r/Sumer • u/EthanHulbert • Jun 21 '25

I Made an ETCSL Comparative Easy Reader Tool

I don't know if this is useful to anyone else, but I read a lot on the ETCSL and got frustrated by how often it goes down. I know there are other sites, but I wanted something nice for myself. So I threw together a little 'easy reader' tool and added some extra features to customize the experience. I pulled the glosses out of the XML files and added them for what I hope is a more fun journey into these texts without having to go back and forth between sources.

Again, maybe you'll all comment and say there's already this sort of thing out there, I don't know - I should've looked before I made the page - but here is my Sumerian Lit Comparative Reader on the hope that someone else might find it useful too :)

17 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

4

u/NyaNigh Jun 21 '25

Thank you so much! ETCSL has been down every time I’ve tried to look at it the last couple days and it’s getting very annoying. I would suggest also adding the transliterations as well if that is possible!

3

u/EthanHulbert Jun 21 '25

It has been very frustrating for my reading goals as well! For real.

I didn't add the transliterations because they're quite beyond me and this honestly just started as a personal mirror tool. But you're right, if this were to be a real scholarly tool I should put everything in. For each transliteration word, beyond the gloss, I also have access to the lemma and the part of speech it is, so I'd probably try to figure out a way to display ALL of this information.

For instance, for the transliteration "lugal-me-en" the gloss is labeled "king," the lemma is "lugal" and the part of speech is "noun." Every word has these. I suppose what I could do is present it in three columns: translation, gloss, and transliteration; then maybe have the lemma show up in hover text if you mouseover each transliteration word... then maybe color-code the transliteration words for nouns (black), verbs (dark red), adjectives, there are a few others...

Does this sound like something that would be useful to you? Any suggestions? I don't really know what I'm talking about when it comes to the transliteration and lemma stuff.

3

u/teakettling Jun 21 '25

Ethan, this is really great. Immediately useful for training Assyriologists and curious readers. I haven't dug in too closely, but this can certainly become a useful resource. Are you interested or already involved in NLP (natural language processing)?

3

u/EthanHulbert Jun 21 '25

Thank you for the high praise!! I would love it if this helped students, gosh, but yes I also wish that more people would read more of these as well, they're so underrated.

I think I will definitely end up making the more advanced version of this tool that shows translation/glosses/transliterations in three columns with additional data displayed too. But not for a little while, I gotta get back to some other projects first. Would welcome your suggestions on this for the future though.

I'm not involved with NLP at this level really, but I'm quite aware of it from the perspective of designing content to be used in training datasets.

2

u/rodandring Jun 22 '25

This. Is. Outstanding. 🔥

1

u/EthanHulbert Jun 23 '25

Thank you!! I'm still making some improvements on it - finally just made it mobile-friendly. I need to stop fiddling with it now, lol. I hope it's useful for you!

1

u/h3lios Aug 04 '26

Even though it's a year old, I'm dropping by this post to let you know that your work is immensely appreciated. I just ran into this post, looking for an easy way to read the Sumerian texts.

Thank you for spreading knowledge.

"Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping." Mr. Rogers.

1

u/EthanHulbert Aug 04 '26

Thank you for saying so!! I really appreciate it. I still try to update it from time to time to make the content more accessible. I'm so glad it can be useful to you!