Recently I was reading through Rouse’s ‘Greek Boy At Home’ in the pdf available on archive.org, and I started wondering how hard it would be to digitize old texts like this into modern formats to make them easier to read (and distribute) to a modern audience…so I thought I would give it a try. I OCR’d the scanned text, proof-read and double-checked the accuracy against the original, and tried to format it a bit so that it looked nice and presentable. and here is the resulting PDF. It’s much easier to read and use than the original scan, and only 700kb. Please download and share it far and wide if you find it useful. You can also get the docx here (if you want to play around with the text, or fix any typos that I missed), and while I was at it I also digitised his mono-lingual Greek dictionary as an excel spreadsheet here.
So, hopefully this is something that people will find useful. It was a bit time-consuming so I don’t know how feasible it is to do this en masse for every Greek reader on archive.org, but it was a kinda fun project and hopefully one that someone other than me will get some use out of!
Hey that’s really interesting…do you know if they have completed and published any texts? It looks like they are focusing on digitising actual written works though, not learner texts. But still very very cool.
I have now looked at the text and found that there are hundreds of mistakes - mainly accents and stresses, but sometimes a wrong or missing letter. I have my own special program for correcting texts. If you want to correct texts, I would recommend at least Ancient Greek Spellchecker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E01PtlyKhnM
Many Greek readers are already compiled into electronic form. I have printed quite a few of them in Lulu. I used to proofread them myself like you, but nowadays you don’t have to do that anymore, because there are quite a few available ready-made. For example:
The hundreds of mistakes things is concerning - I will need to look into that! I’m not sure how it could be that many as I did read through the whole thing twice, some sections more than that…but thank you, I will watch that video! A spell-checker guiding my efforts will help immensely.
…and for what it’s worth, that version on amindforlanguage.com is based on my text (I originally digitised it for greek-learner-texts.org, which was overseeing that project), the cloviscorp one is incomplete, though I did use their text for the sections when it was available (though it had some mistakes in it that I fixed, and the ε/α/ο- verbs were uncontracted for some reason) and the other is a printed edition that doesn’t count…I was hoping for something that can easily be shared and used online which is how most people do their language learning these days.
EDIT: Quick update, I have downloaded that spell-checker and am working through the text now. It’s an extremely helpful tool that I will get a lot of use out of - thanks very much for the suggestion! But it’s interesting though that ~90% of the errors it detects are actually not errors…although I have found one example so far where the error was actually in Rouse and not in me!
I thought it was yours, the amindforlanguage.com, because it has exactly the same errors as yours. For example:
Θράσυλλου
τὴς
Θρασύτομος
Ἱταλίᾳ
ἀλλα
µέσφ
ἡμων
τραπέξης
ἀνευ
ἑπτα
ἐνδεκάκις, ἐνδεκάκις, ἐνδεκάκις
ἔνδεκα, ἔνδεκα, ἔνδεκα
ἐνδεκάτη
εστὸν
γαρ, γαρ
μεν, μεν
ἔρυθριῶμεν
ἔστὶν ἡ κέφαλή
ᾡδάς
και, και
ἐνικησαμεν
ᾂδειν
γἀρ
τὀ
πατηρ
επὶ
This spell checker is going to add years to my life - thank you! I have fixed every error that you mentioned above…and now I get to do the same thing to the other texts I’m currently doing for Greek Learner Texts. The spell checker is going to make this 100x easier!
I’ve been looking at your OCR texts of Rouse. You mention incorporating errors highlighted in this thread (or based on the spell-checker). Did you incorporate these into the documents on Dropbox? I noticed, for example, that ΔΙΑΛΟΓΟΣ IVβ still reads τραπέξης when it should read τραπέζης. Curious if you have a superior, updated form of the text somewhere.
