It's nice when fun and profit converge: a Greek translation I made of a passage in Trollope won a prize. (Nicer yet, it turns out they've doubled the award recently without telling anyone ( Read more... )

I wonder if one of you programmers out there would be willing to help with a small desideratum of mine ( Read more... )

If you know something about talking to computers, I'd appreciate your advice on how to go about the following project ( Read more... )

לחם, מלחמה, הלחים < ל+חם
- and Arabic lahm 'meat', the original sense being 'produce by application of heat', hence 'forge' (with extension to כלי מלחמה 'forged tools, weapons' and hence מלחמה 'war') as well as '(baked) bread' and '(cooked) meat'.

לבש < ל+בש ( Read more... )

The world is a little poorer today: the last man to have fought in the trenches is dead, at the fitting age of 111. Things that for the rest of us are history - the Western Front, no man's land, the miseries of mud and gas, Passchendaele - still lived until today for one man as memory: no more.

Here, for your entertainment, is the opening of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, followed by a translation into Ancient Greek. (The rendering is perhaps a bit wooden in places; suggested improvements will be welcomed.) (Take that, Andrew Wilson!)

( Read more )

So just how much family trauma was this Jesus kid repressing?

First he disowns, not just his father the carpenter as an individual, but the entire category of earthly fatherhood. This is way beyond the normal Oedipus complex - he doesn't want to kill his father, he wants to pretend that he himself, uniquely in history, never even had a human ( Read more... )

As doctors give physic by way of prevention ( Read more... )

My new favorite word.

If I had spent the hours I've put into training myself to be an academic on writing instead, I would probably have a book out by now. I don't do this for an internal and an external reason: I lack the discipline, and I need an institute to stamp my visa. This is depressing. Some other linguist could write the papers I will publish; whatever its ( Read more... )