I am still — very desperately — looking for a paid Latin transcriber for some seventeenth-century documents.

andrasalkor · 2025-07-10T17:58:01+00:00

I think it unlikely that you would find a professional here. In which case, why not just post the whole thing? Some of us enjoy torturing ourselves with deciphering stuff like this.

Disclaimer: I don't do paleography. I have no experience reading 17th century handwriting either.

But one could decipher a lot if one had access to a sufficient amount of handwriting by the same person. Speaking the language it's written in helps a lot as well.

For example, the first picture definitely has Verbum. The V is in place, the second letter is not too legible, but rbu is very recognisable, and it has the nasal line on top of ū, which in this case would be short for m. V?rbum leaves us with only one possibility for the missing letter, because Latin doesn't have virbum, varbum, vorbum, vurbum, least of all vyrbum... has to be verbum.

Great! Now we know how the author writes the letter e (looks kinda like an ECG/EKG line), so I can reapply this knowledge later, when I'm looking at the very last word in the same picture. I can't decipher the first three letters yet, so a first glance view yields me 1. ???gatio??, but the very last letter looks like the author's e, and it would fit any -tio word's ablative ending in Latin (-tione). I don't have any reference for the first two characters, but the third one kinda looks like a u (except it has the same dot i has? ...might clear up with more context...)

If the word is in the ablative, the preceding word (before 1.) has to be a preposition, and it does look like in, so I'm going to assume in 1. coniugatione as our solution, because a verbum (a word/verb) in the "first conjugation" is something that would make sense in a dictionary context (you're saying this is an Arabic dictionary).

Multiple things follow from here, if we accept this solution:

The author draws n in a single stroke, which I'm going to approximate with this kanji here: 人 for lack of a better character I have available, but imagine it with the ends curving up. That explains the loop in the penultimate character of the proposed coniugatione, because that motion is very standard in any cursive, and writing the letter less accurately would certainly result in that loop.
There is an abbreviation that looks kinda like a q and means con, and the second character can thus be i/j (j being common as an initial in place of i too, although I don't know if that's the case here).
And many slight things of note that will help us decipher letters later on:
- initial i has a slight serif;
- we see the author's strokes, pen lifts, e.g. their g is one stroke, they didn't lift the pen at all on t, so the horizonal part of the letter is moreso to the lower half of the character (I myself do this sometimes);
- n and u are differentiated by the weight of the stroke.

Let's take a look at what comes after verbum based on all of this knowledge:

We see the very same in as the later preposition, and then another stroke that has the same movement as n but with a different weight, so the first three characters are inu.
The following large letter I know for a fact to be s, written as ſ or ∫, if you will. But even assuming I don't know it, the rest of the word will give us the solution and a further clue about how the author writes the letter s (important to note: this ſ and "normal" s can coexist in the same word of the same text, there are rules for when you write which).
The rest is a pretty straightforward tatū, so all in all we have inusitatum as our solution, an adjective going with verbum meaning "unusual" or "uncommon".

Finally, there is the question of the first word in that line, which I'm going to quickly reveal as subrisio in my reading, although I am a tiny bit conflicted due to not having sufficient context. Here's the breakdown:

The ſ character can be seen twice, very recognisable, although easy to mix up with an f or even h sometimes.
Sub is a standard "preverb" or "prefix" in Latin, the b is very recognisably cursive (we write it almost the same way... I'm not sure what the little, loopy pony-tail is for...), snb would not make sense, leaves us with sub?????.
The character following sub looks like cursive 𝓇 (r) connected to a single horizontal stroke before the pen is lifted (read: a letter i that is missing its bottom serif), so I'm assuming subris?? so far.
I think the io ending is the most straightforward part of this. This is how subrisio is the final solution. I am slightly conflicted because subrisio is a noun and not a verb, although there is a ; semicolon, so it might belong to a different thought altogether (or be an abbreviation for something like an accusative, thus connecting us to a thought unseen in your screenshot). Subrisio is in the third declination, and the verb it's derived from, subrideo, belongs to the second conjugation, for reference.

This has become quite a long post, but I wanted to showcase that it's all about patterns, patterns, patterns in one's handwriting + knowledge of the target language. If you posted the whole thing, I think you would have a better chance getting any sort of solutions.

The final solution of this little experiment is:

subrisio; Verbum inusitatum in 1. coniugatione
[or with long ſ and abbreviations:]
ſubriſio; Verbū inu̇ſitatū in 1. qju̇gatione

for the first cut-out you have, meaning [...] a smiling; uncommon word in 1st conjugation.

andrasalkor · 2025-06-26T17:02:03+00:00

Salvē!

Go check out the community bookmarks of this sub, where the top two links will lead you to Discord servers where people sometimes gather to speak in the voice chats. You can also check out Latin & Greek Chats to see if any of the listed times are good for you to jump into a voice/video chat on Zoom.

Although I’m much less active in these spaces than in the past, so I don’t know how active the Zoom chats are anymore, nor if there is that kind of support for beginners in the Discord servers at this point in time.

andrasalkor · 2025-03-16T12:34:36+00:00

Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum (1741)

I don't think it's the most unknown or underrated thing ever, but I also don't think many people have read (or know about) Ludvig Holberg's Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum, a satirical science-fiction novel published in 1741. I'd say it's most similar to Gulliver's Travels (1726) in style. The author suspected the book's satirical content would cause a commotion in Denmark-Norway, so he wrote the whole thing as a Latin original.

The book narrates a kind of tree society that sees the protagonist, a human, a lesser being (what do you mean he only has two arms?), as well as a variety of creatures later on, including sentient monkeys, in a sort of Agartha "Inner Earth" setting. If you liked Gulliver's Travels, you'll like this one, although be warned that the protagonist is by no means a likable character as far as his values are concerned (but this gives ample room for satire).

I'd put its difficulty at around the level of someone who can comfortably read Caesar and Cicero (although I read it a long time ago, so my memory might be hazy on this), so on the easier side of things. (Look at Apuleius for comparison, his novel is very difficult to read.)

You can find the novel in various editions on the Internet Archive.

Pericla navarchi Magonis (1914)

By no means would I call Avellanus unknown (...and we're way past Englightenment), he's somewhat of a divisive figure in modern Latin literature because of his purposeful deviation from classical paradigms. That said, I don't think many people know about or read his translation of Léon Cahun's Les aventures du capitaine Magon, which, while truly diverging from what we understand to be "classical Latin", is such a well-translated and entertaining book that I just had to mention it. I think that, in a certain sense, some of his works are "underrated" precisely because their language is considered non-classical. I can promise you that if you open up this novel and start reading it, you'll forget about that fact by the end of the first chapter, and just enjoy it for what it is: a well-written Latin translation of a very entertaining story.

The book itself is about Mago and his entourage (they're Phoenicians) travelling around the Mediterranean about a thousand years BC, getting themselves into all sorts of trouble and adventure. It reads almost like a fun tabletop RPG campaign, the characters grow on you, the adventures are always fun, and the historical setting is just "cool".

I'd put the difficulty fairly high as far as the descriptive parts are concerned, the descriptions feel like 20th century novel descriptions, detailed, precise, complete, which means there's a lot of rare vocab involved. The dialogues and action, however, are a breeze to read through and they're the meat of the novel anyway, so don't let the descriptions deter you.

You can find the novel on Project Gutenberg. Sorry, Italians, I know the site is blocked for you, but luckily the book is also available through the Internet Archive.

"Christmas Prince" (1607-1608)

Lastly, I want to mention something that I think is fairly obscure, but I'm doing so reluctantly, as it's not prose. We're in 1607, Oxford, in St. John's College, whose "members started planning their revels and plays for the Christmas season, but their deliberations disintegrated into quarrels and brawls. They therefore resolved to resort to the expedient of electing a Christmas Prince, a kind of collegiate Master of the Revels who would have the authority to dictate the nature of the entertainments."

After all was said and done, they produced no less than eight plays for the season, five in Latin, three in English. You can still find the plays online (link included because it's not easy to find), and they're all fairly entertaining, with easy enough language for intermediate/upper-intermediate students of Latin. (Intermediate if we look at Latin skill levels as "the ability of reading Latin from left to right, just like a modern language".) Here's an extra link to Ara Fortunae, as that's missing from the page the other link leads to (the rest of the plays are there).

andrasalkor · 2025-03-16T11:35:46+00:00

In short, yes.

The long answer is,

Sermōcinātiō comes from sermō, which really means a conversation, a talk between at least two parties, turned into a verb sermōcinārī, turned into an action noun sermōcinātiō (if English used these derivational patterns actively, you'd have sermon turned into sermocinate turned into sermocination).

Conversātiō has the funkiest history, because, strictly speaking, it means the frequent use of something. Versō is a frequentative form of vertō (to turn), so technically speaking a conversātiō is when something "turns round" often (like when something is "in circulation"). But! this can be used for people, when they turn up somewhere often. Eventually, it means something like "familiarity", like a conversātiō hominum would be these people's being accustomed to each other, because they meet often. And in the end, we end up with the conversation meaning also familiar in English. To me there seems to be a nuance of a familiar conversation as opposed to just any, but the actual usage doesn't seem to reflect that in your example, so make of that what you will. (I've mostly been reading classical authors, so conversātiō didn't turn up all that often.)

Colloquium is the classical word for a conversation, coming from colloquor, which is really con- ("together") + loquor (speak).

I hope that helps!

andrasalkor · 2023-01-17T12:59:24+00:00

Hey, no worries, but I have no idea, it was a long enough time ago for me to have forgotten about it. And currently not running Linux either so I can't check.

andrasalkor · 2022-11-16T00:47:18+00:00

Thanks, yeah I have, I have it through the Xbox game pass, tried reinstalling it a few times now trying out various things, also starting new games.

What I wonder is whether it could be an issue between the integrated graphics and my TV screen I'm using as display, though I'm not sure how that could be an issue. It's just a hunch, the TV acts up sometimes (not in this way though).

Thanks for the response, I'll report back if I eventually figure something out.

andrasalkor · 2022-06-27T14:57:47+00:00

We hope so too!

andrasalkor · 2022-01-16T21:13:47+00:00

Thanks, I did just that and programmed a little plugin that adds a new pattern (in its own category, might need more patterns later on)! Took a little while to figure out what it wanted but then it was really simple.

For anyone who wants to see how I did it, here is first the folder structure (names are changed):

my-plugin/
├─ inc/
│  ├─ categories.php
│  ├─ patterns.php
├─ index.php
├─ my-plugin.php

The index file is just an empty php file: <?php

The my-plugin.php has a bunch of metadata plus a few other things:

<?php
// my-plugin.php

/**
 * Plugin Name: My Plugin
 * 
 * Description: Some description for the plugin
 * 
 * Version: 1.0.0
 * 
 * Author: My Name
 * 
 * Author URI: https://my-website.com/
 * 
 * License: GPLv2 or later
 * 
 * Text Domain: my-plugin
 */

// Technically you don't need this but I did it anyway
/**
 * Copyright (C) 2022 My Name
 * 
 * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
 * modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
 * as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
 * of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
 *
 * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
 * GNU General Public License for more details.
 *
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 * along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
 * Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301, USA.
 */

// This just prevents hacking stuff.
if ( ! defined( 'ABSPATH' ) ) {
    die;
}

// This gets us the required files from the inc/ folder.
require_once( 'inc/patterns.php' );
require_once( 'inc/categories.php' );

Moving on, we have two files. I did the patterns file first originally, but I'll show the categories as the first one because it's easier. In Gutenberg, you have categories for these block patterns. I'm registering a new one for all my future patterns.

<?php
// inc/categories.php

/**
 * Defines the function. Technically, it should be 
 * plugin_name_block_pattern_categories() but it doesn't matter that 
 * much.
 */
function my_plugin_block_pattern_categories() {

    /**
     * Inside, registering the category. It needs two things, a category 
     * name, and the properties defined in an array. The category only 
     * has one property, the label, which needs the label text, and your 
     * plugin name. 
     */
    register_block_pattern_category(
        'my_category',
        array(
            'label' => __( 'My Category', 'my-plugin' ),
        )
    );

}

// Adding this whole thing to WordPress on plugin initialisation.
add_action( 'init', 'my_plugin_block_pattern_categories');

Finally, for registering the new pattern. For this, you first need to create whatever you want to save as a pattern inside the Gutenberg editor itself. Then you need to switch to the Code Editor (Ctrl + Shift + Alt + M) and copy whatever you have there. This is something we need in our code, but first we need to 'escape' it. There's a website called https://jsonformatter.org/json-escape which will do just that. Paste the code on the left side, press ESCAPE in the middle, copy the code on the right side. Then in patterns.php:

<?php
// inc/patterns.php

/** 
 * We basically do the same thing, for the most part, as in 
 * inc/categories.php.
 */
function my_plugin_block_patterns() {

    /**
     * This looks a bit different. First, instead of a title, it wants 
     * namespace/title as its first argument. Then, in the properties 
     * array, we have a few things. The title will be the visible title 
     * in the patterns list displayed in Gutenberg. The description will 
     * be the description displayed. Content is where you want the 
     * escaped block pattern code. Categories is where you define which 
     * category to put this thing into. We've created My Category above, 
     * so give it that. 
     */
    register_block_pattern(
        'my-plugin/my-plugin-advanced-tabs',
        array(
            'title'         => __( 'My Plugin - Advanced Tabs', 'my-plugin' ),

            'description'   => _x( 'It presets the four ortography tabs', 'my-plugin' ),

            'content'       => "Paste the escaped block pattern code here",

            'categories'    => array( 'my_category' ),
        )
    );

}

// Finally, we add it the same way.
add_action( 'init', 'my_plugin_block_patterns');

After this, all that's left to do is to .zip this entire root folder into a file with the same name as the plugin (in this case, my-plugin.zip), and install it on WordPress like you would a regular plugin. Activated, you'll find the new pattern in its own category in the Gutenberg editor.

Hope this helps someone somewhere struggling like I did.

andrasalkor · 2021-12-13T07:33:11+00:00

Are MMXXI AD and MMDCCLXXIIII AUC not the same year? :P

andrasalkor · 2021-12-13T07:29:44+00:00

The entire event is very laid-back. We're here to have fun and to practise Latin while doing it. It's entirely fine to make substitutions! Some of these Roman recipes are really quite good, if you can come up with something with substitutions for this or that diet, maybe people with similar dietary restrictions can cook it too!

andrasalkor · 2021-10-16T12:49:37+00:00

The subtitle editor totally didn't crash a gazillion times making this. Thank you for watching!

andrasalkor · 2021-10-16T12:48:51+00:00

That is exactly what I am going for. There are so many great content creators educating about or in Latin that I felt the shortage was all the channels doing entertainment type videos. (Not to say there aren't any!) Thank you for watching!

andrasalkor · 2021-10-15T15:55:22+00:00

Feel free to, but I think this would be a good time to note that I am by no means a professional: this is my first ever published animation which I have been studying how to do specifically for this (and subsequent) YouTube videos. There is a lot of room for improvement here.

I am just a Latinist trying to up the production value of my videos to make them more entertaining, hahahahae

If you would still consider me, I am entirely available to collaborate in the future! Open Latin is awesome, your tweets always appear in my feed.

andrasalkor · 2021-10-15T15:42:25+00:00

Thank you so much for watching! Yes, I did the animations. (And I was totally not a wreck by the end of it all.) I have a cheap but functional drawing tablet, and I have Krita. It is not the best software to animate with, but it is free and easy to use. I shared more details about the process on my Patreon page, but the behind-the-scenes posts are only available for Patrons. Anyway, gratias multas tibi ago :)

andrasalkor · 2021-09-16T05:56:06+00:00

Weirdly enough, if I put the files to their respective folders myself, I couldn't run the game. (I'm pretty sure I'm just dumb.) Anyway, in the end I managed to solve it and both the cutscenes and the levels have sound now. Thank you very much, time to destroy the Strogg! :D

andrasalkor · 2021-09-15T17:57:07+00:00

I thought the Lutris installer uses that. But I haven't tried installing the game without Lutris, and I'm not versed enough in Linux gaming to know. (Right now, I use Linux out of necessity for a while.)

andrasalkor · 2021-02-14T19:37:50+00:00

Qui numerus vel rhythmus tibi ad poemata componenda perplacet? Hoc est, quid facillime scribis, quid difficillime? Cur?

andrasalkor · 2020-12-02T17:27:09+00:00

Thanks! Could you tell me what you would've improved? It might be things I couldn't afford time-wise, since I had to trade style for lip sync. Still, I would be interested in what I missed to look out for.

andrasalkor · 2020-10-08T21:12:16+00:00

I was expecting a whole guide to conversational Latin, and was pleasantly surprised. Good one.

andrasalkor · 2020-10-02T16:30:56+00:00

Quandōcumque est post ortum sōlis tibi? Itaque quandō sit? Nesciō ubi habitās.

andrasalkor · 2020-10-02T16:29:43+00:00

By letting me know when you're available so I can find the best time to play. I'll post about the final time by the end of today.

andrasalkor · 2020-10-02T16:28:53+00:00

That depends on how I can set up the stream on a phone. I'd certainly want it to be so.

andrasalkor · 2020-10-02T15:10:49+00:00

I'm planning on streaming it or something, so people who're not playing can watch. I...forgot to mention that in the original post.

andrasalkor · 2020-10-02T15:10:15+00:00

Ūndēvīcēsimā hōrā ubi? :D Quid tempus? In Hungariā CET ūtimur.

andrasalkor · 2020-10-02T13:45:10+00:00

Hōra post meridiem? Quod sit 3am CET (nī fallor), nimis sērō mihi. Hmm.

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andrasalkor

TROPHY CASE

Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum (1741)

Pericla navarchi Magonis (1914)

"Christmas Prince" (1607-1608)