[B-Greek] Scanning Funk's Grammar
Ken Penner
pennerkm at mcmaster.ca
Mon Jun 7 18:10:44 EDT 2004
Hi Rod,
Yes, mixed polytonic Greek and English (with Unicode output) can be OCRed
using Anagnostis. If accents and breathing marks are not a concern, many OCR
programs can recognize mixed English and Greek (with Greek codepage output).
The OCR that came bundled with my scanner produced the following, for
example (from Mounce, p.30):
Do not memorize the endings in the following illustrations. ΑΙΙ we want you
to see is how inf1ection works.
Case endings. The case οί a word in Greek is indicated by the " case end-
ing." This is a suffix added to the end οί the word. For example, the basic
word for " apostle" is άπόστολο. Iί it is functioning as the subject οί the
verb, it takes a case ending that is equivalent to the "subjective" case in
English: ς (άπόστολος). Iί it is functioning as the direct object οί the
sen- tence, it takes a case ending that is equivalent to the " objective"
case in English: ν (άπόστολον).
ό άπόστολος πέμπει τον άπόστολον . The apostle sends the apostle.
Since the case endings, not the word order, are the key to knowing the
function and number οί a word, it is extremely important that you leam them
well.
There are only five cases in Greek. We willleam two οί them in this chapter,
two in the next, and the fifth later on.
Anagnostis is very expensive (hundreds of dollars). And while it does great
on upright proportionally-spaced Greek (such as the NA26), it doesn't do as
well with italic (UBS4) or monospaced (Funk) text.
My scanner's OCR produced the following from Funk (p.47):
081. Eng1ish is rich in words borrowed from or re1ated to Greek. Α number of
important New Testament words have been taken over direct1y by theologians,
e.g. agape (άγαπή) , kerygma (κήρυγμα), 8omatic (σωμα, base σωματ-) ,
euchari8t (εόχαριστία) . The Greek counterparts of such words are the more
readi1y identi- fied if the student is aware of transliteration
equiva1encies (§052) .Many other Eng1ish words, especia11y from technica1
and scientific 1anguage, afford means of recognizing Greek ancestors. Phone,
for examp1e, comes from φωνή, 8ound; phonoZogy, the sci- ence which treats
sounds, is derived from ψωνή + λογία. An ophthaZmoZogi8t is an eye doctor:
όφθαλμός, eye. Note the pho- netic relationship between the following Greek
words and Eng1ish derivatives (care must be taken, however, in re1ating
meanings; Eng1ish derivatives do not a1ways mean the same thing as their
Greek counterparts) : μάρτυς (base μαρτυρ-) , martyr; ~ήτωρ, rhetor-ic;
ήγεμών, hegemony; ~θνoς, ethnic; πόλις, IndianapoZi8; ~γώ, ego; είς (neut.
~ν) and θεός, henothei8m, cf. theoZogy.
As you can see, it will take considerable manual editing and independent
proofreading, but OCR is a good start.
And yes, of course the final product will use Unicode encoding.
Ken Penner, M.C.S. (Biblical Languages, Greek Focus), M.A. (Hebrew Poetry)
Ph.D. (cand.), McMaster University
pennerkm at mcmaster.ca
Flash! Pro vocabulary software: http://s91279732.onlinehome.us/flash or
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flash_pro/join
> I hope those involved in scanning realize what it takes to OCR *Greek*
> text..., esp. mixed English & Greek text.... Perhaps there is
> software that
> will do so, but I don't know of any. If that assumption is
> correct, realize
> that a scan will produce readable text of only the English
> portions. That
> leaves a *LOT* of manual entry of Greek text, often in
> complex formatting.
> And I would *hope* that this would be done in Unicode so as
> to be viable in
> future years. All the incompatible legacy encodings of the
> dozens of Greek
> fonts in use over the past 20 or more years has left us with
> a royal mess.
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