WISH Superscriptorium: Latin-English translation program

WISH Superscriptorium 2009 is a simple computer-aided Latin-English translation program, using plain-text grammar and vocabulary data files derived from William Whittaker's "Words" program by way of Mike Polis's "Glossator." It requires Tcl and Tk 8.5 (or greater, when there is an even greater version). The main program window consists basically of three scrolling text widgets side by side, with the headings "ORIGINAL TEXT," "TRANSLATION OPTIONS," and "TRANSLATION," below some menus and mini-toolbar buttons.

Latin words can be inserted into the "ORIGINAL TEXT" box by typing, pasting, or opening a file. When the user clicks on a word, here's basically what will happen:

• The word will appear with a green background in the "TRANSLATION OPTIONS" window, with a dot between what appears to be the root, stem, or base of the word and the grammatically significant suffix (if any). Also in the green background will be what part of speech the word appears to be, together with abbreviations for things such as the gender of nouns and adjectives (M, F, N for masculine, feminine, neuter), declension of nouns and adjectives (e.g., D1 for first declension), conjugation of verbs (e.g., C2 for second conjugation), case taken by preposition (e.g., "w/Acc" means the preposition takes the accusative case, "w/Abl" means it takes the ablative). If the word has more than one definition or more than one possible grammatical analysis, it will be repeated for each.

• A brief definition of the word (not necessarily specific to the grammatical function of the word being analyzed) will appear with a yellow background.

• The infamous "duplicitates Latinae" (i.e., confusingly duplicitous or multiplicitous word endings, and uses of the same ending to serve more than one grammatical purpose in Latin) will be conquered, or at least set forth so a user with some rudimentary knowledge of Latin can conquer them, with human-readable abbreviations for the number and case of each grammatical possibility.

After that, if desired, the user can use the "TRANSLATION" box for anything from a rough scratch pad filled with bad guesses about the meaning of sentences, to a real "super-scriptorium" displaying an elegant, polished translation (if the user knows how to produce one). The mini-toolbar buttons and the features of the File, Edit, Search, and Display menus are adapted from WISH Supernotepad 2009.

WISH Superscriptorium 2009 is available in a "tar.gz" package including the program, documentation, and a simple installation script for Linux/Unix operating systems, as well as a .PET package ready for single-click installation on Puppy Linux.

Download WISH Superscriptorium "tar.gz" package (approx. 830 KB)
Download WISH Superscriptorium 2009 .PET package for Puppy Linux (approx. 830 KB)

Read WISH Superscriptorium 2009 User Help Guide

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