by John Whelpton, Baptist Lui Ming Choi Secondary School, Hong Kong, Indirizzo e-mail protetto dal bots spam , deve abilitare Javascript per vederlo

Finnish Radio’s Nuntii Latini programme, a 4-5 minute weekly news bulletin in Latin, with audio and written text available at http://www.yle.fi/radio1/tiede/nuntii_latini/ , is well-known to Classicists. Purists may have reservations about neo-Latin in general or about a `classical Latin’ which uses the medieval pronunciation of the diphthong `ae’, but the advantage of using interesting material linked to contemporary events surely outweighs the disadvantages.

For nearly a year, I have been working to make Nuntii accessible even to virtual beginners by glossing the words of the bulletin using the free-of-charge service available on GlobaLinguist's language learning and teaching website (http://www.wordchamp.com). Coverage is now complete for the bulletins from 9 March 2007 onwards (the main Nuntii site only allows access to bulletins from the last two months: broadcasts from May 2000 are archived at http://www.interrete.de/latein/nuntiifin.html). Particularly with less widely used languages like Latin, the bulk of WordChamp's content is user-generated and anybody who registers can create glosses via the site’s `Web Reader' function. Learners who just want to read on the site must also register, which simply involves providing an email address and selecting a user name and password, as shown in Fig. 1 below (students under 13 may only sign up if taking a class with a teacher already registered on the site).

Once registered, you select `Web Reader’ from the top of the site’s opening page and then either type in the Nuntii Latini URL in the space provided or, alternatively, paste into another box text which has previously been copied from the Nuntii site (see fig. 2 below). After twenty seconds or so of processing time, WordChamp will then display either the Nuntii site itself or the plain text and the reader can see the glosses by simply placing the cursor over individual Latin words (fig.3). New glosses can be provided, or old ones modified, by clicking `Add translations’ or `Edit translations’ in the pop-up box.

In contrast to the Electronic Pocket Oxford Dictionary, which both fully parses words and gives principal parts etc, I concentrate only on direct support to reading so that transportantur, for example, is glossed simply as `(they) are transported’. I generally provide fuller parsing where a simple translation would not indicate a word’s grammatical function, so the entry for maritimae reads `maritime, of the sea (ADJ FEM GEN DAT S, NOM PL)’. I hope this will enable learners to read extensively on the site, even before they have fully mastered the grammatical categories of Latin.

I am trying to get this facility known in the Classics community, both so that learners will make use of it and also so that anyone who feels competent to do so will expand the glosses to cover other material (e.g. the articles in the Warsaw-based Latin news magazine Ephemeris - http://ephemeris.alcuinus.net). Creating a large enough database is time consuming as each inflected form needs to be glossed separately and the more people who are contributing translations the better. As I am primarily an English teacher and academic historian, I would also be glad for feedback from someone less peripherally involved with Latin than I am myself.