Thomas Aquinas' works with English and original Latin presented in parallel

by danielam • 5 years ago

231 77 5 years ago

TheFreim3• 5 years ago

This is something I've wanted for so long! Amazing! Most sites hosting works such as those of St. Thomas Aquinas are often lacking, this looks great!

hodgesrm3• 5 years ago

Have you run across anything similar for Augustine? He is one of my favorite authors.

TheFreim3• 5 years ago

Other than paid software like Logos/Verbum bible software I don't know of anything like this, sadly.

mrkramer• 5 years ago

Wonderful!

tasty_freeze2• 5 years ago

Doesn't work for me on FF on windows 10.

There is no index on the left, the scrollbar thumb doesn't work, and when you scroll down with the arrow keys, it goes only a few paragraphs before stopping.

da_chicken• 5 years ago

Works for me on FF 89.0.2 64-bit Win10 20H2.

tasty_freeze2• 5 years ago

odd, it works for me now too

dr_dshiv• 5 years ago

https://alpheios.net/

Is an open source project for making alignments like this. Great for learning and close inspection.

bombcar• 5 years ago

This is a working system used to produce https://aquinasinstitute.org/operaomnia/ - you can sometimes see changes made in real-time if you’re observant.

SilasX2• 5 years ago

Wait is the English a translation or did he write them in both languages? I’m guessing the former since the English seems too modern (and writing both versions would be a lot of work).

TheFreim3• 5 years ago

It's a translation. It was originally written in Latin.

DemocracyFTW• 5 years ago

cf. 般諾波羅心經 which is, in fact, thought to have been first composed in Chinese, and later to be translated to Sanskrit. Also Aquinas was a 13th c Italian who ended up in Paris, so not altogether unreasonable that he did write in England, in English, given his conventionalized first name. I only say this to safeguard against comments along the lines that were my first impulse.

Finnucane2• 5 years ago

If Aquinas knew any English, it would have been more like Chaucer’s. It’s unlikely he would have had any reason to write books in English.

yummypaint• 5 years ago

It has been said that the quickest way to get a question answered online is to prominently post the wrong answer. I feel like this was Aquinas's role in the development of western philosophy.

unmole• 5 years ago

I don't follow. Can you elaborate?

52-6F-627• 5 years ago

Not OP, but from what I understand Aquinas seems to have had a fixed lens he allowed himself to view the world through and seemingly based the fundamentals of his philosophy on. Not even Aristotle could be properly studied without a Christian lens.

He's generally viewed as a net positive since Christiandom ruled the western world and Aquinas reconciled some Aristotelian and Neoplatonic views with the Catholic Church ("Nothing comes from nothing", "cause and effect", etc) But to Aquinas, those Neoplatonists from whom he derived his cosmology and philosophy were nothing better than pagans lining up to be burned in the good lord's holy fires—even though they figured the same thing about the way things appear to work.

benpbenp• 5 years ago

It is a joke based on Aquinas' style of answering questions. He begins with a handful of "objections" that take the opposite position to the one he eventually lands on. To take a random example, "Whether a man is bound to give thanks to every benefactor?" (https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q106.A3)

handrous2• 5 years ago

He wrote a lot about a variety of Big Topics in philosophy and theology, often getting things quite wrong, sometimes subtly, sometimes... less subtly. This has prompted much commentary, refutation, and further development toward better arguments.

agomez314• 5 years ago

This is incredible! Great work!

AdmiralAsshat• 5 years ago

Excellent. My Latin is crap these days, and if I had to read the original it would take an hour to get through a page with a dictionary open, but it's great to have the Latin right there if something in the English raises an eyebrow.

nerdponx• 5 years ago

It would be absolutely incredible to have a resource like The Latin Library (https://thelatinlibrary.com) with parallel translations.

Finnucane2• 5 years ago

Loebclassics.com, but requires subscription.

thwave• 5 years ago

Perseus Digital Library has a quite a few, in Greek as well. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collection?collection=Pe... https://scaife.perseus.org/library/

hodgesrm3• 5 years ago

This translation looks good from a quick scan. Reasonably faithful to the text of Aquinas without being unduly contorted to track the Latin structure. A nice effort!

dantondwa• 5 years ago

I wish this existed for every philosopher. This is marvelous and an example of what I love about the Internet!

slaymaker1907• 5 years ago

This reminds be of the "No Fear" series of classics which really helped me get into Shakespeare. What I usually do with stuff like this is read the original, read the translated/simplified version, and then finally read the original text again. I find that this method really helps both reinforce the meaning as well as appreciate the beauty of the original language.

arkj• 5 years ago

I found this curation of lectures https://aquinas101.thomisticinstitute.org/ (they are on apple podcast as well) very helpful to understand the thought of Aquinas. It's not like a typical course but collection of talks on aspects of Thomistic philosophy.

guerrilla4• 5 years ago

I like Aquinas, especially for his silly attempts to justify Aristotle's particular choice of categories, which eventually led to Occam proposing his razor... but why is this popular now?

silent_cal3• 5 years ago

He is much more satisfying to read than modern philosophers.

silent_cal3• 5 years ago

Because his philosophy is true.

silent_cal3• 5 years ago

St Thomas was a man of prayer and a Galaxy Brain!

cbfrench• 5 years ago

I’m prepared to go ahead and grant him Universe Brain status. ;)

svat3• 5 years ago

What are some other websites/resources like this? That is, ones that make a text easier to read, either with parallel translation or word lookup etc?

Listing the ones I know (in no particular order, just a list I had collected a while ago):

- Physical (print) books: Loeb Classical Library (Greek and Latin) https://www.loebclassics.com/, Clay Sanskrit Library (Sanskrit) http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org/volumes_current.php, Murty Classical Library of India (various languages) https://murtylibrary.com/volumes.php.

- Perseus Hopper (Greek and Latin), https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/

- Chinese Text Project (https://ctext.org/)

- https://nodictionaries.com/ (Latin)

- http://pseudw.herokuapp.com/iliad/books/1?start=500&end=589&... = https://github.com/nkallen/pseudw/ (Greek: The Iliad)

- http://alpheios.net/ (Latin, Greek)

- quran.com / legacy.quran.com / corpus.quran.com (The Quran: Arabic)

- Dickinson College Commentaries (Latin) e.g. https://dcc.dickinson.edu/tacitus-agricola/1

- "e-readers" under http://sanskrit.uohyd.ac.in/scl/ (Sanskrit)

- Gita Supersite (Sanskrit) e.g. https://www.gitasupersite.iitk.ac.in/srimad?language=dv&fiel...

- https://greenmesg.org/stotras/lakshmi/sri_suktam.php etc (Sanskrit)

- No Fear Shakespeare (https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/)

- https://github.com/tasuki/side-by-side e.g. https://enchiridion.tasuki.org https://ttc.tasuki.org/

- This one (https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.I.Pr.3)

Of these, http://alpheios.net/ and https://github.com/tasuki/side-by-side are ones that allow you to build your own webpages / present your own texts. Are there more?

peterburkimsher• 5 years ago

Shameless plug for my own Chinese-learning program, Pingtype. It does word-by-word translation as well. Here's a direct link to one example dataset (Bible)

https://pingtype.github.io/bible.html

svat3• 5 years ago

This is really cool; thank you! It was a bit hard at first to understand what was going on (and that the page was still loading), but after find the docs at https://pingtype.github.io/docs/docs.html I understand better, and it seems really impressive and useful. And it's really (pleasantly) surprising that the translation happens offline in the browser, after loading so little data (the font is bigger).

baltimore• 5 years ago

Sefaria - Jewish texts (Bible, Midrashim, Mishna, Talmud, etc.). Example of a side-by-side layout: https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.1?lang=bi&aliyot=0

gerdesj2• 5 years ago

This is a great resource but please for the love of Tommy, use modern English.

"Because the Teacher of Catholic truth ought not only to teach the proficient, but also to instruct beginners, according to the Apostle:"

I'm not looking for: "lol, don't preach to the choir rofl. The Big Guy says so." but it's 2020ish and not 1950.

I know exactly where that language style (in the translation) comes from and it needs to go away. If I find the word "thou" later, I will go (slightly) postal. OK my left eye will twitch a bit.

svat3• 5 years ago

Translations are not made every day; one has to pick from what is available (and in the public domain at that, for a website like this), and the translation used here is evidently the one published in 1922 in 21 volumes as being by "Fathers of the English Dominican Province" but actually by one person, Father Laurence Shapcote (1864–1947). (Via the article linked from https://thomistica.net/news/2011/9/13/the-shapcote-translati...)

In 1910 the Province decided to have the Summa translated. Fr Laurence brought out the first volumes before he left England, but the bulk of the work was done in South Africa. In addition he also translated the Summa Contra Gentes (4 volumes, 1923 –1929), and the Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia (3 volumes, 1932–34). This translation of the Summa is ‘literal’. […] In a way, for students who have no Latin, the Shapcote translation gives a better idea, more of the feel, of the original, even though it does not make conversation with St Thomas so easy.
Laurence Shapcote never wrote anything: there is no way of telling what his own ‘Thomism’ was. It is a century since he started work. He did not respond to suggestions that he should unmask his anonymity. Readers who are thankful for this literal translation would surely be all the more grateful if they knew that it was done by Laurence Shapcote alone, in very austere conditions, on the Rand and in Natal, doggedly translating his way through the major works of St Thomas.

But your comment is intriguing; I'm mostly struck by the idea that the style of 1950s is so much different from that of 2020s. (For reference, 1950 was the year of publication of Asimov's "I, Robot" collection of stories published earlier, or C. S. Lewis's "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe"; Greene's The Third Man and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four were published the previous year.) In what sense is the sentence fragment you quoted not modern English? You gave an example of what you're not looking for; could you also give an example of how you would rewrite it?

And what does this have to do with "thou", which went out of use in the 17th century? (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thou&oldid=102516...) A translation into standard English wouldn't have used "thou" even in 1950 (and this 1922 translation doesn't either, except in literal quotes from the King James Bible).

(Of course, neither of us is using the technical meaning of "modern English" which includes Shakespeare too https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Modern_English&ol... .)

gerdesj2• 5 years ago

Sorry for the late reply and thank you for spending quite a lot of time responding to me.

But your comment is intriguing; I'm mostly struck by the idea that the style of 1950s is so much different from that of 2020s.

I threw the 1950s into my comment because that is post WW2 and pre me - I'm 50 ie off of 1970 and onwards. I perhaps didn't think it through too much. I am a Brit wot went through the private school system in general apart from the six or seven schools in West Germany, London and Manchester before age eight. My upbringing was loosely observant Church of England.

The CofE Book of Common Prayer, Hymnal etc was full of thee and thou and was modernised to you and you around those decades. You still hear "for Thine is the Kingdom" in the Lord's Prayer even today.

Thine, thee and thou (your, you and you) are still in use. You also see what looks like Ye or ye but the letter that looks like Yy is really the letter thorn so ye is really thee.

Shake the spear wrote during the time of the great vowel shift in English which seems to have taken about 300 years. Spelling in his time was pretty random and looks more like hints and indications, rather than "correct". My home town of Yeovil has over sixty documented spellings since around 400CE. A lot of them are seen in those 300 years. I would put Shakey into a different brand of English because I doubt that he and I could have conversed. My mum could make herself completely unintelligible by falling back to her girlhood Devonian dialect from the 40s/50s.

Language is way more interesting and diverse than a WP page can possibly describe. I do love WP - its a cracking project and I've written quite a lot of WM (M not P - I'm a nerd not a clever bloke) pages. However it does fall short sometimes due to some small minded editors who squat on their pages and refuse to allow changes.

Language scholarship used to need a bit of a kicking but I think that is quietly happening over the last 20-30 years. I'm not an expert in any way but I do see signs of broadmindedness and proper scholarship in some of the books I read that have a language component. That said, you then get threads like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27721748 . Search for the terms Chinese and Sanscrit for the exciting bits (or the bits where you quietly close the door and wander off.) There are some decent ideas and comments in there but they are really hard to find.

Sadly, aggressive nationalism is rearing its ugly head in no small way. I'm a Brit and well aware of my nation's past. It seems like everyone wants to piss off the rest of the world a la the worst excesses of the British Empire. My forebears () invented the word jingoism and it is quite awful seeing others not learning the lessons of our past.

Whoops, sorry. Back in the room ... 8)

() I should point out that my documented ancestors include people who identified with all four UK nations and the male line runs back to Germany (Hanover) in around 1750 where the trail runs cold.

Thomas Aquinas' works with English and original Latin presented in parallel

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