Medieval(ish) Backgammon

[jester]

Very exciting find. New to me.

Mandragorias, seu Historia Shahiludi....

This document was written in the 17th Century by an Oxford Don, Thomas Hyde. An orientalist, he wrote a book (inlcuded in the above) which describes the varieties of backgammon played in the Arab world.

The good news is: This book is available free on Google Play.
The bad news: He was an Oxford Don. The book is written in Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek.

Anyone want to take a stab at it? I'll tell you that the sections having to do with actual descriptions of backgammon variants begin on page 390 (the Google Play version of the book).

[Thomas Powers]

Just be glad he didn't know Klingon

[jester]

He's actually rather good. His Latin is consistent and translatable and gives you the original passage in Hebrew, Greek, or Arabic and then follows immediately with the Latin translation. And he uses different fonts for each language to avoid confusion (his choice of Gothic/Fraktur for vulgar modern languages was amusing). But using a translation bot (Google Translate) is simply not the same as speaking the language.

I've scanned (using the old Mark-I Eyeball) the text and done some exploratory 'drilling' as it were to nail down the locations of the important texts within the document. But the translations I'm getting a still pretty rough. And, really, moving from Arabic (which is one of the least precise languages in the world ) into Latin (which isn't terribly much better) to English is a sure recipe for confusion.

I've got a surplus bottle of scotch about the house. Maybe I'll take that down to Duke Garick and see if he's willing to trade it for some Arabic to English translation.