SAVE LATIN AND GREEK ON ALPHEIOS!
(and help extend its support to other classical languages)
THE PURPOSE
Many of the most important books ever written, the most profound and
the most beautiful, were written in one of the ancient languages no
longer spoken. 1 Translations can convey some part of what their authors intended, but by no means all.
Traditionally it was necessary to devote prolonged study to each
language, preferably with a knowledgeable teacher, before ever
confronting the original text itself. Today, a variety of online tools
can help anyone begin to appreciate the original language whenever they
wish. The Alpheios Project was created to bring the latest technology to
this task, and already has tens of thousands of users around the world
with its reading support tools for Latin, Greek, and classical Arabic
and Chinese. The software was designed to permit new languages to be
added easily, and there are plans underway for its extension to other
classical languages such as Persian, Sanskrit and several others.
In keeping with its mission to bring texts in the classical languages
to the widest possible audience, Alpheios has always made its tools
available for free and has kept its code open source for use by any
other non-profit initiative.
THE CRISIS
However, at the moment, not only the expansion but even the survival
of the present Alpheios functionality is threatened by impending changes
to the Firefox browser, which is currently the only platform on which
Alpheios runs. Significant modifications of our code will be needed,
and at the moment we do not have the resources to make the changes in
the required time frame.
THE APPEAL
We are consequently making our first public funding appeal. We are
hoping to raise between fifty and one hundred thousand dollars so that
we can employ professional programmers in an accelerated timeframe.
Since we are a registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization, all
contributions are tax-deductible in the United States.
If you consider this initiative worthwhile, please let others know about it, whether or not you are able to contribute yourself.
At this point we don't anticipate any insuperable technical
challenges since the requirements are quite clearly defined and all the
original developers of Alpheios remain available for consultation. We
just need competent hands to do the work before the clock runs out on
Alpheios.
THE HOPE
In addition to maintaining Alpheios on Firefox, the changes to the
code that must be made will greatly facilitate porting Alpheios to other
browsers and to mobile devices, among the most frequent requests from
our users. They should also help bring an expanded Alpheios reading
environment to other classical languages and provide a more convenient
platform for the deployment of a greater variety of language learning
games. We believe that the supreme importance of the classical
languages, and their immediate relevance to our present world, can only
be fully appreciated when they can all be studied with similar tools in
a common reading environment.
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(1) (Perhaps the best known of
these "classical languages" are ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and
classical Chinese, Persian, Arabic and Hebrew, but there are many more,
including Old Norse and Old English, Old French and the Langue d'oc, Old
Spanish and Old and Middle High German, not to mention the great
languages of the ancient middle east, such as Egyptian, Sumerian,
Akkadian, Hittite, Classical Armenian, Syriac and Aramaic, or the
classical Japanese of the Man'yōshū.
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