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Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it

ancientlibrary.net

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Re: Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it

#41

Post by bonoboTP »

tmshapland wrote: post #30

I'm always surprised to see that a large enough portion of the HN community are interested in classics that posts like this make it to the front page. Who are you all? What are you doing here? My undergrad was in classics and viticulture, then did grad school in atmospheric science, which led me to tech and hackernews. How did you get here?

I'd think there's a strong correlation. It's a kind of nerd stuff. Greek mythology, classics, train schedules and types, all the space probes and all the NASA stuff, Haskell etc etc. It's all very similar.

Re: Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it

#42

Post by usern20260720 »

I generated a read-along version of Athenaze read by a real native language Greek speaker and I met some of the problems that this web has: the vast amount of vocabulary makes managing a dictionary rather complicated.

For tbos version, I gather that a bilingual presentation would be more than necessary: keep Ancient Greek text on a side and display a scholar translation into a selection of switcheable languages

Re: Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it

#43

Post by usern20260720 »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #6

Interesting project. I would love if you could switch fonts to something like New Athena Unicode. I built something similar to this by cloning the Diogenes repo and getting Claude to re-implement it in Python (it’s a very old battle tested Perl code base, so a great reference implementation) and using the TLG database for the Greek and Latin texts. You can take this even further by integrating it with the Barrington…

My favourite ancient greek font is Theano

Re: Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it

#44

Post by DonaldFisk »

nephihaha wrote: post #33
smithkl42 wrote: post #28

Love this. The way the Greek is displayed isn't very helpful, though. Specifically, any vowel with a grave accent displays the accent as a separate letter, which makes it very distracting to read. I don't think it's a problem with the encoding, as I can copy the inline text and it displays just fine - though with some weird spaces before commas or periods: ΕΝ ΑΡΧΗ ἦν ὁ λόγος , καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν , καὶ θεὸς…

I recognise that quote. :) But am I right in noticing a lack of breathings? Unless the tilde indicates it. I'm not sure of the difference between the acutes and graves here. I am used to seeing only one kind of accent on ancient Greek vowels.

The breathing marks are clear in the Ancient Library texts (e.g. St John's Gospel), but difficult to make out on Hacker News.

A propos of breathing marks, iota subscripts, and the three different accent marks of Classical Greek, when I learned it at school we had to remember the breathing marks and iota subscripts, and would lose marks if we omitted them, but we didn't need to learn the accents. Modern Greek now has only (acute) accents, which you need to know to stress the correct vowels, exactly where the accents were in the equivalent Classical Greek words.

Re: Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it

#45

Post by spudlyo »

tmshapland wrote: post #30

I'm always surprised to see that a large enough portion of the HN community are interested in classics that posts like this make it to the front page. Who are you all? What are you doing here? My undergrad was in classics and viticulture, then did grad school in atmospheric science, which led me to tech and hackernews. How did you get here?

I'm a recently retired software nerd who got into reading 19th century literature. I was greatly inspired by characters in these novels, most of whom had the advantages of a classical education, and I lamented how poor my own was. One day I idly wondered how hard it would be to learn a bit of Latin (as I was constantly having to look up Latin references) and once I discovered LLPSI[0] I was hooked.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_Latina_per_se_illustrat...

Re: Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it

#46

Post by equalbeforegod »

milkcrate wrote: post #35
thaumasiotes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that Perseus considers itself end-of-life; there is an analogous project that's supposed to have succeeded it, but I don't remember what project that is.

It's called Scaife[1] and it's borderline unusable. Slows to an absolute crawl on my ~2020 machine within a few minutes, and the viewing experience is very uncomfortable. I'd be really surprised if people preferred it to Perseus. [1]: https://scaife.perseus.org/

Agreed. Scaife supporters are delusional.

What should actually be done, and what OP should do, is take the Perseus website and make it so it doesn't 503 all the time (it is incredibly unreliable).

Then, FOIA the State of California for the pay-to-play data which the UC Irvine-based TLG hoarders are withholding from the public (it is a publicly funded project...) so that the corpus can be meaningfully extended and built upon.

The 1990's tier html vibe of Perseus is to its great advantage.

Re: Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it

#47

Post by hcayless »

The Greek font is terrible—it’s using the Modern Greek “acute” accent which looks weird, and commas aren’t supposed to have spaced before them. It’s cool that Perseus did the work that makes this possible though. More info about what edition we’re looking at would be nice too.

Re: Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it

#48

Post by yardshop »

tmshapland wrote: post #30

I'm always surprised to see that a large enough portion of the HN community are interested in classics that posts like this make it to the front page. Who are you all? What are you doing here? My undergrad was in classics and viticulture, then did grad school in atmospheric science, which led me to tech and hackernews. How did you get here?

I became more interested in Latin when learning to sing the Carmina Burana, after already knowing some German and Spanish. I haven't learned much beyond that, but still fascinated by it as with all languages.

Re: Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it

#49

Post by retrac »

frollogaston wrote: post #18
laichzeit0 wrote: post #6

Interesting project. I would love if you could switch fonts to something like New Athena Unicode. I built something similar to this by cloning the Diogenes repo and getting Claude to re-implement it in Python (it’s a very old battle tested Perl code base, so a great reference implementation) and using the TLG database for the Greek and Latin texts. You can take this even further by integrating it with the Barrington…

Kinda font-related, it's throwing me off how every V in the Latin texts show as U. I don't like how they modernized the spellings in school, but if you're not doing that, aren't they all V? Also most of the word popups use different spellings, like "iam" becomes "jam".

Using either spaces or miniscule letters, is anachronistic for both classical Latin and Greek. They only had a single case in antiquity and didn't usually mark word boundaries.

For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trajan_inscription_duoton... (Latin as typically carved in stone)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Herculanean_Rolls_-_... (Greek as typically written on papyrus)

Re: Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it

#50

Post by Transformanshen »

An interesting project. Ancient languages have always fascinated me, but the effort required to read even a single page of Greek or Latin can be a serious obstacle It's nice to see tools that simplify this process. I might even want to give it another try
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