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| ``Re: The Elements''
by Wkbj79 on 2007-06-06 15:06:52 |
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| > I think of it (adding the Greek text) not as a matter of nerdy coolness, but as a matter of being useful for scholarship. This way, anyone interested in knowing exactly what Euclid had to say about rhomboids has Euclid's own words available and can form an opinion as to the interpretation and conclusions presented as based upon that text.
> ...there are quite a number of historians of math and classical scholars interested in ancient math. If we do as good job presenting Euclid, including quotations in Greek and links to Mourmouras' site and similar places, then PM could also be a useful resource for these people. Also, from a historical point of view, remember that Euclid's book is very important...
Excellent points.
With regards to your point on informing readers what Euclid had to say, I can totally vouch for this. While doing research for my master's thesis, I stumbled across a relevant source "Despre Inele Ciclece" (Romanian for "On Cyclic Rings"). To the best of my knowledge, this is only available in Romanian, Russian, and French. Although my advisor was content with the French translation, I opted to translate the original Romanian. It turned out that my translation yielded statements that were more mathematically precise. That added to the fact that my translation involved one less translation led us to believe that my translation was more accurate.
BTW, what is the policy on adding translations of papers to PM? I imagine that, since I translated "Despre Inele Ciclece", I would have the copyright my translation, but I could be wrong.
Back the The Elements! I think that I will e-mail Mourmouras and ask about terms of usage in the site. Hopefully, by the time I hear back from him, you will have found a package for writing Greek text.
Also, I have noticed that, not only is the spacing all wrong, but also that either I do not know the code for producing certain Greek diacritical symbols or the code does not exist in TeX. The latter would highly surprise me, but after Google searching and looking in many places, methods for producing more accurate Greek diacritical symbols elude me.
Finally, I guess that I must amend the reason for my opinion why adding the Greek would be cool: I have always been interested in foreign languages and etymology. While this is nice on a word-by-word basis (pahio has been adding entries and briefly indicating the etymology of the word), a longer text would be nicer.
Warren |
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