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Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it
- noahbald 1mo agoIs there anything like this for Egyptian and Cuneiform texts?
- soiltype 1mo agoDoes this have some use case that the Perseus Digital Library doesn't already serve?
- flats 1mo agoI 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…
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- thaumasiotes 1mo agoNote 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.
- milkcrate 1mo agoIt'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/ https://scaife.perseus.org/
- equalbeforegod 1mo agoAgreed. Scaife supporters are delusional. What should actually be done, and what OP should do, is take the Perseus website and make it so it doesn't 503 all the time (it is incredibly unreliable). Then, FOIA the State of California for the pay-to-play data which the UC Irvine-based TLG hoarders are withholding from the public (it is a publicly funded project...) so that the corpus can be meaningfully extended and built upon. The 1990's tier html vibe of Perseus is to its great advantage.
- panagathon 1mo agoYeah, it's awful. I can't believe how much of a downgrade it is from the old Perseus Hopper.
- dr_dshiv 1mo agoGiven your opinions on this, may I ask for your feedback on https://SourceLibrary.org https://SourceLibrary.org? I’d greatly appreciate it.
- cwnyth 1mo agoIs it not just Perseus with a wrapper?
- lsb 1mo agoNeat! Similar to my graduate thesis, NoDictionaries: https://nodictionaries.com/cato/de-agri-cultura/156 https://nodictionaries.com/cato/de-agri-cultura/156
- bohnohboh 1mo agoit would be nice to sort by date or date range as well
- laichzeit0 1mo agoInteresting 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.
- hegem0n 1mo agoI 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.
- frollogaston 1mo agoKinda 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".
- marginalia_nu 1mo agohttps://ancientlibrary.net/claudian-carminum-minorum-corpusculum/ 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 1mo agoWilliam 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 https://latin-words.com [2] https://latin-words.com/word/latin/fulgere https://latin-words.com/word/latin/fulgere
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- qsort 1mo agoThat'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 1mo agoIt'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.
- Boss0565 1mo agoI like it. Can you make the formatting on parsed words easier to read?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- tempaccountabcd 1mo ago[dead]
- beloch 1mo agoSuggestion: 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.
- frollogaston 1mo agoAlso sometimes you have to expand the entry to get to the meaning at all
- b3orn 1mo agoAnd it's not immediately obvious how to close a pop-up again.
- ndoddhdudhhd 1mo agoAnd make it faster to load! If these 2 are fixed I’d use it daily
- gfaure 1mo agoCool! Enclitic -que should _not_ be broken off as a separate word, though.
- cwnyth 1mo agoThat plus the spaces between punctuation makes it clear it's done for tokenization, but nothing puts it back together again.
- frollogaston 1mo agoWow, I used to spend forever looking up words in Latin books.
- gaigalas 1mo agoClicking 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.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- 6r17 1mo agoI built myself such a simple lexicon for technical stuff (concurrency vocab - invariant, genetics, stuff like that) - can only recom the practice as vocabulary is clearly a big step difference
- veqq 1mo agoVowel lengths on the main text would be great.
- smithkl42 1mo agoLove 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 .
- nephihaha 1mo agoI 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.
- milkcrate 1mo agoCould vary by text? I see breathing marks in Homer.
- retrac 1mo agoModern 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.
- DonaldFisk 1mo agoThe breathing marks are clear in the Ancient Library texts (e.g. St John's Gospel), but difficult to make out on Hacker News. A propos of breathing marks, iota subscripts, and the three different accent marks of Classical Greek, when I learned it at school we had to remember the breathing marks and iota subscripts, and would lose marks if we omitted them, but we didn't need to learn the accents. Modern Greek now has only (acute) accents, which you need to know to stress the correct vowels, exactly where the accents were in the equivalent Classical Greek words.
- tmshapland 1mo agoI'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?
- sfRattan 1mo agoLatin in school from 6th grade onward. And a classical education with many holes and gaps that I am continually filling in.
- boelboel 1mo agoIn 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.
- sturakov 1mo agoI grew up with an awareness of Greek and Latin as part of western heritage education. A lot of role playing games, especially from Square Enix,leverage a lot of Latin and classical education.
- nephihaha 1mo agoI 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.
- ButlerianJihad 1mo agoPracticing Roman Catholic family with liberal arts education
- milkcrate 1mo agoCould stand to have a better Greek font, but this is great stuff. Thanks for sharing.
- usern20260720 1mo agoI 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
- hcayless 1mo agoThe Greek font is terrible—it’s using the Modern Greek “acute” accent which looks weird, and commas aren’t supposed to have spaced before them. It’s cool that Perseus did the work that makes this possible though. More info about what edition we’re looking at would be nice too.
- Transformanshen 1mo agoAn 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
- turpentine 1mo agoOnline 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.
- leoc 1mo agoI'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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitopadesha : https://archive.org/details/firstbookofhitop00ml/page/2/mode/1up 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_description/grammaticography/gloss/index.php 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Survey_of_India ). https://theamericanscholar.org/the-new-old-way-of-learning-languages/ 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 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 https://shop.hyplern.com (might as well add an affiliate link! https://invi.tt/N5VZXP7g https://invi.tt/N5VZXP7g ) and https://interlinearbooks.com/ https://interlinearbooks.com/ are two publishers offering modern interlinears aimed at language learners. The polished but expensive Legentibus service https://legentibus.com/ https://legentibus.com/ offers some interlinears too. Guess who Vincent F. Hopper https://archive.org/details/chaucerscanterbu0000chau_k0e4 https://archive.org/details/chaucerscanterbu0000chau_k0e4 was for a time married to!
- noisy_boy 1mo agoI 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?
- songhonglei1985 1mo ago[flagged]
- dazzatron 1mo agoI love this. I try to read different works of philosophy by getting chatgpt live to narrate it paragraph by paragraph to fully digest it. But newest works it refuses to do that unfortunately. It would be quite amazing to do a second pass on the original Latin works in the same way as well.
- JuniperMesos 1mo agoI 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 pretty sure there's an analytical error in that sentence. The word "nostra" is glossed as Nom Plur Neut; that is, the possessive adjective "noster", "ours", in its nominative plural neuter form. "Nostra", with a short final -a, is indeed the nominative plural neuter form of that possessive adjective. However in that sentence, the word is being used as an ablative singular feminine, with a long final -â (which is unmarked because the text as they present it doesn't seem to mark vowel length at all). archive.org has this (https://archive.org/details/caesarscommentar07caes/page/n11/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/caesarscommentar07caes/page/n11/...) 1918 out-of-copyright literal word-by-word translation of the text, which does mark vowel length, and you can see that the translator words the last clause as "the third, (those) who in (the) language of themselves are called Celtae, in ours, Gauls". nostrâ is modifying an implied linguâ there, which is a singular feminine noun in the ablative case, so nostrâ has to inflect to agree with it - nostrâ [linguâ] translates to "in ours [our language]". My Latin is self-taught and mediocre at best, but even I was able to spot that error. And The Gallic War is a very famous text that is routinely taught fairly early on in traditional Latin education - a lot of students of Latin over the centuries have read that exact line of Caesar's. The fact that the LatinCy neural language model for Latin, which the site claims performed the analysis, screwed this up doesn't leave me very confident about the quality of the grammatical analysis in more difficult corners of Latin grammar.
- wjnc 1mo agoCongrats on self learning Latin. That takes hard work. I adore reading texts on ancient texts that go into possible alternative interpretations. One of my favourite classes in university was on a work of Plato where the professor knew both the Greek, Latin and Arab versions of the text and could get carried away philologically, even philophillically, on how we could alternatively interpret sentences. Reading about deconstructing the origins of say the Bible. Those are scientific works of marvel to me.
- onlyafly 1mo agoThis is very close to a problem I have also been working on. I built Kevilex for Ancient Greek readers: https://kevilex.com 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.
- tempodox 1mo agoI 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.
- gbjcantab 1mo agoThis 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.
- applicative 1mo agoIt 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 https://biblehub.com/interlinear/romans/1.htm
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- tempaccountabcd 1mo ago[dead]