A reader writes:
Hi Jimmy,
I’m a big fan of yours. There are certainly a lot of vocabulary
resources for NT Greek, but I’ve never seen a Latin vocabulary
frequency list for the Vulgate (in book form, any way). Do you know
of one?
I’m afraid I don’t, but would love to have one.
For those who may not know, a word frequency list is a list of which words are most common in a given text or language. These lists are invaluable study tools for people trying to learn a language because, by studying the most common words first, you will be able to speak or read the language much quicker.
For example, if you were learning English, you would be advised to start by learning words like "the," "is," "house," and "blue" rather than words like "triumphalistically," "absquatulate," "boll-weevil," and "chartreuse." If you focus on learning the latter kind of words first, it will be a looooong time before you start understanding ordinary sentences.
People in recent years have created word frequency lists for the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament and the Aramaic part of the Old Testament and the Septuagint (if I am not mistaken) and a whole bunch of other texts. They have made learning these langauges much easier.
Unfortunatley, I don’t know of one for the Vulgate. If anyone out there does, please use the comments box to tell us!
Barring that, I should mention that a few years ago I took some steps toward creating such a word frequency list for the Neo-Vulgate (New Testament, if I recall correctly) but was unable to finish the project. I still have the files, and they could be converted into such a list (and into something even more useful), but I don’t have the time to complete it myself. I’d need help.
The problem is that Latin is a highly inflected language, meaning its words change form a lot. The frequency list that I have is of inflected forms, which is no good for learning–at least not the way traditional courses work. To convert it into a usable list, a person (or group of persons) or a computer program would have to go down the list and uninflect the words (that is, put them back into the dictionary form students need to memorize) and then combine the resulting word totals.
This is something that could be done by machine. In fact, I already know of a program that will parse Latin words for you, and part of that means giving the dictionary form of the word. It would be possible to largely automate the process–likely using the parsing program I already know about–but I don’t have the programming skills needed to pull the pieces together.
If someone (or someones) out there do and would like to take a crack at this, use the comments box or e-mail me.
Incidentaly, it would be possible to use the list to create something even more useful–a morphologically tagged Neo-Vulgate. This would assign a code to each word of the Vulgate New Testament that contains its parsing information. Such things already exist for the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew & Aramaic Old Testament, and they are useful for people trying to figure out hard word forms. Nothing like it exists for the Vulgate (so far as I know), but with the right programmer and a couple of people who speak Latin, it would be possible to construct one far more easily than in the past.
Either of these two projects could also lead to other helpful learning tools that exist for Greek and Hebrew but not for Latin.
If anyone out there would be able and interested in helping out with any of this, lemme know!
Here’s a Vulgate frequency list that I found.
That address should be:
http://www.intratext.com/IXT/LAT0001/_FF1.HTM
A tool that could be adapted to this purpose with considerable ease would be KLatin. This is a program that is available under Linux. It does not have a word list for the Vulgate so the major work of “uninflecting” the words in the Vulgate is a major project on its own.