Reading Ancient Languages

[jcobban]

I would like to load as many ancient texts in the original languages, particularly classical Greek, and Biblical Hebrew, as I can onto a tablet and link them to appropriate supporting dictionaries, since while I have basic familiarity with these languages (1 year each at the university level) my vocabulary in each is distinctly finite. I intend to spend the coming summer at a dig on Cyprus and cannot haul my bookshelves with me. However support for ancient languages appears to challenge the capabilities of e-reader software. For example even if the e-reader supports displaying a Greek character set, it only appears to support modern Ellenika Demotica (ISO 639-1 code el) and not Classical Greek (ISO 639-2 code grc), and therefore I would not be able to load the appropriate dictionary, even though the two languages are almost as different as modern Italian and classical Latin. For example "fish" in modern Greek is "psari" as opposed to "ikhthous" in classical Greek. The identification field for language in E-book metadata references IETF RFC 3066 which permits use of the 3-character language codes in ISO 639-2, but I cannot find any documentation for any e-reader or software which explains what it supports.

I am looking for user experience in this area.

Also Liddell & Scott, the standard classical Greek to English dictionary is available as an e-book, but I would prefer a version encoded as a lookup dictionary, that is in a form such that clicking on a word in an e-book with language code "grc" would pop-up a matching definition from Liddell & Scott, the way that my e-reader works when I am reading a book in a modern language. That way I would not have to switch between two open books.

[tomsem]

If your goal is to create a custom lookup dictionary for ancient Greek, I think your only option is Kindle. It has always been possible for third parties to create lookup dictionaries for Kindle, as this was defined in the original Mobipocket platform which Amazon bought and has since extended. While there is an ePub spec for 'glossary' tagging, I'm not aware of any examples where it is implemented (would love to learn of any).

In practice, very few third parties have created lookup dictionaries for Kindle, and Amazon has had to license content and create the lookup dictionaries themselves as they have expanded into new markets with new language requirements. That said, you can purchase a Latin-English lookup dictionary (and a few dozen other third party lookup dictionaries) in the Kindle Store and these will work on any Kindle and in some of the Kindle apps (for Fire, iOS, Android). I don't think anyone has published a lookup dictionary for ancient greek, however.

But the format is 'known' (not sure where you can find the spec now, as mobipocket.com is gone), so you can create your own lookup dictionaries. Check the 'Kindle Formats' forum here I think there are some threads about creating lookup dictionaries, and you can google for some more clues. That said, it is not trivial, particularly with a morpheme-laden language like ancient Greek, not to mention testing needed to make sure it all works properly.

Displaying texts in ancient languages on your e-reader should not be an issue. Recent ones will have at least one font that has more or less 'universal' Unicode support. If you are creating your own ePub content from web sites, or old document formats, etc., you may need to deal with some encoding issues, but there are tools for that.

The trend in reading systems seems to be to offer online translation (Kindle, Google Play Books) features. This is often more useful than single-word lookup as you can get entire sentences and paragraphs translated at once. But of course it is not much use for dead languages, at least until Microsoft or Google add those to their translation options.

[ekbell]

You could check out the Faithlife platforms and books particularly Noet Scholarly tools. All books/libraries bought can be read on any Faithlife platform (i.e. Logos books can be read using the Noet app and the other way around)

While I haven't taken advantage of their specific language study tools and materials, I have found their books to be nicely cross-referenced and the tablet apps have a *very* useful flexible split screen function so that material from one book can be directly compared to another book.

Drawbacks: while they do provide a *lot* of public domain stuff for free (Check out the Perseus Classica Collection) most of the material tends to be on the expensive side. Currently their books have to be read using one of their programs/apps (they have a desktop program plus iOS and android apps for each division) the ability to import material is limited.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by jcobban

However support for ancient languages appears to challenge the capabilities of e-reader software. For example even if the e-reader supports displaying a Greek character set, it only appears to support modern Ellenika Demotica (ISO 639-1 code el) and not Classical Greek (ISO 639-2 code grc), and therefore I would not be able to load the appropriate dictionary, even though the two languages are almost as different as modern Italian and classical Latin.

Most epub apps don't support polytonic Greek characters. (This has nothing to do with the language metadata.) Your best bet would be to embed a free polytonic Greek font, e.g. Galatia SIL, with Calibre.

Originally Posted by jcobban

Also Liddell & Scott, the standard classical Greek to English dictionary is available as an e-book, but I would prefer a version encoded as a lookup dictionary [...]

A StarDict version of the Liddell & Scott dictionary is available as free MR download. You can use this dictionary with ColorDict. (Most major Android epub apps have built-in ColorDict support.)

[pluma]

Originally Posted by jcobban

I would like to load as many ancient texts in the original languages, particularly classical Greek, and Biblical Hebrew, as I can onto a tablet and link them to appropriate supporting dictionaries, since while I have basic familiarity with these languages (1 year each at the university level) my vocabulary in each is distinctly finite. I intend to spend the coming summer at a dig on Cyprus and cannot haul my bookshelves with me. However support for ancient languages appears to challenge the capabilities of e-reader software. For example even if the e-reader supports displaying a Greek character set, it only appears to support modern Ellenika Demotica (ISO 639-1 code el) and not Classical Greek (ISO 639-2 code grc), and therefore I would not be able to load the appropriate dictionary, even though the two languages are almost as different as modern Italian and classical Latin. For example "fish" in modern Greek is "psari" as opposed to "ikhthous" in classical Greek. The identification field for language in E-book metadata references IETF RFC 3066 which permits use of the 3-character language codes in ISO 639-2, but I cannot find any documentation for any e-reader or software which explains what it supports.

I am looking for user experience in this area.

Also Liddell & Scott, the standard classical Greek to English dictionary is available as an e-book, but I would prefer a version encoded as a lookup dictionary, that is in a form such that clicking on a word in an e-book with language code "grc" would pop-up a matching definition from Liddell & Scott, the way that my e-reader works when I am reading a book in a modern language. That way I would not have to switch between two open books.

Forget about ancient char maps, UNICODE is your friend.

[jcobban]

Originally Posted by pluma

Forget about ancient char maps, UNICODE is your friend.

Thank you, but my concern was primarily for the dictionary lookup. An e-book with language code "el" would invoke a modern Demotic Greek dictionary.

[jcobban]

Originally Posted by ekbell

Drawbacks: while they do provide a *lot* of public domain stuff for free (Check out the Perseus Classica Collection) most of the material tends to be on the expensive side. Currently their books have to be read using one of their programs/apps (they have a desktop program plus iOS and android apps for each division) the ability to import material is limited.

Thank you.

The Perseus site is excellent for its integration with Liddell & Scott. The primary drawback is that the documents are read in a browser, requiring an Internet connection. I cannot depend upon having a wi-fi connection where I am going this summer.

[ekbell]

Originally Posted by jcobban

Thank you.

The Perseus site is excellent for its integration with Liddell & Scott. The primary drawback is that the documents are read in a browser, requiring an Internet connection. I cannot depend upon having a wi-fi connection where I am going this summer.

Faithlife does have free iOS and android apps for Noet and books can be downloaded onto those apps for offline access.

I've been reasonably content with my android app with the exception of library management (I exported a list of my Noet books from the desktop program, imported it into Calibre from there to CC as empty txts so that I can use Calibre's tag system to keep track of my books). As I've stated I particularly like the flexible split screen which makes comparing two versions of a book easy to do.