AELalight

Instructions for subscribers to the Ancient Egyptian Language Email List who participate in the study of the Eloquent Peasant

Mark Wilson and I have created a possibility to automatically align your contributions on the Eloquent Peasant (consisting of transliteration and/or translation) with the hieroglyphic. The result is put on the Web, aligned with contributions from fellow AEL members. For ease of reference I will call this facility AELalight (a "light" variant of a more general scheme AELalign that you don't want to hear about for now).

This is roughly how it works: You send an email message with your interpretation of some part of the text to the AEL list, with as subject "align peasant". The content of this message should satisfy certain requirements described momentarily. Your message is automatically forwarded to a program that combines this with the hieroglyphic (which has been prepared already by Jenny Carrington). You get an email message back saying whether the processing has been successful. You can then use Netscape or Internet Explorer to visit: http://www.dfki.uni-sb.de/~nederhof/AEL/peasant/guest0.html.

At the moment this set-up is experimental, so problems are bound to occur. Please report these to nederhof@dfki.de. Furthermore, we foresee and accept that perhaps only a few of the people who want to join in the study of the Eloquent Peasant will want to make use of the facility described here. So if you want to ignore this Web page, this is perfectly fine.

I will now describe in more detail what your submission should look like if you want to make use of AELalight.

The lines in your message will be divided into empty and non-empty lines, where a non-empty line is defined to be a line containing one or more visible characters (as opposed to spaces, tabs, etc). Let me call a sequence of one or more consecutive non-empty lines a "paragraph".

There are three kinds of paragraph. The first consists of a single line such as:

version = R

This says that the following paragraphs pertain to version R of the Eloquent Peasant. We will also use versions B1 and B2. A message may contain one such statement somewhere at the beginning, and may contain more statements of this kind when you switch to another version in the middle of the message. If there is no statement of this kind at the beginning of the message, AELalight will assume the following text applies to version B1. (See the hieroglyphic to find out which versions we use for which parts of the Eloquent Peasant.)

The second kind of paragraph looks like this:

zero or more lines of transliteration ; zero or more lines of translation

or like this:

zero or more lines of transliteration ; zero or more lines of translation # zero or more lines of comments

I will call this a transliteration/translation paragraph. So, such a paragraph consists of two or three parts. The first and second parts are separated by a line containing a semi-colon ";" and nothing else. If there is a third part, this is separated from the second part by a line containing "#" and nothing else. The first part consists of zero or more lines of transliteration, the second part consists of zero or more lines of translation, the third part consists of zero or more lines of comments on the preceding translation.

Inside of the transliteration and the translation (but not inside the comments!), you may insert positions within the manuscripts R, B1 or B2. In the case of version R, such a position is e.g. <8.4>, in the case of versions B1 and B2, such a position looks like <123>. These positions are needed to properly align your contribution with the hieroglyphic and with contributions from others.

There is also a third kind of paragraph, viz. one that is not of any the above forms (it neither starts with "version =" nor contains a line containing a semi-colon ";" and nothing else). Such a normal-text paragraph cannot be interpreted as meaningful for the purposes of AELalight and is simply ignored. This kind of paragraph can be used for free comments and discussion for the benefit of the (human) readership of the AEL email list.

An example of the content of a message is given below.

Dear All, This is my interpretation of the beginning of the Eloquent Peasant. version = R The first clause is easy. <1.1> s pw wn(.w) ; <1.1> There once was a man, Note that the form of "wn" in the above is the old perfective. ^xw.n-^jnpw rn=f ; called Khunanup. # The meaning of this proper name is explained by Allen (p. 356). sxtj pw n ^sxt-HmAt ; He was a peasant of the Wadi-Natrun. # As Parkinson (1997) points out, Khunanup is more likely to be a trader than a farmer. ...some more paragraphs... mT wj m hAt <1.3> r ^kmt ; Look, I'm going <1.3> to Egypt I hope this makes sense. Best wishes, I.G. Noble

In the transliterations in the example above, I write "j" as opposed to "i" and before suffix pronouns I insert "=" as opposed to ".". This style is however not mandatory. In fact you can choose any style of transliteration you want; AELalight doesn't care. Only be sure not to use the symbols "<" and ">" except for positions.

In "Look, I'm going <1.3> to Egypt", one could have omitted the position <1.3> from the translation. In general, omitting a position from the translation deteriorates the results of alignment, but sometimes, when the word order of Egyptian and English is very different, one has no other choice, since the position in the hieroglyphic does not correspond in any obvious way to some location between two English words. However, if you write a certain position in both transliteration and translation, be sure to do that in one and the same paragraph.

Positions in the transliteration may be written within a word. E.g. "h<1.3>At" indicates that in the hieroglyphic the line break or column break is in the middle of the word "hAt". In all other cases, be sure to separate the positions from the words by spaces, so write "hAt <1.3> r" rather than "hAt<1.3>r".

If you submit for the first time, both transliteration and translation in the first transliteration/translation paragraph need to start with a position. This also holds if your subsequent messages do not deal with continuous parts of the Eloquent Peasant.

If you send a message after you had sent messages before, the new material is appended behind the old material. If the first position in the new material also occurs in the old material, all the old paragraphs starting with the one that contains that position are discarded. This can be used to make corrections. However, if you want to make corrections that go back very far, you may want to avoid the message to go to all the AEL subscribers; in that case use the subject "update peasant" instead of "align peasant", and your message will be exclusively forwarded to AELalight.

You cannot give multiple transliterations or translations for the same phrase. In particular, writing the same position twice in a transliteration or twice in a translation will lead to problems. If you want to indicate that a reading is uncertain and alternative interpretations exist, use comments after a line containing "#" as explained above, or use a normal-text paragraph between transliteration/translation paragraphs).

How your contribution is partitioned into paragraphs is largely a matter of taste. One reasonable constraint though is that the paragraphs should be large enough so that the change in word order when going from Egyptian to English should be rendered within a single paragraph, or put in a different way, a word in the transliteration and its English translation should occur in one and the same paragraph.

Some final remarks:

Don't forget to write "align peasant" or "update peasant" in the subject field, or otherwise your message will not be processed by AELalight.
Be a little patient in waiting for the automatic reply. It may take a while for your mail to be forwarded to AELalight via the AEL email list.
AELalight will try to retrieve your surname from the header of the email. This is not fail-safe. My apologies beforehand if some names are scrambled up.
Keep your own backup files, since I cannot guarantee my code has no bugs that may lead to loss of data. It is recommended that you maintain one file in which you accumulate all your interpretations for the complete text. With this file you can easily update your contribution using the subject field "update peasant", as explained above.
The system described here is actually a specialized form of a more general version of AELalight. The system described here also invokes the more powerful program AELalign.
Acknowledgements: Chris Macksey and Mark Wilson contributed essential ideas. Many thanks go to Geoffrey Watson for adapting his program mdc2html to simplify integration into AELalign, and to Jenny Carrington for providing the hieroglyphic.