Comments on mockup of "ransom note" format

Greek Learning Greek
1

I wonder if folks here would be willing to give comments on the following description and sample of a method of presenting a foreign-language text. There is an explanation and a diagram, and also a link to a pdf file in which I’ve done the method for the beginning of the Iliad.

This method is meant for people at an intermediate level of proficiency, and my initial use case is the Iliad. We’ve had some discussion of this sort of thing recently, and Joel brought to my attention a cool method used by Ilya Frank - http://english.franklang.ru/index.php . I’ve been doing a bunch of software work to try to make this proposal doable for me as a hobby project in a reasonable amount of time, and with my limited language skills.

This is a photo mockup (using a randomly chosen book as a prop) of the idea. We have about 15 lines of Homer, in a large font, on a left-hand page. There are aids surrounding this page: one page preceding it and two pages following.

In this four-page sequence, the first page is a vocabulary list. It contains every dictionary form (lemma) corresponding to the inflected forms in the Greek text, except for the ~100 most common lemmas in Homeric Greek. The idea is that you may want to scan the vocabulary list before you try to read the actual text, locking some of the less common words into your short-term memory and priming your brain to recognize inflected forms.

Next you turn the page and you have a two-page spread, in which the left-hand page is Homer, and the right-hand page is the “ransom note.” The idea of the ransom note is that for the 10 or 12 least common words in the text, a translation is provided at a location that is at the same geometrical position as the corresponding Greek word in the actual text. These glosses are superimposed on top of a very light gray copy of the actual text, to make it easier to see where the lines lie and where the translation sits on its line. These words have also already been listed on the vocab page. A reader who is highly proficient and doesn’t need much help may find that these words are all they need, and they never need to look at the vocab page.

Finally, the fourth page is an English translation, which you can flip to for help.

The link below is a pdf file with my rendering of the first 15 lines of the Iliad in this format.

http://lightandmatter.com/temp_mockup.pdf

The translation is the one by Buckley.

Any comments or suggestions would be much appreciated. This morning at the breakfast table, I ambushed my wife, who is a language teacher, and asked for her comments. One thing we spent some time discussing was whether it’s a good idea to split the vocabulary list in half, as in this sample, separating the less common words from the more common ones. (The more common ones here are roughly the ones that rank between 100 and 700 in a frequency count from Homer.) The advantage of separating them, as I see it, is that for a reader at a fairly advanced level, it may still be helpful to review the vocabulary before reading the page, but they don’t need to be reminded of easy words like θεά. Such a user can just roll their eyeballs over the less common words. It is true, however, that this may be less optimal for people whose reading level is somewhat lower. When those folks hit a word like θεά and don’t know what it is, they have to flip back to the vocab page and scan through two alphabetical lists rather than one. However, this should still be a lot faster than pulling out a dictionary.

The entire concept is optimized for reading a paper book. I’ve seen some other methods of presentation that are electronic, and I think those designs naturally come out very different. E.g., you can mouse over a word and have its translation pop up. I just find that reading a book from a screen is not enjoyable. I want to sit on the couch with my terrier and hold a paper book in my hands.

If you do decide you like the ransom-note format, and I end up supplying you with endless shining ransoms, then please make sure to reciprocate by releasing any of my beloved daughters whom you may be holding hostage. Otherwise I can’t vouch for the consequences.

2

Hi Ben, my first thought is whether you could put the ‘ransom note’ gloss above / below the word, rather than superimposed? Then it could become something like https://nodictionaries.com/, but for Greek.

Cheers, Chad

3

The thing that strikes me is that it’s vocab heavy and syntax light. The only guide to how the individual words fit together, other than case endings and verb forms, is the English translation. I’m not sure that is the best way to get people reading Greek (let alone Homer). That’s my main reservation. I also wonder how many beginners will be willing to sit on the couch holding a paper book in their hands, with or without a terrier at their feet. You and I are not Gen Z, let alone Gen Alpha.

4

Thanks, Chad and mwh, for the comments. My motivation for the idea was basically that I wanted to be able to just read the text as much as possible, and not be mentally switching back and forth between Greek and English all the time. This was the reason for keeping the Greek page super clean.

Interesting point. Of course, I’m not expecting that someone who didn’t know Greek would just pick this up and start reading. It’s meant for people who are already reading ancient Greek at some sort of intermediate level.

Yeah, that’s certainly a possible generational divide. I did at least raise my kids to appreciate terriers.

One thing to say about this is that I intend to structure this in a very flexible way, so that the actual book is output by an open-source computer program. It’s not just going to be some word processor file that I hand edit. So for example if someone else wanted it in a more compact format, with two-page layouts rather than four-page layouts, that should be straightforward to accomplish. Or it could generate html and javascript, or an ebook format, or generate a pdf file in interlinear format. The big labor-intensive task is to write up glossary definitions, and glosses that fit the context.

5

I would be concerned that without dictionary work and a commentary, a beginning reader would lose much of the richness of the text, which is after all the reason for learning to read it in the original. Reading the entire Iliad with this aid wouldn’t be too much different from reading it in translation. But this might be a good way to start, maybe for just the first book and maybe Book 2 up to the catalogue (which doesn’t require much linguistic help, anyway).

But even a beginner tackling the first book needs a good commentary, which will help them proceed to reading without training wheels. Some understanding of the formulaic nature of the epic language and verse and the “realia”, the morphological luxuriance, as well as a deeper understanding of the vocabulary than a one or two word English equivalent can provide, are some of the information a commentary can offer, and the beginner can build on this information as s/he progresses, to attain the ability to read fluently and continuously with more understanding and with less recourse to the dictionary.

Also, it’s very important to read metrically, either aloud or silently, not just to experience the poetry but also to acquire fluency, because the epic language is inextricably bound up with the meter. Pharr doesn’t seem to give a good sense of how important this is.

Some of the words listed in the uncommon column, regardless of frequency, belong in the common column on account of their importance, e.g. βασιλευς, θοος, and vice versa.

6

Hi, just to add, it may be worth checking out books that have a similar aim, and seeing what you like and what you’d improve. Examples that come to mind are Geoffrey Steadman:

https://geoffreysteadman.com/iliad-6-22/

and Pulleyn:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/homer-iliad-i-9780198721864?cc=au&lang=en&#

The key bit I noticed in your last post is where you said the ‘big labor-intensive task is to write up glossary definitions, and glosses that fit the context’. (I thought you were looking to automatically pull glosses from Perseus or something like that). If you’re going to look up the glosses (as we would all agree you should!)—use Cunliffe—then I’d say go for it. It doesn’t matter what product (if any) comes out of the exercise; if it gets you flicking through Cunliffe, it’s a success.

For what it’s worth (answer: little or nothing), I’ve been experimenting with a new format: video commentaries, using:

  • public domain audio in Latin or Greek of e.g. Homer, Vergil etc. (there are some good versions out there),


  • the subtitles function to present the text, glosses of less common words (Cunliffe for Homer of course), scholarly commentary for reference, and


  • public domain videos, images and maps for visual context.

After decades of producing old school commentary for personal consumption, I think I may actually prefer this new format (there’s something about bringing together text, commentary, reconstructed pronunciation, images and maps in the same place), but we’ll see, it’s still an early experiment.

Cheers, Chad

7

I like Chad think you would find it useful to explore Steadman’s model. He in fact has used a model pioneered by Pharr in his edition of the Aeneid, books 1-6.

Although you could use a dictionary to compile your vocabulary lists this site https://bridge.haverford.edu enables you to compile vocabularies for eg Iliad book 1 lines 1-30. These lists are customisable so you can specify words you want to omit. You can also order them as they appear in the text or alphabetically.

I dont think the English translation is helpful, especially to people who are in the early stages of learning Greek, you might as well read the Loeb. At an intermediate level the translation would be a hinderance. We ought to be encouraging students to read Greek as Greek. I have been reading my way through the Lingua Latina per se illustrata materials and I am very impressed with this approach. It really does encourage students to read Latin as Latin without any translating. Its a pity that there is nothing similar in Ancient Greek although people are intermittently working on it I think, (Athenaze, as good as it is, still retains translation from Greek to English) lack of money I guess impedes progress. On reading you might be interested in this from Professor William Harris “THE SIN OF TRANSVERBALIZING… or Translating as you Read !” http://wayback.archive-it.org/6670/20161201175537/http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/LatinBackground/transverbalizing.html

I dont agree with everything Harris says and I think that grammatical explanations are necessary, as MWH says. It would be a tall order for you to write them at this stage.

Video commentaries seem like an excellent thing to explore. The multi media books that one can download for free here http://www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk/ebooks give some idea of how one could design a book which included some of the things Chad talks about. The books are about performance history of Greek tragedy but I see no reason why this format could not be adapted. (with a lot of work I guess!).

Despite your fondness for a physical book electronic reading offers so many more possibilities like proper search function etc. I read on my iPad sitting on the sofa. When I play I also use the iPad on a music stand with a foot pedal to turn pages - it beats fumbling with a page and missing an entry. :smiley:

8

Still battling with this. I found it easier while studying in a class where we were speaking Koine. Alas, however, not much time for that. And simpler material is easier to do this with, but reading things without translations and staying away from the translations as much as one can until one has made a complete hash of it on your own helps. :slight_smile: There are some readers out there which do vocab helps in Greek which I think is great. I like the JACT Greek resources where they give you a precis and they give vocab helps - most importantly including idioms and expressions - but don’t actually provide a full translation.

But any tips in that direction would be interesting to me

Thx
D

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Hi Seneca, that multimedia book approach sounds fantastic, and far too hardcore for my word-processor-and-internet-browser capability. I would love it if someone did that for a classics text!

In the meantime here one of my far less ambitious experiments with a video commentary. I’ve done more than this (Vergil, Odyssey etc.), it’s just the first one I did. It comes out of about 15 minutes of working out how to use a pre-loaded app on my laptop (iMovie).

http://discourse.textkit.com/t/video-commentaries-vergil-experiment/18529/1

If others on this forum know how to make proper videos and wanted to give it a go, I’d really appreciate it and I’m sure others would too!

Cheers, Chad

10

Allen Rogers Benner published Selections From Homer’s Iliad in 1931 (originally in 1903). I have a used hard copy of it. The book includes selected texts, Notes, a short Homeric Grammar and a Vocabulary. So the book provides what you and your dog are looking for, something to hold in your lap while sitting in an easy chair. The one drawback, of course, is that there are only selections from Book I and the other books.
Amazon doesn’t show a copy of the book I have, so I can’t demonstrate it.

11

Thanks, all, for your comments and suggestions. The thing that I’m constructing is not proposed as a stand-alone way for people to start with Homer. The assumption is that the reader is already at an intermediate level, so I don’t propose to write an introductory grammar, which I wouldn’t be competent to do. The reader needs to find that elsewhere and learn it first. I agree with the comments that a commentary would also be helpful, but again, this is outside the scope of what I can do with my time and expertise, so the reader would have to look elsewhere for it. I don’t know how other people approach this sort of thing, but, e.g., if I’m reading something like the gospels and aiming for a deep level of understanding, I don’t really expect that I’m going to own one copy of it that will be one-stop shopping. I’m going to have my copy of the Revised English Bible on hand, the Greek text with notes, online access to an interlinear text, and so on. It’s true that page 4 of my ransom-note layout, with the English text, will probably have a lot of space left at the bottom that could be used for commentary. But even if, for example, I could find a commentary that was old enough to be public domain, adapting it for inclusion in my ransom-note presentation would be a big project involving a massive amount of hand editing.

I share Seneca’s goal of reading the text without mentally translating. That’s why I designed the layout so that when you hold it in front of you, you’re basically seeing a very plain-looking page of unadorned Greek, with only a few glosses of the most uncommon words on the right-hand page. The English translation is there if you want to peek at it, but only if you flip to page 4 of the four-page layout.

I agree with others who have posted that it is necessary to get one’s hands dirty with a dictionary. The brief glosses I’m writing are not meant to be a substitute for that. I’m sure different people have different ways of working, but personally I have a big stack of flashcards, and each time I write a flashcard, I carefully study dictionary entries, see if there’s an interesting etymology, and so on. But I can’t enjoy the actual reading of a text if I’m constantly resorting to a dictionary. The ransom-note format is designed to allow me to get my vocabulary ducks in a row before I start a page of text, and then be reminded of the more obscure words, if necessary, with just a quick glance to the right.

Thanks, Seneca, for the pointer to the Haverford vocab lists. The page didn’t work in my browser, possibly because I have it locked down pretty tight for security. I’m trying to make the whole thing as automated as possible, so I don’t want to have to go to someone else’s web site in order to generate a vocabulary list for each page. The automation will make it possible to play with the format and easily generate the output in different ways, which I can’t do if I’m writing up vocabulary lists myself for each page or cutting and pasting them from some other source. Generating the lists is not super hard to do. So for example, if a word like βασιλεύς occurs dozens of times, but in various inflections such as βασιλῆϊ and so on, my code will be able to recognize βασιλῆϊ as a form of βασιλεύς, will know the frequency of the word in general, and will automatically generate the glossary entry on page 2 of the layout, looking up the brief gloss that I’ve written, such as “chief, king.” I just have to write the gloss once, and then the rest is automatic. I was originally going to use CLTK’s lemmatizer for this purpose, but it turned out not to have high enough accuracy, so I’m resorting to a lookup table based on the Project Perseus treebank data.

Chad, your video work sounds interesting. Is there a sample we could look at?

Thanks for the pointer to Steadman. Personally, this format makes me feel claustrophobic, like I’m peeking through a keyhole at a short snippet of the text, and it seems very distracting to be constantly moving my eyes from the text down to the aids and then back up. The numbered notes do seem like they’d sometimes be helpful, although providing a note for a word like τὸν seems like overkill.

Yeah, I noticed that as well – the frequency of many words in Homer seems counterintuitive. Words that I think of as obscure are actually very common, and vice versa. But I don’t want to type up each page’s vocabulary list by hand, I want that to be automated, so I’ll probably just go with the results of the frequency counts. Sorting the words into the two columns is just a heuristic or a time-saving device to allow more advanced readers to focus on prepping a shorter list of words in their short-term memory, without being distracted by a lot of words that are already in their long-term memory.

I’m currently at a stage of work where I’m getting close to automatically generating pages, as opposed to the hand-built mockup that I posted when I started this thread. I would like to generate pages for something like the first 100 lines of the Iliad and then test-drive the method myself and see how it feels in practice and whether I want to modify it. I’m hoping to have something worth sharing within a few days, although things always take longer than I optimistically expect.

12

I’ve done some more software work on this and have used it to produce ransom notes for some initial pages of the Iliad.

software and readme file: https://github.com/bcrowell/ransom

initial pages of the Iliad:

…for viewing on a screen: https://lightandmatter.com/temp_iliad_screen.pdf

…for printing as a booklet: https://lightandmatter.com/temp_iliad_booklet.pdf

The first couple of pages of the pdf give an explanation of what it is and how to use it, basically condensing material from earlier in this thread and reiterating the limited scope of the project. (It’s not an introductory grammar text, not meant to stand alone or replace a dictionary, and so on.) There are instructions in the readme for how to print the document in booklet format, which is how it’s actually designed to be used (not on a screen).

As discussed previously, the aids are mostly vocab, not grammar or notes. However, the software knows a 3rd-declension noun when it sees it, and automatically gives a little further explanation in the vocab list in those cases. I might also do something similar for some of the verb forms that might be hard to recognize.

There are some minor software improvements I’d like to make, such as adding line numbers and whiting out a word in the gray Greek text when it’s overlaid with a black English gloss. However, my main goal for the near future is to develop a more efficient workflow for producing additional pages. Everything is machine-generated, except that I write up the mini-glosses by referring to wiktionary or Cunliffe. I don’t edit the text on the page or make manual decisions about what words to include or exclude in the vocabularies. With an efficient workflow, I think I can probably crank out a new page in half an hour or so, which would be fairly small compared to how much time I need to actually read and understand that page myself.

Further comments or suggestions would be welcome.