Lewis & Short

The project Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary aims at mapping Latin lemmas extracted from the Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary (1879) into UNL. The lemmas were extracted from the online version of "A Latin Dictionary" available at the Perseus Digital Library. The project is coordinated by the UNL Language Center at the University of Patras, in Greece, under the supervision of Dr. Olga Vartzioti.

Instructions

The Project, under the acronym lat in the UNLarium, is open to students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate Study Programs in Classics, and especially in Latin Language and (Roman) Literature. Specialists and Graduates in the field of Latin Language and Literature (of Classics, as well) are very welcomed, too. Project lat has started on in December 2011 within the frame of the Internship Program in Computational Linguistics coordinated and sponsored by the UNDL Foundation, which provides all the necessary training and academic support for the Interns. Five students of the Classics’ Section of the Department of Philology at the University of Patras are participating in the up to six months Internship Program, and they are working on creating entries for the Latin-UNL Dictionary: Ioanna ALEXOPOULOU, Anastasia GLARAKI, Evangelos KATSARELIS, Maria KOTOPOULI, Panagiota TAKTIKOU.

The activities expected to be developed within the Internship Program are going to be continued and after its completion, aiming at addressing the complete Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary into UNL. This will be a useful linguistic tool for academic purposes and cross-language validation according to the UNLweb’s goals. Enrollment in the Project lat will provide for the students, now and on, further development of their skills and competences in Latin Language and its use, and also familiarization with grammar research and comparative linguistics. Creation and development of Latin Language resources into UNL (dictionary, grammar, knowledge bases, translation memories and corpora, i.e. Latin Literature) will not only help academic purposes, but will provide an extend and broad reception of Latin Literature among people and communities who are not specialists in reading Latin Literature, but are interested in cultural studies or having an impulse in studying classical civilizations, e.g. Roman, and their impact to present cultures and linguistic origins or cross-cultural relations.

LIST OF INSTRUCTIONS for the Users working on assignments in the Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary:

• While working in the Dictionary, please choose only lemmas of the Categories: Nouns (common), Adjectives, Verbs, and Adverbs, which can be addressed in UWs (The WordNet contains more 100,000 synsets, i.e. concepts. If you cannot identify a lemma, please decline it (it will be treated later on).
• Please, do not modify the lemmas. As for Verbs, you should write the lemma in first person singular.
• Link the Latin lemmas to the most frequent UW, i.e. the meaning of the Latin lemma in English, only after checking their meanings in the L & S Latin Dictionary, or Glossa (off line, download from here).
• If there is a case that your lemma is a preposition, a conjunction, a pronoun, an interjection, and numerals please notice that these are not linked to UWs. They are represented by relations or attributes. In these cases, the field UW must be left empty. Notice also that the UW will only be required in case of nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs.
• While filing in the information asked for the lemma, please consider that in Inflection you should choose a rule from the drop down list. If there is not a relevant Grammar Rule in this list, this means that the rule is not yet introduced to UNL Grammar. Please decline the lemma, which will be treated later on. If the lemma is a peculiarity or has to be addressed as irregular, you should create an inflectional rule especially for this lemma in the Dictionary.
• In Word Form please indicate the lemma as it is given. Please do not fill in the Root- or Stem information if you are not sure about it. The Stem of a word is usually given in the traditional Grammars, which you may also consider a useful tool while working in the UNLweb: (Latin Grammars at http://www.textkit.com)
• For what is to be considered a root and a stem of a given word form, please consider that "root" is the word form without derivational affixes, and "stem" the word form without inflectional affixes. According to traditional (Latin) Grammars Stem is the fundamental part of the word to which certain case-endings (inflectional affixes) are appended, for example in "portam" : porta- is the stem, and –m the case-ending for Accusative Singular (nouns of first declension). But in most cases the final vowel of the stem has coalesced so closely with the actual case-ending that the latter has become more or less obscured. The apparent case-ending thus resulting is called a Termination. In these cases you should write as “root” the primitive form, which is usually monosyllabic, and as “stem” the root with its suffix (as indicated in the word form given) leaving aside the case-ending (=termination). i.e. root= “por”, stem= “por+ta” > “porta” (see Bennett’s Grammar, p.21).
• Further information or questions please do not hesitate to contact UNLweb or Dr Olga Vartzioti.