let x = x

Andrew Gelman drew my attention to his latest post on different kinds of suspense. Wrote a looooooooong comment which turned out to have missed much that was key. Meanwhile things have gone horribly wrong between the editor formerly known as Mr Whitelist (Ed Park) and me. 2C2E.

Moving right along.

A friend who is a professional classicist tells me by e-mail that he was sent a promotional flyer about Lectrix a while back.

Anyway, it went ahead, and a couple of years ago I received an advance flyer about it, which gave a sample line with examples of their discussion and commentary - the sample line being Aeneid 9.9.  In order to demonstrate the value of their "dictionary/parser", they highlighted the word "sedemque" - and informed us that this came from "sedo, sedare, sedaui, sedatum: settle, allay; restrain; calm down", and the "parser" box accordingly parsed it as "sedemque: verb subjunctive present active 1st sing."

Now, anyone with a minimal knowledge of Latin can see that the word is not a verb, but a noun - from sedes, of course.  But whoever had done the dictionary/parser did not have a minimal knowledge of Latin.  I investigated further, and discovered that what they had done was simply stick "sedem" through a computer translator, and the computer came up with it being part of the word "sedare".  I told X, in some amusement, and he contacted CUP, who explained that their computer dictionary wasn't yet complete, but that it would be complete before the final product went on sale; they also implied that the problem was that the word was "ambiguous", and that this ambiguity would be reflected in the final version.  But this seemed to me to show the flaw in the whole enterprise, because "sedemque" in Aeneid 9.9 is not ambiguous at all if one actually knows Latin, instead of simply running word-forms through a computer.

So, well, hm. Note that the Perseus project, which also provides links to dictionary entries and grammatical help, is free (link in sidebar). It may be that Lectrix was substantially improved after the trial run. My guess is that this is what went on behind the scenes: people who actually knew the languages said you couldn't provide grammatical guidance using computer programs of the quality then available; a computer programmer who didn't know the languages said Piece of cake; and the rest is history. And a trial subscription to Lectrix is not available to individuals, because anyone who checked it out and found this level of elucidation of "sedemque" would decamp.

Languagehat had a post a couple of days ago on his bafflement over the verb " imitere" in the opening lines of Livy's Ab Urbe Condita. To a classicist, unsurprisingly, it's obvious what the verb is; LH went to the PDF commentary provided by the author, and all was revealed. This is, obviously, what someone who subscribes to a service like Lectrix is looking for; if I were eligible for a trial subscription I could see whether they're now providing it.