I made these up for work a few months ago, and some of you may find them useful. They are charts giving the standard Alt-codes for accented letters that are used in various software packages, for instance Alt-237 (on the number pad) for small I with an acute accent (í) or Alt-159 for capital Y with an umlaut (Ÿ). These charts put the symbols on a grid, with six columns for A, E, I, O, U, and Y, five rows for acute, grave, circumflex, umlaut, and tilde, and three more rows at the bottom for æ, ß, and other symbols that do not fit into the main grid. The letters are in 36 point type so you can hang them on the wall behind your desk and still see them.

Not clear what I mean? Just click on one of the links to see the files. The first chart (DOC or PDF) puts the first five rows in the order that seemed most natural to me, and most likely to anyone else who has taken Greek (probably not a large subset of my readers): acute, grave, circumflex, umlaut, and tilde, in that order. The second chart (DOC or PDF) puts the rows in the order implied by the numerical sequence of Alt-codes: grave, acute, circumflex, tilde, umlaut. This puts alt-192 (À), alt-193 (Á), alt-194 (Â), alt-195 (Ã), and alt-196 (Ä) in numerical order from top to bottom, and the same goes for most of the other columns.

There are gaps on both charts, since not every letter can take every accent, at least in Microsoft world. I take advantage of these gaps by putting Ç ç and Ñ ñ between à ã and Õ õ in the same row. These four symbols are used mostly in modern Romance languages — between them, Spanish and Portuguese use all four —, so they go well together, and they’re even in alphabetical order. Here and in the bottom row, the intrusive consonants are shaded to make them stand out.

As always, the comments are open for suggested additions and corrections. Comments are moderated to filter out spam, so they will not appear until I approve them.

I have made up a one-page handout cross-referencing Seneca’s Epistulae Morales against the various 20th-century commentaries, each of which covers a different selection. The Word 2000 for Windows (.doc) version is here, the Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) version here.

Besides showing at a glance which commentaries cover which letters, and (very interesting) which letters are more or less popular among commentators, I also use it as a check-off list to keep track of which ones I’ve read. With 124 letters and a substantial fragment of another, it’s easy to lose track. If anyone wants to see how I did it, or is curious about which ones I’ve read, the color-coded personalized versions are here (.doc) and here (.pdf).

Feel free to print out any of these files and use them yourselves. As always, comments and queries are welcome. I should probably mention that the unfortunate language in 47 and 56 is a purely coincidental result of listing commentators by the first letters of their last names and in order of publication.

I promised these to a reader. They are handouts I’ve used in various Latin classes to introduce second-year students to meter, beginning with Ovid and Martial, and continuing with Horace. I kept them down to two pages each, so they could be printed out as single-sheet double-sided handouts. That meant a certain amount of simplification, but I’ve included the essentials.

The first handout, Latin Meter I: Ovid and Martial is here (.doc), here (.pdf), and here (.pdf). The second, Latin Meter II: Horace, is here (.doc), here (.pdf), and here (.pdf). Please feel free to use them in your own classes, and to suggest improvements in the comments or by e-mail.

Finally, I’m hoping someone can tell me whether the first or second of each PDF file is better in any way. It’s been a long time since I’ve used Acrobat, and I wasn’t sure whether to use PDFMaker or Acrobat Distiller, so I did them both ways and in that order. The metrical marks are done in Century Gothic, whose U’s are the best approximation I’ve found of a breve. If interested readers can let me know whether they come out right on their computers, I will be very grateful. It looks to me like the Distiller files add tiny tails to the U’s, making them less useful as brevia, but I can’t tell how others see them. I used Word 2000 for Windows and Adobe Acrobat 4.0, which should both (I hope) be old enough for compatibility with most reader’s systems.