Best practices or personal preferences for interlinear texts?

Greek Learning Greek
1

Interlinear texts are great for people with little or no knowledge of a language. For example, I have zero knowledge of Hebrew, but I can look at an interlinear Genesis https://biblehub.com/interlinear/genesis/1.htm and get an idea of what’s going on, without needing to put so much trust in a translator as an intermediary, e.g., someone who is a Christian and is trying to impose their religious views on the text. I’ve been producing a presentation of the Iliad https://bcrowell.github.io/ransom/ that is not interlinear and is aimed more at people who are at an intermediate level in the language, but who still need aids. In the course of coding up the software that helps produce this, it’s occurred to me that I have everything that would be needed in order to produce a certain type of interlinear Iliad, which would be more appropriate for people who don’t know any Greek and just want to dip into the text. I’m wondering if this would be a worthwhile thing to do, and if so, what is the optimal way to design such a thing.

Here are a couple of interlinear or interlinear-ish presentations of Homer that I’ve come across: Jackson https://issuu.com/john_jackson/docs/iliad_interlinear_book_1 , Giles https://github.com/bcrowell/giles . Jackson seems to have done a pretty careful and well thought out job on the Iliad, which may make it of less interest to produce a new interlinear Iliad or Odyssey. However, his work is all closed-source, and I’m an open-source guy and see that kind of walled garden as a sad exercise that is best ignored and forgotten. It’s also possible that his design choices are nonoptimal or optimal only for certain purposes. For example, he’s produced it as a non-hyperlinked PDF, whereas it’s kind of nice how biblehub’s presentation of Genesis is hyperlinked to things like dictionary entries.

I would be interested in people’s opinions about design choices for this type of thing:

(1) Jackson presents a general-purpose gloss for each word, not attempting to pick out the sense that is more specific to that particular sentence. Giles and biblehub have selected a particular sense for each instance, although biblehub links to an external dictionary entry. These choices may be a trade-off between casual readers and scholars.

(2) Giles permutes Homer’s word order to fit the English, which is perhaps disrespectful to the poetry but also probably more optimal for the totally casual reader who speaks no Greek. Jackson uses a preexisting translation, which he cuts up into pieces in order to try to match the Greek lines, but often that matching is not one-to-one. (For me, doing this chopping would be a fairly nontrivial project.)

(3) Jackson and biblehub give part-of-speech analysis.

(4) Biblehub gives a transliteration, which Giles and Jackson omit.

Opinions? Suggestions?

2

Interlinear texts are great for people with little or no knowledge of a language.

I disagree with your premise. I think they are an obstacle to anyone wanting to learn a classical language. The fact that they encourage readers to think of translation as the first step in understanding a text starts them off in the wrong direction. The fact that they appear to offer help when in fact they are hobbling a learner’s capacity to make progress makes them pernicious.

If you have no or little knowledge of a language how are you to judge the quality of an interlinear? It seems to me that one is equally at the mercy of translator’s bias. How will you ever develop the ability to understand the structure of a text (without translating or even knowing the meaning of all the words in the passage )?

Unfortunately there is no quick fix or easy route to reading classical texts. One has to learn the grammar and read many texts making lots of mistakes. Just like no one ( I hope) would think of doing exercises with the key open in front of them what is the point of “reading” an interlinear text? One might as well read a translation.

All this has been well ventilated before. I am sure others will offer detailed observations on the merits of the texts you cite. I just wanted to raise an objection to the whole idea of Interlinears.

3

Perseus is an interlinear, for anyone in denial about it. You click the words that you don’t know instead of looking below the line. Google Translate can also be used like this for modern languages (and I’ve seen people talking about this being an amazing way to pick up a language fast).

Interlinears, including Perseus, are solid tools and also solid cribs when misused. I used some of the above interlinears for the first few weeks of learning Greek, progressed to translations (another solid tool and solid crib sort of thing) once I had a base vocabulary, and eventually had enough Greek that I didn’t use the translations anymore, and just learned more Greek from reading.

This was and continues to be very much a multi-year process, and I have used plenty of other tools along with these. I especially like Morewood’s Dictionary and Grammar and now wish that I had never opened any other grammar for the first few years of Greek.

4

I have to say I agree with Seneca. I avoid interlinears like the plague. I own one NT interlinear and I never use it. I prefer parallel displays of chunks of text of sufficient size the you can see how a larger block of text is handled. This avoids the tendency to match word for word which beginners really shouldn’t be encouraged to do as they. At it’s base interlinears run contrary to the fact that different languages serialize differently.

It is true if you know enough you can get away using them and avoid the pitfalls but by that point you probably don’t want to be using them anyway.

I’ll note that I don’t normally see modern language interlinears either. I do see facing page translations though.

Thx
D

5

In your post, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that I’m describing my own use case. I’m not.

I’m also not proposing interlinear texts as a way for anyone to learn a language. I see them as tools for people who have no intention of learning the language but nevertheless want to be able to interact with texts written in the original language. For example, a person who has no intention of learning classical Hebrew can nevertheless use an interlinear Genesis to interact with the original text. As another example, if you look at a paper in a linguistics journal that discusses something having to do with the Kickapoo language, you may very well find that it gives examples in some type of interlinear form. This is because there are very few linguists who know Kickapoo well, but there may be many in the potential audience who want to know what the paper has to say.

This sentence is poorly expressed. I can’t tell what language you think is being discussed; whether the pronoun “you” is meant to be literally me or just the general “one” or “some person;” whether you have in mind the creator of an interlinear presentation or its user, or both, or whether you think for some reason that they would be the same person; or why you think I (or some hypothetical other person) want to “judge the quality” of an interlinear presentation. The tone comes off as extremely arrogant, although it can be hard to gauge people’s intended tone on the internet.

6

My post was sparked by the first sentence in your post. I have no idea whether you use interlinears or not but you offered an unqualified recommendation for their use (“they are great..)” and implicitly recommended them to “those with little or no knowledge of a language”. Well that’s how I read your post anyway.

This is a forum primally about learning classical languages. So I wanted to warn “those with little or no knowledge of a language” against interlinears as many in this category will be people tying to learn a classical language.

Those “who have no intention of learning the language” I fear will get very little if anything from an interlinear. It was this group I had in mind when I asked the question "If you have no or little knowledge of a language how are you to judge the quality of an interlinear?

This question was motivated by your statement that “but I can look at an interlinear Genesis https://biblehub.com/interlinear/genesis/1.htm and get an idea of what’s going on, without needing to put so much trust in a translator as an intermediary, e.g., someone who is a Christian and is trying to impose their religious views on the text.” I read this as meaning that you (bcrowell) were able to judge the quality of the interlinear as opposed to a translation, particularly with regard to bias and by extension this was something anyone with little knowledge of a classical language might be able to do. The “you” in the sentence you quoted is colloquial for “one” but that of course includes you (bcrowell) as I guess you have little knowledge of Hebrew.

I don’t want to get too deep into the idea of “bias” but in my view it impossible to produce either an interlinear or a translation without making choices and those choices will be, in part, at least, culturally conditioned. One only has to look at past translations to see that this is so. All we can do is to be aware that we are biased as our predecessors and learn that there is no such thing as an objective translation.

Leaving that somewhat philosophical point aside I fail to see how anyone without, probably, a great deal deal of knowledge about a classical language will be in a position to judge a translation or the the “fidelity” of an interlinear. Sure someone can judge a translation on its readability or how much they enjoy it but surely not on its relationship to an original text. (I am specifically thinking of your group that has “no or little knowledge of a language”.)

I suppose that there is something “arrogant” about posting on this forum. Thinking that one has something worth saying, but that surely applies to us all? You have a view with which I disagree, others will read the posts and make their own minds up. I was not suggesting that you should not have posted about this.

When I saw what I took to be unqualified praise for interlinears I thought a contrary view ought to be expressed lest anyone reading this thread might think that everyone agrees with you. Over the years there have been many posters on this forum who, having very little or no knowledge of a classical language, try to ask questions, the answers to which they are ill equipped to understand. They are usually advised by several people here to start to learn the language and then ask the questions.

7

It turns out that among professional linguists, there is a pretty widely recognized set of guidelines called the Leipzig Glossing Rules: https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php

8

I guarantee that any published interlinear to date involving the Bible or even classical texts never employed these rules.

Furthermore, no, interlinears do not allow people who have no knowledge of the language to interact with the language. They can create a sort of illusion (delusion) that they are doing so, but actually they are just interacting with another translation and translator choices.

There are no shortcuts. The best and only way to interact with a language is to know that language.

9

When they learned Latin and Greek two thousand years ago, they also used interlinear translations :wink:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0909NqMwxXI

10

What a wonderful lecture! I’m a third of the way through now and listening raptly. Thank you so much for pointing me to this.

Dickey’s self-deprecating humor is charming. It seems universally true that those who are least pompous are those who know the most.

There is some especially relevant material at 25:45. At 37:30, we have a text in which the vertical columns have been rotated around to make horizontal interlinear text, in two colors.

11

When they learned Latin and Greek two thousand years ago, they also used interlinear translations > :wink: >

I know you are being light hearted and possibly mischievous but this is not how I understand the lecture, to which I have previously posted a link.

To me an English interlinear is where English words are written under the classical language without any regard to idiom (it is not therefore any kind of Translation) in an attempt to match the word order of the original. It completely fails to recognise that say a Greek thought might have have to be expressed in English in a rather different way and a literal gloss is unhelpful.

What we have in the texts that Dickey is talking about are bilingual texts which include translations.

Dickey says she would not dream of teaching Greek by providing her students with a translation (around 26.). She points out that the dialogues were learned by heart and deployed when required when ancient students were confronted with a suitable opportunity. This, as she says, works perfectly as long as your interlocutor sticks to the text. I think from what I have read of her work on this subject her interest in these texts is in the store of cultural information which they contain rather than as models for contemporary teaching practice.

I have not seen any evidence that interlinears were used in the ancient world, but even if they were it does not make it a good thing. In the ancient world teachers regularly beat their pupils if they did not learn their lessons. Although some of us on this board might regret that this option is not available to deal with the ruder and more obdurate members, on balance it is an advance that in the UK at least corporal punishment is no longer permitted. :smiley:

12

The best (most useful and comprehensive) interlinear text I’ve ever seen is Winthrop Sargeant’s rendition of the Bhagavad Gita. Although not a “classical” text, I would love to see this done with Greek and Latin works. I can’t seem to figure out how to attach an image but here is link to the Google Books preview.

https://books.google.com/books?id=KHTmRSnoGp4C&lpg=PP1&pg=PA102#v=onepage&q&f=false

The structure he uses is:

Original line
Transliteration of that line
Rough (literal) translation of that line

Full translation of entire verse

Right column: definitions including parts of speech. (and this is the best feature, in my opinion)

13

Thanks for this! I really appreciate it.

I’m going to immediately procure a copy of this book.

14

Thanks for posting. That sounds interesting. Unfortunately the Google Books link doesn’t work for me.

To post an image, upload it to a site like this one https://imgbb.com/upload and then use the image tool in the toolbar (the icon with the mountain and sun).

15

Let’s see if this works.

16

Here is another way you can have a look through it too:
https://idoc.pub/documents/bhagavad-gt-translated-by-winthrop-sargeant-779ppdf-d47e5zyrejn2

17

You’ve likely seen it already by now bcrowell, but Reddit user tomispev is trying an approach which has some similarities to the one you’re taking at present.