An 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
laichzeit0 5 hours 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.
spudlyo 3 hours 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.
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".
retrac 16 minutes ago [-]
Using 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.
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?
yardshop 21 minutes ago [-]
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.
spudlyo 1 hours ago [-]
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.
I 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.
bonoboTP 1 hours ago [-]
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.
sfRattan 2 hours ago [-]
Latin in school from 6th grade onward. And a classical education with many holes and gaps that I am continually filling in.
ButlerianJihad 2 hours ago [-]
Practicing Roman Catholic family with liberal arts education
nephihaha 2 hours ago [-]
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.
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.)
lsb 1 hours ago [-]
Fixed!
svat 4 hours ago [-]
I remember encountering NoDictionaries years ago, and love it. Thank you for building it!
beloch 4 hours 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.
frollogaston 3 hours ago [-]
Also sometimes you have to expand the entry to get to the meaning at all
b3orn 3 hours ago [-]
And it's not immediately obvious how to close a pop-up again.
smithkl42 3 hours ago [-]
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:
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.
DonaldFisk 1 hours ago [-]
The 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.
milkcrate 2 hours ago [-]
Could vary by text? I see breathing marks in Homer.
usern20260720 1 hours ago [-]
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
soiltype 5 hours ago [-]
Does this have some use case that the Perseus Digital Library doesn't already serve?
flats 4 hours 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…
thaumasiotes 3 hours ago [-]
Note 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 2 hours ago [-]
It'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.
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.
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 4 hours ago [-]
William Whitaker's Words [1] is the best resource I've ever come across for this. 'Fulgere' is 'to shine' [2].
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 4 hours 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.
6r17 3 hours ago [-]
I 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
3 hours ago [-]
veqq 3 hours ago [-]
Vowel lengths on the main text would be great.
hcayless 51 minutes ago [-]
The 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.
bohnohboh 5 hours ago [-]
it would be nice to sort by date or date range as well
milkcrate 2 hours ago [-]
Could stand to have a better Greek font, but this is great stuff. Thanks for sharing.
gaigalas 3 hours ago [-]
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.
gfaure 4 hours ago [-]
Cool! Enclitic -que should _not_ be broken off as a separate word, though.
cwnyth 2 hours ago [-]
That plus the spaces between punctuation makes it clear it's done for tokenization, but nothing puts it back together again.
frollogaston 3 hours ago [-]
Wow, I used to spend forever looking up words in Latin books.
Boss0565 4 hours ago [-]
I like it. Can you make the formatting on parsed words easier to read?
2 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 00:17:25 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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
[1]: https://archive.org/details/p1fablesoforbili00godl/mode/2up
Also most of the word popups use different spellings, like "iam" becomes "jam".
For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trajan_inscription_duoton... (Latin as typically carved in stone)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Herculanean_Rolls_-_... (Greek as typically written on papyrus)
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?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_Latina_per_se_illustrat...
A lot of role playing games, especially from Square Enix,leverage a lot of Latin and classical education.
The thing that strikes me from ancient texts is not the obvious differences from our day, but the similarities.
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.)
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 .
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.
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
[1]: https://scaife.perseus.org/
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.
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.
[1] https://latin-words.com
[2] https://latin-words.com/word/latin/fulgere
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.