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Learning an ancient language with an ancient text editor

Mike Hamrick (he/him) - mikeh@muppetlabs.com

The following image shows where the talk is in the schedule for Sun 2026-12-13. Solid lines show talks with Q&A via BigBlueButton. Dashed lines show talks with Q&A via IRC or Etherpad.

Schedule for SundaySundaySun 9:00- 9:10 Sunday opening remarkssun-openSun 9:10- 9:20 BONE and gnaw.el: tracking what mattersboneSun 9:40- 9:55 Local file history possibilities in EmacslocalSun 10:15-10:30 hutch: code reviews for the mildly disenfranchisedhutchSun 10:40-11:00 Beyond the Chatbot: Team-Oriented AI in EmacsteamSun 11:20-11:40 Beyond shell history: Saving compilation output in EmacscompileSun 1:00- 1:20 DnD and Org Roam: Becoming a Better DM with EmacsdndSun 1:30- 1:50 bible-gateway: A Two-Edged Sword in EmacsbibleSun 2:10- 2:30 Ghost in the Shell: a libghostty powered terminal for EmacsghostelSun 2:50- 3:10 Column-aligning text in EmacsalignSun 3:30- 3:50 Revisiting Emacs Mouse Interactions with AnjuanjuSun 4:00- 4:10 Emacs on Android - Emacs for the next 40 yearsandroidSun 4:30- 4:40 Sunday closing remarkssun-closeSun 10:00-10:21 prefix-tab-groupsprefixSun 10:30-10:50 Emacs as a Window Manager and concurrencyrauSun 11:10-11:30 El-gpu and pix-el: GNU Emacs 2D and 3D game programmingel-gpuSun 1:00- 2:00 [Panel] Emacs, LLMs, and Free SoftwarellmsSun 2:20- 2:40 A (sort of) REPL for learning SVGsvgSun 2:50- 3:00 Org Babel everywherebabelSun 3:20- 3:40 Learning an ancient language with an ancient text editorancientSun 4:00- 4:20 It's Probably Not a Virusvirus9 AM EST10 AM EST11 AM EST12 PM EST1 PM EST2 PM EST3 PM EST4 PM EST5 PM EST

Format: 20-min talk ; Q&A: BigBlueButton conference room https://media.emacsconf.org/2026/current/bbb-ancient.html
Etherpad: https://pad.emacsconf.org/2026-ancient
Discuss on IRC: #emacsconf
Status: Waiting for video from speaker

Times in different time zones:
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~3:20 PM - 3:40 PM EST (US/Eastern)
which is the same as:
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~2:20 PM - 2:40 PM CST (US/Central)
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~1:20 PM - 1:40 PM MST (US/Mountain)
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~12:20 PM - 12:40 PM PST (US/Pacific)
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~8:20 PM - 8:40 PM UTC
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~9:20 PM - 9:40 PM CET (Europe/Paris)
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~10:20 PM - 10:40 PM EET (Europe/Athens)
Monday, Dec 14 2026, ~1:50 AM - 2:10 AM IST (Asia/Kolkata)
Monday, Dec 14 2026, ~4:20 AM - 4:40 AM +08 (Asia/Singapore)
Monday, Dec 14 2026, ~5:20 AM - 5:40 AM JST (Asia/Tokyo)
Find out how to watch and participate

Description

There is a vast treasure trove of free Latin language pedagogical content available on the Internet, but shockingly little of it is in plaintext – 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.

Questions or comments? Please e-mail mikeh@muppetlabs.com

Back to the talks Previous by time: Column-aligning text in Emacs Next by time: Revisiting Emacs Mouse Interactions with Anju Track: Development - Watch