So far this first week of vacation has been used, as Lauren astutely noted, as, effectively, study hall. This weekend was largely spent preparing for my Latin probatio on Tuesday. The good news is that I managed to catch up on all the optional exercises in the back of my Wheelock’s and I had an interesting opportunity to learn more about extending Textmate.

I have discussed elsewhere the power curve of the editor emacs versus vim, but think that Textmate may have hit the sweet spot in terms of writing extensions.

Extension 1: Writing Macrons

While I had earlier posted about my joy of finding a keyboard map which would allow me to enter macron-ized vowels with Option + Vowel, I found this to me a very straining key combination on my keyboard. It’s not that easy to hook a thumb under to hit option plus a vowel.

Thanks to my crazy remapped keyboard, where Control is where Caps Lock is, I was able to remap Control + Vowel -> Macronized Vowel. This is a much better typing arrangement ( try it: Push caps lock plus a/e/i/o/u ). Even nicer is that on a Dvorak keyboard, all of these combinations can be hit with the left hand solely.

While this may be nifty, you say, I can say that it’s even niftier because I was able to scope the effectiveness of these bindings to be within certain types of documents. While emacs and vim certainly both support this feature it was incredibly easy to implement in Textmate. I simply scoped this command set to be within the text.html scope and it was carried into text.html.markdown ( an HTML shorthand ) text.html.textile and good old text.html itself. This is huge, huge, huge. This means that when editing PHP or Perl code Control + “e” or macronized-e reverts to its default setting of “end of line”. Very handy.

{ Aside: Astute readers may note that by assigning Ctrl+e to be macron I lost a handy mnemonic key-binding for go-to-end-of-line. I did, in fact. I have remedied this by adding, in that same scope Control + “]” as a replacement and that’s worked out pretty well so far. }

##Extension 2: Speaking of Markdown

So key bindings and scoping may not be that big of a deal to you, but it was a huge step forward to me. Further, modal text editing is not something particularly foreign to vim or emacs. However, I had a few needs come up that would have been hairy to add in Vim’s scripting language, but that were incredibly easy to add with Textmate.

###Ascii Table

Often when answering the questions in the back of Wheelock the question takes the form of:

1. Identify the personal endings of the future and imperfect tenses of the first two conjugations. 1) -o 2)-s 3)….

Obviously, constructing the answer in a table would be preferable with column headings being the given number, the given ending, the identification / the translation / etc. But the code for entering an HTML table is, while simple, a bit of a pain to enter. It’s very tag-heavy. Textmate has not done the best job of making this process easier.

In the php-markdown-plus wordpress extension, suppotr was added for Ascii tables. Why this hasn’t been added for the Markdown master code base I have no idea.

####Step 1: Create columns

There were six rows of data. Add plus one for the headers.

ruby -e ‘7.times{puts “|”}’

I type into textmate and push Ctrl+R. I get this:

 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |

Textmate just let me type a Ruby one-liner into the text, hit Control R and insert the text. Not too shabby.

####Step 2: Fill in the table headers:

|person|imperfect|future|
|
|
|
|
|
|

####Step 3: Let’s fill in the given persons…

|person|imperfect|future|
|1st sg
|2nd sg
|3rd sg
|1st pl
|2nd pl
|3rd pl

Now it would be a pain to closs off all the row definitions with “|” by hand. I could use a search and replace expression like “s#$#|#g” on the highlighted range, but I wrote a simple key-binding to do that search and replace for me. I saved this add on into a bundle I created ( HTML Editing for Latin Students ) and voilá. Thus i hi-lit the section, control + | and…

####Step 4: Close off newly-added column

|person|imperfect|future|
|1st sg|
|2nd sg|
|3rd sg|
|1st pl|
|2nd pl|
|3rd pl|

Now I needed to fill in the subsequent columns…I use control +n to go to the next line so that I don’t have to use the mouse or the arrow keys. It makes the vertical editing task much easier. This is an emacs convention. I close the process off with Control + | again.

####Step 5: Finish off the table

|person|imperfect|future|
|1st sg|bam|
|2nd sg|bas|
|3rd sg|bat|
|1st pl|bamus|
|2nd pl|batis|
|3rd pl|bant|

and the future…

|person|imperfect|future|
|1st sg|bam|b?|
|2nd sg|bas|bis|
|3rd sg|bat|bit|
|1st pl|bamus|bimus|
|2nd pl|batis|bitis|
|3rd pl|bant|bunt|

Now, to my eye, this is an intelligible table. Nevertheless, I will need to convert this to an HTML table as Markdown doesn’t natively support this conversion. Now, if I were in emacs here, I’d need to break out some eLisp code. In vim I’d have to go through the hell of using the scripting metalanguage. With Textmate, I just write a ruby script and then paste that in ( it’s pasted after the jump ) and then bound that to a key-binding. Thus I have “Turn Ascii table into HTML” bound to Command-Option-T

<table border="0" cellspacing="5" cellpadding="5" style="">
  <tr>
    <th>person</th>
    <th>imperfect</th>
    <th>future</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>1st sg</td>
    <td>bam</td>
    <td>b?</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
  ...
</table>

And that was incredibly handy.

###Make styling with CSS easy

One of the things that made me choose HTML for my language of typing was the ease of styling. Per standard didactic purposes, there will be translation sections in exercises. I wanted to style the “given” one way and the answers another. Again, Textmate to the rescue.

Add a tab-trigger.

Typing: “pgiv(tab)”

<p class="sent_given">. </p>

I type a number (say, 11) then hit tab again and I’m inside the tag, typing the given.

Typing “pans(tab)”

<p class="sent_answer"></p>

Similar, but for answers. As both of these <p>-tag elements have classes associated with them, I can format them with CSS to get the look I want. Simple.

But wait, there’s more.

Doing ‘pans’ and ‘pgiv’ is inefficient. How about I type all the sentences at once, in paragraph form, start the paragraph with the question number to start at, and then have each of those set up as <p> tags with the “given” class associated with them?

11.  This is sentence one.  This is sentence two.  This is sentences three.

Highlight run through Ruby script I added called “Line-ify as Given sentences..”

<p class="sent_given">11.  This is sentence one.</p>
<p class="sent_given">12.  This is sentence two.</p>
<p class="sent_given">13.  This is sentence three.</p>

I’ve added other features like a corrections binding (corr-tab) to produce a span elemnent that’s colored red so that I can annotate errors, but I’ll stop here. You get the idea.

Textmate: Pretty, easy to extend with scripting languages you already know to key bindings you want in such a way that you don’t obliterate key bindings you don’t want to lose.

###Conclusion

I’ve been so impressed by the power of Textmate in the regard of making HTML so much easier to generate, that I’m thinking about extending these features to LaTeX to get the beautiful formatting power latent there. I hopes this has helped you see that Textmate isn’t just a wonderful editor for code-hackers, it’s great for classicists as well!

This is a popular sentiment, but as I sit here reading and translating my Latin homework I’m always struck by how applicable these lines are ( I think my translation is right, but you may want to go to the source for yourself, I’m also reading a watered-down version for beginners but…) Livy: Nec vitia nostra nec remedia tolerare possumus. “We are able to tolerate neither our vice nor its remedy.” Cicero: Ubi l?g?s valent, ibi populus l?ber potest val?re. “Where the laws are strong, there the free population thrives.”

When I was a young fellow living in The Castilian dorm in the late 90’s, I would occasionally visit the TV lounge on my floor early in the morning and study there. Being a bit of an odd bird in that I would rather “sleep less and get up early” versus “stay up late” this would mean that the lounge was empty ( save the odd beer can and cheetos wrapper before the morning cleaning staff came through ). The cable provider in Austin at that time carried Classic Arts Showcase which follows a roughly MTV-like format where a clip is introduced by a title-card in the lower left describing the music and the visual, and then the art plays.

It’s such an absolute lie. I’m totally working. I’m just not working on “work work” stuff, rather I’m working on school work and personal stuff work. I’m a bit ashamed about it, honestly. It’s a cruel mistress, this thing I have called “a love for learning.” It breaks your heart and makes you hide in rooms at desks behind paper or in front of computers. But could I be otherwise if I tried? And those stacks of papers, bills, loose receipts, scribbled ideas, would they file and sort themselves? Deciding that it just wasn’t quite nerdy enough to write an extension set to Textmate to help produce Latin homework in HTML with references to CSS…I decided to write extensions to LaTeX to be able to prepare text in Latin.

I’m busily studying for my class’ finals. I’ve also been trying to close out some projects at work before the first fortnight of December passes. Past that coordinating anything is a bit of a fool’s errand.

I checked out my grades for Fall semester and I got an A in Latin. I think

Owing to the domain / DNS / hosting drama of the last few weeks, I’ve not been very motivated to post. Partly because I thought that investing any time and effort into the old site might make it harder to migrate to a new site. Further, after spending tons of time trying to get some non-responsive, irresponsible business owner to do what you contracted with them to provide, I just simply lost my zest for posting. But, let me summarize a few things that tell where I’m at roughly. Work Decommission and migration are the orders of the day. I’m working on an interesting project now for horizontal aggregation of tag metadata across vertical data channels.

This started off as a bit of an amusement just to see if i could show the elegance of Ruby – and find a way to help me memorize the suffix-addition-heuristics that characterize inflected languages like Latin. As usual, it quickly became much more than that. Known Issue: The macrons are slightly off, particularly in the 3rd person plural ( no vowel before ’nt’ should ever be lengthened ). I’ll write a fixer routine soon. [code lang="ruby"] #!/usr/bin/env ruby class Verb < Object attr_reader :firstpersonform, :infinitive, :perfectstem, :passperfpart, :stem def initialize(initString) (@firstpersonform, @infinitive, @perfectstem, @passperfpart)=initString.split(/,\s+/) pparts=initString.split(/,\s+/) @passive_endings = ["r", "ris", "tur", "mur", "min\xc4\xab", "ntur"] @personages = ["First Singular", "Second Singular", "Third Singular", "First Plural", "Second Plural", "Third Plural"] end def stem # For efficiency, if the iVar @stem is defined, don't go # through this structure return @stem unless @stem.

Latin. “Now remember Captain, you first have to look at the gender, number, and case of the adjective and coordinate the translated tense with respect to the infinitive” If you want them to succeed in the world of technical, non-linear, cross-functional thinking, accept no substitute. The argument could be made “but we live in an area with a strong Hispanic population ( uh, where? Anywhere in the lower 48? ) - Billy should learn Spanish.” This is an understandable and pragmatic attitude. Spanish is a beautiful language that gifted us Lorca, Marquez, and Cervantes. But here’s the thing, each step in latin is like a chess game, each tiny decision is the product of several threads collapsing to to a single point, and that point, in turn, opens up a wide path of contingencies that cascade into the text series of associations.

If you’re interested in my notes or charts, or references, check out amorlatinae.com.

Previously I had shown how I had used Ruby to re-create passive system conjugations. I decided I’d try to add on some functionality and I’ve come up with a Ruby script that handles full verbal system conjugation for 1st and 2nd conjugations (-āre / -ēre) in Latin. I’ll ultimately build this into a Rails application, but I’m getting the design and debug out of the way with a ruby script. Check out the code on my tracking page. I need to add support for 3, 3-io, and 4th, but I’m amazed by how light this code has come up to be ( ~ 300 lines with generous whitespace!

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 \&\#x12b;. I would like it to go through the sentence and change each of those LaTeX-macron characters to HTML entities.

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? Simplified macron-based entry ( ={a}, ={e}, etc.) Process simplified text to UTF-8 ( the language of rails ) Code to process these strings into full conjugations Rails as a display engine What do you think I’m making?

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. Special deponent verbs that take “objects” in the ablative case Use Fruity Fungi potions with tabasco Utor Fruor Fungor Potior Vascor Subjunctive Conditional Helping Verbs Worm wood, Hades is in the White House, show the worms out were would had would have should would

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: Forming the Subjunctive Subjunctive Uses 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.

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.

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.

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’ve been taking a bit of a hiatus from blogging thanks to: Car accident drama Latin III postponed GRE from this weekend to the 24th of October Work The LatinVerb library. 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.

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:

My blogging has been light for the last several months because I’ve been focused on trying to get admitted to graduate school. Included in the portfolio of “why Steven is a special snowflake and you should admit him” argumentation is reference to a project which demonstrates the fusion of my interests in Latin, linguistics, Ruby, metaprogramming, and Rails.

During my blogging hiatus towards late April and Early May, I finished my fourth Latin class. During the class we covered the larger parts of Books I and II of the Æneid. But we did not finish them. In a move that can only be considered arch-nerdly, I am reading the ending of these two on my own. In some ways, with several grand sunk, it seems like a very bad use of my funds to basically let all the knowledge leak out over the summer. On the other hand, couldn’t I be reading something else, something that doesn’t require a dictionary nearby?

“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.” – Alexander Pope A recent Wikipedia article of the day sent along notice that the anniversary of the publication of Newton’s “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” had just past. I thought I would take a look at the original text and see what my substantial investment in Latin education seine me of it. Google Books has a fine scan with the Le Seur commentaries. I was taking a look at De Mundi Systematae: Liber Tertius and saw several small postulates that were exceedingly brief and nowhere as complicated as the language in the rest of the text.

I really enjoy my Latin classmates, they all are fine students, committed to the cause of studying something strictly for its beauty, its import, and its bond that it makes us feel to yesteryear. As an advice to anyone in languages let me recommend that you always be bold: come in, try to do that horrendous Dutch guttural ‘g,’ fully nasalize your French vowels, etc. When you’re unafraid to err, you open up the possibility that you will actually learn. I say this as preface because one of my peers made an error which induced a laughter such as I have never seen before in a language class.

On the 12th of this month I presented at Lone Star Ruby Conf V I have been working on a project for the last few years that conjugates regular Latin verbs into specific, as well as aggregated, results (Code). While coding this library, I had some ideas about the tools and techniques that made it possible for me to handle the complexity of this issue. From these ideas I derived some guidelines about how to decide “when to metaprogram and how.” I presented this.

I have finished translating (although I’m not sure the level of proficiency) the first quarto page of Bruno’s “On the Shadows of Ideas.” It’s been a real treat to get back into Latin.1 You can see my progress at my Github hosted blog site dedicated to the translation: Translating Bruno’s DE VMBRIS IDEARVM. Footnotes “Treat” coming from the ancient Latin word meaning “profound pain” requiring a half-dozen of grammatical references, grimoires, and

This is a post I had sitting in my drafts folder, uhm, for about 2 years. I’m fishing it out now because I’m a completionist masochist.

A friend forwarded on to me this post entitled: “Don’t study latin if you want to become a better programmer” by Daniel Lemire, professor of Computer Science at the University of Quebec. His piece questions the wisdom of teaching Latin as a means of creating a better programmer. As a lover of the Classical world, Latin student, programmer, and teacher of programming, I found myself disagreeing with his conclusion: in my programming practice I definitely recognized competencies learned while studying Latin resurfacing again and again. I believe Lemire is missing some nuance to his description of learning and I think that they might explain how we come to different conclusions. Let me start with a usage where I agree with Lemire.

I Program, Should I Learn Latin to Get Better?

Let’s start with the obvious case. If you are, say, learning Python and then one fine day you think: “My goodness, I’d like to be better at this” and your solution is “I’m going to go buy a copy of Wheelock’s Latin and get to it,” you’re probably choosing a sub-optimal strategy. Your time would be better spent at one of the following

1. Writing Python
2. Reading Python
3. Finding a Python mentor / meet-up, etc.

While I agree that there are individuals who, upon learning Latin with some background in programming probably found some way to have it drive their programming acumen forward — say, by writing a RubyGem ;) — this is probably a vanishingly small amount and not something I’d recommend as a general rule.

So let me concede the obvious use of this utterance and agree that you should not do task Y to become better at task X. However, I don’t think this is what the author’s post was intending to analyze. My interpretation of his post is that since he “believe[s] that knowledge is only weakly transferable, …[he favours] practical skills that are immediately useful.” And here’s where I think his model loses some of its nuanced understanding of learning and thus becomes less compelling.

Does Latin Study Contribute to Learning Programming More Easily?

I believe that there are transferable skills that come from broad-based learning and that they are worth the time and the effort of acquiring.

Specifically broad-based topics that train, enhance or instill facility with metacognitive competencies do transfer well to other studies. I would contend that learning Latin tends to force its students to acquire a series of metacognitive competencies that would prove highly useful in learning to program (a raw skill) and learning to be a programmer (a set of behaviors).

Is it guaranteed that other “practical, immediately useful” skills such as Karate or swimming would fail to offer these learnings — certainly not! And I should hope that learners of all ages and all disciplines experience the joy of finding these metacognitive competencies in new nooks and crannies as they learn more about their world. For me, that’s quite possibly the best part of learning and, as I approach mid-age, one of the great advantages I have in learning material over a 16 year old: I know that I have a battle-tested series of competencies that allow me to ascertain, interpret, and integrate learning in a way such that new facts feel natural versus foreign objects that must be toted about.

Nevertheless, I believe that the pedagogy of Latin has something special to it: something instructs both moral character (the noble sentiments of the ancients) as well as intellectual character, its metacognitive competencies. There’s a reason, after all, that the archetypal “teacher molds the mind of a future generation and is never forgotten” movie is Mr. Chips and Latin, long before Keating taught poetry in “Dead Poets Society” or Escalante taught calculus in Los Angeles in “Stand and Deliver.”

Let me try to list a few of these competencies.

“I love Latin because it has nothing to do with me. It has nothing to do with anything in my life.” https://t.co/iQMivvkL78 — The Paris Review (@parisreview) September 21, 2017 One of the best and weirdest things I ever did was to study this as an adult. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/09/21/human-life-is-punishment-on-the-pleasures-of-studying-latin/

Last week our neighbor invited Lauren and I to attend a performance by Teatro Nuovo at the fabulous Gothic, Episcopal Church of The Heavenly Rest on 5^th of a restoration of a symphony by Donizetti and Rossini’s “Stabat Mater” (“The mother was standing”).

It had been a hot day so it was wonderful to arrive at the church and be welcomed into cool shade. We were lucky to hear introductory remarks by Mr. Gabriel Dotto, a scholar of Italian opera.

I was unacquainted with Donizetti, but found this symphonic piece to be very compelling and remarkably well-done. The fourth movement had not had its orchestration completed and, as part of the revival, was restored by scholar and our maestro, Will Crutchfield.

She follows the contours of the Latin syntax with remarkable commitment, even at the risk of obscuring the sense in English.

In 2008, I took the “Æneid” class at the University of Texas. It was a great class where we used Clyde Pharr’s student edition of the text for the course. In one of annotations, I found one of the most fascinating descriptions of ancient masculinity I have ever read:

92. frigiore: chilly fear; the ancient heroes were not ashamed to display their emotions, and often gave way to terror or grief. They weep copiously on occasion, and are no more dainty about the shedding of tears than the shedding of blood