Verba

Verba is a console-based Latin-English dictionary application based on the public domain dictionary An Elementary Latin Dictionary (1895) by Charlton T. Lewis.

Verba provides a console-based Latin-English dictionary in which a search may be conducted using any form of a word. For instance, if you were to search for the word arma, verba would return:

arma (arma):
    - noun nom neut pl
    - noun voc neut pl
    - noun acc neut pl
1. arma, ōrum; noun neut
    1 AR-, implements, outfit, [rest elided for brevity]

arma (armo):
    - verb second person sg pres imperat act
1. armo, āuī, ātus, āre;
    arma, to furnish with weapons [rest elided for brevity]

Lewis' An Elementary Latin Dictionary was digitized by the Perseus Project by encoding this dictioanry into TEI XML. The Perseus project also has generated morphological forms from the text corpus, and this is available in the Perseus Hopper source.

License

• The file /org/perseus/lexicon/lewis.xml is licensed under the Creative Commons ShareAlike 3.0 License, according to the Perseus Project download page.
• The file /org/perseus/lexicon/latin.morph.xml is distributed with the Perseus Hopper source, which is (according only to the sourceforge project listing) licensed under the Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL 1.1). The Perseus Hopper project page claims that "...The exact license terms used by this project on their project summary page and in the licensing documents included in their downloads", but I have found nothing detailing the license anywhere in the source distribution.

I would prefer to release under the GPL, but since Perseus won't dual-license I'm releasing this software under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) 1.1 using a provision (section 13) permitting licensing under the GPL. The only files not covered by this license are the two listed above.

Source and pre-built binaries

Source is available from the verba-console git repository: https://github.com/grantham/verba-console

Pre-built binaries are available from http://www.magnopere.org

Prerequisites

The following must be installed to run:

• A recent Java (6 or later)
• SQLite 3 (the sqlite3 command must be in your system path).

In order to build, you'll need:

• A recent JDK (6 or later)
• SQLite 3 (the sqlite3 command must be in your system path).
• ant

Building

1. call:

    $ ant -Dinstallation.dir=/home/you/bin/verba-1.0.0 -Dproject.version=1.0.0 install
   

This will build the jar, a script to start the application, and the database.

Both of the -D parameters are optional:

• if installation.dir is not specified, install will create a ./verba-installation directory and install there.
• if project.version us bit specified, the current version + _-SNAPSHOT- is used.

Installing

From source:

Simply run the ant install target, passing in the path to the desired installation directory:

    $ ant -Dinstallation.dir=/path/to/installation/dir install

From pre-built binaries

Download the distribution zip file from http://www.magnopere.org and unzip in your preferred location.

For convenience, either add the verba.sh script to your system path or create a script in your system path which changes to the verba-console installation directory and invokes the verba.sh script.

Running

If you did not put a verba.sh (or a script which invokes it) in your system path:

1. $ cd /path/to/installation/dir
2. $ ./verba.sh

Otherwise, just enter the script name you created in the console.

When verba starts, simply enter any form of a latin word you wish to look up at the prompt:

$ uerba> arma

Spell the word however you wish, as Verba will internally rectify the orthography to one using the consonantal u/i system.

The form of a word will be mapped to one or more lemmas (i.e. terms in a dictionary). The part of speech and matching inflectional forms will be listed for each matching lemma along with the definition for each lemma.

For instance, if you entered arma

$ uerba> arma

you would see this result:

arma (arma):
    - noun nom neut pl
    - noun voc neut pl
    - noun acc neut pl
1. arma, ōrum; noun neut
    1 AR-, implements, outfit, [rest elided for brevity]

arma (armo):
    - verb second person sg pres imperat act
1. armo, āuī, ātus, āre;
    arma, to furnish with weapons [rest elided for brevity]

The form arma matches two lemmas: a noun, and a verb.

• For the noun, we list three inflectional noun forms which arma matches, then procede to give the definition.
• For the verb, we list the single inflectional verb form that arma matches as a verb, then procede to give the definition.