Salvete!
Lately I have been tinkering with word study as part of my ongoing quest for Latin phrases not covered in sufficient detail by the usual books. I do so using “regular expressions”, search patterns standing in for a variety of words (especially important in an inflected language like Latin). I am using command line tools and a script when using Linux, but I also discovered a Windows solution: Notepad++, a free text editor (“free” as in free beer and free speech). I wrote a tutorial to show how you can use Notepad++ to search external text files for words. It is not a tutorial for regular expressions, but a showcase for why regular expressions might be useful to you. It can be downloaded from my web-site:
What can regular expressions do for you? A few examples:
- Finding instances of “applicare” (in all its inflections and including the “adplicare”-spelling).
- Finding instances of “vires” (as “vires”, “viresque”, “uires”, “uiresque”).
- Finding out about doors (“ostium”, “ianua”, “fores”, but also “porta”, again in all inflections).
Valete,
Carolus Raeticus