As I mentioned previously, I’ve been working on a library in Ruby used to model Latin Verbs.
Here’s a 5 minute demo of what you can do: My Latin::LatinVerb + Ruby’s IRB environment produces this:
It’s easier on the eyes if you watch the full-size version at blip.tv
I’m working on building a site around this code base. I hope to release it within the next month, but for the moment, I can give you a small sample of my recondite study.
I’ve been taking a bit of a hiatus from blogging thanks to:
Most of these don’t produce much in the way of visual artifacts, but here’s a short demonstration of the LatinVerb library ( it’s coherently working, but still needs some refactoring to get it to 0.1 release state… ). Here’s the video:
What’s going on here is that I have a Ruby debugger ( RDebug ) session open where I’ve created an instance of Latin::LatinVerb. I then proceed to execute some of the “vectors” that uniquely identify a single conjugation of a verb or a collection of verb tenses.
It’s not too pretty yet, my main work has been on getting the thinking working. The displaying part comes next.
Lauren and I took to calling that “eye klav-divs” towards the end of the series ( 13 episodes ). It’s an excellent mini-series, truly showing the capability of television to deliver high art, quality acting, and subtle direction to the masses.
Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out!
Instead of the sublime, we now choose to stew in the mud.
If you have the chance and want to be boggled at the astounding amount of treachery that members of the same family can visit upon one another, “I, Claudius” is a great tale. I loved Jacobi’s Claudius, he captures a vulnerability and fear through the first 10 episodes that inspire so much pathos and tenderness that you have to root for him all the way through — even when the necessities of his office drive him onto a path of corruption and bloodshed.
I also liked the amazing or impressionistic way the sets were designed. Being a mid-70’s BBC drama, the budget was assuredly tight, but with just a few paper-mâché effects of pillars we had no problem accepting “Ah, this is a palace” or “this is a desolate island cottage”.
Siân Phillips receives eternal praise as the scheming, murderous, materfamilias, Livia. Episodes without her lacked a certain punch and I can definitely see why De Laurentiis and Lynch cast her as the Reverend Mother Mohaim in “Dune”.
Listen here, Claud, er, Paul, I’ve got a little box for you…
It’s definitely worth a viewing if you have, uh, 13 hours for it.
Today I took my Latin II final which represents a substantial weight off of my shoulders. It’s weird not to have the nagging sense that somewhere, somehow, i should really be reciting conjugational or declensional paradigms.
My efficient professor offered to grade it there on the spot and I walked out knowing that I got 97 points on it. Not too shabby. That locked me an “A” in the class.
I celebrated with a pho meal and trip to Target with my beautiful girlfriend.
Brian Blessed, scenery not being chewed
Last night instead of cramming, we watched the 1976 mini-series “I, Claudius” — it was at least in the Latin vein. Major cool part: Vultan from “Flash Gordon”, Brian Blessed, playing a (to my mind, rather portly) Augustus. Primus inter pares needs to be primus intering the gym.
I say, upholding the customs of the elders is paramount!
Tonight I hope to relax a bit and head to bed early.
Or maybe enjoying a tender family moment with Ming:
“with a mighty flash” indeed…
I’ve been pretty quiet of late because I’ve been trying to get ready for this year’s review season at work and because I have a very sick application ( as in, it is on a server with an indeterminate and short lifespan ) that I’m trying to clone on new hardware with an interface facelift and move to a new standard of Perl.
Additionally, I have my Latin II final tomorrow.
Probably won’t be much action here until I get the finals behind me and some writing done.
Some people, when reviewing for Latin finals pull out a legal pad and a few sharp pencils and then happily go about their day.
Others write a LaTeX guide to:
And post them on the internet…
I mean, GOSH, how anyone study without these charts being beautifully typeset via LaTeX? Lauren remarked that she didn’t know my Latin class had a LaTeX-formatting component.
Eep.
Latin Mnemonics:
I’m having a difficult time remembering some rote memorization tasks in Latin. I’m trying to make up some mnemonics or rhymes, but am not having much luck.
| Use | Fruity | Fungi | potions | with | tabasco |
| Utor | Fruor | Fungor | Potior | Vascor |
| Worm | wood, | Hades | is | in | the | White | House, | show | the | worms | out |
| were | would | had | would | have | should | would |
Can anyone do better?
OK I said that you conjugate the verb fully, but that’s not entirely true. As I’ve not yet learned the subjunctive system, I’m limited to the indicative present and perfect systems. I’ve also included the participles as well as the infinitives.
Might I add that linguistic and string processing with Ruby is a pleasure. Many Years (tm) ago I tried this is French with Java and it was an unholy pain.
Can anyone guess where I’m going with these last few posts?
What do you think I’m making?
BTW: This code is very much rough draft, it’s enough to handle the ideas, but needs more modularization and more refactoring, so this is not “steven at his best” level code
When I write my Latin homework in LaTeX, the source winds up looking like this:
\item[13.] Am\={\i}c\={o}s tr\={\i}st\={e}s exc\={e}pit, ad m\={e}nsam inv\={\i}t\={a}vit, et e\={\i}s perfugium ac s\={o}l\={a}cium h\={\i}c dedit.
{ Aside: You might be thinking that entering “\ = { \ i }” just to get a single character would be a drag, but thanks to Textmate I have created snippets such that Control + letter does all that typing for me }
Now if I want to post this to the web, I need to convert those characters from say “\={\i}” to “\ī”. I would like it to go through the sentence and change each of those LaTeX-macron characters to HTML entities.
Similarly, I occasionally have need to convert LaTeX-macron sequences to UTF-8 codes.
And yet other times I want it to convert those codes to macron-ized characters.
The best part is that I’ve written this function into Textmate as an extension so for me conversion is:
Default String
Highlight the LaTeX string
Choose my command with this script in it
Text is replaced, magically!
And it looks like this in a browser…
\item[13.] Amīcōs trīstēs excēpit, ad mēnsam invītāvit, et eīs perfugium ac sōlācium hī
