This is a question for the more advanced in latin:
how do you think of thelatinlibrary.com and Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum, specially on what concerns the Classics?
Are they reliable as copies or have you found many errors in their texts?
I’d like to know about any complains you have about those sources, as I want to compile a latin wordlist containing all the Classical words, and this needs to be as accurate and correct as possible, since it will serve as a base for further uses, thus the texts to be scanned need to be as exact as possible.
I gather that, while copying, copists “fixed” the archaisms contained in the texts. This in fact is a loss to me, but there’s nothing I can do about it other than ask this improbable question: does anyone have high-fidelity copies of the Classics (maybe something you typed yourself, or saved from somewhere you trust)? Also, how else do they modify the texts?
Also, if some of you already have all the Classics downloaded to your PC, I’d appreciate a .zip containing all of them sent to my private e-mail. That’s no laziness of mine, I just think that if any of you have read a lot of texts and still have them on your PC, there’s a high chance you’ve spotted and fixed eventual mistakes on the original copy.
As I’m only interested in Classical Latin and maybe Early Latin, I’d like to ask for verification on the following for completeness.
Early Latin Authors (239 BCE ? - 149 BCE ?): ennius(Quintus Ennius) plautus(Titus Maccius Plautus) terence(Publius Terentius Afer) cato the elder(Marcus Porcius Cato)
Golden Age Latin Authors (75 BCE - 14 CE): catullus(Gaius Valerius Catullus) horace(Quintus Horatius Flaccus) lucretius(Titus Lucretius Carus) ovid(Publius Ouidius Naso) propertius(Sextus Aurelius Propertius) tibullus(Albius Tibullus) virgil(Publius Vergilius Maro) cicero(Marcus Tullius Cicero) julius caesar(Gaius Julius Caesar) livy(Titus Liuius) sallust(Gaius Sallustius Crispus)
Wow, great tip. This Phi-5.3 sure has a lot (click) of latin texts. It contains all the authors on which I’m interested (listed on my previous post) and at least all their works that thelatinlibrary.com also has. I wonder if there are Classical texts missing from PHI-5.3.
Thanks so much for the tip, Deses. I’ll go for that.
Thesaurus linguae Latinae has nothing to do with PHI, to my knowledge. It is not a Latin counterpart of Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (but I would sure love to have TLL). I got PHI 5.3 last year. It was indeed 50 dollars. For some reason they don’t advertise much and their website is not very useful. I had to send an email and they send an order form back. The address is listed here:
Not only is it free and entirely transparent, since it falls under the GNU public license, but it also contains a much more intelligent an d powerful search engine than Musaios. Lastly, since it runs as a perl script it is user-extensible and nearly platform independent. Nevertheless, much work remains to be done on these programs by people interested in applying the techniques of corpus-linguistics to classical philology.
Also, I’d add that working with texts of Latin authors , especially pre-classical authors, without a critical apparatus is going to be dangerous, if not positively self-defeating. It depends on the kind of information that you’re interested in extracting, of course. If you’re just interested in Latin in terms of literature and its literary afterlife in modern European languages, then you’ll find that online classical texts are “good enough to live with.”
On the other hand, if you’re interested in getting linguistic information from early Latin texts, the digital resources so far available are woefully inadequate. Without an apparatus to guide you, many grammatical and orthographic matters will silently reflect the theoretical opinions of the editor, without giving you any idea of the real divergence and indecision in the MS tradition. Suppose, for instance, you were interested in researching the tolerance of hiatus (allowing a word that ends in a vowel to be followed by a word that begins a vowel) in Attic oratory. If you were using Blass’ text, you’d be happy to find that most orators studiously avoided hiatus – except that without an apparatus, or better yet (since many of the changes he silently adopted) without knowledge of the editorial tradition, you wouldn’t know that this was Blass’ systematic imposition on the text and that other conclusions are perfectly sustainable. In Latin there are bound to be many vital choices regarding, e.g. the subjunctive and future tense, which will be decided on theory rather than any certain fact, which you cannot know about using just the resources available online. Many of your conclusions will exhibit an unconscious circularity even with the best texts.
Can I ask what purpose your Latin wordlist? There are many resources which already approximate this, like the OLD, which is emphatically worth its price tag. If you’re interested in “Classical” vocabulary, why include pre-classical material, which is where the most uncertainty lies? How do you plan to deal with orthography, which varied significantly across time? Will you include epigraphic evidence?
It’s hard to explain my purpose - it’s still a little fuzzy in my head.
But I know I want catulli ad cornelium to start with “quoi”. Does PHI-5.3’s start like that?
I’ve just read their license, it’s a little exaggerated, but I have no choice. I think I’m buying it.