The Greek Tutor Project

One of my current hobbies at the moment is trying to come up with a relational schema for the New Testament...in Greek!

This aim is not as off the wall as it may appear.  Some of my earliest computing experience came while helping my father, John Hurd, as he developed a system for teaching Koine (New Testament) Greek to his students while he was in the Faculty of Divinity at Trinity College in the University of Toronto in the early 1970's.  At the time the best available platform was the programming language APL running on an IBM 360 mainframe.

Throughout high school I maintained interest in the sciences and mathematics, as well as the classics, completing four years of instruction in Latin and three in Greek.  It is only now in retrospect that I realize that my Latin teacher Mr. Lloyd in all probability taught the Greek classes for free as we scheduled them before school or during lunch periods to an exponentially decaying group of students (Greek 1 had eight students, Greek 2, four and Greek 3 two!).  It should be noted that while I was nosed out for my high school's math prize, I was the recipient of their Latin prize.

In the 1990's my father ported the Greek Tutor to the PC via a version of APL for that platform.  A few years ago he retired after serving as Dean of the Divinity School and being awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from the U of T.

I have long hoped that we would be able to revive the code for a "modern" platform and when the iPad came along I decided that the time has come.  My subsequent experience with database-backed software design may color my perceptions (to the man with a hammer all the world's a nail), but looking at the code what I saw at base was a database.

Essentially the Greek Tutor combines lessons in Greek grammar with the ability to browse and search the entirety of the Greek New Testament.  The program "knows" about every word in the New Testament including part of speech and how the word forms relate to each other.  The challenge has been that the data was locked (actually quite literally) in proprietary files specific to the APL language.  A secondary problem has been that the code was written long before the adoption of the UNICODE standard and therefore the treatment of Greek characters was proprietary.  However, I am happy to report that with the kind assistance of people on the new group comp.lang.apl and the availability of a freeware, compatible APL implementation, APLSE, the conversion is well underway.