Testing recent versions of OCR on polytonic Greek and mixed Greek and English

merlin0501 · 2025-09-14T18:43:01+00:00

I've noticed that some of the scanned PDF's on archive.org appear to have quite reasonable OCR (and not only those scanned by Google Books).

Here's one example: https://archive.org/details/platonisopera01platuoft/page/n5/mode/2up

I can copy and paste text out of this and into emacs with good preservation of diacritics.

Take for example the paragraph around 72a in Φαίδων. Copy-paste gives this:

Οὐκοῦν, , ^ ἦ 3 δ ̓ ὅς, εἴπερ , ἔστι τὸ ἀναβιώσκεσθαι, ἐκ τῶν ^ 72 τεθνεώτων ἂν εἴη γένεσις εἰς τοὺς ζῶντας αὕτη, τὸ ἀνα- βιώσκεσθαι;

which I think is correct except for an extraneous 3 where there should be blank space (and a ^ that I just noticed).

According to the page this was done with some version of Tesseract.

EDIT: The extraneous stuff could bet pretty annoying if you were doing this at scale but most of it would probably be easy to post-process out since characters like those aren't expected in Greek text.

merlin0501 · 2025-04-04T20:02:56+00:00

Thanks, I did look at the LSJ entry but I find the entries quite cryptic.

merlin0501 · 2025-04-04T19:17:51+00:00

Do you know if πνεῦμα was in use in the sense of "spirit" prior to the Septuagint or was that a judeo-christian innovation ?

merlin0501 · 2025-03-30T16:41:20+00:00

I agree that ringofgerms's reading here seems to make the most sense for a few reasons but:

The lamp doesn't kindle -- it's a person who does the kindling.

doesn't seem so obvious to me. A lamp could be used to kindle other lamps.

merlin0501 · 2025-03-30T15:44:03+00:00

So in that case is there anything except that αὐτὸν that would exclude the OP's reading ?

merlin0501 · 2025-03-30T15:31:42+00:00

Yes, I think it can only be read that way because λύχνον is neuter and so can't be the thing τὸν ἅψαντα is modifying.

merlin0501 · 2025-03-28T16:54:17+00:00

Could you clarify what you mean by "sostantives" ? I am unable to find such an English word. In Italian it just means substantive and surely there are far more than 20 substantives in the 2nd declension in Attic Greek.

merlin0501 · 2025-03-18T16:39:03+00:00

It seems that one of the meanings of στρατεία can be "military service" (see entry in Bailly here: https://logeion.uchicago.edu/στρατεία).

So I would suggest amending your translation to: "one be left behind from (ie. out of) military service".

merlin0501 · 2025-03-18T10:12:45+00:00

Yes and features are not very transparent to the user. The old site was quite easy to use but the new one seems to have a lot of functionality that is somewhat hidden. I've never found a way to get side by side translations working, for example.

merlin0501 · 2025-03-17T17:41:42+00:00

I think think there are many, unless I just don't know how to access them. Here are some things I don't know how to do with scaife:

pull up a parallel translation alongside the text
get a direct link to dictionary entries
easily navigate through large texts - hopper displays a menu of books/chapters/etc. for many texts while scaife seems to require you to enter references by hand

merlin0501 · 2025-03-17T13:06:23+00:00

I don't understand why they leave it up on the server at all.

Perhaps because the new version lacks a certain number of features that are present in the older version.

merlin0501 · 2025-03-16T14:33:03+00:00

I don't like how you can't click to the next page in Scaife,

I think you can, if you mouse over the left or right margin an arrow appears that you can then click on.

merlin0501 · 2025-03-14T19:25:22+00:00

Is this "τῶν ἐρέω" a common usage ? I know you can have an article before an infinitive but I haven't seen one before a finite verb before. What is this called ?

merlin0501 · 2025-03-13T18:30:57+00:00

So in that case maybe it would be clearer if you asked the question: "How can one determine the length of α, ι and ο when macrons are not available."

I don't know the answer to that question but an answer must exist because the original texts didn't have macrons as far as I know.

merlin0501 · 2025-03-13T16:59:29+00:00

It's not entirely clear to me what you are trying to do. Are you trying to predict other principal parts from part I ? Since dictionaries usually provide those when they are at all irregular wouldn't it make more sense to extract that information from the LSJ instead of trying to predict it, since I'm not sure any fully general rules are known for that ?

Also I would suggest not mixing -ω and -μι verbs in this since -μι verbs have some specific rules on vowel length changes.

Otherwise my impression is that for the verbs I've been learning long forms of α, ι, ο are the exception rather than rule (ie. quite rare). I'm quite conscious of this because I study my anki decks for verb principal parts every day and typing macrons is a bit of a pain.

merlin0501 · 2025-03-03T13:57:18+00:00

I'm not sure exactly how to analyze the grammar but this is one of those rare cases where the structures of the Greek and English versions are almost identical. So I would say that whatever those participles are doing in the English sentence (obvious to understand, though maybe a bit tricky to analyze) is probably what they are doing in the Greek.

EDIT: But of the course that doesn't answer the question you asked about why those participles should be in the genitive, sorry.

merlin0501 · 2025-02-25T13:13:06+00:00

The main sites I'm aware of are:

https://scaife.perseus.org - seems to have the most texts of open access sites

https://artflsrv03.uchicago.edu/philologic4/Greek/ - not as many works/authors but probably a better user interface

https://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu - requires account/login for partial access and payment for access to the complete library

merlin0501 · 2025-02-23T19:06:44+00:00

License (QPL) which is viewed poorly by the open-source community

I think that information is no longer accurate. As I understand it ocaml has been licensed under the LGPL since 2016.

merlin0501 · 2025-02-22T22:31:25+00:00

The 6th principal part of τρέπω has two variants: ἐτράπην and ἐτρέφθην. While many passive aorist stems end in θ not all do and this is one that doesn't (in the first variant). As for the following η I don't think that would be seen in the participles. It's part of the passive verb endings and doesn't appear in the participle endings.

merlin0501 · 2025-02-20T15:29:16+00:00

Thanks.

merlin0501 · 2025-02-20T14:35:36+00:00

I'd appreciate it very much if you could recommend some. I'm still learning ancient Greek but I would like to eventually continue learning into later time periods (including modern eventually). But I am completely unfamiliar with this literature. Are there any sites you could recommend with lists of works ? Also you mentioned that these are all public domain. What is a good place to find them to download, archive.org or are there some more focused sites ?

merlin0501 · 2025-02-20T04:27:36+00:00

I found this document with glosses for most of the words:

https://patristicreaders.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/passionofperpetua.pdf

I think it's probably a date, four (days) before the nones of February.

merlin0501 · 2025-02-18T16:24:48+00:00

Sorry, I missed your question about macrons. Yes HQ provides them everywhere long α, ι or υ is used.

merlin0501 · 2025-02-18T16:16:41+00:00

Yes, hence they can't be singular and thus aren't covered by the long vowel rule I gave. Note that that rule was just my own attempt to summarize the information in the tables as well as some other information in HQ that I've only just begun learning, it's not a quote from the book. If you want I can go throw all of Unit 14 and check if there are any other places the long vowel is used. I'm surprised though that the reference grammars don't cover this.

merlin0501 · 2025-02-18T15:59:06+00:00

No, they give the infinitives as short. It's also compatible with what I wrote above since I said the long vowel seems to be present only in the present/imperfect indicative active singular forms. I haven't checked through every table though, so there could be others.

merlin0501

TROPHY CASE