Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary/RICH-2K/Project description

Project description

The Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary (for short RICH-2K) is a classical dictionary explaining Latin words, primarily those "representing visible objects connected with the arts, manufactures, and every-day life of the Greeks and Romans." The aim is to help understand what a Latin text is actually about and the "world" the text resides in, instead of merely translating it. To this end the project tries to...

• Provide easy access to the complete 1849-edition of Anthony Rich's Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary, and Greek Lexicon (abbreviated RICH-1849).
• Enable users to improve these articles by adding links to the original passages quoted or referred to in the text, etc. For more see the project page How to contribute.
• Provide a framework for adding more articles.

What RICH-2K is

The following was taken from the Preface of Anthony Rich's Illustrated Companion:

1. Define the true meaning of all the terms, technical or otherwise, expressive of any particular object, artificial production, manual operation, &c., which can be submitted to ocular inspection.
2. Impart a distinct notion of that meaning, by exhibiting a virtual representation of the thing itself, faithfully copied from some classic original, thus presenting the same forms as the ancients were accustomed to look upon, and suggestive of the same ideas as they themselves conceived.
3. Furnish a general knowledge of the social customs, and every-day life, of the Romans and Greeks, in the shape of a vocabulary, containing all the written terms which have reference to such matters
4. All of this illustrated by a series of pictures, after their [= Romans and Greeks] own designs, of the dress they wore, the houses they lived in, the utensils they used, or the pursuits they followed, by which we may be said to acquire a sort of personal acquaintance with the people themselves, and to see them, as it were, in a glass, under the genuine characters, and familiar aspects, which they presented to one another.

What RICH-2K is not

• It is not a dictionary.
  • A good online-dictionary of Latin and Greek is Logeion (see External Links below).
• It is not a repository for primary texts and therefore does not contain long extracts of original Latin (and Greek) texts.
  • The articles do contain many references, however. Links to online editions (preferably at Perseus Digital Library), should be added for these. See the project pages about Project guidelines and Recommended editions for more.
• Its focus is on the "visible" world of the ancient Greeks and Romans, primarily of the latter, therefore:
  • It does not contain biographical articles.
  • It does not contain geographical articles.
• It is not an image gallery.
  • It does, however, contain all the images of the book. These were scanned at 1200 dpi from an original 1849-copy of the book and uploaded to Mediawiki Commons. See Commons' category The illustrated companion to the Latin dictionary, and Greek lexicon.
    • Adding images, as long as they serve to improve the article, is possible and recommended.

Initial state

At the beginning, the Illustrated Companion contains only the content of the book (Preface, articles, Greek Index, Classed Index), including the images, which have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. However, from the very beginning it is designed to be improved and expanded. Some numbers for RICH-1849:

• Number of articles: 3205
• Number of REDIRECT-articles: 303 (secondary lemmas listed after the headword of an article)
• Number of images: 1915
• Number of articles with a category in RICH-1849's Classed Index: 2129
• Number of articles without a category in RICH-1849's Classed Index: 1076
  • For these articles the relevant categories need to be added after the initial creation.
  • These articles are marked using the category Category:RICH-2K/Classed Index-category missing.
• Number of articles without links to other articles: 555 (mostly very short articles)
  • For these articles at least one link to another article of RICH-1849 should be added, especially if the article has not a category in the Classed Index either.
  • These articles are marked using the category Category:RICH-2K/Dead-end-pages.
• Number of orphaned articles, i.e. articles no other article is linking to: 701
  • For these articles at least one link from another article of RICH-1849 should be added, especially if the article has not a category in the Classed Index either.
  • These articles are marked using the category Category:RICH-2K/Orphaned articles.

Why Wikiversity?

Why is this project hosted at Wikiversity instead of Wikisource or Wikibooks?

Let's imagine a full transcription of the original 1849-edition of the Illustrated Companion by Anthony Rich and call it RICH-1849. We shall call this project, for brevity sake, RICH-2K. And now, let's have a look at the article about the Roman toga (a piece of attire). In RICH-1849 we can call it RICH-1849/Toga, and it contains exactly the content of the 1849-book. Now, let's look at the article RICH-2K/Toga. At the beginning its only content would be the article RICH-1849/Toga. Does that make RICH-2K/Toga and RICH-1849/Toga the same? Not at all, because in truth RICH-2K/Toga is a "container" which initially contains only the article RICH-1849/Toga but later on may include more information: images, external links, article text which builds on or extends RICH-1849/Toga and information from other sources of information (Wikipedia, specialized books). By the way, this added article information would not be a mere copy of the text at Wikipedia, because the information needs to be looked at through the eyes of someone reading the original Latin texts (more citations with direct links to these, etc.).

External Links

• Logeion: Online-dictionary providing access to both Greek and Latin dictionaries.