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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

#51

Post by turpentine »

Transformanshen wrote: post #50

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

Online tools to simplify this process like Perseus have existed for at least 15 years, and you could view original texts side by side with English for comparison, and original words have all their cross-references hyperlinked etc. All maintained by academics committed to rigorous and nuanced approaches to translation.

Ancient Library is some vibecoded alternative that the LLM translation it uses will be incorrect. Color me unimpressed.

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

#52

Post by [deleted] »

bonoboTP wrote: post #41
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.

[deleted]

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

#53

Post by ndoddhdudhhd »

beloch wrote: post #12

Suggestion: For the pop-up text, bold the meaning of the word so it pops out a bit better. Due to the formatting of word definitions, you have to go hunting for it in many cases.

And make it faster to load!

If these 2 are fixed I’d use it daily

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

#54

Post by retrac »

milkcrate wrote: post #37
nephihaha wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Could vary by text? I see breathing marks in Homer.

Modern editions usually use modernized spellings. There are no breathing marks in the oldest manuscripts; they are a classical innovation (circa 400 BC) several centuries after Homer was first written down (600 BC or earlier). Though most of Homer as we receive it today is through medieval manuscript copies, and copyists often "corrected" the spellings just like we do today.

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

#55

Post by mkehrt »

retrac wrote: post #49
frollogaston wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Sort of. Romans didn't handwrite like that. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive . Note that the "u" character in both ancient and late ancient Roman cursive is more like the modern "u".

(Source: not an expert in any way)

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

#56

Post by mkehrt »

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.

There are in fact rough breathing marks there on the articles, stacked under the inverted breve accents. Which is an alternate form of tilde.

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

#57

Post by leoc »

I'm a bit out of energy at present but I'll try to put together a comment.

From the point of view of a learner it's unfortunate that macrons (diacritical marks for long vowels) have not been added to the text, and that 'u's have not been altered to 'v's where appropriate.

The word-by-word treatment of translation makes this broadly a part of the category of interlinear texts. For comparison here's one of the early pages of Max Müller's 1864 Sanskrit-to-English interlinear of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitopadesha : https://archive.org/details/firstbookofhitop00ml/page/2/mode... . This is part of a revival of interlinear texts, as a resource for language learners, which traces back to John Locke but really caught on in the English-speaking world in the early nineteenth century thanks to James Hamilton. It's unusual for "traditional" interlinears in having one row which gives a(n explicit) morphological gloss of each word in the original (the "da, 3 sg. Pres. Par" and so on) in the same column as the original word, an English translation of the word, and (in this case) a transliteration. But morphological glosses are a standard feature of modern "interlinear morphemic glosses" https://www.christianlehmann.eu/ling/ling_meth/ling_descript... made by and for linguists who want to analyse and compare languages, rather than learn them. Linguists' adoption of modern IMGs seems to have taken off in the 1960s (though some use has been made of interlinears for "serious" linguistic purposes since at least the 1890s beginnings of the Linguistic Survey of India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Survey_of_India ).

https://theamericanscholar.org/the-new-old-way-of-learning-l... is a very incomplete history of interlinears (the French are especially shortchanged) but probably still the best thing out there in English. See also https://www.reddit.com/r/interlinear . (I have to release some things about the history of interlinears myself but I'm years late at this point.)

https://shop.hyplern.com (might as well add an affiliate link! https://invi.tt/N5VZXP7g ) and https://interlinearbooks.com/ are two publishers offering modern interlinears aimed at language learners. The polished but expensive Legentibus service https://legentibus.com/ offers some interlinears too.

Guess who Vincent F. Hopper https://archive.org/details/chaucerscanterbu0000chau_k0e4 was for a time married to!

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

#58

Post by panagathon »

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/

Yeah, it's awful. I can't believe how much of a downgrade it is from the old Perseus Hopper.

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

#59

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#60

Post by Curious_Cake »

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 read quite a lot as a kid. Fiction and non-fiction. I'm intensely curious, and the "why" and the "how" of things leads you into new subjects. It doesn't hurt that history is also filled with stories as compelling as most fiction. Much of the old stuff also holds up quite well. Meditations by Aurelius is amazing. Also, Confessions by Augustine of Hippo.

I have many interests but botany became a big one, and the scientific naming scheme is mostly Latin and Greek, which leads to some interesting word history. "Sativa" means anything "cultivated" (example, "Avena sativa" is "cultivated oats" and "Crocus sativa" is "cultivated saffron"). "Nemo" means "no one" (so the "Search for Nemo" is the search for no one, haha), the root word for "service" means "slave". There are many more interesting associations.

I find the deepest and most awe-inspiring truths within physics (out of which biology and chemistry are arguably sort of abstractions in terms of order of complexity). Behind this is a long awkward history of curious people fumbling for answers in the dark. I am an odd nut, but it is connecting in a comforting way the way I can see others have asked the same burning questions of the "how" and the "why" of things, and the myriad subjects it has lead them to.

As John Muir once said: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

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