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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

#71

Post by laichzeit0 »

usern20260720 wrote: post #43
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

I’m going to check that out. My personal favorite is the variant of New Athena Unicode they use in the Cultura Classica books (it’s like Lingua Latina per se Illustrata but for Attic). They made some modifications on some of the characters, noticeably sigma. I might get Claude to clone that font for me so I can use it in my projects.

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

#72

Post by onlyafly »

This is very close to a problem I have also been working on. I built Kevilex for Ancient Greek readers: https://kevilex.com

It also provides one-click definitions and grammar analysis. The main difference from this project is that it remembers your vocabulary across texts. You can mark words as new, learning, or known. It then recommends texts based on the vocabulary you already know.

It also includes flashcard review, sentence explanations, text import, and an Old English library.

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

#73

Post by tempodox »

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?

All language fascinates me, whether that be natural or formal.

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

#74

Post by tempodox »

I looked at the Latin. It would be nicer if they used the authors’ real names in the table of contents instead of the mangled and garbled leftovers. And spelling Iulius with a “J”, how dare they! But the actual texts themselves seem to be given flawlessly. No artificial distinctions between “u” and “v” for instance. Much appreciated.

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

#75

Post by Jach »

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?

Why are you always surprised, especially if it keeps happening?

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

#76

Post by Jach »

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…

> the text as they present it doesn't seem to mark vowel length at all

I think most Latin text out there won't use diacritics at all. I only studied it for 3 years back in high school leading to the AP exam and I don't think I was ever taught about them or saw them once. This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3bmLi1bKI0 and wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_%28diacritic%29 were interesting. I'd bet part of the reason is just a side-effect of teaching Latin as a dead language where you never speak it / pronunciation doesn't matter. I remember very little of the language, I believe also in part because of that.

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

#77

Post by jessmartin »

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?

Philosophy and CS double major here, love reading old books. Read a lot of theology and ancient literature. Homeschooling my kids, part of the curriculum is learning Latin.

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

#78

Post by [deleted] »

Planktonne wrote: post #9
marginalia_nu wrote: post #7

https://ancientlibrary.net/claudian-carminum-minorum-corpusc... I don't get a definition for 'fulgere', third word first entence, just a reference to 'fulgo'. I can guess what it means though from the more common 'fulgur', maybe something adjacent to flashing or lightning, but translations seem a bit sketchy.

William Whitaker's Words [1] is the best resource I've ever come across for this. 'Fulgere' is 'to shine' [2]. [1] https://latin-words.com [2] https://latin-words.com/word/latin/fulgere

[deleted]

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

#79

Post by DFHippie »

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)

A web interface to classical texts is going to be anachronistic.

If its purpose is pedagogical, it should include macrons, spaces, punctuation, case -- the works. Making every word clickable but leaving the reader to guess at vowel length seems like leaving the job half done.

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

#80

Post by gbjcantab »

This is a nice idea (prettier Perseus) but it really falls down on the substance, which is the morphological tagging. At least in what I read this morning (the beginning of book 13 of the Odyssey) it had no answer or was wrong on maybe 40% of what I checked? I’m sure the overall rate is much better than that but you’re only checking the hard words, usually. Perseus had them all right, for what it’s worth.

So kind of the classic 2026 application: a nice-looking app that has 60% of the functionality of something that already exists, in a way that’s 30% broken.

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