Friday, April 15, 2011

Special Edition: Online Sources for Texts with Macrons





Although I am not a fan of macrons myself (except in elementary Latin textbooks and reference works like dictionaries and grammars), there are many people who put a premium on the use of macrons. Because macrons are not widely found in earlier printed Latin texts which are now in the public domain, most Latin texts you find on the Internet do not have macrons. This is an unfortunate situation: even though I do not advocate the use of macrons, I think people should be able to choose what works best for them, and the lack of texts with macrons online represents a real barrier. If you want a text already with macrons, you have to buy that text from a commercial publisher or you may just be out of luck, as most Latin texts have never been printed with macrons at all. Luckily, though, this is a situation easy to remedy: people just need to share their own texts marked with macrons online!

The debate about macrons flares up at LatinTeach once a year or so, and this year I asked if people had sources for Latin texts with macrons online that they wanted to share. Even though I don't like macrons, I did a year-long project of publishing texts with macrons online, and I also keep an eye out for texts marked with macrons at GoogleBooks. John Whelpton responded to my query at LatinTeach with some additional suggestions for finding texts with macrons online, so below you will find above a list of what we have so far. IF YOU KNOW OF TEXTS WITH MACRONS ONLINE - either texts you have put there (it's easy to do with a blog or wiki or even just public GoogleDocs) or texts someone else has published online - please add a comment to this blog post with a link to the online text and a title/description, and I'll keep the list updated based on those additional contributions. I am really counting on people to help me with this, since I am not especially interested in macrons and am not likely to seek out and find these resources on my own... but I am glad to share the links here!

For those of you with texts you would like to share, Google's Blogger.com is one great ad-free option, and so is GoogleDocs, where you can import existing Word documents and publish them as webpages, all for free. You can also use wiki software, like PBWorks.com for educators or WikiSpaces.com. :-)

From Nubifera: Throcmorton, Equus quī canis esse vellet: