Digital dictionaries: Forcellini

[Godmy]

(A resource), edit 2.8.2014

Hello, some months I ago I finished this project http://lexica.linguax.com/ ( http://www.linguax.com/lexica ) (has been edited 28.1.2014) where I pretty much make from PDF Latin dictionaries (such as a scanned version of Forcellini: Lexicon Totius Latinitatis) a version where you can search by typing on your keyboard: after writing a word, the page the word is in appears.

It is better than having some low quality OCR (an automatic transcription) and also better than to have just a PDF you cannot really search in - a compromise.

There are also some Latin-Greek and Greek-Latin dictionaries (ancient Greek). And I'm planning to add more.

[cb]

this is really cool, i'm going to be using this all the time, thanks!!!

[Godmy]

I thank you

I'll let you know when other dictionaries are added!

(Also you can switch from a dictionary to dictionary via the left top corner, but you have figured that out probably.)

[ivanus]

I really like your solution to making these texts accessible. Indexing the pages is an elegant way to make the text available when it's impossible to OCR and is far too much to reasonably transcribe.

It's a very clever compromise.

[Godmy]

I must admit that it wasn't originally my idea and some (maybe a bit complicated) pdf-reader based solution existed, but I'm the author of this implementation

[Interaxus]

Marvellous! I love being able to switch dictionaries on the fly.

My very first search turned up a curiosity: Valpy has no entry for 'occurro'. I wonder why?

Cheers,
Int

[Interaxus]

The second word I searched for was 'necopinatus' (unexpected, unforeseen). Only Forcellini had that one. Whitaker's Words has it too. It suddenly struck me: why not add Whitaker's Words to the top left-hand corner? Then we'd have a parser as well. Just a thought.

Cheers,
Int

[Godmy]

Interesting idea about the Whitaker... my problem is the space if I want to keep the page clean. By that I mean that I don't want to face the problem that a considerable part of the page is just "this text spam" and not the relevant information searched. Right now it is quite usable even on 1024*768 (I don't recommend any lower resolution and if you use a mobile phone browser... well, you'll have to deal with it somehow I access it sometimes (not often) on my phone, so I know).

I'm thinking about more dictionaries, but mostly I'm afraid that the public won't see the results as most of the dictionaries I have in mind or are already processed, are still copyrighted, therefore not available. (but I would rather use a PM for this kind of conversation)

[Godmy]

I am sorry for the website not running today. Nothing wrong on my side: the site appears to be in the best shape (from its control panel), but in the reality the server is not responding. I am trying to contact the provider, but it seems that they have cut support for free-users... but I am trying nevertheless.

I also may come to some other permanent solutions...

I will let you know.

[Godmy]

So I have bought a paid hosting, now I'm reuploading the dictionaries (which will take me maybe all the rest of this day).

Maybe I'll be asking then for the donations more loudly, since the costs for the website has just become real...

I'll let you know when it is done and give you a new address.

[Godmy]

The old website is working now, but once I'll get the new hosting running, I will shut it down.

[Godmy]

- So the website is moved to a new hosting and I have now my own domain!

http://www.linguax.com/lexica (or http://linguax.com/lexica )

(Linguax,acis is a rare adjective used once by Gellius meaning the same as loquax,acis <- but that was unfortunately taken together with most of Latin words in their canonical form <- and it is short)

It will cost me around 82 USD / year (the domain and the hosting) so I will be glad for any donation. There is a donation bar in the dictionaries (it will disappear once it is filled) for the next year costs. (this year has been pretty much all payed by one generous donor, even though very many few donated).

In the case I couldn't keep it running solely on donations, I might think of advertisements... or some other annoying solutions.

The users from the old address will get redirected.

The server is now situated in Netherlands (the old is/was in Pennsylvania), so the users from Europe (as myself) might be happier now. But it should be faster in total, so all users, no matter the place, should get the pages faster (unless they have naturally a very slow Internet connection... but even with that maybe).

(I simultaneously moved my older project to http://www.linguax.com in case you wondered why the "/lexica" is there)

[Godmy]

- Keys Z and X (or Y and X), can be used now to go to the previous or next page.
- Use TAB to type a new word
- Use arrow keys for easier orientation on the page/the picture
- Use ENTER instead of hitting OK

[aochagavia]

Hello Godmy!

I came across your website and I liked it so much! You have done a wonderful job! The only "problem" I see is that it requires internet access.

I would love to create a desktop application to be able to use the dictionaries offline. In order to do this I would need to recreate the database in my computer, which implies going through every single page and notating the top-left word of it. Since this is a lot of work, I want to ask you if you would be willing to send me this information (the word index database). For the images I can write a script to download them automatically, so that is not a big problem.

Please post here your answer or send me an email to aochagavia92 [at] gmail [dot] com

Thanks in advance!
Adolfo.

[thesaurus]

Great resource!

I had talked on this forum about scanning/OCR the Forcellini books back in 2008, but it was a daunting project and I never got it off the ground.

Glad to see that you've made this resource more widely available.

[Godmy]

Since today you can use simply http://lexica.linguax.com (the old one will work nevertheless http://linguax.com/lexica <- it links to the same place).
Maybe some day I will rearrange my projects and use the main domain for the dictionary http://linguax.com which now hosts an older project of mine.

aochagavia: Downloading the images directly from the website would be a problem since there is some traffic which costs something (please do not attempt it) But we would find a way. I may contact you in the future, once I have more time

thesaurus: I'm glad you like it. Actually there might be soon a purely digital version You will hear more from me about it.

[Nesrad]

Godmy: Would you mind giving me the index file of the Forcellini pdf so I can add it as bookmarks and use it offline in a pdf reader?

[bedwere]

Hi,

Thank you for your work! Would you consider adding this volume to your collection?

A copious and critical English-Latin dictionary
by Smith, William, Sir, 1813-1893; Hall, Theophilus D
It probably needs to have two indexes, since there's a proper names dictionary at the end.

I'll be happy to contribute a donation and help, if you tell me how.

[calvinist]

Hi,

Thank you for your work! Would you consider adding this volume to your collection?

A copious and critical English-Latin dictionary
by Smith, William, Sir, 1813-1893; Hall, Theophilus D
It probably needs to have two indexes, since there's a proper names dictionary at the end.

I'll be happy to contribute a donation and help, if you tell me how.

mirum dictionarium est! I've never heard of this dictionary before, but this is much more in-depth than the Bantam and Cassell's that own (which are both excellent). It looks like Bolchazy-Carducci has reprinted it and the Amazon reviews are good. This will have to be added to my wishlist!

[bedwere]

I bought the reprint too, but the on-line search tool is very convenient, when you are on the go.
I'm currently using it for the Ben-Hur project.

[Seraphinus]

I know for a fact Godmy has finished scanning and uploading Smith's dictionary, but it is unclear to me when he'll officially release it.

I'll be happy to contribute a donation and help, if you tell me how.

If you go to http://www.lexica.linguax.com/ , you'll see the Donate button at the top, which will take you to PayPal.

[bedwere]

Gratias! Ideo patienter praestolabor.

[testsuda]

Thanks so much

[Godmy]

I'm going to publish several new dictionaries soon: among them critical English-Latin dictionaries, an English version of Forcellini, critical English-Attic dictionaries and much more.

Moreoever there might appear a fully digital hand-transcribed version of Forcellini.

I haven't yet asked for any donations for this year, maybe I will once I publish the dictionaries, since I still want the website to pay for itself without me feeling like I should include ads and similar annoyances.

[procrastinator]

I'm going to publish several new dictionaries soon: among them a critical English-Latin dictionaries

Is this "A Copious and Critical English-Latin Dictionary" by Smith and Hall, published in 1871? If so, readers might like to know that Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders has a project to proofread an OCR version of the dictionary (which will be submitted to Project Gutenberg once finished for everyone to enjoy). If anyone would like to help out, go to http://www.pgdp.net/ and register, then check the beginner tutorials at http://www.pgdp.net/c/quiz/start.php?show_only=PQ. The dictionary project page is at http://www.pgdp.net/c/project.php?id=projectID5775aeccac0c7&expected_state=P1.proj_avail.

[Nesrad]

Moreoever there might appear a fully digital hand-transcribed version of Forcellini

I am amazed to read this. Transcribing Forcellini would be an enormous task, and the service rendered to students of Latin would be incomparable. We could even have new paper-bound editions of Forcellini, and possibly (computer-generated) abridged editions. It would be the only real monolingual Latin dictionary available, and what a dictionary!

[Seraphinus]

I'm going to publish several new dictionaries soon: among them a critical English-Latin dictionaries

Is this "A Copious and Critical English-Latin Dictionary" by Smith and Hall, published in 1871? If so, readers might like to know that Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders has a project to proofread an OCR version of the dictionary (which will be submitted to Project Gutenberg once finished for everyone to enjoy). If anyone would like to help out, go to http://www.pgdp.net/ and register, then check the beginner tutorials at http://www.pgdp.net/c/quiz/start.php?show_only=PQ. The dictionary project page is at http://www.pgdp.net/c/project.php?id=projectID5775aeccac0c7&expected_state=P1.proj_avail.

I'll definitely contribute to this. Thanks for informing us about it.

[Seraphinus]

Hi guys. For anybody looking for an online version of Smith & Hall's dictionary, some Brazilian guy has made us the great favour to put it up in a similar format as Godmy's dictionaries, so that you're able to search for headwords. Behold:

http://edgard.bikelis.com/lat/dic.py

Enjoy!

[whsiv]

Good find. Thanks for sharing!

[Godmy]

I'm afraid the existence of the Linguax website is endangered at the moment. I can either shut the site down (since I don't have finances to run this any longer with the number of both dictionaries/traffic and the high number of users every day I have) or I put ads (Google-Ads e.g.) into there and make them absolutely unblockable - something I would hate to do since I hate ads, or I start receiving donations :-/ I have received some rare ones from some of the users here, but I'm still afraid the website is a little bit more expensive. (more about that there)


Also since today I added 4 new dictionaries:
- an updated list can be seen here http://lexica.linguax.com
- an English-Latin critical dictionary (Smith & Hall for those who prefers the original version) http://lexica.linguax.com/smith.php
- English-Attic / English-Ancient Greek critical dictionary Yonge http://lexica.linguax.com/yonge.php
- English-Attic phraseological dictionary Fradersdorf http://lexica.linguax.com/fradersdorff
- and one much required Hungaro-Slovak dictionary nobody here probably cares about

And more are to come in this month (hopefully, if the website continues running).

[anphph]

Hey Godmy,

I really like linguax, so I'll chip in. Is there any way you could have a "completion bar" of some sort, so we know how much you need vs how much you've got?

[Nesrad]

How about a stand-alone version that can be used locally?

[Godmy]

First, I'm sorry for the lesser frequency of me answering to you, people, I must confess I visited Textkit scarcely in the last years.

anphph: I actually had something like that about 4 years ago, but it didn't work that well, I usually had to update it manually. But I suppose, since I developed the announcing system today, I should be able to tell everybody when we're covered (and I hope it's better just a matter of days than weeks). On one hand it's true that I didn't openly ask anybody for a donation for almost 4 years, on the other hand the donation button was there (albeit I made it much smaller than the original Paypal button was as to make it even less annoying to users, since I'm so anti-ad and anti-useless things on websites, myself being an AdBlock user) and I had to cover the last few years more or less from my pocket (although there was one donator who really helped me out a few times in the past and I spoke with him).

nesrad: I thought about that many times, but the thing is that I often correct things or make them better and I like less the solution of making repeated releases sometimes several gigabytes big. Also, I'm not sure how technically user friendly that would be. Aside from this nagging financial side of it, I still consider the web solution the most practical (most non-classical languages dictionaries I use are online too). But I can see your point! +the situation that has just transpired...

[Godmy]

I fixed the donation buttons, the announcement should show again, but in case you already clicked it today, just click on the OK button again. Sorry for the annoyance.

[Godmy]

Alright, just in one week, we're covered thanks to you all! The site can continue now as it is.

Who would still like to help me in further development (or who hasn't donated yet and would like to) I still collect donations for reserves / for a kind of safety buffer (for the future) and every dollar will be appreciated and motivate me to work on more dictionaries!