2026/talks/ancient.md


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# Learning an ancient language with an ancient text editor
Mike Hamrick (he/him) - <mailto:mikeh@muppetlabs.com>

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There is a vast treasure trove of free Latin language pedagogical content
available on the Internet, but shockingly little of it is in plaintext &ndash;
the greppable, diffable, interoperable, and eternal format that is the
fundamental substrate of GNU Emacs.

In this talk I'll demonstrate how I use both local and cloud-hosted ML
models to transform recorded Latin audio into glorious structured plaintext
that not only encodes the text itself, but also its morphological and
semantic context. Thus transformed, we can now render the text with
attached metadata that enables powerful word-at-point features like
linguistic details in the echo area, accurate dictionary lookups, and audio
playback with precise word alignment.

-   Slides: <https://muppetlabs.com/~mikeh/latin_emacs.html>
-   Live website: <https://fabulae.orbilii.com>


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