[HN Gopher] A web app to read Latin texts with inline translations
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       A web app to read Latin texts with inline translations
        
       Author : realaleris149
       Score  : 107 points
       Date   : 2024-12-29 15:12 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (adi.earth)
 (TXT) w3m dump (adi.earth)
        
       | realaleris149 wrote:
       | After finishing DuoLingo's Latin course, I wanted to read some
       | Latin texts, but I didn't find easy enough texts and going back
       | and forth to a dictionary was cumbersome.
       | 
       | So I created this app for reading basic Latin texts. The idea of
       | the app is to have a Latin text with translation of each word
       | under the paragraph line, which makes it easy to grasp the
       | meaning but also focuses on reading the original Latin text.
       | 
       | It only has one book, if I finish it I might add others.
       | 
       | I used OpenAI to do the translation which looks pretty good for
       | me, with the caveat that... well... I do not know Latin. This
       | approach will not probably work for more complex texts.
       | 
       | This mode of reading works for me, not sure if is of interest to
       | anyone else.
       | 
       | The app source is on GitHub if you are interested:
       | 
       | https://github.com/aleris/duplex-lectio
       | 
       | A couple of details about the dev process:
       | 
       | https://adi.earth/posts/duplex-lectio-read-latin-bilingual/
        
         | mentalgear wrote:
         | Thank you for the details: I really like the minimalist UI,
         | well done! And I like to see you sharing the tools that you
         | build to help others learning.
         | 
         | That being said, I'm surprised though, that the translations
         | are GPT generated, so not sure how trustworthy this actually
         | is. Domain foreign users have to be able to trust that learning
         | resource are proof-read / accurate.
         | 
         | Not to say it's worthless, but you may want to note that the
         | translations were done automatically and may contain errors.
        
         | jrflowers wrote:
         | >I used OpenAI to do the translation which looks pretty good
         | for me, with the caveat that... well... I do not know Latin
         | 
         | OpenAI also does not know Latin. This is either a tool to troll
         | people that can read Latin or a tool to help people "learn" a
         | made up vaguely Latin-shaped set of gibberish that ChatGPT
         | nondeterministically generated. This only works for a
         | definition of "Latin" that is a sort of vibe wholly detached
         | from structure, syntax, or vocabulary.
        
           | rahimnathwani wrote:
           | vaguely Latin-shaped set of gibberish that ChatGPT
           | nondeterministically generated
           | 
           | OP hadn't used AI to generate Latin, but to generate
           | _English_.
        
             | jrflowers wrote:
             | It doesn't matter which set of text you generate with
             | ChatGPT in this case. Using it in either makes the output
             | useless as a tool to learn anything about both sets of
             | text. This issue is compounded further when, as the OP
             | readily admits, there is no quality check involved (OP does
             | not know Latin)
        
               | rahimnathwani wrote:
               | Using it in either makes the output useless as a tool to
               | learn anything about both sets of text
               | 
               | OP is using it as a tool to improve their comprehension
               | of Latin. The tool shows a word by word translation,
               | which is jarring to read linearly, but works well for
               | filling in gaps.
               | 
               | It's far from useless as an aid to comprehend the Latin
               | text.
               | 
               | It's been over thirty years since I last studied Latin,
               | but I still remember enough to be able to tell that this
               | tool would be useful for a learner, even without perfect
               | accuracy.
        
           | empath75 wrote:
           | You're severely overstating the case here, as if it just
           | produces random text like a markov generator or something.
        
           | dmd wrote:
           | I _do_ know Latin (quite well), and gpt-4o does an
           | _extremely_ good job at translating from English to Latin and
           | vice versa.
        
             | nescioquid wrote:
             | Note how one opinion provides the warrant for the other.
        
         | satvikpendem wrote:
         | Duolingo really isn't good for learning languages. When I
         | learned Latin, I used the immersive method of just starting to
         | read simple texts to more complex ones. The principal book of
         | this form is called Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, I have the
         | color PDF if anyone so needs it. It's a book that starts off
         | with very simple sentences and gradually introduces more
         | complex topics like tenses and declensions as the story goes
         | along.
        
           | thaumasiotes wrote:
           | > It's a book that starts off with very simple sentences and
           | gradually introduces more complex topics like tenses and
           | declensions as the story goes along.
           | 
           | I'm not sure this is actually an approach I'd recommend. I
           | was recently asked to give some supplemental English tutoring
           | to a Chinese brother and sister, 9 and 5 years old. The
           | 5-year-old could already use and understand 'simple'
           | sentences such as "what do you see?" and "where is your
           | brother?", though I'll note that the subject-auxiliary
           | inversion required by a question of that form isn't exactly a
           | simple concept.
           | 
           | I got them a copy of The Cat in the Hat, and their mother
           | objected that it was too advanced for either of them, because
           | most of the verbs in The Cat in the Hat are in the past
           | tense, which apparently isn't covered within the first four
           | years of Chinese English instruction.
           | 
           | You can't learn what you're not exposed to, but you can learn
           | a lot of what you are exposed to in a language.
        
             | satvikpendem wrote:
             | Lingua Latina is for adults who already have some base
             | level knowledge of tenses in their own language, preferably
             | a Romance or Germanic language (as I believe some languages
             | don't have tenses), not for children who have no concept of
             | them. Once you start reading the book, it really does start
             | to make sense while teaching you the various forms. It's on
             | Internet Archive if anyone wants to read it:
             | https://archive.org/details/lingva-latina-per-se-
             | ilustrata-p...
        
               | thaumasiotes wrote:
               | > preferably a Romance or Germanic language (as I believe
               | some languages don't have tenses)
               | 
               | A couple of points:
               | 
               | - If you natively speak a Romance language, learning
               | Latin by example is going to be really easy for you. This
               | doesn't belong in a comparison with anything else.
               | 
               | - Germanic speakers have no special advantage over any
               | other Indo-European speakers.
               | 
               | - You might be interested to know that while Mandarin
               | verbs don't inflect for tense, the negative particle
               | _does_ , so you have to observe a distinction between
               | past and present tense whenever you're negating a verb.
               | 
               | Wo Bu Li Jie  I don't understand
               | 
               | Wo Mei You Li Jie  I didn't understand
        
           | hombre_fatal wrote:
           | Meh, when you say Duolingo isn't great, you should compare it
           | to something in its same class. I don't think Duolingo
           | competes with sitting down with a grammar book. The whole
           | reason I used Duolingo, which got me up to speed with Spanish
           | enough to read books, is that I could do it anywhere and any
           | time rather than bust out a book for serious study. I was
           | never going to do that, so Duolingo was strictly better for
           | learning a language than a book.
           | 
           | People lose track of that every time they dunk on Duolingo.
        
         | Timwi wrote:
         | I love this mode of reading very much. I think this could be
         | great for any language, not just Latin, and any target
         | language, not just English. The only difficulty is sourcing
         | good texts that are both fun to read and also suitable for
         | language learning at various levels of skill.
        
           | thaumasiotes wrote:
           | I've been working on a tool to display the structure (and
           | glosses) of a text. All the structural and definitional
           | annotation is provided by me based on personal knowledge. So
           | far I have most of a single short fable in Mandarin Chinese
           | done. ;D
           | 
           | Does this sound like something you'd be interested in
           | checking out?
        
         | eyko wrote:
         | I do not speak latin, although I studied it for two years in
         | high school and I'm a native speaker of a romance language, so
         | my understanding of latin is pretty much basic to guesswork.
         | 
         | This is a really cool tool -- I often read latin texts with the
         | original on one page and the translation on the other, just
         | because I think it's interesting to see how they wrote/spoke at
         | the time, but for the most part certain words or declinations
         | throw me off guard. Inline literal translations really help
         | there.
         | 
         | That being said, I noticed whilst reading some of the texts
         | that the inline literal translations are still in latin, e.g.
         | in "Part IV. I Some Barbarous Customs", most of the translated
         | text is just latin. I guess OpenAI won't take all our jobs just
         | yet!
         | 
         | I do have one suggestion for improvement though. Many of these
         | texts have translations that are already in the public domain
         | (older translations). It would be helpful to display the
         | original Latin and a fluent English translation side by side,
         | whilst still being able to toggle the literal translation on or
         | off. This setup would make it easier to compare the original
         | text with a fluent English translation, similar to the format
         | used in some bilingual books.
        
         | philsnow wrote:
         | "Translation of each word" is also called a "gloss", and I
         | think it's absolutely vital for trying to read works in
         | translation.
         | 
         | Lots of words and phrases have multiple meanings and
         | connotations in their origin language and it's not usually
         | possible for a translation to bring the richness into the
         | target language.
         | 
         | (I'm going to butcher this because I don't have the text in
         | front of me, but) Thomas Aquinas composed several hymns for the
         | feast of Corpus Christi, one of which is "O salutaris hostia",
         | which contains a reference to "fer auxilium" which is often
         | translated to "bring help".
         | 
         | The choice of the word "fer" isn't the most obvious choice for
         | "bring", though. Some translators have speculated that Aquinas
         | chose "fer" because of how close it is to "ferculum", which is
         | a litter or wooden frame upon which spoils are carried, which
         | refers to the crucifixion.
         | 
         | .... I _think_ that's right.
         | 
         | Anyway if you have a gloss along with a translation, it's
         | easier to include context like that as footnotes on individual
         | words/phrases.
        
           | thaumasiotes wrote:
           | > The choice of the word "fer" isn't the most obvious choice
           | for "bring", though.
           | 
           | Well, if you asked me how to say "bring" in Latin, that would
           | be my first choice, and the irregularity of the verb tells us
           | that it's very common in general, though not necessarily for
           | this.
           | 
           | Lewis and Short has "In general, _to bear, carry, bring_ ";
           | "In particular, _to move, bring, lead, conduct, drive, raise_
           | ", which seems to hit the concept of "bringing help" squarely
           | in the center. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=f
           | ero&la=la#lexi...
        
         | kamma4434 wrote:
         | I think it's pretty cool, but with Latin a simple word by word
         | translation will quickly become unmanageable because you need
         | to re-order and break up sentences to make them understandable
         | in other languages. If you take Cicero for example, it is
         | common to have periods that last one full page of text.
        
         | Alex-Programs wrote:
         | If you'd like to try to use Wiktionary instead of OpenAI, you
         | may find this useful:
         | 
         | https://dictionary.nuenki.app/get_definition?language=LatinC...
         | 
         | The code is here: https://github.com/Alex-Programs/nuenki-
         | dictionary
         | 
         | However, feel free to use the API for small scale usage; the
         | API can handle ~5 orders of magnitude more requests than it
         | currently receives.
         | 
         | You can see that each word has many different definitions. It's
         | very difficult to do a word-by-word translation that takes
         | context into account, though I'm going to attempt it at some
         | point using a small LLM that merely picks from Wiktionary data
         | for a https://nuenki.app hover mode.
        
       | Tomte wrote:
       | The jargon is ,,interlinear translation".
        
         | DiscourseFan wrote:
         | Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42572538
        
         | leoc wrote:
         | The best article on the subject in English is maybe still
         | Ernest Blum's "The New Old Way of Learning Languages"
         | https://theamericanscholar.org/the-new-old-way-of-learning-l...
         | but note that it's quite imperfect. For example, there's no
         | mention of the fact that interlinears went mainstream in France
         | in the century between Locke's efforts and Hamilton's. There's
         | also a subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/interlinear , but you
         | may still have to message a mod to be allowed to post.
        
       | sieve wrote:
       | I suggest using ruby annotations for the translation part.
       | 
       | I am building a sanskrit reader[1] and needed a feature that
       | allowed users to tag words with notes/meaning. ruby annotations
       | work wonderfully for that.
       | 
       | [1] Site: https://www.adhyeta.org.in/
       | 
       | Backend: https://github.com/s-i-e-v-e/adhyeta
       | 
       | (The vocabulary features require a login, which is not open to
       | the public as of yet.)
        
         | Timwi wrote:
         | I can see some texts in Sanskrit but I couldn't find any ruby
         | annotations, nor a way to add/suggest any.
        
           | sieve wrote:
           | I am still working on the app part of the website
           | (https://app.adhyeta.org.in/). Will enable registration/login
           | in a week or two.
           | 
           | This is how the interface looks like/works, when logged in.
           | 
           | https://www.adhyeta.org.in/a/images/z85.png (ruby annotations
           | can be seen floating above the source text)
           | 
           | https://www.adhyeta.org.in/a/images/z88.png
           | 
           | The "app" is laid out exactly the same way as the www version
           | is. The only difference is that it provides tools to
           | manipulate the status of words. Login is required because
           | vocabulary progress has to be tracked on a per-user basis.
        
         | aeve890 wrote:
         | How... how does it work?
        
           | sieve wrote:
           | Ruby annotations?[1] They were originally meant to provide
           | pronunciation hints for Asian languages. The hints naturally
           | float above or below the corresponding word. You do not have
           | to play around with tables/grids/flex to make this happen.
           | 
           | [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
           | US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ru...
        
             | Alex-Programs wrote:
             | +1 to this, they're an excellent little feature. Just bear
             | in mind that the rendering differs substantially by
             | browser, and some fonts (for the ruby text) work better
             | than others. I'd recommend overriding as much as possible,
             | including the font of the ruby text.
        
               | sieve wrote:
               | I primarily test with Chrome and Firefox (Epiphany,
               | occasionally). And my usecase requires that I provide
               | downloadable fonts as not all fonts have nice-looking
               | Devanagari renderings. So, the overriding happens
               | naturally.
        
               | Alex-Programs wrote:
               | Yeah, I also target Chrome and Firefox. I'll occasionally
               | test on Edge.
               | 
               | I had a user report that pinyin was looking funny on
               | Reddit. Turns out they use a system font stack which
               | includes Verdana (and so only shows up on Windows), and
               | Verdana does really poorly with Pinyin ruby (iirc it was
               | a generic ruby thing, not just Pinyin).
               | 
               | I just replaced it with a custom system font stack
               | without Verdana.
               | 
               | Not a difficult fix, but something to be aware of.
        
             | pbhjpbhj wrote:
             | What's the function of the non-rendered rp-elements?
        
               | sieve wrote:
               | Backwards compatibility for browsers that do not support
               | this feature. You put your opening and closing
               | parenthesis tokens within the "rp" tags and such browsers
               | will show the hints within those parentheses.
               | 
               | https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
               | US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/rp
        
       | utf_8x wrote:
       | TIL the sentence structure of Latin is wild
        
         | aeronaut80 wrote:
         | Latin's sentence structure is much more flexible than languages
         | such as English. For example, Latin uses cases for nouns to
         | indicate which is the subject and which is the object, whereas
         | English uses word order. This allows Latin sentences to be
         | constructed in various orders without affecting meaning. It
         | also leads to Latin's reputation for trying the patience of
         | students such as myself (studied for five years at school many
         | years ago).
        
           | cenamus wrote:
           | This is also quite common in some more synthetic languages,
           | like most slavic ones for example.
           | 
           | And the latin case is made muuuch more extreme due to the
           | fact that we read poetry and stuff written in the yambic
           | hexameter, which would have also been quite alien sounding to
           | an average roman citizen on the street.
        
           | intalentive wrote:
           | It's like passing data around in a list or tuple, versus key-
           | value objects or dictionaries.
        
           | average_r_user wrote:
           | I remember in school one trick was always to start finding
           | the verb and then use that to build a broader context of the
           | phrase
        
           | mathieuh wrote:
           | People might find it interesting to know that English still
           | has remnants of its case system in its personal pronouns, for
           | example I/me/my/mine, he/him/his, she/her/her,
           | who/whom/whose.
           | 
           | Some people struggle with who/whom but in fact it's the same
           | as "he" versus "him": if you replace "who" with "he" in the
           | sentence and it sounds wrong then you should be using "whom".
        
         | 1-more wrote:
         | the difference, if you're looking to dive deeper into this, is
         | that English is a more analytic language, and Latin is a more
         | synthetic language. In Latin you mostly alter the form of the
         | words to match their meaning. In English you mostly change
         | order and add auxiliary words to change meaning. I'm qualifying
         | these with "mostly" because nothing is all one way or all
         | another, generally.
         | 
         | Word order does matter a bit in Latin, but much less than it
         | does in English. "Dog bites man" and "man bites dog" are
         | different due to word order. In Latin you can write "canis
         | hominem mordet" in _any_ order and have it mean "dog bites man"
         | because that's the only thing those nouns in those cases can
         | mean. To do "man bites dog" you have to say "homo canem mordet"
         | (again, in any order). Conventionally, though, you end a
         | sentence or a subordinate clause with its verb, and the subject
         | that matches up with a verb is usually the one closest to
         | space-wise.
        
       | Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
       | There's some intensive spoken Latin course in Rome, I remember
       | reading about it at the time and it sounded totally immersive. It
       | was a follow on from what Fr Foster had run previously
       | (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/father-reginald-
       | foste...).
       | 
       | On my bucket list whenever I win the Powerball and can stop
       | working full time
        
         | cenamus wrote:
         | I suppose you've alreard heard of it, but Lingua Latina per se
         | Illustrata is also supposed to be very good.
         | 
         | Especially after having had to learn Latin the "old fashioned
         | way", which is basically like learning English via analyzing
         | and translating Shakespeare word by word, musing about the
         | meaning of each words position. All while hardly being able to
         | produce your own sentences
        
           | satvikpendem wrote:
           | It is very good, that's how I learned Latin. For those
           | wanting to speak it, there are online chat rooms I used to
           | use.
        
       | tkgally wrote:
       | I have been using LLMs to restore some of my very rusty Russian
       | reading skills. I give them a text in Russian and ask them to
       | explain it word by word and sentence by sentence, and I ask
       | follow-up questions about parts I am still unsure of. It works
       | quite well, and I haven't noticed any mistakes yet.
       | 
       | I just tried the same thing with the linked Latin text and Gemini
       | Experimental 1206. The results appear below. Perhaps someone who
       | knows Latin can tell us how accurate the glosses, translations,
       | and grammatical explanations are.
       | 
       | https://www.gally.net/temp/20250102interlinearlatin.html
        
         | pastage wrote:
         | I used this method too and found several misstakes, it can be
         | pretty gross mistakes where tone shift is not detected by
         | choosing the wrong words. Idioms and fixed phrases are the
         | hardest I guess. Usually I can get an explanation if I ask
         | four-ten follow up questions it can be really hard to get it
         | right. I hope you are not missing mistakes, and that it is just
         | how I use it that makes it such a burden for me.
         | 
         | I have the worst time with transcripts, and email
         | conversations.
        
           | tkgally wrote:
           | The accuracy of the results might depend on the language
           | you're reading, the LLM you're using, the nature of the text,
           | and the amount of context you give to the LLM. When I've
           | tested the best models with more or less standard texts, such
           | as excerpts from novels or news articles, in English,
           | Japanese, and Russian, the results have been extremely good.
           | The latest versions of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are able
           | to explain the meetings of words quite well, and they also
           | get the grammar correct. (I say this as a long-time language
           | teacher and lexicographer. I have written and edited many
           | textbooks and dictionaries for learners of English and
           | Japanese; LLMs come close to my ability and maybe exceed it
           | sometimes.)
           | 
           | They are not always so good, however, with more granular
           | aspects of language, particularly the way words are written
           | or pronounced--the problem the models have with the word
           | "strawberry" is well known. I've also seen them struggle with
           | the meanings of words and sentences in isolation, as a lack
           | of context can confuse them (as it can confuse people).
           | 
           | In the case of emails or transcripts, the text might contain
           | mistakes or non-standard language that might trip up the LLMs
           | as well.
           | 
           | In any case, at least for major languages and non-critical
           | applications, I think LLM's are a great way to understand
           | what is written in another language.
        
       | thom wrote:
       | This is nice! I do use ChatGPT a fair amount as I'm still crap at
       | Latin and Greek, but a lot of scholarship just plonks it in
       | untranslated. It has always worked fine for getting the gist. I
       | am extremely lucky in that while moving house my wife allowed me
       | to buy the complete Loeb collection but until then I spent a lot
       | of time on Tufts' Perseus library. The Latin and English sources
       | (and Greek for that matter) are all in XML on GitHub, so some
       | enterprising soul could probably hook up a wider set of books
       | from here:
       | 
       | https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-latinLit/tree/master
        
         | thaumasiotes wrote:
         | Perseus seems to be slowly falling apart; I think it's
         | unmaintained. I also think there's supposed to be a more
         | current replacement. But that's as far as my knowledge goes; do
         | you know more?
        
           | thom wrote:
           | It does seem under resourced. Version 5 never appeared and I
           | don't know what 6 is supposed to look like. It's still a
           | great online resource, but having my own library, and access
           | to the Hellenic and Roman Library in London, I'm happy to
           | take things slow these days.
        
       | katspaugh wrote:
       | I built a similar thing a while back:
       | https://github.com/katspaugh/interlinear.io
       | 
       | Useful when you're at a very low level of a language. Past B1 or
       | so, it's mostly looking up individual words.
        
         | sieve wrote:
         | This is nice! Have been building something similar for Sanskrit
         | (links in my other comment).
         | 
         | And yes, this is not helpful beyond a point. But most people
         | never reach that point. So, any help is useful.
        
       | joshcrews wrote:
       | A great collection of Latin texts you can use to find your next
       | books: https://thelatinlibrary.com/
        
       | vitus wrote:
       | I think it's a useful start, but I for one still prefer
       | consulting a dictionary on the side (e.g. Whitaker's Words --
       | https://latin-words.com/) to make sure I get the nuances and make
       | sure I parse the individual words correctly.
       | 
       | The first thing that stood out to me with the translation is that
       | it goes word-by-word, and doesn't have any room for ambiguity.
       | 
       | For instance, in the first line, "profectus est" is the third-
       | person singular perfect form of the deponent verb "proficiscor"
       | based on context, but it could also be the perfect passive form
       | of "proficio" (which my brain initially gravitated toward, as one
       | of the many derivatives of "facio"). I'd be a bit worried about
       | picking the wrong one if given the word out of context. Or even
       | just picking the wrong translation for a word: for the second
       | sentence, using the word-for-word translation, I might try for
       | "He long was spent at Periander, king of the Corinthians" when
       | "He long dwelled at the house of Periander, king of the
       | Corinthians" would read more naturally, using different
       | translations for "apud" and "versatus erat".
       | 
       | Further, if you don't treat these pairs as holistic verb forms,
       | you get very confused by just reordering words: "Arion, after he
       | is having traveled abroad, ..." vs "Arion, after he traveled
       | abroad, ..." And, it can cause some issues with relative ordering
       | of events (where it's common to move between verb tenses to
       | indicate that some events happened further in the past --
       | pluperfect vs perfect especially).
       | 
       | And, if you treat "erat" as "was" all the time (as is the case
       | with "versatus erat"), you'll interpret pluperfect (which implies
       | finality) as imperfect.
       | 
       | Later in the first paragraph, I'd run into a little bit of
       | trouble with the ablative absolute ("Ingentibus opibus ibi
       | comparatis"): "Great wealth there acquired" would more literally
       | be translated as "With great wealth having been acquired", or,
       | taking some liberties with the translation, "After he acquired
       | great wealth, ..."
       | 
       | Moving on to the second heading: yes, "ut" is most commonly used
       | as part of a result or a purpose clause with the subjunctive, but
       | a newer reader might not understand why we use the subjunctive
       | here instead of the infinitive. The most literal translation
       | might be "The sailors make a plan such that they might rob and
       | kill that man", but yes, once you're more used to the language,
       | you'd translate it simply as "The sailors make a plan to rob and
       | kill him".
        
         | randomcatuser wrote:
         | Learned something new. It's incredible that you have this kind
         | of detail... do you think there's a UX that can help readers
         | learn more/explore this kind of ambiguity?
         | 
         | I think the interlinear is realy good at showing one
         | translation (and isn't super distracting) -- do you imagine
         | more like footnotes/etc type things?
        
           | vitus wrote:
           | I know various e-readers have the ability to look up
           | unfamiliar words or phrases in a dictionary by tapping on
           | them, so you can focus on only looking up things that you
           | don't know, or look for another definition for some word if
           | the definition you have doesn't quite fit. For instance, I
           | would probably need to revisit my parse in that first
           | sentence, "Arion, since he (or perhaps some unspecified deed?
           | but why not the ablative absolute here?) was accomplished
           | abroad, ..." using proficio as "has been accomplished"
           | instead of proficiscor for "departed"); looking up profectus
           | in a dictionary would yield the other base word.
           | 
           | I also wonder about jotting down translation notes while
           | reading -- when seriously trying to translate a text, writing
           | down notes in the margins or between lines (if there's
           | appropriate spacing) helps a ton. At least until you're
           | familiar with the grammar and the constructions, laboring
           | through the translation is a huge help.
           | 
           | For someone like me who is reasonably familiar with the
           | grammar, but might be rusty on the actual vocabulary (having
           | last needed to use it in any semi-serious context more than a
           | decade ago), I could see myself referring to the existing
           | app's translation on occasion to give me some ideas regarding
           | the actual words. But I don't know how helpful it is for
           | someone newer to the language, who'd need more than just
           | vocab.
           | 
           | Another commenter also mentions the possibility of pairing
           | the Latin text with a well-established English translation.
           | That might also be interesting; I could certainly muddle my
           | way through a translation without knowing the grammar, but I
           | would make plenty of mistakes if I didn't stop to think about
           | cases and verb forms. What I think would help most is to
           | perform a surface reading, followed by a refinement to make
           | the text more idiomatic.
           | 
           | For instance, taking one of the sentences in the second
           | paragraph: "Pecunia omni nautis oblata, vitam deprecatus
           | est." My surface reading would look something like... "With
           | all money offered to sailors, he begged his life." I might
           | then refine that to "Having offered the sailors all of his
           | money, he begged for his life."
        
       | eigenhombre wrote:
       | This is really nice, and I hope you continue with additional
       | texts, as I have been trying once again to pick up Latin basics,
       | using YouTube videos and Wheelock's Latin (which is one of the
       | best foreign language books I've ever seen).
       | 
       | It would be nice to be able to add the macrons or even acute
       | accent characters to show emphasis syllables as another toggle-
       | able option -- ChatGPT seemed to do OK with that task for me just
       | now.
        
       | randomcatuser wrote:
       | Wow, I like this design. Somehow you picked just the right font
       | size combination so that I can focus on the Latin (but still the
       | English is accessible)
       | 
       | I can imagine a click interaction (click on a word/phrase, learn
       | more about the grammar, etc). What kind of interactions would
       | people like for reading texts like this?
       | 
       | (this is so useful for Chinese too!)
        
       | Mobius01 wrote:
       | I really enjoyed this. You made a great choice in typography and
       | the relative size where the English translations do not interfere
       | with the original Latin text. I hope you can continue.
        
       | araes wrote:
       | The web design's relatively minimalistic and clean. Saw the ruby
       | annotation thing a bit ago in the HTML spec. Seems like there's
       | lots of applications for them that don't get used.
       | 
       | Anybody happen to know of a Latin OCR software that could grab
       | the text parts from Latin documents? Have an interest in
       | translating the Etymologiae of bishop Isidore of Seville, since
       | its one of the main reference texts for education in the middle
       | ages. Just 280 pages of Latin's a bit much for hand copying to
       | text files.
       | 
       | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymologiae
       | 
       | [2] Archive.org
       | https://archive.org/details/etymologiaeaddde00isid
        
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