librivox

Busy busy busy. Real busy. So here's some good stuff I came across somewhere in between Dutch mining laws and Finnish road signs:

Librivox is a site which "provides free audiobooks from the public domain" recorded by volunteers. The catalog lists several hundred works in 15 languages, including Hebrew, Latin and Old English. I came for Juhanni Aho's "Helsinkiin" (which pleasantly surprised me by its quality matching that of commercial audiobooks. Well done, Tuija!), but stayed for "Three Short Stories in the Maastricht Dialect" (plus the text). I just love wacky dialects!

The Digital Archive (via PaleoJudaica.com) contains many free e-books of older date on all matters Oriental and Near Neastern. Thatcher's/Harder's "Arabic Grammar of the Written Language", "Syriac Grammar" by George Philips and "Higher Persian Grammar" by D.C. Phillott should be enough to capture most of y'all's attention. And if it's not, there's also all kinds of stuff on Ottoman and Persian literature, early Church and general history to keep a guy/gal busy for months. Internet, you gotta love it.

Sahidica is a by-product of my decision to delve into the secrets of the Coptic language (inspired by viewing "The Lost Gospels" and "Stargate: The Director's Cut"*). It includes the New Testament in parallel Sahidic Coptic and Greek with a lexicon of Sahidic and a Bohairic version of NT as a bonus. And the editor seems to have done a great job comparing and editing various published editions of NT in Sahidic. Hooray for good old fashioned philology!


* Yeah, I know, it was Egyptian. But hieroglyphs scare the willies out of me. Next best thing 'n' all.