A post to the graded-reader mailing list from March 23, 2008.

Owing to the amount of interest I received about A New Kind of Graded Reader...

Back in 2004, I talked about algorithms for optimal vocabulary ordering.

I don't think I've mentioned it here before but next week, I'm one of the keynote speakers at the BibleTech 2008 conference in Seattle.

It is fairly common, in the context of learning vocabulary for a particular corpus like the Greek New Testament, to talk about what proportion of the text one could read if one learnt the top N words.

I've hinted before about Ulrik Petersen and I collaborating on Greek New Testament linguistic endeavours.

See Python Unicode Collation Algorithm for background.

After the continuation of a permathread on the b-greek mailing list about the pros and cons of interlinears, I built some quick demonstrations of how CSS and Javascript could be used for dynamic interlinear glosses that would not be possible on the printed page.

My preliminary attempt at a Python implementation of the Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA) is done and available at:

http://jtauber.com/2006/01/27/pyuca.py (old version—see UPDATE below)

Some of you will be aware of Ulrik Petersen's work on augmenting Tischendorf's 8th edition with morphological tags and lemmata, based on work by Clint Yale and Maurice Robinson. Ulrik is also the developer of Emdros, an open-source text database engine for annotated text.

The overlap of Ulrik's interests and work with my own on [MorphGNT] is very exciting and so we've started talking about how we might be able to collaborate on some things together.