cache the results of morphology lookups. So now morphology lookups should increase by another order of magnitude (as long as a word is cached). If the word is not cached, the lookup will still be 2-3 times faster.

I apologize for geeking out a bit here, but I hope you notice the speed improvements.

As usual, I’m always developing The Latin Lexicon, but since I’m on winter break, expect to see some serious improvements for January!

Oh, one more thing. I also set up some bug-tracking software (BugZilla) to keep track of issues and improvements. So if you find all this technical stuff interesting, feel free to check it out!

Ok, one more thing! OpenID logins will be down for a day or two. Also, if you created an account or any flashcards between the 16th of December and today, I’m afraid that information is lost because I upgraded the database on the 16th and didn’t get it moved until today. Sorry about that, if you’re affected. 

Okay, so I bought a new server and it’s up and running. It will just take a couple of days for the new IP address to launch. Um, that is, if the IT people at UNM haven’t gone on vacation already!!!!

The temporary home of The Latin Lexicon is now on a slowish public web server until a grant comes through or a new server arrives. I hope to have one up in the next two weeks.

So, as a result, the site will be 5-10 times slower. That’s not to say it’s deadly slow, but it will be a noticeable change. The good news is that everything seems to still work, and within a week or two everything will be back to the same speed it was yesterday, perhaps even faster.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

I recently got a rejection letter concerning a grant for a new computer.

But it’s not all bad news. I have a backup plan. I can get a slightly older, slightly slower computer from an online source (all told about $150) or from UNM Surplus (if I can figure out all the paperwork and if there are any machines available).

Other updates: I haven’t done much back-end work recently, but I have been correcting entries as I find them. So! Work continues at a slower pace. Normally I do get most updates done during holidays, so expect to see large-scale changes in late December and early January!

Vale.

As most Latin students know, UNUS NAUTA is not just “one sailor” but the acronym U.N.U.S. N.A.U.T.A. It is taught as a mnemonic device to memorize the 9 special adjectives whose genitives end in -ius: unus, nullus, ullus, solus, neuter, alter, uter, totus, and alius.

In a recent post, I noted a problem with the adjective neuter. In the neuter form, my parser was not discovering the forms for nominatives and vocatives. I dug into this problem and discovered some interesting facts that I never really took to heart.

UNUS NAUTA is not one declension, as many Latin grammars would have us believe. It is actually composed of four different declensions: the normal UNUS NAUTA declension (unus, nullus, ullus, solus, totus), then the alius declension (which is unique because its genitive is alius instead of aliius as we would expect; and it has neuter-singulars in -ud), next the R-type declension (neuter, uter), and finally the ER-type declension (alter). I can see why Wheelock compressed his declensions, but it turns out that he didn’t spend enough time pointing out the differences! To be sure, they are minor, but somewhat important if you’re writing software to parse out the different forms!

So I created 4 unique declensions for the 9 different types of adjectives. Now, the UNUS NAUTA adjectives parse properly!

Update: I fixed indeclinable nouns, too. I had forgotten to add their (non-) paradigm.

Enjoy!

It’s been a few weeks since it’s been a busy semester. But I’m still making changes and continually updating words!

But here is some news to keep it fresh. First, I added a couple of rare “metria gratia” forms. The form “largibar” in Propertius 1.3.25 is from the verb “largior.” The correct imperfect passive form should be “largiebar” but it seems to have been contracted to “largibar” … Apparently this happens in Propertius and Plautus and not many other places. I will have to do some research to see what other rare forms show up.

Second, I fixed a couple of small bugs with neuter nouns and adjectives. There was a problem with them not showing up in the accusative (since neuters are always the same in the nominative, accusative and vocative). I also found a bug (but didn’t have time to fix it) in some pronouns … a pronoun like “neutrum” should be parsed as nominative, accusative and vocative, but it’s only being parsed as accusative.

Finally, I applied for a grant for a new, faster, dedicated server. With any luck, they’ll give me the grant and I’ll have the new server up in a month or two!

There was a small bug in the iPhone/iPod touch AJAX code that prevented it from working. I’ve fixed that for the time being. Sorry!

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!