Homer Specific Cheat Sheet?

Greek Homeric Greek and Early Greek Poetry
1

First, I made a new avatar. Pretty cool, huh? That’s a crested lark, what the Romans called “Alauda.” In old Greek, the word’s “κο?υδόσ,” but I found out, when I was looking for good images to work from, in Modern Greek, it’s called “κατσιλιε?ησ τησ δεκασ.”

I’m studying Modern Greek at the same time I’m studying ancient which is not as difficult as it may sound. There is harmony. The various forms make… “linguistic chords” is the phrase that comes to mind, but all the above is off topic to what I’m really posting about.

I’m having a hard time reading certain specific pages in Pharr’s book, mainly the ones dealing with declensions and such. Also, switching back and forth from one page to another in pdf documents is a pain, and I was wondering, does anyone know of a good cheat sheet for that sort of thing? I’m looking for a Homer specific set. Nouns, Verbs, Pronouns, you know, all the kinds of things that students use cheat sheets for. In my searching, I haven’t found quite what I’m looking for. It seems the emphasis is on later forms. I’d prefer text or HTML as I can then reformat it and use computerized search tools.

Thanks in advance,

Rex

2

Hi Alauda,

First off, nice new avatar! I don’t remember what your other one was, but I remember thinking it was a little scary…

I’ve also been having a similar problem with the Pharr stuff…some things are hard to read and it gets annoying “flipping” through the pages on my computer. Most frustrating moment: I spent about ten minutes one time trying to figure out why some word had a strange diacritical mark on it, only to realize that it must have been a piece of dust or something on the photocopy machine.

Anyway, I don’t think what you’re looking for exists on the web in .doc or html form (that I could find–maybe someone else will chime in here and let us both know). So what I’ve been doing is making cheat sheets as I go, either in excel or in word. Writing them yourself is a great way to help learn them, too. If you don’t want to, though, let me know exactly what you’re looking for, and if I have it, I can send you a copy.

Also, for some reason, what’s worked really well for me is having two copies of Pfarr on my computer while I work: one open to the lesson I’m working on, the other for flipping around to find vocab, look up explanations, etc.

So good luck!

3

Last year I have been busy typing the grammar part of Pharr in betacode (which I could convert to unicode). I stopped at paragraph 922, also left out numerals and the declination of participles.

But I do have the nouns, adjectives, pronouns and thematic verbs.

4

Reaaaallly. With some tweakage that could be turned into nice web pages, or a nicer PDF.

5

Hey Perispomen, thanks for the offer of your work on that, but, I’m thinking now, that what I need to do is as Brendan suggests: type it out myself.

It would be a good way to learn, and I would get the formatting the way I like it – which is in a form I could revise endlessly and change my mind about constantly :slight_smile:

And that first avatar? That was my shadow on a bush near Mt. Shasta. It was trippy looking, I know, but I like to draw weird stuff. Right now I’m doing gargoyles as seen on old buildings. Those things are alive they watch you. I’m fascinated by them.

Cheers,

Rex

6

I would have to complete it then :slight_smile: It already turned out a very fine Palm format ebook.

7

Not if we could convince a few other people to type up particular sections.

8

An earlier attempt to do that died down before.

Perhaps it is better for me to just type ahead, as I did last year during my holidays (one is coming up within a week).

9

annis wrote

Not if we could convince a few other people to type up particular sections.

Well, I’m working right now on the Section 626 I think it is? Noun Declensions. I’m having a hard time with Polytonic fonts though. Modern greek is no problem, but that would not serve the intersts of everyone. It seems there is a bug in my configuration file with regard to the polytonic dead keys. (I use Linux exclusively, and the version of X Window I installed has a certain issue there.) But I should have that sorted out by the end of the day. Certainly it would be nice to help other people SOME way since I can’t offer much in the way of linguistic expertise.

However, if someone else works on that section, that’d be fine. I could benefit from that work and work elsewhere. I am amenable. I don’t mind typing at all.

Rex

10

I have the paradigms from Pharr 659 to 733, 760 to 778, 904 to 921.

If we would also like to have the non-paradigm paragraphs (the English text), then I would suggest OCR instead of typing. I could scan the pages (I have Finereader, very good software to OCR text), then the result from that would only have to be proofread (oh and the examples in Greek would have to be typed, that’s true).

I would focus on the paradigms though.

11

Well, I mis-remembered what section the paradigms were in. You’ve actually done the part I was working on! Given the difficulties I’m still having with polytonic typing, I see that I really could use those files.

So well done. Would you like to send them to me?

Hmm… now I’m wondering, where can I find a unix betacode to unicode converter… Time for some googling.

Rex

12

I can convert it for you, no problem. What address can I use? You can send me a personal message (PM) if you do not want to expose your email here.

13

How do you feel about Emacs? A reasonably modern install will let you enter polytonic Greek, with layouts based on either Ibycus4 or Babyl.

But you’re a vi-user, there’s a quick-n-dirty java program, Transcoder (see near the bottom; not the same transcoder as the javascript one) that I run locally for massive conversions.

14

I would be delighted to host a Unicodified version of Pharr’s grammar on Aoidoi, if you have nowhere else to keep it. I could do random bits of data entry from time to time, too.

15

Regrettably, I have too much on my plate to seriously entertain the notion of offering much aid, but I think it would be good to get such cheat sheets availible for Homeric Greek. There’s some Old English website which has a neat looking “Magic Sheet” which succintly (and colorfully) shows all of OE’s paradigms on one page … of course, I doubt all of Greek’s far more extensive morphology could fit on one page, but I think a low page count should be a goal.

16

I will apply myself and finish the remaining paradigms next week. We can then see about the rest.

17

First, Perispomenon sent me an rtf file in both betacode and unicode, and I must say, I’m delighted. It is obviously the result of some dedicated work, and it was very kind to make it available. Thank you!

Second, to Annis, yes, I’m a total Emacs geek. I keep my hand in on vi and find it very useful, but for lots of typing, Emacs is the way to go for me.

Unfortunately, I’ve NEVER gotten Emacs to display polytonic fonts. Annoying, because almost all my other programs have no problem. Emacs font configuration has always been alien to me. Clearly, I need to study this more; additionally, it seems on my system, the font configuration files DO have to be modified to allow the polytonic deadkeys to work at all. Nevertheless, I’ve noted down the references you said, babel and Ibycus4, and as soon as I write this, I’m looking into those.

Third, I found several converters, and I’m checking out that vi one too, but just as a fun project, I decided to write my own using Perl and a custom xml notation. I want to be able to type like this: mh=nin a)/eide qea\ phlhi+a/dew )axilh=os

And have this come out inline with English text: μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος with the tags stripped out.

Note that I use for , but that’s arbtrary on my part. It would be easy enough to use any other tag at all. (That’s the beauty of xml.) The idea of using the tags makes the program super efficient in that it will not try to analyze every character, only the ones within the tags. Second, by placing the more common letters and letter forms first in the search order, I get an exponential performance boost. Probably that vi converter, if it’s powerful for large files uses a similar algorithm (design logic), but the converters I found, did not; thus are really suited for small files on a personal computer rather than large files on a network.

I’m about halfway done with the converter, a Perl program. I’ve found that typing in beta code is actually really efficient, maybe even easier than a polytonic keyboard layout, so even when I get the text entry bug sorted, I may still use beta code out for the speed of use!

Fourth, I agree with GGG (You don’t mind if I use the abreviation, do you?) That a cheat sheet should be compact. Then it’s really useful. At some point (soon), I’ll put up my versions for critique/review/correction/suggestion.

Cheers,

Rex

18

Ahh. My kind of Unix geek!

Unfortunately, I’ve NEVER gotten Emacs to display polytonic fonts. Annoying, because almost all my other programs have no problem. Emacs font configuration has always been alien to me.

Hmm. I never had to do any font twiddling for this, except of course for adding a Unicode font to my X fontpath (I use the Caslon set). Any file I edit with Emacs that’ll have Greek is tagged:

-*- coding: utf-8 -*-

Except of course html files, which I have covered with this tweak in my .emacs:

(modify-coding-system-alist 'file "\\.html\\'" 'utf-8)

Then use C-u C-\ to toggle entry method; the C-u will ask you to pick a method, and I usually use greek-ibycus4, which is a lot like betacode, except use ’ and ` instead of / and \ for the accents. Then you can bounce on C-\ to toggle back and forth.

Third, I found several converters, and I’m checking out that vi one too, but just as a fun project, I decided to write my own using Perl and a custom xml notation.

What are you using for the actual conversion? You might want to check out Diogenes. It’s an interface to the TLG, but it has extensive perl libraries for Greek font tweakage.

19

Gee, I’ve been posting a lot!

But, well, this thread has resolved a lot of things. This last is
to thank Annis for his suggestions re setting up Emacs for
polytonic. Googling “ibycus-4” led me right to

http://www.m17n.org/cgreek/

And that led to

http://www.m17n.org/cgreek/manual21.en.html

At which time I downloaded and installed their Emacs 21
package. And now I have polytonic fonts in Emacs. It was so easy,
you could have knocked me over with a feather!

Wahoo! Thanks!

I was actually copying and pasting little empty squares into the
converter program I was working on before this, but now,
everything is spiffy. The font that comes with the cgreek package
is very nice, crisp and readable. Typing polytonics is a
snap. This is just too cool.

Rex

20

And here’s yet another post. I did not see that Annis had
another when I posted the last.

Thanks for the additional Emacs tips. I see what I was doing
wrong. I thought I had Emacs set up to treat everything as UTF8
unless I specified otherwise, but that’s not how it works,
evidently.

For the actual conversion of betacode to unicode, I’m using
straight perl. (I’ll spare everyone an explanation of how the code
works.):slight_smile: It’s all pretty brittle right now anyway, but I have a design
that’s moving forward.

The key is estimating the like occurances of characters and handling
them in order, so the number of program loops is the least it can be.

Right now, I’m experimenting with character counting on files
from Perseus to see which characters are the most frequently
used. None of source code I’ve seen does that. From my tests,
on the first bit of the Iliad, it looks like α, ι, ε, ο, σ, ν, τ, η, λ,
?, θ, δ, μ, κ, ω, θ, ξ, γ, φ, β, ψ, but I know that is likely a
skewed survey by virtue of a limited sample; still, a trend can
be seen.

And that was probably TMI

Best,

Rex