Humanist Latin Dictionary: Software Review

Rob Latousek's Centaur Systems is responsible for the final software packaging and marketing of this partially annotated dictionary compiled by William Harris, professor emeritus of Middlebury College. The content material has migrated across several systems and operating systems in its odyssey of development. It is now available for both the MAC and the IBM compatible (using Windows). I have only used the IBM compatible edition of Humanist Latin Dictionary.

At this point Humanist Latin Dictionary is the only full fledged Latin lexicon available in electronic form. It is advertised as having over 15,000 entries, and it does include more words than a small dictionary such as Collins pocket dictionary. It also allows you to work in conjunction with any text of your choice, providing that you have an electronic edition of it, in what is called "text file" format. The graphical user interface of the program has been arranged conveniently for the user, especially the user who may wish to have several programs and windows open at the same time. It has a compact toolbar at the bottom of its dictionary window that offers Latin or English access to the dictionary, and allows the user to check the entries before or after the target entry by the touch of a button. Besides enabling searches for full Latin words in their lexical form (as they are listed in the dictionary), it also allows partial look ups, which it calls stem (first part of a word) or root (any contiguous string of letters anywhere in a word). Further, it allows the user to mark words for later recall, and then to view marked words in sequence, and better yet to recall and view those same words in a later session.

With these capabilities Centaur Systems' Humanist Latin Dictionary is worth having available as a general library or classroom resource, as well as for more specific curricular use. In this later role it would serve well as a way for a teacher to extend the class's reach beyond the textbook, provided the students have access to computers. Since this program allows the option of adding notes with any vocabulary word, it allows the teacher to annotate passages with whatever further information is needed. A wide selection of texts are available on the Internet to use in the Text Window of this program. This is one way for school departments to stretch their book budgets beyond even Scrooge's imagination. Of course, the catch is the initial cost for computers and this program, and the continuing cost of quite considerable input by the teacher. Though this is the greatest opportunity that a program like this offers, and will be the way that the academic world goes not too many years in the future, still at this time the two biggest reasons for getting this program are 1) the ability to tailor-make and print out specialized vocabulary lists and 2) that aspect of this dictionary which is underscored in the first word of its title, 'humanist'. Prof. Harris evinces a lively interest in many aspects of ancient culture and the history of words which is encapsulated in some illuminating and intriguing notes that are sprinkled through out the entries and that highlight key words and those that he found interesting for one reason or another. Some of those were his notes on qualis-qualitas, caballus, medicamentum, quanti, denarius, quadrantius, centaureum, battuo, sacer, coniugium-conubium, iudex, sabatta, profluvium, quartanus, and sagina. These show the breadth of Professor Harris' interests, from numismatics to social customs to linguistic history.

The IBM edition has heavy hardware requirements: 8 megabytes of RAM and 9 megabytes of harddrive storage (the MAC version is a little lighter, requiring only 6.1 Mb of RAM). I ran it under Windows95 on both a 486 66mh machine with 8 Mb RAM and a 686 90 Mh Cyrix with 32 Mb RAM. It was faster on the more powerful hardware, but still no speed demon. In particular, you must be careful not to hit the wrong key, (e.g., mark, view, clear, root); on the fast machine each took about 20 seconds to complete the cycle. That's when there are no hits; it can take much longer, if you are looking up something from the English.

Though the Humanist Latin Dictionary is now the only full Latin lexicon on the market, it will very soon have very strong competition from Latin Perseus, which, like the Greek Perseus, will offer several very useful options not available with HLD, including the ability to look up a word by clicking on it in the text, and to get some morphological and syntactic analysis as well as lexical information. Some of the irritating things about this incarnation of HLD are that there is no way to stop a search; that the user cannot continue a search and at the same time scroll the lexical screen or mark a word, that the scroll down key is right over the exit button, and that there are no built-in hyperlinks, and no capability of adding them.

The author's supplementary notes on individual words are interesting but they are sporadic and far between. This lexicon is in no sense encyclopedic; for the most part the information is a basic range of meanings and a comment on the freqency of usage. There is no regular Latin or Indo-European etymology, no linguistic history, no commentary on usage, and no cultural or historical commentary. There are several instances where there are false references (e.g. to materies s.v. lignum) and one error of fact that I came across: s.v. pronuba the note claims that Juno was the sworn enemy of Dido. Despite these limitations Humanist Latin Dictionary certainly fills a strongly perceived need for digitized reference resources and will have a strong niche in the market for some time in the future; indeed, in my estimation its niche will increase in direct proportion to the extent that it comes out with upgrades 1) that add some of the desiderata listed above and 2) that recode the program to improve its search engine or to handle the data more efficiently in order to speed up the its reaction time.

Allan Wooley
Phillips Exeter Academy