Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Great Scott! Perseus (full LSJ and Lewis-Short) on your computer!

In the previous post, Jeremy linked to a notice regarding the Diogenes program which reported (in October 2007; am I among the last to find this?):
Announcing the release of version 3.1 of Diogenes, a free program for reading the databases of Latin and Greek texts published on CD-Rom by the Packard Humanities Institute and the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae.

The major new feature in this version is that, thanks to the generosity of the Perseus project, morphological data and dictionaries for Latin (Lewis-Short) and Greek (LSJ) and are built-in.
After checking with Jeremy and installing the program, I can confirm that you don't need the PHI / TLG CD-Rom to make this work. What it does do is put the full Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon on your computer along with the Lewis & Short Latin lexicon. Not having purchased either of these, I have in the past resorted to using the wonderful Perseus website (I have created external links from within BibleWorks7 and Logos; not sure if Accordance can do that), but users of the site know that it does not always work and can be painfully slow sometimes. As the graphic below shows, Diogenes certainly doesn't provide all the linked information available on the Perseus site. If all you need are dictionary entries and parsing information, though, Diogenes is an incredible tool... and free!
Some notes and things to keep in mind:
  • The installation program is a 64Mb download, and after installation, it will take up slightly more than 500Mb on your harddrive.
  • There are versions for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.
  • Diogenes is very fast and opens in its own browser type of window.
  • If you are not using the PHI/TLG CD, you can choose one of two "Actions" (see the top graphic):
    "Look up a word in a dictionary" or
    "Parse the inflection of a Greek or Latin word."
  • Just leave the "Corpus" at "TLG Texts."
  • In the "Query," you will need to use Unicode input for the Greek. Diogenes is smart enough to know whether to search the Greek or Latin depending on your input language.
  • When your results appear, you can click on other Greek/Latin words that are linked in the lexicons, but you won't be able to click on the links to items on the TLG/PHI disk.
  • One little bug: it looks like Diogenes omits section number headings on the lexical entries.
Now, if someone can figure out how to pass parameters from the Bible software into this program...
Thanks for pointing out this resource, Jeremy. To learn about this resource is one of the reasons why I blog.

UPDATE: Check this blog post by SFJohnson for more info on Diogenes and its LSJ implementation in relation to the text and implementation in Logos.

2 comments:

  1. You're quite welcome. :) Diogenes is such a helpful tool for me that I use it all the time for my Greek and Latin studies. Thanks for the details in the post. They're quite helpful as well.

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  2. Have you tried Perseus under Philologic? It works much faster than old site: http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/PERSEUS/

    Also, Peter Heslin is set to discuss the future of Diogenes at the Institute of Classical Studies Works-in-Progress Seminars in London on Aug 22:
    http://www.stoa.org/?p=805

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