All good things must come to an end, including high school side projects. Last weekend I pulled the plug on my website volutabrum.de after nearly 25 years and millions of visitors.
First things first: “Volutabrum” is Latin for “a wallowing-place for swine”.
The site was a web directory for German translations of Latin texts. The words in the previous sentence represent just how much happened in those 25 years!
“Web Directory” — Gen Z people have no idea what this is 🫠 tldr: Big website with manually curated links, sorted into categories. 2001 was the tail end of popularity for the entire-web directories like Yahoo and Altavista. Specialty directories like Volutabrum lasted longer and co-existed with Google (3 years old in 2001!) because the benefit of human curation outweighed the bigger catalog.
“German” — I lived in 🇩🇪 back then! They were still playing in knockout rounds of ⚽ tournaments! Since then I first moved to 🏴, had a short stint in 🏴 (near Wrexham fwiw), then came to the US.
“Translations” — In the Before (AI) Days, human translators would read a text in the source language and create an equivalent text in the target language. Doing this with ancient languages like Latin made for wonderfully mind-bending high school exams. It’s also wonderfully pointless because every source text in existence has been translated already.
“Latin” — In Germany, Latin as a school subject peaked in popularity during the 2000s when 10% of German students studied it. It’s been declining since then but is still the third most elected foreign language, after English and French, today. I was one of those Latin students, hence why this website exists and why I had a dictionary handy to find a silly word for the domain name.
Programmable Logic Controller joke incoming: As you can see, I’ve been interested in old languages for a long time. While my Latin skills have faded, I still enjoy working with ancient languages such as Ladder Logic and Structured Text. Discussing the fine differences between the rich dialectical traditions of the Rockwell Empire versus the Late IEC-61131-3 dialects is just as engaging as studying Caesar’s Gallic Wars versus a medieval monastery ledger.
