Working Materials towards a born-digital Homer

Gregory Crane

The general goal of this work is to break down the barrier between the reader of a translation and the underlying source text. As of summer 2021, the work presented here focuses upon speakers of American English, Persian, and Spanish (with an emphasis on what might be broadly described as New World Spanish) who are engaging with two pre-modern languages (the Ancient Greek of the Homeric Epics, the tragic playwright Sophocles, and the philosopher Plato and the Persian poetry of Ferdowsī (940-1019 or 1025) and of Hafez (1315-1390 CE).

I emphasize American English and New World Spanish (in partiuclar, that of Colombia) because at least some potential students of Ancient Greek and Latin in the Western Hemisphere see them as the cultural property of the European. When the American (the highly American) filmmaker Oliver Stone, for example, chose British actors, implying to his American audience that he associated the Greco-Roman world with British culture. Such an attitude deeply alienates

This repository includes a range of working materials designed to support a born-digital "Smart Homer". In the long run, the goal of a Smart Homer is to adapt to adapt to the needs of its readers.

Summer 2021 Use case: As of summer 2021, we focus on one partcular use case. Readers begin by engaging with a modern language translation but find themselves drawn into the source text itself. Some readers become so interested that they wish to take the source text apart, seeing how it works and then comparing it to the translation. As they do, they begin to get experience with the workings of the original language and start picking up particular words and even some grammar.

First, readers should be able to learn as much of the source langauge as they wish and as they need to understand the source text in front of them (e.g., a reader gets interested in the Odyssey) or any corpus that they may wish to explore (a reader starts out with a desire to learn about the language of Plato or of Greek tragedy or some other genre). The goal is to generate personalized language courses that prioritize the vocabulary, grammar and background information (particicular people, places, ethnic groups, fetivals etc.) that will appear most frequently. Learners should then be able to visualize how thoroughly they have mastered these features by seeing a map of their target corpus updated (e.g., moving from red to green) as they learn more and more.

Some readers may wish, and should have available to them the tools to, develop advanced mastery of the language - anyone with the time and ability should be able to learn enough to pass PhD examinations in the language, reading with fluency and with the ability to explain the linguistic form of what they encounter. Others, however, will be satisfied to learn enough about the language to make more informed use of the growing body of explanatory annotations available to them.

Second, readers should, insofar as humanly possible, be able to explore historical sources and then to learn the underlying languages in their own native languages. If anyone is to apply a term such as "classical" to the subject for which they are paid experts, then they have declared those materials to be the common heritage of humanity and they must labor to open those sources up to the broadest possible subset of humanity.

For centuries, Europeans pursued this goal by learning how to communicate in Latin -- a language that belonted to everyone and to no one. In such a world, whether your mother spoke to you in Croatian or French, Dutch or one of the dialects of Italy, everyone needed to master Latin and that mastery provided far more potential equality for speakers of less common languages than the fier competition for culture hegemony between large languages such as English, French, German and Italian (the four modern languages that students of Greco-Roman culture generally strive to be proficient).

The goal, however, is not to create even more national language bubbles for students of historical languages. However many primary and secondary school students within Europe and beyond study Latin, all of them with whom I am familiar do so either in their own national language or in a national language which their parents want them to master (e.g., students in a German language school in Greece or French language school in the United States). When they do so, they participate in separate, cultural linguistic spaces, each of which has its own text books in the national language. Such educational systems fail to

1. A reader begins by working with a source in a modern language translation. Links from the translation draw the reader into the source text. Such links include:

   • Performances of the source text, whether as sound recordings or videos. The goal is to communicate that the source has a particular meter and poetic form and/or that it represents language that was, at one point, urgent and spoken. A second goal is engage a different part of the brain than that used for reading and writing, hopefully creating a more complex and powerful embodied understanding.

   • Alignments at the word and phrase level between translation and source text: readers can mouse over the translation and see what words (if any) in the original correspond to the translation. When pre-existing translations are aligned in this way, readers can be shocked to see how much in the translation does not match with the source text and/or how much of the source text may not be represented in the translation. (In the case of Homeric epic, some translations regularly leave out what the traslators see as formulaic epithets).

   • Particularly important

2. Localization:

Translations aligned to sentences in the Treebank

Aligned Greek/English sentences are designed to help raeders with little or no knowledge of the underlying Greek begin immediately to interact with the source text in the original. There are two assumptions:

1. We can search for all forms of a single dictionary entry: e.g., ask for μῆνις (the default, nominative singular dictionary form that ends with a sigma, ς) and retieve also μῆνιν (the accusative singular form that ends with a nu, -ν).

2. Users can usually determine how the Greek word has been translated if they know its basic meaning and have access to a translation of the passage they are examining: e.g., if they know that μῆνις designates "anger," then they can guess that it can also be translated as "wrath." The more compact the passage, the easier it generally is to find the corresponding translation.

3. Transliteration is a big help.

   1. Greek can be automatically transliterated with relatively little trouble (although not every system that serves Greek implements transliteration). For Greek, the help is substantial but not critical in a structured class: students who work with Roman alphabets can learn how to deal with the Greek alphabet in less than one class because most Greek letters are similar to letters in (various variations on) the Roman alphabet.

   2. For Arabic script languages such as Arabic and Persian and for Hebrew, transliteration is both necessary for students who are used to a Roman alphabet and difficult to implement automatically: these languages do not normally write down the short vowels. In order to pronounce the words, you need to know the language - the writing is an aid-to-memory rather than a representation of the word as pronounced.

One exercise that has worked well has been to ask students to look

I have updated the sentence breaks in Iliad 1 and plan to do so for Odyssey 5 in summer 2021. The goal is to be able to serve the smallest possible sentence.

A Digital Version of Richard John Cunliffe's Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect