Hilliard and North Vocabularies

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hlawson38
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Hilliard and North Vocabularies

Post by hlawson38 »

I've been typing into a text file the Hiliard and North Exercise vocabularies. Does anybody know if such a text file already exists? Below are some example entries. I've already tested my file by importing it into an Anki deck.
Ex7; enough; sǎtis.
Ex7; snow; nix, nǐvis, f.
Ex7; set out; prǒficiscor, -i, profectus.
Ex7; easily; fǎcile.
Ex7; tree; arbor, arbǒris, f.
Ex7; fall; cǎdo, -ěre, cěcǐdi, cāsum.
Ex7; lie; jǎceo, -ēre, jǎcui.
Ex7; return; rědeo, -ire, -ii, -ǐtum.
My goal is gradually to type these in as I work my way through the H&N exercises. Eventually, I want to share this work. I'd love to see comments about this project.
Hugh Lawson

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Re: Hilliard and North Vocabularies

Post by Carolus Raeticus »

Salve!

I would recommend adding information about the type of word, e.g.
Ex7; snow; nix, nǐvis, f.;noun
That enables filtering according to type of word (in addition to exercise number) possible. Doing so while creating the file is not that much more work, but adding stuff later on...

Good look with your project! Vale,

Carolus Raeticus
Sperate miseri, cavete felices.

hlawson38
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Re: Hilliard and North Vocabularies

Post by hlawson38 »

How important is it to include the N&H diacritical marks?

My goal is to produce a text file with three fields, separated by semicolons:

exercise number for the particular vocabulary (semicolon)
English prompt(semicolon)
Latin word or expression(period, aka full stop)

The text file will let users do make up flash cards.

I can type in the diacritical marks easily, though I am probably making errors that will be very hard to proofread. This concern leads me to wonder if the text file would be just as useful without the diacriticals. For me, it would, but the point of sharing is to make it useful for others as well.
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Barry Hofstetter
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Re: Hilliard and North Vocabularies

Post by Barry Hofstetter »

hlawson38 wrote:How important is it to include the N&H diacritical marks?

My goal is to produce a text file with three fields, separated by semicolons:

exercise number for the particular vocabulary (semicolon)
English prompt(semicolon)
Latin word or expression(period, aka full stop)

The text file will let users do make up flash cards.

I can type in the diacritical marks easily, though I am probably making errors that will be very hard to proofread. This concern leads me to wonder if the text file would be just as useful without the diacriticals. For me, it would, but the point of sharing is to make it useful for others as well.
I would at least include the macrons, very helpful for learning scansion and reading poetry later on. I once had the parent of one my students who also taught at the same school. When we got to the point where we were reading Vergil, she remarked to me one day "I could never understand why you insisted that they include the long marks as part of the spelling. Now I know!"
N.E. Barry Hofstetter

Cuncta mortalia incerta...

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Re: Hilliard and North Vocabularies

Post by Hylander »

You only need to type the macrons, no need to type the breves. Every vowel that has no macron is presumed short. But you would need to type the macrons consistently. From the sample, you seem to be typing just the breves, and not consistently, which isn't very helpful.

As a practical matter, the main advantage of knowing vowel quantities is to enable you to read verse metrically with fluency, without having to figure out the scansion of each line. (That's not to say that vowel quantities aren't an important feature of the Latin language that you should know for their own sake.) But once you learn how to read verse metrically, you assimilate vowel quantities of individual words without giving them too much thought, especially if you have already learned the quantities of the inflections. If you've learned the inflections, learning to reading verse metrically won't be too difficult, and you will develop intuitions about the quantities of individual words (not necessarily infallible, but it's a big help).

In other words, knowing how to read verse metrically and knowing vowel quantities are mutually reinforcing.

I believe there are some Latin words with "hidden" quantity (as there are in Greek), where the quantity is unknown today and can't be inferred from verse.
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hlawson38
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Re: Hilliard and North Vocabularies

Post by hlawson38 »

Thanks for the careful comments. You've given me much to think about.

So far, I've been trying to reproduce exactly what is printed in the pdf file of N&H on the textkit web page. I've rechecked the sample I gave in the leading post in this thread, and it appears to be what N&H printed, so far as breves and macrons are concerned.

N&H print many breves, which has made me wonder about whether I should continue my purely clerical approach to this task. On the other hand, copying N&H at least gives me a criterion of relative correctness.

If one wanted to revise the N&H diacriticals, what might one use as a criterion of correctness?Are there standard wordlists of Latin words marked according to acceptable present usage?
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Re: Hilliard and North Vocabularies

Post by Hylander »

Are there standard wordlists of Latin words marked according to acceptable present usage?
Dictionaries generally have the information.

Maybe there is some advantage to selectively providing vowel quantities, but I don't see it. It seems to me it could be misleading, and that it would be preferable either to provide macrons alone or both macrons and breves (exercising great care to get them right so as not to mislead), or to leave it to readers to look to their dictionaries for guidance.
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Re: Hilliard and North Vocabularies

Post by hlawson38 »

I'm glad I raised the issue. I need to think about this.
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Re: Hilliard and North Vocabularies

Post by Timothée »

Of course the metre reveals no hidden quantities. They have to be inferred in other ways, and it goes without saying that there’ll always be gaps in our knowledge. How the inference is done is so convoluted a process that it probably cannot be presented here.

Mind, even open syllable vowel lengths are not always known. Not all words occur in poetry (as preserved to us), or the metrical information is inconclusive (also including corruption in the transmission). For instance, it is disputed whether 4th declension neuters (a small class of words) had -ū or -ŭ in the singular nominative-accusative.

As Hylander says, use a dictionary for the vowel lengths (or, if possible, a few dictionaries). An example: A month ago I wondered if it is Parĭsiī or Parīsiī. Different dictionaries will answer this differently. The word is attested since Caesar, but not in poetry. We have it in poetry not earlier than in Venantius Fortunatus, who is only from the 6th century. He uses the word many times, and only once with ĭ. Is that enough for ī? ĭ might be thought to fit in meter worse than ī. The French Paris supposes ī, but is that conclusive?

hlawson38
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Re: Hilliard and North Vocabularies

Post by hlawson38 »

hlawson38 wrote:I'm glad I raised the issue. I need to think about this.
I've done some thinking. I'll continue typing in the vocabularies, with the goal of reproducing the breves and macrons just as N&H have them.

Using this file as a source, I can produce two other files, one with macrons only, and one with no diacriticals. I don't know how to do this now, but I'm sure there must be away for a computer to make the appropriate substitutions.

Thanks for the comments.
Hugh Lawson

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Re: Hilliard and North Vocabularies

Post by Interaxus »

hlawson38

You can just paste your plain typed-in text into Johan Winge's amazing Macronizer and it'll add the macrons for you. Then check they correspond to the textbook.

http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~winge/macronizer/

I doubt you need the extra clutter of breves. All vowels not marked with a macron may safely be assumed to be short.

Vale!
Int

hlawson38
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Re: Hilliard and North Vocabularies

Post by hlawson38 »

Interaxus wrote:hlawson38

You can just paste your plain typed-in text into Johan Winge's amazing Macronizer and it'll add the macrons for you. Then check they correspond to the textbook.

http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~winge/macronizer/

I doubt you need the extra clutter of breves. All vowels not marked with a macron may safely be assumed to be short.

Vale!
Int
Many thanks, interaxus. I'm continuing to peck away. I'm up to exercise #166 now.
Hugh Lawson

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Re: Hilliard and North Vocabularies

Post by rom35 »

Learn the words and prepare the decks with macrons. All the time. As "malum, ī, n." is not "mālum, ī, n.". :D

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