Windows interface for William Whitaker's WORDS

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Deses
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Windows interface for William Whitaker's WORDS

Post by Deses »

It's a little program I put together. There are a few bugs, but for most users it should work without a glitch. I may end up getting a domain, but this address should still remain accessible. Feel free to add a link to any classics related pages.

http://legam.supremeserver7.com

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Post by Timothy »

you beat me to this one!

I take it this is a driver app? I've been playing with a translation of the ADA code. very nice!

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Deses
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Post by Deses »

Timothy wrote:you beat me to this one!

I take it this is a driver app? I've been playing with a translation of the ADA code. very nice!
Much simpler. I am using raw output from words.exe. I wrote this app a year ago and finally decided that others might benefit as well.

At any rate, there is plenty of latin apps to be developed!

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Post by Timothy »

That's what I thought. You've wrapped the words app pretty well. I ran it last night and it worked fine. I was hoping to try to work out some of the ideas on dictionaries. I think there's a lot that can be done with that.

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Post by Deses »

Timothy wrote:That's what I thought. You've wrapped the words app pretty well. I ran it last night and it worked fine. I was hoping to try to work out some of the ideas on dictionaries. I think there's a lot that can be done with that.
What kind of ideas?

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Post by Timothy »

Deses wrote:What kind of ideas?
The file format that Words uses is capable of marking words according to a period of the Latin language. The idea Whitaker uses is to have a dictionary for each period or one dictionary that can be filtered for a particular period. His idea is that the user specifies a period and the words and the program would reject any definitions that fell outdside the period i.e. it would be improbable that a classical text would have a medieval word.

Other dictionary types are theological or scientific. With separate dictionaries it would be nice to be able to load and unload them, archive, and send them, etc.

The program allows for a customized adjunct to a dictionary and it would be nice to be able to incorporate that into a the main dictionary, or another dictionary.

As far as I know, the capability for the different dictionary is there but unused. Whitaker says the problem is data so another thing is a way has to be worked out to build the dictionary up for text.

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Post by benissimus »

Very nice, I particularly like that it doesn't cut off parts of long entries though I suppose it will retain some of the occasional misspellings from Words.
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Post by tdominus »

What are the misspellings in Words?
Any can be fixed up by editing dictfile.gen (or the other .gen files) in a text editor.

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Post by tdominus »

Nice work. It'd be nice if you could parse the output of words, and fill in its abbrevations. Eg, instead of 1 1, it could say 1st decl. (I believe the second digit is for internal purposes.) And even better would be a button to view all forms of a given word. I think this would require parsing of the files.

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Post by benissimus »

tdominus wrote:What are the misspellings in Words?
Any can be fixed up by editing dictfile.gen (or the other .gen files) in a text editor.
I haven't been writing them down, they seem to appear pretty randomly in occasional entries. If I'm not mistaken, the original Words program pulls entries from the Perseus L&S, which also has some typos in it.

On a separate note, may I suggest that the I-bar start in the entry field, so you can just open the program and start typing (as opposed to having to tab 2 twice).
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Post by Deses »

I'd say the major problem is the actual compilation of such dictionaries.

I use OLD, L&S and Du Cange depending on the text. But there are obvious copyright issues that prevent us from adding those databases to WORDS. Niermeyer, I believe, exists in electronic form. But it is most likely out of my reach price-wise...

Of course, WORDS is more or less a tool for an occasional latinist. But the lack of comprehensive dictionary tools often makes things more difficult than they ought to be even for true professionals.

Then there is TLL... In a few months they are releasing the entire current database on CDs. If it is done well searching by century should be available. But the price tag is likely to be close to $1000. Too bad. I am not very fond of having to go to the library to look-up a few words.

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Post by Deses »

benissimus wrote: On a separate note, may I suggest that the I-bar start in the entry field, so you can just open the program and start typing (as opposed to having to tab 2 twice).
One day I will probably get back to that code. Misspellings, of course, will remain there until someone makes the corrections.

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