About Orbilius.
Orbilius is a tool to search for a word, as a token and its concordances, in a corpus of modern Latin texts.What Orbilius basically does is give for any searched word a glossary translation, if present, and a list of concordances. With the opportunity to consult directly the texts in which they occur.
All you have to do is type or paste your word in the text box, chose the work and translation language from the drop-down list, and press 'Submit'. Orbilius will automatically give the above data for the word.
The corpus is in fieri. At present it groups articles from the online newspaper Ephemeris and from the Latin versions of the Vatican web site and Wikipedia, counting more than 5 millions tokens in about 6000 articles. Last update: December 2017.
The glossaries too are in fieri. Actually Orbilius is progressively learning while you use it: when you ask Orbilius for a word, it crawls the web to search its translation and implements its glossaries in an almost unsupervised way. The model for that is the WordNet-WSD approach.
Why Orbilius?
Lucius Orbilius Pupillus (114 BC - c. 14 BC) was a Latin grammarian, teaching in Rome. The poet Horace, who was one of his pupils, remembered him as a harsh teacher (plagosus, id est a flogger), and Orbilius has become proverbial as a disciplinarian pedagogue.Actually what the Orbilius application aims to do is help study Latin as a living language.
Why modern Latin?
Though Latin is no more spoken at home or in the street, I am convinced that it is not to be considered as a dead language at all.As a matter of fact it is the official language of a state (the Vatican City), it is still amply studied by millions people all around the world, it is not so rarely used as a lingua franca beside English, it is more healthy and widespread than several living languages... Actually it is the second or third language for a large part of educated people in several countries.
But, most of all, Latin is a really beautiful langauge with more than 20 centuries of literature, and there is no intelligent reason to abandon it. So here it is.
Notes.
Thanks to Prof. Dr. Matthias Hüning (Institute of Dutch linguistics at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) for creating the free and open source TextSTAT, which I am using to prepare the corpus.Thanks to everyone still using Latin as a living language.
Thanks to my brillant mind for having always new ideas to work on.