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

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

#91

Post by boelboel » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 3:39 PM UTC

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?

In some countries classics are still widely taught in middle school/high school (as in about 10% of the population taking up Latin). Where I was brought up (Flanders) I'd guess over 50% of people with an advanced degree took up Latin, maybe 5-10% Greek. In certain circles not taking up Latin and/or Greek means you were either not smart enough to do so or you were uncultured. So anyone "cultured" with a CS/engineering degree took up Latin.

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

#92

Post by hegem0n » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 3:55 PM UTC

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…

I would love to learn more / collab (for personal use) if there's a way to connect with you. I'm on proton mail if you want to reach out, henrystafford77.

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

#93

Post by littlecorner » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 2:11 PM UTC

retrac wrote: post #86

Jach wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pa…

You are correct: Latin vowel length is usually only indicated in educational material, dictionaries, etc. > 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. You're not the only person to have had this insight. Modern pedagogy often emphasizes using ancient languages spoken al…

My understanding is that the lack of vowels, word spacing, and punctuation in texts suggests that all ancient texts were meant to be heard, not read. I think it was Augustine, or some other Church Father, was talking about seeing someone reading silently as something remarkable or that he hadn't seen before.