Ancient Greek divination, by S.I. Johnston (book review)

Book Review: discourse.cpp by O.S. le Si

discourse.cpp is a short collection of computer-generated poetry edited by computational linguist Aurélie Herbelot. The poetry was produced by a program, named O.S. le Si, that was derived from Herbelot’s research on context-based ontology extraction from text (Herbelot and Copestake 2006; Herbelot 2009). In this case, Herbelot provided 200,000 pages fromWikipedia for the program to parse and o...

Book Iv of Euclid’s Elements and Ancient Greek Mosaics

I.4: “If two triangles have the two sides equal to two sides respectively, and have the angles contained by the equal straight lines equal, they will also have the base equal to the base, the triangle will be equal to the remaining angles respectively, namely those which the equal sides subtend.” I.9: “To bisect a given rectilinear angle.” I.10: “To bisect a given finite straight line.” I.11: “...

Magic and divination in ancient Palestine and Syria

treated enlargement of the prostate. He also claims he has shown how they treated atherosclerosis based on the evidence of the discovery of ajoene and alliinase in fresh garlic. It appears from this that he is reaching conclusions on specific therapies of early physicians by means of the discoveries of modem pharmacology. Some notice should be taken of the evidence suggesting that drugs were no...

Case Attraction in Ancient Greek

Case attraction has stood as a puzzling, and elusive, oddity of older Indo-European languages. This paper focuses on attraction in Ancient Greek, establishing both the regularity of the operation and its underlying motivation. A novel method is proposed for grounding case in terms of a feature-based representation of agentivity properties, loosely based on Dowty’s proto-role theory, but reformu...

Ancient Letters. Classical and Late Antique Epistolography [book review]