Public domain

The Latin public domain is vast. Transcription projects make much of this easily available and resuable, from texts through to dictionaries. Scans of texts can be found at Google Books, Archive.org and Europeana.

Many texts have been transcribed by volunteers, including:

• Wikisource Latin aims to transcribe public domain Latin texts, including historical texts and those aimed at learners.
• Gutenberg.org offers some learner texts
• Perseus offers dictionaries and texts
• Belgian University of Louvain offers many plain text transcriptions.
• The Latin Library has a vast array of Latin transcriptions

Community resources

The Internet has brought us many new Open licenced Latin resources. Most famous is Vicipaedia, but there are many others:

• Tatoeba Latin includes over 36,000 Latin sentences written by volunteers.
• Wikiversity has a beginner Latin course.
• Wikibooks has a complete Latin textbook, and other shorter Latin learner texts.
• Wiktionary has over 36,000 Latin entries.
• Collatinus is Open Source software that analyses Latin text for morphology (lemmas) and syllable quantity.
• Latin StackExchange has a community giving translation advice and language questions, all of which is released as CC-By-SA.

Many Youtube channels are licenced as CC-BY – which means you can download, remix and use their work, so long as you credit them. Famous examples include:

• Ancient Literature Dude licences all his recitals as CC-By
• Gaius Annaeus Iacobus releases his recordings as CC-By.
• Musa Pedestris has released some of her recent recitals as CC-BY
• Quomodo Dicitur have all their recordings as CC-By.

Please check each Youtube video for the CC licence before you reuse it. It can be found in the information panel.

Commercial resources

Open Content allows commercial follow-on development. Some prominent examples include:

• Clozemaster.com and The Great Translation Game, reusing Tatoeba sentences
• Public domain texts are presented in Latin course materials at Lingq.com
• Many teachers provide reworkings of public domain materials; prominent among these are Latinitium, Latinum Institute, Satura Lanx and Scorpio Martianus.

There is of course a huge range of commercial book publishers also republishing public domain texts.

Our content

We are working on a handful of transcription projects, aimed at Latin learners. Let us know if you want to help, or want us to help with your project.

• High quality, Latin redubbed animations and videos at our Youtube Channel and Wikimedia Commons
• Wikiversity Latin for Beginners course: first, we asked CarpeLanam for her permission to republish her course from Duolingo’s forums. Then we added vowel length markers as macrons and some simple audio from Wiktionary. Now we are providing new excercises from the content on different platforms.
• Jánua Linguárum Reseráta; we transcribed, added accent markers for long vowels and updated the translation. We also asked permission from another transcriber, Tym Marsh, to publish his edition with notes.
• We also asked permission to publish Tym’s Corderii Colloquia, transcription
• We transcribed the very excellent and until now lost Ólim plays by Effie Ryle.
• We transcribed Cothvrnvlvs, plays for learners by Edward Vernon Arnold.
• We transcribed Easy Latin Stories by George Bennet.
• We have taken the plain text copies of Erasmus’s Colloquia, to present them as a downloadable ebook. This is complete, but not fully proofread.
• We have published Ad Alpēs as a downloadable ebook on Wikisource.
• We have produced a demonstration Latin-only World Map using MapTiler’s combination of Wikidata Latin names and Open Street Map

There is plenty more to do. What would you like to help with? What would you like us to do?

Content suggested by friends

These are transcriptions and works particularly for learners that friends of the project have suggested to us

• Here are some “Direct Method” books for teachers and learners.
  • Primus Annus, by Walter Lionel Paine, and Cyril Lyttleton Mainwaring at Gutenberg.
  • Fabulae, virginibus puerisque aut narrandae aut recitandae by Reginald Bainbridge Appleton, at Gutenberg
  • Puer Romanus, by Reginald Bainbridge Appleton and William Henry Samuel Jones, at Gutenberg

There is plenty more to do. What would you like to help with? What would you like us to do?

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