Diogenes is an open-source program that comes in handy for users who intend to look for ancient Latin or Greek words or phrases explanations. This piece of software will deliver you detailed information for any type of entered query in just a matter of seconds.
Once you launch the application, you will notice its simple and intuitive interface, manageable by any user. You will be able to easily find the meaning of any word/phrase written in ancient dialect related to Greek and Latin.
All you have to do in order to use this efficient tool is to select the type of action you wish to perform (look up a word in the dictionary, morphological search, browse to a specific passage, etc.), choose the proper database to look for the entered text and enter the query.
Unfortunately, the application won't come with many integrated databases; if you are looking for a more accurate search, download more databases from publishers like Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and the Packard Humanities Institute.
The program will offer you fast and accurate results depending on the selections you made previously; in case the searched word/phrase is not located within the selected database, the application will deliver you the nearest entry.
An advantage of using this piece of software is the fact that you can save the results as a HTML file and use it later on.
Therefore, Diogenes is a handy application that provides you with a fast and easy way to find ancient Latin or Greek words/phrases explanations.
v3.1 [Jun 9, 2010]
- Thanks to the Perseus Project, Diogenes now comes equipped with morphological data on all of the words in the TLG/PHI disks and with the LSJ Greek and Lewis-Short Latin dictionaries. It comes with an English dictionary, too, to make those dictionaries more accessible to non-native speakers of English. As a result of including all this data, the size of the download has increased enormously.
- Instead of linking to the Perseus web-page, clicking on Greek and Latin words now sends an AJAX request to Diogenes which inserts the analysis and definition into the margin of the page. Not only are the words in the databases clickable, so too are the words in the dictionary definitions: click on any Latin, Greek or English word to get its definition. Click on citations in the definition to jump to the context.
- Before distributing Diogenes, the Perseus analysis tool called Morpheus is run over the corpora, and the lemmata are matched up with dictionary definitions. The AJAX server script does a binary search on this list of analyses when a word is clicked. To enable morphological searching, an inverted list, with lemmata mapped to inflected forms, is also shipped with Diogenes.
- Unicode developments: Unicode input was added and made the default. Utf-8 output now prefers the basic Greek codepage where the extended codepage duplicates it. On the Mac, utf-8 additionally defaults to decomposed characters. Many Unicode equivalents were added from the TLG beta code manual.
- Upgraded to Xulrunner 1.9a8pre (pre-release codebase of Firefox 3), which fixes many Mac UI bugs. This means that the minimum requirement for the Mac is now version 10.4 of OS X.
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