new Perseus 5.0 reading environment for Greek and Latin under development

[mcthulhu]

See https://sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdates/ ... and-latin/, about plans to design "A new reading environment that captures the basic functionality of the Perseus 4.0 reading environment but that is more customizable and that can be localized efficiently into multiple modern languages, with Arabic, Persian, German and English as the initial target languages." It sounds like it's supposed to merge several existing projects for the classics. Functionality will include a lightweight treebank viewer, and word/phrase alignment between the source text and translation. There's a link to an existing Alpheios reading environment for Greek that might be a model for whoever wins the contract. I was pleased to see that the source code is supposed to end up on GitHub under an open license.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Alpheios used to be in my browser, and it worked well enough until Firefox objected to its presence. But a better model IMHO would be LWT or its competitors. I just gave a new look at Alpheios, and it fails to address a significant drawback to vocabulary look-ups. The LBJ in the background is a bit of a muddle for a dictionary to be used in the 21st century. For example, using Alpheios to look up a word at the beginning of Plato's Meno, ἀσκητόν. Alpheios, using LBJ, I suppose, gives the meaning from A Homeric Dictionary (George Autenrieth), 'finely or curiously wrought,' without a hint that there might be another meaning. The meaning appropriate to this case in the Meno is 'that which can be taught.' Using LWT (as it happens that is exactly what I am doing right now), I can choose between 2 sets of dictionaries, one being the LSJ and/or the Middle Liddell and all their given definitions, the other being a Logeion view of LSJ and the Middle Liddell. Not to mention the Diccionario Griego-Español , which is in progress and not available for every word, as well as a Dutch-Greek Dictionary whose name escapes me, which is also, apparently, in progress.
One would also hope the new viewer can track the words the individual has looked up (apparently one can). One also longs for somewhere to write one's own notes, to insert other notes, diagrams or pictures, and to set side-by-side a translation of the text. If memory serves, it's been a few years, LingQ allows for notes and pictures to be inserted, so I'm not asking for anything revolutionary. Another model might be OneNote, which allows for a kind of free-form way of note taking.
One does applaud Crane for his initiative, at any rate, and wish the project well.

Edit one time to correct spelling.

[mcthulhu]

I have no connection to the project, but you could try asking whether they've looked at LWT's user interface.

BTW, have you tested the Alpheios extension in the Pale Moon browser? It's a Firefox offshoot that aims to continue support for traditional Firefox XUL extensions even though Firefox itself is moving away from them; so there's a chance that older extensions might work there.

[MorkTheFiddle]

BTW, have you tested the Alpheios extension in the Pale Moon browser? It's a Firefox offshoot that aims to continue support for traditional Firefox XUL extensions even though Firefox itself is moving away from them; so there's a chance that older extensions might work there.

No, I have not tested Pale Moon, nor even heard of it. I will give it a shot. Thanks.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Bump. To update the Perseus 5.0 reading environment for Greek and Latin.
Much development has taken place with this project. The environment that the developers created is called Scaife. Sahmilat mentions it in a couple of posts. This is his second post: 2nd Post

In effect, Scaife can display parallel texts in Ancient Greek and Latin. It looks also as if they plan to add other languages, such as Persian .
A brief, 3 minute, 15 second, video on Youtube gives an overview in English: