Collatinus — User’s Manual

Yves Ouvrard <yves.ouvrard@collatinus.org>

Version 10

1. Introduction

Collatinus lemmatizes Latin texts: if you give a declined or conjugated form, Collatinus can find the word you should look up in a dictionary to learn its various meanings, how it’s translated into another language, and other information dictionaries provide.

Version 9 added the ability to look for meanings words acquire in combination. A good example is the expression nauis longa, or its inflected forms nauem longam, longae nauis, etc. Collatinus 8 gave this:

• longus, a, um : long
• nauis, is, f. : ship

But nauis longa means, not “long ship,” but “battleship,” and now Collatinus produces this analysis:

• nauis, is, f. : ship
• ¶ nauis longa : warship
• longus, a, um : long

Collatinus also performs morphological analysis; for example, if you ask it to analyze the form legem, it answers:

legem
   lego, as, are: bequeath, will; entrust,
         send as an envoy, choose as a deputy
   lex, legis, f.: motion, bill, law, statute;
         principle; condition
         accusative feminine singular

Collatinus is useful especially for Latin teachers, enabling them quickly to prepare supplementary and unusual readings for their students, complete with lexical aids. Students often use Collatinus to read Latin more easily when their vocabulary and familiarity with inflection are still weak.

Obviously, Collatinus is of no use to good Latinists seeking only their own reading pleasure.

1.1. Uninstalling

Find the directory in which Collatinus was installed, usually

C:\Program Files\collatinus\

and run the program uninst.exe.

1.2. Compiling

Collatinus is free software, and anyone who agrees to place the resulting program under the same free license can modify and compile it. For more information, see the last section of this manual and the file COPYING included with this program.

2. Quick start

If you want to try Collatinus without having to read the whole manual, here are the steps for basic usage:

1. Start Collatinus,
   • on the command line

     $ collatinus

   • or by clicking on its icon
   • or from your desktop menu.
2. Click on the button Onerare, the second from the left.
3. In the dialog which appears, choose a file and click on Open or OK.
4. The Latin text should appear. Let your mouse pointer hover over a word for a second to get its morphological analysis.
5. Click on the button Omnia lemmatizare, the sixth from the left.
6. The text’s vocabulary should appear.
7. In the file menu (Capsa), choose Scribere. A dialog offers to save your work. The format depends on the tab chosen at the bottom of the window: text, html or LaTeX.

3. The Latin text

Collatinus makes it easy to prepare little known Latin texts and to make them accessible by giving non-specialists the vocabulary they lack. But how to acquire the texts?

3.1. From a book

Copying by hand takes a long time. One can make a digital image and use a program for optical character recognition, but that also takes considerable time and it’s not very reliable: it’s almost impossible for the proofreader to achieve perfect accuracy, and programs have trouble recognizing the type used in older books.

3.2. From a CD-ROM

This is a costly but very interesting solution. I know of at least two publishers who offer the whole ancient corpus: PHI (Packard Humanities Institute) and Teubner. You can find their address through a search engine.

3.3. From the internet

This approach is more and more fruitful. Enter the incipit of the work or the passage you want, surrounded by quotation marks, in a search engine. For example:

"is fuit in uultu uisae sine ueste Dianae"

After a few false starts, that should lead to the whole text of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Note that I’ve used uultu rather than vultu. Each gives results, but you should think of both possibilities. Some sites, which you’ll soon come to know, specialize in publishing Latin. They are noted on Weblettres, among other places: www.weblettres.net/sommaire.php?entree=16&rubrique=54

Then put the Latin text in Collatinus’ window. Of course, you’ll need to start Collatinus with the command

$ collatinus

You can copy and paste: in your browser, select the text and copy it (Ctrl+C); in Collatinus, click in the upper part and then paste (Ctrl+V). You can also save the text found on the internet or on a CD to your hard disk, and then load it with Capsa/Onerare.

Once you have the text, you should re-read it often, modifying or correcting it.

4. Lemmatizing

This can be done in two ways:

• By letting your mouse pointer hover over a Latin form. A tooltip appears, giving all lemmas from which that form can arise, with complete morphological analyses.
• If you want to keep your work to save it or to print it, you must first choose a format. Collatinus offers three:
  1. plain text, ready for formatting in a word processor;
  2. html, to be touched up in an HTML editor and put online;
  3. LaTeX, which you can touch up and compile for high quality printing. Many sites allow you to teach yourself LaTeX, which, in my opinion, is a better solution than word processing.

To copy the lemmatization of a word into your work, just click on it.

• If you want to lemmatize the whole text in one go, click on the button Omnia lemmatizare, or use the menu Lemmata/Omnia lemmatizare. In that case, the morphology isn’t added, but you can choose to sort the lemmas alphabetically and even to make the inflected form precede each lemma.

Since Collatinus is not infallible, you are strongly advised to re-read and correct what it produces. Collatinus lists without hesitation interpretations any human reader would eliminate without even thinking: for example, forms of the lemma sus, suis, f.: pig, which are rare but homonymous with the ubiquitous possessive suus, sua, suum.

At any time, you can erase the whole lower window with a button on the toolbar or an option under the Editio menu. You can also erase everything with the first button on the left.

5. Inflection and other uses

The Flexio tab shows the inflection of a word you click on. This function is provided without guarantee; you should warn students that the resulting tables may be incorrect. In particular, it displays the passive of verbs which have no passive and declines certain irregular words as if they were regular.

Collatinus is often used for other purposes than preparing a text for printing and distribution to students. For that reason, we have made it possible for teachers to restrict functions which may tempt students to neglect study of declensions and conjugations or to give up on memorizing vocabulary.

A fresh installation of Collatinus comes with all its functions enabled. You can restrict them from the menu Lemmata/Magister. For use on a network, it suffices to make the indices of Collatinus read-only for users whose possible misuse of the software you wish to prevent.

The dialog which pops up lets you

• decide how unusual a word must be for students to receive help (the most common words are grade 0, and the rarest grade 5);
• decide whether students will have access to the morphological analysis which appears in tooltips when the mouse pointer hovers over a word.

Some pedagogical uses for Collatinus:

• It can serve as a reading aid: load the text, try to read it, and when you have trouble let the mouse pointer hover over a word you can’t figure out. Sometimes the opposite happens: Collatinus doesn’t know a word which the reader does know. In that case, it should be added to the lexicon. I haven’t yet published the program I use to edit the lexicon—it’s really not presentable—but I’ll do so as soon as it’s less of an embarrassment.
• You can have students use it to make specific lists: all third-declension nouns in a text, the lexical field of justice, words related to duco, etc.
• Collatinus can provide material you can work up into lexical statistics.

6. The Gaffiot

Félix Gaffiot died in 1937. Seventy years later, in 2007, the first edition of his Dictionnaire fell into the public domain. Thanks to Gérard Jeanneau’s digitization, for which we are grateful, the whole of Gaffiot’s dictionary can be consulted from within Collatinus, either manually or automatically. For access to the Gaffiot, just click on the second tab, at the bottom of the application. Clicking on a word in the Latin text leads automatically to the corresponding entry in Gaffiot. You may also look a word up manually in the search bar.

7. The data

Collatinus’ data is in the files named lemmata.??. Version 10 comes with six such files, each corresponding to a European language:

• lemmata.de for German;
• lemmata.uk for English;
• lemmata.ca for Catalan;
• lemmata.es for Spanish;
• lemmata.fr for French;
• lemmata.gl for Galician.

The Lemmata menu lets you choose a target language; in the same menu, Calepino gives you all six simultaneously.

7.1. The first part of a lemmata file

is the dictionary proper; its format is very simple:

canonical form|pattern number|perfect stems (separated by commas)|supine stems (comma)|text of the entry

example:

anteeo|23|anteii,anteiu|anteit|antĕĕo, is, ire, ii, itum : go/walk before/ahead…

For the pattern number, cf. word endings.

The text of the entry gives the morphological data (genitive, gender, principal parts, translation). A p in the heading indicates that the word is always declined in the plural. For nouns of the first and second declensions and verbs following the pattern of amo, the roots are automatically calculated, not listed. But irregularities may be noted:

do|17|ded|dat|das, dare, dedi, datum : give
tenebrae|0|tenebr||arum, f. p. : darkness

7.2. The second part

must be preceded by the line

---desinentiae---

Here is the format for a word ending:

ending|case|gender|number|degree|person|tense|mood|voice|pattern|part number

Example:

ebimini|0|0|2|0|2|2|1|1|25|1

Here is what those numbers mean in the database:

7.3. The third and final part

is only for irregular forms. It must be preceded by the line

---irregulares---

Here is the format for an irregular form:

form|lemma|case|gender|number|degree|person|tense|mood|voice

Example:

deabus|dea|5|0|2|0|0|0|0|0

The numbers mean the same as for word endings.

8. Syntactic data

Idioms are recorded in the file expressions.fr, whose format is like this, with the elements numbered from zero:

Latin idiom|translation|no. of the element triggering display|lemma.morph.agrees in.agrees with|another lemma.morph. etc.

Examples:

aduersi dentes|les dents de devant|0|dens...|aduersus.m.cn.0
abrumpere uitam a ciuitate|rompre avec sa patrie|3|abrumpo.act..|uita.ac s..|a...|ciuitas.ab s..

In the first example, the idiom will be displayed when dentes is lemmatized. Dens can be in any case, and the adjective aduersus will agree in case and number (cn) with no. 0, that is, dens.

In the second example, four forms are defined. The fields for morphology and agreement are left empty for the preposition a. The idiom will appear under ciuitas.

8.1. Abbreviations in the database

9. License

Collatinus is published under the GNU General Public License. The text of that license is included with and must always accompany the program. You should read it attentively and note that more and more programs and documents are released under its terms. In sum, the source code of Collatinus must be easily accessible, with no surcharge. In its original distribution, the source is given in the same archive as the binary. Any further work which uses all or part of Collatinus must be placed under the same license.

I wanted Collatinus to be free so as to help the Latin language remain what it has been since antiquity: the symbol of a European and even world-wide culture, indispensable despite what is often said of it.