Monument

I won't be doing this any time in the near future, because I'm rather too busy, but meanwhile it's interesting to think about:

I would like to make a wiki where you could set up a basic Latin lexicon. There would be three parts: firstly, you would list each lexeme on its own page, like this:

{{verb|laudō|laudāre|laudāvī|laudātus|praise}}
{{noun|culina|culinae|f|kitchen}}

You could populate this automatically from Lewis and Short (which is in the public domain, and Perseus has it available for download).

Secondly, you would represent the morphology on another page as a list of rules:

{{rule|%ārum|noun genitive plural|%a|noun nominative singular}}

"If you see a word ending ...ārum, and the same word with ...a is in the dictionary as a nominative singular, then assume it's the genitive plural of that same word." (Perhaps the syntax would be different; I'm thinking aloud here.)

Thirdly, and this would be the especially fun part, I would make it transfer all this content automatically to indexed form in a database. Then I'd make a front screen where you could paste some Latin text such as this, and have some JavaScript (à la ckeditor) which automatically highlighted the parts of speech and cases for you, and wrote in a gloss. Then if you were writing Latin, it would show you whether you'd said what you meant to say, and if you were reading Latin, it would give you a useful visual aid to checking that your understanding was correct.

It would also be possible to use this as a filter on sites such as the Latin Wikipedia and vatican.va, rather as the BBC does for Welsh.

Anyway, probably not going to do that for a few months, but it would be an interesting experiment.