4 ms·

I’d love to know more about how they determined this was a new document rather than a copy of another. Is there a central catalogue of all Ancient Greek texts t

• jan_Inkepa 4y ago
  I don't have an overview, but there are various databases for greek and latin inscriptions - https://inscriptions.packhum.org/allregions https://inscriptions.packhum.org/allregions for example is a big one. For written materials, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/ http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/ is pretty good, but I don't think that has rarer stuff. Compared to Chinese textual sources (where it's pretty easy to find/search gigantic digitized catalogues of old chinese texts - though I don't know much about it so maybe it's lacking in many ways once one starts delving deeper), digital humanities in european languages seems to be lagging behind. Archive.org does a lot of heavy lifting for medieval latin texts, but the disadvantage is that they're not 'digitized' in the sense of being correctly OCR-ed (which is a minefield for Medieval Latin because of all the abbreviations). You have lots of individual endeavours to catalogue various types of material, and some are really good/nice, but that they're not integrated together is a minor pity (though maybe there is some nice site that I don't know about). I'm not a professional in this field, nor that learned, I've just dabbled and experienced varying degrees of frustration/satisfaction. Maybe someone who actually has an overview/proper knowledge of the field can comment, but until they do that's my layperson perception of the landscape...
• bigbillheck 4y ago
  > Is there a central catalogue of all Ancient Greek texts Yes, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae: http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu
  • theoldlove 4y ago
    TLG doesn’t have inscriptions.
  • jan_Inkepa 4y ago
    That just covers literary texts it seems, so you'd probably want an epigraphy source for texts like the one in question?
  • rob74 4y ago
    How appropriate for a Thesaurus of Ancient Greek to have a... Latin name? Wait a minute...
    • jhbadger 4y ago
      The name is a reference to an earlier (paper) collection of Greek texts from the 16th century, Henri Estienne's Thesaurus Graecae Linguae. Although Estienne was French, the commentary and the like were in Latin as that was the tradition in scholarly work at the time.
      • ARandomerDude 4y ago
        > that was the tradition in scholarly work at the time True, though it's stronger than that. Latin was the closest thing to a universal language in Europe at that time, serving a role similar to that of the English language today.
        • jhbadger 4y ago
          Exactly. Like if somebody had a modern collection of Greek texts and called it "A Collection of Greek Texts" in English people wouldn't think it that strange that the title wasn't in Greek.
        • dredmorbius 4y ago
          Yes, in the sense that Latin was the common language. But the sense was far stronger in that texts existed in Latin. And for the most part, not in other languages. (I'm not sure what the status of Greek was, given that much of Roman (and Byzantine) culture actually used Greek.) In modern terms, producing a single copy of a book cost on the order of half-a million to a million dollars: 300 cattle for the vellum medium, and 4-12 months of a scribe's work to copy out the text. It was vastly more tractable to bring readers to texts (by teaching the small literate portion of the population Latin) than to bring texts to readers. This all changed with the introduction of the printing press, one of the first consequences of which was creation of a large vernacular literature, both through translation of Latin works and the creation of new works in the common tongue. That also turned out to be highly disruptive, in interesting ways.