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

(ancientlibrary.net)

40 points | by aagha 2 hours ago ago

14 comments

  • laichzeit0 an hour ago

    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.

  • lsb an hour ago

    Neat! Similar to my graduate thesis, NoDictionaries: https://nodictionaries.com/cato/de-agri-cultura/156

    • lr4444lr an hour ago

      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.)

    • svat 26 minutes ago

      I remember encountering NoDictionaries years ago, and love it. Thank you for building it!

  • beloch 23 minutes ago

    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.

  • gfaure 14 minutes ago

    Cool! Enclitic -que should _not_ be broken off as a separate word, though.

  • marginalia_nu an hour ago

    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.

    • Planktonne 33 minutes ago

      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

    • qsort 30 minutes ago

      That's actually ok. In virtually all Latin dictionaries verbs are listed in the first singular person of the present indicative (e.g. you would find "sum" and not "esse"). It's just showing you the dictionary entry.

      • marginalia_nu 17 minutes ago

        It's not really very useful in this particular case, as you can't actually navigate the "dictionary" any other way than finding the base word form somewhere in the text you're looking at.

  • soiltype 2 hours ago

    Does this have some use case that the Perseus Digital Library doesn't already serve?

    • flats 14 minutes ago

      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…

  • Boss0565 an hour ago

    I like it. Can you make the formatting on parsed words easier to read?

  • bohnohboh an hour ago

    it would be nice to sort by date or date range as well