Doctor Angelicus 13

I have finished the first lexical approach of "unit HS".  It took several weeks. This long time is due to the fact that I began with a small enough database of latin words. If I redo the same for other units it will be done more rapidly since many words will be already known.

I use java programs of my own under the Eclipse environment. I designed these programs several years ago with the aim to make a helper system for reading english texts. In fact, in an english page, average french people who studied english find at least half a dozen of words needing explanation ... though average french people will never avow it.

I performed this programming task during my first years of retirement which began in 2003  — Not exactly the first years since I spent before that some time to make in LaTeX form a lot of flying papers where I had written mathematics.

Now switching from english to other languages, and in particular latin, was an attractive idea. But for latin, there is a problem. The words database must contain, with a dictionary entry, all the inflections. In english, with man, one must find also men in the database file; with walk, one must find also walks, walked, walking and walkings. But in latin, a noun has half a dozen inflections and a verb more than one hundred counting the inflections of various participles.

The solution I retained, for verbs, is to write in the database file only the six inflections corresponding to the mode and time of verbs existing effectively in the latin text scanned. For example, if Thomas uses the word confidimus, I add to the database the words cōnfīdō, cōnfīdis, cōnfīdit, cōnfīdimus, cōnfīditis and cōnfīdunt found in wiktionary. And I drop the macrons since pronounciation is not my purpose (despite the fact that accents are sometimes necessary for good interpretation).

The next step is to produce a booklet containing the meaning of words that need explanation. I did it for some english texts. Of course I shall not do that for all the 229 units of Opera Omnia.

I add a remark about the size I chose for my "units". During the scanning process, for control purpose, many times I must run the java program of my helper system. For each word of the unit, the program must read the whole database. Fortunately, today, desk computers are quick enough to do that in about one minute for a source text of 200 to 300 K bytes and a database of several megabytes.

Affable Calcaire.