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- Hacker News
- 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?by noisy_boy
- 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
- 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 ἦν ὁ λόγος .
by smithkl42 - 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.by nephihaha
- Does this have some use case that the Perseus Digital Library doesn't already serve?by soiltype
- Is it not just Perseus with a wrapper?by cwnyth
- I was wondering the same thing —Perseus has been around since _1987_ & seems to have more features? I guess this is a bit more attractively laid out…by flats
- 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.
by onlyafly - Clicking out to close a dictionary popup only works if you click empty space within the layout center. This is annoying. On a wide monitor, most empty space is on the sides (where clicking doesn't close).
It seems some books are missing chapter markings. Revelation, for instance. The verses are numbered, and you can notice when chapters change, but one can be lost when searching for a specific chapter.
Dictionary entries are cool, but I would want the in context meaning at least highlighted, so I don't have to read the full entry and do that myself.
Overall, nice idea but it seems like a very barebones implementation that needs a tremendous amount of polishing to be useful.
by gaigalas - 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.by beloch
- And make it faster to load!
If these 2 are fixed I’d use it daily
by ndoddhdudhhd - Also sometimes you have to expand the entry to get to the meaning at allby frollogaston
- 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.
by gbjcantab - It follows that their tagging AI didn’t also learn by … at least taking the Perseus judgment into account?
I assume the well marked ‘interlinear’ koinē NT texts online are coming from antecedent bible scholarship and the needs of eg ye olde Protestant bible colleges, and are nearly infallible (theological niceties aren’t likely to intrude! - but maybe I’m wrong)
But NT is included in the corpus above, so I wonder if one could conveniently automate a test of their high handedness. I can’t figure out how to recover their tags etc. Maybe I’m wrong about NT stuff online https://biblehub.com/interlinear/romans/1.htm
by applicative - Neat! Similar to my graduate thesis, NoDictionaries: https://nodictionaries.com/cato/de-agri-cultura/156by lsb
- I remember encountering NoDictionaries years ago, and love it. Thank you for building it!by svat
- Nice.
May I point out that in "Crudam si edes, in acetum intinguito", that "edes" is more likely to be the future of edere/esse "to eat"? (Just guessing by context.)
by lr4444lr - 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?
by tmshapland - 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.by yardshop
- 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.by bonoboTP
- I think the answer is that the past is as relevant as the future. If people here know both computer programming and classical history, I think that means they have a more rounded view of the world. (The problem in my part of the world, unfortunately is that classical education has often been class based.)
The thing that strikes me from ancient texts is not the obvious differences from our day, but the similarities.
by nephihaha - 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.by gestalt1
- 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.
by JuniperMesos - 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...
by spudlyo - 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.
by baruz - 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."
by Curious_Cake - 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 Atlas (there are scans on Anna’s Archive) for looking up ancient place names, so you have dictionary + map lookups. If you’ve read any of the Landmark series books you’d known what I mean.
Also better if you can generate chapter by chapter critical apparatus on difficult grammar and Anki decks. It’s an annoying part of learning these languages to have to stop and look up words, I like spending a few days learning vocab before reading and it makes it so much more pleasant than having to stop and look things up the whole time.
Obviously all this stuff is copyright so it can never be shared, but I don’t care it’s for my own personal use. I also bought like 6 hours worth of Ionnis Strattakis’ recordings where he reads a bunch of Ancient Greek in reconstructed Attic pronunciation and fine-tuned a text to speech model (styletts2) with full accent markings and breathings. It’s extremely natural sounding. My long term goal is to have a personal tutor that I can speak Attic to and basically have lessons with everyday (speech to text -> llm-> text to speech). All the pieces are there to actually do this.
LLMs have been an absolute game changer for me who is a hobby classicist but also knows how to build software. They are so amazingly good at Attic Greek and Latin, it’s like having the best teachers in the word at your fingertips for some really niche topics that it wouldn’t be possible with otherwise. Also extremely good at managing, building, cleaning up, deduplicating Anki decks.
by laichzeit0 - My favourite ancient greek font is Theano
- 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.by hegem0n
- 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".
by frollogaston