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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

#61

Post by dr_dshiv »

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/

Given your opinions on this, may I ask for your feedback on https://SourceLibrary.org? I’d greatly appreciate it.

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

#62

Post by baruz »

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 was interested in astronomy as a six-year-old, which led me to Greek myths, which led me to Greek poetry, all of that in translation, as well as Gene Wolfe’s Latro books as they came out.

I was learning to program at the same time, following along A K Dewdney’s Computer Recreations column. I went into college to learn pre-med but always found myself more interested in the humanities, like my survey of Greek literature, which was supposed to accelerate my prerequisites. Also hung out with friends in the engineering labs on Sun Sparcstations playing netrek and MUDs, which did for me.

Anyway, I pivoted and started taking computer courses, like artificial intelligence, reading from Russell and Norvig, Clocksin and Mellisa, and Paul Graham.

I learned Greek while consulting for companies across the country, programming network performance tests, to have something to do in the hotels.

Fast forward to 2008, 2009, and I see that the Lispy Hackers and Painters guy had a new website. I started an account but lost it. Or did they reset it after disuse? Anyway, that’s me.

Oh, I did take Latin in Catholic high school, but did not really use any of it for reading, just vocabulary, but it did help with the old-style grammar-first Greek texts I learned from.

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

#63

Post by noisy_boy »

I tried to find a way to read the entire translation of a given work but I found only being able to highlight a word to see it's meaning, not the entire translation. Maybe I missed how to get that from this site? Or is there a site that provides translations of such ancient works?

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

#64

Post by 0bit »

spudlyo wrote: post #20
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…

> LLMs have been an absolute game changer for me who is a hobby classicist but also knows how to build software. Definitely! I myself have been having a lot of fun[0] recently using LLMs to enrich one of my favorite beginner Latin readers[1] with audio forced-alignment, POS tagging, morphology, definitions, and other niceties that learners might appreciate. [0]: https://hercules.hookbangsplat.com [1]: https://archive…

Here's a companion website with similar features: https://latinlanguage.org/ for an upcoming book: https://www.amazon.com/Latin-Tamer-Mastering-Language-Rome/d...

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

#66

Post by dazzatron »

I love this. I try to read different works of philosophy by getting chatgpt live to narrate it paragraph by paragraph to fully digest it. But newest works it refuses to do that unfortunately. It would be quite amazing to do a second pass on the original Latin works in the same way as well.

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

#67

Post by JuniperMesos »

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 was always interested in human linguistics, including but not limited to understanding the classical languages of the Western tradition. In high school I taught myself some Latin from Wheelock's, and I've dabbled in trying to learn Greek from time to time as well. Someday I hope to also learn Sanskrit and complete the classical Indo-European trifecta.

At one point I was seriously considering attempting an academic linguist career. Fortunately, I was also interested in computers; and as I often tell people who ask me about it, computer programming pays much better (and I'm glad I didn't pursue a humanities academic path for other reasons). Still, it's an interest I try to keep up with when I can.

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

#68

Post by gestalt1 »

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?

Just a general curiosity and desire to understand our world and our history. What first got me into the classics is the fact that they have influenced much of what has come after, and I figured it would be interesting to go back to the root so to speak.

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

#69

Post by JuniperMesos »

I checked out the page on Caesar's The Gallic War and looked at its famous opening line "Gallia est omnis diuisa in partes tres , quarum unam incolunt Belgae , aliam Aquitani , tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae , nostra Galli appellantur".

Apart from the UI around the word parsing pop-up being kind of buggy (it doesn't close readily, the scroll position seems to get saved differently depending on the word), I'm pretty sure there's an analytical error in that sentence.

The word "nostra" is glossed as Nom Plur Neut; that is, the possessive adjective "noster", "ours", in its nominative plural neuter form. "Nostra", with a short final -a, is indeed the nominative plural neuter form of that possessive adjective. However in that sentence, the word is being used as an ablative singular feminine, with a long final -â (which is unmarked because the text as they present it doesn't seem to mark vowel length at all).

archive.org has this (https://archive.org/details/caesarscommentar07caes/page/n11/...) 1918 out-of-copyright literal word-by-word translation of the text, which does mark vowel length, and you can see that the translator words the last clause as "the third, (those) who in (the) language of themselves are called Celtae, in ours, Gauls". nostrâ is modifying an implied linguâ there, which is a singular feminine noun in the ablative case, so nostrâ has to inflect to agree with it - nostrâ [linguâ] translates to "in ours [our language]".

My Latin is self-taught and mediocre at best, but even I was able to spot that error. And The Gallic War is a very famous text that is routinely taught fairly early on in traditional Latin education - a lot of students of Latin over the centuries have read that exact line of Caesar's. The fact that the LatinCy neural language model for Latin, which the site claims performed the analysis, screwed this up doesn't leave me very confident about the quality of the grammatical analysis in more difficult corners of Latin grammar.

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

#70

Post by wjnc »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #69

I checked out the page on Caesar's The Gallic War and looked at its famous opening line "Gallia est omnis diuisa in partes tres , quarum unam incolunt Belgae , aliam Aquitani , tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae , nostra Galli appellantur". Apart from the UI around the word parsing pop-up being kind of buggy (it doesn't close readily, the scroll position seems to get saved differently depending on the word), I'm prett…

Congrats on self learning Latin. That takes hard work. I adore reading texts on ancient texts that go into possible alternative interpretations. One of my favourite classes in university was on a work of Plato where the professor knew both the Greek, Latin and Arab versions of the text and could get carried away philologically, even philophillically, on how we could alternatively interpret sentences. Reading about deconstructing the origins of say the Bible. Those are scientific works of marvel to me.
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