Category: Database

This category includes posts that discuss computer databases that allow storage and retrieval of information for automated lexica, web sites, and other tools that serve the interests of students and teachers of Ancient Greek.

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Argument Structure in Hellenistic Greek

I have uploaded my paper, “Argument Structure in Hellenistic Greek” to two places. You can read it here at Greek-Language.com at the following location:

You can also view it at Academia.edu.

This paper is an updated version of one I presented at a national meeting of the SBL in the late 1990s. A slightly updated version was published by Forum, the journal of the Westar Institute in 1999 under the title “From the Lexicon to the Sentence: Argument Structure in Hellenistic Greek.”

This latest version lays out my proposals for information that should be included in an electronic lexicon of Hellenistic Greek.  Serious advances in digital technology have made it possible to include information about syntactic and semantic relationships that would have been impractical only a few years ago, and in the context of the work that Jonathan Robie and I are doing on using XML to structure and query databases, I decided it was time to make my most recent proposals easier to locate.

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Using Pinax and Django for Collaborative Corpus Linguistics (Greek)

If you are interested in web design and the possibilities it presents for collaborative work in Ancient Greek Linguistics, you must see James Tauber’s BibleTech2010 talk (embedded below). It’s almost an hour long, but well worth the time.

James begins by explaining Django, a core tool for managing basic functionality on a website. He then explains Pinax, a product that runs on top of Django to power much of the functionality of social networking sites. He finishes this discussion, though by presenting the possibilities of using this combination to power collaborative work in corpus linguistics, using Biblical Greek as his example.

He is developing precisely the kind of tools needed to do the lexicon project I have in mind. Here’s the talk. Feel free to comment on its implications for Greek Linguistics.

Using Pinax and Django For Collaborative Corpus Linguistics from James Tauber on Vimeo.

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Database Design and the Hellenistic Greek Lexicon

Over the last few days I have had some interesting conversations with people who design databases (including my eldest son) regarding what would be involved in designing a database to allow lexical information for Ancient Greek to be presented in an extremely flexible manner so that the user of the lexicon could use any form of a given Greek word as the lemma under which to organize the lexicon.

If you are familiar with database design, I would love to hear your comments on this issue. If you are not, I’d be glad to address any questions I’m competent to answer.

How do you think the database should be structured to support the kind of lexicon I have proposed?