I wrote some code that would take a table like this:

I can call my/make-fill-in-quiz to get a quiz buffer that looks like this. If I get stuck, ? shows me a hint in the echo area.

To make it easier, I’ve left case-fold-search set to nil so that I don’t have to match the case (uppercase vowels = macrons), but I can set case-fold-search to t if I want to make sure I’ve got the macrons in the right places.

Here’s the code to display the quiz buffer.

     (require 'widget)
     (defun my/check-widget-value (widget &rest ignore)
       "Provide visual feedback for WIDGET."
       (cond
        ((string= (widget-value widget) "?")
         ;; Asking for hint
         (message "%s" (widget-get widget :correct))
         (widget-value-set widget ""))
        ;; Use string-match to obey case-fold-search 
        ((string-match 
          (concat "^"
                  (regexp-quote (widget-get widget :correct))
                  "$")
          (widget-value widget))
         (message "Correct")
         (goto-char (widget-field-start widget))
         (goto-char (line-end-position))
         (insert "✓")
         (widget-forward 1)
         )))

   (defun my/make-fill-in-quiz (&optional quiz-table)
     "Create an fill-in quiz for the Org table at point.
The Org table's first column should have the questions and the second column 
should have the answers."
     (interactive (list (org-babel-read-table)))
     (with-current-buffer (get-buffer-create "*Quiz*")
       (kill-all-local-variables)
       (let ((inhibit-read-only t))
         (erase-buffer))
       (remove-overlays)
       (mapc (lambda (row)
               (widget-insert (car row))
               (widget-insert "\t")
               (widget-create 'editable-field
                              :size 15
                              :correct (cadr row)
                              :notify 'my/check-widget-value)
               (widget-insert "\n"))    
             quiz-table)
       (widget-create 'push-button
                      :table quiz-table
                      :notify (lambda (widget &rest ignore)
                                (my/make-fill-in-quiz (widget-get widget :table))) 
                      "Reset")
       (use-local-map widget-keymap)
       (widget-setup)
       (goto-char (point-min))
       (widget-forward 1)
       (switch-to-buffer (current-buffer))))

Incidentally, I generated the table above from a larger table of Latin verb conjugations in the appendix of Wheelock’s Latin, specified like this:

#+NAME: present-indicative-active
| laudO    | moneO   | agO    | audiO   | capiO   |
| laudAs   | monEs   | agis   | audIs   | capis   |
| laudat   | monet   | agit   | audit   | capit   |
| laudAmus | monEmus | agimus | audImus | capimus |
| laudAtis | monEtis | agitis | audItis | capitis |
| laudant  | monent  | agunt  | audiunt | capiunt |

#+NAME: imperfect-indicative-active
| laudAbam   | monEbam   | agEbam   | audiEbam   | capiEbam   |
| laudAbas   | monEbas   | agEbAs   | audiEbAs   | capiEbas   |
| laudAbat   | monEbat   | agEbat   | audiEbat   | capiEbat   |
| laudAbAmus | monEbAmus | agEbAmus | audiEbAmus | capiEbAmus |
| laudAbAtis | monEbAtis | agEbAtis | audiEbAtis | capiEbAtis |
| laudAbant  | monEbant  | agEbant  | audiEbant  | capiEbant  |

#+NAME: future-indicative-active
| laudAbO    | monEbO    | agam   | audiam     | capiam     |
| laudAbis   | monEbis   | agEs   | audiEs     | capiEs     |
| laudAbit   | monEbit   | agEt   | audiet     | capiet     |
| laudAbimus | monEbimus | agEmus | audiEmus   | capiEmus   |
| laudAbitis | monEbitis | agEtis | audiEtis   | capiEtis   |
| laudAbunt  | monEbunt  | agent  | audient    | capient    |

with the code:

#+begin_src emacs-lisp :var present=present-indicative-active :var imperfect=imperfect-indicative-active :var future=future-indicative-active
  (defun my/label-latin-with-verbs (table verbs persons tense)
    (apply 'append
           (-zip-with (lambda (row person) 
                        (-zip-with (lambda (word verb)
                                     (list word (format "%s - %s - %s" tense person verb)))
                                   row verbs))
                      table (-cycle persons))))
  (apply 'append 
         (mapcar (lambda (tense)
                   (my/label-latin-with-verbs 
                    (symbol-value tense)
                    '("laudo / laudare" "moneo / monEre" "ago / agere" "audiO / audIre" "capiO / capere")
                    '("1st sing." "2nd sing." "3rd sing." "1st plu." "2nd plu." "3rd plu.")
                    (symbol-name tense)))
                 '(present imperfect future)))

#+end_src

This uses dash.el for the -zip-with and -cycle functions. There’s probably a much better way to process the lists, but I’m still getting the hang of thinking properly functionally… =)

Anyway, I’m sure it will be handy for a number of other quiz-like things. org-drill and org-drill-table will probably come in handy for flashcards, too!

You can view 4 comments or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

As always, click on the image to view a larger version, which you can print out if you want.

Please feel free to share this under the Creative Commons Attribution License! =)

If you like this, check out Damian Conway’s site or this paper on Lingua::Latina::Perligata. Like these sketches? Check out my other sketchnotes and visual book reviews.

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

We were delighted to find Cattus Petasatus, a Latin translation of Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat. There are even translations for some of the other books, like Green Eggs and Ham. I like reading them in addition to our textbooks. They make Latin feel more contemporary.

Learning Latin with W- is a lot of fun. He shares the ways Latin reminds him of French. He thinks I find it easier to say Latin than he does because of my background in Filipino, which also has a lot of short syllables. We review our study group homework together, laugh at the contrived examples, and look around for other resources. I’m so lucky my husband is a geek. =)

We’ll gradually work our way up to Winnie ille Pu. Maybe we’ll even put together our own Latin projects!

You can view 1 comment or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Here’s what we have so far: An Easy Method for Beginners in Latin, Lessons 1-9

We’re starting off using Tiddlywiki because it’s a wiki system that W-‘s been using a lot for his personal notes. He’s familiar with the markup. It’s not ideal because Google doesn’t index it, the file size is bigger than it needs to be (0.5MB!), and it’s Javascript-based. It’s a good start, though, and I should be able to convert the file to another format with a little scripting. My first instinct would be to start with Org Mode for Emacs, of course, but we already know what W- thinks of Emacs. ;)

Most of the text was easy to enter. Harkness is quite fond of footnotes, numbered sections, and lots of bold and italic formatting. We’re going to skip the illustrations for now.

Typing all of this in and using it as our own reference, though, we quickly ran into a limitation of the standard TiddlyWiki engine (and really, probably all wiki engines): you had to search for the exact word to find something. In order to find poēta, you had to type poēta, not poeta. That’s because ē and e are two different characters.

We wanted to keep the macrons as pronunciation and grammar guides. We didn’t want to require people to know or type letters with macrons. Hmm. Time to hack Tiddlywiki.

TiddlyWiki plugins use Javascript. I found a sample search plugin that showed me the basics of what I needed.

I considered two approaches:

1. Changing the search text to a regular expression that included macron versions of each vowel
2. Replacing all vowels in the Tiddler texts with non-macron vowels when searching

The first approach was cleaner and looked much more efficient, so I chose that route. If the search text contained a macron, I assumed the searcher knew what he or she was doing, so I left the text alone. If the text did not contain a macron, I replaced every vowel with a regular expression matching the macron equivalents. Here’s what that part of the code looked like:

s = s.replace(/(.)/g, "['/]*$1");
if (!s.match(macronPattern)) {
  // Replace the vowels with the corresponding macron matchers
  s = s.replace(/a/, "[aāĀA]");
  s = s.replace(/e/, "[eēĒE]");
  s = s.replace(/i/, "[iīĪI]");
  s = s.replace(/o/, "[oōŌO]");
  s = s.replace(/u/, "[uūŪU]");
}

That got me almost all the way there. I could search for most of the words using plain text (so poeta would find poēta and regina would find rēgīnae), but some words still couldn’t be found.

A further quirk of the textbook is that the characters in a word might be interrupted by formatting. For example, poēt<strong>am</strong> is written as =poēt”am”= in Tiddlywiki markup. So I also inserted a regular expression matching any number of ‘ or / (bold or italic markers when doubled) between each letter:

s = s.replace(/(.)/g, "['/]*$1");

It’s important to do this before the macron substitution, or you’ll have regexp classes inside other classes.

That’s the core of the macron search. Here’s what it looks like. I was so thrilled when I got all of this lined up! =)

And the source code:

// Macron Search Plugin
// (c) 2011 Sacha Chua - Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License
// Based on http://devpad.tiddlyspot.com/#SimpleSearchPlugin by FND

if(!version.extensions.MacronSearchPlugin) { //# ensure that the plugin is only installed once
version.extensions.MacronSearchPlugin = { installed: true };

if(!config.extensions) { config.extensions = {}; }

config.extensions.MacronSearchPlugin = {
  heading: "Search Results",
  containerId: "searchResults",
  btnCloseLabel: "Close search",
  btnCloseTooltip: "dismiss search results",
  btnCloseId: "search_close",
  btnOpenLabel: "Open all search results",
  btnOpenTooltip: "Open all search results",
  btnOpenId: "search_open",

  displayResults: function(matches, query) {
    story.refreshAllTiddlers(true); // update highlighting within story tiddlers
    var el = document.getElementById(this.containerId);
    query = '"""' + query + '"""'; // prevent WikiLinks
    if(el) {
      removeChildren(el);
    } else { //# fallback: use displayArea as parent
      var container = document.getElementById("displayArea");
      el = document.createElement("div");
      el.id = this.containerId;
      el = container.insertBefore(el, container.firstChild);
    }
    var msg = "!" + this.heading + "\n";
    if(matches.length > 0) {
        msg += "''" + config.macros.search.successMsg.format([matches.length.toString(), query]) + ":''\n";
      this.results = [];
      for(var i = 0 ; i < matches.length; i++) {
        this.results.push(matches[i].title);
        msg += "* [[" + matches[i].title + "]]\n";
      }
    } else {
      msg += "''" + config.macros.search.failureMsg.format([query]) + "''\n"; // XXX: do not use bold here!?
    }
    wikify(msg, el);
    createTiddlyButton(el, "[" + this.btnCloseLabel + "]", this.btnCloseTooltip, config.extensions.MacronSearchPlugin.closeResults, "button", this.btnCloseId);
    if(matches.length > 0) { // XXX: redundant!?
      createTiddlyButton(el, "[" + this.btnOpenLabel + "]", this.btnOpenTooltip, config.extensions.MacronSearchPlugin.openAll, "button", this.btnOpenId);
    }
  },

  closeResults: function() {
    var el = document.getElementById(config.extensions.MacronSearchPlugin.containerId);
    removeNode(el);
    config.extensions.MacronSearchPlugin.results = null;
    highlightHack = null;
  },

  openAll: function(ev) {
    story.displayTiddlers(null, config.extensions.MacronSearchPlugin.results);
    return false;
  }
};

// override Story.search()
Story.prototype.search = function(text, useCaseSensitive, useRegExp) {
  var macronPattern = /[āĀēĒīĪōŌūŪ]/;
  var s = text;
  // Deal with bold and italics in the middle of words
  s = s.replace(/(.)/g, "['/]*$1");
  if (!s.match(macronPattern)) {
    // Replace the vowels with the corresponding macron matchers
    s = s.replace(/a/, "[aāĀA]");
    s = s.replace(/e/, "[eēĒE]");
    s = s.replace(/i/, "[iīĪI]");
    s = s.replace(/o/, "[oōŌO]");
    s = s.replace(/u/, "[uūŪU]");
  }
  var searchRegexp = new RegExp(s, "img");
  highlightHack = searchRegexp;
  var matches = store.search(searchRegexp, null, "excludeSearch");
  config.extensions.MacronSearchPlugin.displayResults(matches, text);
};

// override TiddlyWiki.search() to ignore macrons when searching
TiddlyWiki.prototype.search = function(s, sortField, excludeTag, match) {
    // Find out if the search string s has a macron
    var candidates = this.reverseLookup("tags", excludeTag, !!match);
    var matches = [];
    for(var t = 0; t < candidates.length; t++) {
        if (candidates[t].title.search(s) != -1 ||
            candidates[t].text.search(s) != -1) {
            matches.push(candidates[t]);
        }
    }
    return matches;
};

} //# end of "install only once"

To add this to your Tiddlywiki, create a new tiddler. Paste in the source code. Give it the systemConfig tag (the case is important). Save and reload your Tiddlywiki file, and it should be available.

It took me maybe 1.5 hours to research possible ways to do it and hack the search plugin together for Tiddlywiki. I’d never written a plugin for Tiddlywiki before, but I’ve worked with Javascript, and it was easy to pick up. I had a lot of fun coding it with W-, who supplied plenty of ideas and motivation. =) It’s fun geeking out!

You can view 1 comment or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Macrons turn up in many languages. In Japanese, you use them to indicate that vowels are doubled. 大阪（おおさか）can be romanized as Oosaka or Ōsaka. In Latin, beginner textbooks often use macrons (macra) to indicate pronunciation. (Why do we care about pronunciation for a dead language used mostly in church hymns? W- and I actually want to be able to use this conversationally, at least with each other. After all, if you don’t use it, you lose it.)

I suggested Emacs. In Emacs, it’s just a matter of using M-x set-input-method to choose latin-alt-postfix. With that input method, you can add macrons to letters by typing – after them. For example, typing “a -” will result in ā. Not only that, dynamic abbreviations (M-/) make it easier to retype words you’ve already written before.

W- wouldn’t hear of using Emacs, being almost as firmly wedded to vi as he is to me. ;)

Instead, we spent some time figuring out how to set up KDE and gvim to make it easier for him to type in macrons. HTML character sequences were out of the question, of course. W- used KDE’s settings to map his unused Windows key and menu key to compose keys. That made it easier to produce ē, ī, ō, and ū using the key sequence “Compose + hyphen + vowel”. However, “Compose + hyphen + a” produced ã, not ā. This was probably a bug based on some issue reports we found on the Net, but the suggested fix didn’t work (im-switch -c to change to default-xim). I found a page describing an .XCompose fix, customizing the key sequences. He copied the relevant key sequences from en-US’s locale settings for Compose in /usr/share/X11, restarted X, and it worked.

Now he’s off and typing!

2011-04-24 Sun 23:21

You can view 12 comments or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

The Latin textbooks that W- ordered from the library have arrived, and we’re slowly making our way through both Wheelock’s Latin and an online copy of a Latin textbook from the 1880s. Writing is probably going to be painfully slow and ungrammatic for a while, but hey, it’s worth a try. =)

Why Latin? Geek quirkiness. Secret languages for greater connection. Potential classical education.

It will be interesting. Let’s see if my blog can handle the characters…

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.