Alpha issue in Perseus ᾁ for ᾄ - ᾁδω and ᾁσματος

Greek Learning Greek
1

This is a Perseus issue arising from an earlier thread.
In the current version of Perseus, searching for:

a)/|dw

returns

ᾁδω

Here is the search.

Also, in the Perseus - LSJ entry for ᾆσμα, the same issue arises for ᾄδω

ᾆσμα , ατος, τό, (ᾁδω)
A.song, esp. lyric ode, hymn, Pl.Prt.343csq., Alex.19, Luc.Salt.16; “ᾆ. μετὰ χοροῦ” SIG648B7 (Delph., ii B. C.).

Again, under μέλω (relating to the previous thread):

“πάνυ μοι τυγχάνει μεμεληκὸς τοῦ ᾁσματος” Pl.Prt.339b;

Under Ἅιδης, ᾄδης is written with spiritus lenis rather than asper. Is that breathing a correct alternative?

Before I go to the Perseus webmaster on this, are there other (contracted) forms of words which begin in ᾄ-, which I would be able to test the Perseus search tools / database against?

2

Actually. Looking at it a bit further, there seems to be some form of widespread / systematic data corruption going on here.

The first few are:



Others are:





3

The TLG LSJ is based on the Perseus LSJ, and we spent years proofreading it. I just hope the Perseus webmaster is still responsive to feedback.

4

Were these issues with the alphas in the texts that you adapted from Perseus? I don’t think I’m the first to notice this mis-match between the print and digital versions. There may be more than 200 of these in the Perseus text corpus at least. They are too extensive to have gone uncorrected for so many years and too consistent to be random, so I suspect it is relatively recent data corruption.

5

The TLG and Perseus data entered their texts independently. The LSJ is the only file the TLG took from Perseus. The TLG texts entered at the very beginning (e.g. their Aeschylus) had typos, because back in the early 1970s there weren’t any digital texts to proofread vocabulary against (bootstrapping problem), so proofreading resorted to detecting odd trigraphs, and trigraphs aren’t that reliable. I was involved in finding some old typos in my time in the TLG. But they were very infrequent, and from memory, the main culprit was rho as P.

I do not share your optimism about human nature. And I don’t see what kind of data corruption would convert a Beta code “a)/|” into a Beta code “a(” (which is how Perseus entered its text). This was a sytematic misreading of the Greek, which has gone unfixed… shrug

6

The LSJ OCR project was hampered by the Ninth Edition’s horrible typeset. There are errors in the LSJ that the TLG still hasn’t fixed. For example, look up ἀπεικ-άζω:

“ἀ τὰ καλὰ τῶν ζῴων Isoc.1.11;”

Obviously, that’s nonsense, and should be

“ἀ. τὰ καλὰ τῶν ζῴων Isoc.1.11;”

But the period after ἀ. is extremely faint in the Ninth Edition, and hard to make out even with a text version. Perhaps the OCR project should have started from the eighth edition, with its extremely clear and distinct typeface, and introduced Ninth edition changes as a diff. Perhaps it would still be worthwhile to do that, if only to catch the common italic/bold issues in both the TLG/Persesus versions of the dictionary.

I’m surprised, however, that the copyright holders of the Ninth Edition supplement haven’t created a digital version that incorporates the supplement. It would be a far smaller project than the LSJ digitalization, and really useful.

7

The Logos edition I have includes the supplement.

8

Feedback from the Perseus confirms that these are indeed “a)/|” in the Beta code, and that there is a problem with is particular ᾄ downstream in the conversion to unicode for CTS and for display on the Perseus 4.0 site if the unicode (precombined) option is chosen. The data in the github repository of texts currently contains this conversion error.

9

Wow. I stand corrected, and bewildered.

10

Hi opoudjis. If it would help your bewilderment, I could PM you the emails about it. What I mentioned here is just a summary of what seems most relevant and the parts which I can (almost) understand.

What’s additional in the email is a seemingly frustrated appeal that I should follow some communication convention - which I don’t understand the what or the how of. Also there is a lot of technical terminology in long sentences that I personally cannot relate to concepts, processes, experiences or entities.

11

I’ve verified that the bug shows up when you select “combined”, and is fixed when you chose beta or any other option on the right. But they’ve got it correct here:

https://github.com/PerseusDL/tei-conversion-tools/blob/master/xslt/alpheios/beta-uni-util.xsl#L250

And that’s been in the code since 2015? Longer? Are they using an entirely different codebase for generating the Perseus website now?

BTW, the trick, when writing something like beta-uni-util.xsl, is to regex the name of the character in the Unicode definition file. It makes for a dozen lines of python, versus 2000(!) in that file.

12

J. Is the same thing with “option on the right” happening when the breathing is moved to the right in the word Ρ῾ητῶς in Galen in the following?

I am in two minds about it. It parses correctly, so presumably it is a display problem rather than a beta code problem, but it doesn’t show up in a search so presumably it is a beta code rather than display problem.

13

It’s the same (sort of) issue. Select one of the other options in this box to see it normally.

14

On my tablet at least, the “combining” option ends up with the circumflexes dusplaying as carrots between their character and the next, and in characters with a breathing and an acute, the acutes are above the breathings rather than beside.

The Beta Code option lets me see the Beta Code. Apparently in this case, the problem is in the Beta Code. The asterixes both in this word and in the following Ρ῾ηθεῖσαν appear in context to be spurious. Looking at the other examples of capitalisation in Beta Code, if it was intended for them to be capitalised, they would be written as

*(rhtw=s *(rhqei=san

rather than

*r(htw=s *r(hqei=san

Is there a way to test that to see if I am confident or actually correct?

15

The breathing can come after the letter in betacode. It does look like a spurious capitalization, but that beta code should still be parsed (and is in combining mode). If combining doesn’t work on your tablet, you’ll need one with better unicode support.

16

It will be less trouble to contact the Perseus Webmaster and wait for release 5.

Perhaps that use of spurious was too veiled… I mean, I wonder if that portion of the text was maked off as spurious (questionable) in the print edition that Perseus based their digitalisation on, and the asterixes that served one function in the print version came to serve a different inadvertant function (ie capitalisation) in the digitalised version?

17

A sidepoint:
Within the searchable corpus of Perseus texts, ῥητῶς only occurs in later texts.

18

For the time being you could just put up with Ρ῾ητῶς representing ῥητῶς and ᾁ representing ᾄ, and continue reading. The errors are trivial and obvious, so shouldn’t throw anyone off or significantly impede reading.

And with LSJ you could use the hard copy, as I do.

19

Trivial and obvious in reading, yes, because as human readers we have commonsense - the ability to understand by intellect, rather than mere sensory input. For a computer however…

Display and parsing are two issues that seem to work okay within the constraints, foibles and limitations we have been discussing, but the integrity of a search is another. In the present order, viz.

*r(htw=s *r(hqei=san

they don’t show up in search results (regardless of which display preference is used) where is search terms are the uncapitalised

r(htw=s r(hqei=san

. The search routine seems to have been written within stricter parameters than the parsing one, and it has demonstrable “limitations” when it comes to capitalised forms.

The search routine has 3 “interesting” features, so far I can oresently identify.

The first is that when a search is made for a capitalised form, such as in Xenophon, Memorabilia for the proper name,

*swkra/ths

The results are not localised / truncated to just a few lines, but great swaths of text are returned.

Secondly, the “results” of the search are not highlighted, as they are in other searches for non-capitalised forms.

Those 2 things are not good, but can be accommodated by people like us, who have developed skimming skills in Greek on par with their own language of education. For somebody, however, who plods through a text word by word or phrase by phrase using grammar and dictionary, trying to get (full) comprehension from the Greek, that might be troublesome and disheartening.

Thirdly, when choosing the (default) “expand” option during a search if capitalised forms, the search actually doesn’t expand the search to the other declensional cases. A user without an adequately fostered sense of scepticism will be confident as they look through the results. For capitalised forms, the search needs to be repeated for each declensional form, in order to perform a comprehensive search for the “word” rather than the “form”.

That third point also “holds” (in so far as the search is concerned “breaks down”) for other words too. The capitalised and correctly accented

*(/oti

to be found at 2.1 and 3.1 of Galen, does not show up in a search for the capitalised and incorrectly accented (but perhaps faithful reproduction of the typset form of the text)

*(oti

that occurs at 1.12. Furthermore, neither of those 3 instances of two capitalised forms shows up in the 26 results returned from a standard search for

o(/ti

In fact it is not possible to search for

*swkra/ths

in Xenophon by using the non-capitalised sequence

swkra/ths

as that will simply return a message saying that no results were found.

Beyond the triviality and obvious nature of these things, there are issues here involving the accuracy of the Beta Code and of the un-tested coding for the search engine(s?).

20

Barry, if you have a moment to check it, how does your alternative search engine in the other software handle these errors and inconsistencies that Perseus is carrying in its concordance function?