8 ms·
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 rep
by laichzeit0 1mo 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.
- 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".
- retrac 1mo agoUsing 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_duotone.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trajan_inscription_duoton... (Latin as typically carved in stone) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Herculanean_Rolls_-_Papyrus_157-152.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Herculanean_Rolls_-_... (Greek as typically written on papyrus)
- mkehrt 1mo agoSort of. Romans didn't handwrite like that. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive . Note that the "u" character in both ancient and late ancient Roman cursive is more like the modern "u". (Source: not an expert in any way)
- DFHippie 1mo agoA 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.
- spudlyo 1mo ago> LLMs have been an absolute game changer for me who is a hobby classicist but also knows how to build software. Definitely! I myself have been having a lot of fun[0] recently using LLMs to enrich one of my favorite beginner Latin readers[1] with audio forced-alignment, POS tagging, morphology, definitions, and other niceties that learners might appreciate. [0]: https://hercules.hookbangsplat.com https://hercules.hookbangsplat.com [1]: https://archive.org/details/p1fablesoforbili00godl/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/p1fablesoforbili00godl/mode/2up
- 0bit 1mo agoHere's a companion website with similar features: https://latinlanguage.org/ https://latinlanguage.org/ for an upcoming book: https://www.amazon.com/Latin-Tamer-Mastering-Language-Rome/dp/1567927912 https://www.amazon.com/Latin-Tamer-Mastering-Language-Rome/d...
- spudlyo 1mo agoNice! I love all the Latin audio, although most of it is well above my level. I'm always pleased to hear well-pronounced Latin with elision and prodelision. Do you know how the audio is licensed? I'd love to have my own copy, and am trying to organize a CC-BY-SA archive of spoken word Latin.
- 0bit 1mo agoYou could ask the author "wardfarnsworth at gmail.com". I have been in touch with him before about his chess website https://www.chesstactics.org https://www.chesstactics.org based on his book "Predator at the Chess board". He was quite responsive.
- usern20260720 1mo agoMy favourite ancient greek font is Theano
- laichzeit0 1mo agoI’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.
- usern20260720 1mo agoit this font. Theano Modern. It has certain limitations so I had to use a more canonical one for Obsidian https://ancientgreek.eu/audiobooks/epictetus-enchiridion.html https://ancientgreek.eu/audiobooks/epictetus-enchiridion.htm...