Philip Harvey
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Students of New Testament Greek know that time is of the
essence.
At lunch break during Greek Summer School one of them is
reclining on the grass.
She looks up to see rushing past a Rabbit in tailored
waistcoat and checking his fob watch.
More unusual things have been seen at university, but all
the same it’s a lesson.
Soon she will have to follow her interests and return to
class.
Fortunately she is sensible and well-educated, which means
she uses devices.
One of them is the Liddell & Scott 9th
edition on Kindle (2007).
Sometimes when she goes into L&S it’s like falling down
a well at incredible speed.
Other times it’s like drinking something that makes her feel
very big, or very small.
Other times though she comes up against utterly irrational
situations.
At a tea party a March Hare says that his L&S is totally
corrupted and unusable.
A Dormouse says he cannot even download his L&S, but
then he’s always falling asleep.
Mine has never worked, announces a Hatter, let’s change the
subject!
Her own copy isn’t all bad, but it has trouble reading
inflected words.
That’s inflected, not infected, mutters a trippy Caterpillar
who seems able to read her mind.
Everything the same is slightly different from the way it
was before, the Caterpillar adds, enigmatically.
Where am I now anyway? she thinks to herself.
In fact she finds that about 70% of searches on her L&S
do not return a hit.
“Low ratios are because Greek texts are not consistent when
it comes to how unicode for polytonic Greek is applied.”
Who is that? she thinks, looking around.
“A unicode text can be encoded using composing diacritics,
or precomposed diacritics,” comes a second voice. “The consensus today favours
precomposed diacritics but within this subset, due to faulty duplication, we
again have two choices. Vowels can be represented using acute or tonos with the
consensus being in favour of the tonos. Most computer operating can
disambiguate these variations but devices like the Kindle and Android based
systems do not.”
“Really?”
It is a Turtle talking to a Gryphon.
Everything is very strange today, she thinks. Let’s take a
reality check with Thesaurus Linguae Graecae.
“Digitization, markup and correction of L&S proved to be
far more time consuming and demanding from a scholarly point of view than we
anticipated, hence the entire project took five years to complete. The effort
began by extracting identifiable sections of the text, such as headwords and
meanings, that we could proofread using TLG correction software or by collating
multiple digital versions. This approach was helpful but not entirely
effective. Ultimately, the bulk of editing required a human eye. The final
project contains a number of enhancements compared to the printed version. A
number of lower case or ambiguous entries have been converted to upper case and
a large number of typographical errors have been corrected. Sub-entries in the
printed edition marked with hyphens, have been expanded and treated as
headwords. Greek words (both headwords and Greek inside entries), and English
definitions can be searched and L&S citations are linked to the TLG updated
editions (when possible).”
Something of a mouthful and her eye keeps returning to the
sentence:
Ultimately, the bulk of editing required a human eye.
Say what?
The words say what I want them to mean, neither more nor
less, declares a large Egg sitting on a Wall.
This whole business is getting right out of hand and reminds
her of something her clergyman father once said:
“Of the making of e-book readers there is no end. And to get
them all to do what you want them to do is a vexation of the spirit.”
Being sensible and well-educated, not to mention polite, she
decides for the moment to be off with its headwords.
She is aware that with an original, if hefty, copy of the
L&S book itself in front of her, the questions about the words of great
price will be answered in two minutes.
Where to find one?
Abebooks has some, U$94.63 from a place in Bonn, U$163.12 at
Cotswold Internet Books.
While Amazon spruiks the Kindle with the following Notes:
“1. An alphabetical index is not provided as the Lexicon has
over 800,000 headwords. 2. The preface, list of abbreviations and bibliography
have been removed to bring the file size within the Kindle eBook limit of
50MB.”
Curiouser and curiouser.
The fact that an e-book has a word limit seems altogether
the most extraordinary thing to the budding Greek scholar.
It seems to somehow or other she knows not why contradict
the thought that her device has limitless space.
Perhaps it is an urban myth, she thinks to herself.
Such is her muddle, she has even split an infinitive.
But no sooner has she had these unusual thoughts than she
finds herself awake on the grass by the riverbank.
How glad she is that she has been to Wonderland, and not to
a picnic at Hanging Rock.
The last thing she needs is to be sucked up into the vortex.
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