LANE ON PERSEUS.

I tend to think of the Perseus Digital Library as a source of Greek and Latin texts, but I haven’t been there for a while, and I hadn’t realized how much they’ve expanded. What caught my attention in particular was seeing that last month they added Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon! I guess they’re serious about making “the full record for humanity as intellectually accessible as possible to every human being.”
While I’m on the subject, another thing I just learned is how to access the very useful “word study tool.” (It came in handy in reminding me that Latin miseris can be a form of the verb mitto ‘send’ as well as of the adjective miser ‘wretched.’) You just select “All Search options” under a search box, and there it is on the right under “How to enter text in Greek.” And besides Greek and Latin, you can search for forms in Arabic and Old Norse. Bravo, Perseus! (Now add more languages!)

Comments

  1. Mattitiahu says

    Back when Perseus went open-source three or four years ago, and they started adding all these new features, a friend and I talked briefly about trying to use its source-code to encode some Coptic resources. Sadly then neither of us were competent computer programmers so nothing really came of that.

  2. aquilluqaaq says

    (It came in handy in reminding me that Latin miseris can be a form of the verb mitto ‘send’ as well as of the adjective miser ‘wretched.’)
    Each phonemically distinct though: miserīs (dat. / abl. pl.) from mĭser, and mīseris (fut. perf. ind.) and mīserīs (perf. subj.) from mitto.

  3. Yes, but that doesn’t help when you’re confronting written texts. If I had a Roman around to read things aloud for me, things would be different.

  4. Another handy thing is if you’re reading an original text on Perseus you can click on any word and it will automatically bring it up in the word study tool. If there are several possibilities for what it is, it highlights the one it considers most likely in the context. I’m not sure exactly how this is determined, but a user vote seems to be part of it.

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