Volunteer needed for proofreading the Latin of Irenaeus

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stephan happy huller
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Re: Volunteer needed for proofreading the Latin of Irenaeus

Post by stephan happy huller »

perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Irenaeus is the most tedious writer in history
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DCHindley
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Re: Volunteer needed for proofreading the Latin of Irenaeus

Post by DCHindley »

stephan happy huller wrote:perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Irenaeus is the most tedious writer in history
You'll get no argument from me on that!

Yet, all the more reason to be able to easily refer to the Latin (translation) of Irenaeus. Like you and many here, I have Latin Grammars and Lexicons to work out the meaning.

IMHO, the 19th century English translator rendered what he thought a "straight thinking" (proto-orthodox) Christian Irenaeus *should* have said. Jerome did the same kind of thing when he "translated" (read: "re-wrote") Origen's original Greek words into Latin.

Based on comparisons with the Greek fragments, the 2nd century Latin translator "barbarously" rendered the original Greek word for word without any attempt at making it flow as prose. I'll take that any day.

DCH
ficino
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Re: Volunteer needed for proofreading the Latin of Irenaeus

Post by ficino »

How many pages? I've taught Latin for many years. But I'm swamped with various things. Let me know. Or maybe some of us can split the job.
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DCHindley
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Re: Volunteer needed for proofreading the Latin of Irenaeus

Post by DCHindley »

ficino wrote:How many pages? I've taught Latin for many years. But I'm swamped with various things. Let me know. Or maybe some of us can split the job.
ficino,

The project is on the back burner at the moment. However ...

The OCR'd Latin text (no Greek or footnotes) of Harvey's edition, volume 1 (books 1 & 2), is 125 pages. "Oh, that doesn't seem so bad!" Yet then there is volume 2 (books 3 to 5), which is a more hefty 248 pages.

Not that the typeface is twice as dense in volume 2, but that about 1/3 of volume 1 has a 100 page introduction, all of which, by today's standards, is pretty much crap. I omitted that Intro as well (although it was scanned, with lots of errors, even though it's in plain English, because ABBY 11 found its funky font hard to read).

I would send you, via e-mail, the PDF of the two printed volumes (Greek, where it has been preserved, the Latin translation, and his footnotes), plus the corresponding MS Word files with the Latin text. As I mentioned, ABBY 11 does not like weird fonts, and misread several letters such as e, s, a, e and ligatures. Worse yet if the font was in italics. All I ask is that you read the text in the MS Word file, stop where the grammar or spelling seems wrong, check the PDF for the correct reading, make a change (maybe mark them in red), and move on - at your own pace.

It just surprised me that there is no UTF-8 Unicode Latin text available anywhere on the web, at least that I could find via Google, except for a chapter or two here or there. You can find the Greek fragments available as UTF-8 Unicode scans, but not the Latin, even though the Latin translation is the only relatively complete text of the five books that survives.

DCH
ficino
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Re: Volunteer needed for proofreading the Latin of Irenaeus

Post by ficino »

I'm very sorry, but I have taken on too much already. I cannot responsibly commit myself to working on this. At least, not until after June 2016 (unless I have to push that deadline back ... aargh).
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DCHindley
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Re: Volunteer needed for proofreading the Latin of Irenaeus

Post by DCHindley »

ficino wrote:I'm very sorry, but I have taken on too much already. I cannot responsibly commit myself to working on this. At least, not until after June 2016 (unless I have to push that deadline back ... aargh).
Thanks for the response, ficino. I'll get over the ... <sob> ... rejection!

DCH :whistling:
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