Homer’s Odyssey shorthand marginalia identified…

The University of Chicago Library’s thousand dollar shorthand identification challenge I mentioned here a few days ago has been won – the full announcement is here.

And the winner was… Italian software engineer Daniele Metilli who, working with colleague Giula Accetta, was able “to identify the shorthand and translate the first fragments in a few hours on a Thursday night. If I didn’t have access to online sources such as Google Books, the Greek Word Study Tool of the Perseus Digital Library, and the French corpora of the CNRTL, I probably wouldn’t have won. What great times we live in!”

But it ended up being a three horse race, as two runners-up (Vanya Visnjic, a “PhD student in classics at Princeton University”, and Gallagher Flinn, a “PhD student in linguistics at the University of Chicago”) also identified the script and gave correct translations of fragments. So it was Metilli only by a nose!

Anyway, it turns out that the “mystery script” was a little-known system of French tachygraphy published by a certain Jean Coulon de Thévénot (1754-1813) in “Méthode tachygraphique, ou l’art d’écrire aussi vite que la parole” (1789), of which a revised 1819 edition was available online.

Metilli is still working on it (well done!), and has collected much of his findings on a good-sized PDF on his personal website. At the end of his write-up, he has a bit of fun speculating as to the identity of the note-taker:

While discussing the translator hypothesis with Miss Accetta on the day before publishing this report, something odd came to my mind. The main edition of the Odyssey we used as reference was translated by Édouard Sommer and published by Hachette book by book starting in 1848. While transcribing the shorthand, we had noticed how the annotations sometimes seemed to use the exact same wording as the “argument analitique” found in that edition.

The Sommer translation is very accurate and close to the text, just like our annotations. The other translations of the time (Bareste, Leconte de Lisle) look nothing like it. So it finally came to me: which year did Hachette publish book XI of the Odyssey? Which year did the annotator write his notes? The same year: 1854. What if Mr. Sommer were our mysterious annotator?!

At the risk of sounding like Penry the mild-mannered janitor, all I can sensibly do is quote Chinese-American philosopher H. K. Phooey, “Could be!” 😉