I knew we were getting close, as the title appeared a few months back, a sign that the text is on its way into cyberspace.
It has arrived, and Laura Gibbs has set up a wiki to transcribe it, so that we can have a searchable dictionary.
A few latin teachers and others have now joined the effort to get this dictionary online in a searchable form, it is a very important project, as no student level dictionary such as this exists.
Here is Laura's post:
A quick update about the Latin-Latin Lexicon of Comenius - the wiki system
is working! Several people have already transcribed some pages, and so far
it looks like the wiki will meet our needs really well. You can see how it
is proceeding if you look here:
http://comlex.pbwiki.com
It's easy to just transcribe a page - it doesn't take a lot of time to do
that, and each page is full of curious and fun things! Alternatively, you
can help proofread the pages people have already transcribed, or you might
want to be the person who goes through and adds the bold and italic
formatting to the transcribed pages. Any kind of contribution people want to
make would be very welcome! If I were to do this on my own (which is also
fine - this is the kind of project that suits my "inner geek" perfectly), it
would probably take me about 2 years... which would be okay - but wouldn't
it be cool if we could finish this in time for back-to-school in Fall
2009...???! If we can get a few people contributing to the project on a
regular basis, that is a very do-able goal.
Just as an example of the serendipitous items you will find in the
dictionary, I was delighted by this gloss of a proverb which showed up in my
page for today:
Adest, de quo loquimur] Lupus in fabula, Ter. Etiamsi lupi meminisses.
I LOVE IT. This is a dictionary that goes far beyond a word list, but
instead provides many "cultural keys" to the use of Latin idioms along with
sayings and proverbs, as you can see from this entry. After all, you might
not realize what the proverb lupus in fabula, "the wolf in the narration"
(English: "speak of the devil") means without a context, but Comenius
provides a great gloss: "the person we are talking about has shown up."
Plus, in addition to the Terence citation, Comenius gives this variation:
"Etiamsi lupi meminisses." I Googled that, just to see what I could find,
and it led me a collection of proverbs in Spanish and Latin published in
Madrid in 1792, digitized at Google Books (http://tinyurl.com/7euxfu). Any
of you folks who are weave Spanish materials into your Latin teaching will
like this book very much I suspect.
Anyway, THANKS to the folks on this list who are among those pioneering
people who transcribed pages this weekend, and I hope some other people
might be intrigued to give it a try - even just to see how a wiki project
like this works. I am someone who uses wikis both for collaboration (as
here), and also as a sole-author method of publishing content very quickly
and efficiently online (it's way faster than creating a website from
scratch). There is an ad-free version of PBWiki available at no cost to
educators - you can find out more about that here:
http://pbwiki.com/academic.wiki if you want to have a wiki for a project of
your own.
I figure New Year's Resolutions are a great occasion for starting wikis and
blogs!
How cool is this! I hope it does grow into a fully searchable dictionary. We need one bad!
