The New Links Page

I guess it must be spring break! Instead of hanging out on a beach in Cancun, I dilligently worked on updates to this site. One of my favorite new updates in the links page.

Thanks to Delicious, I can now grab RSS feeds of all my favorite Latin links and show them to you as I find them. There are about 20 links up right now. Feel free to send me your suggestions!

Saving the Latinitas Recens Lexicon (Update)

I recently searched for latinitas recens (a Latin Lexicon of modern terms such as "bicycle" et cetera) and came across a post on alt.language.latin saying that it was missing. The original blog post is here: Saving the Latinitas Recens Lexicon.

I'm sad to see that it has gone missing from the web. Unfortunately, the Google Cache has also expired. Since this very important resource is in danger of extinction, I took the liberty of mirroring the Latin-English portion of the site (including sigla). I will keep the page posted until the original maintainer (Florus) can re-upload his version.

Here is the link: Latinitas Recens (Speculum)

Seeing as how one group-member suggested a one-page version, that's what this mirror is. Keep in mind it's about 430K.

Two notes: I am missing pages 8 and 9 (no longer in cache, not in archive). If you have them, please email them to me so I can include them. Also, I will do the English-Latin as time permits.

I hope you all find it useful. Feedback is appreciated.

Update: Thanks go to Rodericius who has generously provided page 9.

Verb Paradigms

As I promised, I've been working on verb paradigms. As of now, they're up and running. Just search for any Latin word and click "see the complete paradigm".

Most verbs show up just fine, but of course some irregular verbs will show odd glitches. Therefore the data is "beta" but the paradigms should still prove helpful.

Here are some caveats:

• certain irregular verbs will have weird forms, for instance, the participles for esse (which didn't exist until late antiquity).
• deponent verbs will show active forms. Remember that deponent verbs do have active participles, and the imperfect subjunctive is formed from the "reconstructed" active infinitive. I'm trying to imagine a way to "gray-out" the unused active forms, but I haven't decided fully on that yet.
  
• as a result of deponent verbs having "active" forms, they are now stored in the dictionary in their active forms, although on flashcards they will still show their deponent forms. So for instance sequor will be searchable under sequo.
  
• unusual forms, such as dic, duc, and fac will show up as dice, duce, and face. I haven't implemented and "irregular forms" system yet, even though I've half mapped it out. UPDATE: It turns out that Plautus was fond of using forms like dice, duce, and face even though they were later rejected by Terence.
  
• UPDATE: Some forms which are not known to exist (in other words, we don't have a record of them) but can logically be deduced will show up on the paradigm charts. For instance, the rare future active participle of volo, voliturus shows up and so does it's non-extant future active infinitive voliturus esse. Many grammar books will not show these forms simply because we don't have a record of them. Nonetheless, it is logical to assume they existed or would have been known to exist during Roman times (at least in theory).
  

So, work continues! Enjoy.

Again with the optimizing! Oy!

I've been tinkering again.

First, I did some server-side wizarding and sped up the website by a small margin (maybe 25%) and also stopped a nasty bug that was slowing down pages every once in a while.

I fixed some smallish bugs on the search pages. The user interface should be a tad more useful and friendly there.

While designing a new, awesome feature (verb paradigms!) I uncovered some paradigm errors. Those have been neatly squashed.

Soon, you will see a masterpiece in action! Full paradigms for all parts of speech! Right now I've got the verbs mostly working. I'll unveil this feature when I feel it's good enough for prime-time.

That's all for now! Carry on...

Interface Changes, Keyboard Shortcuts and the Ancient Passive Infinitive

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).

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.

New Server and Speed Increases

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. 

Happy holidays! Happy Hannakwanzaamas!