What would be the ultimate tool for ancient texts?

[Peter Kirby]

Hello,

I am thinking about developing, in the distant future, an eminently useful tool for studying ancient writings (the domain name earlywritings.com has been reserved for this purpose). This site would include Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Latin texts. It may expand later to include some Eastern, some Arabic, and a few medieval writings.

You can look at the design of the Gospel of Thomas Commentary (http://www.gospelthomas.com/) for a starting point, but I want an earlywritings.com that has more features and more stuff included. There would be a web interface (running off a database), not an executable program on the user's hard drive.

What would you want to see in such a tool? Be creative! Please don't hesitate to mention both things that could be easy and things that might be impossible. Any idea is a good idea at this stage.

(Hint: think Bible software. What features do you like in programs you have used, or what features would you like to see in such programs?)

best,
Peter Kirby

[barryrob]

Hello,

I am thinking about developing, in the distant future, an eminently useful tool for studying ancient writings (the domain name earlywritings.com has been reserved for this purpose). This site would include Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Latin texts. It may expand later to include some Eastern, some Arabic, and a few medieval writings.

You can look at the design of the Gospel of Thomas Commentary (http://www.gospelthomas.com/) for a starting point, but I want an earlywritings.com that has more features and more stuff included. There would be a web interface (running off a database), not an executable program on the user's hard drive.

What would you want to see in such a tool? Be creative! Please don't hesitate to mention both things that could be easy and things that might be impossible. Any idea is a good idea at this stage.

(Hint: think Bible software. What features do you like in programs you have used, or what features would you like to see in such programs?)

best,
Peter Kirby
I would like to see a copy of the Hebrew and a copy Greek N.T. Interliners side by side in one book with word souce note included.

And hopefully a better speller that me.
Barryrob

[Peter Kirby]

Ah, so you are thinking of being able to view an interlinear with the Greek or Hebrew words underneath their corresponding English words. (Or vice versa-following the Greek/Hebrew order and placing words below.) And, possibly, one could look up the original-language word to see its definitions. Is that the essence of your suggestion?

Anyone else have comments?

Note that, while this would include biblical texts, it will expand to include a wide range of literary works from antiquity.

best,
Peter Kirby

[Jaltus]

Fully searchable.
A parsed form, with ambiguities noted (no decisions made for the reader).
Side by side instead of interlinear, thus Greek/English parallel to each other.

[Sparko]

I would like to see a copy of the Hebrew and a copy Greek N.T. Interliners side by side in one book with word souce note included.

And hopefully a better speller that me.
Barryrob
Barryrob, for a good online interlinear Bible source, try http://www.studylight.org/isb/

[Bib Lit Major]

Within the suggestions of Jaltus, Id' like to see them fully searchable such that all texts in the same language can have all the same words or parsed forms in the database so that comparisons on usage can be made, as well as identifying possible interdependencies, much like GRAMCORD does for the BHS, LXX, and GNT.

This would probably be a monumental undertaking. Plus, another setback would be having to do that for all possible textual variants. If you wanted to be completely satisfactory, you'd have to give every single variant of every single text...or at least offer the representative ones in areas which make an interpretative difference, and even then, these are up to interpretation. Plus, you might want to add translations of works, just for linguists to look at how rigid certain translations were...

So many options...so little time.

[Peter Kirby]

Within the suggestions of Jaltus, Id' like to see them fully searchable such that all texts in the same language can have all the same words or parsed forms in the database so that comparisons on usage can be made, as well as identifying possible interdependencies, much like GRAMCORD does for the BHS, LXX, and GNT.

I agree that being able to search for all forms of a word (such as christos and christou) would be a very good thing. But I am confused by what you say above about the texts being "fully searchable...in the same language" while you mention in the same sentence the BHS, which I understand to be in Hebrew and not Greek.

This would probably be a monumental undertaking. Plus, another setback would be having to do that for all possible textual variants. If you wanted to be completely satisfactory, you'd have to give every single variant of every single text...or at least offer the representative ones in areas which make an interpretative difference, and even then, these are up to interpretation. Plus, you might want to add translations of works, just for linguists to look at how rigid certain translations were...

Certainly, the effort would not start as a monumental achievement (it would look much like most Bible search web pages on the 'net at first). The information will be held in a database, and the design of the site can be extended, over time, to include more features. One of these would be a good critical apparatus, but this wouldn't get done in the site's first year. Yet it is still something that I think should be done.

Any other comments, anyone?

best,
Peter Kirby

[Bib Lit Major]

I agree that being able to search for all forms of a word (such as christos and christou) would be a very good thing. But I am confused by what you say above about the texts being "fully searchable...in the same language" while you mention in the same sentence the BHS, which I understand to be in Hebrew and not Greek.

They are indeed, but I was making the comparison to GRAMCORD because in GRAMCORD, one can look at the uses of a particular form of a word or even particular grammatical combinations in more than one document, provided it is in the same language and corpus of material, not affirming that BHS and GNT are of the same language or that one can make one search for both. In GRAMCORD, one can look up the occurences of Cristou in all Greek NT texts, not just the one you are currently looking at. One frustating thing about GRAMCORD is that one cannot look up all the occurences of Cristou in both the LXX and the Greek NT, which if you followed my suggestion, would probably make your tool superior in this instance because one would not have to repeat the same search for each corpus of texts. Anyways, sorry for the confusion.

[Agent Yoshi]

I am currently making a site similar to the one you mentioned, except that the only plans are to host writings and commentaries of Karaite Sages of the past. First I am putting up the English translations (if any exist), and later I will prepare a section for the commentaries in their original language (most are in Judeo-Arabic)

http://www.karaitica.com/